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:

<?
session_start();
$gender=@$_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:

<?
session_start();
$religion=@$_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:

<?
session_start();
$artist=@$_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:

<?
session_start();
$lights=@$_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:

<?
session_start();
$desiredvariablename=@$_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.

Tracking

First of all, if you are direct linking you can use the dynamic tags in the URL when you submit your creatives and they will be replaced with the appropriate information. Note that you can only use these in the SUBID field of your CPA network link if you are NOT using a tracking platform. In other words, don’t put the tags directly into 202, they won’t work like that. If you are direct linking and using Prosper202 you can place the dynamic tags in the kw= field or c1=, c2=, c3= etc. when adding your creative on POF. There is not a good way to view the c1=+ variable stats in 202 so I use them solely to pass info to landing pages which I will show you a little later in this post.

Here is an example of a P202 link with dynamic tags:

http://yourtrackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=1&t202kw=USMixedC{age:}

Assuming the user is 46, this will return USMixedC46 to your prosper202 statistics in the keyword field.

If you are promoting to males and females in the campaign you can do the following: http://yourtrackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=1&t202kw=USMixedC{age:}{gender:}
to see if your visitor was male or female.

I suggest using Mr. Greens POF uploader and appending subids to creative names AND the url. In this case I would load something like this into the URL field of the uploader:

http://yourtrackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=1&t202kw=USMixedC{age:}ad
so that the ad’s subid is clearly defined from the output of the dynamic tag. Let’s say the user is 23 years old and clicks the creative HotChick9, the KW will appear in 202 as USMixedC23ad9

This is not really the best arrangement of information in the kw field but it is the best way to explain the way it works. Adjust to your own needs.

You don’t have to use 202 to do this, you can use any tracking that allows 1 or more keywords or subids.

Now that we’ve got all the easy, basic stuff out of the way, the good stuff is part 3 which I will put up in the next few days.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could use one landing page for several age groups, male or female, different interests, etc? You CAN. Even in the dating niche! Stay tuned and I’ll show you a freakishly easy way to do this.

Using dynamic tags in your ads can boost clickthrough rate, and can often bolster your conversion rate as well. If used improperly, you’ll get a horrible CTR  and you won’t even know why!

The Tags

The dynamic tags are variables on POF that get replaced with the specific information you are calling for from a users profile.

The 3 tags available are as follows:

{gender:default} –> Replaced by Male or Female
{age:default} –> Replaced by exact age of the logged on user
{state:default} –> Replaced by name of the state or province of the residence of user. (Works for UK users as well.)

You will replace “default” with a replacement tag as outlined below, or leave it out completely. ALWAYS keep the : intact or it will not work correctly, and your user will see your tag instead of the desired dynamic entry. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen ads running that literally read “Looking for {age} year old men”.

Inserting Tags Into Your Ads

In order to use these tags, you’ll place them in the ad where you want them to show. You can target US users, but call out their state within the ad to make it seem more relevant to that user, thus getting a better CTR.

Example: Sexy Singles in {state:default}

This will work, but if for some reason the state information is not available when the ad is served, it will read “Sexy Singles in default”.
To fix this, replace default with “your area” or “your city”.

You can get advanced with these dynamic tags and make your ads appear highly relevant to someone in a specific age group as well.  For instance, target males age 25-30 and build your ad like this: “Single moms looking for men {age:25}-30 years old in {state:your area}”. In this case, if a 28 year old male in Florida is served the ad, it will read “Single moms looking for men 28-30 years old in Florida”. This keeps the ad a little more realistic by keeping an age range instead of an exact age in the ad (although that can work as well). If the age is unavailable for some reason, it will still display 25-30, and your area.

That’s all there is to it! Stay tuned for the next part where I’ll show you how you can improve your tracking and conversion optimization using dynamic tags with POF and Prosper202.