Earlier this week, POF came out with some new and improved ad guidelines. In light of these new changes, I’d like to try to shed some light on the situation and tell you why it’s not all that bad.

POF Introduces an Updated Set of Guidelines

POF has grown quite a bit in the last few years. But with rising popularity with both marketers and users, POF was reportedly receiving an increasing number of complaints from their users about an excess of lewd images.

Yet, while explicit images were not permissible, pictures of shirtless men and women in provocative bikinis outdoors were almost becoming commonplace. So in an attempt to retain user experience, they came out with a new set of guidelines:

1. No Bikinis (1-piece swimsuits as well)
2. No Short Skirts (nothing shorter than mid-knee length)
3. No Bare Stomachs, ie. Midriff, on women
4. No Nude Torsos (topless males from the shoulder up are acceptable)
5. No Short Shorts
6. No Pictures of People That Look <20
7. No Images of People with a “Sexual Expression” On Their Face

Essentially, if it’s not work-appropriate, the approval team has been instructed to decline your ad. This means that if your images contain women in tight dresses or who resemble adult entertainment employees, they will likely be declined.

POF Also Introduces Retroactive Declines

Not only will new ads be required to follow the new guidelines, old ads will too. This is because for the first time, POF will be conducting ongoing retroactive denials.

Retroactive denials means ads which were previously compliant under the old guidelines will not be grandfathered in and will be subjected the same approval process as new ads, resulting in a more leveled playing field

Along with these new guidelines, there will also be a greater emphasis on consistency with the approval team. While in the past this has been a minor issue with POF, their mentioning of enforcing these rules more diligently is encouraging.

5 Things to Look Forward To With New Guidelines

At first glance, these new guidelines may be incredibly discouraging to a lot of people out there. But change isn’t always a bad thing. Before dismissing these guidelines as a completely negative thing, consider the benefits of running on a stricter advertising platform:

1. Higher Quality Leads – Abandoning superficial tactics will force marketers to rely more on creating ads with more substance.
2. Wider Variety of Offers – As a trend of higher quality leads from POF begins to develop, more advertisers will want POF’s traffic and more of it.
3. Payout Increases - At the same time, current advertisers will be more willing to pay you more for your POF traffic.
4. Greater Sustainability - With a greater volume of higher quality traffic, your chances of getting kicked off of an offer for a working campaign will decrease dramatically.
5. Equal Footing - Lastly, those annoying legacy ads that have somehow continued to undermine the compliance guidelines will finally be a thing of the past, placing you at equal footing with your competition.

The new guidelines mean that many POF marketers will have to re-think how they design their campaigns. No longer will people be able to rely on superficial, cheap tactics of raw sex appeal.

Also bear in mind that your landing pages will not be subjected to these new guidelines. So while some of your old ads may be getting declined, your landing pages will still be compliant.

Turn Lemons Into Lemonade

Think of the long-term gains. For instance, you may find that maintaining success in POF under these new conditions may inadvertently teach you how to create angles that could be applied to campaigns on other traffic sources.

As previously mentioned, without the use of lewd images, you will have to rely on your ability to tap into deeper emotional triggers to get users to click and convert resulting in a more universally applicable campaign.

Plus, while these changes were sudden, everyone appeared to find out at the same time without much notice. So while we wish that the community would have gotten a “heads up” of sorts, at least a majority of people out there got equal notice, leveling the playing field even further.

A Little Bit of Advice

There will be a lot of affiliates who will undoubtedly give up on POF because of the new guidelines, so take these upcoming weeks as an opportunity to take a higher share of POF traffic and innovate with new rising POF paradigm.

What you should also do is talk to your network AMs and advertisers about allowing POF traffic with its new advertising guidelines. Let them know that traffic quality is on its way to an upward trend and that you’d like to test their offer to see if it works for them now.

Some Final Words

Keep in mind that you still have access to one of the most comprehensive targeting ad platforms available today. While you may not be able to use the same images you used in the past, you can still target to any niche out there.

Ultimately, continue to explore new ideas and develop new angles while you have the chance.

Recently, certain landing page restrictions were lifted by the team over at POF. According to POF rep. Ben Louie, now you can include landing pages with exit pops, popunders, and email captures. This is great news for all of those landing page enthusiasts out there.

For those of you who are not familiar with these techniques however, you may be asking yourself how you can implement these elements into your POF campaigns. So in this post, I’ll show you how you can use exit pops and popunders to push your offers just a little bit more to the user and get them to act before they decide to ultimately leave.

Enter: The Exit Pop

If you don’t know what an exit pop is, it’s simply a last-ditch effort to get the user to stay on your landing page and continue on to your offer by popping up an alert message asking them to confirm their decision to navigate away from your page.

Example of a typical Exit Pop

So to make something like this, you’re going to need 2 things: a Javascript function that will make an alert box appear when the user tries to navigate away from your page, and a jquery that will set up how your alert box acts and appears.

First, download your JQuery here if you don’t already have it on your server. Next, paste in the below code above your </head> tag in your landing page.

What this script does, is open an alert window whenever the user tries to navigate away from your page by going back or closing your page. However, as noted by the “$(“a”)” , if the user clicks on any links with an ‘a’ anchor, the alert message will not pop up, and they will be able to proceed to the offer page.

Everything else is pretty explanatory.

However, perhaps you may want to go with a more subtle approach to making one last attempt at getting the user to commit to a favorable action. In which case, you can use a pop-under.

Offer Them An Alternative Offer With Popunders

A popunder is a little less invasive than an exitpop, in that it opens up the page of your choosing underneath the window that user is currently using. What that means is that after the user has navigated away from your page, a new page opens and loads (typically unbeknownst to them) and once they’ve closed out their browser, they’re met with an alternative  offer which they may find appealing. This tactic is used a lot by other sites that have more than one product or service that they’d like to offer to a user.

Luckily, adding a popunder script to your landing pages is a very easy thing to do. Just download the popunder scripts then all you have to do is paste a small bit of code above the tag of your landing page. That code looks just like this:

You then just need to paste in the URL of the alternative lander you would like to show the user. There are many ways that you can execute the use of this script like adding a squeeze page for multiple offers or simply leading the user to one offer that you think the user you’re targeting may also want to take advantage of. However, be aware that some users may not appreciate popunders, so be careful not to abuse popunders.

Some Words of Warning

These are some basic scripts, so expect basic function. If you’re big on passing through certain keywords or tokens to an exit pop or popunder, you will need to do some tweaking of the code I’ve provided here or most likely look for something completely new. I simply wanted to provide a quick and easy option for anyone not familiar with these techniques in an attempt to inspire some neat ideas.

Also, keep in mind that not every advertiser likes these two techniques, so make sure that you’re running landers that are compliant with your offers before implementing exitpops or popunders.

Ultimately, I suggest you try to stretch your legs a little with popunders and exitpops to see what you end up with!

Note: iPyxel did not receive monetary compensation for writing this review. It’s purely our own opinion.

Recently we were introduced to a new competitive research tool for Facebook called Social Ad Ninja. We’ve been using this tool for a little while now and figured it was time to share our findings with a brief review. Ahead, we’ll share with you what Social Ad Ninja has to offer followed by what we liked about Social Ad Ninja, what we believe was lacking, and what we hope to see in the future. Follow along…

A Brief Glance

When you first log in to Social Ad Ninja (SAN), you’re brought to the home page which includes some of their most recent updates and a list of the latest ads to show up in their tool. You can click into these ads to check out things like how new they are, and which type of profiles they appear in. But considering that they’re new, there’s not really a lot of information you can pull from these ads. Luckily, this site has more than just that to offer.

User Profiles

There are currently 195 profiles within the SAN system. Of these profiles, 46 have US locations wherein 26 are males and 20 females ranging from ages 14-65. Below is a quick overview of the types of profiles available.

Some profiles also include special user interests within the profile, but a majority of those are displayed in just US profiles.

Ultimately, if you’re looking to see what kind of ads are being shown to 55-yr-old female users in Finland, you would just click on “show” which would then bring up a list of ads that get shown to that profile, giving you something that looks like this:

What Each Ad Will Tell You

After you’ve selected a user profile, revealing a list of ads that get shown to that profile, you can then click on any individual ad to learn more about it. After clicking into an ad, SAN tells us a bunch of useful information like the Ad link, Ad link type which indicates whether or not the ad is for a sponsored story or fan page, the number of URL redirect links, the Days the ad has been alive, and the Other profiles that have seen this ad, thus indicating who else this ad is targeting.

All of this information will quickly come in handy when you’re trying to determine whether or not an ad you’re looking at has the potential to be successful and whether or not you can take anything away from it.

Bookmarking

While an ad may be new, or is likely to run for a very limited time, you may want to save this ad to come back to it later and observe whether or not it performs when given more time to run. Luckily, you can do this by just clicking on the “Bookmark” button towards the bottom of the page, and the ad will be saved to a list which can be accessed at any time by just clicking Bookmarks tab at the top of the page.

In the Bookmarks tab, you’ll get a brief overview of all the ads you’ve bookmarked to date, allowing you to follow the progress of each ad through its lifetime.

Shining Bright With Ad Search 2.0

In the event that you weren’t impressed with SAN before, this is where things really turn around. Clicking on the Ad Search 2.0 tab brings you to this:

In this page, you can select any number of search parameters ranging from gender, age, marital status, location, ad link type, days alive, number of redirects, and profile interests. You can also narrow your search parameters even further by searching for certain keywords in ad titles, body copy, and ad links. One thing to note about this search feature is that when you click on multiple parameters on the left, what you get is an intersection of those options as opposed to a union.

Our Thoughts

What’s any good review without some praises and critiques, eh? This is what we thought about Social Ad Ninja.

“Hitting the Mark”

Considering the easy-to-use interface combined with the ability to pull out crucial information on a wide variety of ads across a wide variety of demographics, the way in which this tool executes its job is like that of a Ninja: fast and efficient. We liked that you could view which other SAN profiles were viewing the same ad, and that we could bookmark any ad we liked with a quick snapshot of each ad. We also liked how easy it was to look for ads shown to a number of different profiles while being able to search for particular keywords in those ads. This way, we found exactly what we were looking for right away as opposed to sifting through the pile of ads.

What to Look Forward to, What We’d Like to See

As I mentioned above, while Social Ad Ninja doesn’t have as many profiles and countries as other tools, they are making attempts to expand their reach and even have a section where users can suggest target profiles. There, users can vote on existing profile suggestions or create their own. Alongside that, you can be sure that the team at Social Ad Ninja is working to catch up to their competitors around the clock, as they appear to be adding a new country about every week or so along with 2,000 new ads each day. Aside from more profiles though, we hope that soon there will be something indicating the average position of each ad, giving us further indication on the success of what we’re looking at.

All-in-all, we’re not sure on what other features Social Ad Ninja is currently working on, but we get the feeling that they won’t be hitting the brakes anytime soon. So far, its proven to be a useful tool and we hope to see more of Social Ad Ninja.