case study

POF Case Study: PinkWink

December 18th, 2012
Affiliate Marketing, POF, Traffic Sources
22
11,861 views

Split testing your affiliate campaigns is always important. It is amazing the different things you can split test and the different results you will see with minor tweaks. With Plenty of Fish one of the primary things I like to split test (once I have a banner with a decent clickthrough rate) is the login count. The amount of times someone has logged into their POF account says a lot about the type of user they are. Earlier this month I started a POF campaign testing different login counts promoting the lesbian dating site PinkWink. The results are pretty interesting and I thought I would share them!

In the example below you will see the banner I used, the traffic I received from Plenty of Fish based on the targeting for each campaign, and my results from Prosper202.

Unique POF Banner

Having a unique banner is really important with Plenty of Fish if you are going to get a high enough CTR (clickthrough rate) to be profitable. Most banners have the text on the right and the image on the left. I decided to make my 310×110 banner with one big image across the top and a small strip of text at the bottom to make it stand out. I am direct linking the campaign so I knew if I used the women from the landing page that would help make the connection from POF to the offer (helping conversions).

Here is the banner I created:

It is easy to see the connection right? The close up on the women’s face should help grab the attention of the POF user and the pink bottom and border will make it stand out even more. My CTR has fluctuated, but based on the 60,000+ impressions I have gotten it’s off to a good start.

Split Testing Login Counts

My main reason for running this POF campaign was testing different login counts. Plenty of Fish lets you target in 50 login increments minimum so that is what I did. I setup 5 different campaigns (shown above):

PinkWink lc50 targeting users who have logged in 50 times or less
PinkWink lc100 targeting users who have logged in more than 50 times, but less than 100 times.
PinkWink lc150 targeting users who have logged in more than 100 times, but less than 150 times.
etc…

So, the users I’m targeting in my PinkWink lc50 campaign are obviously the newer users to Plenty of Fish. The PinkWink lc250 people have logged in 250+ times so they’ve been around awhile. Before I started the campaign I assumed that the best converters would be the PinkWink lc50 people and the most volume would come from PinkWink lc250. Well, one of those was right.

Lesbian Leads

I do not have a ton of data for leads. I have only gotten 44 clicks total, but the data I received has been interesting. I have gotten the most clicks from the users who have logged in 250+ times and they are also the only group of people who have converted. The second biggest group were the people who had logged in between 51-100 times. Although I’ve gotten 8 clicks from those users, not one of them have converted. Based on the volume and conversion data I have, I should optimize for the 250+ people.

Now, I know I do not have a ton of data here, but the data I do have makes me think I can keep this profitable. I have gotten another lead since I originally took these screenshots and it was another user with 250+ logins. I would assume that these women have already all seen PinkWink, but apparently it is not saturated within that market so I may have to try to ramp it up. With the PinkWink lc250 campaign I’ve made around $7 profit, which is nothing to write home about, but if I can find a way to draw in more traffic I may be able to scale it.

I hope this case study has got the gears turning in your head and you able to use my information to setup your own profitable POF campaign. Please let me know if you have any questions. Let’s make some money!

POF Case Study: Jewcier

December 14th, 2012
Affiliate Marketing, POF, Traffic Sources
39
12,954 views

Plenty of Fish is a great traffic source that a lot of my publishers at PeerFly are really starting to take advantage of. In my article on traffic sources based on experience I explain that unless you’re completely new to affiliate marketing, I think you can probably handle setting up and running a campaign on POF. Running a campaign on POF is easy, but getting it profitable isn’t quite as easy. There are a lot of different targeting options you can test and there are a ton of great dating offers you can promote to those targets.

Earlier this month I setup a campaign using an old banner I created for an offer we recently added to PeerFly again called Jewcier. Well, I’ve decided to share everything about that campaign so you can use that information to setup your own successful campaign!

Jewcier Banner

I have only been using one banner the entire time I have been running this campaign. I am sure just about every affiliate marketer you will ever meet will tell you that is a bad idea and I agree. However, this banner (shown to the right) has gotten a pretty good clickthrough rate the entire time I’ve been running the campaign so I decided to just keep using it. Below is a screenshot of my POF stats for my two campaigns Jewcier campaigns combined.

The banner features a girl on the left with a cool border created using CrazyCTR. I included the site’s logo on the right, a small headline, and then a big headline at the bottom. The gradient background helps make the banner stand out from the standard 110×80 image/text ads. I’ve pre-qualified users not only with the banner, but also with my targeting.

Jewcier POF Targeting

The targeting on POF is the secret sauce to setting up a successful campaign. Creating a good banner to get a high clickthrough rate is important, but with good targeting you will get an even better CTR and your conversion rate will be much better.

With my Jewcier campaign I targeted jewish users from the United States (the offer’s only Allowed Country), who had logged in less than 150 times, and were not using a mobile device (Android or iPhone).

Considering that Jewcier is a jewish dating site it only made sense to target jewish users. This decreases my exposure, but it makes sure that the impressions I am paying for are worthwhile.

Targeting New Users

With this campaign I decided to lessen my reach even further by only targeting users who had logged in 150 times or less. Now, these aren’t exactly “new” users if they have logged in 50-150 times, but they also aren’t the old users who have been on POF forever and seen every dating ad out there. I’m direct linking to the Jewcier offer and it’s likely I have some competition also promoting this offer. Well, by targeting users with a lower login count it’s more likely that they haven’t seen Jewcier yet when they click my ad. By including the logo in my banner I’m also kind of pre-qualifying that as well. Someone that has signed up for Jewcier or at least checked out the site is likely to remember the logo or name and if they see it in my banner they probably won’t click.

No Mobile Traffic Please

I am tracking the traffic from my campaign using Prosper202 and I noticed in the Spy view on Prosper202 that a lot of my clicks originally on my Jewcier campaign (about 50%) were coming from mobile devices. The landing page for Jewcier is not optimized for mobile devices so I went in and removed Android and iPhone devices from my targeting. If you’re running a POF campaign that is not mobile optimized I highly suggest doing this.

Jewcier Conversions

So, what most of you probably think is the most important factor, was this campaign profitable? Yes! Here is a screenshot of my Prosper202 stats today for the campaign:

The cost on this isn’t accurate because when I setup my CPC cost on Prosper202 I take whatever my default CPM bid is and use that. Prosper202 is setup for a $0.79 CPC, but I actually paid around $0.31 CPC. My true profit right now is $21.54. The campaign is profiting and has been profiting since I started running it. I’m going to continue to run it at the rate it’s at until it’s no longer profitable. My main purpose of setting up the campaign was to create a case study for tightly targeted POF campaigns, not making a bunch of money.

I am not trying to downplay the amount of work that goes into building a success affiliate marketing campaign, but anyone should be able to get a dating offer profitable on POF. You’re not going to make a ton of money setting up a tightly targeted campaign like I have shown above, but it if you’re making money you can reinvest that money into a broader campaign without having to worry too much about spending your budget. Give it a try yourself and let’s make some money!

Facebook Sponsored Stories Case Study

August 9th, 2012
Affiliate Marketing, Traffic Sources
32
9,450 views

I have been doing quite a bit of advertising on Facebook lately. I am still waiting for them to release their offsite ads network, but for now I am seeing some success with advertising my fan pages using Sponsored Stories. In this article I am going to explain what Sponsored Stories are, how you can use them to advertise your own fan page, and how effective they are in building up engagement, which will help you make money from your fans!

What is a Sponsored Story?

A Sponsored Story is ad placement you can purchase from Facebook which will give special advertising space for your fan page and help you get engagement from both your current fans and the friends of your fans. As you can see in the example on the right, I am getting shown a Sponsored Story from a fan page that apparently one of my friends likes. I am friends with a lot of affiliate marketers on Facebook, so it’s easy to see how this can be very targeted. Typically, you have similar interests as your friends so the response rate can be pretty good.

Setting up a Sponsored Story

Setting up a Sponsored Story is pretty much the same as setting up a regular paid Facebook ad. Go to the Create an Ad page, select the fan page you want to promote, and choose these settings:

You can then choose more specific targeting of the friends of your fans (gender, age, etc.) and create your ad. The one big difference you will see is that you cannot select whether you want to bid CPM or CPC and you cannot choose your bid price. This is because Facebook automatically bids CPM for you and you will pay an Optimized CPM. This is the major difference between setting up your own ad advertising your fan page and creating a Sponsored Story. So, is it better to setup a Sponsored Story or create your own ad? Let’s take a look at my numbers:

Ad	Impressions	Clicks	CTR	Actions	Likes	Spent
Regular Ad	1,031,386	1,437	0.139%	1,667	945	$98.34
Sponsored Story	345,729	4,347	1.257%	16,001	2,271	$165.84

I have spent a bit more with the Sponsored Story because I am very happy with the results so the numbers don’t match up perfect, but if we consider cost per click and cost per Like, this is how it looks:

Ad	Cost Per Click	Cost Per Like
Regular Ad	$0.068	$0.104
Sponsored Story	$0.038	$0.073

Pretty impressive numbers. My regular Facebook ad performed pretty well and I ran it for awhile (over a million impressions), but the Sponsored Story is easily doing much better. I’m getting new fans cheaper and when you consider the other actions users can make (view a photo, like a page post, etc) the engagement is much cheaper and effective. For example, here are some statistics specifically for the Sponsored Story from my traffic last week:

I’m gradually increasing my spend on this campaign as well because I’m seeing a profit from engagement with my fans. Last month I made about $700 off these fans and this month I’m on pace to make over $1,500!

Make Money Off Your Fans

The important thing with monetizing your fan page is to be creative. You can’t simply spam your fans with affiliate links or they won’t be fans very long. I have had a lot of success with building a mailing list from my fans. AWeber has an awesome Facebook Page plugin that makes it really easy to setup a subscribe page using Facebook Connect. You can do this both within a tab of your fan page or by driving them away to Facebook to your own hosted page. I am doing both, but I’m seeing the best results by pushing people to my own site designed around the theme of the fan page. This also opens up new avenues to monetize because you are not limited by Facebook’s terms.

I have seen a lot of mixed reviews on Sponsored Stories and I really think the success of your campaign will be determined by the content of your fan page and the effort you give in making it successful. I’m going to continue to scale the fan page used in this case study and within the next few months I should be making $2,500+ a month from it. It can be done, but like anything else, it takes time and patience. Let me know if you have any questions :)

Important!
You cannot promote our offers on PeerFly directly on your fan page. If you want to push traffic to our offers you will need to funnel your traffic away from your fan page. Directly linking PeerFly offers on Facebook is considered spam.

POF Case Study: SeniorPeopleMeet.com

June 1st, 2012
Affiliate Marketing, Traffic Sources
47
25,209 views

Over the past few days I have been working on a Plenty of Fish (POF) campaign for the SeniorPeopleMeet offer on PeerFly. The campaign I am running has a lot of potential and I plan to continue to work on it, but I decided to share everything anyway including my creatives, my bid strategy, and the results I have seen from the $50 I have spent on traffic. I encourage you to use this information to setup your own campaign. Whether you run SeniorPeopleMeet or not is up to you, but if you simply steal my campaign you will probably fail worse than I did. If you do steal it and make some modifications that turn it into a $500+/day profiting campaign, don’t forget your favorite affiliate manager.

Plenty of Creatives

With POF I have found that it’s very important to test a bunch of creatives, but it’s just as important not to overdue it. If you setup a campaign with a $3.00 daily budget and you are testing 100 different creatives then you are stretching your budget a little thin. I decided I wanted to see at least 2,500 views on an ad creative before I threw it out and kept a close eye on my traffic as it was coming in. After 2,500 views I hoped to see at least a 0.1% CTR. Plenty of Fish claims to have an average CTR of about 0.15%. I will explain why I wanted at least 0.1% or more when I discuss my bid strategy, but in order for a banner creative to be a “winner” it needed to have at least at 0.1% CTR after 2,500 impressions. If not, I deleted it.

With SeniorPeopleMeet I am obviously targeting an older demographic and from what I have read images of couples work well with an older demographic. So, I found a nice couple and threw together a bunch of 110×80 banner images of them using CrazyCTR. CrazyCTR is a awesome site that makes it really easy to add cool borders and effects to your images in order to help them stand out and increase your CTR. Here are some of the banner images I’ve generated and used on my campaign:

creatives POF Case Study: SeniorPeopleMeet.com

Some of these banner images combined with my ad copy had CTRs all day yesterday over 0.1%. The ones I didn’t think would work were actually the ones that did best. For example, the one in the bottom row and second from the left had a CTR of 0.102% after over 35,000 impressions.

Plenty of Bids

Bidding CPM is nothing new to me because I have been running campaigns on Facebook for ages using CPM bidding, but for a lot of you (especially my newer publishers setting up campaigns on 7Search) it’ll be very confusing at first. With a CPM bid, you are paying for every 1,000 impressions. So, if you bid $0.40 CPM you are paying $0.40 every 1,000 times your banner is shown on Plenty of Fish. How do you figure out what you should be bidding in order to get a enough traffic to get a high enough CTR to profit? To make it as simple as possible, I always use a 0.1% CTR to figure out where I need the numbers to be. I hope for a higher CTR than 0.1%, but if you aim for 0.1% and get higher that’s just a bonus. With a 0.1% CTR you will get 1 click every 1,000 impressions. So, if you’re bidding $0.40 CPM and have a 0.1% CTR your eCPC is $0.40. Easy enough right?

I usually start my campaign bidding low and then steadily increase my bid throughout the day. You should do this anyway because Plenty of Fish has more traffic at night and everyone else’s bids increase at night.

Plenty of Results

Here are the results of my campaign creatives mentioned above.

Overall, my CTR for the campaign so far is 0.072% after 171,512 impressions. The conversions are not 100% accurate because I did not place the tracking pixel until yesterday. Besides my targeting though, you have all the information for my campaign right there. POF has a ton of potential and with the information I provided above I am confident you can setup your own campaign and get it to profitability. I am going to continue to test my own campaigns so I know how I can help you make yours better and look forward to your questions. Let’s make some money! :)