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Adult Dating - All the Way to Breakeven (19)

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So let's get started.
I have a couple of years of experience in the whole online-money-making world.
It's about a month that I've started Adult Dating.

First I spent some time and money in the US. Soon I found out I was in the wrong place.
So I tried to switch to somewhere else with a little less competition which also has enough volume to offer, so I started in DE.

After $900, 10 campaigns, 150 banners, 20 LPs and 4 offers, I made back $400.
So I figured I'm doing something very wrong.

Of course in some campaigns, I got close to -10% but I couldn't optimize it any further or make it work in any way.

I know that I've made the wrong choice to go with DE since it was like a constant battle of finding the winning combination and losing it before being able to make anything out of it.

But the bigger problem is me. Given the fact that I come from e-commerce and advertising on Facebook for a long time, statistical significance is very important to me and I'm quite used to gathering data for 2-3 days before making any changes. Now I've found out, there is no time for such thing in adult cpa.

The other thing is I don't actually know how to treat a winning combination properly or even detect the winning one for that matter, and I'm really counting on your advice for that.
Having many banners (20-30), 5 LPs and couple of offers in each campaign, made this way harder.

So here is what I have:
- Beyond Hosting
- StackPath CDN (Sitewide caching. No hard linking) (Just got it and I think I was losing a good 10% of clicks over it)
- Getting Ad Plexity (Desktop) (Prefer the manual)
- CPVLab
- Traffic Junky
- Advidi and ClickDealer accounts
- Quite comfortable with outsourcing and team building (have a coder, 2 coder/graphist and a translator (German))
- I'm good with codes and photoshop

My goal:
Consistent breakeven. So then I can learn the game for free.
Profit is bound to come after that.


I could provide you with the campaigns result that I have so far, but not only many of them are contaminated with direct linking and redirecting data, which makes the LP click-throughs unreliable, but also I highly prefer to change my GEO before going any further.
I was getting 0.08-0.12% ctr on my ads, 13-20% LP ctr and mostly above 10% offer cr (some campaigns above 15%).
My average cpc was 9-11 cents since I was bidding for good volume and good placement.
Mostly PH NTV B. (another mistake)
Banners and LPs were redesigned. Managed to avoid rip&use for 90% of the times. Because it's pointless and didn't work at all. Only good for benchmark.


I want to start on the right foot and go for the GEO that has the least number of odds against me. Of course, it's very important to have a decent volume since I don't want to wait days to get kind of a random data.
I was considering FR, but it seems like a ghost town (not a lot of active players). Of course, this means Relatively less competition, but also fewer possibilities.

> To start, it would be great to know your suggestions for a Relatively good GEO to continue with.


It's a great honor to have access to you with your vast knowledge in this field.
Thank you for taking the time and reading all these.

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Great keep go , for me this network working good https://bit.ly/2K92344

am working with fb traffic.

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Thanks, but I think I'm already set with the right networks.
Specially since I only do SOI dating and don't use any smartlinks.

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Hello,

first thing I would do would be to switch to some modern tracker, CPVlab is outdated ... check Voluum, funnelflux (managed) or Adsbridge or binom ... choice is yours. These new trackers offer more ways of handling traffic and building more advanced funnels.

For adult dating, you dont really need to use a CDN either, beyond with a good tracker will work just fine.

Advidi and Clickdealer is solid, TJ is too.

So you got the basics right, now its about finding the right offer, banner and LP

DE is tricky, you're right, but some people make good money there ... FR is another of the more tricky GEOs, but I can make it work from time to time and the volume is good over there too. US is cut throat, I would stay away as a newbie for sure.

I've seen a few promising offers in less saturated GEOs ... czech republic, poland, spain ... maybe check them out.

Try to ask your AM for some tips, they should know what shows promise and generates solid volume lately.

And prepare for a lot of testing, adult is an impulse vertical, it requires a lot of testing and creatives tend to die rather fast. From time to time, you will find spots where creatives last quite long, but on the big top spots, it's usually short lived.

I will assist you more on your journey, so feel free to ask any specific questions you might have.

Cheers,
Matej.

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Thank you for your reply.

I had the CPVLab license form couple of years ago.

I got the CDN becauese there was a huge (10%) discrepency between TJ and CPVLab clicks.
Thought it might reduce the bounce rate.


Tasklist:
- Get and install Voluum
- Find promosing offers in some of those GEOs

Quesion:
How long you can usually count on a banner in let's say FR?
How about landers and offers?
Definitely there is no actual data for it and it all depends, but it would be great to just have kind of a benchmark.

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Nice work man

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10% is not a HUGE discrepancy actually, in some GEOs its quite normal. Could be also a problem with timezone settings, always make sure you're comparing the same time frame.

There are no benchmarks for this, every banner and LP is different and it also depends on where you run and what % of the traffic you are getting.

In extreme cases, banners can "die" within a day, which means they were not strong enough in the first place. On the other hand, some creatives can run for months and months.

Generally speaking, I usually count on a good creative to be usable for a few weeks.

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matuloo, is CTR the main KPI you're looking at and it gives you a signal that creative is dying?

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The most important metric is the actual conversions and your final ROI. CTR is an indicator, it can actually tell you a lot about your creative, but I wouldn't say it's the most important one. The problem with banner burnout is that the CTR can remain almost the same, but you're no longer attracting buyers, so the the CVR will be lower.

I've written several articles on this, check out these 2 for example, to get more food for thought :

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-down-and-down
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ttention-to-it

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I remember from the days i was doing adult , that for certain geos like germany or NL . ugly banners with fat girls where killing for me. You should try some weird combinations

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I'm reading your articles couple of times a week.
As I'm progressing and gaining more expreince, each time I understand their impact in a different angle and their use in a different phase.



Thanks for the positive vibes man.



Sweet, will definitely add it to the angle ideas.

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Voluum is a more complex solutions, so it takes some time to learn it in and out, but it's definitely a better tool than CPVlab.

BTW, you can edit past costs in Voluum, for whatever time period you want ... open the campaigns list and click the "Update Costs" button.

Your results are actually amazing! I see some green combinations in there, that's great.

At this point I would let the campaign run and use my "cut the worst" strategy

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-of-my-methods

In theory, you should give EVERY possible path enough traffic for it to prove itself as viable or a fail. Then, you would isolate the best paths and focus on them, which should mean instant profit.

In reality, it's harder, as we are working with human beings here and since it's adult traffic, they tend to react in an impulse way.

As a result, if you simply take all green paths and run just those, their performance will decrease and some will become red.

On top of that, in a vertical where ads tend to die quickly, we often don't have enough time to test everything deeply and reach statistical significance, that's why it's not always possible to "play by the book".

We need to find shortcuts, that will help us make decisions quickly and go with the gut feeling from time to time.

I often resort to the "cut the worst" strategy, I throw out a ton of ads, lps, offer landers and let it run for a while ... as soon as some start to fall behind, I simply cut them, there is no space for miracles in this biz. If some ads suck from the beginning, they probably will suck later too. The only problem is to NOT cut to soon ... 1 or 2 conversions in adult mean nothing, the differences have to be bigger in terms to select the real winners.

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There is solid variety of direct advertisers in adult, Id suggest testing some : topoffers, vipoffers, dateprofits, datinggold ...

Advidi is solid, clickdealer is too ... sometimes its better to use a network over a direct advertiser too. Check also aragonadvertising, addiliate ...Mobidea could have somethign for adutl mobile ... I really dont want to endorse any networks, you gotta chose on your own

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So I have a new problem and I think I should get the best out of it and learn.

After testing close to 100 banners, found the design that was working for me.
I was getting 0.12% banner ctr, 22% lander ctr and 40% conversion rate.
So I created 25 banners based on that design and added 3-4 different banners in the mix.

It was doing really well and I actually got the first green day.
So I started scaling, so I can test more landers at the same time. I was running in NTV A initially, so I scaled to NTV B.

Took 12 of best-converting ones and ran with lots of traffic.
Result: banner ctr 0.05%, lander ctr 10% and cr 20%.
It was awful, so I found out I shouldn't run the same in different placements so close to each other

But the strange part is that my NTV A campaign turn to absolute dust.
Banner ctr 0.065%, lander ctr 3% and cr 20%.

I was using one lander throughout the whole process. So I thought I should change something in there.
Changed the gifs and lander ctr got up to 10% which is still awful.
So I'm sure that those great banners are super dead in less than 12 hours.

Starting from scratch with banners. ))

Mistakes:
1. Using the same design for a lot of banners.
2. Running the same banners in two close placements.

Questions:
1. How should I actually scale without making a mess?
2. What is the actual difference in terms of the result, between "Spread through the day" or "Spend ASAP"?
3. Should I go with "All but chrome"? (Chrome brings more than 50% of adult traffic)

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This does speed up the banner burnout for sure, showing the same (or very similar) banner in both ntv A and B spots is not a good idea, especially when the layout/design is a very specific/outstanding one. Variety is your friend, the more of it you can have in your campaign, the longer it will last.

Scale to different sites, from header to footer, to different sources ... GEOs with the same language are also very good to scale to.

ASAP will maximize delivery ... can result in lower CTRs, but it will also push the ads more to the first impressions.
Throughout the day will check your budget and try to spend it evenly ... sometimes this works better, sometimes it doesn't.

I'm usually using the "asap" option to see the full potential of the spot.

This depends on the data really, I wish they'd allow full browser and OS targeting at last.

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Matuloo, thanks a lot for mentioning!

hr1368 we do have the qualities you are looking for, so don't hesitate to write to us or to me directly!
Nevertheless, as it was said, there is a lot of networks (also in stm) who do have those requirements. It's worthy to check more of them and find the most suitable for you

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This could also be bots set to look like firefox. Try to dig deeper into the data to see if these clicks are tied to some placements for example ... there might be a way to block them.

No less than 5 banners, preferably more. At least 2-3 LPs ... depending on whether they are new or proven. Offers depend on what I have available at any given time, I don't mind to start with 1 offer it it's solid, but usually I test several urls for every offer.

I would start with more offers, then focus on a specific lander per offer.

The more the better really ... but it's hard to find multiple ones with comparable performance, but I ALWAYS prefer to have at least 2 of each.

Variety is your friend ... the more banners, LPs and offers you can run in a campaign, then longer it can last ... in case of creatives, if you manage VERY DIFFERENT banner styles to work, that's the best.

It's a very common way of testing images, I'm doing that too ... if you do it to much, the layout will burnout rather quickly, but it's a good way of finding the best performing model.

Congrats on the GREEN btw, great going!

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Hello hr1368,

It would be great if you could join us

We have our own offers in UK/AU/US/CA
SOI and CPA

In case you are interested, please click on the picture.



Please PM if you require any further information.

Skype: stacey.kavratka

SIGN UP

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Hey hr1368!

Love your patience and willing to get the best result! With that passion you will really gain your best consistent results.
If you will ever be in need for some new Dating offers, we'd love to help. We have both mainstream and adult, as well as mobile and desktop.

Good luck with your campaigns!

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