Lesson 3: Where to get adult traffic and how to structure a dating campaign? (29)
Lesson 3: Where to get adult traffic and how to structure a dating campaign?
This is the third Lesson in the "How to run adult traffic in 2019/2020" guide.
The announcement thread, that also contains an index of all already published articles, is here: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...9-quot-section
Lesson 3: Where to get adult traffic and how to structure a dating campaign?
Welcome back my dear adult media buyers 
Let’s start with Lesson no.3 of my Adult Traffic guide for 2019/2020 (and beyond).
Today, I’m gonna talk about adult traffic sources, what traffic type to use, how to structure your dating campaigns, what kind of banners to use, whether to use LPs or not... and a few more things.
WHERE TO GET ADULT TRAFFIC?
As usually, there are several ways of obtaining adult traffic.
We can divide these in two main categories: Organic and Paid.
A few words on organic first: This is the more labor intensive method, it takes a much longer time to build it. But it can be more stable and with the right system, large part of the work can be automated.
There are dozens of ways to build adult sites, writing about each of them would make up for a book, but let me mention at least the most popular site types.
TUBES: this is the most popular adult site type at the moment and I’m sure we’ve all seen lot’s of them. It’s all about streaming video content, pirated or licensed, it’s a wild west out there, though most of the large ones are using licensed promo content these days. At least from a large part
There are 2 basic types of tubes, those who host the content and the other type just scraps content from others. The scrapper tubes just show thumbnail previews and link to the videos on actual tubes that host it. Scrapper tubes rely on traffic trading heavily.
Babelogs/Picture sites/TGPs: These used to be huge in the past, when images ruled the adult internet. Many of them got closed and lost traffic, but there is still a ton of people browsing these sites.
Model/Video indexes: Directory-like sites that rely on the more popular models and pornstars. These sites index ton’s of content, sort them by model or niche and link to 3rd party content.
Story sites/Community sites: These cater to a more specific audience and their fetishes. Sites like these group users that share an interest and are willing to share something from their sexual lives.
All of the above mentioned site types rely on advertising to monetize their traffic and you can usually buy ad space on them through some of the established traffic networks… exoclick works with most of them. In order to make solid money with these sites, you need 100s of thousands of visitors, especially when talking about the tubes.
Another popular approach in the world of organic traffic is to build WhiteLabel websites. Usually it’s done with Cam and Dating sites. A dating or Cam operator will provide you with some kind of a feed and you just take care of the design, or you can get the “whole thing” from them and just use your domain name. Then it’s about SEO magic and getting traffic to it.
One more model worth mentioning would be Review Sites. These focus on paid membership sites that they review, for example. I’ve seen review sites focused on content sites, dating sites, cam sites etc … whatever paid site you can find, it’s possible to review it. Again, this model is heavily dependent on SEO, but once it starts flowing in, the conversions are usually very nice.
I won’t dive deeper into this subject, because most of us here on STM are media buyers, so let’s focus on paid traffic fully.
DIRECT OR THROUGH A NETWORK?
When buying traffic, you have two options again. Buy from a network or a broker, or try to make a deal with the site owner directly. There are pros and cons to both options.
Striking a direct deal with a site owner can bring you cheaper traffic, especially when you find someone who doesn’t really understand the value of the traffic they have on their sites. But this is pretty rare these days.
Dealing with site owners directly has a lot of drawbacks though. Usually, you have to buy the whole rotation, so no cherrypicking of the best GEOs or device types, you simply have to take it all. In many cases, you have to pay upfront, without running any small test. Changing creatives can be a pain, unless they have an ad-server in place or let you use your own. On top of that, MANY webmasters are extremely hard to reach and deal with… they don’t answer emails, they are slow to react, they are not willing to change the ads…
On the other hand, in case you can really find a solid site with quality traffic, it will totally outperform the clicks you would get from a traffic network in most cases. To put it short, buying directly from site owners is hard, time consuming, complicated… but it can produce excellent results.
Buying from an ad network is a completely different experience. This way, you will get access to a HUGE amount of traffic from the largest tubes in existence. Most traffic networks have self serve systems in place these days, so starting a campaign and managing it is very easy.
Then there are the targeting options that allow us to buy only the traffic we want. Most networks have solid targeting by now, you can literally choose to buy users from a specific region, using a specific device and even a specific connection type. Of course there is a drawback here, we need to feed one more mouth in the process, these networks want their cut too and that drives prices up.
Another negative is the competition. Since it’s so easy to buy traffic from an ad network, hundreds of affiliates are doing it and that results in insane competition levels. We all compete for the same traffic, which drives the prices up again. But that’s the way it is, nothing we can do about it.
WHAT APPROACH SHOULD YOU START WITH?
The answer is easy here, as a new affiliate you simply have to go with an ad network. Buying directly requires a lot of experience, bigger budget and working funnels in multiple GEOs. Otherwise, you’d lose heavily on some of the GEOs and the experience would be very expensive.
Now when we have this sorted, let’s take a look at what traffic networks are out there. Bulk of the market is controlled by 4 big networks.
Exoclick
Traffic Junky
Traffic Factory
Traffic Stars
I would say that at least 80% of the general tube traffic is controlled by these 4 networks, possibly even more. The 3 with the word “traffic” in their names are “in-house” networks for some of the biggest tubes out there, such as pornhub, xhamster, xvideos … Exoclick on the other hand works with 1000s of smaller and bigger sites, which makes it the biggest adult traffic network in the world.
I talked more about what sites are in what network in the “industry overview thread”, check it here: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...rent-situation
These 4 are not all there is to choose from though, there are many more.
Traffic Force: Still a big one, in-house ad network for porn.com, good quality.
Ero-advertising, JuicyAds: Similar to exoclick, working with large amount of sites too.
Plugrush: original native ads network, everyone copied the idea from them.
TrafficHaus: they have spots on some large sites too, also offering global flat deals.
Most of the networks I listed so far are focused on banner traffic, but there are more types you can work with:
POPs: Popads and Adnium for example
Email clicks: Vrume, Exoclick has some too… some dating site operators are selling these clicks directly or via a broker.
Members area clicks: Very expensive but quality traffic. Some networks have it, some brokers sell it too. These are harder to find.
PUSH traffic: most of the push networks are not directly allowing adult promotions,but some of them will accept a softcore funnel and offer.
Native: Runative, TrafficStars, TrafficFactory and some others have it on offer.
Escort Traffic: Works well with dating, but these sites rarely work with an ad network. You need to try to get a direct buy there.
There are a few more options, but the ones I mentioned already, should keep you occupied for quite a while. In case I missed something important, please leave a comment in this thread and I will add them. And again, I talked more about this in the intro thread already, so don’t want to repeat myself too much.
WHAT AD DELIVERY METHOD TO USE?
We have a couple options here, again
The most common are Banners, POPs/Redirects, PUSH and brokered Email or Members area clicks.
The highest quality clicks come from Email or Members areas, but these are also the most expensive and hardest to work with. Usually, there is not much targeting possible, you need to prepay, small tests are hard to get accepted, you cannot use your own copy for the ads…
On the other side of the “quality ladder” there are POPs/Redirects. I’ve had the most quality problems when using this traffic type. It’s likely tied with the extremely high % of BOTs that this traffic format is known for. It can still work though, you just need to filter the traffic a lot.
PUSH is a weird one, these clicks convert quite well, but quality problems are also very frequent. It’s basically a HIT or MISS format. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t… you will lose the offer and no optimization will save it
Banner Traffic is somewhere in the middle. The fact that most of it comes from tube sites kinda takes the quality down, since these surfers do not like to pay for anything all that much. But with the right funnel and offer, the results can be good enough.
In my opinion, new adult affiliates should start with banners. Push would also be an option in case you have access to a lot of offers so losing some of them wouldn’t be a problem. But then again, starting your relationship with an affiliate network with questionable quality leads isn’t the best idea. So let’s stick with banners for the start.
HOW TO STRUCTURE YOUR FIRST ADULT DATING CAMPAIGN?
In the previous lesson, I mentioned that dating is probably the easiest vertical in adult, so let’s focus on this one. And based on the previous section, we know that banner traffic is most likely the best choice for the starters. So we are going to talk about setting up dating campaigns with banner traffic.
Whatever traffic network you choose, you need to setup proper tracking for your campaigns. The key to making profits in adult is building the right funnel and matching it with the right offer. To be honest, the offer itself is likely the most important part of the funnel.
These days, almost all affiliate network do have adult dating offers in their list, but let me just mention a few that I personally believe are solid, so you know where to start : advidi, unitedgap, rebll, vipoffers, dateprofits, topoffers, xcash … there are many more, I just listed a few that I actually worked with and didn’t encounter any problems with. Please keep in mind that situation might change and I cannot guarantee that all of them are the right choice NOW… always do your due diligence please!
Ok, back to the campaign structure. You need proper tracking, since testing various parts of the funnel will be your main focus. And there will be a lot of testing, so prepare for that. When I started with paid traffic, quite a few years ago, I had to test several HUNDREDS of banners and DOZENS of LPs until I finally reached some level of stability.
On top of that, I tested a lot of offers too, though way less than the number of banners and LPs. And it’s still the same today, massive testing is a must.
What tracker to chose? Honestly, any of the “modern” trackers will do the job as the funnels used in dating are pretty simple.
The “DEAFULT” structure of an adult dating banner campaign is very simple :
Traffic Source (banner) -> Landing Page -> Offer
This is the most frequently used setup, and it works just fine. But you might want to take it further. You can add a backbutton redirect, popunder or exit pop to the LP. Some people prefer to collect email leads on the LP before sending the users to an offer. There are also LPs with push subscription alerts on the LP… etc.
Based on my experience, the simple clean funnel outlined above, results in the best conversion rate on the “final” offer and also the best lead quality. Once you start adding the additional elements, the CVR will drop somewhat, it’s pretty much guaranteed.
This doesn’t mean that you should not experiment with such setups, because the initial loss in revenue might be made up for, with the other methods. You can open a dating smartlink in the popunder, you can milk your push list, you can profit from the email list…
TIP: When using a backbutton redirect or popunder, or anything similar, do not send these “clicks” to the same click url as the one you use on the actual CTA on the LP. Setup a separate campaign for these, otherwise it’s gonna mess up your stats.
In case you’re about to start your first dating campaign, I would strongly recommend to stick to the simple format, the experiments can come later on.
WHAT KINDA BANNERS SHOULD YOU USE?
There are several banner types and dimensions that you can work with. The most popular size is 300x250 or something close to that (300x315, 338x235) and 300x100 on mobile traffic. These are usually placed in prime locations too, which translates to better quality traffic and the highest volumes…. but also the highest competition.
NOTE: Since I mentioned “mobile” above, let me add a few words about the current traffic breakdown. In adult, the waste majority of users is browsing on mobile devices. On some sources it’s as much as 80-90% mobile and 10-20% desktop users. Desktop converts better, but the volume is simply in mobile now.
The other formats like skyscrapers, regular 480x banners, large footers … have less volume, but shouldn’t be overlooked. They often convert just as well and chances are, there will be less media buyers targeting them, which can translate into lower prices. Your goal should be to pretty much work with all the dimensions that are available.
As for the types, we could specify 2 basic ones : Static and Dynamic (animated). Based on my experience, there is no clear winner. In many cases, a simple static banner with just one photo of the RIGHT model, can outperform a super stylish animated banner, that someone spent hours on designing.
But I do have my favorite format: gallery style banner that rotates photos of a few different models. It looks like browsing a directory of models, pretty much, and users respond very well to it. I’ve also seen a few cartoon banners perform really well, but they need to match with the demo of the site you buy spots on.
Here are a few examples of typical dating ADs that I personally used with good results. As you can see these are pretty simple, nothing fancy or high level about them.
Typical example of a "housewife"... older woman, picture taken at home, large breasts... copy suggest 40+
Another "older" nextdoor type, not perfect by any means, still good looking... shorter and more explicit copy
This is an example of the "gallery type banner" rotating several females. I decided to show you this one because it's horrible in quality, too optimized, even a typo in the copy (my designer made a mistake)... but still, it performed very well.
And one more example... again a "believable" type of woman, no supermodel, shot at home... and using the more misleading "no credit card copy". Careful with these, quality of the leads can be bad.
All the banners above use the most common/popular layout: model on one side, the adcopy on the other one. No need to reinvent the wheel, this simply works the best, stick to it
Let me share some tips on banners that you might use:
1. Use real looking models! Too good looking models might turn people away.
2.Chose pictures that were taken at home, in a bar, in a garden… basically, where people usually spend their time. Glamour shots from studios is not what you want.
3.It’s hard to describe, but certain females simply perform better, you need to find them by testing.
4.Tricks like “no credit cards” will increase the conversions, but sometimes it’s deadly to the lead quality.
5.Older females used on banners increase the lead quality.
6.Use the words “local, near you, in your area” in your copy. Dating is about personal experience, nobody wants to travel a 1000 km.
I will probably write a lesson on adult copy too, but wanted to share a few tips right here before we get there
WHAT ABOUT LANDING PAGES, WHAT TO USE?
The undisputed king of adult landing pages is the “questions & rules LP”, it’s been like that for a few years already and I doubt it’s gonna change anytime soon. It’s always the same concept over and over …
Few questions first: Are you over X years old? Do you have some STD? Will you keep your mouth shut? … The original LP of this kind just had these 3 questions, but later on, people started experimenting by adding more to the mix.
Based on my experience, adding some questions about the preferences worked the best, such as: “What type of women do you prefer?” “What body type” “Size of the breasts” etc. This ads a feeling of some level of personalisation and the users respond well to this.
I’ve seen LPs with anywhere between 3 and as much as 20 questions, staying somewhere in the middle delivered the best results. The more questions you add, the more people close the LP, but the higher the CVR will be, more or less. This is another option you can experiment with a lot and it gives you a chance to differ yourself from the other LPs out there. Creative/funny questions can give you an edge.
Once the questions are answered, the rules are shown or it’s the other way around, first the rules, then the questions. The rules are very simple and usually contain something like : “You agree to be discreet”, “You might see some people you know, do not share this” OR “You agree to respond to a date request immediately” … basically something to get the users heated up and make them feel like they discovered something special that needs to be kept a secret
A good LP needs good imagery too!
Same concepts apply as with banners so let me add some tips here too:
1.Real life, nextdoor type of females works the best.
2.Common locations help too, just like with the banners.
3.If you can find dressed/undressed photos of the same girl, test those for sure.
4.Rotate multiple models, sometimes it works like a charm.
5.Experiment with both softcore and harcore imagery. Don’t make any assumptions before testing, in many cases a fully dressed model will outperform an explicit pose.
6.A strong headline and CTA can take you a long way, do not underestimate this part.
TIP: In some cases, matching the banners with the LP can result in great CVR, try it. Use the same model(s) on the banners and the LP, use the same headline and CTA too. If possible, try to stay consistent from the banner, all the way to the offer. It’s not a must and it’s not always working, but sometimes it’s all you need to become profitable.
WE GOT THE BANNERS AND THE LPS, NOW TO THE OFFERS.
Honestly, there is no way to tell if an offer is good, other than testing it. Once you gain some experience, you will be able to spot a “better” offer lander in a mix of several bad ones, but that’s still just the visual side, it tells you nothing about the backend and the actual conversion sequence.
You simply need to run traffic to it, to see whether it can perform well or not. The “visual” part is very important though, many offers come with multiple landers (offer urls) and some of them clearly outperform the others.
There is usually a “default” one, which is pretty much just a signup form. These can work well if your own LPs are solid and do all the pre-selling. For the more lazy affiliates, many offers now come with built in pre-landers, that look pretty much like standard LPs used by affiliates. These can work even directlinked, but remember, taking any shortcuts is the worst thing you can do in AM.
If you resort to directlinking, you’re losing one selling step and that’s never a good idea. How else do you want to set yourself apart from the competition? Anyone can rip a banner and directlink traffic to an offer, but it’s not that easy anymore, you gotta be creative.
To put it simple, you need to be using LPs, no matter what the offer url looks like. Not all of them will work with your funnel though, you need to test several offer urls for every offer you run. The good thing: your affiliate manager should be able to tell you which of the urls work the best across the network, so start with those.
Some tips now:
1.The chances of hitting the right offer straight of the bat are very limited, always test multiple offers, from multiple networks.
2.The same offer can perform differently in various networks, because of several reasons like scrubbing, network-advertiser relationship, tech setup things… do not be afraid to run the same offers through different networks.
3.Test the various conversion points, SOI, DOI … maybe even revshare. SOI is the easiest to convert, but DOI comes with less quality problems. Revshare is great for long term revenue, if you can master it.
4.Paybumps are very important in this business, focus on quality leads, the higher payouts will allow you to be more competitive.
5.Do not try to work with every affiliate network out there, focus on a few that perform the best for you and consider going direct with the advertisers as long as you have enough experience.
AND LASTLY, THE GEOS.
When choosing your first batch of offers to promote, you need to decide on the GEO too. You can choose from many, so how should you go about it?
Some GEOs are not a good choice from newbies, because of the competition. For example USA, which is a great GEO for dating BTW… but that’s where all the big boys are playing. This translates to high bids driven by the experiences sharks with bumped payouts or direct advertisers handling their own media buying.
Starting in US with zero experience pretty much means you’re gonna get burned, unless you’re lucky.
There are better choices. UK for example, it’s a competitive market, but from some reason, it’s way easier to make money there, compared to US. And since it’s an EN market, it’s pretty easy for all of us to operate there, as we all speak some English, right?
EU and the Nordics are very interesting for the past few years … There are some tricky GEOs in there, like DE for example, but once mastered, these can really rock. But honestly, if you want to try the German speaking markets, Austria or Switzerland are easier to profit from.
I mentioned the Nordics: Sweden, Norway, Denmark are all great markets, the higher payouts per lead can make it somewhat complicated for newbies, but the lead quality problems are less frequent there, so it’s a good option.
All of the ones I mentioned so far are pretty competitive though and not exactly the right choice for the freshest of newbies. We gotta look elsewhere. Since Asia, Africa, Middle East and the other traditionally cheap (in terms of traffic prices) GEOs are not really hot for adult dating, we gotta resort to the lower TIER of European countries.
Eastern Europe has grown as a market for adult dating lately a lot .. Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia… the Balkan countries are growing too, the there is the Russian speaking world… if I was a newbie, I’d put my focus there. The traffic prices are still pretty low and there are already quite a lot of offers targeting these countries.
LET’S WRAP IT UP NOW, OK?
This lesson kinda grew too long already, so I gotta wrap it up here. I’m sure there is already too much text here so it’s likely a challenge to read it all.
As usually, you’re welcome to ask questions below.
Thanks for reading.
Matej.
Great post, many interesting information and advices After the read I think I should experiment more with my funnel and LP. Thanks Matej!
Originally Posted by caravaggio
After the read I think I should experiment more with my funnel and LP. Thanks Matej!
Thank you @matuloo for the plug! Much appreciated :-)
Hi Matuloo,
We are Admolly a direct advertiser of adult dating offers. All our offers are in-house.
Please reach out to me on Skype so that we can discuss things further live:support_72460
PS: We are great fans of your content
Hi Matej,
Is it possible to write you or others (so I don't write to you all the time!) private messages where my thread was not answered? I think I will need this at this initial phase and there will be no need after my campaigns start profiting...
kind regards
Originally Posted by wealthycpa
While waiting, just browse the forums and use the search, large part of whatever questions you might have, has already been talked about on the forum, that's the beauty of the "archives"
Thank you, really useful !
You mentioned that its good to say that members are near them. i noticed some landers places a random number on that. Is there any benefit randomizing such a figure?
if the number was overstated, for eg 5000 members nearby, could it affect quality, since the offer may not have so many members
Okay, I will patiently wait for your reply whenever I PM you. For other moderators or senior members, I could just ask them on a thread if I can write a private message to them and if I can expect a reply.
Originally Posted by matuloo
While waiting, just browse the forums and use the search, large part of whatever questions you might have, has already been talked about on the forum, that's the beauty of the "archives" Originally Posted by wealthycpa
Originally Posted by evohatch
What worked best for me was using double digit, max 3-digit numbers (don't use rounded numbers, 123 looks better than 120) of members within certain range, again not a big one, something like 50km (35, 40...) or so. This way, you're on the safe side because chances are there are several other cities/towns (good for privacy reasons) within that range and it's still not too far and people are used to travel that much.
Originally Posted by evohatch
As matuloo says, when the user is from a small village or so then exaggerated numbers won´t look to good.
Also the city detection isn´t working 100% accurate, can also depend on the country you target.
But when you use wording like "YOUR_CITY and around" you can safely use it for your campaigns.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Depending on the GEO db too of course. I've used to work with maxmind and while it was pretty good in the most exposed GEOs, like the USA, it totally sucked in some EU countries. So I just resorted to using "in your area" and didn't really notice any significant drop compared to calling out the city directly. But yeah, using the city directly is a valid approach and can work well in certain geos.
But for example in DE it sucks so it´s better to don´t use it with CITY only.
Anyway, you have much more experience running adult than I do so it´s good to hear that there is no big difference in just using "in your area".
Much better to keep stuff simple.
Btw, is there still something like the lander with google maps and markers around?
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Thank you! I will test out "and around/in your area" as well. Sometimes I use the {city} on the LP by getting the url parameters from the tracker, is using maxmind that was mentioned any different?
I saw many ads with "no cc"/"free" had been running for a long time. Since it might be bad for quality, how did they continue to run?
When they also use Maxmind it will show same results.
When they use a different database it can show different results, based on the other databases accuracy.
Yup, twinaxe is right, depends on what DB the tracker uses.
I'm not sure about other trackers, but
But even then, the data is not 100% accurate in the whole world. It's really hard to keep such DBs up to date and in certain countries, it's just not feasible for them.
The great Matuloo strikes again with another amazing lesson!
And while you're sick too....get well soon buddy!
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Will be back in a few days!
Hope all is well. I saw that “cc submits” and “free” is used in this example but since it could affect quality, any idea why it could used, or how did these ads run for a long time with no quality issues? Another thing i have be thinking was if using the adult version of snapchat/instagram angle for the ad would give a good quality for a generic offer?
Originally Posted by evohatch
Using snapchat, tinder, whatsapp and tons of other known brands to promote their "adult versions" is an approach that works really well. The problem is, some networks do not allow these anymore, actually a lot of them dont. If you can get such banners approved, many of them will work really well. I didn't experience big quality issues with these angles.
perfect work my friend THANK YOU
LOL i had the same situation one time that my designer missed with the ad copy in a banner and wrote a wrong spelling word , but i found that this banner outperform all other banners and it made very good profit for me that i cloned to all the campaigns i was running at that time.
UGLY really WORKS
Originally Posted by matuloo
Very great post again.
Gallery style banner for large size banner such as 300x250 works well for me, but just fine for mobile size such as 300x100, do you think gallery style banner for 300x100 also an good idea? Or do you have an better one?
By the way, can you list some sources to get the cartoon sources other than ADP, due to there only a few cartoon banners on the ADP over and over again.
Thanks Matej!
Thanks Matej, I see how it works now.
Originally Posted by matuloo
How do you to test several hundreds banners?
Base on my understanding, I can only test dozens banners with 1 campaign/GEO. The first thing will be test angles, 10-max 20 banners, then narrow down to 2-3 angles, test the models, with 3-5 batch of banners, that's all.
I don't how to test several hundreds banners, actually don't know the optimization direction of banners, figure out what angles work very easy, but how to figure it which part of models works? Especially when use the rotate gallery style banner.
Originally Posted by j80montes
With a gallery banner, where there are several models rotated, it's harder to say which one is the right one, if not impossible. What i'm doing sometimes is that I test single-image banners first and once I know what models perform the best, I take those images and convert them into a gallery banner.
Thank you for the great content @matuloo. We really appreciate being part of it. If we can be of any help for the upcoming Dating lessons, please let us know. Always a huge pleasure working with you!
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