New Prosper 1.7 Proves 7% Faster

After reading CTR Tard’s quick review of the new release of Prosper 1.7.2 (view here) I really wanted to get my hands on it. I previously did a case study showing the speed of my Prosper202 redirects vs Tracking202 and the Bevo Media platform. You can view those results here. With 1.7.2 I was really excited to see exactly how much faster my server redirects would be once I cleared the click data. For anyone who doesn’t know, Prosper202 retains a record of all kinds of information for you to perform past queries on old information. It is widely believed that this excess of information kills your server speeds. I’ve spoken to a few internet marketers who preach that they wipe their click database tables on a weekly basis otherwise their ‘server crawls’. Mind you some of these people are doing hundreds of thousands of clicks a day, but some were definitely in the sub 1,000 a day and still claim the speed bonuses.

Testing Time!

I used the same platform and same landing page as before to perform the tests. All prosper tests were performed on a low duty dedicated server. I was really only interested in viewing the Prosper202 stats but I figured it would be nice to compare to another platform’s speed as well. Even though the results show one way, I still opt to continue to use Prosper as my primary tracking platform.

Prosper 1.6 vs. Bevo Media

Prosper 1.7 (No Click Data Removed) vs. Bevo Media

Prosper 1.7 (ALL Click Data Removed) vs. Bevo Media

All in all you can see the Prosper 1.7 with click data removed is significantly faster. It topped my original benchmark by just under 7%. If you are focusing on redirect speeds I would recommend an immediate upgrade as the standard upgrade alone also showed a 6% increase in speed.

I’ve never cleared my Prosper202 click data before, some currently do it manually. It reported about 250MB of click data on this install. I was really thinking that it was time for me to wipe the SQL database and just refresh to really get my snappy redirects back, however in the end it seems they were just as snappy as ever and the click data deletion might not be as big of a deal as we all suspected. I still appreciate them adding it in though!

Anyone else get a chance to try it out yet?

PPV RON Traffic Still Proves Useless

The other day cleaning out my email I saw an email from DirectCPV saying that they had RON (Run of Network) traffic available with their intersitial popups at $4 per thousand views. Thats more than 50% off standard pops so I figured it would be good for a quick test. I had a few hundred bucks sitting in my Direct CPV account and thought it might make some use of it since I don’t run too much traffic with them anymore.

I’ve never worked with RON before but really heard nothing but bad news about it. Its essentially untargetted traffic that is ‘left over’ because no one else wants it. Since its so random you really can’t get too complex with what offers to pitch. I decided I would do the most logical thing and completely throw shit at the wall and see what stuck. I was going to write a fancy script to rotate in all kinds of banners and links but then saw a link on Luke Kling’s blog about Peerfly Banners.

 

Peerfly is an affiliate network that has a pretty HUGE inventory of various email submits. If you are interested in seeing what they got Click Here To Check Out Peerfly! What I really liked is that they have a few tools to help you out with campaigns. One of which was the Peerfly Banners program.

The Peerfly Banners program is basically a small portal that lets you select which offers you want to promote by selecting categories and then choosing what size banners you want. It then generates a javascript code that you can place on your page that will automatically rotate in all the selected category banners. This is AWESOME for placing on sites you aren’t sure how to monetize. You can easily let it run for a week and then see what people were clicking on and what was converting…INSTANT DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH!

I had the idea though to buy some cheap traffic and arbitrage it through this program. Now let me state that I have the nasty habbit of sharing ideas I get at like 3 AM after drinking excess amounts of soda at night on this blog. So sometimes things aren’t always pretty and clean, but the theory is there. I also have the problem that when things are small I typically don’t pay much attention to them. This campaign could’ve been optimized a bit more by adding some lander audio, some more PHP inserts, etc. Anyways, lets look at the landers I used!

What I basically did was offer 3 landers up. Each was pretty basic. The first one I wanted to play the numbers game, give the user a couple of choices. They basically got to pick one of the two banners and they also had an option to exit the page (Pssst. this was really another affiliate link trying to scavenge traffic). With the DirectCPV adware technology users can’t really ‘exit’ out of the page as easily as normal pop ups so I’ve had some REALLY good luck with ‘click here to exit’ options before. I am well aware that offering a user another option is typically not the best idea.

The second lander only had one 350×250 banner on it. I just wanted to try limiting the user’s options and see how that went.

The third lander had a single 425×600 banner on it and no Exit option at the bottom.

The Results

Well, after $52.43 in spend I should’ve received about 13,107 impressions. DirectCPV reported the full 13,107 where my tracking system picked up just over 8,000. So right off the bat I lost about 40% of my RON traffic. This could be due to multiple things but bottom line it was all wasted cash if I didn’t see any page loads from it. (*Note I was using Maxmind Geo Script and external Peerfly banners which may have slowed the page load down.)

The ‘Exit Option’ at the bottom of landers 1 & 2 had a 10% CTR on Lander 1, and a 7% CTR on Lander 2.

As far as click throughs on the actual offers go, I had 730 clicks (about 9% CTR!) spread over 180 different offers! I would say about 80% of those offers were email submits. Of those 730 clicks… ZERO Conversions!

I don’t attribute the 0 conversions to the network or the banner program, more simply the fact that most of the users were probably just trying to close the inner window popup and thought by clicking through it would. It was pretty common to see the same user clicking through on both offers when looking in my tracking logs.

What Sort of Traffic Was It?

When I was trying to do a bit of research I really couldn’t find too many people sharing details about RON traffic so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I ended up getting a ton of traffic from absolute shit sites that literally looked like they were bots just scraping keywords in different search engines. There was also a fair amount of porn in there lol. I extracted the full list of keywords and uploaded it in an excel list if you are interested in seeing them.

CLICK HERE To Download Direct CPV RON Traffic Keywords/URLs

Learn Anything?

Yeah, RON sucks. Seriously, 730 clicks over 150+ fucking email submits and not even one asshole entered an email address?!?

 

Offline Ads in a Train – Epic Fail

As much as I love online advertising I always get lured to offline advertising just because the competition is extremely weak. Calling the competition weak goes hand in hand to past posts of mine where I mention how most local agencies are pretty much retarded and just want your money.

Let’s take a look at the local train station, Alewife Station in Cambridge, MA. I usually hate driving into Boston so I will drive to this station, pay the $7 to park my car and then the $1.60 to take the train to where I need to go (Usually Red Sox Games!). I’ve noticed for a long time how they allow multiple forms of advertising in the train station. These vary from standup posters, cool complex ones that form a flipbook style animation on the walls as the train drives by them, and standard posters within the trains themselves.

The problem with offline ads is that they are NOT cheap! They are often times significantly more expensive than online methods, you can’t target demographics as well, and no guarantee people will see or react to your ads.

Prices to Advertise on the Train

The MBTA uses Titan advertising to manage their rail advertising. Titan shot me over some rough specs upon request and the prices were pretty crazy.

“Rates can range from $2,750 for an 11×28 orange line program to $11,200 for a market-wide 22×21 program [all 4-week net].”

According to their flyers the Orange Line of trains has a daily ridership of about 154,400. I’m sure that is an accurate statistic since there are turn style counters at every entrance/exit. Now they didn’t really clarify exactly how many 11×28 signs you got to put on the Orange Line (1 of 4 Major Subway Routes in Boston) but a little more investigating shows that there are about 436 total inventory advertising spots in the train station. Roughly looking through the areas it looks like only in the larger locations will you see the same ad in multiple areas. Probably an upsell to that particular client to fill the space.

I will assume that the 11×28 poster will have a total placement of ’1′ unit at each of these areas. In the lowest placement area you will be competing with at least 11 other advertisers for subway rider’s attention. Not to mention often times different entrances/exits may make your ad impossible to be seen anyways.

Taking that out of the calculation they claim that 154k riders each week. Now the frequency cap for your offline ad in an ideal situation here would be a maximum of about 2 (departure and re-arrival at the station). Unfortunately what is actually happening is the subway is home to MANY commuters so I would average their actual exposure for about 70% of the riders to be about 10 views per week. This obviously can hurt us advertisers. We can’t have our same ad being displayed to the same user 10 times  can we? Well of course those ever popular ‘brand advertisers’ think this is a bargain, but direct response, this sucks for us.

Anyways, let’s take that out of the equation. Let’s focus on just the standard 2 views per person in an ideal world. Here is the actual math of an ideal situation.

Well damn. $0.31 CPM actually isn’t too bad now is it? The problem being that this is an ideal case and in NO way is it real! I would be willing to bet that the actual people who view your advertisement is WAY less than 154k a day and to be realistic I would wager that approximately 15-20% of the viewers are all under the age of 18. Which is in many ways out of our target demographics. Realistically I would guesstimate that if we were looking to get unique viewers and over 18 demo that the actual CPM would be around $0.91.

Wow, now $0.91 that isn’t too different than the recommended CPM of Facebook for the 18+ Bostonian crowd as seen below:

Obviously the suggested $1.00-$1.76 is a little pricey. FB will still deliver CPM traffic well under those prices.

Well Maybe the Quality Is Better?!?

I asked myself the same question but lets be honest. The reason why online ads work so well is our Call To Action is so easily available. With offline ads your Call To Action is no longer a click away, but instead a ‘phone call’ a ‘request for more info’ a ‘scan this QR code’ or ‘Find us on Facebook’. Lets see what everyone else is doing for CTAs on the train.

The checking account one has a pretty good bribe on it. Some of them have ‘Pull Away’ information which is pretty cool (except that a few are excessively high in the air for most people). The gin ad is just brand advertising so whatever. However most of them had their call to action being a QR code. This was the advent of helping offline ads bridge the gap of mobile and online however on the trains and in the train station…market research SHOULD be your best friend.

I commend all these advertisers and their hard spent dollars but have one Crucial piece of information to share.

 

Conclusion

The advertising isn’t really as costly as the initial insertion orders would lead you to believe. Offline ads aren’t leveraged by many direct response marketers and there is huge room to grow this field. Most of the advertisers were either big brands looking for exposure or government funded groups (who clearly have money to burn) who must be looking to get their name out.

I think there is potential on railway advertising but definitely not using QR codes as your way to bring people online!

Blam Ads! vs. Google Adsense Experiment

Like a lot of people that do marketing, I have my ways that work best for me. One of the few things that I don’t pretend to be good at is SEO. Bottom line I am too lazy to work at it, it bores me, and I’m too cheap to pay people to rank for me. However somewhere along my travels I was grinding on too much soda and was up late at night and spotted a low competition niche and decided to crank out a site for it. So I made some lame long tail ‘.com’ ending blog, did like 3 pages of half ass content and wrote about 5 blog posts. I think I commented on like 5 other blogs to try and grab back links and that was that.

A few months later I was pretty excited to be ranking #2 for my main keyword that got approximately 5k search a month (according to Google).

I was originally running some weight loss ads on the page and eventually switched over to Google adsense ads being displayed on the page. In case you live under a rock, those are part of Google’s content network where other’s ads would then display on a CPC basis on my site. After running the adsense for a few months the cash really wasn’t piling in (not that I expected it) so I jumped at the opportunity to work with ‘Blam Ads!’ to try putting a content locker on my site.

A content locker basically is one of those annoying popups that appear internally on a page until you complete a required action. The actions are usually like filling out an email submit or filling out a survey. The payouts are usually a lot less than you would find at Blam’s sister company EWA (both are long time sponsors of the blog, thanks Ryan!) because the traffic is ‘incentivized’. Its pretty easy to guess that quality will suffer under those conditions.

I had a few issues with the content locker but since this site really wasn’t ‘BIG’ I figured it wouldn’t hurt. You can see them below.

The Myths About Blam Ads!

• Hinder User Experience - I really didn’t want my users to feel like I was trying to ‘use’ them. I then looked at my site and remembered that I hadn’t touched it in about 5 months and proceeded to lock away.
• Piss People Off – I was also worried that people in niche forums that previously would link to me occasionally might just start bashing me. I never saw any negative comments though to be realistic.
• Hurting My Rankings – I had heard that part of what effects your ranking in Google is how long the user is on the page/bounce rate, etc. I was really suspecting Google seeing this code on my page would hurt me. This really didn’t turn out to be any issue at all. The code goes at the bottom of the page in most cases anyway and is a .js insert that will load dynamically so search engine crawlers really don’t seem to care.

The Results

Ok so a few disclaimers here. 1.) I approached my Blam Ads! AM at the time and when I was going to content lock this page up he basically told me he didn’t think this niche would perform well. He suspected that people wouldn’t be willing to complete and offer for this specific content. 2.) When I started working with Blam my site was already being ignored by me and although traffic was starting to suffer its rankings went from a stable #2 to main keyword to bouncing between 3/4. It is currently ranked #6.

Full Stats

Here you can see the full comparison of the traffic as it came in during the dates for each experiment.

Although I really liked the idea of using the content locking gateway to help monetize the traffic to my site it definitely didn’t seem be a viable solution. Its a definite possibility that I could’ve split test some more offers or gateway designs to try and optimize. I’m confident that on my particular site, that a well placed AdSense theme could turn significantly more profit here than it did with its current setup. I do suspect that if you have the right content on your site Blam could definitely be the better choice. I suspect that content that revolves around downloads, tutorials, and media would work very well.

Not that I reached out for much help, but any help from Google would have been of course non-existent. Blam on the other hand always seems to be practically waiting for me to ask for help. I had the fortune of working with Dan Wolfe over at Blam who was always eager to get me to push more traffic any way I could. If you decide to work with Blam I definitely recommend requesting to work with him.

This particular experiment is very small of course. I wouldn’t pretend to know what the outcome would’ve been on a larger volume site. I do think though it gives you a good idea of the basic results you could experience yourself given similar conditions.

Is BLAM Ads! Just Not For Me?

After letting this experiment go on for a while it seemed that this definitely wasn’t going to work for me. I reached out to the Birdman Ryan Eagle himself and asked exactly what is the best use for the content locking gateways. Will they work on any site….should they replace Adsense?

“BLAM Ads monetizes sites that Google don’t monetize well, sites that get mass amounts of traffic from less-than desirable demographics. As you stated  above, sites based around downloads, video content, fan sites, movie related sites always work well. The larger websites use it as an appendage to traditional ad networks to supplement their income and protect more valuable areas of their site also very successfully. Long story short: if you have a micro-niche website that has advertising that can actually pay, I suggest using it as a supplement rather than a replacement.” -Ryan Eagle

Quit Scaling and Start Sniping

Which one of these is easier?

Selling 1,000 glasses of lemonade at $1.00 each or Selling 1 glass of lemonade for $1,000?

The above example is a great one because each scenario yields the same end result, $1,000 in sales. How each is reached is another story. Almost all internet marketers would take the first approach. It takes significantly less resources and skills to sell a $1.00 item as opposed to a $1,000 item. You can see the success in this pattern when you look at how many people push email submits, short forms, etc. These are typically quick sell, low payout scenarios. Apple is a great example with their App Store. It was quickly shown that you earn way more money on the Apple App Store selling a quick game for $.99 instead of spending tons of money developing a great game and trying to sell it for $9.99.

Some internet marketers have gone after the bigger fish. Usually things that have MUCH higher payouts than a standard affiliate offer but have a much smaller demographic and require a more advanced technique of selling. Geno over at AMNavigator showed one such offer, the Compete.com affiliate commission is $1,000! I think the actual sale is $5,000 for a full year of service, so the commission is 20%. Ad Hustler has a great case study where he goes after some big spenders as he sold 68 vehicles for a car dealership.

So today I am going to try and offer some insight on to one of the techniques I use to rake in some serious cash. One of the best areas to try and target a huge sale is by targeting people on Facebook. Now STOP where you are for a second. I know exactly what everyone is thinking “damn another post about scaling a campaign on Facebook by expanding campaigns to other niches”. Well this post is just about the exact opposite.

I’m a big fan of instead of trying to fire a shotgun into a crowd and hit as many targets as possible, we should use the good ole Sniper Rifle and go straight for the headshot.

The BEST and CHEAPEST way that I’ve found to do this is to get your well crafted ad displayed to a SINGLE individual…over and over and over again. The end result WILL be that this particular individual is going to click on one of your ads sooner than later. You all know what I am talking about. If someone displays enough similar ads to you, you are eventually going to click on it just to figure out wtf its all about. I like to take this on a whole other level but we can get to that later.

How The Hell Do We Target a Single User

There are a few ways to do this with blackhat techniques like just message spamming them. I however like the idea of gaining the capability to continuously harass them with non stop CPM ads. To do this we need to take advantage of FB ad’s targeting option to display an ad to someone who like’s a page. Let’s look at the 3 accounts we are going to work with here.

As you can see I will be using my own Mike Chiasson facebook account that I have FB ads on. Next I have the account of Missy Holla who is the person we want to stalk display our targeted ads to. Lastly we have Sean Hollas. (Now I know some people are going to say that the names and faces closely resemble some familiar well known people in the affiliate space…but I assure you that is just a coincidence.)

So looking at Missy’s public profile we can gather a few things. She is a woman, lives in Orlando, FL, and she already likes the Facebook page ‘Coolest Case Study Ever‘. So if we could somehow gain access to being a page admin of that Facebook page we could then design ads that only get displayed to that group.

So seeing that Missy Holla is a part of that group the first thing we need to do is go join/like the page. Most of the time the Facebook Page doesn’t display who the current admin is. If it does you can simply message them. Unfortunately most of the time we have to resort to trying to contact the admin over the actual page wall. This is an example of a message you might post.

Now when the page admin messages you back that’s when you make your request. Sometimes a little social engineering is helpful here. I typically would make some sort of suggestion like offering some cash to be the owner of the page. Since most pages aren’t really monetized by any means this is usually pretty cheap. Don’t go after the pages that have like 10,000+ likes. More look for ones that are smaller, maybe a very small friend’s local business that he was supposed to start but never did. Those sort of pages exist in abundance and could be acquired for next to nothing. On the other hand you could always create a page and try and lure your target into it. IE: “If Your Last Name is Chiasson You Kick Ass” is something I might join if someone with the last name Chiasson invited me. [true story]

Once you are admin of the page you need to go remove everyone except your Single Individual that you are trying to target. In our example that is Missy Holla.

So in our example Sean Hollas is the current page owner of ‘Coolest Case Study Ever’. He sees my request and grants me to be a page admin of the page. Now that I am a Page Admin I now get the option to generate an ad in my FB Ad’s Campaign Setup that specifically targets ONLY people who already ‘LIKE’ my page.

Unfortunately Facebook does have some minimums that you need for the ‘estimated reach’ area that is shown on the right side of the image above. I believe the number is around 100 people, so if your group has less than 100 people FB will deny the ad saying it doesn’t reach enough people. One option you have is to create a secondary FB Page and LOAD it up with 99 dummy accounts (that you won’t login to as to not have ads displayed) and add that onto the target pages. This will allow you to hit your individual user and then also fill up the necessary quote of potential displays to make your ad run.

Set your ad up to either be a high CPM of $1.00+. You won’t spend barely anything since it would just be one person viewing it.

The end result of course. Your ad showing up top on your target’s list!

 

So lets hear some of your ideas on what high end products or business ideas you would like to pitch to certain people. Obviously most ‘standard’ affiliate offers won’t be worth your time on something like this. For myself, I promote manufacturing services to purchasers and engineers at the top medical and defense companies. I talk to my sales team at my day job at a plastic injection molding facility, find out anyone they’ve spoken with in the last week, then start the grind. We’ve had numerous examples of where a customer they are trying to work on will mention a service or statistic I have on my specific landers for them. They always call me up ‘seems like your vodoo is working’.