Recently, the team over at Plenty of Fish unveiled the large-and-in-charge 960×110 banner. This banner is served in the same areas as the small ads as well as the wide banners and, while at first glance, it appears as though it’s just a slightly larger version of the current 728×90 banner, it seems to be a little more than that.

So, like a child with their unwrapped toy on Christmas morning, I got really excited to play with this new banner and began testing its utility immediately. I’m sure that we will provide many case studies surrounding the 960×110 banner in the future; for now however, I would like to share with you a couple of things I’ve already found.

Preparation

The two things I wanted to test was how high I would have to bid to reach top placement, and what kind of CTR this behemoth could generate compared to the smaller banners. So in an attempt to eliminate as many variables as possible, I created a total of 4 campaigns.

The first campaign was composed solely of 960×110 banners.

The initial concept of the banners in this first campaign was to create the illusion that (3) separate 110×80 ads with (3) different headlines and (3) different body copy were being served to the user when in fact it was just one large banner. I created 20 ads like this and ran each ad until it had reached 10,000 impressions. From there, I paused the bottom 15 banners, moving forward with the top 5 banners to test further.

Next, I took all of the faux 110×80 ads within each of the 5 wide banners and created 3 separate 310×110 campaigns (1 campaigns for each headline/body copy used in the wide banners) consisting of 5 ads each resulting in a total of 4 campaigns:

1 campaign with (5) 960×110 ads
3 campaigns with (5) 310×110 ads

Note* While I could have created 110×80 ads for the 3 campaigns, I didn’t want the ad appearance to differ between the small ads and the wide banners, thus hoping to reduce the amount of variables in my discoveries.

First Discovery: More Expensive Top Placement

Much in the same way that we figured how to get top placement with the 728×90 banners, I monitored and recorded the session depth of both banner sizes after incrementally increasing the CPM bid until top banner placement was achieved. Below are the results

What the graph above represents is simply the session depth which resulted according to the set CPM bid where the blue dots represent the session depth of the small ads, and the red diamonds represent the wide banner session depth.

As you can see, top placement was not achieved until the bid was placed at $1.51, shown in the red. However, when given the same targeting criteria,  the small ads only required a bid of $0.61 to reach top placement Clearly, it is more expensive per impression to achieve top placement with the 960×110 banners than with the small ads. But if the results of the 728×90 banners were any indication of how larger banners require a higher bid, this was to be expected.

Still, I figured that these larger banners would have some value. The question still remained as to whether or not these wide banners would bring anything new to the table. I then decided to look into the performance of both banner sizes where I came across my second discovery…

Second Discovery: Cheaper Clicks

I didn’t expect to find this when first looking at the data gathered while running these campaigns, but it turned out that while although I was bidding much higher for the 960×110 banners, I was getting clicks at one-third of the cost of the 310×110 banners.

Keeping in mind that the wide banners I used were just a composite of 3 “faux 110×80” ads, the wide banner didn’t include any flashy design features or utilize tons of white space. However, for whatever reason, users clicked on the wide banners for a campaign CTR of 0.221% while the small ad campaigns received an abysmal average of 0.024%. I’ll admit, the small ads looked terrible, and the purpose of their design and creation wasn’t to perform, so I figured they would bomb. But for some reason when combined with 2 other similar ads in the form of a 960×110 banner, clicks jumped up significantly. We could go on for days on theories regarding these results, but for now we’ll just accept them for face value. Ultimately, what we were left with was a final CPC of $0.48 for the wide banners and a total CPC of $1.41 for the small ads.

As for conversions, there were really only a few. With a total EPC of $0.27, the wide-banner campaign never became profitable, but considering how zero conversions were expected, I wouldn’t exactly call that a loss.

Last Thoughts

The major thing I wanted to discover with these new banners was whether or not they were just another hyped up banner size that POF released to lure in unsuspecting marketers or if they could bring some real value to the table. Ultimately, and I believe the data shows, these banners should definitely be making a huge splash in POF’s system. The clicks seem to be there, so they’re capable of grabbing the user’s attention; and while you may have to bid higher for better placement, the higher CTR will certainly make up for it.
But, as always, test and find out for yourself…

We reached a huge milestone a couple days ago: we launched our long overdue POFpro platform into private beta! If you haven’t been following our updates, POFpro is an all-in-one platform to help you automate, optimize, manage, and scale your POF advertising operation. With it, you get everything centralized in one place. It’s a completely seamless process.

Our initial beta testers I have got to say have all been PHENOMENAL, giving us great feedback and bug reporting and being very patient about it all. The consensus has been overwhelmingly positive once you get everything setup, so I am very very optimistic about the future of this thing. The hardest part will just be getting people to try it out!

What we’re going to do now is limit the beta to a smaller group of testers so we can sort out the bugs and kinks before releasing it to a public beta. At that point, anyone can sign up for free until we can roll out a stable release. You’ll get at least 30 days to try everything without having to give us any credit cards or anything.

Hit us up at Affiliate Summit West 2013 in Vegas!

In the midst of all this, we’re also getting on a flight to Vegas tomorrow morning to attend Affiliate Summit West. If you’re going to be there, please hit us up. We’ll be at all the main meetups and parties. Just email/tweet/whatever. If I have my laptop with, please ask for a demo of POFpro if you’re interested.

That’s it, just a short update. Can’t wait to see some familiar and new faces this weekend!

How would you like to increase your landing page conversions without spending any money on testing, risking virtually nothing? Recently, we came across an interesting website called Pluralis. Pluralis is a crowd-sourced marketplace that allows landing page designers/copywriters or “optimizers” to put their skills to work by connecting them with online businesses that are seeking to increase their conversion rates. Why should this interest you? Well, crowd-sourcing is simply outsourcing a task to a group of people and can be a great alternative to paying one specific business or individual a set amount for their services. Also, if Pluralis’ average resulting conversion rate lift doesn’t excite you, then perhaps the fact that it’s virtually risk-free will. Let’s take a look into Pluralis.

Creating a Contest

While Pluralis was built for businesses seeking to increase their conversion rates (Contest Holders) as well as individuals seeking to optimize landing pages (Optimizers), the main focus of this review will be aimed at the contest holders.

Description and Brief

Once you’ve created your Pluralis account, you can dive right in to creating a contest to increase your landing page conversions with just 6 steps by first clicking on the “Create A Contest” tab. The first two steps require that you create a Description and Brief. Here, you are simply required to give the url location of your landing page and offer page to which you would like to lead your users along with a set of guidelines for your landing page. You can provide content you want the optimizers to use as well as content that you don’t want optimizers to use. This is pretty useful because it allows you to give some directions to optimizers and increases the likelihood that you’ll get positive results.

Content Blocks

Next you can select which elements in your landing page that you would like to have optimized. Selection of each element, or “content block”, is a pretty straight forward process and gives you control over how much or how little variation you would like to see in your landing pages. Below is an example of a landing page where the contest holder has chosen to test their Call-to-Action, a strapline, some bulletpoints, and a couple of other elements indicated by a purple borders:

Rewards,Payment and Script

The fourth and perhaps most crucial step in any contest is the rewards section. Here, you determine what a conversion lift is worth to you and your site. However, you don’t need to decide on the same reward amount regardless of conversion lift. For instance, you can choose to pay the optimizer $1,400 for a conversion lift between 9-25% and $2,000 for anything greater, just like in the image below:

While keeping in mind that higher rewards will gain the attention of more optimizers, you get to choose how little or how much you are willing to pay for a conversion boost.

Lastly, you just need to set up a payment with Pluralis, granting them permission to charge up to the full reward amount if the respective conversion lift is achieved along with the $49.95 launch fee of your contest. Then you just insert Pluralis’ tracking script into your landing page and you’re ready to watch the landing page variations come in.

Initiating and Monitoring Your Contest

After a while, you will get some responses for your contest. Here you can either deny the optimizer’s landing page with some or no feedback on things you would like them to alter, or you can approve their page for testing. Once you’ve selected at least 4 landing pages, live traffic will be sent to your landing pages and the contest will have officially started. Next you can monitor the performance of the landing pages in your contest where things like total users, conversions, conversion rates, and conversion lift are all recorded.

Below is an example of one contest with the original landing page along with 4 variations from optimizers.

Once the contest has commenced, you can go in and view the various landing pages. This is a great opportunity to see if any of the optimizers implemented any of the ideas you had thus giving you something you can work with or avoid in the future depending on its performance.
As you can see, none of the landing pages actually resulted with a conversion lift. Meaning that ultimately, no winner will be determined and no reward will be paid. However, there’s good news. As the contest holder, if no winner is found, you can choose to restart the contest for a new round of submissions without being required to pay another launch fee.

However, if there is a tie in your contest the winners split the reward amount posted. Lastly, in the event that there is 1 winner, the single winner will receive the respective reward amount for the conversion rate lift they generated in a winner-take-all fashion. Thus your contest concludes and you’re left with a higher-converting landing page at a price of your own choosing.

Final Thoughts

There are some things that still need to be worked on with Pluralis. The most obvious is the design/editing interface from the optimizer’s side. Optimizers don’t need a any HTML or PHP knowledge to work on a page because Pluralis has developed a quick and easy designing interface that allows optimizers to click on content blocks and edit them on the spot with almost no coding. However, with Pluralis’ simplistic design/editing interface comes restrictions. Meaning that while you may see variations in copy and images, you’re not going to see innovative JavaScript elements, Bootstrap elements, etc… While this may not seem like a bad thing at first glance, you may find limitations in your landing page’s conversion lift.

However, you may not find that to be an issue. A rep from Pluralis informed me that they typically see conversion lifts between 11% and 25%. Combine that with the average reward of about $1000 and you may find Pluralis to be a much less expensive alternative to hiring copywriters and designers yourself. Keep in mind, if there is no conversion lift, you pay nothing; just re-launch the contest. This is a huge benefit to crowd-sourcing that you won’t find anywhere else.

Ultimately, Pluralis is an innovative product that you should definitely check out for yourself. It’s a great opportunity to increase your conversion rates at a price you set and with very little risk.