Home > Adult Traffic (NSFW) > Follow-along Campaigns

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Adult Native Follow Along (36)

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Decided to give the new native ad format a try with a new traffic source (Trafficstars) and a new tracker (Binom) so I figured a follow along would be in place:

Offer: Titan Gel COD (Adcombo)
Country: Slovenia
Payout: $8.5
Budget: $170 > 20 times payout (10 times for mobile and 10 times for desktop) divided over multiple days.
Tracker: Binom
Ad type: Native ads
Landers: Landers and Pre-Landers supplied by Adcombo. 2 Pre landers, 2 Landers and the Landers without a Pre-Lander. Total of 6 combinations.
Bot detection: Redirect lander as suggested by Caurmen (RIP) in this thread
Bidding: Decided to use the Trafficstars Dynamic bidding with a CPM of $3
Ads: I ripped 10 Native ads doing manually spying

1. Why Titan Gel?

I have promoted Titan Gel on pops before with some success so decide to stick to this product. It also has a fairly high EPC and the payout is not too high which enables me to do more testing.

2. Why Slovenia?

I have been running quite a few offers (adult, AV) in Eastern Europe and have found success there. Traffic is not too expensive and payouts are reasonable.

3. Why Adult native?

Since 6WAMC I have only been running pops but with all the fear surrounding the new Chrome release and stricter ad blocking I decided to try another ad format.


What I have done so far:

- Manually Ripped 10 Native ads from Xhamster in Slovenian.
- Picked the offer and setup 2 campaigns. One targeting desktop and one targeting mobile and tablets. Both just Wifi traffic as this generally is cheaper then 3G traffic.
- Setup both camps to a Dynamic bid of $3, I am not sure if this is too high or too low. Will need to discuss this with my Trafficstars rep on Monday
- Changed my campaign URL as the Binom template had the old Cost token for Trafficstars, I luckily found out after running the offer for a short period of time.

Screenshots:

The campaign has only been running for a couple of hours so not much to report on really but as people like visuals here are the stats from my tracker and Trafficstars:






A couple of questions for the Experts:

1. I am currently bidding a max of $3 CPM and I am not seeing much traffic. Could this be because I am bidding too low or is there just very little traffic available in this GEO?

2. Have you had more success with Dynamic or Standard bidding on Trafficstars?

3. I am trying to send any traffic outside of the GEO to an Afflow adult link. Does anyone know how to setup Afflow in Binom?

4. I have currently grouped Tablet and Mobile in the same campaign. Good idea or should I have split it out further?

5. What do you overall think of this campaign? Could I have improved on things?

I will try to post updates on a daily basis.

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Hello, gonna be watching your thread

$3 sounds like a very high bid actually, I guess they don't have the volume for Slovenia in their native ads, yet.

Didn't try the native format yet, so can't comment ... need to setup some campaigns there myself quickly.

Afflow should work just like another network, so you need to setup a postback with them. Just a friendly warning here, smartlinks rotate all kinds of offers, some of them might not be in par with the regulations of trafficstars ... they became very strict lately. Are you getting a lot of out of GEO clicks?

Split them, tablets and mobile are quite different ... bids will be different too.

Let's wait for some initial results, then we can take a closer look. BTW : are you targeting just xhamster or all the other sites they have in the list?

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Sounds like a good setup.

I'm actually running these offers as well, but on another source and geo, so I will be following you here and there.

I also think as Matej that $3 CPM is quite high, but if TrafficStars Dynamic bidding is something like a SmartCPM then it should be still OK as you should not over pay, just watch closely if someone start biding more under you.

I've also seen SL in the top list, but not sure how the volume is there, it may take a bit longer to collect enough data.

No experience with Binom as well, I'm just curious what made you choose Binom over other trackers? Is there any feature that makes it worth the switch?

Let's see what the following days will bring, keep us updated!

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Update 12-02-18 07:50


​So far the results have been disappointing, I have only been able to spend around $2 even though I have a very high max CPM of $3 and running RON. I am not sure what could be causing this.. It might be the fact that there are only 2 million people living in Slovenia or it could be my settings.

I have messaged my Trafficstars rep and I am waiting for her to come online, so I should be able to update on this in a few hours from now.

I am also facing a small issue with the costs in Binom, for some reason they aren´t tracked correct, small discrepancy. Will check with Binom support to see how to solve this.

Stats from Binom and Trafficstars so far:





To do for 12-02-2018:

- Talk to my Trafficstars rep to see why there is such a small volume.
- Talk to Binom to make sure costs are tracked 100% correct.
- Launch a similar campaign in a bigger GEO, will add the details in this thread later Today.

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Answers to Questions / Comments

@Matuloo:

- Yes, $3 CPM seems very high for Slovenia. That´s why I am confused why there is so little traffic. You might be right with regards to little volume. In Trafficstars it says I should get over 1 million views a day combined. Will check with my Trafficstars rep to see what could be going on.

- So far I am not getting any out of GEO clicks but just want something setup in case I get any out of Geo/Scope clicks. Considering a smartlink from another network (Crakrevenue, Lospollos) just to make sure I catch anything not within the scope of any campaigns.

- I will split things out in future campaigns, thanks!

- I am targeting RON including Xhamster.

@Erikgyepes:

- Are you seeing much success these offers? I had success with them a couple of months ago and still see them all over Adplexity adult.

- I run a lot of pop traffic as well and was billed for overusage by Voluum for close to $200 last month. Binom has no restrictions in terms of volume and from what I have see it is a lot faster then Voluum as well. Next to this it allows you to add Notes to campaigns, you can block camps from Spying tools and the interface is faster then Voluum and has nice minimalistic look.

I am still using Voluum as well, trying to figure out what´s the better option in the long run.

Thank you both for your questions and feedback!

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Update 12-02-18 10:55

I have spoke to my Trafficstars rep and she told me that I have the top bid in Slovenia, there just isn´t much traffic available for this format yet.

She also told me that it was also due to my cap which I had set at 3 unique Impressions per visitor a day. I have now increased this to 5 Impressions per day per visitor.

Will update with more relevant stats when the camp has received more traffic.

Question for the Experts:

- What is advisable in terms of capping.. 3 impressions a day, 5 impressions a day, unlimited impressions?

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There is no chance in hell for them to have 1 mil native impressions in Slovenia, not yet for sure. You've picked one of the smallest GEOs you could have picked

I wouldn't worry about this at all, it's chasing pennies really. On top of that, most affiliate networks have some "fallback" offers in place, so clicks usually don't go to a waste. Once you drive the volume up, then focus on this.

1/24 for the best traffic quality ... increase to get more volume but expect lower conversions and lower CTR. Testing will tell you how much to open it to still benefit from the extra traffic. The more ads you have in rotation, the higher cap you can use basically, so you don't show the same ad to the same person over and over.

There will always be a small discrepancy, with any tracker, it's due to clickloss which is pretty much inevitable. SO unless it's a big difference, I wouldn't worry about it too much ... just adjust your manual bids in Voluum.

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Update 12-02-18 13:44

Still not seeing much traffic in Slovenia, guess the GEO is too small and there is hardly any native traffic available. Will let this campaign run and hope that things will pick up. So far I have only been able to spend around 3 Dollar.

Launched a Second campaign in a bigger GEO

Offer: Titan Gel COD (Adcombo)
Country: Romania
Payout: $14.5
Budget: $217.5> 15 times payout (5 times mobile, 5 times desktop and 5 times tablet) divided over multiple days.
Tracker: Binom
Ad type: Native ads
Landers: Landers and Pre-Landers supplied by Adcombo. 2 Pre Landers and 1 Lander. These were suggested by Adcombo as being the best performers
Bot detection: None, it seems these ads don´t have as much bot traffic as POP traffic
Bidding: Decided to use the Trafficstars Dynamic bidding with a max CPM of $0.5
Ads: I ripped 10 Native ads doing manually spying

Currently waiting on getting the Campaigns approved, will update with stats later today.

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Ok, bigger GEO should definitely mean more traffic, I just started some campaigns with their native format too, so let's see how that goes

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Good luck, let me know how it goes.

Question.. Do you know what type of costs Trafficstars sends with their costs token when you run Dynamic CPM? CPM or CPC?

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Quick question, why are you sticking with native in Slovenia?
Chances are there's more traffic on 300x250 for sure.
Since it is a small country, for the native traffic, you are getting the max traffic out there.
If you wanna stick on native, I would just go for it and not use capping. Take down the bid a little bit, leave it always on dynamic, give it 24h tops and compare results with previous settings.

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@komplikovanna I have now launched in Romania and Slovenia. Both had good performance according to Adcombo.

- For both countries I am not seeing much traffic so I am going to exactly what you said.. Lower the bid to max 0.50cpm and set both capping to unlimited and see what is happening.

Still not getting the right costs in Binom, have been talking to TS and Binom but it seems nobody knows why the costs are off.

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How are you passing the cost actually? The tokens with CPM biddings usually just pass the actual CPM bid, which doesn't help you much since the CTR is changing all the time and it always takes a different amount of impressions to actually score a click. Its pretty much useless.

It's virtually impossible to track costs accurately with CPM bidding, the closest you can get is to let traffic run for a while, calculate the average CPC you are paying and then use that value in your tracker ... not sure how binom works, in the trackers I've used, there was always an option to enter a manual CPC value to use.

BTW: my native test is running, so far the volume doesn't look so hot, but it is serving even at a low bid... didn't want to shoot high straight off the bat ... the LP CTR looks pretty shitty though, will see how it behaves with a higher bid tomorrow.

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Well, I'm trying to crack them.

What I find is that there are huge difference from placement to placement.

I find some gems that are able to do 200-300%+ ROI, but those are very very rare.

What I find is that whitelisting is the key, once something shows potential I separate it to its own campaign.

Also one thing is that we are basically competing with internal media buyers, in that case we are always in the lower end.

But I still like the concept of COD and I believe that with lot of testing there are some gem placements that can do well.

That makes sense, the spying tools blocker sounds like an amazing feature, if this is integrated right into tracker and it works, I have to take a closer look at it.

So as expected Slovenia has low volume, I got similar results with Slovakia.

I would advise you to go for bigger geos, if you have the budget, you will get more volume and higher speed on which you can work.

Or if you still insist to continue, then launch more of these small geos, so you have more things going on and you can also compare the performance of those geos side by side.

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Update 13-02-2018 08:16

- Still not seeing much volume in Romania and Slovenia even though I have switched to no capping. Will let these camps run for a couple of hours, if no improvement then I will pause them.
- Launched in France last night with a bid of 0.1 CPM and a Capping of 5 and I am seeing a lot more volume there.
- Will launch on a few bigger GEO´s Today: Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia with a bid of 0.1 CPM.
- No Conversions yet but not a lot of spend either so still a cheap way to find my way with this new type of ads which I think has potential for the future.
- Still struggling with the costs in Binom, will hopefully get that sorted Today.



Answers to questions/Comments

@Matuloo:

- I am using the following tokens click_id={click_id}&cost={cost}&site_id={site_id}& cr_id={creative_id}&cat={category}&keyword={keywor ds}&referrer={referrer}&campid={campaign_id}&forma t={format}&ip={ip}&geo={geo}&pricing_model={pricin g_model} and it seems to include the CPM token. I had it setup as CPM in my campaign but it only adds very small amounts to the costs in my campaign. I will now try to change the cost tracking to CPC in Binom and see if that makes any difference. I guess that with CPM and especially Dynamic CPM bidding it is hard to pass on exact costs in a tracker.

With regards to your campaigns, where are you running and what are you bidding on average?


@Erikgyepes:

- I am letting Romania and Slovenia run and have added France last night. Will also launch in Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia Today.

Will update later Today with more details and stats.

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CPM or Dynamic/Smart CPM ... doesn't really matter, it won't work for either of them

In order to be able to track costs accurately on any kind of impressions bidding, you would need impressions pixel placed at the source ... this is something that only a few allow and it's creating a big load on the tracker, so I wouldn't even recommend using that. You need to switch to CPC cost tracking an use average CPCs... check the spend, check how much clicks the tracker recorded and divide those numbers. There you have the average CPC. It will need to be adjust at times and it will never be accurate, but that's how it works

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Agreed.
It's virtually impossible for me to have ALL the data in one place ALL the time. Good old fashioned excel will do the trick. Also, you're running one offer on one campaign therefor what happens if you wanna test 2 different offers/payouts within the same campaign on the network? No amount of tokens will give you the precision in summing the costs you're looking for. Just track them and calculate 'manually' in a sheet

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One more thing, do not make your url longer by using tokens that are useless... it's just increases the risk of something going wrong in the redirect chain.

For example format, campaign id, GEO ... geos are deteceted by the tracker, you know what format and campaign you are looking at so that's pointless too ...stick to data that helps you optimize.

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Fingers crossed!

Also regarding tracking cost, the best you can do is just manually update costs the day after, or in a while.

Beside doing it with Excel there is a more advanced way, that may be interesting for you in the future once you will be joggling a lot more campaigns -> doing it through API.

For example I have a script for one traffic source, that run everyday at specific hour and it grab costs from the traffic source and do a manual cost update in Voluum.

This saves a lot of time, however if you want to have exact costs per placement it needs some more programming work to be done.

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Interesting, never considered it but will look into using an API with Google Docs. If anyone has a script and is willing to share it.. Please go ahead, would save a lot of time

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Update 14-02-2018 10:00

I have finally gotten a few conversions! Checked my stats this morning not expecting much but there were a few conversions!

Over the past few days I have launched a few more campaigns so I will share the combined stats per country here:

- Slovenia Titan Gel: Spent $6.947 and 0 conversions > ROI -100% > Will let this run to 5x Payout and will pause when no conversions.
- Romania Tital Gel: Spent $17.389 and 0 conversions > ROI -100% > Will let this run to 5x Payout and will pause when no conversions.
- France Hammer of Thor: Spent $59.729 and 0 conversions > ROI -100% > Will let this run to 5x Payout and will pause when no conversions.
- Germany Tital Gel: Spent $57.575 and 2 Holds (Not confirmed yet) worth $38 > ROI -34% > Will let this run to 10x payout before cutting placements etc..
- Italy Titan Gel: Spent $22.53 and 1 Hold (Not confirmed yet) worth $20 > ROI -11% > Will let this run to 10x payout before cutting placements etc..
- The Netherlands Mature Dating: Spent $22.922 and 4 Conversions worth $9.7055 > ROI -57.66% > Will let this run till 10 Conversions before cutting placements etc..

Comments:

- I am still struggling with the costs aspect.. Voluum has the option to manually update costs whereas Binom seems to track costs a bit more accurate. So still a battle of the trackers going on for me.
- With the dating campaigns I am seeing more conversions which makes it easier to optimise campaings. So instead of running nutra products with a higher price point I might shift focus to SOI dating offers as I will have more data to work with.

To do 14-02-18:

- Let the campaigns run for the rest of the day so that they can gather more data.
- Start a new SOI dating campaign in the US with a specific audience target (BBW) and see how this goes.
- Dig deeper in the cost aspect and find a way to track costs more accurate.
- Take the afternoon off and head out for lunch and a few beers and enjoy the great weather here in Spain. Being able to do what I want whenever I want was one of the main reasons why I decided to become an affiliate.

Next update will be Tomorrow (15-02-18)

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Hello again,

so finally we got some movement

1. the HOLDs at Adcombo won't all fill, keep that in mind so you're not disappointed. The fill rate depends on GEO, for example in India, I've seen results as low as 20% ... but it can be way higher in some other GEOs. So let's wait some more to see what it ends like.

2. I've never seen Binom in action, so can't really help you here. Maybe if you give us more details, someone might be able to help you here.

3. SOI dating is easier to get data for, that's for sure. It's quite a competitive space too though, so it doesn't mean it will be easier to make profits there ... but yes, if you are after getting data faster, SOI could be the answer. I'm not sure about the BBW usa choice ... USA is the most competitive geo for dating out there and I'm not aware of any new BBW offers, I guess you're looking at the BBWdesire offer or a clone of it, those have been around for a long time. It's solid offers, but a bit saturated.

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1. Yeah seeing that now as well, rather high percentage of cancelled orders unfortunately, will update the progress in my next post.

2. What I am doing now is trying to track the costs as accurate as possible and then update the cost manually in my tracker. Seems to be the easiest way to keep an accurate overview of costs.

3. Had some luck with USA dating before but you are right. I have decided to launch some SOI dating camps in Europe in stead.

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Update 16-02-2018 13:00

Here are the results of my campaigns:

- Slovenia Titan Gel: Spent $8.23 and 0 conversions > ROI -100% > Not enough volume, will pause campaign.
- Romania Tital Gel: Spent $26 and 0 conversions > ROI -100% > Not enough volume, will pause campaign.
- France Hammer of Thor: Spent $110.6 and 1 cancelled conversion > ROI -100% > Pausing campaign as I spent more then 5x payout.
- Germany Tital Gel: Spent $118.46 and Sale, 2 Holds and one conversion (Not confirmed yet) worth $38 >Seeing a few conversions but not interesting enough to continue so will pause.
- Italy Titan Gel: Spent $54.77 and 1 Hold (Not confirmed yet) worth $20 > Seeing one conversions but not interesting enough to continue so will pause.
- The Netherlands Mature Dating: Spent $71.7 and 16 Conversions worth $37.47 > Cut banners and placement and let campaign run.

Moving forward:

- I have decided to pause all Titan Gel/Hammer of Thor campaigns. The payout is high but it is hard to gather data with such few conversions.
- Will focus on launching more SOI dating campaigns in (Eastern) Europe. The reason for moving to dating as that it is easier to get conversions and data to optimise campaigns.
- So far I have spent $400 on this type of ads and I can see that it has potential, will top-up my account with another $400 and run SOI dating campaigns.
- Analyse data from the campaigns and build of a blacklist which I can use for future campaigns.

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Yup, it's not easy to make these large payout offers work, that's why it's not exactly the best choice for a newbie. SOI dating will definitely be faster to get data for.

The payouts in eastern europe will be very low, so if want to test there, try a large GEO like Poland or Russia ...

Prepare to test a TON of banners now, and a lot of LPs too ... LPs last way longer than banners, so try to find 2 or 3 solid LPs first. Then you can start mass testing banners or the native ads.

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Hi Eurosen,

We're curious for more updates!
We know you're in touch with your account manager, but feel free to contact us here too if you have any questions.

Cheers!

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Update 28-02-18 17:45

Hello everyone, sorry for the delayed update. I have been very busy with some other stuff.

- I have switched back from Binom to Voluum. Reason is that I decide to focus more on native and banners which don´t have as much volume as pops so for now Voluum will do. I am also a bit worried about the fact that Binom is self-hosted and that I run campaigns all over the globe meaning that I had to setup several servers all across the world.

- I have decided to focus on Dating and so far things are going well. The volumes on Adult native aren´t huge but so far it has been a great learning curve. Currently I am running in 4 Geos and have came up with a solid work process to launch and optimise campaigns. I have seen that more and more adult sites are using this type of ads so having a good workflow in place will help me with setting up and maintaining future campaigns.

So far I have learned a few valuable things:

1. Don´t run RON campaigns without a blacklist, too many crappy sites.
2. Different sites have different performance based on device. This has to do with the way ads are placed per site.
3. Exclude the Gay category from straight dating camps.
4. Shocking images and images where you can see the eyes of a person perform better then vague pictures or pics of just bodyparts.

What I am doing at the moment is starting off with 10 different ads and then slowly narrowing them down based on statistical difference.

The aim during the coming days is to have all campaigns narrowed down to the 1,2,3 best performing ads and after that start cutting based on websites.


Overall it has been a great learning experience so far and I have been able to get a solid workflow for launching and maintaining adult native camps. The coming days I will be focusing on getting the current campaigns green and use my blacklists and stats on ads to launch in more countries.

I haven´t been using any landers in the current campaigns but the plan is to launch some camps with landers to see if there are big differences performance wise.

I will post back later this week with some stats on how the individual campaigns are doing.

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Definitely do test LPs ... if you can come up with the right one, it will SURELY improve your CVR.

What are your numbers looking like so far? Too far away from profit, or getting there?

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Attached are my number from the past few days, most campaigns are green! All being it small numbers:

Please note: The stats for Today haven´t been corrected yet so the overall ROI should be higher as Voluum tracks higher costs then what they actually are. I normally update this the day after.

- Netherlands
> The Dutch campaigns were the first ones I have launched. I have cut the number of ads down to the top 3 performers. Waiting for a bit more data to cut it down to the top performer.
> I unfortunately had to pause Mobile traffic as per the advertisers request. Leads didn´t convert into sales.
>> Next steps will be to cut down on placements once I found the winning ad and scale to other networks.


- Germany
> Traffic in Germany seems to be rather expensive, I have negotiated a payout bump but will need to increase numbers to get a higher payout bump.
> I Pause the Tablet campaign in Germany as Tablet traffic was ridiculously expensive. Need to check with my account manager why this is.
>> Next steps will be to cut down the ads to a top 3 and eventually a winning ad. After this I cut down on placements and scale to other networks.


- Poland
> Polish traffic is not too expensive but their isn´t much volume either.
>> Next steps will be to cut down the ads, cut placements and scale to other networks.


- Spain
> Spain is cruising by just fine, currently running with 7 ads as I don´t have enough volume to cut down the ads
>> Next steps will be to cut down the ads, cut placements and scale to other networks.


- Overall
> Cut down more ads and placements
> Negotiate a payout increase for all campaigns
> Scale to other networks
> Start running campaigns with landers

@Matuloo > How are your native camps doing?

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You're doing great man, those are some nice numbers Now let's give the LPs a try, it should also help with the quality of your leads.

If I can give you a piece of advice, don't forget to test new images/ads too, the current ones will burn out eventually, so don't for that to happen without having something prepared to replace those.

I had to put the native camp on hold for now, I got plenty of good proven banners rejected this and last week, due to the new retarded google rules ... so have to focus on that now and try to find replacements.

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Yup, as eurosen mentioned, you need some additional step in the flow to detect BOTS ... or using a tracker solution that has this feature built in.

The method from Caurmen, in the thread that eurosen linked for you is using a LP that does the bot detection and then redirects the user to the next step in the flow... so it's almost like a direct link, just with a small delay.

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I made it to the magical $xxx profit ( not rev) a day but over the past few days things have gone from bad to worse...

Seems that the more Trafficstars is promoting this format the more buyers are coming in which pushes up the prices and fucks up my ROI unfortunately.

Anyone knows of any other adult native sources apart from PR and EC?

Thanks

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I'm having the exact same experience and the performance is super inconsistent.

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Been consistent but something seems to have changed over the last few days.

Might have to look at banners or pops.

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Traffistars is also doing flat deals, maybe they sold part of the inventory to some large buyers. They also have a problem with the system from time to time, I've seen my CTRs for regular banner campaigns go to shit all of a sudden without any reason too. It's always a good idea to talk to the support or an AM and ask about a particular case.

On top of that, I think they are still testing the layout or making some changes, or at least were doing that not so long ago.

The performance will go up and down, it's pretty normal with any new format.

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