Online dating is an advertising-driven industry if ever there was one, with dating site marketing departements spending an incredible amount of time and effort creating, managing and optimizing ads across Google, Facebook, ads on other dating sites and myriad ad and affiliate networks.
Recently I have heard from a number of people about CrazyCTR, so I decided to contact the developer and ask him some questions. Here’s the lightly edited interview (English not his primary language). Be sure to read through to the end to win a free license to CrazyCTR.
What is CrazyCTR?
CrazyCTR is a tool for web advertisers that saves time in the process of gathering, preparing and optimizing ad images/banners. Tweaking or optimizing ad images result in getting cheaper clicks and lower advertising costs. Some advertisers don’t know how to tweak their ads, others use Photoshop or other image editors for cropping, resizing and tweaking the banners to improve CTR(Click-through-rate). Even if they have or not any Photoshop skills, CrazyCTR can prepare and tweak banners much easier, better and many times faster than Photoshop does, saving hours of work.
How does CrazyCTR work?
The principle is simple, an eye-catching banner is more efficient, it attracts user attention thus it will get more clicks. To accomplish this you should have banners that stand out, with higher saturation or contrast, lots of colors, different borders or other eye-grabbing effects. CrazyCTR makes it easier for an advertiser to apply these kind of effects, without requiring knowledge of any image editing software. We have quite a few tweaks that can be applied to the images, ranging from borders with different shapes and colors to distortion effects. CrazyCTR also has a browser extension that helps you crop and resize images on the fly from the web. If the extension is activated, you just need to hover the mouse over an image, click the Add button than you can crop the image and add it to your CrazyCTR account.
Why did you create CrazyCTR?
Two years ago I wanted to give a try to affiliate marketing. After 2-3 months of using Photoshop almost all the time to apply different effects to my images I searched on Google for someting that automates this task, because it was time consuming and quite boring. I couldn’t find anything so I thought why shouldn’t I create a tool like this…and that’s when everything started.
When did you start CrazyCTR?
I started working on this project about 1.5 years ago, but only this year on February it was ready for public. It took a bit because I tried to make it very efficient, fast and scalable in the same time.
How can CrazyCTR help the dating industry?
CrazyCTR is mostly used for Facebook and Plenty Of Fish platforms, where many of our users advertise dating offers. They obtained great results with tweaks like heart shape borders on female demographics, glowing borders, old looking banners for senior demo and so on. For example, improving the CTR just from 0.15 to 0.21 on Facebook US demographic can decrease Cost Per Click quite a lot. On huge volume this means saving thousands of dollars in advertising costs. The saved amount can be used by dating companies back in lead generation or other places, like providing better matching services.
What trends are you seeing as more people use CrazyCTR? Lower costs, better click rates, other metrics?
CrazyCTR can save both time and money. Practically, it can save hours of work per day if you spend all day long building campaigns and tweaking images. For example, to generate 50 variations of an image in Photoshop can take ages, with CrazyCTR can be done in few minutes. On the other hand, you’ll get lots of options to test, some of them you may never think of, but they can provide great CTR. However, even if many of them have been already tested, the impact of a tweak is affected by the original image, ad text and demographic. To respond stricly to your question, people using CrazyCTR saved more time and spent less on advertising due to more effcient ads.
What types of companies use CrazyCTR?
Our users are mostly advertisers that run medium to high volume traffic. We have as clients advertising/marketing companies, small companies that promote their own products, affiliate networks that run in-house offers or solo affiliate marketers.
What are you plans for CrazyCTR for 2013?
2013 will be a big year for us. Recently, we got a partner with lots of experience in the advertising industry who will help us to increase exposure and tap into emerging markets, like mobile. In 2013 we’ll concentrate on:
– support for mobile and GIF banner optimization
– better optimization based on ad targeting and demographic
– better user experience and more friendly interface
– integration with different platforms
What users should expect when they try CrazyCTR for the first time?
Many users sign up for CrazyCTR, try few variations and if they don’t see a huge increase in CTR they stop using it. The fact is, you need to be lucky to get a huge increase in CTR from the first try, like I said above, even if we filtered lots of tweaks, the variations need to be tested because the angle used, target, ad text and image have a huge impact on final results. But when you find the right combination, you’ll get some pretty cheap clicks. We usually recommend to test original images before and create variations of the winner image, that’s the shortest way to get the best results.
As a special bonus, Online Dating Insider is giving away a one-year license to CrazyCTR. The first person to leave a comment with their email address in the hidden comment field (no spam) will receive a free one-year license key.
