My journey to $100 daily from dating (19)
Hi Guys!
I started another campaign and guess what, this time I hope to make it profitable! I tried 1 other campaign in dating, but that went down completely. Because of my focus on SEO, I hadn't had focus on media buys anymore. But I'm back trying to crush it and this time it MUST work. There are so many brilliant and smart people here were I can learn a lot from and hopefully can point me to BIG mistakes.
I'm running this campaign for almost 3 days now, and it's 
but no worries we will get there!
Some info about the campaign:
- Daily budget: 50$
- Country: NL
- Offer: Sexy.com (Crakrevenue) (4,55$ PPL)
- Traffic source: AdXpansion RON (banners) CPC
The Start
I first started out with thinking of some angles, I wrote down 10 angles. After that I thought it would be best to start out with one angle. I setup the campaign based on CPC (0,1 smart bidding -> turns out I pay around 0.06). I created some banners to reflect the angle and uploaded those (6).
Tracking
I used
Why I chose the offer ?
Because I'm in review of another affiliate program, but didn't go accepted yet. I wanted to try crakrevenue as it works well for me on SEO traffic.
So, after 2 and a half day of buying stats don't look promising. I see my banners get a CTR of average 0.15 (this doesn't matter a lot in my case, I think since I buy CPC with limited budget. Correct me if I'm wrong).
Day 1
Date 12-5-2015
Clicks 610
Spend: 36,64
Conversions 3
Earnings: 13,65
ROI: -62,74563319
Day 2
Date 12-5-2015
Clicks 798
Spend: 49,23
Conversions 0
Earnings: 0
ROI: -100
As far as day 3 looks like, 0 conversions until now. I didn't killed any direct link or landing page / Banner / zone's yet.
Hopefully I get some conversions to start killing some stuff that works badly.
Homework
I will create a new landing page to support my angle more (custom made one).
Any tips or comment are welcome! :-)
Hi Walter!
First off, there's an affiliate network I'd like to recommend, and that's Advidi. They specialize in adult dating, especially for your geo (they're a Dutch company). Adsimilis has nice adult offers also.
With landers, you need to test LOTS of them. Do a lot of spying and pick 5-10 landers you see the most often. Finch lays out a really good spying process in this thread (scroll down to the section "Cherry-Picking the Best Performing Offers"). Using the same process you can see which offers, banners, and landers are being used the most. So you can spy on several things all at once.
Test those 5-10 landers to see which one works best. Then take the one or more that work best and create different versions from them. For example: first round you write 10 headlines and test them; once you have a winner, test 10 different lander images and so on.
With banners, it would be best to be innovative and come up with different angles and look and feel, rather than ripping and testing. I have no idea why, but that was the case for me when I was doing adult - testing ripped banners just never worked half as well as coming up with my own ideas. YMMV though!
I know that many pros suggest to pick a traffic source and stick with it, but I feel a bit differently about that. There are networks that are a lot harder to make profits from than others. If you feel like trying 2-3 traffic sources before deciding on which one to use for your subsequent testing, I'd recommend Traffic Force and Traffic Junky. They're relatively easy to use and the traffic converts. Definitely worth a try IMO!
Looking forward to your next update!
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
I thought the angle should be on the banner and landing page for better performance. But not sure if this is really needed.
Originally Posted by walterwhite
1)Go broad.
This means targetting all categories in your campaigns. In this case, you would want your banners and landers to appeal to as many people as possible. The downside of this is you'd have to test more to get a campaign profitable. Upside is that once you do get profitable, you'd be making money from more traffic (as opposed to going niche) which will result in more revenue.
2)Go niche.
Meaning you set up separate camps to target different categories (e.g. BBW, Matures, Teens...). In this case, you'd of course tailor your creatives to each category. Upside of this approach is it'd be easier to make a niche camp profitable because you'd be catering specifically to selective groups, and competition would be less since many competitors won't bother going niche. Downside is you typically won't have a lot of traffic to work with. Another annoying thing about this approach is that you could be dealing with tons of small campaigns, each having its own banners and landers to test and optimize - could get old really quick.
So each approach has its own pros and cons and I'll leave it to you to decide which path to take. If you want to try going niche though, I'd suggest that you do it with a large geo with lots of traffic, and only pick the relatively bigger niches to target. Whether or not there are good offers that fit the niches you want to target would be another consideration. For example if your banners are about BBWs, your lander is about BBWs, but when the visitor gets to the offer page and doesn't see anything about BBWs, your CR can suffer. Tell your AMs you want to go niche and ask them for recommendations. Alternatively, there are sites that have big members databases that will allow you to make white-label sites for any niche you can imagine. I was tempted to try that but never got around to, but it's something that could turn out to be profitable.
Also - there's nothing to prevent you from taking both approaches! Have a generic camp that targets all categories, then set up some niche camps on the side. If a niche camp becomes more profitable than your generic camp for that particular niche category, you can exclude that category from the generic camp to send all the traffic from that category to the niche camp.
To summarize: Going generic will take time to reach profits, your efforts would be more focused, and potential rewards are bigger. Going niche will take less time to get profitable, but your efforts would be spread out over many camps, and rewards of each camp will be less.
Amy
Great suggestions.
I would recommend you will combine both methods together. What do I mean?
Start by first of all going niche and generating profit everyday. It will allow you to learn the process on a smaller budget and getting to the point of putting converting banners and landers.
Once you are profitable on the niche campaigns, take the daily profit and invest it back now into broad campaigns after you know the process and have more chance to succeed.
Good luck!
I read over your questions again and realized you were asking about angles and not category targetting....but I'll leave my reply above instead of overwriting it, in hopes that the info will still help you. 
Regarding angles - this is how I did it, which may not be the best way, but should serve as an example:
1)I would have a generic lander that I use to test all of my new banners for every angle.
2)If an angle shows a lot of promise I will custom-make a few landers for that angle. If at least one of the landers does better with that angle than the generic lander, I would send the majority of the traffic to the banner + custom lander for that angle.
I'd always leave the first camp running with the generic lander to continuously test new banners, because in adult you always need to come up with new creatives to avoid burn-out / things becoming "stale". And of course, I would continue to do split-testing with the custom lander (tailored to the angle) to optimize it further. When I come up with another new angle that shows promise in the first (generic lander) camp, I would compare it to the first good angle and either replace it or continue to optimize both, depending on how well they each convert and how much further I believe I can optimize them.
Sorry for misreading your questions and hope that I've answered the right ones this time around! 
Amy
Okay, it's been a while and have some updated stats that are poor :-)
Changes done before day 3:
* Only enabled 2 different direct-to-offer pages. (bad idea)
Day 3
Clicks 802
Spend: 49,5
Conversions: 0
Earnings: 0
ROI: -100
Changes done before day 4:
* Created a custom lander that has the look and feel of the offer and added that one.
* at this point, 2 direct to offers and one custom lander were implemented
Day 4
Clicks 126
Spend: 7,84
Conversions 1
Earnings: 4,55
ROI: --41,96428571
As you noticed I paused the campaign since it was just horrible. I paused a few days and now I did some changes again.
Changes done today
* Disabled direct linking to offers
* Use 2 different tours by crakrevenue for pre-landers
* Use 2 different custom made landers (with offer look and feel). 1 general and 1 angle based text
* Use one landing page that I found while studying other offers (Question based landing)
* Create 4 new banners and ripped one banner that I found intresting.
* Lowered the budget on adXpansion to $25 as I want to keep some money to test advidi offers as well.
Hopefully I get a better ROI and actual conversions to start throwing out stuff that are not profitable :-)
In the pipeline
* Will try some exoclick traffic
* Signed up with advidi, got some questions about their system. So hopefully I can add some offers to them next week.
So campaigns just got started again!
What did I changed
* Added advidi as offer (thumbs up for you guys!)
* Disabled crakrevenue, as there links are not redirecting to the correct offer (They are in holiday, so hopfully they get back to me tomorrow)
* Added a few new banners (global ones, none-angles)
* Added a custom landing page I created myself (1 with images, one without)
So now it's the waiting game again!
Todo tomorrow
* Share stats with you guys! + landing page/banner stats
* Setup exoclick as traffic source (premium site placement)
Applause on all the progress! Everything you're doing sounds good to me. Anyone else?
One thing though: I find Exoclick to be tough to crack. Guess you'll find out for yourself. The only way I know of to make it work is by buying RON traffic, and spending tons of money upfront to weed out bad placements. And to make exoclick work, you'll need to have proven creatives. So my suggestion would be to use other sources to optimize your creatives, and then use exoclick for scaling later. But it wouldn't hurt for you to try it anyways to find out first-hand. Just know that I'll be here with a wagging finger and an "I told you so" (can you tell my kid loves me? 
) Just kidding - but if you make exoclick work right out of the gate, then kudos to you! (For your reference - here's the post I wrote about exoclick RON.)
Please at least limit your deposit and set a low daily budget until you're sure the traffic is working for you.
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
One thing though: I find Exoclick to be tough to crack. Guess you'll find out for yourself. The only way I know of to make it work is by buying RON traffic, and spending tons of money upfront to weed out bad placements. And to make exoclick work, you'll need to have proven creatives. So my suggestion would be to use other sources to optimize your creatives, and then use exoclick for scaling later. But it wouldn't hurt for you to try it anyways to find out first-hand. Just know that I'll be here with a wagging finger and an "I told you so" (can you tell my kid loves me?
) Just kidding - but if you make exoclick work right out of the gate, then kudos to you! (For your reference - here's the post I wrote about exoclick RON.)Please at least limit your deposit and set a low daily budget until you're sure the traffic is working for you.
Amy
However, I've tried some other sources (Traffic Factory and Traffic Junky) and haven't had too much success on those as well. Although with Traffic Factory that's mostly because I tend to use high CTR ads that don't convert too well, and with TF's CPC bidding style it costs a bit too much. Are there any good sources you recommend?
Anyway, the follow-along looks pretty good! And yeah, Advidi is a pretty good network, I do most of my offers on there. Adsimilis is good with dating as well.
Excited to see the results you are getting with our offers!
Hi Guys,
Another day has passed! I'm using pure
Day 5
Date 18-5-15
Clicks 211
Spend: 21,1
Conversions: 2
Earnings: 9,14$
ROI: --56,68246445
Landing Pages
* Custom created one (without girls images)
Visits: 63
Conversions: 2
CTR: 11,11%
CV: 3,17%
* Custom created one (with girls images)
Visits: 59
Conversions: 0
CTR: 1,69%
CV: 0%
* Cartoon lander
Visits: 56
Conversions: 0
CTR: 17,86%
CV: 0%
* Direct linking
Visits: 33
Conversions: 0
CV: 0%
These are not a lot of hits :-) bumping to $50 again and will wait to cut until I get more results! When do you determine that you have had enough hits to make a decision ? Especially on RON campaigns ?
Homework
Try Exoclick Premium source
Are you asking when you should cut a lander?
If so just use the split-test calculator at peakconversion.com:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Banners-Part-1
Amy
Todays update (yesterdays stats) !
Day 6
Date 19-5-15
Clicks 967
Spend: 67,96
Conversions: 6
Earnings: 27,54$
ROI: -59,47616245
So my budget for today is almost burned, but managed to cut down a lander and a banner based on the peakconversion.com calculator. (hopefully that reflects my campaign in 2 days). For cutting out placements, I need more data.
I set up an exoclick campaign yesterday, that started to run this morning. I'm using exoclick xHamster in-video and homepage placement. My current smart CPM bid is 0.135, but not getting a lot of traffic! The weird thing is that exoclick states that I'm the higest bidder for some reason.
Questions
* How do you manage to find correlations easily with banner - landing page that convert good ?
* How can I gain more traffic from the XHamster spots ? What are the regular CPM's for this kind of placements ?
TODO's
* Read up on bayesian statistics. Don't like the fact that I'm using something and don't know what it exactly does :-)
Hopefully my stats in 2 days will be better as I did the changes at the end of today.
Keeping my fingers crossed for you...
Amy
Okay, Small update
My campaign was going nowhere to be honest. With my limited budget it will be very hard to make RON work. This is why I analysed my stats and looked for placements that were converting much better as others.
I found 2 placements that were doing a lot better than the rest. I'm going to focus on those 2 placement as that will be easier than an entire RON. I created some new banners and re-testing my landers etc on the traffic. Currently buying on smart CPM 0.4 to get data!
Once I master these spots, I can continue on finding other placements in the bulk data from RON.
Will keep you guys updated on my journey!
Originally Posted by walterwhite
Amy
Hi Guys,
Been a while! I have been checking stats from the RON campaign and branched of 2 new campaigns.
Single Spot Campaign (CPM):
Originally this was a campaign with 2 placements. But the CTR of one placement was bad, this affected in high CPC rates . I disabled this placement, so currently only running one placement. You can see my worklog and progress here:
Bidding
I'm currently at the highest bid for these placements, so not a lot of traffic
Banners
* Currently I am still working with 6 banners, I didn't cut out banners yet as I have the feeling that this is the last thing to do (correct me if I am wrong). This because you need an optimal funnel first before you can cut out the banners.
Landing pages
Having 2 landing pages left (self created):
*Landing1 (with images) (stats last 3 days):
- Hits: 87
- Conversions: 1
- CTR: 26.44%
- CVR: 4.35%
*Landing 2 (with animated gif) (stats last 3 days):
Overall stats
- Hits: 85
- Conversions: 1
- CTR: 15.29%
- CVR: 7.69%
Offers
I'm currently still trying 4 offer landing pages (same offer). PS the codes are here to help myself in knowing what stats I written down :-)
Here are my stats of the last 3 days:
* Offer1 (Code: PG)
- Hits: 12
- Conversions: 1
- CVR: 8,33%
* Offer2 (Code: BET)
- Hits: 13
- Conversions: 0
- CVR: 0%
* Offer3 (Code: NGM)
- Hits: 13
- Conversions: 1
- CVR: 7,69%
* Offer4 (Code: VMWJZ)
- Hits: 23
- Conversions: 1
- CVR: 4,35%
These are all stats of the last 3 days, as you can see this is a very small campaign. Maybe I am testing too much things on this kind of small campaign ?
Whitelist Campaign (CPM)
The is a white list campaign of all the placements gathered from the RON campaign. You can see my stats and changes in the screenshot. Currently I am running 35 different white listed zones.
Bidding
Currently bidding 0.23 (smart) cpm. Looks I get all the traffic since my real CPM is only around 0.11
Banners
* This campaign has 9 active banners. Cut out some banners in the beginning that had poor CTR rates.
Landing pages
Having 2 landing pages left (self created):
*Landing1 (with images) (stats last 3 days):
- Hits: 196
- Conversions: 2
- CTR: 12.24%
- CVR: 4.35%
*Landing2 (with images) -> variation (stats last 3 days):
- Hits: 87
- Conversions: 4
- CTR: 12.22%
- CVR: 12.12%
Offers
The last 3 days are maybe a bit weird stats, as the offer has been accessed through different landing pages and direct to offer (but most of this stuff is cut now).
* Offer (accessed through landing page 1)
- Hits: 23
- Conversions: 4
- CVR: 17,39%
* Offer (accessed through landing page 2)
- Hits: 14
- Conversions: 1
- CVR: 7,14%
Questions:
* Do you rely on stats of the whole campaign for cutting banners/landers/offers or rather from a few days ? I'm currently doing it over the whole campaign, but could be that cutting out one landing pages increase CTR+CVR because of a better optimal flow. What is your guys advice on this ?
* Is it the best thing to do, to cut banners at the end ?
* Is it already good to find some funnels that work out, or should I still wait for some more data ?
* I want to find a good funnel where I can get good profits on the whitelabel CPM campaign. Once I get this funnel optimised, I will run it some more on RON and see what kind of placements looks promising. Is this a good idea ?
Sorry I didn't updated this thread for some time :-) It's a lot of work, but hopefully I can keep up the work now and keep you posted!
Regards,
WW
Nice progress Walter!
The biggest thing that's jumping out at me, is that you're not getting enough traffic for testing.
When you're in the testing stage, don't fixate too much on trying to get profitable. Rather, focus on getting enough traffic to do your testing - because it's only through testing that you can optimize your creatives and find the best offer!
Of course, by trying to get more traffic, your costs will go up - but at the same time, your tests will go so much more quickly! How to find that balance is up to you.
Additional suggestion: Either test one thing at a time, or use separate camps to test different variables (banners, landers, offers). If you want to use your current camp for all your testing, try doing this:
-Pause all but your best banner and best lander, and rotate all your offers. Use the split-test calculator to check and cut offers until you're left with the best one. When testing offers, don't forget to ask your AM which offer landers are converting well - sometimes there's more than one lander for an offer, in which case you'll want to test both/all.
-Once you're down to your best offer (or 2), reactivate your landers. To answer your question above, you can cut landers as soon as stats reach statistical significance (again, see this this post for details). HOWEVER - you don't ALWAYS want to cut everything until you're left with the best lander. It really depends on how you're doing your testing. If you're testing a few different lander styles for example, and see say two that shows potential, you'll want to keep them both and optimize both further. However, if you're testing 10 different headlines for the same lander, then you'll want to cut until you're left with the one with the best headline.
-Try to only test banners or landers at any one time - otherwise things can get confusing with too many moving parts, not to mention it will take many days for each round of testing to get done which can drive you nuts. So for example after some lander optimizations in the step above, you may want to craft a batch of banners and test them with your best lander(s). Then you can cut the underperforming banners and leave the promising ones in rotation, and go back to testing landers by testing 10 different images....and so on. (Alternatively you can start separate campaigns and use each to optimize a different thing: one for banners, one for landers, and one for offers. Depends on your preference really.)
Looking forward to your next post!
Amy
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