Case Study – PoF : $$$ on the 110×80′s with Dating Niche.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 20:51After talking with a few friends who advertise on Plenty of Fish it seemed as if none of them believed you could make money advertising in the 110×80′s. For those of you who don’t know what that is, Plenty of Fish offers 4 ad dimensions (Regular: 110×80, IAB: 728×90, 300×250, and 160×600). I know there are ways to make money on the smaller 110×80′s because I’ve done it before. After showing them they said it was too old and that it couldn’t be done now. Well they were wrong see for yourself:
The first thing I did was pick an offer (I noticed Dating – Shop4Guys (Females Only) (US) was back live at EWA , if you aren’t a part of the EWA private network, you may also try Wolf Storm Media as I believe they have the offer) so I thought why not just run the same offer, it’s worked before!
Next, I had to decide on how to target my ads. The targeting was simple for me, for country I put United States (offer only accepts traffic from US), for gender I put female (offer only accepts female registrations), I left the login count blank for now I’m sure this will eventually change, and for browser type I put Internet Explorer and Firefox (to avoid mobile browsers). For body type I picked Big & Tall/BBW, A Few Extra Pounds, and Prefer Not To Say. I chose these because in my ad title I was going to be targeting *Bigger* females. For age, I broke it up by campaign, I separated my campaigns by 5 years, meaning in the first campaign I had 18-23, next was 23-28, and so on (However the age group of 28-33 got messed up in tracking202 so I couldn’t track very well, I decided to pause this age group for good and just work on the other age groups)…For frequency cap (views per login) I put the minimum, 3. The daily budget on each was set to $10, for the sake of testing purposes. Here are the targeting options I selected:
Plenty of Fish Targeting - Shop4Guys
The next thing I needed to do was upload my creatives. For this I decided to use the PoF Uploader tool. I’ve used it forever and have just stuck with it because it works, Plenty of Fish also has their own mass uploader tool you might want to check out as well. I used two different at titles, and 10 different images, so 20 creatives in each age bracket for a total of 120 creatives. You can see what those creatives look like below:
Plenty Of Fish Dating Creatives (BBW)
Tracking all of these creatives wasn’t going to be easy to do without a tracking platform. Since I didn’t want to spend any money I decided to use prosper202 which is free. Each creative had it’s own tracking link keyword that looked something like &t202kw=S4G3_1-2 The S4G part let me know that it was for my shop4guys campaign. The 3 lets me know that it is the 3rd age group (28-33), after the underscore we have a 1-2 that means the click / conversion came from the first ad title with the second image.
I let the campaigns run for a few hours and after checking the stats here is what I came up with, 52% ROI in TESTING PHASE! (Yes I know this isn’t very much data but this is just to give you an idea on how things started out, and from there they only got better).
Now this campaign is still running and has been for a while (and is still profitable). However, I have cut some creatives that were yielding low ROI, I have also added new creatives and after testing mode this campaign is pushing upwards of 100% ROI / day. So to answer your questions, yes you can make money on the 110×80′s, be patient, optimize it, and BANK.
Now campaigns like this come and go and I am constantly having to launch new campaigns targeted at different audiences and using different traffic sources. For the best in affiliate marketing training check out PPV Playbook Private Coaching
Constantin says:
April 21st, 2011 at 11:17 am
Thanks for showing the stats…I agree POF can be great but do you really think 5 dollars of testing is enough to say anything about anything?
Cord Marston says:
April 21st, 2011 at 5:32 pm
To be honest, I agree $5 isn’t a significant amount. I really just wanted to show how you can use the 80×110′s for targeting. More of a noobie guide than anything.
Some people skip / don’t bother with them because they don’t think it’s possible to make money. This is supposed to give them that little push to try it, because i know there is money there, I monetized my whole first $1k deposit on those.
pedro says:
April 22nd, 2011 at 2:44 pm
Hey just wondering, lets say you were to run a campaign on a larger than $5 budget, would you do anything different than you did here?
Cord Marston says:
April 22nd, 2011 at 5:35 pm
Not at all, the budget for this campaign isn’t actually $5 that’s just the only stats I am showing for now. I will have a new table up soon.
Justin Dupre says:
April 23rd, 2011 at 4:40 am
I wouldn’t worry about 3 conversions after $5 ad spend. If you’ve gotten that far in such a small spend amount WITHOUT optimization, you know you’re pretty much set up to ball after you optimize and scale that out.
This post that 10 people out of the hundreds/thousands that read it will make some people their first affiliate monies.
Justin Dupre says:
April 23rd, 2011 at 4:40 am
**This post that 10 people will take action on, out of the hundreds/thousands that read it, will make them their first affiliate monies.
Chris says:
April 24th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
I’m confused about this “&t202kw=S4G3_1-2″. I thought you would insert that info as the sub id in your network affiliate link? whats a sub id used for then?
Cord Marston says:
April 25th, 2011 at 5:52 am
Justin, thank you for the input! I hope it makes some people their first affiliate monies.
Chris, you can so it on your network affiliate link as well, I like to run it through prosper202 which uses t202kw= (there version of a subid, kind of), prosper202 helps me get quick overview of the campaign.
Stewart says:
April 25th, 2011 at 6:33 pm
“&t202kw=S4G3_1-2″
I’m always confused about this part. You said you had loads and loads of ads, so did you manually edit the subid of every ad? Or does the POF Uploader do this for you?
Surely it would take days for you to edit the subid for 100+ads?
Thanks
Cord Marston says:
April 25th, 2011 at 8:00 pm
The PoF uploader tool will change each subid for you
well it adds the last two numbers 1-1 , 1-2, 1-3 and so on…
douchebag says:
April 28th, 2011 at 12:09 am
Glad to see you ripped some of my images.
Cord Marston says:
April 28th, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Ripped some of your photos? A google search for noncommerical protected images on the word “hot guys” will return the same images
Jsm says:
May 11th, 2011 at 2:42 am
Hey Cord,
how’s the campaign going…guessing that now its quite dead for sure? If not, with the recent changes, what’s your bid now(was like 0.29 before…)?
Alvin says:
May 11th, 2011 at 12:24 pm
Thanks for sharing great info!
Im assuming you direct linked?
Do you think a landing page would increase your conversions?
Cord Marston says:
August 4th, 2011 at 1:16 am
A landing page would most likely increase the conversions. This is just the basic setup on how to get things going. Eventually you’re going to want to rotate the offer, optimize the targetting, and try things like landing pages / new creative angles.