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The Diary of a Wakeboarder - Cracking the Adult Dating (11)

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Hi guys,

after my first attempt with sweepstakes and pops, I decided to move from sweeps to adult/dating. In my first follow along you can find a reason why I decided to move from after 1 month.

I never ran any adult campaigns so I started at the very beginning:

• Read sticky STM posts in adult category
• Read follow along from fellow affiliates
• Discuss with AMs about GEOs and offers
• Connect with STM member in the same vertical to brainstorm
• Open accounts on the most popular ad-networks for adult
• Check what affiliates are running in my local GEO

I noticed that most of the banners for dating on Pornhub in my local GEO are awful. Really, really bad translation. To get familiar with creating banners (images, angles, PS, …) and traffic sources (Traffic Junky) I decided to run a small test in my country.

I’m testing 10 banners and 1 offer, direct linking. Here the weekend results.

Revenue: $13.03
Spend: $47.92
ROI: -72%

With this campaign, I’m testing angles with local slang words and phrases on banners.

After 274k impressions, my average CTR is 0.135%. Banners are displayed only on PornHub, Video A/B, and Top Right Square.

My first campaign where I will start test landers and different offers will be CZ or DE. Need to find a way how to handle translations. I know for OHT service but I would like to find some local guy who can help me with local slang words, but I will test both… ripped banners and my own “unique” ones.


There are a few things that I’m not sure about. I would be happy to get some directions.

• Should I start with one site (eg. PornHub) when testing?
• Does it make sense to test different bid when testing offers/banners?
• Is it important to focus and learn the ropes with one spot/site or go broader?
• When testing offers, should I test only with one dimension 315x300px?
• Which tool should I use to find landers? With Adplexity I can’t find almost anything adult related.

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CAMPAIGN UPDATE

Hey guys,

here is a quick update on my first adult/dating campaign on TJ. Three different AMs recommended me to test DE offers.

With my first DE campaign I'm testing:

- 10 banners (1 ripped, 9 unique)
- 7 landers (ripped from PH)
- 1 offer that I know it convert
- Video A, Video B spot on PornHub

The campaign is running now for almost 24 hours.

Campaign stats

Visits: 177
Clicks: 62
Conversions: 2
Revenue: 5.82
Spend: $25.12
ROI: -76%

Voluum stats for active landers.



Bids & Spots
At the moment I'm buying Desktop only traffic from PornHub (VideoA/B). I'm not sure why spot Video A doesn't get any impressions. I've increased the bid already but nothing changes.


Conversions
Because I got only two conversions, both from different landers/banners, I need to spend more to collect more data and then cut bad banners/landers.

Questions
- Should I increase the daily spend if I want to test so many banners/landers at the same time?
- Is it better to test fewer combos (banner/lander) at the same time?
- When should I cut the banner? I don't want to cut banners based on low CTR, which means I need to spend 2-3x payout before cutting the worst one, right?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

EDIT

Because I'm struggling with getting more traffic I've decided to test fewer landers at the same time. A few minutes after I disabled 5 other landers, I got one new conversion. It's probably a coincidence but it feels good. I will leave the campaign until tomorrow to collect enough data to kill and replace some banners. In the meantime, I will copy this camp on mobile and compare the results with desktop campaign.

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I would definitely cut down the amount of landers to 3, you'll never get enough data.

Also I would axe Pornhub NTVA, you're not going to be able to profit at that bid (0.191), and I believe the spot has less available impressions than the B spot.

Just run on Pornhub NTVB for now until you find something that works.

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Hello, let me chime in for a bit :

Never do this, unless the offer itself looks like a lander ... even then, using custom LPs will yield better results in most cases.

Adplexity has an adult version too, check it out

It does, but one thing at a time! If you test banners and LPs and offers and at the same time move the bids ... it will result in a gigantic mess.

While in the learning phase, it's good to focus on a limited amount of factors, so it's a good idea to stay on one spot and one banner dimension ... or just a few. Any extra factors makes things more complicated. But as soon as you are confident about the setup and optimization process, feeel free to explore what's out there.

DE is a very complicated GEO for dating from some reason. There are several people here on STM who try DE and none of them is doing too good. DE has great volume and some people can reach very good results there, but its hard, I'm not able to run in DE as well ... it always dies on me.

As Jabong already suggested, I would also recommend to cut it down a bit, you started with to many variations.

You can cut based on CTR in case it's VERY poor ... at some point the clicks become to expensive, so it can't work no matter what. If the banners perform in a similar way, you need to wait for the leads to show you what can work. 2x spend is the most used rule of thumb to go by.

Good luck, will be following your thread.

Matej.

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Hey Matej and Jabong, thanks a lot for both your insights I already switched to testing less variables at the same time. My last test was 4 banners and 3 landers, and after some conversions it seemed obvious which lander to use, so I started running with just that one. I was running only Pornhub interstitial and bidding high, and 2 days ago with this combo I got to breakeven, but with very little traffic (around 20$).

My question here if this is normal - 20$ traffic in a huge geo like DE on pornhub interstitial bidding high?

Next day one banner was standing out so I cut other banners and because it was in green slightly, I ran the traffic on other TJ placements (xhamster, redtube, ...) - all of them. In Voluum I set up the CPC manual cost (from data of Pornhub interstitial), but other placements had different CPCs ofcourse, so what happened was that TJ spent like 100$ of traffic, but Voluum was only showing like 40$ and it seemed like the camp is doing great (30% roi), but in fact it was about -50%.

I paused other placements after that, the Pornhub Interstitial ran breakeven after that test so I let it running, but today at the same bid, same lander, same banner and same offer, there were only 3 conversions after 20$ spend (-70% roi).

Unfortunately I can't provide any screenshots today, because after this mess with costs for other placements, the data is not easily readable.

Plan:
- throwing one more offer in the mix, and test both of these also on desktop
- keep making banners and testing them on a separate camp
- maybe try out different bids with the same combo?
- will probably switch from TJ to Plugrush or some other adult display traffic source - I hate the interface, hate the delays.. But I won't do it instantly, will try out Plugrush tomorrow and maybe run newer camps from there

Questions:
- If I ran all DE mobile placements and only got around 100$ of traffic in 12 hours, how do other affiliates get serious amounts of volumes??
- How do you guys set costs for TJ in voluum? Same as me - CPC manual entry?
- What's you system with bidding on TJ - you can't see how much traffic you will get at what bid, there is also confusion on bidding screen (90% traffic 0.156, 5% 0.180, 5% 0.134 - example)..
- How would you suggest I rip landers on windows OS - sitesucker works great on Mac OS, but windows has HTTrack which is annoying and I can't rip cycling landers from bigger affiliates. "Save page as" also works mediocre well - from 10 ripped landers, 3 work well, others have some kind of errors.


Thanks for all your feedback guys, good luck with your camps

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With regards to your questions (just my 0.02)

1. If you're running on TJ, even though the sites are large, there are a lot of advertisers fighting for the traffic. You can try other sources like Exoclick, TrafficHaus, Traffic Factory etc. to increase volume. Also flat-rate buys can up the volume a lot, but that's obviously something down the line since you're just starting out.

2. I use CPC manual entry. After a while you'll learn more or less what you're gonna pay for that specific spot and you just plug in your best guestimate.

3. Bidding is really an art form you're gonna just have to learn through trial and error. On TJ your position will be based on bid, budget, account balance, and frequency cap.

4. All the ways you mentioned to download LPs are pretty standard. Also Adplexity has a download function as well if you do end up using it.

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It happens, but they definitely have more traffic than that. I think they sell part of it to other networks or on flat deals plus their system also takes your account balance into account, so if you have low balance, they will throttle the traffic. The same with campaigns that target a lot of spots, but have low daily $$$ cap.

Yup, using manual CPC too, but to overcome the problem you got, I create separate campaigns for the large spots, so I have more accurate CPC to use.

I HATE their interface too, but they have solid traffic quality and that's what matters more.

Jabong gave you good responses too, so won't repeat the same again

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Are you still going ahead with this campaign?

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I think he's focusing 100% on the POP campaigns that's been driving solid results lately, check it here : https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...me-POP-Working

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chhikara matuloo is right. I've paused all adult camps and focus only on pops.

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Hey Wakeboarder,

Check us out on Adnium https://adnium.com/ref/5527

I'd love to chat to you about your campaigns, and the traffic we have to help you scale up your media buying.

Add me on skype: james_gsm

Speak soon!

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