PoF CTR Competition

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.

results

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!

 

results2

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.

-=-=-=-

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.


Read More

Resubmit POF Ads with Ease – Greasemonkey Script

POF Approval Team got you down?

400 of your ads get declined because of a landing page issue?

Hate seeing this after a hard day of uploading?

Frustrated that there’s no simple solution for resubmitting ads in batch that were declined?

Want to turn the above into this with less effort?

As we all know, inconsistent reasoning or landing page issues can cause mass disapprovals and it just plain bites having to reupload everything.

Usually good ole’ Benjamin helps me sort it all out and I’m good to go …

After my recent frustration of submitting banners of all different IAB dimensions, for all different age groups using the lovely POF uploader (www.mrgreen.am) and manually configuring the target country (new countries not supported by uploader at this point in time), I really didn’t want to do the whole process over again after all my ads were declined.

I was fed up, decided I would test out my coding ability and my lose my Greasemonkey Virginity, and decided to whip something up today that should hopefully provide a simple, not-so-elegant solution to my 1st world problem.

It may have taken up a good chunk of my day but it should save a lot of time down the track.

YOU MUST HAVE
-Firefox (i’m using 8.0.1) – http://www.firefox.com/
-Greasemonkey plugin – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir…/greasemonkey/

INSTRUCTIONS

After installing the above, you’ll need to snag my script from here (make sure the plugin is enabled.. top right hand corner, icon should look ‘active’).

https://fitaffiliate.com/downloads/po…mitter.user.js

How it works:

DISCLAIMER:
PLEASE BE CAREFUL AND MAKE SURE THE SCRIPT IS DISABLED AT ALL TIMES WITH THE EXCEPTION OF RESUBMITTING DECLINED ADS ..

The reason I mentioned this above is because, if you don’t want to deal with pop-up boxes every time you navigate to a campaign with a declined ad or two, then you’ll leave it off until the time is right.

How to enable?

Well, once you are on the right page “ManageCreatives.aspx”, where there’s a declined ad/bunch of declined ads, it should show up in the drop down list.

Once you’ve enabled it, you can go ahead and open all your campaigns in a new tab and let it run on each one.

The way it works is, it goes through all ads marked as “Declined”, triggers the Edit button, hits submit without changing anything, and repeats the process until all declined ads are resubmitted.

It takes about 3 seconds to kick in once the page as reloaded (a timer had to be used so that page elements were rendered out before attempting to automate everything).

Known Issue
Sometimes, it may not resubmit all the ads due to slow loading times on the page..Try to keep it to 4-5 at a time, depending on your PC speed and internet connection speed..Firefox is known for being a memory hog so take it easy on the tabs!

Simple workaround for this is to just refresh the page if there’s still declined ads on it.

Hope people find this useful!


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.

-=-=-=-

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.


Read More