This simple fact changes the entire nature of the web as we know it. Many Pay Per Sale offers use videos that cannot be played on some mobile phones, and frankly… nobody is going to sit there and watch a 10 minute sales video on their phone, it’s inconvenient. In addition, any CPL offers that have more than 3-6 fields will probably be abandoned as well, especially if they are on pages not optimized for mobile viewing.

What to do?

You have 3 options:

• Limit your ads to non-mobile viewers only
• Run your ads to everyone and accept the bleeding (some ad networks don’t even offer platform targeting)
• Run your ads to everyone, but redirect mobile traffic to a more reasonable funnel

In the 3rd case, you have a lot of options. For instance, if you’re running a dating offer you can redirect mobile traffic to a mobile dating offer instead, pretty straightforward. You may also be able to work with the offer provider for a host and post type of arrangement and actually build a mobile optimized lander, and in most cases your payout will remain the same which is a HUGE plus since alot of mobile offers have lower payouts than their desktop counterparts.

If you’re promoting an offer that uses a video sales page, you can redirect mobile traffic to a squeeze page that basically says “WHOA there buddy! This video is so AWESOME you’ll want to watch it on your home computer with the speakers blasting – so enter your email and I’ll shoot you the link so you don’t miss out.” The benefits here are two-fold: You capture their email address which means you can continue to remind them about the offer and promote new offers to them, and you actually have a chance at converting from the original click instead of completely losing the lead.

The Method

There are a few commercially available scripts that detect mobile traffic, but free is king so I’ve been using the php-mobile-detect class available for download from Google ‘s code repository. It’s a small and fast PHP class and can be used to display different content based on the platform being used (iOS, android, etc). That’s great but the best part about the class is that you can detect between traffic originating on a mobile phone vs a tablet. This is important because I actually experience a relatively high conversion rate on tablet traffic visiting desktop optimized pages. Something about the iPad makes it really fun to watch a sales video or fill out a 3 page form.

Once you download the php class, upload it your server and use php’s include() function on your page and instantiate the class somewhere near the top of the page:

include("Mobile_Detect.php");
$detect = new Mobile_Detect();

Now all you have to do is feed it some logic. Let’s say we have a text link to an offer, but want to use a different link for mobile traffic:

if ($detect->isMobile()) {
    $url = 'http://example.com/mobileoffer';
}
else {
    $url = 'http://example.com/regularoffer';
}

echo '<a href="' .$url. '">Meet Hot Chicks</a>';

Now the link will point to the mobile offer for mobile users, and the regular offer to desktop users. Pretty simple stuff, huh?

You can go as far as you want with this — create mobile specific landers, etc.

But you don’t have to limit this to landers or redirection for PPC/display stuff. Why not detect mobile traffic on your blog and display ads for mobile offers or offers that are more suitable for mobile traffic instead? How about dynamically insterting a “Click Here to Call Us!” button for your eCommerce sites or Pay Per Call landers? How about ALWAYS reverting to a squeeze page for offers that have long sales videos or software downloads so you still may get credit for that sale even if they go to their desktop to complete the offer instead?

Every little bit helps, and when you stop the bleeding it will have a positive effect on your bottom line.

Anyway, that’s not the point. Things have gone absolutely crazy for me and my life has changed quite a bit since then BUT I never left the game. More or less I just put away ALL distractions and have been working on some VERY interesting projects over the last few months. Don’t worry, I won’t hold out on you, you’ll find out soon enough what I’m talking about.

In the works:

• Some free tools for you guys to use on the site. I have become borderline obsessive with overdelivering lately and I go the extra mile to make sure I provide stuff you can actually USE and hopefully stuff you won’t find anywhere else (not for free anyway).
• A couple BADASS wordpress plugins based off some custom functionality I have built into several of my sites recently. If you use WordPress and you make monies online, you’re gonna want this. These will be rolling out shortly. May have some free copies for a few folks…if you’re an experienced affiliate and you’d be interested in being a part of a focus group and giving a review, post a comment and I’ll see what I can make happen. Stay tuned.
• An even more badass software platform that I’m going to keep under wraps for now. Let’s just say testing my ugly prototype version has been VERY successful for me, and I have spent several nights awake thinking of ways I can pack it full of features and functionality to save you time and make you more money. This will probably end up being a fully hosted solution, and at a price point for people who are serious about making huge money online and already have an idea of what they’re doing. I’ve got an itch to make this an invite only thing and I will probably only accept 10 or so users out the gate. I am currently performing stress testing and putting finishing touches on. I hope to make this available within the next month.

I leave you with a shot of the Lamborghini Aventador I photographed while visiting the Lamborghini Factory in St. Agata, Italy

I will be contacting you ASAP.

Everyone else, thanks for your support and keep watching! I’ll be doing more fun things like this in the future.

I have been having some issues with my PC but I will post the winner Monday the 19th. The winner will be chosen from the pool of users who ‘liked’ 3dolla as of the 16th. I am making this post from my phone.

The winner will be posted here as well as on FB. I’m trying to think of a way to make it up to you guys for the delay. Post a comment if you have any suggestions

Check out her findings here:
http://blog.ads.pof.com/2011/09/06/shannons-guide-on-how-to-advertise-to-women-part-1/

BTW if you’ve been working on POF for long, you’ve probably had thousands of your ads go across Shannon’s screen for approval. She’s not some random person fresh out of marketing school, she’s knows POF, and she knows how an ad should engage women.

The fact is, those of us that do this – those of that live, breathe, eat, and sleep this – it is what we were created to do. I can’t count on my fingers and toes how many people I know that have asked me to teach them what I do, and I’ve even tried a few times. It’s never the exact same reason – but they always fail or give up before they even get started, and it’s hard for me to really truly understand that.

When you get down to it, there’s alot of reasons people fail at online marketing. Some people just don’t “get it” and you can’t find a way to break it down further than that. Some people are just too lazy. Some people just don’t have the drive. Some people don’t have the BALLS to lose a thousand dollars in a day to find something that can make them ten thousand by the end of the week.

All of that to say this: If someone you personally know or speak to mentions that they want to get started, give them a few quick pointers, and tell them where they can go to start learning. Once they take some leaps of faith, then you can start to help them here and there. If it’s something they TRULY want and something they are actually capable of doing, they will be able to get to a certain point on their own, just like you did. Save yourself alot of time and headaches trying to “fast track” your friends, and let them learn similar to the way you did, through a genuine desire to do whatever it takes to make moneys online.

OKCupid did some research based on response rates across various races between members of the opposite sex. The numbers are actually pretty interesting and can be used as a guide for predicting how your target demographic will respond to your dating creatives.

Here is what they found regarding the way females of a particular race respond to men of a particular race:

So a few things stick out here:

• Black WOMEN are the MOST responsive across the board
• White MEN are the MOST responded to across the board
• White, Asian, and Hispanic women seem to prefer white
  men much more than men of any other race

Now let’s take a look at how men respond:

Observations here:

• Men respond at almost twice the rate of women on average (kind of expected that)
• Men respond the LEAST to black women (even black men!)
• White men are the LEAST responsive across the board
• Middle-eastern men are the MOST responsive across the board

Pretty interesting stuff here. The results of this research are useful as guides even beyond interracial targeting. For instance, middle-eastern men being the MOST responsive male race demographic? That wouldn’t have been my first guess. How many people are specifically targeting middle-eastern men? Testing creatives against this research could prove that you can actually increase profit by breaking down your campaigns and strategically bidding based on CTR and conversion by race.

Marriage Trends by Race

I also found some information that shows trends based on marriage statistics and they are also pretty interesting. Check this out:

• In 73% of black/white marriages, the husband is black and the wife is white
• In asian/white marriages it’s over 3 times more likely that the husband is white
• Asian/black marriages are rare but it’s over 6 times more likely that the husband is black in these marriages
• Asian men appear to prefer asian women in marriage, while asian women are more likely to marry outside their race.
• Hispanic men and women are almost equal in their preferences to marry outside their race

So what does this all mean?

Well it means that even if this data doesn’t translate directly to the results you’ll see with advertising, it shows that there are HUGE biases in the interracial dating niche. Testing against these biases can mean the difference between a profitable campaign and a outright loser. Simple things like using creatives with black men targeting white women instead of the opposite can make or break your campaign.

On the bright side, when biases are very strong, you can expect reasonable consistency once you have the data – which usually means it’s easier to scale and your campaigns will last longer.

Please leave a comment and if you’d like to see the rest of the research data, check out the rest here:
> OKCupid – How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get
> LoveToKnow – Statistics on Interracial Dating

1. Locate the facebook widget on the side of this page as pictured below.
2. Within the facebook widget, locate the like button.
3. Click it.

I know it’s quite an ordeal, but for your efforts I will reward 1 lucky winner. As a side note, it’s not really “free” because, well, I have to pay for it… but free in the sense that you don’t!

The winner will be chosen randomly and announced Sept 16th, 2011.

Gogogogogogo!

But what if I told you that you’re only hitting the tip of the iceberg here? This post is quite long but I hope you stick with me because this is really valuable information.

If you read my last blog post on dynamic landing pages with POF, you already know the basics of how this works. You take your &c1= from your prosper202 link and append POF’s dynamic tags like {gender:default} or {age:default} to the target URL so they pass through to your lander. You save your pages in .php format instead of html and add this little tidbit to the top of your landing page code:

<?
$gender=@$_GET['c1'];
$age=@$_GET['c2'];
?>

and then dynamically display the values in your page using <?=$age?> or <?=$gender?> etc. Once you’ve got that down and working, it’s time to advance.

Taking Your Dynamic Landers To The Next Level

One of the great things about POF is it allows SO many ways to target your demographic. Instead of limiting yourself with the tags that POF provides you, you can really get fancy and start adding your own custom tokens to your landing page URLs and actually call out demographic information in your lander without having to change the lander itself.

Awhile back, I was able to take ONE proven lander with high CTR on broad traffic and, using dynamic tags, make it work for 13 different demographics.

Basically, I used that same landing page and set up 13 different campaigns. Each campaign was identical aside from 1 thing, RELIGION. I had the following PHP code at the top of my pages code:

<?
$religion=@$_GET['c1'];
?>

For each campaign I simply changed the c1= variable to the name of the religion I was targeting in the link. So my click-thru URLs on pof looked like this:
http://trackingdomain.com/index.php?t202id=999&c1=Christian&t202kw=keywordhere
http://trackingdomain.com/index.php?t202id=999&c1=Catholic&t202kw=keywordhere
http://trackingdomain.com/index.php?t202id=999&c1=Lutheran&t202kw=keywordhere

Then on my page (in the header for instance), the code looks something like this: Date A <h1><?=$c1?> Girl?</h1> and will of course display whatever variable I entered in the URL.
Here’s a few screenshots of it in action:

[Show as slideshow]

Now, don’t think you have to use prosper202 for this to work, this works for any PHP page, and in my opinion (as far as tracking goes) works even better with CPVLab.  In the code $variablenamehere=@$_GET['urltokenhere']; as long as your are calling the $variablenamehere part in your page and the urltokenhere matches the token you used to pass it through the URL, you can name these whatever the heck you want. If you target people that love bacon and you want to pass is through a token called “a” and assign it to the variable $favfood, your link can be http://trackingdomain.com/landingpage.php?a=bacon. Your php code at the top of the landing page will be <? session_start(); $favfood=@$_GET['a']; ?>, and when you call it out on the page you’ll use <?=$favfood?>.  Hopefully this is making sense.

Still with me?

Good, because this is where the real fun starts. The beauty of dynamically inserting information with PHP variables is that it doesn’t stop at simple text insertion. You can dynamically insert these values into ANYTHING. The title, links, javascript or jquery pop-up alerts, you name it.

You can even dynamically change the pictures that show up on the page. Don’t believe me?

Check this page out: http://3dolla.com/dynexample/example.php?artist=Eminem&age=18&state=Florida

Now, that is one ugly ugly page, but I just whipped it together to show you what can be done. Go up to the address bar and change the artist= variable to either Shakira or Kesha and hit enter and see what happens. You can also change the age= variable to any number you like, or the state= variable to any state you like. Pretty nifty huh?

The code found before the <html> tag in this example looks like this:

<?
$artist=@$_GET['artist'];
$age=@$_GET['age'];
$state=@$_GET['state'];
?>

And the dynamic image swapping is accomplished by naming the pictures found on the page Eminem.jpg, Shakira.jpg, etc. The img code looks like this: <img src=”<?=$artist?>.jpg”> so that the value stored in artist= is passed directly to the image source address and it shows the correct picture.

You can change as many pictures as you want at once. If you have a dating landing page that you are using to target a range of males of different of ages, you can have an image set of younger women that you display 20-35 year olds and a set of older images that you display to the 45+ demographic. For your younger demographic, just pass agerange=young and name all your images young_1.gif, young_2.gif, etc, and use the image tags <img src=”<?=$agerange?>_1.gif”> and for your older demo pass agerange=mature and repeat the process. Get creative with this! You can use the same page to show all blonde chicks, all brunette chicks, tall guys, short guys, fat guys, skinny guys. The possibilities are endless.

More Advanced Techniques

I want to cover 1 last thing you can do using custom url tokens. You can actually switch the content of an ENTIRE page or just portions of a page by using switch.
This is useful if you want to display either an entirely different page based on the token that gets passed, or if you have a table or some other large chunk of html you want to switch dynamically.

I made a quick example of this which you can see here: http://3dolla.com/dynexample/lights.php?lights=off

Just follow the instructions on the page

The top code is:

<?
$lights=@$_GET['lights'];
?>

And the code that switches the content is:

<?
switch ($lights)
{
case off:
echo “<p>The Lights Are Off.</p>
<p><img src=’moneyoff.jpg’ width=’500′ height=’374′><br>
You see something large ahead of you but you’re not quite sure what it is.</br>
Go to the address bar and change lights=off to lights=on and hit enter (if you dare!) </p>“;
break;

case on:
echo”<p>The Lights Were Off, But You Cleverly Turned Them On.</p>
<p><img src=’moneyon.jpg’ width=’500′ height=’374′></p>
<p>You now see that you are standing in a room full of your own internet monies that you have made.<br />
In addition to US Currency you have taken your strategies international and also have a nice bundle of foreign cash.<br />
You now feel enlightened and have the uncontrollable urge to tell all your friends about 3dolla.com“;
break;
}?>

In this example, the variable we are using from the URL is lights= and it is storing in the $lights PHP variable. The switch code is saying SWITCH content based on the $lights variable, and the case portion is saying that if the value of $lights is off, show this code, but if the value of $lights is on, show this code instead.  You can add as many “cases” as you want

A stripped down version for you below. Replace X and Y with whatever you are passing through the URL

Top code:

<?
$desiredvariablename=@$_GET['desiredURLtoken'];
?>

Content switching code:
<?
switch ($desiredvariablename)
{
case X:
echo “HTMLCODEHERE“;
break;

case Y:
echo”HTMLCODEHERE“;
}?>

Please note that when you echo html code in PHP you need to change any quotation marks used in the HTML code to apostrophes instead or it will break the code.

There are more cool things you can do with PHP and if you guys like this I would be happy to do more posts like this in the future.

Please feel free to ask any questions below!

From the previous posts in this series you should already know how to pass the dynamic variables though the URL to your tracking link or landing pages. Quick refresher, add the desired tag, ie. {gender:default}, directly into the target URL on POF or in Mr. Green’s POF uploader as either a &c1= token, or your own custom token.

Custom token you say? Yessir (or ma’am).  This is where this gets powerful, big money-little work powerful — but since it doesn’t apply only to POF I will be covering it in a followup post.  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, I want to make sure you understand how it works.

The Code

First of all, you are going to need to save your landers as .php files instead of .html — if you’re new to this sort of thing don’t worry, the only thing this does is tell your server to look for PHP code inside the page and process it. It won’t affect the HTML on the page at all.

Okay, so you’re passing these dynamic tags through the URL and you need your page to GRAB them and USE them in your copy. Now, let’s assume you are passive the {gender:default} token through the &c1= variable, and the age token through the c2 variable. You’ll want to paste this into the code of your landing page BEFORE the <html> tag. This should be the very first thing in your code:

<?
session_start();
$gender=@$_GET['c1'];
$age=@$_GET['c2'];
?>

This tells your page to GET the tokens that got passed through the url from the c1 and c2 variables and ASSIGN them to $gender and $age. Keep in mind, YOU define that the php variable is called, so it doesn’t HAVE to be $gender, it could be $g, $sex, $roflmao, you get the idea. Most of the time your lander is more targeted toward men or women anyway, so you can assign any available dynamic POF tag that will be useful to you on your lander or for tracking.

Now that we have grabbed the gender and age from the URL and stored them in a PHP variable, we can now echo that variable anywhere in the page. ANYWHERE. Want to insert the age somewhere? we have to do is use the following code to insert it:

<?=$age?>

So to use this in your header, instead of hard-coding “25 Year Old Men Wanted”  your code will say <h1><?=$age?> Year Old Men Wanted</h1>
A 25 year old visitor in this case will see “25 Year Old Men Wanted” while a 37 year old visitor will see, you guessed it: “37 Year Old Men Wanted“.

Now if you want to get really fancy, you can use the tag to modify an age RANGE. If you have segmented out a campaign across several age ranges (which I always recommend for testing), you can take your 45-49 age range and use &c2={age:default}-50 in the actual target url and now if a 47 year old male visits the page the header will read “47-50 Year Old Men Wanted”.

You can also of course use the dynamic POF tokens as way to geotarget on a state level which is pretty awesome. Instead of passing {gender:default} gender through &c1=, pass {state:default} and in the PHP code at the top of the page, assign the value to $state instead of $gender. Now you can call on it like this: <h1><?=$age?> Year Old <?=$state?> Men Wanted</h1> and your lander will now display “47-50 Year Old Texas Men Wanted“. If you are using State-level geotargeting this is great because it doesn’t rely on outside sources so there is no chance of affecting load time on your lander.

Now you can easily use any of POF’s tokens to dynamically change your landing page so that it speaks directly to your target demographic.

I am going to be covering some really advanced tactics on my next post that will show you some really evil tricks to dynamic landing pages that you can use for ANY traffic source including POF that will allow you to get even better CTR’s and boost your ROI.

Please feel free to post any questions or suggestions you have below.