Off-White Hat » ppc http://offwhitehat.com Earth's Most Trusted Off-White-Hat Affiliate Marketing Resource Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:42:18 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 List of Ad Networks (Courtesy of Google) http://offwhitehat.com/list-of-ad-networks-courtesy-of-google/ http://offwhitehat.com/list-of-ad-networks-courtesy-of-google/#comments Fri, 09 Jul 2010 06:09:56 +0000 admin http://offwhitehat.com/?p=309 If you’ve logged into Adsense recently, you may have noticed the following alert:

google adsense alert

If you go into your “Adsense Setup” section and choose “Allowed Sites”, you will see an option that lets you block all of these external ad networks, block individual networks, or allow all of them (default). For those of you who are constantly on the lookout for new places to buy traffic (and fear the backlash of such an inquiry on Wickedfire), this could be a pretty handy little list.

Here I have copy + pasted the list (sort of), and even gone above and beyond the call of duty and hyper-linked each one to its respective site. Well, most of them. Keep in mind that many of these companies only deal with big clients, sizable media buys, etc. However, some do offer CPC advertising, such as Chitika, AdPepper, Pulse 360, etc. Also, I should point out that I’m not endorsing these networks in any way, as I have only used a handful of them personally. Now, without further adieu…

Google Certified Ad Networks (as of July 8th, 2010):

Please not that the list was pruned of some duplicates (i.e. Adcompany UK, Adcompany EU, etc) and also some Google properties.

I hope you get buttloads of use out of it.

]]> http://offwhitehat.com/list-of-ad-networks-courtesy-of-google/feed/ 4 A Profitable Facebook Campaign – Full Details http://offwhitehat.com/profitable-facebook-campaign/ http://offwhitehat.com/profitable-facebook-campaign/#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 09:33:28 +0000 admin http://offwhitehat.com/?p=105 If you’re one of those newer affiliate marketers who is frustrated with losing money on PPC and need a bit of positive reinforcement to help motivate you and realize the potential in this here crazy business, then this post is for you.

To be honest, I’m getting pretty sick of Facebook. What a royal pain in the ass to have to constantly re-create and re-submit ads after they are disabled. I had a good run with them, but now I’m getting more involved in other things and I think our relationship is just about over.

To celebrate the burning of this bridge, I’m going to go ahead and outline in detail a very laser targeted dating campaign that will make you a few bucks. Of course, if enough people stumble upon this article and run it, it will probably become worthless rather quick. It definitely won’t make you rich (because of the limited size of the target audience), but it has always been profitable in my experience. I’ve been running this campaign and slight variations on it for over a year.

It’s also worth mentioning that this of course doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to Facebook. I’m sure with a little imagination you can find ways to run similar campaigns on other platforms.

Nerds Love Asian Chicks

Okay, to be fair, plenty of non-nerds have an inclination towards Asian women, but never mind that for now. From testing various keywords with different dating sub-niches, I determined that guys who are heavily into sci-fi, anime, RPGs, and martial arts are also heavily into asian girls. Not a huge surprise perhaps, but something you might not have considered.

You could always build an Asian-oriented (no pun intended) landing page, but I’ve always found landing pages to be unnecessary when promoting dating offers on FB. That is, as long as you find a decent offer/lander from the merchant.

The best converting offer I’ve used this with was Spicey or Sweet which I was running through Affiliate.com (who no longer has it). They had me at $3.50/lead. Copeac still has Spicey or Sweet with several landers, but I don’t see an Asian one currently. If you ask your AM nicely, they might be able to hook you up with one.  Ads4Dough also has Spicey or Sweet. You will probably have to cloak the offer to something a little less “suggestive” to get it approved by Facebook.

Check out the Finding Singles offer from Neverblue. They have some customization options you can utilize, such as changing the graphic on the LP (say, from a blond white girl to an asian girl in glasses). You can also change the title text on the LP. The Facebook nazis seem to be alright with Finding Singles. You might also want to try actually running it. It doesn’t convert as well as Spicey, in my experience, but it was still profitable (about $0.19 EPC).

If you know of any other Asian themed dating offers, feel free to test them out as well.

The Campaign Details

Since I promised full details, here are the exact interest keywords I targeted for one particular ad:

Anime, Anime Club, Anime/Manga, Animemanga, Bleach, Chobits, Dragonball Z, End of Evangelion, Final Fantasy, Full Metal Alchemist, gundam seed, Gundam Seed Destiny, Gundam Wing, Hellsing, Inuyasha, Love Hina, Naruto, Naruto Shippuuden, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Pokemon, Prince of Tennis, Robotech, Wolf’s Rain, Yu Yu Hakusho orrr yugioh

Feel free to add your own. I can’t remember exactly (that’s from a now-disabled ad) but I believe the target audience was around 100k. Single males, 18+, of course. Here, take the creative, too, you greedy bastard:

I ran that particular ad for several months, only in the evening hours and consistently on Thurs, Fri, and Saturday. I would throw in other days randomly as well.

If you have any experience with FB ads, you know that an ad’s effectiveness will dry up if you run it too often. At the peak of this one’s performance, it was getting a CTR of nearly 2%. The all-time CTR (after running it after it had cooled down significantly) was %0.30. I had to pay 11 cents per click to get decent volume, but I could run it at 3 cents without getting a “bid too low” warning from Facebook.

I ran this ad using a URL redirect which some of the time directed to Finding Singles with Neverblue and some of the time to Spicey or Sweet (Asian) with Affiliate.com. Here are the stats from Affiliate.com:

“Main” of course is the subid of the campaign detailed above. “you2b” is shitty YouTube traffic which obviously doesn’t do anything spectacular. “MA” as you can see has a slightly better conversion rate. “MA” stands for “martial arts”. It was an identical campaign except it was targeting males 18+ with martial arts related keywords on their profile. This target was somewhat bigger, but for whatever reason the CTR just wasn’t quite as good and I had to pay around I think something like $0.19-$0.25 per click.

Since I’m feeling generous, here is another creative that was effective with similar campaigns:

Not quite as effective as the first, but still pretty good. Hopefully those two creatives will give you an idea of what works and what you can realistically get approved.

In Conclusion

Like I said, this specific campaign isn’t going to make you rich, because of the low volume. But hopefully it will be that “ice breaker” for someone out there, or at the very least give you a little insight on a successful campaign to inspire you. I’m willing to bet some of you already have some ideas on how to take the fundamentals of this campaign and apply/scale elsewhere.

Best of luck.

EDIT:

I guess it wouldn’t be full disclosure if I didn’t give you the title/body of that ad.

]]> http://offwhitehat.com/profitable-facebook-campaign/feed/ 7 Bullshit, thy name is Facebook http://offwhitehat.com/bullshit-thy-name-is-facebook/ http://offwhitehat.com/bullshit-thy-name-is-facebook/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:09:03 +0000 admin http://offwhitehat.com/?p=59 I know talking about Facebook Ad trouble is sort of like beating a dead horse now, but this is my damn blog and I reserve the right to bitch.

Everyone who is in the know knows that IQ offers are hot. By hot, of course, I mean they’re converting wonderfully and not quite as regulated as other profitable offers. At least, that is the impression one gets while perusing Facebook with the sheer abundance of IQ ads to the right.

Now, I know the old song and dance; resubmit, tweak, resubmit, resubmit, tweak, resubmit, until eventually you get an intern that isn’t a complete tool to approve your ad. That’s all fine and good. But after having about a dozen IQ ads rejected, I decided to do a little experiment.

Instead of linking to the Challenge IQ offer at Ads4Dough (which is the one I so dearly wanted to promote), I decided to link somewhere else. Are you ready for it? I linked to an ACTUAL FREE IQ WEB SITE. That’s right. I found a non-profit (as far as I could tell) website that offered 100% free, legitimate IQ tests.

Knowing fully well that most Facebook interns shit their pants when you use the word “free” in your ad copy, I made sure to omit it. I then submitted two separate ads both linking to the free site, both using puzzle type images with very simple title and body messages that got the point across (while still avoiding the term ‘free’).

The result? I bet you can guess.

The content advertised by this ad is restricted. Per sections 8 and 9 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines, this content is prohibited from being advertised on Facebook. Ads for this product, service or site will not be accepted in any form, and may result in your account being disabled.

So, now Facebook is basically threatening me for trying to spend my advertising dollars to sate the desires of their enthusiastic userbase to demonstrate their intelligence quotient so that they may pat themselves on the back and revel in their computer generated recognition. As retarded as it may be, college kids love that shit. So in essence, I was trying to spend my own money to enhance user experience, and I was not allowed to do so. What a shame.

Oh, but don’t think I’m giving up. I’ve already started tracking down young women that work for Facebook ON Facebook, then cross checking their names on MySpace and adding them as friends (using a different social network I think will rule out any chance of suspicion). Budding online romances will soon ensue, followed shortly by a flurry of ads for online casinos and fuck buddies on Facebook. And you’re all gonna be like WTF!?

Psh, Facebook. More like poopbook.

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