TwinRed Review: Everything You Need to Know

Intro

Have you ever wondered how dating affiliate pros are able to consistently hit their conversion targets day-in, day-out?

Or maybe you’ve been questioning how to find quality adult, VOD, and gaming traffic that’s a perfect match for your offers.

Well, if you have, then you’re in luck!

We recently signed up to TwinRed – a leading self-serve adult ad network & ad exchange – to find out just what makes them the first choice for affiliates who specialize in adult advertising.

In this article we’re going to look at what’s new and what’s in store, as well as reveal a never seen before case study, so you can master the art of adult traffic and start leveraging the power of pop-unders, video pre-rolls, native, banner, and interstitial ads with TwinRed.

What is TwinRed?

TwinRed is a self-service, openRTB, independent ad network developed by Double Impact (formerly DoublePimp).

Advertisers can bid on premium ad inventory in real-time, and can manage their campaigns via an array of advanced targeting and optimization tools.

Advertisers can also take advantage of the network’s full tracking capabilities, precise user targeting, ad-fraud security tools, and personal Skype support.

Expect quality traffic from premium inventory in top-tier GEOs, and get access to a suite of custom tools that will fine-tune your campaigns to perfection.

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic the former Double Impact team now runs fully remotely in Los Angeles and Budapest for the moment – using online task management and conferencing apps such as Slack, Skype, Jira and Freshdesk – and has a flexi system in Barcelona. This is good news for advertisers who rely on the availability of the support team to help manage their campaigns.

What ad formats do TwinRed offer?

Let’s take a look at the ad formats you can choose for your campaigns on TwinRed.

Popunder: This type of ad format displays a full page ad under the current browser window which is displayed when the current window is closed. While it remains a popular format for affiliates, as it converts well for many types of offers, unfortunately Google didn’t share the same view and popunder bans for sites running google Ads have started to appear.

This format is still available on TwinRed but check out the section below on why it may no longer be the best ad format for your campaign. While affiliates can still expect a similar ROI – and in some cases even see a boost in conversions – higher volume campaigns may be impacted as a result of the Chrome browser accounting for up to 70% of all adult traffic.

Display ads: You can find a wide selection of premium inventory for all popular banner sizes and dimensions.

Interstitials: Interstitial is an ad format that’s been adopted by TwinRed to overcome the Google ban on popunders. It’s fully compliant with Google’s new advertising policies and is available across a wide range of inventory.

It works by displaying an interactive landing page which appears after the user clicks a link and before arriving at their destination. It can also include optional features such as a countdown timer. This type of ad format provides a good user experience and has a high click-through rate across all GEOs and verticals.

You can use the same creative and ad copy that you would have used for popunders, which makes the transition to using interstitial ads pain free. Publishers are required to provide a dismissal button on the ad.

Video pre-roll: This format displays in-stream video clips that play automatically when a user clicks on a video link, just as you know from Youtube, etc. Large volumes of premium traffic are available for this future proof ad-format.

Native: Native ads use a custom widget to blend in with the surrounding content and have a high click through rate and ROI. They’re also a popular choice with affiliates who run large volume campaigns. Each placement corresponds to one block within the native ad widget. You can run Native ads via CPC or CPM and they have proven to work well especially in dating, gaming, and nutra verticals.

They typically work well with advertorial style landers and are fully integrated within the user experience. This is a relatively new ad format for TwinRed and includes premium ad inventory from high volume publisher sites with plenty of adult traffic.

Native ads have high user engagement, but make sure you test everything for best results, including headlines and multiple images, and boost your conversions by using emoticons and macros. Advertisers can currently use the {country} , {city} , {browser} macros, with more to follow.

Publishers may also be interested in TwinRed’s ‘compete’ technology. This allows publishers to show whatever ad gives them higher rates, which could be either a regular banner ad or the native widget within the same ad-spot.

Push: This revolutionary ad format has proved extremely popular with affiliates over the past few years. It works across all devices and users can receive notifications even when they are not actively viewing the page they subscribed to. Push is live on TwinRed but at the time of writing is only available through OpentRTB, so make sure you click the notification button to stay tuned for any developments.

Experiment with these ad formats and test multiple ad spots to see which ones work best for your offers. You’ll find there’s plenty of quality traffic for cam, dating, VOD and games offers on the network.

What’s the story with popunders?

Early in 2020, Google made some far-reaching policy changes that have had a significant impact on publishers running adult traffic.

Most notably, the popunder format has now been banned on sites running Google Ads and in the Google Chrome browser.

This was a huge blow to advertisers who used the popunder ad format, and publishers with popunder inventory suddenly found themselves losing 5 figure incomes overnight.

TwinRed (now under the administration of ex TrafficStars CEO, Peter Rabenseifner) has been at the forefront of developing innovative adtech solutions to circumvent this problem and stay compliant with the Google policy updates.

One notable development from TwinRed is the inclusion of interstitial ads. These use the same creative as pops, but if you were previously familiar with the popunder ad format from Double Pimp, you’re probably going to notice some changes.

We recommend speaking to your account manager and setting up a test campaign using interstitial ads to get a feel for how they work.

Getting started with TwinRed

Registering a new account on TwinRed only takes a few minutes.

First, select the Advertiser button and then fill out the partner questionnaire which will connect you to premium features on the network.

Once approved, you’ll be able to unlock new payment methods and increase your spending limits.

Once you’ve submitted your info and accepted the terms and conditions your account status will change to pending approval.

This is what you’ll see from the dash:

Just click to add funds and you’ll be creating your first campaign in no time at all!

Advertiser dashboard

The first thing you see when you log into your account is the Advertiser Dashboard. This gives you a running totals for the last 30-days and will show account info, including any active and placements.

If you want a more detailed summary of your campaigns you can click on the Campaign tab. This is also the place where you can create your first campaign – as we’ll see in just a moment.

Next, the Medias tab to see all of your saved creatives.

This is particularly useful, as not only can you group all of your creatives in one place, but you’ll also be able to see how they look to the end user.

Want more tracking?

You can add macros to your destination URL to get extra data about your campaigns, such as which sites are delivering the most traffic and which browsers are working best for your offer.

TwinRed encourages you to submit multiple creatives sizes for each ad format to access the most inventory on the network.

Click the Summary Report tab or Advanced Report tab for checking your stats, or select the Accounting tab to view funds and payment history.

That’s about it for this section of the dash, so now let’s check out how you can use TwinRed to create a profitable campaign and boost your ROI!

Using TwinRed: A case study

Adult – CPA goal $50

Rather than take you through each step of the campaign creation process, we’ll be using a live case study which will show you precisely how you can use TwinRed to make insane profits.

For this case study, the advertiser used an adult offer.

They’re a pretty well-known brand and it’s interesting to see that you can achieve such a high ROI with this type of offer.

First of all, the advertiser started out with a specific goal to identify which 300×100 banner spots will perform well. (You don’t have to start out with the exact same goal as this – but make sure you have a clear end result in mind when planning your campaigns.)

The creatives were optimized on the partner end, using iFrames, so the advertiser had more time to focus on the campaign. Doing it this way also helps combat banner blindness and keeps the creatives fresh to the user.

The other benefit to this strategy is that any ads which are duds are removed, while the ones that are performing well are displayed more often. To optimize things further, Adultforce adds at least one new creative to the flow on a rolling basis.

When setting up your campaign on TwinRed, you can choose Run-of-Network (RON) or target specific placements.

This campaign was set up using RON, and targeted the US for banners with the 300×100 display ad format. Other than this, no specific targeting was used – so all OS & browsers were shown the same ads.

This means the campaign was receiving traffic from all publisher sites on the network with 300×100 inventory. This is usually a good strategy to start with to determine which sites are performing best for your ads, especially if you don’t have any pre-existing data to work with.

The frequency cap was set to 1 in every 24 hours and the campaign was left to run for 30 days. This will give you a significant amount of data to work with, and smaller budgets can easily cut this back and still get good results.

Initial results

30 days and over 12 million impressions later, it was clear that one site was performing way better than the others for this offer.

But did it meet the advertiser’s goal?

There were 19 conversions in total, with an ad spend of $1,052 and a CPA value of $55.39.

Of these 19 conversions, the site Crazyshit accounted for 11 of them, with a CPA value of $42.51. So not too shabby!

This was the best CPA across all the sites the ad was tested on. With encouraging test data and a positive ROI, the advertiser then created a new campaign targeting only that one publisher.

Here’s where things start to get a little more specific:

Two separate placements were created, one for each operating system. One placement was set up to target Android & Chrome browsers, and the other exclusively targeting iOS.

These two placements were given a higher bid allocation than in the initial campaign, and the frequency capping was switched from 1 in 24 to 3 in 24 hours. This was done to make sure that the volume quota was met as the campaign was now only targeting one that one publisher.

Long term performance

After running this campaign for a further 3 months, the set up was proven to be a success.

So much so, that the two placements cited above remain at the top of the list for the best performing ad campaigns in the advertiser’s account to date.

This is a pretty big win and shows that by testing and isolating your campaigns in this way you can get great results.

The campaign was run over the months of September, October, and November – with November outperforming the other two months by triple the amount of conversions for both placements.

This is a powerful example of how you can use TwinRed with popular adult offers to get exceptional results and optimize your campaigns for sustained performance.

Pro Tip: Some niche offers might convert at a much higher ROI historically if you get this step right.

Creating your first campaign

Click the Create New Campaign button from the Campaigns tab. Next, give your campaign a name and define the start and end dates and click next to continue.

Here you can select a budget for your campaign and click the Create Campaign button to get started. You’ll still need to add placements and targeting, so click to Create New Placement.

From here you can set up the basics, targeting, schedule, media rotation, caps and bids.

There’s some neat targeting features to help you get qualified traffic to your offers.

These include, country, city, sexual orientation, network targeting, and channel targeting.

Use the advanced options in the Technology Targeting section to target specific devices, OS, and browsers.

Next, fill out the scheduling table and add your creatives to the media rotations.

Click on the creative to see which placements are using this media and test the creative in your browser.

Then, add your spend and frequency caps, and choose your bid and zones. Use this to select individual publishers for your campaigns.

Another good thing about TwinRed is that it works off of a second price auction when choosing dynamic CPM. This means that if your bid is the winner, you’ll only pay one increment over the second highest bid when using dynamic CPM bidding.

From here, if you look over to the left corner of the dash, you’ll be able to see the estimated daily inventory and median bid for your placement. For best results, it’s recommended that you bid over the median bid.

Finally, add your bidding placement name, review your placement, and you’re good to go!

Don’t worry too much if you think you may have overlooked something on your first campaign, as you’ll be able to edit your bids, zones, caps, targeting, schedule, and creatives directly from the campaign details tab.

Tracking

TwinRed works with all popular trackers and is super easy to set up for advanced reporting.

If the tracker you use is not included you can reach out to the support team for assistance.

If you’re in any doubt about how to use this feature, contact your account manager who will be able to help you out.

Make sure to use the custom macros to get detailed info about your campaigns.

Payments

Funds can be added to your account from the Accounting tab.

You’ll be able to see your cash balance, credit limit, and the amount you have available to spend. You can add funds by wire or Paxum – with a minimum deposit amount of $500 for wire and $100 for Paxum. Paypal is available but only on request. You can also check your payment history and account ledger from the same tab.

It’s even possible to create a Pro Forma invoice for future pending campaigns.

While it would be nice to see additional payment options for the account, most users shouldn’t have any difficulty adding funds.

Verdict

TwinRed is an impressive rebrand led by an innovative team who are making all the right calls in response to a rapidly changing climate.

The focus on interstitial and native, as a solution to the popunder truth bomb, is a timely development and it will be interesting to see how it plays out over the coming months.

There’s a good range of ad formats which, along with high traffic partners on the network, should guarantee a good return on your investment.

The volume and quality of traffic is good and will convert well for affiliates working with adult, VOD, and games offers.

If you’ve been on the fence about jumping in or are keen to try out TwinRed for your own offers, now is a good time to get in.

With many consumers furloughed or working from home, affiliate offers in all verticals are gaining a lot of traction.

TwinRed offers the perfect opportunity to benefit from this downturn and use it to your own advantage.

The quality and volume of the traffic should be sufficient to attract high-volume affiliates who are serious about making money.

Ready to get started?