CPA Peerfly Dating Offer Case Study

207 replies
I'm going to preface this by saying I don't know how long I will update the thread for. I would like to get feedback on what I'm doing so I will try to keep it updated frequently, but I do have other obligations and such to attend to that are more important.

I also want to add the following important points:

1) This is a living case study, everything you see here is live data.

2) Because I want to avoid a bunch of people copying what I'm doing, I won't be disclosing every single detail. There are a few details that are being left out on purpose to avoid this problem.

3) This campaign has been running for about a week right now, so I have some baseline data to share in the next post.

Lastly I want to make it clear that I am not an expert with CPA marketing. I have a long track record of tradition affiliate marketing (generating sales / %-based commissions). CPA is something that I have had a fairly poor track record with, but I have never really dived into the deep end with it.

This post is going to cover the following:

-Why Peerfly?
-Offers
-Landing Pages

Why Peerfly?

I have accounts with 2 CPA networks - MaxBounty and Peerfly. Until now I have focused the little effort I did with CPA on MaxBounty and never really gave Peerfly a chance to test out their platform. That is something I want to correct, and Luke is quite active here which is also helping their case.

I've had the chance to exchange a few PM's with Luke over the past few months and even though he isn't my Peerfly Account Manager, he's been very approachable and friendly.

I have talked to my account manager at Peerfly a few times - Nikki - and she seems quite friendly and approachable as well. We have a very long thread of emails going back and forth over the past few weeks, she has been very helpful even though I am hardly generating anything right now.

Getting support and being able to communicate with the network is extremely important to me and so far Peerfly has excelled in that area (especially considering I haven't done anything with their network until now). I've learned over the years that I would rather have a really good rapport with the network I'm doing business with than getting a better pay structure out of a network I never talk to.

Because of all this, Peerfly gets my thumbs up.

With that being said, there are a few things about their system that is really starting to piss me off. But it's nothing that will make me walk away, their system just has some quirks to it that I haven't run into with MaxBounty or the more traditional affiliate networks.

Offers

I am sticking to the Dating niche for this campaign.

Why?

Simply put: sex sells.

I have been marketing products online for a very long time. Sex is one of the biggest things that sells online, and it's something I'm familiar with (I used to promote a lot of porn sites many years ago).

So I picked 2 offers from Peerfly:

xxxBlackBook: I selected this offer because I like the landing page and it accepts adult traffic from the US, Canada, and the UK (aka the "Big 3 English-Speaking Countries").

Just Hook Up: I selected this offer because the landing page looks good and it pays better than most of the other dating offers ($4.75/lead). They have a few different offers available in Peerfly, I selected a specific one and had to get approval to run with it (which I fully disclosed what I intended to do and within a few hours I was approved to run the offer). The biggest problem with this offer is that it only accepts US traffic.

So what I will be doing is building a bunch of landing pages and directing paid traffic to them. When a visitor clicks on the Call to Action (CTA) it will take them to one of those 2 offers depending on their IP address:

US visitors will get directed to JustHookUp
All others will get directed to xxxBlackBook

While xxxBlackbook doesn't allow all countries, I will be looking at buying traffic from English-speaking countries. My focus will be getting my ads in front of US visitors because the payout for Just Hook Up is better, but I know that won't always be the case.

Landing Pages

Initially I built 2 landing pages which have an almost identical layout. My landing pages have 4 parts to them:

Headline - Just a brief 1-2 sentence headline that is highlighted
Picture - A picture suitable to the offer
Text - 2-3 chunks of text (not really paragraphs, most like half-paragraphs)
Call to Action - A button of some kind

I'm not going to get into the specifics of the landing pages for now. I will say that the CTA has some Javascript functionality on it, it's not just a simple button to click to send them to the offer. I want to pre-screen all my traffic to get the highest conversion rate possible on the offer page. I will post some details on how this works later.

That's it for now, I will post more information later. The next post will focus on traffic sources and the preliminary stats that I got from them.
#case #cpa #dating #offer #peerfly #study
  • Profile picture of the author mraudi
    Sounds good, will be checking this thread regularly for the updates. Can't wait to hear the good news!
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Alright, I had a few mins free so here is Day 1:



      Traffic Sources: 7serach and another PPC network which I'm not going to name right now.

      For landing page 1 I paid for 291 visitors (costing me about 6 bucks, or $0.02/visitor). Of those 291, 30 clicked through and 2 converted, netting me $1.91 profit for the day - that's a 31% ROI as you can see, so overall it apperas to be a good fit.

      For landing page 2 I paid for 277 clicks (costing about 6 bucks). Of those, 25 clicks through and 0 converted, making it a very unpleasant result.

      Because of this, the day ended with me in the hold for about $4 overall (spend $12, made $8). Not great, but not too horrible either.

      On day 2 I looked over the stats and decided to turn landing page 2 off based on these numbers. While I should have probably pumped some more traffic through it, I was expecting at least 1 conversion and didn't get anything.

      So what was different between the landing pages? The picture, nothing else. So obviously the picture I selected for that landing page wasn't really helpful at all.

      More coming
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      • Profile picture of the author cybercyborg
        i am a novice... could you tell what this screenshot is of, i mean is it of some tracking tool?
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        • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
          Originally Posted by razul View Post

          hahaha nice.

          I hope it steady states to this even when you scale it up
          We will find out in about 30 days from now. Starting in March I am planning to do a RON campaign on Juicy Ads, that will send me about 500 visitors/day to my landing page while it's running for $10/day.

          Assuming a 25% CTR, that's about 125 clicks to the offer page, and I will need a minimum of 2 conversions/day to break even. So that will be the big test.

          I am currently converting about 6% of visitors to the offer page into conversions, so if that keeps up I could be looking at about 7-8 conversions/day if it holds up.

          The only reason I haven't done it yet is cash flow. I can only sink about $150/month into this out of my own pocket (anything beyond that and the wife will be very unhappy lol). But my payout from Peerfly will probably be around $200ish at the end of February, which gives me a total of about $350 to play with in March.

          Originally Posted by cybercyborg View Post

          i am a novice... could you tell what this screenshot is of, i mean is it of some tracking tool?
          The screenshots showing the tracking system is Prosper202, a free program that was built for affiliate marketers to track the ROI of their paid ad campaigns. Though some of the screenshots I posted were just Excel, I have an unhealthy fascination with spreadsheets lol.
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  • Profile picture of the author LukePeerFly
    Looking forward to following your case study!

    With that being said, there are a few things about their system that is really starting to piss me off.
    I'd appreciate a PM with some details so I can make sure we take a look!
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  • Profile picture of the author loss1988
    Mate, this is a wonderful thread but in my experience, JustHookUp does not convert well as it used to be anymore, may be you will think about change to a new one.
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  • Profile picture of the author Greedy
    Traffic Sources: 7serach and another PPC network which I'm not going to name right now.
    I would highly recommend starting with only 1 traffic source, then once it converts move on to another.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gordon P
    I have to agree with greedy. Don't jump from one traffic source to another. Master one and then scale it. Rather test different offers and LP's.
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Luke I will PM you tonight

      Originally Posted by Greedy View Post

      I would highly recommend starting with only 1 traffic source, then once it converts move on to another.
      Originally Posted by Gordon P View Post

      I have to agree with greedy. Don't jump from one traffic source to another. Master one and then scale it. Rather test different offers and LP's.
      That's my plan yes, but I had a bunch of ad credits with another network just sitting there so I decided to just pump them into it. There's about $50 of credit left on the account and I'm only paying a few pennies per click, so it's going to last quite a while.

      7search is going to be the primary driver for now, but I'm going to look at dumping some money into other ad networks in the future once I've tweaked it more and have more data. I think down the road I'm going to be looking at exoclick and juicyads as the next networks to start testing with. I was hoping to get started with juicyads this weekend, but I discovered their RON PPC ads require a $250 account balance, which is beyond my budget right now. I'm dropping $50 back into 7search (my account ran dry last night), and have about $100 to drop somewhere else to test, not sure where it will go yet.

      Originally Posted by loss1988 View Post

      Mate, this is a wonderful thread but in my experience, JustHookUp does not convert well as it used to be anymore, may be you will think about change to a new one.
      It converts for me, I've gotten several signups since I started this. It could just be how the landing pages are working, I have a specific method I'm using in the layout of them and it seems to convert the traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author PhantomPhinale
    Great post and good luck.
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    • Profile picture of the author mtmm
      Great Helpful Post. Thanks.
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    LESSON OF THE DAY: Always double-check your CPC bids when you are making tweaks. This morning I went into the second PPC account and adjusted my max bid to $0.07 (from $0.10, I'm still tweaking with this network). Apparently I had actually adjusted it to $0.70/click instead and didn't notice until almost 12 hours later. I blew my day's budget ($10) with a whopping 14 clicks instead of 100ish clicks I'm getting per day lol...NICE!

    Anyways, I'm in a rush so here's what I just did, will post more details later or over the weekend.

    I stated earlier that my 7search account ran dry yesterday, so I just went in and deposited $50. I've been averaging $0.01/click so far, so I've got about 5000ish clicks I can pull with that.

    The other network I have $55 left in my account and I've fixed the bidding so I'm only paying $0.05/click (network minimum). That works out to about 1100 clicks.

    So over the next 2-3 weeks I've about about 6,100 clicks coming to my landing pages to try and test.

    With 7search over the past week I have converted 0.26% of clicks into leads, so if I maintain that rate I can expect about 13 leads. At $4.75/lead that's about $61.75 in payouts. I'm not looking at a huge profit margin there, but it's in the green and I can test/tweak stuff as I go.

    With the other ad network I have converted 0.68% of clicks into leads. With 1100 clicks coming I'm looking at another 7.5 leads which is $35.53 (so I would be in the red here if I was paying for this, thankfully it's all leftover credit so I probably won't be reinvesting in this network when the account runs dry unless I manage to make it profitable before it runs out).

    Gotta run
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  • Profile picture of the author Greedy
    LESSON OF THE DAY: Always double-check your CPC bids when you are making tweaks. This morning I went into the second PPC account and adjusted my max bid to $0.07 (from $0.10, I'm still tweaking with this network). Apparently I had actually adjusted it to $0.70/click instead and didn't notice until almost 12 hours later. I blew my day's budget ($10) with a whopping 14 clicks instead of 100ish clicks I'm getting per day lol...NICE!
    Been there before! Just another day, just another lesson. The costlier they are, they harder they are to forget!
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    • Profile picture of the author papuanac1971
      Christian you are same thinking as I am, sex sells!!! I always thinked in that way because if you offering money making program not everyone is interested but in sex, flirt and dating it's different. Everyone like sex and It's very easy to target people. I'm part of MaxBounty and I promote most FirstDate offers that pay $12.75 and this is pretty high. As Im Croatian I know very well about Scandinavian people (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland) and their mentality so was very easy for me to drive traffic on that offer.
      What I use is PPV campaign and exit splash script on my landing page and photo show how successful are my campaigns!!!
      I think your face and your eyes will be same as my smiles one...

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      • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
        Originally Posted by papuanac1971 View Post

        Christian you are same thinking as I am, sex sells!!! I always thinked in that way because if you offering money making program not everyone is interested but in sex, flirt and dating it's different. Everyone like sex and It's very easy to target people. I'm part of MaxBounty and I promote most FirstDate offers that pay $12.75 and this is pretty high. As Im Croatian I know very well about Scandinavian people (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland) and their mentality so was very easy for me to drive traffic on that offer.
        What I use is PPV campaign and exit splash script on my landing page and photo show how successful are my campaigns!!!
        I think your face and your eyes will be same as my smiles one...

        That is amazing how you are doing papuanac1971, I'm barely doing 1-3 signups/day right now lol.

        Out of curiosity are you in the top 10 list for their little Las Vegas event? I was wondering what the earning threshold is to get there, you are making about $3,000/day from the looks of it. Did you qualify for the Vegas trip?
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      • Profile picture of the author sladex
        Originally Posted by papuanac1971 View Post

        Christian you are same thinking as I am, sex sells!!! I always thinked in that way because if you offering money making program not everyone is interested but in sex, flirt and dating it's different. Everyone like sex and It's very easy to target people. I'm part of MaxBounty and I promote most FirstDate offers that pay $12.75 and this is pretty high. As Im Croatian I know very well about Scandinavian people (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland) and their mentality so was very easy for me to drive traffic on that offer.
        What I use is PPV campaign and exit splash script on my landing page and photo show how successful are my campaigns!!!
        I think your face and your eyes will be same as my smiles one...


        Are doing PPC?
        Maybe you can show one LP that you have for dating offer, even the old one that you not using.
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      • Profile picture of the author loss1988
        Originally Posted by papuanac1971 View Post

        Christian you are same thinking as I am, sex sells!!! I always thinked in that way because if you offering money making program not everyone is interested but in sex, flirt and dating it's different. Everyone like sex and It's very easy to target people. I'm part of MaxBounty and I promote most FirstDate offers that pay $12.75 and this is pretty high. As Im Croatian I know very well about Scandinavian people (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland) and their mentality so was very easy for me to drive traffic on that offer.
        What I use is PPV campaign and exit splash script on my landing page and photo show how successful are my campaigns!!!
        I think your face and your eyes will be same as my smiles one...

        PPV traffic ? What PPV network that you used ? To be true I don't think they have traffic that much, how much is your ROI ?
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      • Profile picture of the author diamondoleg
        Originally Posted by papuanac1971 View Post

        Christian you are same thinking as I am, sex sells!!! I always thinked in that way because if you offering money making program not everyone is interested but in sex, flirt and dating it's different. Everyone like sex and It's very easy to target people. I'm part of MaxBounty and I promote most FirstDate offers that pay $12.75 and this is pretty high. As Im Croatian I know very well about Scandinavian people (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland) and their mentality so was very easy for me to drive traffic on that offer.
        What I use is PPV campaign and exit splash script on my landing page and photo show how successful are my campaigns!!!
        I think your face and your eyes will be same as my smiles one...

        Hey buddy,
        Pretty impressive
        I'm fairly new for CPA offers. Tell me please, what is "exit splash script"? And if you can reveal what PPV network you used.

        Thanks a lot!
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      • Profile picture of the author serekesh
        Hi..impressive stats..please, what "exit splash script" do you use?
        Please can you tell which PPV network you used.

        Thanks.
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      • Profile picture of the author serekesh
        Originally Posted by papuanac1971 View Post

        Christian you are same thinking as I am, sex sells!!! I always thinked in that way because if you offering money making program not everyone is interested but in sex, flirt and dating it's different. Everyone like sex and It's very easy to target people. I'm part of MaxBounty and I promote most FirstDate offers that pay $12.75 and this is pretty high. As Im Croatian I know very well about Scandinavian people (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland) and their mentality so was very easy for me to drive traffic on that offer.
        What I use is PPV campaign and exit splash script on my landing page and photo show how successful are my campaigns!!!
        I think your face and your eyes will be same as my smiles one...

        Hi..impressive stats..please, which "exit splash script" do you use?
        Please can you tell which PPV network you used.

        Thanks.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gordon P
    @papuanac1971
    Didn't even noticed this was just from one day
    You have an impressive EPC. Keep it up.
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  • Profile picture of the author Online Guru
    I hope within a short period of time you sell this info in a WSO !!!
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    Want to sell these domain at a very low price. for details just PM me

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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little

    That's my earnings in Peerfly over the past week. As you can see, it's fairly erratic.

    I've been trying to experiment a bunch with 7search over the past week, and I think I'm going to focus on it for this month until I can make it my earnings more stable.

    My goal is to average 2 signups/day by the end of February. At $5/day budget in my campaigns, that should get me about an 80% ROI if I can manage it.

    For the first few days I was testing 2 landing pages. The second landing page barely got any clicks at all, which I attribute to the image I used on it. So I killed that landing page and modified the first one slightly.

    The modification increased the results quite substantially over a 3 day test period:

    LP01: 777 hits, 97 clicks, 1 lead (12.5% CTR, 0.13% conversion)
    LP03: 735 hits, 97 clicks, 4 leads (13.2% CTR, 0.54% conversion)

    So today I made LP03 my control variable to try and beat, and added 2 new landing pages giving me a total of 3 landing pages that I'm currently testing.

    Getting very cheap clicks from 7search doesn't seem to be the problem, I suspect the campaign I have setup I could easily ramp up to $15-$20/day and still hit the budget every day.

    But the problem is getting those clicks to convert so I have to keep experimenting with different landing pages to see what works.

    Something else I've discovered - I seem to get more leads if I turn the campaign off in 7search for a few hours, then turn it back on. A while ago I got 7search to turn on the campaign scheduler in my account, so I'm trying to figure out what hours of the day my campaigns convert the best. So far mid-day/early afternoon and late evenings seem to get the best results so far. My campaign is completely turned off from 1AM - 12PM every day, I just can't seem to get a single conversion during that window so I focus my budget during the hours I can get it to convert.

    Somebody above said they couldn't get JustHookUp to convert, well here's my stats in Peerfly for the past week, as you can see it will convert it you do it right:



    EDIT: I think the next big thing for me to do is dig through all my click data in P202 and figure out which RID's are not converting at all for me and block them in my account so I'm not paying for traffic. Will probably do that in the next day or two now that I have several thousand clicks worth of data to look at.
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    • Profile picture of the author razul
      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      EDIT: I think the next big thing for me to do is dig through all my click data in P202 and figure out which RID's are not converting at all for me and block them in my account so I'm not paying for traffic. Will probably do that in the next day or two now that I have several thousand clicks worth of data to look at.
      That's a really good idea!Then you are going to start really killing it!

      Great work mate. Keep up the updates dude. Plenty of people will be reading and getting help/ideas.

      Thank you
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      For the love of Chango: Use the "Thanks" button instead of spamming/plaguing a thread with your thank you posts
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      • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
        Last night I posted that I need to do some analysis of the clicks I'm getting to figure out if I should block some RID's in 7search, so that's what I'm doing right now and will show you all how I'm doing it.

        Data analysis is something I'm actually very good at, it's something I do for my day job so it's almost second nature to me.

        First, I exported all my click data over the past week from P202 into Excel:



        I also added a total row at the bottom of all the click data:



        What this shows me is that I spent $31.20 with 7search this week and made $42.75 (or $11.55 profit) - a net ROI of 37% which is respectable. But because I'm dealing with a small dollar amount here it's not enough for me to be happy.

        As I said in an earlier post, my goal is to hit 2 conversions/day with my current 7search campaign. But over the past week I have only gotten 9 leads instead of 14 that I am aiming for, so I'm not at my target yet.

        The good news is that over the past 2 days I have hit my target both days, but I want to make sure I keep hitting that target.

        The first thing I need to do is eliminate all the rows with 10 or fewer clicks. Simply put, there just isn't enough data there to really make any intelligent decision on. Heck, I would almost want to say prune out anything below 50 clicks, but I think there is some valid data here to work with. After cutting out the <10 click rows, here is what I'm left with:



        Taking out all the single click data removed 6 of my leads from the equation

        The next thing I did was highlight my best (green) and worst (red) performers of the remaining set:



        I define a best performer as one that generated a positive ROI.

        I define a worst performer in one of two ways:
        a) 0% click-through rate
        b) low click-through rate

        The 0% CTR's should be obvious - they are just sending junk traffic. The reason I am also selecting lower CTRs is because it feels like wasted money to me. And while even though some of them have a higher CTR than my performers, these ones didn't generate a signup. Since I haven't really gained anything from these, I don't think I'm taking a big risk by wiping them out for now.

        What I'm left with is seeing that my 3 best performers sent 431 clicks, 26 click-throughs, and generated 3 leads over the past week.

        My worst performers sent 241 clicks, with 13 click-throughs, and 0 leads for the week. While it may not seem like a huge difference, if I had gotten those 241 clicks from the top performers instead I probably would have seen an extra lead or two.


        EDIT:

        I just went in and decided to look at another factor here - keywords. This campaign is currently only using 11 broad-match keywords in 7search and I just pulled the stats on them for the same time period:



        2 of my keywords generated 8 of the 9 leads I got in the past week for a total ROI of 92.8% - that is amazingly good.

        I also flagged 2 keywords as follows:

        Keyword #2 got a good amount of traffic and click-throughs on my landing page, but it converted only half as well as the other keywords did and I actually lost money on it. Granted I didn't lose a lot of money, but it is still losing money.

        Keyword #10 got a good amount of clicks, but it has the worst click-through rate of the entire keyword basket (not including the 2 keywords that only got 1 click - those don't have enough data to decide anything on).

        So I've decided to kill those 2 keywords from this campaign for now. I may add them back in later when I have more budget to play with, but here's what I'm seeing:

        612 clicks ($6.12 cost) to generate 1 lead. Those 612 clicks could have put put through my other keywords and gotten the same number of click-throughs but 1 or 2 more leads during that time (conversion rate is double on my performing keywords). So those 2 keywords are gone.

        And I do apologize, but I will not be disclosing the keywords I'm using at all during this case study.
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  • Profile picture of the author sladex
    Nice post, thank You for sharing.
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  • Profile picture of the author NameThatCandy
    Thanks for sharing! It really inspires me!
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  • Profile picture of the author jugnu
    Great thread, keep it up warriors
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  • Profile picture of the author tagr79
    ChristianLittle,

    Great case study. I'm just about to start w/ CPA as well... For LPs, are you using the Merchant's LP or you're creating custom LPs?

    Thanks
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by tagr79 View Post

      ChristianLittle,

      Great case study. I'm just about to start w/ CPA as well... For LPs, are you using the Merchant's LP or you're creating custom LPs?

      Thanks
      I use my own landing pages that are funneled through P202.

      So all my traffic goes through this process:

      Source => My Landing Page => Merchant Landing Page

      I'm finding (at least in the dating niche) that you have to presell people on the offer before they get to the merchant page. I've tried direct linking in the past with a few offers and it failed miserably.
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      • Profile picture of the author mraudi
        Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

        I use my own landing pages that are funneled through P202.

        So all my traffic goes through this process:

        Source => My Landing Page => Merchant Landing Page

        I'm finding (at least in the dating niche) that you have to presell people on the offer before they get to the merchant page. I've tried direct linking in the past with a few offers and it failed miserably.
        Do you mimic the offer page? I heard it converts better, just want to know if you do it or not.
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        Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything.

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  • Profile picture of the author mraudi
    GREAT progress ChristianLittle! I'm not making money YET but I'm constantly tweaking my campaigns. Keep up the good work man.
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    Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything.

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  • Profile picture of the author mraudi
    Yeah when I first started, I did a TON of reading and almost everyone recommended to "mimic" the offer page. Right now I am rotating between 3 LPs which look nothing like the offer page. Compared to when I "first" started when I mimic the offer page, I have a higher CTR. Guess I'll keep testing and see how it goes, thanks for the case study, it's really inspiring and motivational to keep me going!
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    Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn't sell much of anything.

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  • Profile picture of the author Dean Henry
    Following anxiously. Keep up the good work. You may want to head over to Affplaybook, you can get lots of tips from their follow along case studies.
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    FREE Traffic?! No way...but maybe Yes way? Stop being curious and find out Here!

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  • Profile picture of the author diamondoleg
    Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

    I'm going to preface this by saying I don't know how long I will update the thread for. I would like to get feedback on what I'm doing so I will try to keep it updated frequently, but I do have other obligations and such to attend to that are more important.

    I also want to add the following important points:

    1) This is a living case study, everything you see here is live data.

    2) Because I want to avoid a bunch of people copying what I'm doing, I won't be disclosing every single detail. There are a few details that are being left out on purpose to avoid this problem.

    3) This campaign has been running for about a week right now, so I have some baseline data to share in the next post.

    Lastly I want to make it clear that I am not an expert with CPA marketing. I have a long track record of tradition affiliate marketing (generating sales / %-based commissions). CPA is something that I have had a fairly poor track record with, but I have never really dived into the deep end with it.

    This post is going to cover the following:

    -Why Peerfly?
    -Offers
    -Landing Pages

    Why Peerfly?

    I have accounts with 2 CPA networks - MaxBounty and Peerfly. Until now I have focused the little effort I did with CPA on MaxBounty and never really gave Peerfly a chance to test out their platform. That is something I want to correct, and Luke is quite active here which is also helping their case.

    I've had the chance to exchange a few PM's with Luke over the past few months and even though he isn't my Peerfly Account Manager, he's been very approachable and friendly.

    I have talked to my account manager at Peerfly a few times - Nikki - and she seems quite friendly and approachable as well. We have a very long thread of emails going back and forth over the past few weeks, she has been very helpful even though I am hardly generating anything right now.

    Getting support and being able to communicate with the network is extremely important to me and so far Peerfly has excelled in that area (especially considering I haven't done anything with their network until now). I've learned over the years that I would rather have a really good rapport with the network I'm doing business with than getting a better pay structure out of a network I never talk to.

    Because of all this, Peerfly gets my thumbs up.

    With that being said, there are a few things about their system that is really starting to piss me off. But it's nothing that will make me walk away, their system just has some quirks to it that I haven't run into with MaxBounty or the more traditional affiliate networks.

    Offers

    I am sticking to the Dating niche for this campaign.

    Why?

    Simply put: sex sells.

    I have been marketing products online for a very long time. Sex is one of the biggest things that sells online, and it's something I'm familiar with (I used to promote a lot of porn sites many years ago).

    So I picked 2 offers from Peerfly:

    xxxBlackBook: I selected this offer because I like the landing page and it accepts adult traffic from the US, Canada, and the UK (aka the "Big 3 English-Speaking Countries").

    Just Hook Up: I selected this offer because the landing page looks good and it pays better than most of the other dating offers ($4.75/lead). They have a few different offers available in Peerfly, I selected a specific one and had to get approval to run with it (which I fully disclosed what I intended to do and within a few hours I was approved to run the offer). The biggest problem with this offer is that it only accepts US traffic.

    So what I will be doing is building a bunch of landing pages and directing paid traffic to them. When a visitor clicks on the Call to Action (CTA) it will take them to one of those 2 offers depending on their IP address:

    US visitors will get directed to JustHookUp
    All others will get directed to xxxBlackBook

    While xxxBlackbook doesn't allow all countries, I will be looking at buying traffic from English-speaking countries. My focus will be getting my ads in front of US visitors because the payout for Just Hook Up is better, but I know that won't always be the case.

    Landing Pages

    Initially I built 2 landing pages which have an almost identical layout. My landing pages have 4 parts to them:

    Headline - Just a brief 1-2 sentence headline that is highlighted
    Picture - A picture suitable to the offer
    Text - 2-3 chunks of text (not really paragraphs, most like half-paragraphs)
    Call to Action - A button of some kind

    I'm not going to get into the specifics of the landing pages for now. I will say that the CTA has some Javascript functionality on it, it's not just a simple button to click to send them to the offer. I want to pre-screen all my traffic to get the highest conversion rate possible on the offer page. I will post some details on how this works later.

    That's it for now, I will post more information later. The next post will focus on traffic sources and the preliminary stats that I got from them.
    Hey Christian,
    Thanks for your sharing!

    You said "When a visitor clicks on the Call to Action (CTA) it will take them to one of those 2 offers depending on their IP address" can you explain how you did that?

    Thanks!
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by diamondoleg View Post

      Hey Christian,
      Thanks for your sharing!

      You said "When a visitor clicks on the Call to Action (CTA) it will take them to one of those 2 offers depending on their IP address" can you explain how you did that?

      Thanks!
      I have some code in place which was directing the user to a different offer page depending on their IP address
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[7701218].message }}
      • Profile picture of the author diamondoleg
        Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

        I have some code in place which was directing the user to a different offer page depending on their IP address
        Can you share the code if it is not a secret?

        Thanks in advance!
        {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[7702992].message }}
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    Geotargeting... possible with JS and PHP scripts.

    I have a PHP script somewhere on my HDD

    Edit:

    Found it... get it here -> http://w3cvalidco.de/files/CPA_GeoTarget.zip

    Make sure you update the GeoIP data from maxmind website from time to time (I have updated them today)

    Basically put all files inside the ZIP into a folder on your website.

    Edit the index.php file... upload a landing page into the country folders or point in the index.php file directly to any offers if you wish

    Pretty easy script
    Signature

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    • Profile picture of the author Olen
      Wow this is an excellent post.

      When you say you wipe low performers (affiliate IP's) from the report, are you saying you don't want to look at them with the other numbers or you're blocking them at this point forward? For example when it's 0% CTR.

      And if I missed it, are you paying mostly .01 a click or is this some kind of average between all your keywords?

      Thanks,
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[7701519].message }}
      • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
        Originally Posted by Olen View Post

        When you say you wipe low performers (affiliate IP's) from the report, are you saying you don't want to look at them with the other numbers or you're blocking them at this point forward? For example when it's 0% CTR.
        I'm blocking them. 7search gives you the ability to block publishers in their network via the AFFID and RID variables.

        Originally Posted by Olen View Post

        And if I missed it, are you paying mostly .01 a click or is this some kind of average between all your keywords?
        Right now I'm paying $0.01/click for 7search traffic on average. I have a few keywords that cost more but they aren't getting many clicks.
        {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[7701827].message }}
        • Profile picture of the author Olen
          Thank you very much for this information! I understand about the blocking. What I heard from "guru" and 7search is wait til about 30 - 40 and up, 7 search says at least 50 hits by a single affiliate before blocking?? And you're not doing that at all LOL which is cool, I'm just commenting.

          What's really an eye opener for me is you're getting that kind of action with .01 clicks. That tells me I have no clue what I'm doing when it comes to keyword research or niches for that matter. Someone must know what the hot keywords are going in or what, dump a gazillion keywords in and see what sticks?

          I've got 11 campaigns at 7search and it's just a trickle if I run between .01 and .05.

          Best of Luck to you! I'm learning watching you!!
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        • Profile picture of the author emigre
          Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

          Right now I'm paying $0.01/click for 7search traffic on average. I have a few keywords that cost more but they aren't getting many clicks.
          What are your ad rankings like with $0.01 bid if you don't mind sharing.
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    • Profile picture of the author diamondoleg
      Hi Michael,
      Thanks for the code!

      Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

      Make sure you update the GeoIP data from maxmind website from time to time (I have updated them today)
      I'm a fairly new for it, can you please explain me how to update the GeoIP dat, why to do it and what the maxmind is?

      Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

      Basically put all files inside the ZIP into a folder on your website.

      Edit the index.php file... upload a landing page into the country folders or point in the index.php file directly to any offers if you wish
      Man, this part is overwhelmed me Can you please please explain it in more details for dummies?

      Thanks a lot!
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[7703015].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author Greedy
      Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

      Geotargeting... possible with JS and PHP scripts.

      I have a PHP script somewhere on my HDD

      Edit:

      Found it... get it here -> http://w3cvalidco.de/files/CPA_GeoTarget.zip

      Make sure you update the GeoIP data from maxmind website from time to time (I have updated them today)

      Basically put all files inside the ZIP into a folder on your website.

      Edit the index.php file... upload a landing page into the country folders or point in the index.php file directly to any offers if you wish

      Pretty easy script
      Thanks for the share!
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[7705456].message }}
      • Profile picture of the author Michael71
        No problem, Greedy

        Originally Posted by Greedy View Post

        Thanks for the share!
        Signature

        HTML/CSS/jQuery/ZURB Foundation/Twitter Bootstrap/Wordpress/Frontend Performance Optimizing
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Originally Posted by emigre View Post

    What are your ad rankings like with $0.01 bid if you don't mind sharing.
    According to 7search I'm ranked 1.7 overall for my campaign. But I have a few keywords that I'm not even in the top 3 for and getting a couple of clicks.

    7search did a big change to their minimum bidding in January, all the big keywords are now $0.05/click minimum. I just did some thorough research into keywords that weren't bumped to that minimum and am taking advantage of it as best I can


    UPDATE:



    Tonight I opened a can of worms - I audited the traffic I was buying from 7search. I checked the IP's of a few visitors and discovered they were not from the United States. Something didn't feel quite right, so I built a program in PHP using my geoip database and ran all my traffic through it over the past few days, here's the results:


    I'm completely dumbstruck by this. Only 59% of the clicks I've been buying from 7search over the past few days has actually been from the US, despite me setting the campaign to just US visitors.

    I'm actually quite upset about this. Clearly this is a major problem - I have been sending traffic through to the merchant page that simply won't even get to see the landing page for a large portion of my traffic.

    What's really bugging me is that 393 hits came from "UNKNOWN", which means the country of origin isn't registering in my geoip database (which means it's fake or a bot).

    The funny thing is that even though only 60% of the traffic I'm buying can convert on the Just Hook Up offer, I'm still making a small profit.

    So this has made my mission for tomorrow quite clear:

    a) Talk to 7search about what I've stumbled on and hopefully get some kind of refund for all the bad clicks

    b) Put in some extra code on my geotargetting redirect script to point traffic from India and those other countries highlighted in red to something that I can actually convert them on.

    c) Figure out what to do about UNKNOWN countries...I might have to find some generic offer that accepts traffic from any country just to dump it to. I know MaxBounty has a few generic offers that are open to all countries so I might have to dump this traffic there to see if I can do anything with it (I doubt it, but you never know lol).

    I would start doing this tonight, but I've had a very long day and don't have the energy to even attempt any of this right now.


    EDIT:

    This was really aggravating me, so I went in and hacked my geo redirect script as follows:

    US traffic -> Just Hook Up (Peerfly)
    Canada, UK (and a few others) -> xxxBlackBook (Peerfly)
    All other traffic -> Dating Survey (Max Bounty)

    The dating survey offer pays total crap ($1.70/lead), but it accepts all international traffic so I'm going to dump anything that I can't target to there for now until I have a better solution in place. I'm too tired to do anything else on this tonight, so some emergency php triage is the best I can do until I get more sleep.
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    • Profile picture of the author Michael71
      Christian Little

      "unknown" could mean they are using proxies.

      I am using .htaccess on some sites to deny access via proxy.

      Code:
      # deny proxies
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteCond %{HTTP:VIA}                 !^$ [OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP:FORWARDED}           !^$ [OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP:USERAGENT_VIA}       !^$ [OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP:X_FORWARDED_FOR}     !^$ [OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP:PROXY_CONNECTION}    !^$ [OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP:XPROXY_CONNECTION}   !^$ [OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP:HTTP_PC_REMOTE_ADDR} !^$ [OR]
      RewriteCond %{HTTP:HTTP_CLIENT_IP}      !^$
      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]
      In this case access via proxy is forbidden (using it for wp-admin folders) but you can reroute them if you change the RewriteRule.

      Another nice trick is if you deny/reroute traffic from anonymous proxy services like safersurf.

      Code:
      # deny SaferSurf
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .safersurf. [NC]
      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]
      Again, you can change the RewriteRule to route them to a generic offer. And you can add other anonymous proxy services.

      If you want to deny bots/scrapers you could use this code:

      Code:
      # deny bad bots
      RewriteEngine On 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BlackWidow [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Bot mailto:craftbot@yahoo.com [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ChinaClaw [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Custo [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^DISCo [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Download Demon [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^eCatch [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EirGrabber [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailSiphon [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailWolf [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Express WebPictures [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ExtractorPro [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EyeNetIE [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^FlashGet [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetRight [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetWeb! [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go!Zilla [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go-Ahead-Got-It [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GrabNet [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Grafula [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^HMView [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} HTTrack [NC,OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image Stripper [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image Sucker [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Indy Library [NC,OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^InterGET [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Internet Ninja [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JetCar [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JOC Web Spider [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^larbin [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^LeechFTP [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mass Downloader [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MIDown tool [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mister PiX [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Navroad [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NearSite [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetAnts [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetSpider [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Net Vampire [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetZIP [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Octopus [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline Explorer [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline Navigator [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^PageGrabber [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Papa Foto [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pavuk [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pcBrowser [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^RealDownload [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ReGet [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SiteSnagger [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SmartDownload [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperBot [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperHTTP [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Surfbot [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^tAkeOut [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Teleport Pro [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^VoidEYE [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web Image Collector [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web Sucker [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebAuto [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebCopier [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebFetch [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebGo IS [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebLeacher [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebReaper [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebSauger [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website eXtractor [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website Quester [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebStripper [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebWhacker [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebZIP [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Wget [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Widow [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WWWOFFLE [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xaldon WebSpider [OR] 
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus 
      RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]
      A good service (in my eyes) is the GeoIP API from smart-ip.net (áÿÃ'€Ã°Ã²ÃºÃ°: Óõþ-IP API).

      Using some jQuery code it allows you to route the traffic how you need it. According to my tests it was always getting the right IP address, even if I used a german proxy (located on my webserver). Maxmind did not get my IP address if I used a proxy.

      The code looks like this (make sure you are loading jQuery before you use the code):

      Code:
      $(document).ready(function(){
      $.getJSON( "http://smart-ip.net/geoip-json?callback=?", function(data){ 
      	
      	var traffic = data.countryCode;
      	
      		switch (traffic) {
      		
      			case "US": 	window.location = "http://yahoo.com";
      						break;
      			case "CA":	window.location = "http://yahoo.ca";
      						break;
      			case "DE":	window.location = "http://yahoo.de";
      						break;
      			case "UK":	window.location = "http://yahoo.co.uk";
      						break;
      			case "AU":	window.location = "http://au.yahoo.com";
      						break;
      			case "ES":	window.location = "http://yahoo.es";
      						break;
      			default:	window.location = "http://google.com"
      		}	
      	
      	}); 
      });
      You can add more or delete countries easily...
      Signature

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      • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
        Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

        Christian Little

        "unknown" could mean they are using proxies.

        I am using .htaccess on some sites to deny access via proxy.

        Code:
        # deny proxies
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:VIA}                 !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:FORWARDED}           !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:USERAGENT_VIA}       !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:X_FORWARDED_FOR}     !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:PROXY_CONNECTION}    !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:XPROXY_CONNECTION}   !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:HTTP_PC_REMOTE_ADDR} !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:HTTP_CLIENT_IP}      !^$
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]
        In this case access via proxy is forbidden (using it for wp-admin folders) but you can reroute them if you change the RewriteRule.

        Another nice trick is if you deny/reroute traffic from anonymous proxy services like safersurf.

        Code:
        # deny SaferSurf
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .safersurf. [NC]
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]
        Again, you can change the RewriteRule to route them to a generic offer. And you can add other anonymous proxy services.

        If you want to deny bots/scrapers you could use this code:

        Code:
        # deny bad bots
        RewriteEngine On 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BlackWidow [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Bot mailto:craftbot@yahoo.com [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ChinaClaw [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Custo [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^DISCo [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Download Demon [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^eCatch [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EirGrabber [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailSiphon [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailWolf [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Express WebPictures [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ExtractorPro [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EyeNetIE [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^FlashGet [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetRight [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetWeb! [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go!Zilla [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go-Ahead-Got-It [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GrabNet [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Grafula [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^HMView [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} HTTrack [NC,OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image Stripper [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image Sucker [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Indy Library [NC,OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^InterGET [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Internet Ninja [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JetCar [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JOC Web Spider [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^larbin [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^LeechFTP [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mass Downloader [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MIDown tool [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mister PiX [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Navroad [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NearSite [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetAnts [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetSpider [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Net Vampire [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetZIP [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Octopus [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline Explorer [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline Navigator [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^PageGrabber [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Papa Foto [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pavuk [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pcBrowser [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^RealDownload [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ReGet [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SiteSnagger [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SmartDownload [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperBot [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperHTTP [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Surfbot [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^tAkeOut [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Teleport Pro [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^VoidEYE [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web Image Collector [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web Sucker [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebAuto [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebCopier [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebFetch [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebGo IS [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebLeacher [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebReaper [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebSauger [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website eXtractor [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website Quester [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebStripper [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebWhacker [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebZIP [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Wget [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Widow [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WWWOFFLE [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xaldon WebSpider [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus 
        RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]
        A good service (in my eyes) is the GeoIP API from smart-ip.net (áÿÃ'€Ã°Ã²ÃºÃ°: Ã"õþ-IP API).

        Using some jQuery code it allows you to route the traffic how you need it. According to my tests it was always getting the right IP address, even if I used a german proxy (located on my webserver). Maxmind did not get my IP address if I used a proxy.

        The code looks like this (make sure you are loading jQuery before you use the code):

        Code:
        $(document).ready(function(){
        $.getJSON( "http://smart-ip.net/geoip-json?callback=?", function(data){ 
        	
        	var traffic = data.countryCode;
        	
        		switch (traffic) {
        		
        			case "US": 	window.location = "http://yahoo.com";
        						break;
        			case "CA":	window.location = "http://yahoo.ca";
        						break;
        			case "DE":	window.location = "http://yahoo.de";
        						break;
        			case "UK":	window.location = "http://yahoo.co.uk";
        						break;
        			case "AU":	window.location = "http://au.yahoo.com";
        						break;
        			case "ES":	window.location = "http://yahoo.es";
        						break;
        			default:	window.location = "http://google.com"
        		}	
        	
        	}); 
        });
        You can add more or delete countries easily...
        Thanks for the info Michael, I'm going to review it later today when I go in and try and clean up this mess. My geo database is based on Maximind, but it's probably outdated so I'm going to have to update it before talking to 7search and verify what I discovered.

        I will definately look at your .htaccess stuff, I am fairly familiar with that so will see how to adapt it for me.

        The jquery stuff I probably won't touch, I haven't learned jQuery yet lol.
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      • Profile picture of the author serekesh
        Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

        Christian Little

        "unknown" could mean they are using proxies.

        I am using .htaccess on some sites to deny access via proxy.

        Code:
        # deny proxies
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:VIA}                 !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:FORWARDED}           !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:USERAGENT_VIA}       !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:X_FORWARDED_FOR}     !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:PROXY_CONNECTION}    !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:XPROXY_CONNECTION}   !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:HTTP_PC_REMOTE_ADDR} !^$ [OR]
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:HTTP_CLIENT_IP}      !^$
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]
        In this case access via proxy is forbidden (using it for wp-admin folders) but you can reroute them if you change the RewriteRule.

        Another nice trick is if you deny/reroute traffic from anonymous proxy services like safersurf.

        Code:
        # deny SaferSurf
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .safersurf. [NC]
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]
        Again, you can change the RewriteRule to route them to a generic offer. And you can add other anonymous proxy services.

        If you want to deny bots/scrapers you could use this code:

        Code:
        # deny bad bots
        RewriteEngine On 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BlackWidow [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Bot mailto:craftbot@yahoo.com [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ChinaClaw [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Custo [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^DISCo [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Download Demon [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^eCatch [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EirGrabber [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailSiphon [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EmailWolf [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Express WebPictures [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ExtractorPro [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^EyeNetIE [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^FlashGet [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetRight [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GetWeb! [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go!Zilla [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Go-Ahead-Got-It [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GrabNet [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Grafula [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^HMView [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} HTTrack [NC,OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image Stripper [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Image Sucker [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Indy Library [NC,OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^InterGET [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Internet Ninja [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JetCar [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^JOC Web Spider [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^larbin [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^LeechFTP [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mass Downloader [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MIDown tool [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mister PiX [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Navroad [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NearSite [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetAnts [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetSpider [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Net Vampire [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^NetZIP [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Octopus [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline Explorer [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Offline Navigator [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^PageGrabber [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Papa Foto [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pavuk [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^pcBrowser [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^RealDownload [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ReGet [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SiteSnagger [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SmartDownload [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperBot [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SuperHTTP [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Surfbot [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^tAkeOut [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Teleport Pro [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^VoidEYE [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web Image Collector [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Web Sucker [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebAuto [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebCopier [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebFetch [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebGo IS [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebLeacher [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebReaper [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebSauger [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website eXtractor [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Website Quester [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebStripper [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebWhacker [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebZIP [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Wget [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Widow [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WWWOFFLE [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Xaldon WebSpider [OR] 
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Zeus 
        RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]
        A good service (in my eyes) is the GeoIP API from smart-ip.net (áÿÃ'€Ã°Ã²ÃºÃ°: Ã"õþ-IP API).

        Using some jQuery code it allows you to route the traffic how you need it. According to my tests it was always getting the right IP address, even if I used a german proxy (located on my webserver). Maxmind did not get my IP address if I used a proxy.

        The code looks like this (make sure you are loading jQuery before you use the code):

        Code:
        $(document).ready(function(){
        $.getJSON( "http://smart-ip.net/geoip-json?callback=?", function(data){ 
            
            var traffic = data.countryCode;
            
                switch (traffic) {
                
                    case "US":     window.location = "http://yahoo.com";
                                break;
                    case "CA":    window.location = "http://yahoo.ca";
                                break;
                    case "DE":    window.location = "http://yahoo.de";
                                break;
                    case "UK":    window.location = "http://yahoo.co.uk";
                                break;
                    case "AU":    window.location = "http://au.yahoo.com";
                                break;
                    case "ES":    window.location = "http://yahoo.es";
                                break;
                    default:    window.location = "http://google.com"
                }    
            
            }); 
        });
        You can add more or delete countries easily...
        Thanks for this report.
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Just a quick update before I'm out on the road for the day.

      First off, no conversions for 3 days. I'm attributing a large part of this to the geo redirect script I put in place. A large portion of the traffic I'm getting from 7search appears to be international or using a US-based proxy and the offer I'm routing them to won't convert until tomorrow at the earliest.

      Second, I'm about 99% certain that I'm going to drop 7search in favor of JuicyAds (at least for the rest of this month). Unless I see at least 1 conversion for xPress over the weekend I not be adding more funds to my 7search account for now.

      This morning I did some preliminary digging on the properties on JuicyAds and picked out 15 sites and plugged their stats into excel (in case you haven't noticed by now, I love spreadsheets).

      Here's what I came up with:



      For this initial test run I'm looking to spend around $25 for the first week. Juicy requires a $100 minimum payment, so I'm aiming to spend $25/week over the next 4 weeks.

      Based on that, I picked out 4 sites of the list I generated and broke them into 2 possible campaigns.

      Campaign #1 (green) is very international traffic, but extremely low CPC. I can get about 3,000 clicks from my landing pages to the offer pages during the week if I go with this.

      Campaign #2 (purple) is a mix of international traffic and about 25% US traffic as well. I can get about 653 clicks from my landing pages to the offer pages during the week if I go with this.

      More later, gotta run
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      • Profile picture of the author LukePeerFly
        Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

        Just a quick update before I'm out on the road for the day.

        First off, no conversions for 3 days. I'm attributing a large part of this to the geo redirect script I put in place. A large portion of the traffic I'm getting from 7search appears to be international or using a US-based proxy and the offer I'm routing them to won't convert until tomorrow at the earliest.

        Second, I'm about 99% certain that I'm going to drop 7search in favor of JuicyAds (at least for the rest of this month). Unless I see at least 1 conversion for xPress over the weekend I not be adding more funds to my 7search account for now.

        This morning I did some preliminary digging on the properties on JuicyAds and picked out 15 sites and plugged their stats into excel (in case you haven't noticed by now, I love spreadsheets).

        Here's what I came up with:



        For this initial test run I'm looking to spend around $25 for the first week. Juicy requires a $100 minimum payment, so I'm aiming to spend $25/week over the next 4 weeks.

        Based on that, I picked out 4 sites of the list I generated and broke them into 2 possible campaigns.

        Campaign #1 (green) is very international traffic, but extremely low CPC. I can get about 3,000 clicks from my landing pages to the offer pages during the week if I go with this.

        Campaign #2 (purple) is a mix of international traffic and about 25% US traffic as well. I can get about 653 clicks from my landing pages to the offer pages during the week if I go with this.

        More later, gotta run
        Well, that's about as detailed as you can get Looks like two good buys. Hope you're able to get them profitable!
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Just a quickie update here for anybody that is still following this.

      Here are my earniings in Peerfly since Feb 8:



      I'm currently getting $5/lead from Just Hook Up, all but 1 of those leads were because of Advertise.com (the 1 exception is from 7search).

      As you can see, I'm currently hitting my goal of 2 leads/day.

      Furthermore, here's how much I've spend to get those 2 leads/day:



      Spend: $19.40
      Leads: 8
      Revenue: $40.00
      ROI: 106%

      It works that I'm spending about $4.20/day and I'm making $10 in return. 5 days in a row of consistent performance of this

      Unfortunately there's a few problems here:

      1) Advertise.com does not show you how many impressions you get. The performance I'm getting right now has been completely from testing and tweaking on a daily basis for the past two weeks. Initially I tried to follow the advise of my account manager over there and he kept pushing me to raise my max bid to really high levels (we're talking like $1/click) to get the most exposure. I did that for a while and I did get a ton of clicks but I was paying a stupid amount of money for them, so I've been tweaking it constantly and managed to get it to this level.

      2) The campaign is only working with my current settings and I can't scale it up with them. The only way to get more traffic is to increase the Max CPC, which means I will be spending more money to get what I'm getting.

      The good news is that if I just leave the campaign as-is and drop more money into it, over a 30 day period I could expect:

      Spend: $126
      Conversions: 60
      Revenue: $300
      ROI: 138%

      So it's kinda a no brainer at this point. I think I have no choice but to put the remaining $100 of my budget for this month into this campaign.

      My peerfly account currently has $100 in it, if I can get another 20 days of this activity doing then I'll be looking at another potential $200 by the end of the month.

      That's a pretty damn good ROI, which means in March I will have a much bigger budget to play with

      Estimated March Budget:

      $150 base + $300 peerfly earnings = $450

      That will let me keep the Advertise.com stuff running and maybe look at an RON campaign on Juicy Ads.
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      • Profile picture of the author Ranksword
        Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

        Just a quickie update here for anybody that is still following this.

        Here are my earniings in Peerfly since Feb 8:



        I'm currently getting $5/lead from Just Hook Up, all but 1 of those leads were because of Advertise.com (the 1 exception is from 7search).

        As you can see, I'm currently hitting my goal of 2 leads/day.

        Furthermore, here's how much I've spend to get those 2 leads/day:



        Spend: $19.40
        Leads: 8
        Revenue: $40.00
        ROI: 106%

        It works that I'm spending about $4.20/day and I'm making $10 in return. 5 days in a row of consistent performance of this

        Unfortunately there's a few problems here:

        1) Advertise.com does not show you how many impressions you get. The performance I'm getting right now has been completely from testing and tweaking on a daily basis for the past two weeks. Initially I tried to follow the advise of my account manager over there and he kept pushing me to raise my max bid to really high levels (we're talking like $1/click) to get the most exposure. I did that for a while and I did get a ton of clicks but I was paying a stupid amount of money for them, so I've been tweaking it constantly and managed to get it to this level.

        2) The campaign is only working with my current settings and I can't scale it up with them. The only way to get more traffic is to increase the Max CPC, which means I will be spending more money to get what I'm getting.

        The good news is that if I just leave the campaign as-is and drop more money into it, over a 30 day period I could expect:

        Spend: $126
        Conversions: 60
        Revenue: $300
        ROI: 138%

        So it's kinda a no brainer at this point. I think I have no choice but to put the remaining $100 of my budget for this month into this campaign.

        My peerfly account currently has $100 in it, if I can get another 20 days of this activity doing then I'll be looking at another potential $200 by the end of the month.

        That's a pretty damn good ROI, which means in March I will have a much bigger budget to play with

        Estimated March Budget:

        $150 base + $300 peerfly earnings = $450

        That will let me keep the Advertise.com stuff running and maybe look at an RON campaign on Juicy Ads.
        Congrats and keep going
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        • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
          Originally Posted by sladex View Post

          Hi Christian Little,
          Can I ask you if you made a profit or lost money at your testing time in the last month?
          If not a secret can you tell me more about how much did you invest and how much returned?
          Thanks.
          I have the results right here, was planning to post this anyways since the month has ended.

          Here are my stats for the 3 campaigns I ran in February:



          And here is the report from Peerfly for the same period:



          So my campaigns lost money, but not a huge amount.

          Lessons Learned

          I sent several clicks to a few offers that didn't get a single conversion. Specifically that 602 clicks was to xPress, if I had gotten 1 conversion from those clicks I would have been in the green for the month. xPress pays out $55.25/conversion

          Alternatively, if I had sent those clicks to the other offers which I have been able to convert I could have potentially gotten another 25 conversions which would have worked out to about $122 in revenue. That would have put me in the green for sure.

          The offer I sent 171 clicks to was a per-lead site that I just couldn't get to convert. But the funny thing is it has 2 different offer pages and I sent 21 clicks to the second offer page and got 1 conversion.

          So that's a huge factor - my landing pages and traffic sources don't convert on PPS signups. It's a painful lesson, but it has been learned and I know moving forward to avoid them.

          Doing some basic math here:

          I sent ~1500 clicks to Peerfly in February. Just over 700 of those went to offers that I was able to convert extremely well.

          In theory if I could sent that 800 clicks to the offers that I was able to convert I should be able to get more revenue.

          Another problem is that over the past few days my conversions in Peerfly have been horrible:



          Only 1 of the 3 campaigns was running during that time, but it was also the best performing campaign and was consistently getting 2 leads/day for the first 2 weeks when it was running.

          This campaign seems to really only convert well on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So I think I will leave it running but trim it down to just those 3 days of the week and see what happens. I have enough funds in the account to let it run until Monday, so I'm going to leave it and see if my theory is correct. If I get 2 leads/day for the next 3 days I will prune the campaign down so that it runs on just those 3 days of the week.

          Right now my landing pages are directing traffic to 2 offers (the top 2 in the report above). At one point I was testing 5 different offer pages, but that included xPress and a few others that I didn't feel very comfortable with initially and pulled shortly after putting them into the rotation script.

          Planning for March

          I have about $$350 I can play with. So I need to figure out the best way to make this work.

          I will need to put $100 into the campaign that is currently running, that is the minimum deposit amount and my account will run dry over the weekend. As long as I get 5-6 leads over the weekend I plan on continuing this campaign. It's a bit expensive (I'm paying $0.06/click), but it is converting fairly well.

          That leaves me with $200-$250 to put somewhere else to test.

          I have a few options and will be reviewing them over the weekend. I won't have the money until next week anyways, so I am not going to rush into any decisions at this point.

          I do have a few networks I am considering and am trying to figure out where I can get the most bang for my buck but I'm not ready to post any information about them here yet until I think about this for a bit.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    It's not too hard, Christian

    I can help you if you need anything. Just let me know.
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Thanks.

    I'm not sure how much of that stuff I will use, I don't really have anything against international traffic, but the offers I was specifically promoting were only for certain countries so I was wasting money. I have partially corrected that now, but it's still a problem.

    I switched my geoip script over to the latest maxmind geoip database just now and ran the numbers for the past 6 days.

    Of the 2450 clicks, 1722 were from the US. Still 700 clicks from places that weren't supposed to get clicks. It looks like India is a big source of traffic for 7search, over 300 clicks came from there.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    You could deny traffic from india via .htaccess, but guess that won't help, no?
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    I thought about that, but I would rather try to monetize that traffic as opposed to just block it out. That way if an ad network I'm buying from sends me a bunch of that traffic I can get a refund and try to take advantage of it while I have it coming in.

    So I found an offer on peerfly which will work better, it's Xpress.com which is an international dating website that allows traffic from all countries. The only downside is that it's a pay-per-sale instead of per lead. The good side is that if I get a conversion it's worth $55.25 to me lol. I already got approval from Peerfly to run the offer in my campaign since it's not a campaign that is open to everybody.

    So I'm going to update my geo redirect shortly, I have a few hours before traffic from 7search starts trickling in so I'm going to make some breakfest and get the kidlets ready for school first.

    I just sent a refund request to 7search, I identified that since February 1st I have gotten 815 clicks that were not from the United States. I included every IP address, the Maxmind country data, and the breakdown of the cost for those bad clicks.

    I've never requested a refund from 7search before, I'm hoping I sent it in properly lol.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    What I was thinking of to show only ads in the evening of the countries...

    E.g. 9pm - 3pm or something... but for every country.

    Works with a mix of JS and PHP.

    How much is the refund?
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Total refund should be $8.15 to cover 5 days worth of bad clicks. So about $1.65/day, or 165 clicks per day.

    For timing, that's what I'm doing. Currently my 7search ads only run from noon until midnight every day, but there are 2x one hour breaks during that time for a total of 10 hours/day. I have gotten a few signups just after noon, but most of my signups come in the evening, so I'm trying to focus it there.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    Yup, but for every country? Or only for US based traffic?

    What about different time zones?
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Right now just US timezones, when I have more money to put into this I am planning to expand big time, but for now I'm focusing on the US market.

    7search got back to me saying that my data is bad and they gave me a list of every click with the IP and some other data that I have gotten. The IP's don't match what is showing up in P202, so I'm not really sure what to do here. According to P202 they are sending me international traffic, but according to their tracking they are sending me US traffic only.

    Any thoughts on this?
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    I do not know their system.

    Maybe the users have used US proxies... but with some .htaccess magic you can deny proxies.

    I would try that first.
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Again I don't want to deny anything from hitting my landing page. I'm putting in code to direct non-US traffic to places where I can make money off them somehow.

    What I want to do is show 7search that the traffic they are sending me doesn't match what I'm tracking on my end so I can get that 815 clicks back. I'm just not getting anywhere because whatever they are using to identify the IP of their traffic doesn't seem to agree with how P202 is identifying the IP of their traffic.


    Aside from that, mini update for anybody following this:

    I've updated my redirect script as follows:

    US => Just Hook Up
    Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Norway => xxxBlackbook
    All Other Countries => xPress

    I've also redone my campaign scheduling with 7search based on performance over the past 7 days:


    Those are the time periods where I have gotten conversions with this campaign, so I'm sticking with those times for now (in PST, that's my timezone).

    I don't know if xPress will actually convert at all, but it will be hard to really measure well because it gives members a 3 day free trial before they have to pay, so I'm not sure how well this will work since I don't get paid unless they convert after that third day. But it will have to do for now as I can't find a better and more relevant offer in either Peerfly or MaxBounty that allows traffic from any country.
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    • Profile picture of the author Michael71
      The problem I have with the free maxmind geoip database is that it is NOT checking if you are using a proxy server or not.

      With smart-ip.net I can see if the user is using a proxy.

      What I meant is this:

      a: "normal" US traffic will be directed to the "US offer"
      b: "proxy" traffic will be directed to some other generic offer

      This can be done with jQuery (I am doing it already on other sites), set a cookie on the client computer, and when the user (maybe, who knows) comes AGAIN to your offer site the site will "see" the user is a returning visitor.. send this user to another offer...

      It is not hard to "code", maybe 30 minutes.

      Some time ago I have used an URL rotator for proxy traffic... that's possible, too.

      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      Again I don't want to deny anything from hitting my landing page. I'm putting in code to direct non-US traffic to places where I can make money off them somehow.

      What I want to do is show 7search that the traffic they are sending me doesn't match what I'm tracking on my end so I can get that 815 clicks back. I'm just not getting anywhere because whatever they are using to identify the IP of their traffic doesn't seem to agree with how P202 is identifying the IP of their traffic.


      Aside from that, mini update for anybody following this:

      I've updated my redirect script as follows:

      US => Just Hook Up
      Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Norway => xxxBlackbook
      All Other Countries => xPress

      I've also redone my campaign scheduling with 7search based on performance over the past 7 days:


      Those are the time periods where I have gotten conversions with this campaign, so I'm sticking with those times for now (in PST, that's my timezone).

      I don't know if xPress will actually convert at all, but it will be hard to really measure well because it gives members a 3 day free trial before they have to pay, so I'm not sure how well this will work since I don't get paid unless they convert after that third day. But it will have to do for now as I can't find a better and more relevant offer in either Peerfly or MaxBounty that allows traffic from any country.
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      • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
        Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

        The problem I have with the free maxmind geoip database is that it is NOT checking if you are using a proxy server or not.

        With smart-ip.net I can see if the user is using a proxy.

        What I meant is this:

        a: "normal" US traffic will be directed to the "US offer"
        b: "proxy" traffic will be directed to some other generic offer

        This can be done with jQuery (I am doing it already on other sites), set a cookie on the client computer, and when the user (maybe, who knows) comes AGAIN to your offer site the site will "see" the user is a returning visitor.. send this user to another offer...

        It is not hard to "code", maybe 30 minutes.

        Some time ago I have used an URL rotator for proxy traffic... that's possible, too.
        Yeah, I'm not very thrilled about it either, but I will figure it out as I go and find what works best for me.

        I haven't gotten any conversions over the past 2 days which is discouraging. I have noticed a bunch of activity on my keywords from other bidders which may play a role, but I also sent a ton of traffic to xPress yesterday (120 people clicked from my landing page to the offer page). Unfortunately I won't know if any of that converts for 3 days.

        So here is the current plan:

        My 7search account is going to run dry in 4 days. I'm going to keep the campaign running until the account is dry and see what my stats look like. If I get 1 conversion on xPress by monday (I need a few days buffer time because people that signup for xPress get a free 3-day pass), then I will put more money into 7search and keep the traffic going.

        If not, then I'm going to look at alternative traffic sources. Right now I'm thinking JuicyAds because I've been wanting to give it a shot and my landing pages can handle international traffic now.

        I'm also not impressed with 7search right now. The ticket I have with them regarding a refund for the bad clicks has turned into a bit of a pissing match and I'm very unhappy with them. So the only reason I will send more money to them when my account runs dry is if any of this xPress traffic converts over the next 5-6 days.

        One piece of good news is that my landing pages are getting a 30% click-through rate I attribute that to a whole bunch of tweaking I've been doing, that's a pretty damn good CTR as far as I'm concerned.

        So there may not be much of an update to this thread until Monday when I figure out where I'm going to be putting my money next.
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  • Profile picture of the author Silent Voices
    Great Helpful Post and good luck!!
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    30% CTR is pretty good

    Wish I could take a look at your LP
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Landing page stats over the past 48 hours:



      The CTR is really good But no damn conversions lol. So I know my landing pages are working so either 7search's traffic or the offer page itself is having the issue (again the bulk of the traffic is going to xPress right now so there is a big time lag involved which is a major pain - I won't see any conversion stats on that offer until Saturday I think, if even).
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    I hope so

    On the plus side I got a conversion for Just Hook Up today, first lead I've had in 3 days lol.

    I got some inspiration for changes to my landing pages, going to try and put them into the 3 I currently have running so I have a total of 6 landing pages up and running when the Juicy ads start, I have a feeling the revisions will help me get an even higher CTR.
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  • Profile picture of the author seregap
    The CTR is really good But no damn conversions lol. So I know my landing pages are working
    not necessarily im afraid.

    one thing you must always keep in mind though is that high lp ctr means nothing without the actual conversions. so if your campaigns are not converting at 30% they probably wont magically start converting at 60% either.

    see, it's actually quite easy to get a person to click on something, but do your landers actually sell the idea of signing up right there and right now or simply make the person curious if there's a larger photo of that hot girl on the next page?

    this is the sort of question i would start asking myself first when i had a high ctr and a very low cr. then i would look at changing offers/networks.

    good luck with Juicy

    I got some inspiration for changes to my landing pages, going to try and put them into the 3 I currently have running so I have a total of 6 landing pages up and running when the Juicy ads start, I have a feeling the revisions will help me get an even higher CTR.
    a bit more inspiration for you:
    Image 1360364666-clip-12kb.png
    new dating landing page i created yesterday
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    One problem I see is when people click on your LP and then get redirected to the "real" offer page... I think a lot people just click away because another site opens...

    Maybe the offer site differs too much from the LP or they just don't want another site to be opened.

    I'm thinking about a "way" to get the form from the offer site loaded into the LP...

    (have to think about it)...
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

      One problem I see is when people click on your LP and then get redirected to the "real" offer page... I think a lot people just click away because another site opens...

      Maybe the offer site differs too much from the LP or they just don't want another site to be opened.

      I'm thinking about a "way" to get the form from the offer site loaded into the LP...

      (have to think about it)...
      I know some people do that by putting the form on their landing page and use some fancy code to pass the variables along when they click and it pre-populates the CPA field. I know MaxBounty has the functionality on most of their offers for this, but I don't know how to do it. I'm assuming if you pass the variables along as GET parameters to the landing page then it will populate the form maybe?

      On a related note, I've gotten 3 Just Hook Up leads in the last 12 hours, after a 3 day dead zone. I'm starting to think the day of the week makes a big difference for dating stuff, as I saw a similar drop in performance last week (Wednesday and Thursday seem to be a dead zone).

      I'm going to do a thorough dive through my stats over the weekend and make my final decision about 7search for this campaign.

      As of right now for February:

      Budget: $50
      Spend: $40
      Revenue: $48.50

      So right now I'm almost breaking even for the month with 7search, but I still have $10 left in my account and that's not accounting for any possible signups to Xpress.com (which I've sent 370 visitors to so far).

      If I can get a few more signups then I think I might reconsider dumping 7search and try to tweak it more. I think the biggest problem is scheduling, it seems there are certain days of the week I just don't get conversions. So if I prune the campaign down from 7 days/week to 4, that would let me boost the budget on those to get more clicks when they seem to convert.

      I'm really on the fence right now, need to wait to see what happens with the last $10 in clicks from 7search which should be done around tomorrow night.

      Also - I sent an email to Juicy Ads asking for campaign suggestions and showed them my landing pages. The response I got back was that I would probably get the best bang for my buck by running a RON campaign for people in the US, but that costs $250 and it works out to $0.02/click. That would get me about 5000 clicks to my landing pages, which is higher than 7search is currently costing me. So if I go with Juicy I think I'll test out ads on the sites I listed above - start small and scale up.
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  • Profile picture of the author thomas228
    great work! very interesting post keep it up
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    Awesome @ breaking even.

    I think in your stats you can see when these signups were made... e.g. thursday - sunday... so you could tweak the campaign.

    Can't wait to hear more

    About the form stuff... I think in most cases you just need to pass the variables directly to the URL provided in the <form action>, so there is no need to "duplicate" the form... it is possible if you just take the form from the offer itself and put it onto your LP.

    But that would need some investigation (if that works or not).
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

      I think in your stats you can see when these signups were made... e.g. thursday - sunday... so you could tweak the campaign.
      Yup, it's one of many many reasons why I like P202 so much. I can break it down by hour of day or day of week

      I'll post some screenies of my stats in the next day or two. I'm going to look at it probably tomorrow night, trying to avoid the computer today. This weekend we have a new holiday up here called Family Day and I'm trying to avoid the computer and spend time with the kids

      Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

      About the form stuff... I think in most cases you just need to pass the variables directly to the URL provided in the <form action>, so there is no need to "duplicate" the form... it is possible if you just take the form from the offer itself and put it onto your LP.

      But that would need some investigation (if that works or not).
      Yeah, that's what a GET parameter is. I know how to do it, but I don't know for sure if that works. The advantage to doing it is that it lets you capture some information before sending the visitor onto the offer (i.e. dropping them into an autoresponder funnel), but pre-populating the offer page probably helps a lot with conversion rates.

      I was thinking that I'd do that if I started experimenting with another niche (i.e. video games). I have a feeling that email marketing to dating traffic probably won't convert at all and would be more hassle than it's worth.

      (If somebody can show me I'm wrong here then by all means please show me some stats that you have, but I'm worried about dropping visitors into an autoresponder and sending them dating emails, I strongly suspect they will instantly get flagged and sent to the spam folder automatically even if I use a service like AWeber).

      I think video games, health, and certain other niches could work extremely well with if you do it. But I'm not setup to handle that yet and I really don't think it will work with dating traffic.

      Also correction from above, the 5000 clicks from Juicy would be if I could get a $100 campaign running on their RON, if I did the $250 I'd get 12,500 clicks to my landing page. But simply put I don't have $250 so I can't do it. $100 is all I have left in my budget for February, I can only afford to put about $150/month into this stuff for now until I start seeing some positive returns.

      If I suddenly drop $250+ on the credit card the wife will use my balls for target practice lol.

      However if I can drop $100 into a RON campaign on Juicy and get $150-$200 back then I can drop $250 in the next month. I'm willing to put 100% of my profits back into growing this until it's at a good level.

      EDIT:

      If I did get 12,500 visitors from Juicy and got them all from the US, about 3000 would click through to Just Hook Up and about 60-70 would convert, which would net me $300 - $350 from my $250 ad spend. But that's just a ball park estimate based on my current stats.
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Trying to get some input here on a problem.

    My landing pages will direct the visitor to an offer depending on their geolocation.

    US traffic gets sent to Just Hook Up, most others get sent to Xpress.

    Now with 7search I'm finding a good portion (about 30-40%) of their traffic is coming from people on a US proxy server.

    I can detect that and determine their true country of origin, but I'm not sure where I should send that traffic.

    My option right now:

    A) Send them to the US-only offer since they are using a US proxy server.
    B) Send them to my fallback international traffic offer since they are not really in the US.

    Initially I was sending all of the traffic to the US offer and I was getting more leads, but I'm concerned about the potential issues with sending proxied traffic to the offer page.

    I have noticed that my conversion rate has gone down a fair bit over the past week when I started directing proxy traffic to the international offer, so I'm not really sure what to do here.

    Any thoughts?



    Also - Michael71 - thanks for the code. I downloaded it last night and hacked the hell out of so I can use it to display the city of the visitor on my landing pages That's going to be my next set of landing pages - cloning my current 2 landing pages so they list the closest city of the visitor (i.e. instead of "We have thousands of women online right now", it will read "We have hundreds of women in <<City>>" - or something like that, I haven't worked out the exact text yet lol).
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    If they are not really in the US, only using a proxy, send them to an international offer.

    I would do so

    No problem @ code
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    That's kinda what I was figuring.

    Sorry for the really long wall of text here, but I've got a lot on my mind with all of this and I need to vent it somewhere. I am not posting any screenshots right now, but there's a few stats here.

    My 7search account is about to run dry so I need to make some decisions. But I'm extremely tired so I don't think I'm going to make any decisions on this tonight.

    But here's my stats for February so far. I posted some stats the other day but I apparently included both of my traffic sources in the initial stats, so I'm going to clear the air right now and show stats for both networks that I'm buying traffic from.

    So here goes:

    7search.com

    Clicks: 4,362
    Click-Throughs: 1,012 (23% CTR)
    Conversions: 7 (0.16% conversion rate)
    Revenue: $33.50
    Cost: $43.62
    ROI: -20%
    Cost Per Click: $0.01

    So I actually am in the hole more than I thought with 7search. But it's not a huge difference, and I've been doing a fair bit of testing with my landing pages.

    Advertise.com

    Initially I didn't say what my other traffic source was, but I want to clear the air on that now.

    Clicks: 528
    Click-Throughs: 94 (17.8% CTR)
    Conversions: 6 (1.1% conversion rate)
    Revenue: $29.75
    Cost: $36.96
    ROI: -19.5%
    Cost Per Click: $0.07

    You can see that I lost about 20% on my investment with each network. However Advertise.com is giving a much higher overall conversion rate which is a big plus, but much lower amount of traffic and much higher cost per click.

    I am really not liking Advertise.com right now. Their interface is very clunky, and they do not tell you how many impressions your ads are getting. Also, whenever you ask them for information about impressions or anything, they simply respond with "bid higher and you'll get more clicks!". Despite the fact that I'm getting signups with their traffic, I'm really not all that comfortable using them. My account with them has about $20 left in it and I'm just going to let it run it's course over the next few days while I figure out what to do next.

    Now as I said, 7search is about to run dry on me (it should be done within the next few hours).

    But I have some things I need to figure out before I put more money into the account:

    I'm not getting anywhere with them when questioning the quality of their traffic. I have some major issues with this because they are dead set on using their data which isn't accounting for proxy servers, so a good portion of the clicks I'm getting are not from the US despite the campaign being set to that.

    Earlier this week I put in code to direct all international traffic to xPress instead of passing them onto Just Hook Up (which is what I was doing originally - I was letting all traffic go to Just Hook Up under the assumption that 7search really was sending me valid clicks from just the US). As of right now I have sent 545 clicks to xPress from my landing pages but haven't gotten any conversion data back yet.

    Just for comparison purposes, during that same time I sent 466 people from my landing pages to Just Hook Up and got 13 conversions.

    I also know that when I put in the geo-filtering on my end my conversion rate went down substantially. I was converting about 3.4% of clicks into signups on Just Hook Up at the start of the month, now I'm only converting about 1.5% of clicks.

    That tells me the proxied traffic from 7search that I blocked from that offer for a while did convert very well. But technically they weren't in the US so I'm left with a bit of a dilemma here on what to do. If I had sent those 545 clicks to Just Hook Up I probably would have gotten another 10 conversions or so, which would have been a big boost for me and I would have had a very nice ROI. But it's rather shady and I don't like doing shady stuff.

    This also brings up the question of xPress. I still haven't gotten anything in terms of conversion data about it. Today is day 4 of when I first started sending them traffic.

    The notes on the offer in Peerfly do say it usually converts anywhere from day 4 to day 10 for traffic that you send to it, but after sending 500+ clicks to it I think I need to wait and see if any of it converted.

    So here is the current plan:

    On tuesday or wednesday (depending on how much I procrastinate lol) I will look back at my stats and see if I've gotten any action on xPress. I think that will be one of the biggest identifiers on what I'm doing. 1 xPress conversion is worth 10 Just Hook Up conversions, but I just don't have any data yet.

    Until then, 7search is going to run dry tonight and Advertise.com will run for a few more days. So I may have a day or two where I have no incomming traffic while I sort this all out and make my next move.

    Either I'm going to put more money into 7search or look at Juicy Ads.

    The reason I need time to look at the data more is that I have put a lot of work into my landing pages. At the start of the month I was getting a 10-12% CTR on them, now I have a 30% CTR and I have some thoughts on how to get an even higher CTR.

    Assuming I did that, then dumping another $50 into 7search I could expect:

    5,000 clicks
    1,500 click-throughs

    Assuming a 2% conversion rate that would be about 30 signups or $150. But that would only work if I turned off the geotargeting redirect I'm using. If I just reloaded the account right now about 40% of those clicks will end up on xPress and I still don't have any idea how well it converts - even Peerly doesn't have any conversion metrics on it yet.

    It's worth $55.25/conversion so I would love to get something working with it - but right now I'm working blind so I need to see if I get anything on the 545 clicks I already sent to it - again going back to the whole waiting for a few days issue.

    One last thing to consider with 7search is that I have a lot of click data now. I can use P202 to do some analysis on anybody who has sent me a large number of clicks that didn't convert and filter them out, and I can also check which hours of the day and days of the week converted and adjust my campaign around those factors to try and optimize which traffic I'm getting.

    Another thing with 7search that I have completely left out so far is adding more keywords. My entire campaign with them so far has been with 17 keywords (15 now, I stopped 2 of them last week because they didn't convert anything). So there is a lot of room there to work with as well.

    One last thing worth pointing out - xxxBlackBook - I sent 166 clicks to it using my geo redirect (basically anybody from Canada, the UK, and a few other countries that qualified). Not a single conversion. That's aweful and it's getting taken out of my rotation script when I go in and start revising stuff.

    But alas, I'm too damn tired to figure any of this out tonight and I need to wait and see if anything happens with xPress over the next few days before making any moves.
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    It looks like I may have to reconsider Advertise.com with what I'm doing afterall.

    Initially I was only getting traffic from them because I had a like $60 in credit in my account with them leftover from another project, so I started using that money for this campaign.

    I think I've tweaked my landing pages very well for it or something, because in the past few days I'm actually seeing some pretty good stats for it.

    Feb 7 - 10 (last 4 days)
    Spent: $18.44
    Clicks: 304 ($0.061/click)

    Click-Throughs (Just Hook Up): 39
    Conversions (Just Hook Up): 6
    Revenue (Just Hook Up): $30

    Click-Throughs (xPress): 9
    Conversions (xPress): Unknown

    ROI: 63%

    During the first week of this Advertise.com converted horribly, but over the past few days I've been getting 2-3 signups/day from them and only spending $4.61/day on average to get it.

    So I think I may need to seriously reconsider them, they are generating a very nice ROI over the past few days.

    I've got $17 left in the account, so I have about 4 days worth of budget left in there. So on wednesday I will sit down and review everything and make my final decision then. If they send me 2+ signups/day like they've been doing, I might have no choice but to dump that $100 into them to keep that up for now and revisit my other options in March when I have more money available.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    That sounds awesome... I think I have to talk to you about an idea I had last night. If you have some spare time let me know.
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

      That sounds awesome... I think I have to talk to you about an idea I had last night. If you have some spare time let me know.
      Hey Michael,

      I can be available for a phone call tomorrow afternoon sometime or pretty much anytime on Wednesday if you want. PM me your availability and what timezone you're in so we can figure it out. I'm in PST (Vancouver, Canada).
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  • Profile picture of the author mraudi
    Hey Christian, been following your case study closely and good to hear that you're getting results from your campaigns. I'm not having much luck with dating on pof, I have a friend who's doing adult and he's making some good figures. He's telling me to give adult a try, I might give it a go and see what results I bring in. Well hopefully one day I can make my own live case study here and share with you all as well. Wish me luck!
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by mraudi View Post

      Hey Christian, been following your case study closely and good to hear that you're getting results from your campaigns. I'm not having much luck with dating on pof, I have a friend who's doing adult and he's making some good figures. He's telling me to give adult a try, I might give it a go and see what results I bring in. Well hopefully one day I can make my own live case study here and share with you all as well. Wish me luck!
      Hope it goes well for you I tried POF back in the fall and blew $85 over a few days and didn't get back nearly what I put into it. The key to POF is the CTR on your ads, but it looks like it requires a huge amount of maintenance and continually updating your banners (on a daily basis from what I've seen) to make it work.

      It's too much of a gamble for me personally and it is too much of a timesink. I would go a little crazy if I had to spend an hour every day creating new banners for the campaign just to keep the clicks rolling in.

      But I am a PPC guy, not a CPM'er. Big difference in mentality I guess
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      • Profile picture of the author mraudi
        Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

        Hope it goes well for you I tried POF back in the fall and blew $85 over a few days and didn't get back nearly what I put into it. The key to POF is the CTR on your ads, but it looks like it requires a huge amount of maintenance and continually updating your banners (on a daily basis from what I've seen) to make it work.

        It's too much of a gamble for me personally and it is too much of a timesink. I would go a little crazy if I had to spend an hour every day creating new banners for the campaign just to keep the clicks rolling in.

        But I am a PPC guy, not a CPM'er. Big difference in mentality I guess
        Thank you for the kind words. I just got accepted into CPATrend, we'll see how that goes. I lost a decent amount on POF but I take that as a learning experience so it's all good. Hope I'll be able to start my journey soon so I can get a live case study going on here to share with fellow warriors!

        Again, good luck with everything, and DO update this thread as I'll continue to follow closely.
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  • Profile picture of the author Simiv68
    Congratulations on your success. I think there are a lot of people following it, just not a lot replying. Anyway, it is very interesting and very detailed and I plan on following it as long as it's active.
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  • Profile picture of the author NameThatCandy
    Thanks for sharing! I subscribed this thread, I learn a lot!! BTW, congrats on your success!
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Effective immediately I will no longer be disclosing traffic sources for this case study.

    Within 24 hours of posting stats of what I'm doing with Advertise.com somebody has gone in and started bidding on the same keywords at a higher rate and sending them to landing pages that are very similar (almost identical) to mine.

    This resulted in my traffic from Advertise.com taking a dive, and I only got 1 signup yesterday. Additionally, looking at my traffic this morning compared to the past few days I can tell that I probably won't get any signups today.

    Essentially my campaign is dead in the water as of right now because somebody copied what I did and outbid me. I will not get into a bidding war on a PPC network, that will just hurt my bottom line.

    The good news is that I didn't put the next $100 into my account there, so I will be looking at alternative traffic sources this morning and will hopefully find something to sustain me for the rest of the month.

    I'm very unhappy that it came to that, but I had a feeling it would happen if I gave out too much information. Because of this, I have to keep my traffic sources hidden from this point forward.

    It looks like the same thing happened in 7search. I've been ignoring that account for the past few days as I thought it ran out of funds, apparently somebody found out some of my keywords and out-bid me on them. Because of this, I still have a few dollars sitting in my account with them lol
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    • Profile picture of the author NameThatCandy
      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      Effective immediately I will no longer be disclosing traffic sources for this case study.

      Within 24 hours of posting stats of what I'm doing with Advertise.com somebody has gone in and started bidding on the same keywords at a higher rate and sending them to landing pages that are very similar (almost identical) to mine.

      This resulted in my traffic from Advertise.com taking a dive, and I only got 1 signup yesterday. Additionally, looking at my traffic this morning compared to the past few days I can tell that I probably won't get any signups today.

      Essentially my campaign is dead in the water as of right now because somebody copied what I did and outbid me. I will not get into a bidding war on a PPC network, that will just hurt my bottom line.

      The good news is that I didn't put the next $100 into my account there, so I will be looking at alternative traffic sources this morning and will hopefully find something to sustain me for the rest of the month.

      I'm very unhappy that it came to that, but I had a feeling it would happen if I gave out too much information. Because of this, I have to keep my traffic sources hidden from this point forward.

      It looks like the same thing happened in 7search. I've been ignoring that account for the past few days as I thought it ran out of funds, apparently somebody found out some of my keywords and out-bid me on them. Because of this, I still have a few dollars sitting in my account with them lol
      Sorry to hear that! You are so nice to share all the info and people just stab your back like this!
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    • Profile picture of the author vick2011
      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      Effective immediately I will no longer be disclosing traffic sources for this case study.

      Within 24 hours of posting stats of what I'm doing with Advertise.com somebody has gone in and started bidding on the same keywords at a higher rate and sending them to landing pages that are very similar (almost identical) to mine.

      This resulted in my traffic from Advertise.com taking a dive, and I only got 1 signup yesterday. Additionally, looking at my traffic this morning compared to the past few days I can tell that I probably won't get any signups today.

      Essentially my campaign is dead in the water as of right now because somebody copied what I did and outbid me. I will not get into a bidding war on a PPC network, that will just hurt my bottom line.

      The good news is that I didn't put the next $100 into my account there, so I will be looking at alternative traffic sources this morning and will hopefully find something to sustain me for the rest of the month.

      I'm very unhappy that it came to that, but I had a feeling it would happen if I gave out too much information. Because of this, I have to keep my traffic sources hidden from this point forward.

      It looks like the same thing happened in 7search. I've been ignoring that account for the past few days as I thought it ran out of funds, apparently somebody found out some of my keywords and out-bid me on them. Because of this, I still have a few dollars sitting in my account with them lol
      I thought a Internet Marketer never share's their secrets, Rule #1 of Fight club. come on mate you know better.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    Nasty... maybe you should change the niche and don't tell anyone.
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

      Nasty... maybe you should change the niche and don't tell anyone.
      I thought about it. But sex is easier to sell than most other things, and I have come up with a few ideas that will be very hard for somebody to copy without detailed knowledge of what I'm doing.

      Trying to get it setup now so I can get things moving, but there's a lot of work involved in the change I'm trying to make.
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    It happens unfortunately.

    On the plus side, this gave me the kick in the butt I needed to start putting my next idea into action. I spent the past few hours making a whole new campaign with some different offers and I'm testing out a set of new landing pages on a completely ad different network as of right now. Hopefully it will convert
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  • Profile picture of the author Olen
    Well that sucks! enjoyed reading your posts.
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  • Profile picture of the author PPC-Coach
    No offense, but what did you expect?

    You showed everything, so naturally 90% of the people reading it are going to carbon copy it and kill your campaign. That's why you show one thing but run 9 others that you do not show. (At least that's my style). Even when you specifically tell them, "do not copy this", they still will. Then they wonder why case studies never work for them. It's because they're not looking for a case study where they can learn and see the thought process involved, most are looking for something they can just blindly copy and make them money. It never works that way but it takes people a long time to figure that one out.

    Good job on the success though, take it to another offer and don't post the details!

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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by PPC-Coach View Post

      No offense, but what did you expect?

      You showed everything, so naturally 90% of the people reading it are going to carbon copy it and kill your campaign. That's why you show one thing but run 9 others that you do not show. (At least that's my style). Even when you specifically tell them, "do not copy this", they still will. Then they wonder why case studies never work for them. It's because they're not looking for a case study where they can learn and see the thought process involved, most are looking for something they can just blindly copy and make them money. It never works that way but it takes people a long time to figure that one out.

      Good job on the success though, take it to another offer and don't post the details!

      That's pretty much what I'm doing now. I have shifted gears to a different traffic source and won't be disclosing it. I've also re-targetted everything to focus on a different approach and all the new landing pages are on a different domain.

      I'll just stick to posting stats as this goes for now
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      • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
        UPDATE:

        I have made the following changes just now (the campaign turns on in about an hour from now):

        First - I created a new landing page. Until now I have been testing images on the landing page, but I think I am capped out on that for now, no matter what images I test I always get worse results than my current control version. So my next landing page test has a revised call to action on it to see what kind of difference it makes.

        Second - I have temporarily removed the third offer from my rotation script. For some reason I just can't seem to make it convert, I have tried numerous times over the past few weeks to send traffic to it and the results have been terrible. So I am now only sending traffic to 2 offers instead of 3.

        Now I have to wait and see what the results are of these tweaks
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      • Profile picture of the author charlbgoff
        Good stuff, really appreciate the in depth info you are sharing. A true testament on how someone can simply run with $5/day and be successful. This is the exact method everyone should be using to find profitable campaigns and scale!
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    Never tell anyone your secrets ...
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  • Profile picture of the author Simiv68
    Well the bright spot on this may be that whomever is doing it lacks creativity and so their new found campaigns won't last. Good luck with the new ideas you have and I look forward to reading more.
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    • Profile picture of the author spriggs
      Originally Posted by Simiv68 View Post

      Well the bright spot on this may be that whomever is doing it lacks creativity and so their new found campaigns won't last. Good luck with the new ideas you have and I look forward to reading more.
      well said.. some people are just copy cats and will sell their own mother for a buck.I really appreciate your case study very generous of you to take us along your journey.
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  • Profile picture of the author mraudi
    Oh sorry about the bad news chrtisian, I swear to god I wasn't one of the people who killed your campaign lol. Just look on the bright side, you're gonna be smarter now!
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  • Profile picture of the author PerformanceMan
    Very entertaining thread. I've never seen a man work so hard for so little...just to have it stolen by someone with even less

    IM is hilarious!
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by Michael71 View Post

      Mate,

      I just wanted to know how they look... and I did not even started to code my own landing pages.

      I am not even registered with 7search or any other PPC network.

      I am a web dev... nothing more, nothing less...
      I'm not accusing you of anything Michael Just making an observation

      Originally Posted by PerformanceMan View Post

      Very entertaining thread. I've never seen a man work so hard for so little...just to have it stolen by someone with even less

      IM is hilarious!
      This isn't really hard work, it's just documenting what I'm doing. It's keeping me motivated and on track, so this thread is more for my own use than anything. If it helps other people learn that's great, but I'm doing this mostly for myself.

      I want to get the landing pages working properly before pumping in a higher volume of traffic (i.e. in March I'm aiming to do a RON campaign with Juicy, I'd rather have these landing pages tested and proven to work before doing that because it's a $250 investment minimum).


      Anyways, update here:

      I've re-launched my ppc campaign as of this morning, spent some time yesterday making tweaks to the landing pages. I was hoping to have the new ad campaign up and running yesterday, but it didn't happen. Got too busy with other projects.

      The new ad network I'm using had a very useful keyword tool, much better than advertise.com or 7search provide you with. It actually identified some interesting keywords that I have put into the campaign to see how they work out. I'm waiting for the campaign to be approved, hopefully that will be sometime today (I have no idea how long it takes with this network, I read some postings about it taking 1-2 days).

      Another good thing about this new network is that it lets me schedule what times of the day my ads will run. Advertise.com didn't have that as an option, I'm very thankful to have that feature back because it's just wasting clicks in the mornings, it looks like dating traffic really only converts in the late afternoon/evenings.

      I have 2 landing pages setup and ready for this new campaign.

      The first landing page is my most successful one from the last group (#3) which got the best CTR and it was the best at converting the traffic once they went to the offer page.

      The second landing page is nearly identical except the picture is different. It seems that the main picture you use on the landing pages is one of the key factors that affects CTR and conversion rate. I experimented a bunch with this on the last round, so I plan to keep testing this.

      One interesting item of note regarding photos that I have found so far: A picture of an almost-naked girl taking a photo of herself on her iphone doesn't work with my landing pages That was the worst performing landing page out of them so far.

      As for which offers I'm promoting, I will leave that hidden for now until I have some data. I will say that I'm sticking strictly to Peerfly offers (that narrows it down to about 30ish dating offers lol).
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    I hope you will have some nice success with the new campaign, mate.

    I am busy with coding, as usual. Had some personal stuff to fix (my gf is in Germany because of that) but it seems it worked out for us (tax consultant, lawyer and police).
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Just a quick update before I take off for the weekend.

    My new ppc campaign just went live this morning, it took about 24 hours to get approval.

    It's only been running for a few hours but I did get 1 conversion so far, need to let it run for a few days before I have an idea of how it performs. It's currently costing me about $0.09/click which is higher than I would like to pay, but I want to let this run for a few days to see where it goes.
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  • Profile picture of the author fbauto1
    wow at the figures !
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  • Profile picture of the author beastmode80
    Good Job man! The simple fact that your split testing on smaller networks make you way ahead of the rest. My first great income came from cpa and is still one of my largest money makers. If you ever have any questions i might be able to help. A tip you might find useful is to try to capture a email first and promote multiple offers through a auto-responder. What i did (and you didn't get this from me is i went to a torrent search and found a ebook on getting better erections and adding size to your manhood, or you can find stuff on how to pick up women. Then rewrite it as a free report and just give it away. Your optin rate will be very high and then you can promote sex related offers of all kinds. Hope that helps.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    Awesome tip

    Sex sells, and that will never end...
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Today so far:

    Spent: $2.75
    Clicks: 44
    CPC: $0.06
    Click-Throughs: 11 (25%)
    Conversions: 2
    Revenue: $10
    ROI: 263%

    Whoever foobared my last campaign, thank you!
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    • Profile picture of the author razul
      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      Today so far:

      Spent: $2.75
      Clicks: 44
      CPC: $0.06
      Click-Throughs: 11 (25%)
      Conversions: 2
      Revenue: $10
      ROI: 263%

      Whoever foobared my last campaign, thank you!
      hahaha nice.

      I hope it steady states to this even when you scale it up
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      For the love of Chango: Use the "Thanks" button instead of spamming/plaguing a thread with your thank you posts
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    • Profile picture of the author chamal
      wow cool go head best of luck

      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      Today so far:

      Spent: $2.75
      Clicks: 44
      CPC: $0.06
      Click-Throughs: 11 (25%)
      Conversions: 2
      Revenue: $10
      ROI: 263%

      Whoever foobared my last campaign, thank you!
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  • Profile picture of the author nicnac03
    Very cool man.
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  • Profile picture of the author seregap
    a little tip: if your lp ctr is high but offer cr is so low you might want to look for an offer that has a link that sends the user straight to the registration page. especially in cases when you are confident that your lp does all the selling, or when your lp is very niche and the offer lp is very generic. sometimes it works to double and even triple your offer cr.
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by seregap View Post

      a little tip: if your lp ctr is high but offer cr is so low you might want to look for an offer that has a link that sends the user straight to the registration page. especially in cases when you are confident that your lp does all the selling, or when your lp is very niche and the offer lp is very generic. sometimes it works to double and even triple your offer cr.
      I'm promoting dating offers, the only ones I'm promoting are ones where the page they land on has the signup form on it. I don't think Peerfly actually has any dating offers that are different except xPress which has a very funky offer page and requires several clicks before they see the signup form.
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  • Profile picture of the author seregap
    search for ihookup in your peerfly dashboard and you will see one of the offers that sends to registration page, for example. this is what i meant. i know that most dating offers have a reg form on the landing page, the point being to avoid ANY generic offer landing page. many other networks have many of these type of links.
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  • Profile picture of the author KnowJack
    Thanks for the effort Christian.

    It's nice to see how you go about it, and how rigorous your analysis is. This is the best thread I have read in a long time. It certainly is a great stop along the path to CPA enlightenment. It's also nice to see that you truly wanted to help everyone, and that some spoilsports didn't phase your attitude in the least.

    Also, thanks Michael71 for your great input and solutions.

    I love this place!
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    • Profile picture of the author Michael71
      No problem, mate

      Originally Posted by KnowJack View Post

      Thanks for the effort Christian.

      It's nice to see how you go about it, and how rigorous your analysis is. This is the best thread I have read in a long time. It certainly is a great stop along the path to CPA enlightenment. It's also nice to see that you truly wanted to help everyone, and that some spoilsports didn't phase your attitude in the least.

      Also, thanks Michael71 for your great input and solutions.

      I love this place!
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Today so far:

    Spent: $2.77
    Clicks: 40
    CPC: $0.07
    Click-Throughs: 17 (42%) - I made a tweak to my landing pages, nice bump
    Conversions: 2
    Revenue: $9.75
    ROI: 252%

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    • Profile picture of the author AndyL
      This thread is a great read, Well done Christian & Michael for all the useful information.

      Cheers
      Andy
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  • Profile picture of the author PPC-Coach
    Good stuff! Don't reveal anything though on this one.

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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by PPC-Coach View Post

      Good stuff! Don't reveal anything though on this one.

      I'm still trying to figure out what to post here aside from stats which probably won't change much for the rest of the month until I add more traffic to the mix. I did start documenting my processes on how to tweak ppc campaigns on a new blog I just started, but as with this thread it's not giving out the specific details of my own campaigns because of what happened.

      Anyways, stats for today so far:

      Spent: $3.30
      Clicks: 46
      CPC: $0.07
      Click-Throughs: 11 (24%)
      Conversions: 2
      Revenue: $10
      ROI: 203%

      Hmm...my ROI is shrinking every day. That's probably not a good sign lol.

      I'm really reluctant to make many changes to the ppc campaign I have running because I'd rather sit here making $7 profit/day for the next 2 weeks and that would give me a nice ad budget to play with in March.

      One of the big problems with paid advertising is cash flow management when you are first getting started
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  • Profile picture of the author brettkbrett
    Good stuff, really appreciate the in depth info you are sharing. A true testament on how someone can simply run with $5/day and be successful. This is the exact method everyone should be using to find profitable campaigns and scale!
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  • Profile picture of the author Super Money Maker
    Thanks for sharing this with us really appreciated.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael71
    Let's build a network of useful CPA tipps'n'tricks
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    That's kinds what I'm going to do with my blog I think, focus it on the process and optimization techniques Show people how I do what I do and hope it helps somebody.

    Update:

    I've come to the conclusion that I can't get a better image on my landing page right now. I've tried about a dozen different images and only one seems to get really good results.

    Here's some stats since the new campaign started running:

    Traffic Source

    Clicks: 189
    Cost: $12.22
    CPC: $0.065

    Prosper202 Landing Page Report



    Peerfly



    The difference in click-throughs can be attributed to me doing some testing and the fact that P202 filters out clicks from duplicate IPs in the report. That's also throwing off the net cost in P202 by $0.10 (not a big deal).

    Total Spend: $12.22
    Total Revenue: $29.75
    Profit: $17.53 ($5.84/day)
    ROI: 143%

    I'm really liking the fact that I'm converting 13% of click-throughs into leads right now (booyah!).

    The challenge now is to get more click-throughs while preserving that conversion rate without increasing my ad spend.

    So I'm going to start playing around with the Call To Action next. I have a few thoughts on what I want to test, so I'm going to take my existing landing page and modify it with a few different CTA's on it to see if it helps.

    I'm also going to be looking at dropping the third offer in my rotation script, I can't seem to get it to convert at all. I'm on the fence about this, it's still only a few clicks so I might give it a few more days.
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    • Profile picture of the author Super Money Maker
      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      That's kinds what I'm going to do with my blog I think, focus it on the process and optimization techniques Show people how I do what I do and hope it helps somebody.

      Update:

      I've come to the conclusion that I can't get a better image on my landing page right now. I've tried about a dozen different images and only one seems to get really good results.

      Here's some stats since the new campaign started running:

      Traffic Source

      Clicks: 189
      Cost: $12.22
      CPC: $0.065

      Prosper202 Landing Page Report



      Peerfly



      The difference in click-throughs can be attributed to me doing some testing and the fact that P202 filters out clicks from duplicate IPs in the report. That's also throwing off the net cost in P202 by $0.10 (not a big deal).

      Total Spend: $12.22
      Total Revenue: $29.75
      Profit: $17.53 ($5.84/day)
      ROI: 143%

      I'm really liking the fact that I'm converting 13% of click-throughs into leads right now (booyah!).

      The challenge now is to get more click-throughs while preserving that conversion rate without increasing my ad spend.

      So I'm going to start playing around with the Call To Action next. I have a few thoughts on what I want to test, so I'm going to take my existing landing page and modify it with a few different CTA's on it to see if it helps.

      I'm also going to be looking at dropping the third offer in my rotation script, I can't seem to get it to convert at all. I'm on the fence about this, it's still only a few clicks so I might give it a few more days.
      What is the PPC network that you are using ?
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      • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
        Originally Posted by Super Money Maker View Post

        What is the PPC network that you are using ?
        I made the mistake of disclosing that last week and somebody went in and outbid me and essentially killed my campaign because I couldn't outbid them and maintain my profitability.

        I'm on a different PPC network now and have no intention of saying which.
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        • Profile picture of the author AndyL
          Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post


          I'm on a different PPC network now and have no intention of saying which.
          Quite right too.

          Keep up the great work
          Andy
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        • Profile picture of the author Super Money Maker
          Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

          I made the mistake of disclosing that last week and somebody went in and outbid me and essentially killed my campaign because I couldn't outbid them and maintain my profitability.

          I'm on a different PPC network now and have no intention of saying which.
          So what are you trying to say that any traffic source could work but you have to test and test and test until you start seeing profits.
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  • Profile picture of the author mraudi
    Oh job well done Christian! You seem to be doing better and better each time I visit this thread. If you don't mind, how do you manage your creatives? Say you go with style A and you get a conversion from ad1 for instance. Do you use the image on ad1 and use that on say style B for testing? Also, how many impressions do you give each creative before you decide to pull it?
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by mraudi View Post

      Oh job well done Christian! You seem to be doing better and better each time I visit this thread. If you don't mind, how do you manage your creatives? Say you go with style A and you get a conversion from ad1 for instance. Do you use the image on ad1 and use that on say style B for testing? Also, how many impressions do you give each creative before you decide to pull it?
      I have a fairly extensive background in split and MV testing, so I'm a little anal about how I do it.

      Here's the basic rundown:

      Start with 1 landing page.

      Copy that landing page to a new file so you have 2 copies of the exact same landing page.

      Modify 1 element of the second landing page. Only modify 1 element to test.

      If you start modifying 2-3 different parts of the landing page you have no idea which version of the change worked unless you have a MVT program running.

      Let the 2 slightly different versions of the landing page run for a while and use a script to rotate which one appears to the visitor.

      After you get a few hundred clicks to each, check the stats in P202 to see which is performing better. The best performer is your Control version. Use that to benchmark all new landing pages until you come up with one that beats it (again each version of your landing pages should only have 1 element changed).
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      • Profile picture of the author mraudi
        Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

        I have a fairly extensive background in split and MV testing, so I'm a little anal about how I do it.

        Here's the basic rundown:

        Start with 1 landing page.

        Copy that landing page to a new file so you have 2 copies of the exact same landing page.

        Modify 1 element of the second landing page. Only modify 1 element to test.

        If you start modifying 2-3 different parts of the landing page you have no idea which version of the change worked unless you have a MVT program running.

        Let the 2 slightly different versions of the landing page run for a while and use a script to rotate which one appears to the visitor.

        After you get a few hundred clicks to each, check the stats in P202 to see which is performing better. The best performer is your Control version. Use that to benchmark all new landing pages until you come up with one that beats it (again each version of your landing pages should only have 1 element changed).
        That's a thorough breakdown! What about your ads? How do you split test them?
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        • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
          Originally Posted by mraudi View Post

          That's a thorough breakdown! What about your ads? How do you split test them?
          You can assign a unique identifier to each ad and pass it along as a c variable into Prosper202.

          For example, I usually reserve the c4 variable for different ads. So I put &c4=Ad1 for the first ad, then &c4=Ad2 for the second ad, and so on. That way you can break it out in the Group Overview report in P202.

          Here's an example of what it looks like when you use the Group Overview report to break it down by c4, then by Landing Page variable:

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  • Profile picture of the author nicnac03
    Hey Christian,

    Excellent work man. I just have a quick question. Are the images on your landing page professional looking or amateurish? Also, where do you go to find them?
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by nicnac03 View Post

      Hey Christian,

      Excellent work man. I just have a quick question. Are the images on your landing page professional looking or amateurish? Also, where do you go to find them?
      Amateur. I read in on several blogs that dating traffic converts better if you use amateur photos, and while I haven't personally tested it I'm inclined to believe it.

      As for the source, the image that I'm using I bought the rights to a long time ago for a completely unrelated project, but the license lets me use it for pretty much anything as long as I'm not reselling it.

      I would suggest always buying your main images if you have the budget. There's potential for lawsuits and such if you cross the line and just start ripping images off (despite how stupidly easy it is to these days). Even if it doesn't go that far all it takes is a complaint to your webhost about using stolen property on your site and it's game over.
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  • Profile picture of the author nicnac03
    Thanks for the replay. Yeah I have the same mentality as well. I see all these tutorials about going to some major image site and just start taking screen shots.

    I'll be following your progress.
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  • Profile picture of the author Greedy
    Entertaining thread.

    Bottom line don't reveal your shit, if you don't want it swiped.

    Good luck with this new campaign.
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  • Profile picture of the author sladex
    Amazing thread, just read it all...I see you learned a lot coooooool
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  • Profile picture of the author Sweetcheeks12354
    Hey Christian,

    Where do you host Prosper?
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    • Profile picture of the author Super Money Maker
      Originally Posted by Sweetcheeks12354 View Post

      Hey Christian,

      Where do you host Prosper?
      Probably in his hosting.
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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by Sweetcheeks12354 View Post

      Hey Christian,

      Where do you host Prosper?
      I have a shared hosting plan with HawkHost.com. They aren't as big or popular as HostGator, but I've found the quality of service with them has been absolutely amazing.

      And their servers can handle traffic. At one point I was sending about 1,100 visitors per day through prosper202 when I was experimenting a lot with 7search and they never once complained about CPU load or hogging too many resources. If you try that with HostGator they will start bugging you about resource usage once you hit about 500 visitors/day.

      Quick update for today:

      Spent: $7.04
      Clicks: 98
      CPC: $0.07
      Conversions: 2
      Revenue: $9.75

      Still made a small profit. But I'm not sure why I suddenly got a big rush of clicks and didn't see any improvement in conversion. Too tired to figure it out right now, will look at the stats in P202 tomorrow morning and see what happened, for the past few days I've only been spending about $3/day, I'm not sure why it jumped to $7 suddenly since I didn't change anything. My guess is somebody that is competing against the same keywords maybe stopped their campaign or something.
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  • Profile picture of the author newbiecpa
    hi Christian Little!! can you tell me which network you use !! thanks
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Quick update:

    I went looking through the data from yesterday and couldn't find a specific keyword, affiliate, or referrer that was the cause of the increase in traffic.

    But I did find some keywords over the past week where I got a bunch of clicks and didn't get any action on at all (i.e. 20+ clicks to my landing pages, but none of them clicked through). So I added those as negative keywords in the campaign so I won't get any more clicks from them, about 16 negative keywords in total.

    I also found a few keywords that converted better than the rest, so I created an exact keyword for them and started bidding on them seperately. After playing around with the bidding system I've got them into the #1 position so I will see what happens there.

    As for the surge in traffic, what seems to have happened is one of the broad keywords I'm bidding on went from average position of 5 to 3. So it looks like 1 or 2 people stopped bidding on that specific keyword. For the time being I lowered the bid on that specific keyword to get me back to the #5 position.

    At this point I'm not sure why my conversion rate tanked when this happened. I got about twice the amount of traffic that I usually get, but only had an average day in terms of conversions. I couldn't find any specific reason in the data yet.

    Will have to wait and see what happens.

    I got a lead early this morning (my campaign runs from midnight till 1am). So here's hoping this afternoon I get 2 more leads
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Update:

    I only got 1 conversion yesterday.

    Part of that was my fault, I set the max bid on one of the new exact keywords I'm targeting to $0.80 instead of $0.08...suffice to say my budget went faster yesterday. I didn't catch the mistake until this morning lol.

    The other part is that I was testing 2 landing pages. Over the past few days my control landing page has gotten all the conversions, the new landing page I was testing was getting click-throughs but no conversions at all. So I killed that page and just have the 1 lander running again.

    Gonna see if I get 2 conversions today before putting up a new landing page to test.
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  • Profile picture of the author espresso
    Chris or anyone else can i ask what rotation script you are using
    I tried to use one last week and while it worked for regular urls it didnt work for affiliate urs
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  • Profile picture of the author IMBlessed
    Nice thread here man, I'll be trying hawkhost.
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  • Profile picture of the author chamal
    any updates ?
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Will be updating this thread in a day or two, I've been offline dealing with other stuff. The campaign took a bit of a dive over the past 2 days, but it looks like it's back to normal now.

    I am quite convinced that Wednesday and Thursday are dead zones for dating traffic. Going pull the data from P202 either tonight or tomorrow to verify and adjust my campaign as needed. I seem to get no signups at all on those days, so that's a problem with my campaign that needs to get corrected. I don't mind turning it off for a few days during the week, but need to review the data first
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    • Profile picture of the author Gordon P
      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      Will be updating this thread in a day or two, I've been offline dealing with other stuff. The campaign took a bit of a dive over the past 2 days, but it looks like it's back to normal now.

      I am quite convinced that Wednesday and Thursday are dead zones for dating traffic. Going pull the data from P202 either tonight or tomorrow to verify and adjust my campaign as needed. I seem to get no signups at all on those days, so that's a problem with my campaign that needs to get corrected. I don't mind turning it off for a few days during the week, but need to review the data first
      Just be sure not to judge too quickly. If your volume is low this can happen. Dating converts everyday, but like you said on some days of the week your ROI will be lower
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    • Profile picture of the author seregap
      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      I am quite convinced that Wednesday and Thursday are dead zones for dating traffic.
      dont jump to conclusions too early mate. they are not in general.
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      • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
        Sorry for the lack of posting over the past few days, I've been dealing with other issues which take priority (my day job and family). I also made the mistake of buying Civilization V and have been a little distracted with the damn game lol.

        So here is a quick update before I go pass out for the night.

        First off, here's my earnings in Peerfly for the past 10 days (I would really like it if you could customize the date range on their Dashboard report so I could go back in time lol):



        In my last post I said I was going to look at turning my campaign off on the days that I've gotten very poor performance, and several of you replied stating that I shouldn't jump the gun on this.

        So here's the stats for this specific campaign for the date range Feb 15 - Present (Feb 15 is when I started running ads on this new ppc network).



        It may still be too early to make a judgement call on this, but Tuesday and Wednesday are not looking good. Furthermore, Thursday I get very little action as well.

        So there really isn't much data here to make a solid decision on, but part of me is screaming about these days because I am consistently not getting anything out of them. I think I will give it until the end of this week before deciding if I should turn the campaign off during those days.
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        • Profile picture of the author razul
          Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

          I also made the mistake of buying Civilization V and have been a little distracted with the damn game lol.
          HAHAHAH that is hilarious man! The ol drug of computer games :p

          PS Thanks for the updates dude! Great job. So many people [including myself] will be learning from your thread. Good on you.

          Peace
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  • Profile picture of the author MilkerFocus
    good job!
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  • Profile picture of the author espresso
    **** me papuanac1971
    They are some stats
    I am trying at the moment to covert dating offers but having little success
    Am going to be trying a new traffic source later so will see how it goes
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    • Profile picture of the author arranrice
      Originally Posted by espresso View Post

      **** me papuanac1971
      They are some stats
      I am trying at the moment to covert dating offers but having little success
      Am going to be trying a new traffic source later so will see how it goes
      POF is a good place to have success with it.
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  • Profile picture of the author sladex
    your thread has a lot of information, thank you for sharing your experience
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  • Profile picture of the author Greedy
    yeah, you've got to keep the video games off the laptop.

    They'll eat up my time fast as well.
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    • Profile picture of the author staszek30
      Wonderful post Christian,
      I thought about taking part in the CPA, and I see that it's not as easy as what some people write, maybe someone knows a better method to make money with CPA than a paid traffic?
      how about Trust Jacker for instance?
      If anyone has any other ways please write
      good luck
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    I've never heard of Trust Jacker.


    Quick update:

    My campaign died yesterday and today, which somewhat confirms my feeling about weekdays sucking for dating traffic.

    I'm going to do a monthly review of everything in a post in the next day or two and post my plan for March once I look at the data.

    I'm going to be getting about $180 from Peerfly plus $150 out of my pocket for a total of $330ish to play with in March. I might stretch that a bit to $350 so I can keep my current campaign running plus starting up a campaign on another traffic site which requires a $250 deposit. Still figuring it all out, but I won't have the money for everything until probably next wednesday so I'm not in a massive rush to get it all figured out right this minute.
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  • Profile picture of the author Inferno272
    this is an EXCELLENT read. Awesome job.
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  • Profile picture of the author Carlsbadd
    Great work. and thank you for your updates
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  • Profile picture of the author sladex
    Hi Christian Little,
    Can I ask you if you made a profit or lost money at your testing time in the last month?
    If not a secret can you tell me more about how much did you invest and how much returned?
    Thanks.
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  • Profile picture of the author newxxx
    you said, in the beginning, that you used 2 different photos on your 2 landing pages

    can you say what the two photos were ?

    teen, never married, divorced mom, widowed mom, 20's, 30's 40's ???

    clothed, semi-nude, lingerie, topless, nude ???

    thank you
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    • Profile picture of the author mraudi
      Originally Posted by newxxx View Post

      you said, in the beginning, that you used 2 different photos on your 2 landing pages

      can you say what the two photos were ?

      teen, never married, divorced mom, widowed mom, 20's, 30's 40's ???

      clothed, semi-nude, lingerie, topless, nude ???

      thank you
      He's already had a bad experience with people copying his campaign and ended up killing it. So I don't think you're going to get anything off him this time.

      Go look at where you want to advertise and see what your competitors are using. That way you can tell what's hot or not. You get what I'm saying?
      Signature

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      • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
        Originally Posted by mraudi View Post

        He's already had a bad experience with people copying his campaign and ended up killing it. So I don't think you're going to get anything off him this time.

        Go look at where you want to advertise and see what your competitors are using. That way you can tell what's hot or not. You get what I'm saying?
        This pretty much. If I give out any more details than I have it just invites more trouble and I'm not really looking for that.

        It looks like my campaign has turned bad for some reason, I'm not exactly sure why but I haven't had a chance to look into it yet. I'm still getting clicks to the offer page (10-20/day), but they aren't converting like they were at the start of the week.

        So I went to one of the offer pages and noticed they changed the page. It has a different layout, so maybe the new layout has a bad conversion rate or something. Going to try and figure it out in the next few days while I plan out the next month.

        I've also been thinking about what I'm going to do for March. I'm debating about trying a different niche to see if I can make it work. Not quite sure yet, there's a lot of options out there so I'm going to review some of the other niches tonight to see if anything jumps at out me.
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        • Profile picture of the author Inferno272
          Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

          This pretty much. If I give out any more details than I have it just invites more trouble and I'm not really looking for that.

          It looks like my campaign has turned bad for some reason, I'm not exactly sure why but I haven't had a chance to look into it yet. I'm still getting clicks to the offer page (10-20/day), but they aren't converting like they were at the start of the week.

          So I went to one of the offer pages and noticed they changed the page. It has a different layout, so maybe the new layout has a bad conversion rate or something. Going to try and figure it out in the next few days while I plan out the next month.

          I've also been thinking about what I'm going to do for March. I'm debating about trying a different niche to see if I can make it work. Not quite sure yet, there's a lot of options out there so I'm going to review some of the other niches tonight to see if anything jumps at out me.
          I don't feel like re-reading the entire thread, but i am curious about one thing (and i you're not if memory serves me right)...are you split testing offers as well? it might not be a terrible idea to split test 2 or 3 offers while youre at it to find out which converts the best.
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          • Profile picture of the author mraudi
            Originally Posted by Inferno272 View Post

            I don't feel like re-reading the entire thread, but i am curious about one thing (and i you're not if memory serves me right)...are you split testing offers as well? it might not be a terrible idea to split test 2 or 3 offers while youre at it to find out which converts the best.
            Yes, he's testing different offers as well. I went back and re-read his previous posts, very informative actually.
            Signature

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            • Profile picture of the author Inferno272
              Originally Posted by mraudi View Post

              Yes, he's testing different offers as well. I went back and re-read his previous posts, very informative actually.
              i could have sworn he wasn't...that he was sending 1 offer for 1 set of ips and another offer to another set, but not rotating different offers to the same ip range...
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  • Profile picture of the author jinifang
    Christian,

    I'm new to CPA and learning a lot from your case study. Much appreciated and I hope you can keep posting.

    To your success.

    Robert
    Signature

    Newbie making zero today but looking towards my goal of netting $100/day. I'm interested in CPA PPL business model. Looking for free coaching and willing to barter a 6-page
    mobile website.
    Sample: atc.viral5xmarketing.com

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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    I'll set the record straight then

    In February I tested 5 different offers with 4 different landing pages. That made a total of 20 possible combinations that I was testing. By the end of the month I had narrowed it down to 2 offers and 1 landing page that converted for the campaign.

    I'm still in a pre-launch phase for this month. I totally forgot about the silly Net30 payout (I'm not used to that lol). So I'm actually only going to be working with $150 this month and that payout from Peerfly will come next month.

    My current campaign didn't get any conversions over the weekend and the account is down to like $8 balance left, so I turned it off.

    I'm diving into all the data I collected during February to see if I can spot any opportunities to go after. I don't want to turn any campaigns on until I have a plan, and if that means going a few days into the month without any clicks that's alright since I'm not losing money.

    Will have more info in a day or two, work is insane right now so I haven't had much time to get more moving on this
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    UPDATE

    I have launched my first campaign for March.

    I was having a hard time justifying the $0.07/click that I was paying with the network I was using, so I switched over to a network that focus on adult traffic websites and the CPC is much lower. Obviously my conversion rate will probably drop, but I want to see what happens with the first few days before jumping to any conclusions.

    The traffic is going to get directed to the 1 landing page that has proven it's worth, and I have 2 different offers that people will be able to click through.

    Furthermore, I am looking at where to go next and have some ideas.

    I think the next project I want to get involved in is to start capturing lead information before passing them on. So I'm looking at incorporating an autoresponder into a set of new landing pages, but in a completely different market.

    I really don't see autoresponders and email marketing working for dating unless I start building out some kind of relationship site. That's something I could do, but it works against my current dating campaign which is more focused around "hookup tonight!" type pages. So I'm on the fence about that, I think when I do this I will look at other markets, and there's 3-4 that come to mind that I think I could do well.

    So here's a question to those of you doing this - is it better to have a landing page with an email capture form pass people onto an offer as soon as they signup, or is it better to give them a free guide or something instead?

    I'll probably test both approaches, but would appreciate it if somebody had some data they could share on this.
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    • Profile picture of the author razul
      Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

      So here's a question to those of you doing this - is it better to have a landing page with an email capture form pass people onto an offer as soon as they signup, or is it better to give them a free guide or something instead?

      I'll probably test both approaches, but would appreciate it if somebody had some data they could share on this.
      Great question! I am super keen to hear other people's opinions and YOUR TEST results [which will be the best info/data]

      Also, thanks for maintaining this thread
      Signature
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      For the love of Chango: Use the "Thanks" button instead of spamming/plaguing a thread with your thank you posts
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  • Profile picture of the author PPC-Coach
    One thing about cheap traffic, it's cheap for a reason. I'm not saying it won't work, but what I mean is don't do thing JUST to get cheap clicks. Sometimes when you make a mistake and bid WAY too high, you end up finding keywords that just ROCK. You wouldn't have found them otherwise either.

    Just sayin'

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    • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
      Originally Posted by PPC-Coach View Post

      One thing about cheap traffic, it's cheap for a reason. I'm not saying it won't work, but what I mean is don't do thing JUST to get cheap clicks. Sometimes when you make a mistake and bid WAY too high, you end up finding keywords that just ROCK. You wouldn't have found them otherwise either.

      Just sayin'

      Yeah I figure my conversion rank is going to drop a lot but I want to try. Worst case scenario I blow $150 this month for nothing.

      On the up side I got a conversion after the first 20 clicks from the new network which is encouraging but I know that wont be a true measure of the campaign lol
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      • Profile picture of the author mraudi
        Originally Posted by Christian Little View Post

        Yeah I figure my conversion rank is going to drop a lot but I want to try. Worst case scenario I blow $150 this month for nothing.

        On the up side I got a conversion after the first 20 clicks from the new network which is encouraging but I know that wont be a true measure of the campaign lol
        Cheaper traffic doesn't always mean it's a bad thing, you can still reach for max ROI if you do it properly. Congratulations on the new conversion only after 20 clicks!

        I just finished uploading all my ads to this new traffic network and am waiting for approval. Anxiously to see what will the outcome of my campaign will be like. I will probably do a live case study here but we'll see.
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        • Profile picture of the author Maecenas23
          Christian, my sincere congrats on what you did till now and your kindness even after some morons destroyed your campaign.

          I followed all your posts and comments, made notes and put them all together with the other notes I made about CPA networks. Will take this into consideration when I will start the whole story ( in 1-2 months maximum)

          Thanks and good luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Quick update here:

    The new campaign isn't performing well, I've tried adjusting it several times without much luck so I stopped it.

    I've made a decision to rethink my campaigns to focus on other areas.

    I'm going to be stopping this case study and will be posting a new thread in the next week or two after I put a few things in place on my end and get started.

    The reason I am stopping this thread is because I am expanding outward from Peerfly, I want to look at other networks and other ideas.

    Peerfly is a great network and I've learned a lot and I will continue to use them with my next case study but I want to have different options open to me. But since this thread was named for Peerfly I think it's only appropriate if I start a new thread that doesn't name a specific network.

    I really want to look at doing something with list building/autoresponders, and possibly looking at some kind of recurring revenue situation as well. So I'm going to be looking at various options over the next few days and figure out my game plan.

    Essentially I want to setup a site or series of sites that is my own personal sales funnel instead of just sending people into other sales funnels that I have no control over.

    Keep an eye out later this week for the next thread I create which will be a case study showing it all as I go
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  • Profile picture of the author Bri777
    Awesome thread. keep it up man. (very cheap clicks btw, I wanna find out your traffic source )
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  • Profile picture of the author Petarx
    Great thread! I planing to do the same thing but with a little bigger budget - about 500 $. Just dont give up
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  • Profile picture of the author dosapati
    Great Case study for me ..Thanks Christian, i get many usefull tips from this thread.. looking for updates from you..
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  • Profile picture of the author reckless
    any new updates ?
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  • Profile picture of the author Al amin
    Great Thread learning a lot at least far better the so called to CPA wso. Keep it up.

    Thanks
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  • Profile picture of the author Glynn Kosky
    Keep it up.

    Thanks
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  • Profile picture of the author alpinestars
    Hi guys,

    @Christian Little

    Thanks a lot for this case study... it gave me more ideas... and my mind is being blown right now... these methods will not only work with dating niche... but I believe it will also rock other niche...

    I just have a quick question...

    How do you guys create a landing page easily?

    I am using MS PAINT... (LOL)

    are there any good tools/software out there that can easily create a landing page? where you just drag/drop an image/text/font/color and also a link or CTA?
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  • Profile picture of the author trafficbroker
    JustHookUp works with ALL english Geos not just US. I send a lot of my pubs there and they send all english geos, just an FYI
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  • Profile picture of the author watsonovedades
    amazing info man keep it up
    Signature
    Whatever your mind can conceive and BELIEVE you can achieve
    Follow me on Twitter - @DineroConPc
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  • Profile picture of the author thequietmind2014
    thank you for this case study
    but how can i be accepted by Peerfly?
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  • Profile picture of the author watsonovedades
    this thread is very old
    any updates Christian Little ?
    wondering is you test this intensively on 7search which is crappy traffic you can do very well on TrafficJunky or TrafficForce, they have plenty adult traffic you can convert with your already proven LP and offers
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