How to Make POF Campaigns that Never Burnout

For every traffic source, affiliates always dread the day that their profitable campaigns reach a stage of burnout or banner blindness. The same complaints seem to hold for POF, but to tell you the truth, I personally have not really experienced it.  I believe that if you make your campaigns a certain way in POF, they will almost NEVER die. Here’s how I do it…

The key to significantly reducing the probability of campaign burnout (or eliminate it completely), is to reduce ad exposure for any given ad to any given person. When exposure is reduced, banner blindness becomes a non-issue. Your campaigns might go through periods of volatility, so they might not be profitable some days, or even possibly some weeks, but across a long period, they should remain profitable if they have been tested and proven by a significant amount of data already.

The main components to making long lasting campaigns are relatively simple:

First, when making campaigns, you must set frequency caps for all campaigns to the POF minimum, which is 3. I typically set this frequency cap to “per visit”, but you can set it to “per day” to reduce exposure even more. This ensures that each POF user only sees the ads in a particular campaign a maximum of 3 times per visit, per hour, or per day.

Second, when targeting login counts, always target in segments of 50. So if you want to capture login counts 0-150 with your current angle, then create 3 separate campaigns with login counts 0-50, 50-100, and 100-150. These campaigns should be running different ads. This ensures that as the life of a POF user moves forward, the ads you show them are refreshed after a certain number of impressions. If you have frequency cap set to 3 per visit, then they will see ads in a particular campaign a maximum of 150 times total before seeing a new batch of ads.

Third, make sure you have at least 5 ads running in each campaign at any given time. Having at least this many ads keeps a reasonable number of ads in rotation so that the user rarely sees the same ad thrice in a row out of the 3 impressions you are going to show them in a campaign.

Lastly, when a proven campaign starts fizzing out, don’t give up on it right away. Test a few very different CPM price points and see if it makes a difference. The CPM bid of a campaign can have a dramatic impact on ROI and profit. Look for a complete post on CPM bidding and optimization in the near future.

If after implementing the above strategy your campaigns are still burning out, then it can be attributed to a period of increased competition on POF. Meaning, during the testing of your campaign, competition was relatively low. After you’ve vetted your profitable campaign, competition has increased, rendering your previously collected data somewhat irrelevant to the new competitive atmosphere.

This is what happened to a few of my campaigns that indeed did burn out permanently. In most cases, however, the competition isn’t permanent, and I simply rerun the campaigns to check for profitability after weeks or months.

Honestly, I can probably count the number of times I had to fail a proven campaign (one that has been profitable for weeks) on one hand. The campaigns that consistently make me money have been running for months and months, and some have even been running for over a year. There are many POF marketers who make lots of money doing it differently than described here. This is simply my way of building long lasting campaigns that require minimal ongoing maintenance.