Getting Started in Adult Mobile on a 6-Month Road to Bangkok (34)
Nice start buddy! You've done a lot of work over the past week to get to this point. Will be watching this space...
Amy
Looks like a good start, I'll be following along.
You should think about writing/copywriting as a replacement for your normal job along the way. Very entertaining 
I'm on a similar path! Hope to see you in Bangkok!
welcome! there is a big group of affiliates in bkk, amazing environment to work. so many more variables will soon present itself for testing =D placements, traffic network, affiliate networks, optimization systems. its a fun game!
Hey, just randomly came to this thread because of the latest posts.
I just want to tell you that the translation of the banners is really bad. It doesn't make any sense in german. Just want to let you know. If you need some simple help with the translation let me know.
The text on the landing page has no big mistakes.
Cheers!
Where did you get those translations bud? Please don't tell me you used google translate! 
I'd recommend using Fiverr:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...t=fiverr+adult
@n3wcomer: Thanks so much for verifying the ad text for us! It really helps to have a native look at things. We should start a proofreading service on STM lol! 
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
I've actually run landers AND banners where Google Translate converts better than OHT in a proper 1:1 comparison to statistical significance. Always worth a test once it's working! Google's accuracy obviously varies depending on how complex your copy is and on the destination language.
I'm not able to explain why it converted better. Perhaps slight mistakes make it stand out a bit more to a native speaker...
Originally Posted by Roark
As for how many sites to get traffic from - that would depend on your test approach and how much daily budget you have. A popular approach is to use a couple to a few footer placements to test banners because footer traffic is typically quite cheap relative to other spots. Also, if you're testing a lot of banners at once, it may be better not to target too many placements at the same time - so you won't have so many moving parts that your data is skewed.
I'd suggest to keep brainstorming and testing new banner angles. Adult dating is competitive for sure, so be prepared to lose money in the beginning while testing and optimizing creatives. The good thing about this vertical though is that it's not going to disappear any time soon - such that once you find good angles you'll be able to make everything back and more.
Amy
Thank you Amy, clutch as always
Hey All,
Another day, another post. Here is what happened.
Actions I took:
Today I uploaded 10 of the refined ads I previously mentioned to TrafficJunky. I will start by posting them onto YouPorn and RedTube Mobile footers, with bids of $.185 and $.206. I have also decided to Direct Link the ads for the first day to cull whichever offer seems to be underperforming as well.
Along with this, I also created 20 different angles at 5 ads per piece. I uploaded 1 example of each angle to this post here: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Copy-Examples)
Please feel free comment and critique the examples if you have the time! I would greatly appreciate it. Hopefully I can get some green numbers showing with these creatives. Only time will tell though.
Current tasks:
Since I have spent the whole day creating ads & angles, I will probably lay low for the rest of the night. I might do some banner prepping in Photoshop to prepare for uploading the ads when they do get translated, but overall I do feel that I have to wait and see the outcome of the campaign data until I take further action.
Quick Question:
I recently read one of Charles Ngo’s articles where he talks about breaking down learning focuses into chunks for doing AM. If I were to focus on one thing at a time, what would you say I should focus on first and how should I learn it?
Replied in your other thread:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post230903
Amy
LOL @ #16
Can't wait to hear how this works out for you. Best of luck! 
Hello @Roark! Super quick, just on the translation topic- I am glad to hear you tried out https://www.onehourtranslation.com/ I recommend them to all my publishers in need of translation services and the feedback has been great. Hope you have been pleased with them overall as well.
Do your affiliate managers have any advice on what has worked best for those offers in the past? I would also recommend that Exoclick is a great traffic source for adult dating.
@affiliaxehannah,
Hey Hannah,
My first experience with OHT went great. The person who translated all of my copy did a spot-on job and I added her for future gigs if I am ever doing German.
The main sites that I have been recommended to my AM's are TJ, Exo, TrafficFactory, and TrafficForce.TrafficFactory sketches me out from hearing about some of people's experiences with them in the past and I am using TJ right now, so that leaves Exo and TrafficForce to go.
I have also heard quite a bit about Exo, and it sounds like an excellent site for Adult Traffic. Right now, I am leaning towards TrafficForce for the next Source, but I am sure that I will be using Exo soon enough either way.
Thanks for reaching out!
Over $40 without a conversion? Ouch...
And yet those are solid offers...
Refresh my goldfish memory - but did we test your
The only thing I could suggest is to maybe pause all banners except that benchmark banner, and hopefully that one still works at least semi-well - so that you could use it to cull offers and your first batch of landers. Once you're down to one offer and one lander you could then mass-test all those banners from your 20 angles (in several batches one after the other!)
Keeping my fingers crossed for those first conversions to roll in soon...
Amy
Originally Posted by Roark
As for Exo: you should definitely try it. It's not the 4th biggest traffic source in the world for no reason. Heaps and buckets of traffic to be found, and some placement have pretty good quality as well.
TrafficForce: I haven't actually ran any campaigns on that, but I might somewhere in the near future. The one thing I didn't like is that their interface is complete and utter shit. Terrible to work with, unnecessarily complicated. It always annoys me that all the sources have such different interfaces...
Spend for the day: $32.29
Revenue: 57.73!
Net profit/loss: $25.44
JUST KIDDING
Updates:
More of the same today!
I still had no conversions by lunchtime, so I decided to pause the campaign since I felt like was throwing more money away than I was gathering data by this point.
In the meantime, I am struggling with uploading a CDN (LOL, seems like a lot of people do) to improve the upload speed from lander to offer. While I’m not saying my creatives are the shit of all shits, I don’t think they are quite bad enough to where I have not received a single conversion after $120 of spending, so I suspect there might be something wrong outside of my banners, and the upload speed to the offer is the first suspect to come up.
I recently received the translation for the rest of my copy, so I will also be uploading some new banners tomorrow to introduce some freshness into the campaign.
Regardless, I am pretty happy with how far I have come. I do feel like I have the basic concepts of AM down- banner creation, landers, and hosting (VPN)/uploading items. It always helps to look back a month ago and remember how I felt intimidated just touching Photoshop to now where I can make banners without even really thinking about it. Or when I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing when I was trying to upload to a VPN, when now I can swap out pictures and replacement HTML without much effort.
Just got to take things one step/roadblock at a time.
Spend for the day: $32.29
Revenue: 0!
Net profit/loss: -$32.39
Actions I took:
-Introduced a benchmark banner that was previously proven to be very successful
-Culled pretty much all banners below 19% CTR
-Got bent over
Current tasks:
-Set up CDN
-Introduce 3 new banner angles (9 banners total) to the campaign
-Look into new (smaller size) pictures for landers to freshen things up
-Don’t get bent over again
Holy sh*t! $120 without a single conversion? That's brutal and unusual...
While you're figuring out the CDN thing - it may be worth it to try direct-linking that benchmark banner to the offers (bypassing the landers aka the suspects). May also be worthwhile to try an NTV (next-to-video) placement - those typically convert a lot better than footers, but the traffic is more expensive naturally. At least that way you'll get an idea on how good or bad the offers are. If you DO end up trying this, remember to set a reasonable daily budget ($20-30 perhaps).
I wouldn't cut banners based on CTR (I don't think I ever had reason to). CR is the important metric here. I've had banners that had really high CTRs but CRs that were so low that they almost drained my entire daily budget in the first day (because the network I was using would show higher-CTR banners more frequently). It wouldn't be possible to cull banners/angles at this point since you're not even getting conversions. Let's figure out why that is first - we can look at cutting banners later.
It really surprises me why you're still not getting conversions. We've checked all your links. Landers are the most popular ones being used (I'll take your word for that). Offers are proven according to AMs (and they were indeed converting well when I was still doing adult - unless the databases have become saturated since then? Who knows...) Your banner angles as far as I can tell should be at least good if not great. I'm just scratching my head as to what could be wrong here....
Calling all experienced stackers - any advice will be much appreciated!
Amy
@Johnny Clean
Hey Johnny,
Thanks for the heads up. Appreciate the info and personal experience on the adult traffic sources.
Interesting to hear that you are doing your main volume at TrafficFactory, considering the conflicting information I have heard through the forums. I might have to reconsider it in the future.
Overall, it seems that the people here like Exo quite a bit, so I am definitely considering it at an even level with TrafficForce at the moment. I will explore both platforms in my spare time and see which one I will go for next.
write in to TJ and send them these stats and ask why you are getting traffic from everywhere? it could be your own targeting error or their site code error or something like that.
anyway i have tested your exact offer before, there are some networks with tracking issues for this offer, so test different affiliate networks.
our best result in this offer was like -50% after spending 5k, but still there were some conversions, and we were not competent enough to take the campaign further.
are your banners and landers proven to convert anywhere else?
Updates:
All right, so I have put the campaign on hiatus for the moment and am trying to figure out what exactly is going on. I just sent an email out to TJ’s support asking why the ads have been showing up in the different countries (except for Germany) since all the campaigns I made specifically targeted that DE Geo only.
I also reached out to the AM’s at Advidi and Adsimilis- There is still a bit of confusion at Advidi as to what is going on, but apparently Adsimilis is showing that I have actually received 5 conversions on their platform.
Aside from that, I have also been preoccupied with discussions regarding a potential job working as a media buyer and copywriter for a company after they saw (and apparently liked) some of the copy that I wrote. That has taken up a bit of my time recently, so I am just getting back into the swing of things at the moment and looking to refocus on the task at hand.
Spend (total): $120.51
Revenue (total): $9.18
Net profit/loss (total): $111.13
Actions I took:
-Negotiating the possibility of a new job focused on media buying and copywriting
-Reached out and waiting to hear from TJ in regards to the current campaign
-Getting some new translations proofread in the meantime for making new banners
Current tasks:
-Look into the possibility of trying other offers if these don’t pan out
-Figure out what is going on with the offer at Advidi
-Get the damn CDN up and running
Quick Question:
Not sure if anyone would answer this, but if you guys have any suggestions in the meantime in regards to what to do- either stay with this or find other opportunities for campaigns, feel free to reach out!
Originally Posted by xavierfok
This is my first run-through, so these are also pretty much my first landers and banners going out.
I do have a set of banners from one of Amy's previous campaigns to use, but I mainly focused on testing the most successful one for a benchmark compared to my own when testing out.
Updates:
Long story short, my ancient iPhone 4 broke last night. I ended up searching for way too fucking long to get a new one to replace it. Now I’m a little irritated with myself. Whatever though.
Anyways, while I haven’t re-launched the campaign, I still made some progress. I reached out to my ClickDealer AM and will be trying their version of the offer on the next run. Along with this, my AM referenced me to the best performing landers for the offer. The ones I used before were pretty much just random crap shoots that might have affected the conversions, so that is reassuring.
Aside from that, I did get my copy angles proofread and passed. I will probably upload 3 new angles to the TJ campaign as a final push of sorts to see how the results turn out. I will split-test the Adsimilis & ClickDealer offers for now since the Advidi situation is still up in the air.
Actions I took:
-Found a new Affiliate Network for the campaign in ClickDealer
-Got the angles translated, now uploading them to the banners
-Made progress on the copywriting opportunity. Will be doing “test runs” to see how well I fit in with the organization and get a good feel for the work
Current tasks:
-Finish uploading copy to the banners
-Figure out how to fix the conversion pixel issue with Adsimilis before re-launching on TJ
-Choose the next adult traffic network to go on- Exo or TrafficForce?
-MOTHER. FUCKING. C.D.N.!!!!!
Updates:
So a few things have happened since the last post. The first was that I am a retard and posted a Creative Link in where the Postback Link was supposed to go for an offer.
The landers actually turned out to be one of the main problems with getting conversions. They all had god-awful CTR’s below 2%, so needless to say I axed the shit out of them.
To make matters better, I did figure out that most of the clicks/views from U.S. were most likely Traffic Junky tests, so they didn’t actually affect my CPM usage.
Unfortunately, I still have not set up the CDN, although that seems like a secondary priority that can wait until I get some more important things figured out. My landing page load speeds were around 1.5s on average. While that isn’t great, I do not think it is terrible at the same time and not a main determining factor as to why I have not received any conversions.
Actions I took:
Since Friday, I have:
-Uploaded the ad copy translations to the rest of my banners
-Uploaded 10 of the new banners to Traffic Junky
-Ripped 4 unique landing pages, 9 in total counting variants
-Uploaded 3 of them for rotation to my campaign
-Re-uploaded the campaign with ClickDealer’s offers and unique LP’s
-Added the PornHub footer to the campaign placements
Current task(s):
-See how the new campaign performs with revamped landers and added Network offers
-Finish out on Traffic Junky and get ExoClick started out before the end of the weekend
-Ask for more input from Advidi and Adsimilis AM’s on offer LP's that have been working- something that I haven’t done yet.
BONUS: If I have the time, work on getting the CDN started up
Side Question
Where do you adult affiliates get your cartoon porn from? Most of the cartoon porn sites I visit only have Disney characters and they are not allowed- at least by Traffic Junky's standards. I would highly appreciate a source that has creative material that I can actually use without Walt Disney turning over in his grave.
Should be interesting to see how those new landers will do!
If someone could shed some light on this it would be greatly appreciated!Amy
Updates:
Since the end of the last post, everything that I mentioned has been accomplished.
-Uploaded funds and readied ExoClick
-Added the JD and OD offers from ClickDealer
-Replaced offer LP’s with ones advised from AM’s
-Currently working on uploading the CDN
I can now see all of my conversions after replacing the Postback URL’s, and the lander CTR's have improved massively from the paltry 2% of my last go around. However, I am still running into a wall with conversions. So far, I only have had about 4 today and only 2 yesterday after about $80 of spending. Here are the stats:
Campaign Stats:
Banner Stats:
Lander Stats:
Offer Stats:
Spend for the day: $40.28
Revenue: $6.80
Net profit/loss: $33.28
ROI: -83.12%
Current task:
What to do now?
Should I just wait it out for more data to come in? Or should I start making moves? While many things have improved, I still am having a pretty dismal return on the campaign.
I understand that these offers are long running and quite successful, so I’m assuming there is definitely something wrong going on on my part. Would you guys have any guesses?
Your advice would greatly be appreciated!
I just came across this thread and am in a similar spot! Apologies if I missed this, but are you running more than one offer? Offer is huge in adult.
Also, your LP CTR seems a bit low. I see you posted a couple landers. Did you create these or scrape these? Maybe scrape a lander that you see while spying. Spy on Pornhub's NTV spots and see what kind of landers are being run there.
Last thing - when I started, someone recommended that I stay away from Footer squares. I saw you were running Footer squares awhile back. I haven't tried it so I can't discount it from experience, but just wanted to throw that out there.
Originally Posted by smalcolm
For offers, I am running Just-Date and OnlyDates, both big offers in Germany. I have asked my AM's from Adsimili, Advidi, and ClickDealer about these offers and they all say that both are stellar and some of the best in Adult, so I don't think that they are the problem. I made sure by following up with one of the AM's today and he said that both were still doing good.
The lander CTR's are low? I didn't know that. I thought they were decent! I knew there were some that could go up to 60% CTR, but I thought that for the most part 30% was decent. What are you typically seeing with yours? I used Finch's cherry picking method to find the landers in DE, but so far it hasn't been the smoothest of all experiences for the landers. The ones I am running now though are significantly better than the first ones that I ran though.
And yeah, I agree. Footers aren't the best, but they seem to be a bit cheaper than headers or middle banners, so thats why I chose them to begin with. I was thinking of starting with footers then moving on to headers and mid's when I find which ones have success.
Thanks for the help man!
Awesome - glad to hear it!
I'm not familiar with the German offers, but it sounds like they're doing well for someone so that fits the criteria I use for offer picking 
BTW I just tried an offer in the US on TJ and it's super competitive. I'm not sure how it compares to DE, but I would assume it's the same which makes it really difficult IMO. Maybe try to run these offers in a smaller GEO to start and then expand to DE once you find some winning combos?
I guess overall the LP CTR doesn't matter too much, what you really want to compare is how well a lander converts. But I've noticed the best way to tell if a lander is going to convert early on is by the CTR. I'm seeing CTRs of around 50% right now. The landers you are using look to be okay though from the screenshots. Are you hosting on VPS? Maybe keep testing landers until you find a winner.
That makes sense. I did notice they were cheaper and considered them at one point! You'll have to let me know how it goes.
Updates:
Hey guys, so after a bit of deliberation on the matter, I have decided I am going to put this campaign on hold (for now) for two main reasons:
1) The competition in the DE Geo is too competitive and I feel that I am not making a good enough sales funnel to bring in conversions at this time.
I also do not think I have enough $$$ at the moment carry out a campaign like this through testing and optimization phases to start seeing profit before my bank account is drained to zero.
2) I just saw that the 6 WAM course will be going back online in August (FUCK YES). I think it would be a pretty bad idea not to take this opportunity, considering the people teaching it and the potential skills to be learned from the course as well.
I am also sure that the course will be more expensive than the beta version launching in January, so I will have to hedge my funds accordingly for the cost of the program. Continuing to spend money on this campaign and spending on the course at the same time would send me straight into debt. I do not need debt.
In the end, of things, I think that 6 WAM will definitely give me a much clearer direction for what to do in AM and speed up my learning and growth rate exponentially as a whole.
Sooo.....
After I finish the course, I will consider going back into tier 1’s if the right offer presents itself. In the meantime, I have reached out to my AM and will be looking for any potential offer opportunities in cheaper (CHEAP) tier 2/3 Geos to advertise. If I do find something viable, I might consider continuing that on this thread in the meantime.
If there doesn’t seem to be any good offers or opportunities at the moment, I will just plan on reading/finishing my advertising books and doing freelance copy gigs on the side until the course starts.
Thank you for all the help and advice that you guys have given me! I look forward to meeting and thanking all of you in person for your help someday in the near future.
Best Regards
Update:
Hey guys, so contrary to what I said yesterday, I will actually be running the campaign for another day or so next week.
The reason because of this is because my AM guardian angel, AKA Amy, spotted a couple points in my
Long story short, I will be re-launching a couple specific banner flows next week. It is still likely that I will probably end up putting things on hold to save up for 6WAM, but if things turn out significantly positive, that could change. Just thought I would give everyone a heads up!
Updates:
So I re-launched the campaign with a specific flow to the most promising offer that I had been promoting, which was Adsimilis’ Just-Dates.
These are the numbers from the re-launch:
Spend for the day: $26.53
Revenue: $9.60
ROI: -63.81%
So while the numbers have shown a slightly better trend overall, there is still a lot of room to be made up for and work to be done. Under normal circumstances I think this would imply that the campaign has potential, but at my current level this could take a while to make happen. I might have to do a bit of wandering around and throw a lot of money down the drain without a guarantee of making profit anytime soon if I want to continue this.
By now, I have decided that I will pause the campaigns and save my funds instead for the 6WAMC so I can refine my skills and build off of what I have already learned from this experience.
After finishing the course, I will plan on getting right back into it and haul ass all the way up until the meet up in Bangkok. I might start another follow-along or even continue this one where I left off afterwards- depending on the circumstances of the next endeavor.
Otherwise, I wanted to thank all of you for following along! I appreciate your help and hope to meet all of you in Bangkok towards the end of the year, drinks on me.
Best Regards
Aw...too bad it didn't work out! This actually illustrates the importance of running everything to statistical significance. We took a gamble by taking out what appeared to be the winning offer + lander + banner and just running them, and didn't get great results. Oh well - the last-ditch effort was worth it I guess? Because it could just as well have worked out.
You're in store for a real treat with the 6-week course! Good luck with that. Looking forward to another follow-along from you in the future!
Amy
Man im no expert i just joined aswell and im hardly breaking even, but im learning a lot in the process :. but talkin already from experience are you targeting a Tier 1 country? maybe you should move to a tier 2 or 3 that way you get cheaper data and can analyze better? ! just my 2 cents
regards mate, love your drive.
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