Obtaining Triple-Digit ROIs with Dating
Do you run dating? I don't mean a few leads a day, I mean are you crushing dating? If not, it's time to step up your game. Dating is one of the largest verticals in the industry and quite profitable with average ROI's of 100-200% once optimized (on social traffic). If you're thinking, "ya but those affiliates probably have aged ads and have been in the game for years," you couldn't be further from the truth. We have scores of examples of affiliates who picked up marketing this year and already have recorded $300+ profit days. If you're not banking with dating, chances are you're either asleep or trying way too hard.
"Trying way too hard?" - that's right, my biggest critique of affiliate's ad copy is that they make it way too detailed and convoluted - you're not writing a brilliant novel here, you're just trying to capture people's attention, don't make this harder than it is.
Some fun facts, 60% of people read only headlines. However, if you don't have an image that catches their eye, you never even activate that 60% readership. I'm going to break this down very simply, I apologize if this is old news for some of you but I just see way too many bad ads so I think there is some value in this.
Step 1: The image. If you're testing on FB, you can test a lot at once because there is huge volume available at your finger tips. Test a few variations of your ad copy and a few different headlines also. If you're on POF, I don't recommend testing more than 5-10 images at once and maybe 2 headline variations because you don't have that much volume at your disposal unless you're using extremely broad targeting. It's critical that you find images that get good ctr, otherwise you will never get cheap enough clicks to profit. Don't blame the offer if you can't get profitable, chances are you just don't have high enough CTR, because there are affiliates dominating every one of the top offers that we recommend so it is possible.
- Targeting Males: Split test face shots, body shots, and face + some cleavage depending on your demographic. Note: Use your discretion here, don't run images of half-naked college girls if you're promoting a 40+ offer, this is not going to work out well for the advertiser or you in the long run.
- Targeting Females: Split test face shots, body shots, and shirtless pictures. If 40+, same as before, don't have some ripped 20 year old guy, it's not going to work out well. P.S: Images of couples rarely perform well.
Step 2: The headline. Ok, you've grabbed their attention with the picture of that smoking 50 year old, now what? The best headlines appeal to the users on some personal, emotional level. People don't respond to your clever witty headlines, however brilliant you think they are. They respond because your headline connects to them on some emotional level, some basic need they have or something about their demographic (i.e., body type, interest in hiking or pets, etc). Don't make it harder than it is, human beings are pretty simple, do some brainstorming and test out your results. Also, don't make the headline too long, people have extremely low attention spans.
Step 3: The ad copy. Congrats, if you've gotten them this far, you're very close to a click and as long as your ad isn't outrageously misleading, you might even have yourself a conversion in the making. The most important thing about the ad copy is that it flows naturally from the headline. If not, you risk interrupting the user's train of thought. Make it nice and clean, incorporating the basic premise of what captured their attention via the headline in the first place. Finish it off with a simple call to action (yes, some people really do need to be told to "click here" in no uncertain terms). If the offer allows it, mentioning that they can sign up or create an account for free definitely helps. Don't go crazy with exclamation points or caps, this has been shown to reduce readership and diminishes your ads credibility considerably if it looks like a 13 year old girl wrote it.
Targeting: The targeting for POF and FB varies significantly. I'll go over them briefly because you could end up writing a novel about these.
FB: You can go broad -- focus on getting a good broad campaign going where you will probably have slimmer margins but get more volume, or you can build lots of smaller niche campaigns around specific interests such as hiking, outdoors, pets, dancing, etc. The only limit here is really your creativity and the amount of time you're willing to put in. With facebook, often times the biggest battle is just whittling down your cpc over time (yes, you might have to lose some money to make money). Lots of facebook campaigns start out in the red because facebook's algorithm needs time to assess how users respond to your ad. Once they see that people like your ad, your costs will go down, you will receive better placement, and then you can start to bank on your hard work and patience. If you're bidding cpc, remember that you need good ctr because if your ctr is low and facebook ends up getting less money from you than their minimum cpm baseline, your ad will get cut off and you'll have to start over.
POF: Take advantage of their targeting and create your own niche. It works great, promoting from a niche angle and then sending users to the broad offer (use a lander if need be). Your ctr's will be way better with a targeted headline / adcopy to the user's demographic and as a result your clicks will be much cheaper and your pockets fuller. The flipside to this is you can also target broad on pof if you don't want to spend a ton of time building out all those individual, highly targeted campaigns (though I highly suggest you invest some time in this). When going broad, I still would try to use some sort of angle to distinguish your ad from the million other ones saying the same generic thing (and probably losing money). With broad, you'll probably need to lower your bids in order to get this to work. Also, experiment with session depth and login count as these settings can make the difference between -200% ROI and +200%.
- Over 40, females by and large convert much better than males. The has a twofold effect: (1) targeting females will yield higher CR, but you will have to pay a premium because other people know this so the traffic is more expensive (2) spend the time split testing ad copy to get the male demographic to convert; mastering a niche that other people have written off as "too difficult" or "won't work" is how you create goldmines out of campaigns.
Bidding: There is no sweet spot (sorry if I just shattered some of your worlds). Certain individual campaigns may have a sweet spot, but as a general rule, there is no magical number that I can tell you guys that will make you rich. I bid differently on lots of my campaigns.
FB: With cpc, bid high at first and then bid low is a pretty generally accepted ppc practice. You bid high at the start so your ad gets impressions and builds up credibility with FB's algorithm and then once your impression feed has stabilized, you can start to slowly lower it (sometimes, this can stall out the impressions so be careful). Another thing you can try if you want to boost your impressions is mess around with your daily spend cap. Even if your account is only on a $50 / day limit, increase the daily spend cap on individual campaigns as this can help get you more impressions faster (don't set it crazy high and go out for the day though as you could spend all your money pretty fast this way if your account has a high spend).
- Not all FB traffic is created equal. Make sure to take a look at your referrers and see if your best converting traffic is from facebook or apps.facebook and play around with your bids accordingly to get the traffic that works best for you.
POF: Bidding on POF is so targeting dependent that I can't even toss out a ballpark figure here as I have campaigns with bids all over the place. Depending on how that particular angle converts, what the targeting is, demo size, etc., your bid prices can vary significantly. P.S.: if you're running in >50 login count, I'd recommend dropping your bids significantly as your CTR / CR will likely take a hit. However, if you can monetize this traffic, you have a ton of volume on your hands and minimal competition.
Stay Focused: The most important part of marketing isn't any secret technique or knowledge, it's the individual drive and motivation to not give up and make things work. It can be very disheartening when you're getting started testing out a new campaign and the ROI is negative, but this is a completely normal feeling. When I test new campaigns, even with the experience I have of what performs well, I still generally run negative on the initial test. I could play it safe and only use creatives and ad copy that I know perform well, but if I never tested new things, I would never find next gem of a campaign. I recently tested 4 new angles for example, 1 of them ended up being around -200% even after optimization, a few were roughly break even, but the 4th has been between 100-200% ROI for a week now. As you can see, it pays to spend a little and I hope this will help encourage and motivate those of you who are experiencing these feelings and to let you know that it's completely normal growing pains that every affiliate goes through.
