Plenty of Fish PPC Help...Been At This A Week

Sup everyone,

This is a long one. Get the popcorn or just click back. Need some help.

First time poster here. My friend owns an affiliate network and is extremely successful. I work a boring office job and got a shot in the balls when I didn't get a bonus this year. I resolved to use all my free time to begin affiliate marketing, with the goal of creating a sizeable stream of supplemental income that will allow me to escape the corporate world sooner, if not entirely. This was a week ago, and I knew virtually nothing about these here interwebs.

Since then, I've gotten hostgator, installed Prosper202, bought 4 good .com domains, and experimented with some things. The first few days I started a website with the goal of getting Adsense money. I am at ~200 natural (free) visitors per day through facebook, twitter, and extremely poor SEO that I know nothing about. This is nice because it's free, but I couldn't see Adsense generating significant money without a ton of websites, which would takes lots of time to update constantly with new content.

I started leaning toward PPC after reading Nickycakes and the Treasure Trove on here. I have decent disposable income to experiment with. So I got Adwords/Adcenter vouchers and went to work.

These were both wasted quickly due to one or two term keywords, broad match, typical newbie mistakes. I now have Adwords set to very specific 3+ word keywords including "buy" or "purchase" and exact or phrase match. It gets triggered maybe once a day since search volume is so low, but that's probably a good thing since CPC is ridiculous (like $2+) and I haven't gotten a single conversion from Google.

Adcenter is paused because one of my landing pages had an exit popup, unbeknownst to me. Got it removed and just waiting for them to reactivate.

So Sunday night, I took my OWN money and set to work on Plenty of Fish. When I woke up, I had made $200 in profit on about $6 adspend. 30% conversion rate. Unreal. This was bizarre, since the offer I am focusing on is in another country, and it started converting in the wee hours of the morning. Strange. My conversions are worth $40-87 a pop. I kept the same strategy and when I woke up the following day, I had made about $150.

Now, I know nothing, especially about POF with its lack of keywords. I have no idea how to optimize POF. I can see what kind of people clicked through, from POF's own site, but can't see who's converting. How do you guys use Prosper with this? So I said to myself, I'll just keep the same strategy and triple my daily budget for more impressions. My goal was to "SCALE." I do not know how to correctly scale POF, or any network for that matter, but this was my bumbling idea of it.

So that was today, where I blew about $100, got 200 clicks to the landing page, ~120 clicks on the BUY NOW button, and NO CONVERSIONS (this is a enter your credit card and pay $2 for a free trial offer, not an email submit). What gives? Do people just hate buying stuff on Tuesdays?

I asked my friend who owns the aff network if this was like the stock market, with good days and bad, but with a sound strategy you come out on top in the long run. He said no, if you find a profitable campaign it should be profitable day in and day out until it dries up, which wouldn't just happen in 2 days. This confused the hell out of me. Is there some marketing phenomenon I'm unaware, due to the law of large numbers or something, that will cause people to convert on my offer at a certain percentage at a certain time every night? So. Confused.

I am resisting freaking out and changing stuff around, demographics and ads and all that. Just because I think it would be more beneficial to leave everything as is for a week so I can assess the different trends in conversion by day of the week unaffected by anything else. Is this correct thinking?

I am going to do this, and focus on POF. I'll leave Google on life support since it's too expensive to be profitable unless someone searches for [I NEED TO BUY (OFFER X) NOW]. Adcenter and Facebook can wait. I don't want to spread too thin.

Also I am paying the minimum 16 cents per 1000 impressions, and getting an average of .08% CTR. I have no idea if this is good or bad. What does increasing your bid even do? I get like 300k impressions per day at 16 cents....so wouldn't increasing bid just be a waste?

For anyone who made it this far, thank you so much, and I guarantee you your advice will not fall on wasted ears. I will make it in this business or die trying.

CShoemaker said:

in b4 dont out my niche

Click to expand...

brb finding shoe offer

Thanks for the offer, but I think I figured out P202. Plus, the tracking system on POF is pretty sweet too...to be honest I'm barely even looking at Prosper.

I've definitely settled on POF as my platform. The AMs there are great and they're actual human beings unlike the soulless ban-dealing robots at Google, Microsoft, et al.

The offer I mentioned in the first post appears to have days where it doesn't convert at all on hundreds of clicks, and then some days I wake up to $200-300. The campaign was made when I was a noob and was broadly targeted (just like gender, country, wide age range, browser type). It may just be because I have so few conversions since I've only been at this a week, but so far the people converting appear to be totally random. There is no pattern. So I can't laser focus down into a specific group and make the bazillions that everyone talks about.

So I've resolved to leave this one be, setting the budget high so that the actual spend never actually hits it, so I know I'm getting max impressions per day at that bid price. On average, it is making me quite a huge ROI (but not a big absolute number, like 100-150 a day). I'm using these proceeds to test other offers. I figure if I get enough of these $100/day offers going, I could be doing well after some time. I'm also testing different landing pages with the offer to see if I can boost conversions without changing targeting or bidding. That would be nice.

By the way, I loved the Highly Targeted Ads post CCarter, I'm using versions of those in all my ads now, except for the random ones I throw in just to see if people bite. Thanks. I definitely hope I am a natural! This appears to be my only ticket out of cubicle slavery, so basically if I don't succeed at this I may as well be dead.

So I figured I'd give you guys an update now that it's been 2 weeks.

I've moved to a VPS with BeyondHosting and installed CPVLab!

Since I wasn't seeing huge numbers with my high-payout rebill offer, I decided to test the conventional wisdom that POF is the best for dating offers. Unlike the rebill offer, I was too lazy to create LPs for these...I just direct link. The plan was, if the offer is profitable by direct linking, THEN build a LP to boost conversions.

I bumbled around creating crappy ads, then finally read the iPyxel guide and Justin Dupree's guide as well as the POF Ads Blog, and started turning a profit on two campaigns. These made me about $50 daily for 3 days, which was nice because I wasted quite a bit of money testing/making mistakes. Then on day 4, they FLATLINED. CTR dropped from .1 to .02 on both, with no conversions. Day 5 and 6, the same. I decided to cut them.

It was strange, since I'm interested in long-term campaigns even if they only make me a dollar a day...so I did everything I could to ensure this...I had about 10 creatives per campaign (after trimming the fat and settling on good ones), login count less than 50 to keep fresh eyes on the ads, etc. Kind of a bitch to finally find success and then lose it that quickly.

These were very broad campaigns though, like "Find a Girlfriend Now" (not actual text) style campaigns. I guess I was probably lucky to make anything on them at all with that sort of loose targeting.

I ran the numbers and since I started this (like bought my first domain, joined POF) on 3/24, I've made about $1500, and $150 of it has been profit which is impressive considering 90% of my campaigns fail miserably and hemmorhage money until I pull them. This "profit", however, is reinvested in CPVLab, hosting, etc. so I'm still in the red for this venture. No biggie if I eventually figure it out, as I took a second job to fund this.

Now only like $300 of this has been from my dating campaigns. The payouts are between #3-$5 and the conversions can be only slightly higher than the rebill offer that I pulled because I thought the conversion rate was just too low. Basically, that rebill at 1% conversion is just as good as a dating offer at 10-15% conversion, so I'm now thinking I need to start running the rebill again, now that I've had a reality check and realize I wont make 10000000% ROI.

So I setup my rebill offer again today, using the 10-year age range that conversions came from last time, split into two groups of 5 years, then further split into groups for each login count in increments of 50, then further split into two different AWESOME landers. This will probably be quite expensive but I'll get some good data. I don't really want to bite and claw for conversions on a $3 niche dating offer with no traffic when I can just throw a billion cheap clicks at the $40-87 rebill and hope something converts.

Porque???