Crappy Adult Dating Convertsions in March + April 2009?
 

First let me start by saying I'm looking for help, advice and knowledge, I definitely don't need "hey check out my program and make $$$".

I run a small image hosting site, and have been using pimpmansion as my sole advertising on the site for more than 6 months, this has been great upto now but other the last month or two it's stopped converting, pimpmansion has said they've not noticed anything with any other clients.

I've not changed my ad placement, my traffic still comes from the same places etc.

My stats:

2008:
img522.imageshack .us/img522/5562/pm2008. jpg

2009:
img522.imageshack .us/img522/9572/pm2009. jpg


One thing I've noticed is my % of new visitors has dropped but my visitors has gone up:

New Visitors:
Mar 09 - 32%
Feb 09 - 36%
Jan 09 - 45%
Dec 08 - 40%
Nov 08 - 46%
Oct 08 - 72%

Do you think I've saturated my potential customers?

You might have.
One of the things that I have noticed though is that some of the BIG image hosting sites use CAMS to promote. Not sure what you have there.

If you need a good cam program I have one thats not over saturated and does well.

Might also want to take a look at where your traffic is coming from now versus then,
maybe you lost some SE rankings

Hit me on ICQ if you want to chat about it.

Yeah, same with cams.

Alot of image hosting sites hog the traffic with 0px IFRAMEs, etc.

It's gettin' harder...

Maybe you need to change up your site as your surfers may be getting bored. Or you have saturated your surfers. Always good to give them a choice of 2 or 3 programs.

Crappy dating conversions
 

Interesting post , I run a couple of small dating sites, and its the same picture, march and april really bad. Around Easter is always pretty bad, but this week (an last) have just dropped off the edge, although I'm still getting 1:85 off organic SE traffic.

Hit me up on icq and lets chat. Maybe u should change the landing page to a different niche.. we have several different pages to land on including milf-date.com which might help with the conversions..

April's picked up, I think its just a sign of the times.

Might have a play around with different niches and see how it goes.

well it happens sometimes ur traffic drops down ..

No drop in traffic here, just sales although April has been better, below average but better than the previous month (March).

I just got screwed by pimpmansion and lost over $70 :(

They allowed one of the customers I pushed to them have a refund for MULTIPLE months!!!

I quote:

"If the customer is threatening to charge back then its better just to refund them. Chargebacks effect our merchant account relationship with visa and mastercard."

DOH!

You didn't get screwed over by them, you got screwed over by the customer that you sent. It is very, very easy for a customer to get a refund for things like dating site membership payments. The merchant can do very little to fight it. The credit card company says.. do you have a proof of signature? Of course not.. it is a dating site.. boom.. chargeback.. Customer says that the recurring transaction was not authorised and they cancelled before renewal.. does the merchant have any proof that the customer canceled the account? No? Chargeback. All the onus is on the merchant. It is total BS. And the dating site customers have become wise to this scam and more and more are doing it.

Maybe I'm not used to the world of scamming but if a customer turns around after a couple of months then asks for refund then the previous month should only be refunded in my eyes, for example if it was webhosting it wouldn't happen that way.

But afterall this the the murky world of affiliation.

Except if the customer goes directly to the credit card company and says that the transaction was not authorized. Then you get a black mark against you on your merchant account. Too many of those and the bank cancels your merchant account and that is the end of your dating website. Better to just refund the customer all their money if they complain too much.

I run a couple of small mainstream dating websites. And the banks and the credit card processing companies are the biggest problem we have to deal with. They really are a bunch of assholes. The customer is always right. We have had guys using the site for 6 months and then saying the transaction was not authorized. The credit card company refunds all the 6 months, plus the bank charges us 6x$20 chargeback fees. It sucks.

It has nothing to do with you as an affiliate. They would do the same thing if the member came directly through to their site without an affiliate code.

Things have been pretty bad the past few months for me. Hoping things can turn around with a few new projects. Always gotta try new things!

Yep my new favourite word is "diversify" :)

I think its too easy when things are going steady to sit back somewhat, sometimes it takes a slight hit to re evaluate your situation and look at alternatives and new openings.

switch the sponsors around

I would try at least 3 or 4 different sponsors, and keep swapping out the underperforming ones.

my dating conversion is slow this month

I think everyone is hurting across the board.. signups are getting progressively worse. Good thing I've got alot of rebills to ride on.

June and July are typically the worse times of the year for my sites.

Promote a different dating site every few months

I think the cam companies themselves are participating in this as well...

I dont buy it! Ive been getting this same pitch from a lot of companies... there needs to be a way to verify if these chargeback claims are real... this new monthly shaving fee is irritating.