So, Ben from PoF hosted a competition on the STM forum (if you’re not a member, you’re missing on some wicked info – StackThatMoney).
The competition details were (paraphrased from Ben himself)
“You have to use your own pictures to advertise a dating offer on POF. Everyone targets the same demographic and whoever gets the highest CTR, wins $200 credit to their advertising account. The winner must out their ad at the end of the contest “
So I decided to participate but take it a little further and split test a few things which yielded some interesting stats. Feast your eyes on some interesting data.
First things first, I split tested both ad-sizes 110×80 and 310×110 just to see what effect it had.
Spent: $28.43
Lifetime Impressions: 129,241
Overall CTR: 0.044%
Here are the ads I used.. (the ad copy was a template provided by STM) .. Also, I put a “watermark” on the images for obvious reasons.
What I found interesting from my above tests were:
- Shirtless pic didn’t do so well
- The mirror “MySpace” pic and snowboarder/adventurous pic performed the best.
- Changing the word Astronaut with Snowboarder helped CTR.
- Cartoonifying myself helped CTR (in Photoshop: Gaussian Blur->Fade Gaussian Blur, Darken, Posterize)
The colour test that Maynzie did recently gave me the idea to test out purple as it was the best performer amongst women (apparently purple represents sexual frustration too!).
In both tests (border/background colour), it got better CTR.
Now onto the 110×80′s which performed significantly worse (hint, try 310×110′s if you already aren’t!).
I skipped a couple tests here, one image got denied because it had no border and looked like it was a white BG.
The other is the border-split test which I somehow forgot to include. Nevertheless, here are the results!
I found it strange that the images didn’t perform the same in the different ad dimensions, but then again, 5k impressions is probably not enough to be classed as significant data.
Hope you take away something from the above tests.
– Andrew
If you’re looking for further Affiliate Marketing Guidance, check out StackThatMoney. Best community of experienced marketers from around the globe, exclusive meetups, follow along’s, tutorials and the knowledge of a thousand sun-gods.
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Can’t Decide on Tracking Software?
I’ve recently switched over to a new tracking platform called Thrive by the guys over at iPyxel which I love. It’s still in development, but is constantly improving and making strides, and the best part about it can be self-hosted. The offer a 30-day trial and it’s $99 a month thereafter which is well worth the investment.
Those on a smaller budget can still opt to go the CPVLab route, another favorite of mine but a little more outdated. It is, however, more suitable for PPV traffic if that’s your traffic of choice.