Without further ado, the Online Dating Insider Premiere of the new Zoosk commercial, which you are going to see a lot of starting May 31.

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If a dating site landing page does not immediately appeal to a visitor and get them to register, PPC ads can get expensive, fast.

Behold these testing anecdotes from the Conversion Conference.

We’ve seen a single security icon (i.e. a lock with a checkmark on it) increase actual purchases by as much as 20% on a product checkout page. Similar results were shared at the conference.

Adding authority icons such as “As seen on” media logos like CNN, MSNBC, and Good Morning America contributed to a 40% lift in registrations for RealAge, an age assessment and health site.

athenahealth, an online physician billing provider, increased lead gen form fills 84% and reduced bounce rate 48% on a PPC landing page by switching from a single page to a multi-page form.

More at Which Test Won.

Testing is truly an art. Adding icons, media logos and lengthening signup forms never used to make sense to me, but this is exactly what people respond to.

Testing usually results in an average ~40% conversion lift. If you run a dating site and are not doing at least rudimentary A/B testing of landing pages you are throwing away a good portion of your marketing budget. I can help you select a company or in-house service to optimize your site, contact me to learn more.

Good grief, next think we’ll learn is that people like all of the crap-tastic SEO phrasing and keywords that dating sites cram at the bottom of the homepage. I can’t wait until Google stops ranking sites based on home page SEO, enough is enough.

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Marc Porcelli is a familiar face at dating and social networking conferences. His post, The Online Value Chain, has a great photo of the online advertising ecosystem. If you do marketing for a dating site, you should be intimately familiar with these companies.

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Paid dating sites are facing increasing amounts of frustration from members and a fresh volley of attacks from free dating sites.

Match knows what’s coming: 2010 is the year that free dating sites go on the attack, taking paid dating sites to task on a number of fronts. At some point, a massive advertising budget might not be able to sweep this issue under the rug.

Markus at PlentyofFish pointed me to his blog post, Match.com No longer top dating site, sends in the lawyers, where he states that Match sent him a letter asking him to prove how the site grew so large and a number of other questions.

Match.com says its not possible that plentyoffish has as many signups as we do every day.   Match says there is no way we can generate as many relationships and dates as we do.    Match than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships and dates than they do, and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to know.

Thats what we call a fishing expedition. I met the author of the letter to POF, Match’s General Council, Marshall Dye, years ago at the first SITRAS dating industry event. Marshall is probably the longest-standing member of the Match team. Has anyone been there longer? I wonder how many other dating sites she’s sent letters to this week?

It’s Ok, Cupid

The Match fishing expedition is just the beginning. Take a look at this recent post from OKCupid, Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating. Christian, a founder of OKCupid, has gone to considerable lengths to put together an informative, slightly wobbly and biased argument against paid dating.

Today I’d like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don’t realize.

…As a founder of OkCupid I’m of course motivated to point out our competitors’ flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt. But I intend to show, just by doing some simple calculations, that pay dating is a bad idea; actually, I won’t be showing this so much as the pay sites themselves, because most of the data I’ll use is from Match and eHarmony’s own public statements. I’ll list my sources at the bottom of the post, in case you want to check.

OKCupid does some back of the envelope calculations based on membership lengths of 6.5 months and revenue to find out that eHarmony, by best guess, has around 750,000 subscribers. With 20,000,000 claimed profiles, that means that 96.25% of all eHarmony profiles are inactive or dead. Furthermore, only one out of 29 members is contactable.

At Match, the odds that you are flirting into the void are 93.1%.

It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don’t subscribe to Match.com. Raises eyebrows.

The OKCupid blog does a commendable job of clueing singles into the fact that paid dating sites rely on paid members to email inactive ones, thus raising the chances that the non-paying member subscribes in order to read emails, and a lot of other ways that singles end up with a raw deal. This revelation is not exactly new, it’s just that now bloggers and the media have gotten a whiff of the story and I assure you this is not going to go quietly into the night. Imagine the AT&T and Verizon 3G coverage commercials, only replace with paid and free dating sites duking it out with marketing dollars and social media efforts. It’s remarkable that it took free dating sites this long to take a stand, and what a stand this could turn out to be.

One area where OKCupid chose not to tread in the article is customer service. Match has said for years that one of the primary benefits of a subscription-based service is access to customer service representatives. I’ve talked to hundreds of singles who have called their dating site about a broad spectrum of topics, the most common being billing and relationship advice (you wouldn’t believe what some people ask when they call a dating site 30 minutes before a first date).

Overall, another great effort from OKCupid to provide basic number crunching and insights into the differences between free and paid dating. Its only fair that they publish their own relationship metrics now, come on, guys.

On a personal note, congrats to Markus at PlentyofFish on his upcoming nuptials.

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Some of you may remember when I spoke at iDate a few years ago and I pointed out Sam Cox of Milabra in the back of the room.

Sam sent me this update:

The (Milabra) Image Intelligence platform is now producing 1 billion image ratings a month, and we’re able to generate 10 impressions per image. Amazing things from our engineering team. Additionally, our data is available for sale through the AppNexus real time advertising platform.

Stay tuned for some new partner announcements in the coming weeks, as well as some new product launches.

Read Milabra Optimizing Ad Targeting Visually And Improving Brand Safety Says CEO Cox.

Knock ‘em dead at AdTech, Sam! Maybe some dating sites will talk to Sam about targeting ads based on people’s profile photos. Works well on Facebook.

Related posts:

1. Image Recognition Co. Milabra Launches, Has $1.4 Million in Financing
2. Improving Personal Ad Photos
3. Milabra Presenting on Speedy Image Classification

The post How To Make 45K a Day Scamming Facebook Ads does a good job of exposing how affiliate marketers take advantage Facebook’s advertising platform. I just found the AimClear blog, some good posts there, including Repent Ye Landing Page Sinners! Thine Baby is Ugly. I’ve been working on a post about SEO for personal ads, and this gave me some great food for thought.

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It will soon be possible to compare the performance of online dating search and social ad campaigns side by side. Clickable, the ad management platform that lets search marketers measure and track the performance of their online marketing campaigns across different search engines and advertising networks, will be adding Facebook Ads as an option on April 12. Via Tech Crunch.

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Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson tries out a Google TV service that allows you to run your own commercial on national TV for as little as $100. At one point the silly ad they created garnered 1.3 million views and 1,000 website clicks for $1,000.

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LukeW recently came across a unique contact form. It turns out that Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%. That is amazing. This would also be a great idea for a profile writing form.

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Ads.pof.com now has more inventory available that will be sold as IAB standard ad sizes. When creating a new campaign, this feature will be available to users who have deposited more than $1000 into their account with ads.pof.com.

35 million impressions per day are available for these ad sizes. These ads will be displayed on Plentyoffish.com Profile Pages (300×250) Online My City pages (160×600) and View Message pages (120×600).

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