Home > Adult Traffic (NSFW) > Follow-along Campaigns

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After Dark Dating Follow Along [WAP] ಠ_ಠ (34)

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So I'm in. It's late in the challenge but I want to do this.

Hopefully the last few days I've spent coding away are about to pay off.

Goal: $100/day net profit.
Budget: $100-200 per day.

Offers: Flirtcafe, BeNaughty, C-Date, 2Flirt, Sexychatdating, XXXBlackbook
Countries: Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Austria, +more
Traffic Sources: Exoclick, TrafficJunky, Star-Advertising + a few others I may test.

Tracking: P202 w/ STM tracker V2
Tools: adultadspy trial, photoshop batch processing, opera mobile, pingdom tools

First thing to do is have my previous landing pages, and others I've seen work translated.

While I'm waiting on those to come in, I'll be grabbing ads from adultadspy, and making up my own variations using the same text.

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Always fashionably late .

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Yeah well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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That's a lot of countries / offers / traffic sources for that level of budget.

Think you'd make more progress with just one solid country / traffic source, and focus the $ towards testing ads / landers / offers.

But that's just like my opinion man

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So today I just about exhausted my wrist today... downloading ads from adultadspy. What did you think I was going to say? Trials don't last forever and I still got a lot more to go.

edit: almost forgot. I ran into some problems trying to install the STM tracker(MYSQL had too many files open) that took up some time, but I think I should be able to get it work here shortly.

2 LP translations are completed and 2 more should be done by tomorrow or the next day. Between them and some I've downloaded, I'll should have a handful of campaigns up and running tomorrow.

I'll be using previous LP and ad templates that have performed okay in the past, as well as a some things I've seen a lot on PC but not on mobile yet. Stay tuned!

That gif speaks to my soul. Did you whip that text part up in photoshop?

You're probably right, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. I can go higher per day if need be, but I'll probably end up pausing some and focusing on the on the 2-3 that look most promising anyway.

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5 campaigns/countries are now running. I'll be posting a huge update here later today.

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Day 1 results: Shitty CTR from swiped ads, abnormal discrepancy in clicks, and subids not registering on many conversions. And yet there is hope.



Unfortunately I'm running on fumes right now after staying up till the break of dawn last night, so I'm going to have the save the full update till later. I got to get these new ads and translations sent off before I crash.

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Alright so here's part 1 of the full update.

The Ads
When I did the adultadspy trial, I swiped just about every 300x250 and 300x100 header ad available. I figured since so many were similar in their angle, it was a good indication they were working and I'd take the top performers and make my own versions. As it turns out, that inclination was wrong and the CTR has been pretty abysmal, at least for all the 300x250s I tested on mobile.



Here are the ones I used for Germany and France for example:

German:


French:


Results: The french ads in particular completely tanked.


Germany did better, but that's still a disappointing CTR compared to what I'm used to getting in predominately english speaking countries. This is the top ad of the bunch.


Now maybe I just got unlucky with the ones I tried. I did avoid the "Join Free" and "No CC required" ones. I still have a full folder to test if I wanted to, but I don't think I'm going to.

It's obvious there is a lot of copying going on, presumably under the same mentality that I had of "If everyone's doing it there must be something there." That would probably explain the "Better than Craigslist" ads showing up in foreign countries when they probably don't even know what that site is.

I'm sending off for some more translations here shortly and will be using my previous performing ad templates with them.

So lesson learned. Don't be lazy.

And just for fun, a friendly jab at adultatspy. I caught me off guard at first.

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So Day 2, was largely meh. I'm breaking even at $75 spent $75 revenue so far.



Exoclick is being weird. I've never really had issues with click discrepancy with them, compared to other mobile ad networks, but for some reason I'm actually getting MORE clicks than are showing, to the magnitude of nearly 3X with 310 vs 120 showing in reports. But despite that I'm having trouble getting enough volume. I'm bidding $1.0 now in some countries but getting piss poor impressions, so it has to be my daily budget setting or something else, because even still I'm not hitting the $20 cap. I'm going to talk to a rep tomorrow and see what's up with their system.

Waiting for translations is never fun. I'm going to queue up some more while they're going through to minimize downtime. Going to see about some other country offers to run as well while waiting, and if it's taking too long I'll put up some UK/AU/CA campaigns again to test things out. Probably on TJ or star-advertising.

I intend to write up a more complete post on making mobile landers here tomorrow, and hopefully have some of my own ads to show.

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Not a whole lot to report for today. I got acquainted with using Google maps, which I'll be testing in my LPs with geolocation, and found some new promising offers to rotate in, in some new countries as well.

I'm still waiting on my last batch of translations to come in so I can get some new ads going, which is the thing most killing my ROI right now. I'm going to look to one hour translate for future ad headline work, because waiting 2-3 days for Fiverr doesn't cut it.

Spend: $107
Revenue: $131
Net: $-23



I found it odd I was paying less than I was bidding for a few countries on exoclick, and receiving such low volume. So I experimented with upping Austria bid dramatically from $0.3 to $1.0 to see what would happen. Well what happened was I ended up paying $0.6 CPM, which while I did get more traffic, I didn't get additional conversions. Partly due I think to the ads, but maybe also to due with the lander not necessarily matching up with the offer, advertising it like it's a website with user photos as opposed to a text dating service.

Theres still so much I need to cover and detail. I haven't been able to get Camtasia to work without being extremely laggy, and my PC is pretty fast.

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On Tracking:

Alright time to get more into the details today. I'm going to go over the setup I'm using for tracking to manage my campaigns.

I start by making use of Prosper202's accounts to split up devices by country and device, ie PC US, Android US, etc for the sources I'll be targeting.

You can also add your 3rd party pixels there, but I never do since most networks I've worked with don't support iframes.

This is a manual method of redirection. You could use something like Mobile-Detect to do the job with php querying the user agent string also, which is what I'll be doing for Traffic Junky since it doesn't let you split up campaigns by devices. I'll show that version later.

The get parameters file is needed to pass the url values in the ? and & parts onto the destination. Without setting those you wouldn't be able to track anything.
Here's what I'm using for doing that: https://gist.github.com/The-Dude-Abi...0d280ed37d7924
For the redirect part, you could use something like this https://gist.github.com/The-Dude-Abi...645deed009d64b

So basically this setup lets you get things setup relatively quickly and keep close tabs on everything using your tracker.

STM v2 Tracker
I did opt to use the STM v2 mod in this case, which is much preferable for mobile since it lets you see the specific devices and carriers. It also has pixel tracking which is preferable to javascript tracking on mobile, especially feature phones with limited capabilities. I really don't know why the P202 team opted to do a javascript version. Testing comparing P202 javascript tracking to STM pixel on whatloadsfaster.com also showed a noticeable difference in total page load time:



Additional notes: To avoid making your stats & costs inaccurate, always use the "real clicks" dropdown for viewing campaigns, and updating cpc. This filters duplicate clicks out of the equation which there may be tons of, especially if you're checking everything to make sure it works. You should always double check your redirect links and landing pages before launching.

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Alright gents. Translations are complete...

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So things have been coming together nicely. In this series of posts I'll spill some beans on the ads, LPs, and strategy I've been working with lately. I'll use Hungary as my example. But first, required watching:



Available Exoclick Impressions:

Hungary Android Run of Network



Hungary Android Premium Spots:



The Offer:

The offer I'm running to is Text Chat Dating, which converts on the user typing a message. It looks like this:



For Hungary the payout is quite low ($0.30), but there are many other countries available for it, with both regular, adult, and gay versions. For the strategy I'm employing I think it could do really well for me.

The Ads:

I'm going the route of chat/message ads, as they've worked okay for me in the past. They get high CTR, but conversions can be a problem, which I'll get to the later. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about:



Here's a final result(sorry I don't want to make it that easy for you guys):



I make it an animated gif with 4 frames that so it repeats moving up right down left, etc.

And here's the resulting CTR today so far, after I capped impressions at 1/visitor(for all my campaigns):



The problem with this particular country is I'm not getting enough conversions to really make it worthwhile to pursue, but I'm going to continue testing things out.

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Yo bro, send me your ad copy, i can translate it to proper Hungarian. I'm from Hungary. The word "Abweisen" not even a Hungarian word! Let me know if you need some help!

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Haha I see what I did now. That's the german word for "Decline." It's supposed to be "Elutasítom" right?

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yup, Elutasít or Elutasítom!

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Damnit I'm in the middle of finishing some new LPs and Cloudflare is down. This is the second time its happened in the last few weeks. Not even using the direct pass-through subdomain works. Everything is down, including their site.

Thankfully I still have XAMPP for desktop development.

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Putting it all together.

So one of the things that's very apparent in the adult advertising space, is that copycats are everywhere. Everyone is using the same rules type landing pages and ripping the ads from each other. It sucks but what can you do? Well to make it short not everyone doing high volume in this space is being copied equally, and after some sluething around I figured out a particular cloaking system being used and built my own over the course of a few days, with a few extra improvements. This is most applicable for keeping your adult campaigns going, but it's also something I could end up using for other campaigns on other sources in the future. Some devious possibilities open up with such a system, like running adult on Facebook, but I'm not about to tread those waters. I am however considering leveraging this system with a link rewriting script, so lazy copiers be warned

Landing Page Design

LP1: My take on the rules LP.



Instead of having a wall of text, or a separate page, I opted to use jQuery + jQuery UI to make a pop-up upon an event. Either when the image is clicked, the bottom button, or in other versions, when the top sign-up is clicked.



You can probably see my strategy there, of matching the page design to the offer. What I haven't done much of, is match my LP design to my ad or vice-versa, but I'm working on that.

As far as making these, they're all made from scratch in HTML/CSS/JS & some PHP. No Photoshop slices or anything like that. I've been designing for a few years now, and really the best way to learn is just to keep doing it. Whenever I see something cool I'll just download the page or copy their source, and rework it into my own version. You learn a lot that way.

Dynamic Elements:
There are a few dynamic elements in play on most pages I make. I want to personalize things as much as possible. These include using geolocation to show a user's country flag, their city, as well as a dynamic profile picture based on the ad shown. Remember I'm using chat/message ads, so I want create consistency in what someone is seeing. I don't want them to have their expectations crushed when they click such an ad, only to arrive at a page full of text and feel misled. So at the very least I show the dynamic ad picture.

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Saved for next part.
edit: Nevermind. See later post.

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Nice designs ;D I plan to make some more original landers soon as well, you definitely reap the rewards when you use your own creativity.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend using BrowserStack to test them on different devices. I was quite surprised at how wildly pages differed depending on the phones, especially with text scaling. I found out the hard way that mobile design can be a pain in the ass especially if you're taking something made for the desktop and trying to convert it.

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Pop-ups work great on mobile. I suggest you test one that pops like on Android/iPhone instead of using the broken effect.

Nicely done!

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Well it looks like I won't be going ahead with my google maps API landing page, for mobile at least. After spending hours getting a fancy google maps api setup going, with random profiles appearing based on proximity, I decided to check pingdom tools to see the page load size. The grand total: 1.5MB. And here I thought was being all clever doing maps on mobile. Apparently Bing maps is lighter, but still a whopping 400kb or something like that. Ugh... well at least it's there ready to go for future PC usage.

I do however have another LP that's completely different and about 75% done, so I'll try and finish that first thing tomorrow.

Thanks! As far as testing across mobile devices, I've largely eliminated the need for that since I'm using responsive design with media queries, that scale everything depending on the screen size and pixel density. Since 320px is the lowest width for android & iPhone, I base my designs around that, and scale up. Feature phones on the other hand are another matter entirely and I haven't come up with a solution that works for both yet.



Good idea I hadn't though of mimicking the OS specific effect, just testing the various jquery effects. I do have a LP I'm working on that mimicks another functionality quite well, which I'm hoping to have finished tonight or tomorrow morning.

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I wish I knew more about responsive design and media queries from the beginning. The main problem I had was wildly different text scaling on different phones even when I thought I had it sussed. Had to add like 8 different device size -> text size rules to get comfortable. Would you mind posting an example of the media queries you used for scaling based on screen size/pixel density?

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*Makes a note in his Big List Of Future Tutorials* Thanks for mentioning that - I'm going to start to dive into mobile and mobile tutorials next week, and I'll make that high-priority.

@thedudeabides - what were you trying to do with the Google Maps API? There may be a much lighter way to do it by faking a limited subset of their features.

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Bummer I thought I'd have time to get my other lander done before this was over. My fault for not starting this competition sooner.

For those curious it's an AI chat lander. It's basically going to look like this when it's fully styled:



I'll post an update here shortly with my summary and breakdown.

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Sure. This is what I use:

It's probably overkill with that many dimensions when you really only need 320/480/540/640/720 for smartphones, so I'll probably trim the others later.

The way it works is you first set the default font to 62.5% which makes it 10px. This makes the math easier when specify something in proportion to that base font. Since I based my designs off the minimum screen size of 320px, 10px divides evenly into it 32 times. So each time 32px is added to the screen size, the font increases 1 point.

Now with that setup in place you define everything using either EM or REM units.
So if you have a div with a size of 100px by 200px previously, it would now become 10.0em by 20.0em or 10.0rem by 20.0rem. I currently use REM since it's a) based off the root font, and not the parent element like EM is and b) supported on smartphones. However I'll probably switch back to EM units in order to be able to use the same page on feature-phones.

In order for the scaling to work with images, they all need to be background images. This way you don't get multiple different sized images loading when only one is going to be used. Most of the time I just use the same large image across all screen sizes though, and save the optimization for later.

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I wanted to show a map of the user's area (using the city & country from maxmind GEOip), display random markers on the map, each clickable with a profile. I actually just found someone doing that, and rebuilt the code to work without jquery. Many of the map options like zooming were set to false, but it was still a huge request size @ 1.2MB

I do have another version without the marker profiles that weights in at 700kb, but that's still way too big. I try to keep pages under 100k for smartphones, so I don't think it's realistic to be able to find a lighteight map option.

Ideally I would just make a request with a users location, with a zoom level specified, and it would just give me back an image with no bells or whistles. Then I could do the other stuff with Jquery.

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Could you code a script to accept an IP, or even longitude and latitude since one of the MaxMind databases gives this, make a call to some map-related API and receive some content, then convert that to a jpg using something like imagemagick/GD/etc and return as a result? I.e. offloading all the functionality to an external script, so that on your page you just have <img src="http://something.com/maplookup.php?lat=xxxx&long=xxxx">

Just a thought.

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Well I wish I was that good lol. Baby steps first.

I've found Maxminds latitude/longtitude to not be worthwhile, so it's better to just have it give you the city name and then geoencode that into the lat/long. Google offers such an api so I'm going to try that out, and see about finding another map provider.

edit: Heading out. I'll post my summary when I get back.

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err. you spend so much time on your lander where you could be more productive. just spend $50-100 and hand it over to someone better in coding, takes about 5 minutes to do that

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So here's my wrap up:

In total I spent $370 and generated $245 for a net loss of $125. That doesn't include the handful of translations I had done on fiverr, which is probably another $40 there.



It's not all red though, and there are a few campaigns & offers that look promising(ignore broken CPC and payouts)



Android ended up performing far better than iPhone in every category. Why that is I'm not sure, but on the flipside I've read articles saying iPhone app developers make more than their Android counterparts.

For Slovakia, that was with direct linking. I split tested between that and my LP and direct linking won out.

Germany and France also did okay with flirtcafe & benaughty offers up until recently with the rules lander. In every other country however, the rules lander did not perform that well. Maybe it's overkill I dunno, but I'll be trying out some simpler 1 click pages instead.

Sexy Chat Dating in Austria has a lot of potential I think, but the rules lander especially bombed there for conversion rate. Even still it contributed a large chunk of revenue on several days with just 1 or 2 conversions.

I'm going to be looking to more number and pin submit offers like that in the future with high payouts to try out.

In summary, going international wasn't as easy or cheap as I'd been told, and I wonder if I could have seen better results focusing on US/UK/CA/AU traffic instead for this challenge, or at least moved along faster. I did however learn a ton along the way, and now have some ideas of where to go next.

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You're probably right. I just don't like to spend money on something I could do myself, unless it's a lot of repetitive tasks, and especially not with a limited budget. I'd rather spend it on an ad network or translation work and just crank out the design or code myself, which I enjoy doing anyway.

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Here's my updated smartphone scaling media queries in case anyone is interested. I had forgotten to include my viewport settings. Previously I was also using target-densitydpi=device-dpi for the viewport, but have found it just over complicates things for scaling. It's still good to show higher res images for high density displays though, as it's pretty noticeable.

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Sorry for the bump but how did you end up getting along thedudeabides, also I wanted to ask you about the link rewriting thing you mentioned. I'd like to be able to protect my banners but is it really possible.

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