Pink Cat - From Adult Carrier To Adult Dating (16)
After a few months of doing adult carrier offers with mild success($50-$100 days) I feel more confident with AM as a whole. But great 1click/2click/PIN submit offers for adult seem few & far between. A friend mentioned that they(and some others they asked) also have more trouble nowadays with adult carrier VOD/subscription offers. Yet adult dating is booming so here we are.
This followalong is on my push into adult dating and I'll try to share everything I can. Goal is to just keep this vertical green month-over-month. If other people can do it then darnit so can I.
Starting point: I've ripped a bunch of creatives and tested them on TrafficJunky. I don't expect to go green with ripped creatives, but rather to gauge which types of banners/landers have the "best" performance. From my data so far I've got a few LPs and banner styles to focus on. I do feel comfortable with optimization, far from a pro, but at least I'm not starting from zero.
So far I've had a few tricky things catch me that feel real different from carrier traffic.
- Running Wifi & carrier gives more to optimize, but also adds more complexity
- Adult dating offers can run on just desktop, just mobile, or both--more complexity
- TrafficJunky's interface is damn confusing. Bidding individually per site/zone rather than one single bid(like Exo) is still very foreign to me
My other quandary is traffic volume per banner size. I'm following what I did on carrier offers which were mostly 300x100 and 300x250. I see these two sizes the most while browsing various websites & while spying. So those are the two main banner types I'm testing now(for mobile).
I've got numbers but nothing worth sharing since the data was merely testing creatives. Will update again soon after Xmas when I should have more interesting results, or at least more creatives & a better understanding of TJ.
And a final note: I'm looking to start an adult dating mastermind with a few other people learning this vertical. I'll make a specific thread on that soon, but if anyone's running adult dating and wants to chat send me a PM. My previous mastermind was immensely helpful but was more of a general/newbie mastermind. I'd like to try replicating that but with a focus on adult dating.
A special thanks to everyone who's helped me get this far & looking forward to sharing more!
Oki dokie, so here we go 
Several people report problems with Carrier billing, it still works for many, but good offers are rather scarce right now ... let's see if anything changes here for the better in 2018, but I understand your decision to try dating in the meantime.
TJ has quite different interface indeed, it all slows things down a lot, I'm not exactly in love with it either ... but their traffic is solid and that's what matters the most.
300*250 is the highest trafficked spot in adult for sure, NTV spots offer the highest quality. I would advice to target desktop, tablets and mobile all in their separate campaigns. You will learn that even offers usually want that traffic split up and offer different rates for each.
Anyways, in case you have questions ... shoot
Thanks so much! TJ certainly has a learning curve.. my biggest confusion so far has been properly setting up separate camps like you suggest. Especially running mobile offers vs desktop offers. Some offers have WAP+WEB, others appear to be mobile-only or desktop-only.
Since I started with mobile offers my plan is to stay there for adult dating. Only trouble is that 300x250 banners are totally different on mobile. They appear near the footer on most websites for mobile, whereas 300x250 on desktop is basically top notch right near the player. So I'm not sure if I should be doing 300x100 for mobile-only adult dating offers, or is 300x250 still a good starting size? Both those sizes were popular with carrier offers but I usually tested 300x100 first. Spying in Adplexity shows far more adult dating banners at 300x250, at least for the geos I'm running. My experience with carrier is that 300x100 is the easiest to get working for smartphones & the 300x250 fluctuates based on geo. And mobile 300x250 is so far down the page that CTRs can be abysmal.
Decisions, decisions.
Right now I've got 4 geos with some offers my AMs recommend. I've also ripped 5-8 LPs for each geo and I'm hoping these can work for a while without needing new translations. Some have angles like "milfs" or "mature women", others are just general question-type landers where I can swap out pictures to gauge performance.
Biggest thing for me at the moment is testing banners. I have a feeling these are HUGE and really define the camp... they need to be good enough to get people clicking and keep them curious enough to complete the flow.
So far I've only tested 2 out of the 4 rec'd geos, a few offers per geo and one has decent results. Best offer+lander combo is at -38% and a few banners performed fairly well too. But these are all ripped creatives so I know there's a ton of room for improvement, even just changing the pic of the girl will help:
There's a few LPs I left out of the shot cause they didn't perform. LP05 is the best I have from just ripping & running so far. Now the data isn't really significant but IMO it's a starting point to know which creatives seem to be performing better.
My next steps: test in a couple other geos with recommended offers & keep up with this Germany offer. I wanna make variations of the best banners, although which format to run is still a bit hazy. Will drop with a few q's and update again soon:
1. Best initial testing format for mobile adult dating... 300x100 or 300x250? Or do both work just as well? (( EDIT: I mean 305x99 that seems to be popular on TJ for mobile ))
2. Where does Exo fit into adult dating? I've still got $1k+ sitting in that account, would love to run it but is it better to test with TJ & scale to Exo later? And does Exo have better inventory for mobile vs desktop?
3. Regarding optimization, is banner usually the best place to start for improving ROI? My optimization steps flow like this: find best banner(s) -> find best lander(s) - > find best OS/carrier/device && best placements... Typically with carrier offers my goal was to hit green with best banner+LP without cutting much. With wifi I've got more room to cut so I'm trying to approach these offers with more flexibility. Yet I still think the banner going to have the most significance here. Is it usually about finding the right girl? Most banners have similar "angles" with text, so I'm thinking it's the girl that really makes this work. Naturally I'll figure this shit out in testing but it always helps to get opinions on which variables typically have the largest sway over ROI
Hey man - I've just read through your old thread and now following this thread.
Really good to see a follow along that is actually kept up with and filled with a lot of info.
Keep it up - really interesting
Matej.
Ah great! Looks like I actually have some data sooner than I thought...
For some reason this offer is doing the best out of all the offers I tested, AND it's performing best through direct link. Probably because the offer has an LP with those questions built-into the flow. But right now I've got that segment green(barely) which is a great place to start for optimization.
Now here's the problem I'm having with TJ: I don't see any way to cut based on device or OS. Am I missing this feature somewhere? Or is it just not possible?
If I drill down into the "Direct linking" data it shows that Android is +48% ROI. What I'd like to do is cut iOS out and test just Android but I don't see that option in TJ. So what I'd have to do is buy all the traffic available, then send the iOS traffic somewhere else... but either way the camp would still lose money from buying those segments. Any way to get around this? Or when you run TJ do you have to bite the bullet and buy all OS's?
Here's a quick screen of the OS breakdown just looking at direct link spend:
iOS really isn't too shabby so I may be able to flip that. But I also feel like, there's gotta be SOME way to cut that right? I can't imagine a network like TJ would just not have that option.
Another thing to note: I'm only running on two sites right now. So if I optimize my banners and push a better ROI I can get a lot more traffic from TJ. Trouble is knowing which sites/placements will work best, and how to cut devices/OS that just aren't performing as well.
My goal now is to work on banners to see if I can push up ROI. I may also increase my daily budget to collect data faster and see if ROI holds. But the biggest concern for me is not being able to cut traffic based on device/OS which just seems impossible to optimize. Even if I direct that traffic to Monetizer I still have to pay for it so it's gonna drag down my ROI.
Next steps:
1. Increase daily spend to gather more data & see if the ROI holds with more volume
2. Test new banners, look for angles that work best & make a few alternate styles
3. Scale (slowly) to other sites on TJ & maybe Exo premium placements just to gauge performance
For TJ they do not offer any OS targeting. (incredibly annoying I know)
So unfortunately you are stuck with buying all the traffic.
Yup, no OS targeting in TJ ... they are not a network with the best targeting options unfortunately.
The best bet is to test a different funnel for iOS, maybe some other LP will convert better, or a different offer lander url. I wouldn't try to send it to some smartlink monetizing solution, that's not gonna cover the cost. You simply have to find a better funnel for this traffic.
As for the scaling, try to stay on TJ for now and test the other available spots, there is a lot of traffic in this source, so do not rush to other ones. That can come later on, when you have a more solid funnel and more proven creatives ... everything is easier, once you have a solid storage of creatives to use.
try to send your remnant ios traffic to direct link - i had good days with LosPollos and ImonetizeIt
Good luck! :-)
Wow cool to see so many responses here! It's been a while since my last update and will try to keep this brief.
But I have to say ASW was awesome. Really tiring by the 3rd day for sure... Still it was totally worth the time and money spent. Looking forward to hitting the next conf and hoping to be consistently green by that point.
Right now I'm testing an offer in Germany and have seen decent results. Lots of fluctuations on total conversions per day which I think is normal. Some days hit 3-5 CVs and others hit 12-14+. Hard to optimize like that but I'm hopeful.
So far I'm seeing my best LPs for this offer around -50% and -60%. But for my best banner -> LP combos I'm seeing a lot closer to breakeven. Sending more traffic to just those funnels will certainly drop ROI but I'm hoping with a few tweaks and banner variations I can get something going. Here's what I've got over the past week of testing comparing direct linking against my best LP, then looking at the top performing banners for each:
I have a few other banner variations I'm testing but they're all -100% on these funnels. Banner "cost" is really just eCPC from TJ so those costs appear higher when a banner has a large CTR meaning my banner cost data isn't 100% usable from
What I'm wondering is how to go forward.
My strategy right now is keep running traffic until I can see if the LP03 or direct link funnel is working best. Then cut to just that and start testing more banners(along with banner variations) hoping I can flip green on one banner style. Then create variations of that, keep testing, and hopefully be running 5-10 banners against 1 lander funnel that stays green even with the fluctuations. Does this make sense? Am I on the right track or missing something in my optimization process?
Some questions:
1. How many banners should I typically be running at once? I've noticed banner burnout happens super fast so I've been trying to run low spend and keep them circulating between at least 5-7 different styles & variations. Is that enough? Should I be aiming to run 10+ banners per camp?
2. Is it common for offers to fluctuate quite a bit day-to-day? I've had days that were green for direct linking, then the very next day is -50% or worse for directlink. My spend isn't huge right now(spending about $100/day) so that could be why. But after seeing so many fluctuations I'd be willing to believe it's common for dating offers to be +35% one day, then be -5% the day after & flip back to +20% the day after that. If I flip a camp green but it has a couple red days inbetween is that fairly normal with adult dating?
3. Anything I'm doing so far that's less than ideal? Should I be gathering more data for some of this stuff before making decisions? Or making new lander variations before banner variations? Any general advice regarding where I'm at now & how I'm optimizing would be more than appreciated!
Damn man I wish my numbers looked like yours. But I'll keep on hustlin, erryday I'm hustlin.
Wow this thread deserves an update! I haven't been on STM as much anymore b/c I've been getting a bit more help from other affiliates I've met directly. But I do plan to keep updated on my progress, if only because I've come this far and definitely won't be giving up.
At the end of February a friend of mine recommended casino CPL offers on pops. He said they're doing really well at the moment and he's been helping me out a bit. I started by running both adult + casino together, but found something interesting in the process:
I simply cannot stare at naked women all day!
It seems awesome but damn, it's gruesome. And adult dating is so heavy on the creatives that you really need to be innovating on new banners all the time to see any success. I try to be smart about my AM decisions and try admit when I'm in over my head--so for now I've paused my adult campaigns solely because I do not think I can compete in this vertical. The creatives are so mentally draining that I simply cannot beat other affiliates who are willing to spend hours tweaking banners & creatives with these kinds of graphics. I may come back to the vertical later but for now I'm officially on an adult hiatus
My stats so far this month have been pretty decent. Didn't get to spend as much as I wanted because I was running in smaller geos--not on purpose but more from lack of experience. Overall monthly ROI dipped recently from -10% to -20% from testing in a larger geo, no luck there. Screenshot of April 2018 stats so far(all casino):
Not sure if I'll bother making another followalong on the pops stuff I'm doing now. I don't like taking up time from the busy mods here and I am seeing the real value in connect with affiliates directly. Granted I'm still not doing consistent green so I haven't really "made it" yet. But it's been almost a year since I started and I'm gonna be pushing traffic for the long haul. I've learned a TON from this place and plan on sharing whatever I can...
That said I'll be officially pausing this followalong for the time being since I'm running other verticals now.
A very special thanks to matuloo for all the help on everything. I certainly can't wait to meet in person and shake your hand one day!
And I should say I'm ALWAYS looking to connect with other affiliates. If you're serious about AM and wanna chat or connect via skype feel free to message me.
Keep pushing mate, just don't give up! You will get there.
I hear ya man, adult is not for everybody ... I found it a bit distracting too, but it went away eventually, now I'm not even thinking about it anymore
Cheers,
Matej.
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