thefalcon's Adult Dating Follow Along (Mobile) (32)
Fashionably late to the contest, but I will deliver my best follow along to date! I am a firm believer that the best way to learn is to get your hands dirty. What better way than in the dirtiest niche of all. PORN. From my follow along you should have all the necessary tools to get started immediately and cut that learning curve down to nothing. I myself still have much to learn about the ins and outs of the adult space so let's get to it.
As our mentors on STM have been saying, Adult is a gold mine. Rather than re-iterate all the awesome reasons why, I refer you to Maynzie's post: The Almighty "Cha Ch$ng" World of Adult
There are a couple core things that can be applied to any vertical- so that when the rubber meets the road, you get the best start possible.
1. Spying
2. Creatives/LPs/Hosting
3. Tracking
4. Optimization
With that, let's jump into the details first.
GOAL: $100/day in 2 weeks, with good quality report from the advertiser.
OFFER: BeNaughty - Cupid
$1.60 Single-Opt In (SOI)
Why go through a network when you can go direct? Usually the answer is that you don't have the volume required, but in BeN's case you can get your account started and start pushing in 5 minutes. The main reason I like going direct is that you can communicate directly with an AM regarding your quality.
COUNTRY: USA
We want scale. In order to test all our creatives effectively in a 2 week period, we need volume. Also, if we hit a solid ROI, we can scale insanely, leveraging our hard work. If you are on a tight budget, certainly go INTL, but in order to get fast results I prefer US.
SOURCE: Exoclick - xhamster.com
Through Exoclick we can hit up one of the biggest mobile porn sites, xHamster. They accept Paypal and you can start an account immediately. Super fast and easy.
BUDGET: $100-$300/day
The great thing about going after such a large pool of impressions is that we can get a good deal on xxx budget. Contrast that with PPV where a lot of times you're competing w 3-4 people for $50/day of traffic from one target. $100/day should suffice for our testing purposes and then ramping up to $300+ when we are ready to scale.
Coming Next... The core stuff
-Spying: How to use Firefox to spy as mobile device to get a running start.
-Creatives/LPs/Hosting: Which I choose and why hosting is crucial for mobile
-Tracking: Using MobAff Tracker. For the benefit of the newer folks I will also use the FREE STM mobile tracker as well, so you too can get started testing NOW.
Looks pretty much like a perfect setup!
Your placements, mobile carriers and landing page will determine ALL.
- Darker landing pages are good, and your images can drastically change your conversions!
- Block prepaid carriers (your main carriers will all convert well, ATT/Verizon/Tmobile etc...)
- Follow same quality rules, 25+, don't say 'free' etc
You've got the best offers ATM, cupid has a couple other branded ones as well.
I've had interesting experiences with BeN direct. Mixed results when split testing going through a network. Typically I would recommend going direct for any offer, but BeN is a bit...iffy.
Just make sure you DO NOT RUN RON that will basically ensure getting kicked off the offer haha looking forward to seeing some results bro
This may sound very noobish, but could you elaborate on the DO NOT RUN RON part? Does that only apply to some networks or is that a general rule of the thumb?
Dude I wish you all the best; for this follow along I'm mostly interested in your use of geoedge. I was told that a working mobile spy was "highly improbable" by one of the reds on this forum!!!
@stackman
Many thanks for the tips! I will be sure to employ them. My AM at Cupid has said similar things as well.
@mrgreen
Yeah, i've heard many different things about cupid which is why I was hesitant to use them for over a year. I've split test w other networks and direct has always converted better for me. I guess that just proves that you must always test and test and test. Any other offer you might recommend?
@maynzie
Your attitude is infectious! Yes I am definitely aiming higher, but just for the purposes of the follow along. I want to hopefully show how to make a modest goal attainable. =)
@zealous
Mobile spying is certainly a tough nut to crack. The WRW mobile spying was pretty terrible and it's difficult because it's really hard to keep track of placements and so many different sources etc. Luckily for this campaign, I only need to spy xhamster, which I will show later on. I've been able to get some good stuff simply by identifying high value placements and checking them occasionally w proxy/user agent, which geoedge can do as well.
Update #1: Spying Mobile Placement
As someone mentioned earlier, a legit mobile spying platform is probably currently out of reach. Too many variables, fragmented industry and so on. Fortunately for us we are focused on ONE site: mobile.xhamster.com
Where many mobile campaigns require you to optimize handset, carrier and so on, Exoclick only allows you to target by broad device categories (iphone, android etc.) This greatly simplifies our targeting strategy as well as our spying strategy.
Since we are doing US traffic (and again Exo doesn't target by state), we don't even need a VPN. Geoedge is probably not even necessary to buy in this case as you can try using Firefox User Agent Switcher although I have not tried this possible free method.
Simply install and turn on the Geoedge add-on, select US. and I pick Android since it will likely be the larger share of my traffic. Hit f5 over and over and take note of the banners, LPs, and offers. You'll see that I even hit the CTA button multiple times to see if offers were being rotated and indeed they were! I'm only interested right now in the top banner 300x100.
Lesson here is to spy other porn sites too to get a feel for what's out there. On xhamster I'm only seeing 3 ads that I can use, one LP and a couple offers. Check out pornhub, cliphunter, youporn etc. Don't be afraid to click through everything. Don't forget to change your device too to see if there are any changes. I changed to iPhone 4 and saw that there were ads for iPhone Porn apps. I like to have 5-6 porn sites open at once and click through them quickly and hit f5. Doing this, you can grab A TON of material to test.
These are the banners that I will mixing in with some of my own design. Note that #2 is a gif:
This is a great way to start, by seeing what's out there. Rip some stuff and test it to see some meaningful data. Later on once we get a better sense of what's working, we will start to innovate and make changes as we see fit.
TIP:
- I use firefox to save LPS. For whatever reason, it knows to save img files references in the css of the page whereas in chrome it won't- meaning you will be hotlinking to the original image urls of the guy you ripped from. Clearly we don't want to do that, and manually fixing it is a pain in the ass.
- Some websites use different ad sizes. Make sure you know a little photoshop to adjust as necessary.
- Don't forget to take note of the interesting stuff you see and look at it ON YOUR ACTUAL PHONE. Sometimes you'll find code for all kinds of crazy things that don't show up on desktop and apply to touchscreens.
SUPER PROTIP:
- If you know a little bit about computer logic or scripts, use the iMacros plugin to code yourself a custom scraper! Relaod and scrape every 10 min, save the image and pull the right tags to grab the urls into a csv file and you've got a ton of spy data to work with. I've been too lazy to do this myself, but let me know if you try it.
NEXT:
- Completing my first round test banners/LPs
- Setting up Tracking and Hosting
Your attitude is infectious! Yes I am definitely aiming higher, but just for the purposes of the follow along. I want to hopefully show how to make a modest goal attainable. =)
If this works, its to TJ, Star, Adbucks, Reporo, Gts & beyond!
Originally Posted by thefalcon
@maynzie
so i've heard! you've got me dreamin big man. thanks for the offer tips. I've had my eye on reporo for some time now.
@fjk87
exactly. don't even think about spying feature phones or text/push ads. simply way too much variability in traffic medium on many points for you to get an accurate picture of what's going on. If you're gonna spend the time to test evvvverything, might as well spend that time testing yourself. The flip side of this is that you can have a pretty targeted campaign be protected for a long time.
Now that we have a good idea of what's out there. We finalize the first round of ads and LPs we want to test. Note which are jpgs vs. gifs. "oface" is a gif I picked out and modified into a banner. Doing a search on google for porn gifs can get you some pretty crazy stuff. Another favorite place of mine is r/nsfw_gifs on reddit.
Taking stackman's advice I decided to make a dark version of the lander we are seeing is very popular just to see what kind of difference we might find. I also added a 4th bullet for "25+" to help our quality. This is advice I've received from almost everyone.
Taking Maynzie's advice I added in a couple of Cuipd's other offers into the rotation. The most interesting thing to note is that the payouts vary alot. 1.60, 1.35, and 1.00. We will want to communicate with our Cupid AM regarding the performance of these on their end to really get an idea of what works best backing out and if we can get bumps where they are deserved.
I went ahead and purchased a new domain for this campaign. I use Beyond Hosting so I usually just buy there to simply things. And then I point it through my CDN at MaxCDN to make sure I get an ultrafast loadtime. The second panel is actually the cPanel of my host on BH, and I am configuring the new domain I added on to my MaxCDN address.
Now let me show you how I set up my tracking. This may not be the most efficient method, but it's what I've gotten used to and serves my purposes sufficiently. Since I am using MobAff, there is not an option to rotate offers like in CPVLab yet. I like to use an offer ID variable that I pass to my LP to solve this problem. Based on the ID, the offer link will change to a particular offer.
You'll see how this matches up with the different LPs I set in the tracker:
In total you'll notice 6 links, a combination of 2 different LPs and 3 different offers. You can imagine how crazy this gets if you have more of either. I believe in p202 you can rotate offers?
Of course, don't forget your postbacks in your offer network backend:
To finally cut this post off, I will show the campaign setup in Exoclick on a separate entry.
Now we can see the limited targeting of Exoclick. Only Device category and Country. Do note though that while we can't target granularly, we can sort out the traffic through MobAff tracker and optimize bucket traffic style on our end. We pick the major devices and some feature phone. I usually stay the hell away from blackberry/RIM.
We choose to target xhamster exclusively. This is the one we have been spying + it has the most traffic. We also take note of the bid.
Doing the math we can see that at .165 CPM, there is about $2,000 of inventory here up for grabs on a daily basis. Since our daily budget is starting out at $100, we go for lowest ad frequency and bid at .166.
Uploading the banners is a breeze. Many times you will find out you got a banner from PornHub and need to resize. I always make sure to edit the creative variable passed to my tracker. Also, one thing I found out is that exo adds on a blank space to your link. I have no idea why, but sometimes this fucks up my variables if I'm passing any. So I add &blank to the end of my link to make sure my other variables are solid.
We hit submit and wait for approval....
- I like to double-check my links to make sure they are working properly.
NEXT
Let's get some data!
does exoclick have any mobile variables? if not, are you using any custom ones? havent worked with exoclick and forgot if they support any...
also are they still tough on the redirect part? the tracking url has to be the landing page right?
The setup so far looks perfect.
You are using the right amount of banners / lander to start.
Update us when you have your first numbers!
@vidivo
Exoclick does not have any dynamic parameters/tokens as far as i know. When uploading each ad, I manually pass the creative id, since you submit a link with each banner. The great thing about mobaff tracker or the STM mobile tracker is that they both have reasonably good detection which will cover device type, carrier, etc. Usually the most important thing to get your traffic network to pass is a pubid, but since we are drawing exclusively from xhamster, we dont have that issue. If you were to track by pubid for instance for a RON campaign, I believe the best way to do that would actually be to track through the exoclick reporting by setting up goal conversion there.
@bbrock32
Thanks! Numbers coming up shortly. They are promising indeed.
lots of fun to read! looking forward to following you along, best of luck!
The data is in! I had about $80 left in my exoclick account so I figured i'd let that burn out to kickoff our campaign. I think starting with a small push is ideal because you can quickly identify major problems and eliminate them before u start spending truckloads. For instance you may have a broken link or setup errors.
In this case, one of the offers is not converting at all. Let's show the data before I make my analysis:
Right off the bat, we see a big problem. Cheekylovers has gotten the same amount of impressions but absolutely no conversions. This is a bit suspicious as the offers are all generally appear to be similar flow. This is a questions we will ask our AM, in the event that it is something on their end. In the meantime, I note that we will take cheeky off testing. Also, we see that the dark versions have a higher EPC. Thanks to stackman for recommending to test that!
One issue in our data is there is significant click inflation (over 100%, 744 exo, 1925 mobaff). The EPC is not meaningful in absolute terms, so we will make sure to note that.
Next we look at creatives:
I see that the effective CPC of the ads range from .08-.12 and we will need to directly compare that to our real EPCs. Even though some have high EPCs they might have worse CPCs to stack up against. Being that cheeky kind of messed things up, I think I need more significant data to make any sort of judgement call here. I will note to myself that the strongest on the outset is oface (my self-modified gif banner).
I am pleasantly surprised by the device data. iOs performing way better than android or feature. My plan is to remove feature with the intention of splitting the remaining 3 groups out into separate campaigns after I get some more data.
So for now, I can see immediate positive ROI potential. For spending $73 and getting back $55 when 1/3 of my offer base is a waste means that I can be a little over breakeven before optimizing 1. device, 2. banner, 3. LP, 4. Offer or 5. dayparting. Holy crap that's potential! We do also have to remember to talk to our AM regarding our quality as well as the Cheekylovers issue.
My next step is to make these changes:
- Remove cheeky from rotation
- Remove feature
And start getting more data to be able to optimize at deeper levels.
As for your winning creative try this too.
WARNING: These attractive older women maybe someone you know. They love to fuck guys they meet online. CTA -> View Pics
WARNING: These attractive older women maybe someone you know. They are looking for sex online not dates. CTA -> View Pics
Weird to see such a positive discrepancy in clicks rather than the reverse. Any ideas why?
Maybe it's a result of their anti-fraud system.
Ahh, you mean Exoclick isn't charging your for fraudulent clicks e.g. bots. Are you able to look at IP/referrer reports in MobAffTracker? I would think that would confirm if that was going on.
Experiencing same with the clicks 'issue' with Exo showing fewer clicks than I actually receive. Might be duplicate clicks / bot traffic ? Do you have any freq. cap ? If so, I'm using freq. cap too, could imagine those clicks come from displays that were capped? Otherwise no idea as well.
Yeah the ip/ref reports are in mobaff. He can just check that out.
@pain2k
thanks for the suggestion! I will certainly make some variations on the best ads after the next round of data.
I checked all kind of data to see if I could get a clue as to where these extra clicks are coming from. short referrer shows all exoclick, under device nothing unusual shows (like bots form desktop), country 98% is US. When I look at the specific referrers I see that some have 1 click, while others might have 2,3 or 4 clicks. This makes me think the discrepancy is a result of user interface rather than bots/scrapers. Something like multiple/accidental taps of the banner. Perhaps OS/device specific functionality that results in this inflation.
I'm not an expert on this, so if anyone else has some insight please chime in!
I'm having some issue w my cash flow, been waiting foreverrrr for a big payment to clear on my bank account. Likely tomorrow I will have some new data. Kind of frustrating, but this is why we need to prioritize getting on weeklies.
Got my funding issues squared away. More data is in:
Key changes/observations:
- Stopped traffic to Flirt early on as it was doing really bad in comparison.
- White vs Dark seems to level out. This is only data from the day though so perhaps during nighttime the dark pulls ahead.
- our best ad is the custom creative i made, both in CTR and EPC department. Is this bc the other ads are played out?
Actions:
- I will cut out bottom 3 performing ads and up my budget to get some profits over the next couple days while I put together my next test.
I will test:
- Android and iOs separately, possibly multiples of each at different bid levels. the max bid for ios is .15 while android is way up at .40. We will want to set bids at different levels to see what kind of traffic we get. This also helps us keep an eye on price fluctuations.
- New copy that was suggested in this thread.
- Pull some new gifs from porn sites to test (i have another stashed that i know gives good quality but average CTR, useful for boosting our quality once we get a report back from our AM)
- Throw in some new offers
For now I am comfortable with the LP and don't want to start variations here since we are still nailing down the other components. If the campaign was still breakeven or worse however I might think about adding 1 LP, but for now we are satisfied with the results.
Day 2 Grand Total
$178.50 SPEND
$212.10 REVENUE
We are in profit territory, now it's time to start upping our spend and check in with our quality to see if we need to mix in some ads w older women etc. so we don't get booted.
Hey guys, good news. Last night after I posted my update, I decided to up my budget to $200/day. $50 more spent b4 the budget reset and another $200 spent today.
Today and yesterday in total:
SPEND $366.86
REVENUE $624.45
$100/day+ achieved.
Pretty damn good! Maynzie was right, I can be aiming much higher. The issue right now is now my cap which is 200/day from cupid. I plan to mix in caps from other networks, but I'm not sure if they will convert comparably.
So, I will be adding a couple more banners. This is an awesome site to get gifs from:
Immediately I can pick 2 out which I think might be good. while super sexy ones stand out. I need to remember to skew for older/amateurish style stuff.
In addition to making some new banners, I employ the recommendation pain2k made regarding copy. 4 new ads below:
Just gonna add them, keep the top 2 from the past round and see how it goes.
Next steps:
- Find offers to split test: Adult Friend Finder
- Prepare testing on second mobile traffic source (any recommendations?)
- Prep new LPs to test
seems like the easiest path would be to stick to exo, and try other placements there
What do you use to edit gifs mate?
Great follow-along. Keep in mind too, even if your ROI is sagging, with the data you have now you have the ability to day-part, hour-part, geo-part (by state, if you have that data), etc which can bring you back to profitibility *immediately*.
I'll sometimes end up in this 'wind-down' phase of campaigns myself, test a new banner/lp that smashes it, then scale back to all states or hours again! 100% ROI, 100% of the time!
Nice followalong. It motivated me.
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