Hello Readers, here’s a good read for anyone doing dating on the 110×80’s. This guy’s been advertising with us for over 4 years SUCCESSFULLY now, I’m sure you can learn from his wisdom! Unfortunately, for me, he is now moving onto bigger ventures. LUCKILY for you, he’s spilling the beans on how to become successful on POF as a way of giving back :) Enjoy!

Hope you liked the affiliate-esque title Here we go:

A lot of beginners don’t know how much POF traffic they should send towards an ad to test it, ie. to see if it can get a good CTR and convert. It’s important to have a system that you stick to, applying one standard for your ads is the key to success on POF. I’ve used the platform for nearly 4 years and this is the system that I have used successfully for that entire time. The first thing you test for is obviously CTR. If an ad can’t get a certain CTR, it’s rare that it will convert enough to make up for the lack of clicks. I’ve applied a very simple standard for 110s, which is to let them run to 10,000 impressions for general traffic. By general traffic I mean no login count or niche (eg. smoker, tall, short, drink, body type, etc.). Just gender, age, country, sexual disposition (ie. looking for female or male), and marital status. I generally test age in 10 year increments, but some people use 5 years. I woudlnt’ go anymore than 10 since tastes change significantly. 50 year old men aren’t going to be very clicky on an image of an 18 year old beauty, whereas a 40 year old attractive woman will get the clicks. Obviously if it is a niche offer you will want to include that in the campaign settings as well. So say it’s a single parents offer, you would want to put “Has Children = Yes” in addition to the other settings.

This is the simplest way I’ve found to test for CTR. Run all the ads to 10k impressions (10k each) as cheaply as you can, so try to set it at .16 cents and shoot for 10k impressions on your ads in a 24 hour period. If you aren’t getting enough traffic raise the bid by .03 cents. Usually it’s best to test in batches of 10-20 ads in one campaign, so that way you don’t have to wait like you would if you had 50 ads in one campaign. If you have 50+ images to test create separate campaigns and put 10-20 in each.

If an ad gets .100% CTR or more it’s a winner! Congratulations you have a good image on your hands. I’d estimate that only about one in ten images will meet that threshold. If the image gets below our .100% standard it’s a loser most of the time. What I mean by that is that you still need to check for conversions on each ad. Some ads are freakish, and will have an awful CTR such as .050% yet convert 2 or 3 times on the 10k impressions you sent. If that’s the case, you have to give that ad a chance and niche it out. Always check your conversions when testing for CTR, because you never know if one of them is a outlier, an ad that gets a bad CTR but converts really well.

In regards to ad copy, you should be using the same ad copy on each ad. Make sure it is good copy. Copy is important, but it’s the images that are the most important. So when we are testing we are testing for image CTR by using the same ad copy. Bad copy can ruin an ad, but if an image isn’t up to snuff, your copy won’t be read anyway.

Once an ad gets that magical .100% or more CTR it’s time to niche it out. So you’d take that image and create new campaigns for login counts, drinkers, tall guys, etc. whatever angle you think will work on the ad. Throw all the images that worked into those new campaigns. I usually take the successful images and niche them out to 4 or more campaigns. Sometimes when you put an ad in a niche campaign the CTR won’t be as good as when you tested it, but more often that not you will notice it gets a similar or even better CTR.

Once niched, you simply have to test for conversion rate, ie. does it make money?? My standard for that is usually the payout for the offer, or maybe 1.5x the value of the payout. So say I have an offer that pays $4. I’ll let each ad spend $4-$6 to see if they convert. If an ad has spent $4 but there have been no conversions I will likely deactivate it, unless I really believe in the ad for some reason, in which case I’d let it run to $6. Remember that the cost of traffic goes up the more choices you make in the settings, login count being one of the most expensive, and generally you will pay 3x as much for “Login Count ≤ 50″, which means that the person has logged into POF less than fifty times. Often times you can’t just copy your bid from the original testing campaign and expect to get the same traffic with extra settings. With 110s I generally increase or decrease in increments of 3 cents, since 110s are very likely to overspend if you type in too high a bid.

Since we’ve niched out the image to different ads, it might very well perform with some niches but not others. So for whatever reason, an ad does well and converts with copy related to the education level of the person, but doesn’t do well with copy related to body type. IE: Our women want men with higher level education VS. Our women want men with athletic body types. You never know which ad is going to convert on which copy, so that’s why you have to test all of them.

I might add some more later, but this is a good outline of a system that has worked consistently for me. I also have systems for the other ad formats which I might add here..

– jblint