Category Archive

Hey POFvertisers!

It’s Cyndi here to share some basic essentials with y’all. For many of you, this will be stating the obvious (POF veterans, do gloss over), but for newbies, study this list to make sure you’re not committing any of these CTR-killers. Believe me, if you’re new to POF and you’re doing any of these, you’re leaving money on the table.

The Newbies’ 7 Deadly Sins Of POF Advertising:
1. Testing only one creative per campaign
2. Testing only pixelated/undersized/boring or pro-looking images
3. Using hella-broad targeting (such as multiple countries, both genders, a large age group, etc…)
4. Testing only one ad text (being generic, not taking advantage of great angle opportunities)
5. Not split-testing (creating only one campaign per offer)
6. Promoting a slew of products at the same time…before making a profit
7. Not studying/learning from other advertisers

Are you committing any of these? Well not to worry, now that I’ve told you what NOT to do, let me go in-depth to explain what TO do to have a kickass campaign on POF:

The 7 Steps to Success on POF:

First off: You will want to split-test more images. Only testing one (or a few) is like putting all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. We recommend testing 5-10 unique images per campaign so you can see what works and what doesn’t work. If after 15,000 impressions an ad has a CTR – click through rate – below 0.100%, you’ll want to consider deactivating it and uploading a new image into your campaign. It’s free to add more images in a campaign and provides invaluable data about what your audience responds to, so it’s important to test that out. Remember, the first stages of a campaign are about gathering data about what does and does not work – so make sure you are gathering GREAT data for your investment.

Second: Find images that are eye-catching. We find that royalty-free amateur-looking ads tend to do well on POF (perhaps people are able to mentally block out ads that look like ads?) so don’t be shy about choosing non-pro-looking images for your campaigns. If the image you have isn’t the right size, try cropping it so that it is the exact size required. There are free programs available online and sometimes they already exist on your computer (such as Microsoft Paint) so you can try your hand at designing ads. Also make sure that you are taking full advantage of your creative space — sometimes advertisers shrink down images to the point that they appear pixelated, illegible and undersized. This results in an image (the showpiece of your ad) not selling your offer well. If you are paying for ad space, carpe-diem the sh*t out of it : )

Third: Reign in your targeting. Although targeting every person from the ages of 19-99 in six countries may seem like a good idea it’s actually a huge no-no. It happens all the time, and I can see why people do it, but please don’t. What broad targeting does is burn through your budget with lightning speed while not not allowing you to know which countries were most responsive to your ads. As you can imagine, this data is extremely important in order to create a lucrative campaign. So always, at the very least target one country, one 5-10 year age group and one gender, plus a few other targets that are relevant to your offer. When setting up your targeting consider who would be most interested in your offer, as well as who would not be interested. For those who would not be likely to convert on your offer, you can ‘exclude them’ by selecting the “≠ (is not equal to)” in the targeting section.

Fourth: Test out a few different ad texts. Find some unique angles. If for example, you were promoting weight loss, you could think of some benefits to share with your audience, for example, “Look great for your date!” or “Wear a bikini this summer!” could be unique propositions attractive to members. You may also want to consider targeting a specific audience and calling out to them in your text. That tends to work wonders : )

Fifth: Split test your campaigns. What I mean by this is to create a group of campaigns all promoting the same offer, but each targeting a different demographic. This way you can quickly see which groups are interested in your offer and which ones are not. For example you could create six campaigns all promoting the same offer:

US Men 30-39
US Men 40-49
US Men 50-59
US Women 30-39
US Women 40-49
US Women 50-59

Or if you’re keen, test out some campaigns targeted to Canadians as well (for example):

CA Men 30-39
CA Men 40-49
CA Men 50-59
CA Women 30-39
CA Women 40-49
CA Women 50-59

Make sense? Of course targeting for each of those campaigns would include the extra targets that are specifically relevant to your offer. Some good targets to test out down the road are Login Count, Ads Clicked and Session Depth (we have great posts about these in the blog, so do read on). These are competitive targets that will require you to raise your bid, but you will likely find that the results are worth it.

Sixth: Only focus on promoting one product/offer at a time until you’re making profits. It can be overwhelming (and expensive) to promote multiple offers and you want to do one well before introducing more to your account. Focus on one offer and give it your best shot before investing in another one.

Seventh: Study the advertising blog. I couldn’t stress that enough. There’s so much free information in this blog (and on other blogs on the net) that will help you to optimize your campaigns. Even if you only have time to read a few posts a day do invest the time, Young Jedi : ) We have guest blog posts written by advertisers who are making bank on POF — and they share their secrets to success. Game changing? Yup, most definitely. You won’t want to miss out.

So those are the 7 Sins and 7 success tips. The question is: are you committing any of these sins? Are you rocking any of these success tips? Feel free to repent or brag in the comments below : )

Cyndi

Everyone and their dog knows about <50 log-in count on POF. But what do you know about 100-250 log-in count? Trust me when I say setup a test campaign with this specific log-in count and you’ll be glad you did! Very strong performance here!

+ Low CPM’s
+ People still signing up at a very good rate
+ Less competitors than <50 logs

Ben

This post is beneficial to those who can make a landing page for their offer.

There has been a lot of literature on how a landing page can help increase your conversion rates, which is 100% true. But not many people talk about what little extra things you can add to a landing page to help you squeeze more juice out of that click. So here’s a brief overview of some extra goodies that can potentially increase your ROI.

1) Exit Popup. You know that little window that says STOP! BEFORE YOU LEAVE… bla bla bla. Yeah, that helps ~10%.

2) Capturing emails. This is a field that prompts the user to submit their email before seeing that sweet offer you’re promoting. If you capture people’s emails, this allows you to “build a list” and market to them in the future. So, for example, if you are doing dating and you’ve captured a dating email.. 1 week down the road you can send them a link to a dating info-product!

3) Pop Unders. This is a window that pops under the original landing page so upon closing the window, the user sees another offer.

Keep in mind that all parts MUST be POF compliant, otherwise you’re risking your account with us. The only one that we would be absolutely unable to follow up on is #2…………
Once you implement these, you’ll be able to afford to buy more volume, get a better placement via higher CPM and hopefully take home a larger pay cheque

Reminder that nDemand is going to take POF’s biggest affiliate (biggest spend Jan to Aug) to Hawaii with then in November! Regardless if you work with them or not so … GET TO WORK haha

Ben

I get this question asked ALL the time so let’s take a moment to consider our options. Here’s some ways to test your creatives systematically.

1) Timeline. More about that HERE

2) Payout based. Usually 1x-3x the payout you would receive each CPL or CPS etc.

3) Budget/Impression based. The only danger here is that you may under/over test an ad. For example, $5/day doesn’t get you much data. But if that is your budget, make sure that $5 is spent on a very small niche. Better to gain a lot of insight on a small group than to learn very little on a big group.

Honourable Mentions:

4) Relative Performance: Look at your set of ads, is 1 ad CLEARLY under-performing relative to the rest of your set? It’d be a safe bet to kill the ad before it hits any of the above mentioned thresholds.

It costs money to test. Everyone knows that but the danger of under-testing is just as damaging as over-testing so please make sure you’re spending your advertising dollars wisely. Do you test your ads in a way not mentioned here? I’m sure the community would love to hear about it, please leave a comment!

Ben

Readers! Oh how I’ve missed blogging! So this post applies to those that have used our conversion pixel extensively in the past. If you haven’t yet, no worries, this is what you have to look forward to I’ve been doing some thinking about our new super awesome conversion targeting feature and I’m here today to share these thoughts with you.

So the obvious way to use the converter targeting is to exclude people that have already converted from seeing your ad in the future. Simple right?

What about the reverse?

What about your old campaigns that have massed a ton of converter data? If you’re one of the guys with a campaign like this, you’re literally sitting on a gold mine! By selecting “Show To Converter = Yes”, you’re targeting people who have already converted on your old offer and hence have a high chance of signing up for another offer (the average online dater is a member of 3 sites).

So all you have to do is apply your “Show to converter = yes” targeting and then fill up that campaign with dating offers that you have NOT previously promoted.

Heck, if you remember your old offer, you could even INCLUDE THAT IN THE TEXT! Something like “So bensdatingsite.com didn’t work out for you a few months back? Try this awesome new dating site and meet your match today!” Bonus points if you can think of some non-dating but dating-related offers to show these people

Ben

We have decided to remove the “Previously Converted” targeting option because we thought that we could do better. It’s a very cool option, don’t get me wrong, but you guys deserve the best so here it is.

Instead of targeting people who have converted on a global level, we are now offering the ability to EXCLUDE people who have already converted on YOUR stuff… at a CAMPAIGN level.

This will allow you to no longer show your ads to someone once they’ve been tagged as a converter. In other words, you will not continue to spend $ on people who have already signed up to whatever you’re advertising. In a sense, POF is optimizing for you

We chose to do it this way because we recognize that affiliates could be running multiple campaigns with multiple offers so we didn’t want to limit you in any way. Meaning, someone who has converted on campaign A will no longer see ads from campaign A but will still continue to see ads from campaign B.

Eventually, when you run enough traffic to a single campaign (millions of impressions), your campaign will basically be a list of people who have signed up. So now, you have a campaign full of converters that you can now use to target with another offer So I predict that one day, you’ll “flip the switch” on this campaign with a new offer and be instantly profitable.

Like the “clickers” (ability to target people by how many ads they’ve clicked) option, we have decided to add this feature to the small ad campaigns exclusively (110×80 text ads and 310×110 small banners). That is where all the inventory is so this is where it’ll be most useful! The minimum deposit for this feature will be $500.

So I repeat, this option is only useful when:
a) You implement our conversion pixel on your offer
b) You run enough traffic, the more you run, the more beneficial this option is
c) Have multiple offers to test out

Cheers to a most profitable long term campaign,

Ben

PS. This is not to mention the kick-ass conversion report you get as a result of using our pixel too!

You would be best served by advertising to a demographic that you’re knowledgeable right? Maybe you have insight in a certain demographic that you aren’t even aware of!

What is this magical demographic?

The answer is: YOU

Are you a 20 yr old marketer that understands #SWAG? Or are you a 40 yr old marketer who has 10+ years of dating experience? Do you speak another language? What do you have that you could leverage? Maybe it’s common knowledge to you but to the rest of the world, it’s new and exciting!

For example, today I just found out that the US has drive through banks w/ suction tubes for delivery like the Jetsons cartoon. There aren’t any around in my area of the city but if I saw an ad for that, I’d sign up just to try it… (kind of like, if you had a relative unique angle for your dating ad, people would sign up just to try it!).

Oh.. and BE MORE SPECIFIC. There’s many more characteristics attributable to specifics:

- “Date an athletic girl” is boring.. “Date a Gymnast” is more exciting.
- “Date an athlete” is boring, “Date an MVP” is more exciting.

Anyway, I digress LOL don’t want to pack 1 blog post with too much gold.

Ben

A Swedish Psychologist named Anders Ericsson conducted research on elite athletes and concluded that ANYONE could become an elite athlete given a minimum of 10,000 hours practice. To break this down, it means 3 hours/day, every day, for 10 consecutive years. Quite a claim! But that got me thinking…

Is there a similar minimum hour/financial requirement for internet marketers to go from “newbie” to “intermediate” to “elite” on POF? I naturally got curious and looked at the individuals who I consider heavy hitting, long term affiliates, I started to see a trend. The good news is it won’t take 10,000 hours to become GOOD at advertising on POF

The average seems to be roughly 2 months with funds around the ~$6000 mark (~$100/day for 60 days).

If you think about it, $6000 is an investment in your education. Traditionally, $6000 won’t get you very far in college (ESPECIALLY nowadays) – but it will get you somewhere on POF! Unlike college, real life gives you the test first and the lessons later, which in my opinion, makes real life a much better teacher. Plus, the better you get, the more money you’ll make on your investment right? College doesn’t pay your for attending classes but online marketing will!

Just remember that Cyndi (cyndi@pof.com) and I (ben@pof.com) are both here to help and we both love watching people go from “newbie” to “intermediate” to “elite”

Ben