Keeping PoF Ads Dating Campaigns Profitable Longer

Lately, I've been hearing affiliates complaining about "POF campaigns burning out in a day or two." While there is some truth to this, there are ways around it to keep campaigns alive much longer with only slight alterations. POF is smaller than other traffic sources so you have to be smart about it and first focus primarily on fine tuning your targeting / ad copy to increase your ROI % before you try to double or triple your leads / day. If you take full advantage of their extremely specific targeting options to optimize a campaign it is still very possible to make serious ROI on a campaign before it starts to slow down (I personally aim for 100% minimum ROI after proper optimization). In the reporting, POF shows not only the demographic info of those who convert but also those who don't so you can target not equal to "x" and block out the non-converting demographics and fine tune your traffic.

A recent addition to their targeting options is that now you can block android and iphone mobile traffic from going to your ads under browser type. Previously, if you wanted to block iphone traffic, you had to select just firefox / internet explorer under browser type but you were losing out on all the mac user traffic so that was a poor solution to the problem. Thankfully POF addressed this issue and now you can specifically target or untarget mobile traffic.

Once you have your demo that's converting and you're making money, it's time to scale. There are multiple ways to scale your successful campaign. You can try tweaking the angle a little to appeal to a slightly different target audience or you can port it over to facebook. Also, take advantage of offers that accept traffic from multiple countries and scale your successful US campaigns out to CA / UK. If your offer is only for US, find an offer with a similar theme / offer page that accepts traffic from the other countries - ask your AM if you need help with this.

Another useful way to scale is by taking advantage of all 4 different ad types that POF offers. In addition to the 110x80s, you can also run the 728x90s which means the only ad on that page is yours now and you aren't competing with 2 other 110x80s like normal. You will be paying for this with an increase in your cpm though so be careful with testing them to not blow through a budget. The larger space does create for some more innovative ads though which can make up for the increased cost if you're willing to put the time in. POF also offers two other IAB ads, the 300x250 which is exclusive to the member's profile page and the 160x600 exclusive to the online/your city page. These IAB's account for 40% of POF's volume yet a lot of affiliates forego them because it requires more effort (and higher cpm's) to run these ads effectively but it can be well worth it. With the larger ad space, now you can completely customize your ad copy and image without being limited to the few words and tiny box that the 110x80s force you into. Also, your ad is the only one on this page and its dead center location demands the user's attention. Our internal testing on recent campaigns showed an increase of .100 - .200% in CTR when we replicated our ads from the 110x80 spot to the 300x250. The increased real estate that a 300x250 provides allows for those of you with the time and talent to create quality images to really shine. The extra room also makes direct linking a more viable option as you can do a little more pre-selling in your larger box. If you've got something that's absolutely killing it, test it out with all the different sizes and track how each performs and adjust accordingly.

A lot of people think you can only promote dating offers to < 50 or < 100 login count and this seems to be accepted as common knowledge. However, you could be missing out on a large volume of pof's user base just based on popular opinion and should definitely test this out yourself (Hint: Lower bids as you raise login count to maintain ROI). I'm not promising better results with the older users but with so many people targeting the < 50 count, you might be surprised with the results you get from the less competitive, higher login count demo. Some numbers pulled from POF's blog, about 17% of their volume is in the 0-50 login count range, 11% in 50-100, and 30% of their volume is in the 550+ category - that's a huge user base that a lot of people never even consider testing for dating offers.

Frequency cap is another thing - everyone swears by 3 frequency cap thinking that if the user didn't click on it by now, they aren't going to. Quick question though, have you actually tested it? Advertising is a science and nothing should ever be taken for granted. On POF, the users are bombarded by so many ads left and right, messages from other users, etc. It is possible that maybe it didn't catch their eye the first few times or they were on the rocks about clicking but the 4th or 5th impression did the trick (make sure you are testing multiple images because not every image has universal appeal and it may be the 5th image that gets them to click). Again, every campaign / demographic is different but if your ad has been converting decently and getting a solid ctr, try experimenting with the frequency cap after you have a week or so of data.

Another question I've been getting recently from our newer affiliates is whether to direct link or use a lander. We covered this in a previous guide but I think it's worth addressing briefly again because I've seen it mentioned on a number of sites that direct linking is all but useless and it is impossible to get a profitable campaign going without a lander. However, direct linking is quite useful in that it tells you a lot about your demo and you can quickly test out ad copy ctr, and whether the clicks convert when the user gets to the offer page. If you're getting bad ctr, your ad probably needs some work. Log into a pof user account and look around at what's been running for a few weeks (use this for inspiration, don't just copy, it doesn't work and you won't learn anything) or hit up your AM for some critique. If you're getting good ctr but the conversion rate leaves much to be desired, this is where a lander can come in and save the day. Sometimes we have brilliant ad copy and great images but for some reason the angle we used in our ad doesn't jive with what the offer page looks like and the user decides not to go through with things. However, it's hard to get users to click without using some sort of specific, personalized angle calling them to action coupled with dynamic tags (geo/age/gender). This is where you implement the lander to work them up even further so that when they do get to the offer page, even if it isn't everything they had ever imagined, they're still interested enough from your presell to go through with things.

If you're getting good CTR from your lander to the offer page and the conversion rate is still suffering, look around for some different offer pages or talk to your AM for some constructive criticism. Another approach if you're not ready to give up on your amazing CTR ad is to capture their emails and then you can market a variety of different dating offers to them; who knows you may get multiple conversions out of a single subscriber. We also have several dating offers for email only that maintain steady conversion rates network wide so this is not something to brush aside without some consideration.

As always, this is not an all inclusive campaign guide but I just wanted to encourage people who may be on the fence and barely breaking even that there is still a lot of potential for money to be made and POF continues to be a great advertising platform because they actually want affiliates to make money. Instead of banning accounts for ads they deem inappropriate, they help you make them appropriate! If you have any further questions, feel free to hit up your AM as they'd be happy to go into further details with you.