Where I'm starting (12)

Here's the tl;dr recap of my situation; I'm a programmer by trade who's been trying to get into the game for a while now but I have still yet to run a profitable campaign. I'm to the point now where my paltry $$ limit is about $100-$200 a month. I decided to start with dating on POF.

Currently I'm running a dating offer for mature singles. I'm targeting single women (40-45 yrs old) in the US. I'm currently bidding at 0.45 with a $15 daily limit (tiny, i know!). I have 5 ads running 2 different ad copies (so a total of 10) and I'm getting paltry numbers. Over the past 3 days I've gathered 36,000 impressions with only 7 clicks and no conversions yet. I realized my budget isn't the largest but I'm just trying to work with what I've got and for some reason, I was drawn to the dating niche.

My plan for now is to add more images while removing the image that have no received any clicks yet and going from there.

If anyone has any tips of advice for me, I'd be more than grateful to hear it, thanks!

Hey curtis,

I definitely feel your pain as I'm in your shoes too! This is due to my country's currency and my full-time salary, I've been struggling with my extremely tight budget like yours.. It seems that PoF and FB are harder than PPV with tight budget like us. I really hope someone who is successful now and started with a "tight budget" last time can chime and and really give some "clear" direction as what we should stick with.

I've been very frustrated about this too.

I'm with PoF now too and still in a negative ROI.

Hopefully someone can give more advice to people that have tight budget like us.

Cheers!

Don't give up guys its a numbers game. It's like picking up girls. What's your objective, meet your wife or get laid? If your goal is to get laid then you do whatever it takes. Usually what it takes is talking to 20 girls a night. If you spend all night scoping what girl is your "type" you go up to her and she denies you the night is ruined. The alternative is you talk to any girl that comes within your 1 foot radius strike up 20 conversaitions and 1/20 will prob be DTF (down to fuck).

Same with this, dont spend too much time with just one campaign, stay open to trying new things. Once you test a campaign if you don't see potential, move on. You can achieve this with a small budget, just test less variables, so instead of rotating 25 offers with 25 creatives with 25 targets, just launch something that will have the highest chance of success.

Also, my rule of thumb is if its the first thing you think of then its probably saturated. Why not try international? Why not try banners instead of those little ads on PoF? Why not "borrow" a campaign thats working (don't reinvent the wheel)?

To sum up, launch many campaigns that are ultra targetted high chance of success and see which ones have the most potential.

(Some affs may disagree its just a style thing there is no "right" way)

Originally Posted by The Angry Russian

Don't give up guys its a numbers game. It's like picking up girls. What's your objective, meet your wife or get laid? If your goal is to get laid then you do whatever it takes. Usually what it takes is talking to 20 girls a night. If you spend all night scoping what girl is your "type" you go up to her and she denies you the night is ruined. The alternative is you talk to any girl that comes within your 1 foot radius strike up 20 conversaitions and 1/20 will prob be DTF (down to fuck).

Same with this, dont spend too much time with just one campaign, stay open to trying new things. Once you test a campaign if you don't see potential, move on. You can achieve this with a small budget, just test less variables, so instead of rotating 25 offers with 25 creatives with 25 targets, just launch something that will have the highest chance of success.

Also, my rule of thumb is if its the first thing you think of then its probably saturated. Why not try international? Why not try banners instead of those little ads on PoF? Why not "borrow" a campaign thats working (don't reinvent the wheel)?

To sum up, launch many campaigns that are ultra targetted high chance of success and see which ones have the most potential.

(Some affs may disagree its just a style thing there is no "right" way)

Thanks for the advice angry russian. I'm going to cut this campaign lose if I don't start seeing some conversions tonight. I had made some changes to the targeting options I had set and I immediately started getting more clicks, 14 since earlier this morning (pic attached). But still no conversions. I'm going to let it run through the day today and if I'm still not seeing anything, I think I'm going to try an international offer.

Someone here said POF is all about CTR. What's your CTR like right now? I try to shoot for at the minimum .1% for women-targeted offers, which is all I've done so far. Keep testing different images until you get good numbers. Once you have a good set of solid CTR images, then work on your ad copy to help conversions.

As Angry Russian said, "borrow" a campaign that's working. Use the POF spy tool here and analyze your competition. Sure, you could copy the exact images and ad copy, but for the sake of learning and for long-term success, take notes on your competition's ads - the angle they're taking, details about the images used, etc. Come up with your own formula and test things out. This is what I did to start out in POF, and it's finally starting to work.

I hope you're working with a network that can pay you weekly, so even with a small budget, you might find quick success and roll things over and over again.

The CTR for my whole campaign is for the few days I've been running it is currently at 0.044% so far. My best performing creatives/images are getting between .030 and .091 CTR. I have yet to get over .1% so tonight, i'm going to load some new images up, while keeping my 5 best performers running too, and see how they do over the next day or two.

I've been using the spy tool too to see what others are running and how they're running the offer I'm running and it looks like they're using landers (I was direct linking). So before I switch to an international offer, I think I'm going to try tweaking one of these landers that I've seen others use and see if that helps me out any. My current plan is thus: to get my server ready to host my own landers (i'm a web dev by trade so it's no problem for me do so), then upload maybe 10 new images from the loads i've been collecting over the past few days, then copy (and tweak to make it my own ) one of the landers i saw out in the wild and then finally just let it run until i've sent at least 10x the offer's payout (got that tip here!) and see where it all stands.

Also, I am currently working with a network that's offering weekly payouts (EWA baby!!) so I'm sure I'm going to be leaning heavily on that for a while. I'll report back how it goes! Thanks for the advice all!

Reach out to your AMs at EWA, I heard they are good guys and really knowledgeable.

Your CTRs are really bad for PoF. You definitely need to change something (Images, headlines, or adcopies).

In my experience, its not very hard to game CTR on PoF, my highest CTR was 0.8% over xxx,xxx impressions. I will usually dump any ads with CTR below 0.1%. Take advantage of the dynamic tokens, {State:} and {Age:}, and work them into your ads and you should see a noticeable jump in CTR. You can also go a step further and call out user attributes in your ads (hair color, height, smoker/nonsmoker, etc..) and work these angles into your headlines and adcopies, you'll need to create more campaigns if you want to approach it from this angle though. There is a reason why FB doesn't allow advertisers to call out user attributes on FB ads, its because it works exceptionally well to get the click, PoF allows this so take advantage of it.

You should also be using their conversion tracking pixel or iframe to track where your conversions are coming from when you start getting some. With a $15/day budget it will be tough for you to gather statistically significant data over that many ads. Try dropping the number of ads you're running to 5-6 and let them run for about 3-5k impressions before coming to any conclusions.

I reached out to my EWA AM and he gave me some good advice. So I totally redid my campaign. I'm starting basically fresh. 7 images (more than 5 i know! i just really wanted to try these images out) split across two (new) ad copies which utilize the dynamic tags PoF provides. It's what I saw others were using so I'm going to try it too. I'm also using a landing page that will use some dynamic location info, as determined by the viewers ip address. The ads are currently awaiting approval and I'll report back how things go. Approval time for my PoF ads seems to take a long time (18-24 hrs) but currently I'm just chalking that up to me being a small fry in the eyes of PoF. Thanks for all the insight and I hope I'm using it to the best of my ability

So I got all of my ads rejected. The reason was that the landing page wasn't working and the message stated I need to check my lander to make sure it works for all countries they (PoF) receive traffic in. My ads were only targeted for U.S. traffic and my lander is loading fine. Do I need to redirect visitors from other countries even if I specifically targeting U.S. only traffic?

They're pretty slow on the weekends, not many people in the office on weekends probably. I don't think it has anything to do with how much you spend.

On weekdays they're usually lightning fast with ad approvals, like 1-2 hours tops for me at least, unless you submit ads after 6PM PST when most of them get off work, then you'll probably have to wait till the next morning.

I've never encountered that type of message for landing page rejection, maybe Ben can chime in.

Yeah, my rejection was pretty quick today. I saw Ben had a thread he was taking questions on. I'll see if I can ask him there.