For every traffic source, affiliates always dread the day that their profitable campaigns reach a stage of burnout or banner blindness. The same complaints seem to hold for POF, but to tell you the truth, I personally have not really experienced it. I believe that if you make your campaigns a certain way in POF, they will almost NEVER die. Here’s how I do it…
The key to significantly reducing the probability of campaign burnout (or eliminate it completely), is to reduce ad exposure for any given ad to any given person. When exposure is reduced, banner blindness becomes a non-issue. Your campaigns might go through periods of volatility, so they might not be profitable some days, or even possibly some weeks, but across a long period, they should remain profitable if they have been tested and proven by a significant amount of data already.
The main components to making long lasting campaigns are relatively simple:
First, when making campaigns, you must set frequency caps for all campaigns to the POF minimum, which is 3. I typically set this frequency cap to “per visit”, but you can set it to “per day” to reduce exposure even more. This ensures that each POF user only sees the ads in a particular campaign a maximum of 3 times per visit, per hour, or per day.
Second, when targeting login counts, always target in segments of 50. So if you want to capture login counts 0-150 with your current angle, then create 3 separate campaigns with login counts 0-50, 50-100, and 100-150. These campaigns should be running different ads. This ensures that as the life of a POF user moves forward, the ads you show them are refreshed after a certain number of impressions. If you have frequency cap set to 3 per visit, then they will see ads in a particular campaign a maximum of 150 times total before seeing a new batch of ads.
Third, make sure you have at least 5 ads running in each campaign at any given time. Having at least this many ads keeps a reasonable number of ads in rotation so that the user rarely sees the same ad thrice in a row out of the 3 impressions you are going to show them in a campaign.
Lastly, when a proven campaign starts fizzing out, don’t give up on it right away. Test a few very different CPM price points and see if it makes a difference. The CPM bid of a campaign can have a dramatic impact on ROI and profit. Look for a complete post on CPM bidding and optimization in the near future.
If after implementing the above strategy your campaigns are still burning out, then it can be attributed to a period of increased competition on POF. Meaning, during the testing of your campaign, competition was relatively low. After you’ve vetted your profitable campaign, competition has increased, rendering your previously collected data somewhat irrelevant to the new competitive atmosphere.
This is what happened to a few of my campaigns that indeed did burn out permanently. In most cases, however, the competition isn’t permanent, and I simply rerun the campaigns to check for profitability after weeks or months.
Honestly, I can probably count the number of times I had to fail a proven campaign (one that has been profitable for weeks) on one hand. The campaigns that consistently make me money have been running for months and months, and some have even been running for over a year. There are many POF marketers who make lots of money doing it differently than described here. This is simply my way of building long lasting campaigns that require minimal ongoing maintenance.
Excellent article. Tom you have summed it all. I think having a stable long lasting campaign is worth than any short campaign…………and how u do that? you post explains it all.
Good post, however when you say keep at least 5 ads running do you mean 5 ads with a different image on each with the same title and description or 5 completely different ads with no repetition of image, title or description?
Thanks Jason.
That’s a great question.
The 5 ads just need to have different images for the most part.
The possible exception is when making 310×110 ads. Sometimes the banners are highly recognizable that when you swap the images, it doesn’t really make a difference in people’s minds. This might be something you can’t avoid though. I’ve started to create multiple variations of ads when making a 310×110 campaign to break it up a little bit.
-Tom
Talk about content! Thats a golden post right here Tom!
2 questions came through my mind after reading:
– What if you only target the <50 login count? Do you just skip the second point or you've got a tip for segmenting that <50 also?
-Since the demo size can also affect a campaign's longivity, how do you establish it can be a long term campaign, one that won't run out after a couple days even when using your 4 components?
Thanks and keep up the good work you're doing!
J.S,
Glad the information is helpful!
On your first question, there really isn’t anything additional you can do within the <50 login count area. To be honest, it's probably getting to the point of too much micromanagement at that point anyhow. So, I wouldn't worry about that.
I'm not understanding your second question entirely. Basically, I would carve up your campaigns into more niche than broad. Obviously, you are going to have broad campaigns that target, say, Caucasian females. That's unavoidable, but even if you are doing that, you can cut it up into smaller age groups instead of just 18-40.
See this post for more on that:
http://ipyxel.com/reduce-campaign-roi-volatility-user-similarity-control/
-Tom
Oh what i meant for the 2nd question is actually how do you know when a particular campaign has a big enough demo that it will probably never burnout?
Cause the size of a demo also determines if it’ll dry up quickly or not, even using the components you’ve talked about in this post.
Tks!
The argument is that the size of the demo doesn’t really have a direct effect on burnout. As the size of the demo gets bigger, it’s not like you are now showing your ads to each person less. You are simply displaying your ads to more people. What may seem like burn out when you have a large demo is simply the fact that the people in your demo are very different as opposed to a niche demo. So the traffic your getting could respond very differently to your few ads. Your campaign may go through periods of loss due to volatility. However, I don’t think it contributes to burnout for each POF user.
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Fantastic post Tom. I’ll be giving this a try tonight 🙂