Recommended for you: Hot Single Ladies on Native (24)
Since Native is pretty new to me thought I'd start a follow along and get some criticism if I'm doing anything wrong. Not sure how dedicated I'll be to updating this as things might get busy on my other projects. Anyhow steps I've taken thus far:
#1 - Speak to and ask around about Native to come up with a strategy and choose vertical
So as you can see I've posted around and also reached out to some people for insights as well as speak to my affiliate manager a ton. Long story short I plan to run dating SOI on Native. Reason being that:
- I've run dating before with some success so have an idea of what I'm doing
- Its an evergreen vertical so would be nice if I can figure it out
- SOI payouts are low enough for me to not break the bank in testing and be able to learn a few things
- Spying and speaking to people tells me that this should be viable, though how scaleable it is could be questionable (given the low payouts or need to wait for payout bumps etc.)
#2 - Choose traffic source on Native
Since I use
#3 - Intel gathering
Had a look at the top 20 - 30 pages on MGID to see what websites I'm generally advertizing on. Surprisingly they were mostly streaming sites or download sites (not sure how "Native" my ads are going to look). But at least I have an idea of what I'm running on and why the bids are so low. Afterwards I did a bunch of spying to try and see where those were running on too. Not much difference (and I also suspect filtering by most popular is not the best idea anyways as people are probably swapping out ads consistently). But I got the general idea of what I'm running and the funnels people were using.
#4 - Creatives
Since the feedback seems to be mostly ad > landing page I decided to just use an old funnel I had when I ran dating on push. Its the generic survey style anyways which seems to be what anyone is running on dating these days. I did tone it down a bit to be less aggressive so that it would get through approval for Native.
Generally I have 3 different angles:
- Caucasian ladies
- Asian ladies
- Cosplay ladies
For headlines they were mostly along the veins of:
- General message - "Meet hot asian single ladies."
- Location callout messaging - "Meet single ladies in (insert city)"
- Direct message - "XXX would like to connect with you"
- A few more but you get the point
I kind of overdid the images part, maybe I got too excited when I was looking for creatives that I ended saving wayyy too many. In the end with the headlines + images combination I ended up with over 100 ads (lol...). Definitely way too many to justify the budget spend but going for the throw a million things and see what sticks approach for now. I'm also planning to use some aggressive rules to cut my ads and if I cut things too early then I'll chance it since I do have images that are similar in angle just different girls.
#5 - Campaign Set Up
Budget-wise I have $50 per angle for now just to make sure everything is working. I also have a cap on my offers which is a pain in the ass. Plan to spend at least $500 just to figure out what type of ads work best and filter out some bots. Once I have the general idea I'll then start focusing on other parts of the funnel and hopefully start asking for payout bumps. Current dating SOI conversions are in the range of $2-3 only.
Anyways I've submitted my ads for now, likely expect some feedback to tweak things and start getting traffic in the middle of the week. Will update once I get some data and conversions...
Great start @sushiparlour!
Also, besides MGID, Adskeeper is another great source you might want to take a look at for running aggressive ads. 
Good luck!
Not sure what GEOs you picked, but $2-3 seems low for mainstream SOI dating... are these some lower tier geos?
I would also consider to focus on DOI ... less quality problems and good DOIs can convert pretty similar to SOIs, while the payouts are much higher from the most part. On top of that, it's somehow generally accepted that native traffic requires higher payouts.
PUSH is better for dating in my experience, its more in your face.
Originally Posted by iAmAttila
100 ads is quite a lot lol. At least Volume dsp will go through the approvals, if you went directly on MGID they have a cap of 10 per campaign per day...or something like that.
I suggest that you test only ~5 at a time, pick the top one or two, pause the rest, and then test more variations of the top ads.
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
HOWEVER, I got some VERY good advice about native ads from my MGID manager earlier this year.
This is basically what he said:
"Stop trying to sell your offer so much in the original ad. The purpose of the ad is to grab the attention of your target audience and just get them to go to your lp. Let the lp sell them on the idea of the offer. This is what the big $ affiliates are doing on native ads"
It took me months to figure out what this means and how to implement it haha
But basically, its true. My top performing and longest lasting ads do this.
I'll brainstorm some headlines for you now:
Are Asian Ladies the hottest in the world?
Have you ever dated an Asian Woman?
Crazy Rich Asian Women may want to date you
I have no idea if any of those would work, but I hope that you get the idea...
Dating is a great vertical to start out on for native. It works particularily well on MGID and Revcontent, although things have gotten a bit more restrictive on ads and landers since I last ran it.
But yeah $3 SOI seems too low unless you're running outside of tier1 geos. Honestly it's hard to find good dating offers offers that pay well because so many affiliates run tons of low quality traffic to them and they get their network payouts reduced if not removed from the network. You probably need at least $5 minimum to work for US, if not $6-8
And 100 ads is way too many - you usually start with 5 per campaign in the beginning
Best to treat VoluumDSP as it's own thing/traffic source, not simply a matter of CPM vs CPC.
I'd setup things directly on MGID and VoluumDSP and ditto with Revcontent and see which one looks more promising. Most traffic sources have some sort of CPA automation btw, but that requires you to be passing back a good amount of conversions daily which you should be able to with dating.
Wow thanks everyone for the response so far. Answering a few questions:
- Geo I'm running are EU geos: DE, FR, ES for now
- Have run dating + push in the past, issue for me was quality and kept getting rejected on offers every 2 weeks or so. Felt that native was a bit easier to control the quality (since I know the site its coming from whereas push is fairly opaque on how the "sources" collect push subs).
Plan is to start with Dating SOI then ask for payout bump or work on DOI once I get the general angles + funnel going. Will definitely consider cutting down the ads and good suggestion about treating
For now I've gotten my ads approved (took a day of back and forth) but not seeing many impressions even though my win rate is 95%+ and am only running on 1 geo at the moment. Am considering:
- Duplicating the campaign to run RON (currently I'm running with WL given by my DSP AM)
- Increasing ad frequency to 3 per user (currently at 1)
- Currently running on "smooth" budget, thinking if I should make it spend ASAP.
Was conservative with my initial settings since I was worried that I would get too much traffic. Seems to be the opposite happening and if anyone has suggestions/thoughts on getting more traffic I'm all ears.
I know you want to optimize the funnel with SOI first, but from my experience, there is a small difference between DOI and SOI when it comes to the creatives and the whole funnel. SOI can convert with more aggressive/misleading copy, but then the SOI to DOI ratio is lower. In some cases, funnels that were performing well on SOI, didn't really cut it with DOI offers. And it wasn't that rare to be honest.
@MGID - is there a way to find out the classification for ads or landing pages? As per: https://www.mgid.com/content-guidelines i.e. can I know if my ad is classified as NSFW and if so figure out how to get to PG.
Or does anyone else know?
Having some issues where I highly suspect that most of my camps are getting flagged on MGID side and so as a result the ones that are flagged only get less than 5% of traffic (since most of the sites won't accept it).
Very tempting to switch verticals at this point since I have worked with COD nutra before (so have the various creatives) and it seems it is much better suited with native traffic overall. Hate giving up so quickly so I'll tough it out for a bit longer first to see if I can work around this issue.
I tried to run dating on native, but since most of my campaigns are adult, I always tried to smuggle in something sexy or show at least a bit of skin... eventually, the campaigns always got rejected, so I gave up and got back to full adult So in case you want to do dating on native, find mainstream offers and keep it really vanilla. Some networks even register for the dating sites to check whether there is any adult stuff in the members area and reject campaigns based on that ... even MGID did this to me a couple times
@sushiparlour
Ad denials probably the #1 issue people new to native face so don't sweat it or give up on that campaign so quickly.
Do you have a rep at MGID where you can get direct feedback from? They're tend to have pretty helpful reps so I'd suggest setting up a campaign there directly so they can help you navigate approval and get you up to speed on their rules. Should be able to email or skype you their guidelines for dating.
I don't have much experience with COD personally, but it does indeed seem like a great fit for native with its low CPA for and international traffic in particular since it's less competitive.
Hi!
If you get little traffic, then you can contact the manager with a request to analyze the campaign - maybe it’s not about the type of landing page or teaser.
If you are sure that this is precisely the case, then ask the manager to show which landings/teasers on this vertical are marked above and do the same. Also, often the design is on the verge of permissible and it is assigned the lower type.
Originally Posted by MGID
Okay so been a while since I updated this cause I've been on holiday + busy on other things + making some changes to my approach to Native.
Given my first attempt at Native, my feeling so far has been that:
- Dating can work but need to understand the guidleline etc. which can be troublesome.
- Running
Voluum DSP is different to running direct as per thedudeabides' advice, so am thinking of this in a different light.
As such I've pivoted my approach to running Nutra Weight Loss which I feel is a better fit for this type of traffic source. After that I did some research and although most people did suggest to try US where traffic was plentiful and payouts were generous, but I didn't like the high amount of competition and the high payout of the offers. Therefore I stuck with my own intuition of working on Asian geos (which I am most familiar with) and worked with COD (since most nutra offers in the regions were COD and I've also run some before).
In addition I'm working through my funnel and optimzing sequentially so my approach will be:
- Get a recommended set of offer + lander from affiliate network (some networks provide 1 standard set)
- Spy for a bunch of images that people are using for weight loss
- Brainstorm headlines as well as use some from spying tool
- Use $100 budget to test mobile + desktop (separate campaigns: $50 + $50) to identify best angle + image type to maximize ad CTR and also check that offer can convert.
- Come up with 2-3 new landers based upon best ad angles and test using another $100 budget to maximize LP CTR
- Finally choose best ad + lander combo and run for another $100 whilst cutting widget and observe results.
I'm optimizing with this formula below in mind:
In terms of progress, I've already completed steps 1 to 3 (as this was one of the things I was busy with) and currently testing my ads/campaigns. Having checked a few stats online I'm currently aiming to beat the averages set here https://www.outbrain.com/blog/native-ads-vs-display-ads which is an ad CTR of 0.2%. Given my bid and the amount of traffic in my geo (I'm running RON) I expect to blow through my budget with a day or two so will update then.
Anyways back to spamming F5 as I stare at my stats and hopefully my camps will slim down as quick as this:
Okay need some native guru guidance (@thedudeabides *nudge nudget* 
) before I lose my sanity. So far my results are such:
I know this is on the low side in terms of data. My payout is around $7 and I've spent close to 10 payout with just 1 "semi" conversion. Why I say semi is because it isn't a proper conversion since this is a COD and all it means is someone left their number but did not convert yet (which is why revenue is $0). Nonethless it is a bit worrying and makes me think whether any of my metrics are looking out of the norm, would appreciate any native guru to opine?
My thoughts so far are:
- iCTR numbers are not too bad, can probably cut it enough to be around the 0.15 - 0.2% CTR mark (in line with average)
- My landing page CTR is a little worrying, any guru know whether this is rough in-line with typical metrics?
- My Offer Page conversion rates are extremely worrying... Am thinking whether it is my offer at this point but think I don't have enough data.
- I'm getting less traffic than I thought, currently running on MGID only but thinking of expanding it a bit.
- Maybe using a CPM source was not a good idea since I don't have enough experience on Native.
Am I off in my assessment or should I be patient and need more data?
This is all via the DSP? Was spend all in one day or across several days? I'd setup a campaign direct to test as I think you'll get access to more traffic that way. $67 isn't really anything to go on even it is a $7 COD payout.
But yes your ad CTR looks decent to start with (mobile tends to be like 2x desktop though), LP CTR looks a bit low but that could just be the traffic quality and/or the geo. I have found that nutra advertorials can get lower CTR than more whitehat ecom LPs on some sources, but generally you should be hitting at least 15-20% for sources like mgid and revcontent; and that was before traffic quality changes to Revcontent.
Basically focus on being able to spending money first. I wouldn't worry about testing LP angles at this point really if you grabbed them from spy tools from those you saw running for a while. Focus on your ads instead. I'm not too knowledgeable about what makes a good COD offer so perhaps someone could chime in on that.
Thanks @thedudeabides useful insight as always.
Regarding the questions, I'm running DSP only and spend is over 2 days.
Have you seen a significant difference in running direct vs DSP? I would have thought bidding CPM would allow me to get a good amount of traffic (assuming my ad CTR isn't horrible). And your point about mobile being 2x desktop is spot on as I'm getting 0.17% vs 0.09% respectively.
In terms of budget I've mapped out $300 at least just to reach the point where I'd stop testing this with $100 to optimize ads, $100 to optimize landers and $100 to optimize placements (to an extent I'd continue to optimize ads throughout but the focus would be to start from the beginning fo the funnel first). Is this reasonable for a $7 offer?
Also having looked through the various placements on MGID it seems majority of them are just movie/series/anime streaming sites which makes me think how good the quality of traffic for large native networks outside of taboola and outbrain really is.
Lastly a quick update:
As I was worried about the offer, I decided to take the best creatives and set up the exact same flow in push (since I know the metrics much better) for comparison purposes. So far push > native based upon the conversions I'm seeing which is a bit surprising. Will update in more detail once I get some more data.
Hey,
Have you tried contacting your DSP Account Manager for some good insights on where this type of offer performs best (GEOs & Ad Exchanges) with us? You can also ping me here.
Thanks,
Justyna
So before I starting turning off my brain for Christmas holidays ahead I thought I'd do a final update on this for now (as I try not to leave things hanging).
I spent $150 on Native and got distracted because:
- I switched from Dating to nutra
- Push was doing better with the same funnel (for nutra)
- AWA came along
- Business on other aspects was not going as planned so it needed more hand holding
So as such I just left things to the wayside and didn't want to give native a half assed attempt since one of the things I've learnt in affiliate marketing is that rarely do you do well going half assed (since you are competing against others who are sometimes spending $xx,xxx a day in the traffic sources/verticals trying to crush it). I'll definitely return to native at a later point once I get things in order as my priority right now is on building up infrastructure that can help with creative development + campaign management (regardless of traffic source) so that I can then focus on finding angles + offers. Will definitely be back at trying native once I have things in order.
@jack01 - Great advice. With your brainstorm examples, and this approach in general, is traffic going to an informational article (or advertorial) or straight to the sales pitch?
Based on the ad headlines, I'm guessing this is an informational/advertorial type approach -- with links out to the offer itself?
Originally Posted by summitview
Most people are using questionnaire lp's to get the user engaged.
Maybe a short advertorial followed by a questionnaire would work well?
In other verticals, yes, native->advertorial->offer would be the way to go
Originally Posted by jack01
I have seen one specific approach being used in dating, I think it might be worth a try on native too.
This is an adult angle, so you would have to transfer it to the mainstream world.
The angle is basically selling the story of a man who finds sexual partners on dating sites. The article contains amateur-style photos of a specific woman in various poses, in home-like settings, to spice it up a bit and get people interested. Along with a story of how the guy used to be frustrated from the lack of sex etc... and suddenly he realized how easy it is to connect on these dating sites. The whole concept is written from the point of view of a guy who describes his struggles and then "one day it all changed" and how he did that, with a detailed guide on how to find a dating site, how to register, how to engage with the females... and at the end he obviously recommends a few dating sites, which are the offers he promotes.
In mainstream dating, you could probably just switch the subject from finding sex partners to finding real love or just casual dates.
It would require some creative copy, but I know that this angle worked for many affiliates.
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