The dating niche is one of the few markets that we can all trust to still be here in a few years time. There will forever be a demand for matchmaking websites. Some dude will always be looking to improve his sorry excuse of a love life from the comfort of his stained bed sheets. And even if Facebook takes over the world, we’ll still have Zoosk. So you better get used to “Want A Girlfriend? It’s FREE!”.

Dating has become such an integral cornerstone of CPA marketing that we sometimes forget to test new business models. If you’re one of the guys who combs a network for the first $5 free profile submission going, you’re probably missing out on some ripe marketing opportunities.

Most affiliates assume that the CPA model will always pay better than a CPS offer. Is that the case? Well, have you tried it for yourself? Then you probably should. For all the expert advice of split testing ad copies, it seems pretty ridiculous that an affiliate could forget to split test lead/sale.

It was only recently that I took a few hours out of my day to do a little market research. I stumbled across a UK based dating network called EasyDate.

Two offers that I regularly see flouted on Facebook – Be Naughty and Date The UK – are both listed on EasyDate. The only difference is that the street payout for both is a whooping £4.50. For the trans-atlantic amongst us, that’s approximately $7.50/lead.

I’ve scoured most networks for these offers and the street payout is normally between $5-$5.50. Even with a bump you’re not going to get close to $7.50/lead. So what’s the catch?

The quality of your traffic, my friend. EasyDate is a performance based network, which is enough to send the alarm bells ringing for the majority of dating affiliates – myself included.

What the flashy screencap above demonstrates is the margin that the advertiser is looking to deal with in terms of leads to sales.

To receive the maximum lead payout of £4.50, you need to be averaging 15% for your lead-sale conversion rate. Even if you have no burning desire to test this, it makes for pretty interesting reading. On most CPA affiliate networks, we never get to see the invisible “quality score” that tells an advertiser whether our traffic is converting. But if you’ve ever had an email stating that you need to improve the quality of your traffic, this is why. Your leads aren’t backing out in the sales department.

Most affiliates will look at the chart above and think, “Damn, I’ll carry on sending my junk traffic ’til I’m kicked off the offer, cheers for coming”. That’s fair enough. It gets a bit more interesting when you look at the CPS program though.

£25 for a sale? That’s $45 for a dating subscription, no scratchy payout by anybody’s standards.

The downside to promoting a sale based offer is the lack of visible progress unless you start converting. There’s little way of knowing if your traffic is producing a lead or simply closing the window to head elsewhere. You could be making $40 for leads that never subscribed to the full program – instead of $0 for zero sales. But you’ll never know if you’re only being paid by the sale.

This got me thinking. Well, what if I could continue to send my traffic to a lead-based offer, and somehow seperate the premium converting traffic and funnel it through to the £25 payout instead?

If you could just know in advance which leads are most likely to become sales, you could filter them from the trail and send them to the CPS link. Besides collecting your usual payouts for the leads, you’d receive the occasional £25 sale. It has the potential to blast your ROI to much higher ground. We already know that the advertiser is happy to give you the maximum payout if you can hang on at a 15% lead-to-sale ratio. This tells us a little about the expected conversion rates – particularly when we look at the payouts a network will offer.

The problem is seperating that traffic and picking out the users who are obviously willing to spend for a shag. To do this, you need to understand the true essence of delivering quality leads. You need to understand which segment of the market are buyers, and which are merely tryers. In dating terms, you need to seperate the desperate from the really desperate.

I’d also like to point out that I’m not suggesting you hijack your own quality score by sending the best leads to Offer X and sabotaging Offer Y with junk traffic.

It simply makes sense that if you have somebody reaching your landing page by the search term “cheapest dating site”, you’re looking at a potential sale. Why send them through the lead offer when you could do a little PHP link switching and funnel them to the CPS offer instead? Sure, you will lose some leads. But it makes a lot more sense than setting up a CPS campaign and then sending a bunch of clicks from “free” infested search terms.

It’s much easier to implement this form of traffic control when you’re promoting via PPC. If you have access to the search term, you can make a sensible guess at whether the user is a buyer or a tryer. The presence of “free” in the search term should be an immediate trigger to send them to the CPA offer. In fact, you shouldn’t even be using “free” in your ad copies. That’s going to fuck up your quality score regardless of anything else.

Beyond simply analyzing the search terms, I can think of one or two methods of filtering potential buyers by simply getting cheeky with your landing page. You could even resort to having two links on the same page if you’re clever about it.

Whatever you choose to do, moving in to Dating CPS offers is always going to be a gamble. I’d recommend getting in touch with your affiliate manager. You know those emails you get sent every now and then about low quality traffic? It works in reverse. Get your AM to ask the advertiser how your traffic is performing. If they’re happy with the ratios, it’s a good sign that you could be lining your pockets with some extra money by opening the floodgates on a little CPS.

If you know that you have quality traffic, you’re selling yourself short on those $4.50 payouts.

I highly recommend you head on over to EasyDate if you’re working in the UK dating market. They have pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, and a hybrid model where you get paid for both. Maybe your best option is to stick with what’s already working. It doesn’t make sense to ignore what’s out there though. Go figure it out for yourself.

You sign up to a network, view the list of offers, and it makes sense to assume that the offer with the highest EPC is going to be the offer that brings home the greatest margin of profit. Hey, that’s pretty nice, I can earn $1.80 per-click when it only costs me 50 cents to buy that click. That’s $1.30 profit per-click. If I send 1000 clicks to that offer in a day, Holy shit, I’ve just made a thousand dollars on the fly.

There’s a reason so many newbies get bummed out of the affiliate market avec tail between legs; they believe in logic like this.

The reality is that EPC tends to be as accurate as the latest Google keyword tool. And that’s not very. EPC is rarely an illustrative statistic of the true earning potential in an offer.

EPC is essentially an average, designed to collect together the network performance data of each and every affiliate promoting that particular offer. Speaking from experience however, the only averages that any affiliate should give a damn about are his own. Why should I care about how the rest of the industry is performing? Evaluating trends is for those who don’t want to get their hands dirty tackling the market head-on.

Besides, you’ve got many different factors that can screw with the accuracy of a network’s EPC data.

Don’t forget that law of average. If a network lists the EPC of an offer as $1.20, it doesn’t tell you a thing about the performance of the affiliates who actually know what they’re promoting from what they’re smoking. You could have a high flyer raking in his Acai Berry profit at $3.50 EPC, but if the offer is hot and a few dozen dipshits decide to direct link the promotion on Google’s Content Network – you’re going to see a logical and obvious fall in network EPC. How drastic could that fall be? It depends on the offer. Probably pretty drastic.

I remember one of the crucial early mistakes I made in affiliate marketing was assuming that the network EPC acted as some truer than thou equation for how much money I’d make if I got X number of clicks. My first campaign was a Facebook offer that lost me more money in one night than I care to remember.

I made the false assumption that because the offer had an EPC of $1.70 or something, I’d make the same kind of return by sending any old crowd of un-targeted and ultimately cheap traffic at the landing page. The result? It was something along the lines of me sat at my desk two days later, wondering why the world didn’t want whiter teeth.

It took me a good few campaigns before I started to realize that consumers ain’t simply browsing away online with their credit cards at the ready. You’ve got to earn those purchases, and sending traffic alone is not gonna cut the mustard. God forbid, it’s definitely not gonna work when you’re advertising to half of Facebook in one hit.

So is EPC a complete waste of time? No, far from it actually. EPC can be one of the most valuable statistics in your inventory, but you have to filter the crap before you can cast an educated opinion. So here’s how you make that EPC actually mean something.

1. Ignore whatever widely available EPC data your network makes available to you. That includes the email newsletters, the hottest offers, the best new promotions. Forget about it.

2. Contact your Affiliate Manager directly. Ask them for the latest EPC data (last 2 weeks is latest in affiliate terms) for the top five publishers running that particular offer.

3. Ask for a separate spreadsheet showing the EPC data of the top five publishers in ONLY the method you’re promoting. That’s Web, Search, Email…you get the idea.

4. Compare the two spreadsheets.

Now you have an accurate picture of not only what the big cats are earning, but whether that offer is best promoted as part of a direct PPC campaign or an email send or whatever.

If your Affiliate Manager is worth the network pay cheque, he or she should have no problem in compiling the spreadsheets for you. It’s never “pushy” to ask. Affiliate Managers are there to help you make them money. Don’t ever lose sight of that.

Now that you have some meaningful statistics of what the top performers are earning from an offer, you can scrap those diluted and useless network EPCs. Run your campaign with the intention of matching and bettering the best performers.

That means watching your competitors, learning from them, and doing what they’re doing better then them. Repeat. If you follow those steps, you don’t have to worry about EPC.

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