Open your account to the ‘Main Page’. On this page you’ll see the big green ‘Create a Campaign’ button at the top left of the screen. Click on the green button to get started.

Now you’ll be on the “Create A New Campaign” page. Let’s take it from the top:
 

NAME YOUR CAMPAIGN

Pretty simple, you’ll want to name your campaign something that will reflect, at a glance, what your campaign is all about. The reason for this is to set this campaign apart from the other campaigns in your account, and trust me, down the road, it will save you a lot of time.

The most efficient way to name your campaign is to use a title that reflects both the the offer you’re promoting and the demographics you’re targeting. So instead of writing “Dating Campaign” for example, you’ll want to write something more detailed, like MatchUSF25-30, for example, which translated, displays your offer, the country you’re targeting, the gender, and the age group.

BUDGET

Next up, we have budget. You’ll see here just below the words “Budget” that our advertising model is CPM. What this means is that you pay to have your ad displayed 1000 times. So whatever bid amount you enter in the space below will be what you pay for 1000 pageviews on POF. Now, you’ll see that the minimum bid is $0.13. That buys you some really cheap traffic. So why bid higher? Well, how high you bid determines the quality of the traffic that you receive. For example, if you bid $.20 you’ll get cheap traffic, but your ads will be shown to users who have seen ads like yours 20 times already, and may be less responsive to your ads than users who haven’t seen an ad like yours yet. So there are benefits to bidding higher.
 

TARGETING

Below that we have targeting options, so think about who would be interested in your offer. Next, think about who would not be interested in your offer. Today I’ll be promoting Match.com to women in the US between the ages of 25-30.

 I’ll start with Gender (you’ll see it’s first in the dropdown the list) and choose “Female” and double click on it. Then, I’ll select ‘Add Target’ to finalize it.
Next, I’m going to choose a country (and we recommend no more than one per campaign) choose the US at the top of the list, double click on it, click add target, and there you’ll see it populating the grey area on the lower right side of the screen. It’s important to never forget to include a geographic target, otherwise the ad server won’t know where to run your ads...and since we reach 8 countries, not all of them English speaking, we need to make sure we’re targeting one and using the appropriate language for it.

Next we’ll add our age target. Now to choose an age group, (and we recommend breaking campaigns down into 5-10 year age groups), simply double click on the youngest and oldest age that you’d like to target. So for our campaign today, we’ll be double clicking on 25 and 30, then clicking “Add Target”.

Finally, we’re going to add a target based on a demographic that we don’t want to reach in this campaign. So I’m going to click on the “is euqal to” dropdown menu and select “is not equal to”. Now we’ll scroll down the targeting list to find ‘Marital Status’. The people we don’t want to target in this dating campaign are those who are ‘Married’, ‘Living Together’ and ‘Not Single/Not Looking’. Double click on each, click ‘Add target and Voila! We have our targets set up.

If I decide I don’t want a certain target anymore, I have to click “Remove” to the right of the target in the grey box before I can add that type of target again. So if I choose to target all of the US, but later decide that I want to target a specific zip code, then I must remove the US target before adding my new, more refined target.
 

ADD A CREATIVE

Next, we’re going to move to the ‘Add a Creative’ section. To start off, we’re going to fill in the creative name field. Why must we name a creative? So that we can track and see which creatives are performing well and which ones aren’t. So I’m going to name this creative MatchUSF2530 - 1. This will tell me that the creative belongs to this specific campaign, and is the first image. For my next ad, I’ll do MatchUSF2530 - 2, and so on.

CREATIVE TYPE

Below that, we have the ‘Creative Type’. Click on the size that you’d like to run -- making sure that you have an ad saved on your computer with the exact size requirements. I’m going to choose the Small ad (110 x80) so I have to fill in the ‘Title’ and description. The title is the headline of your ad, so make it catchy (my example below is not so catchy but will give you an idea for the layout)

Title: Would you date a Doctor?
Description: Help! Hunky local doctors don’t have time to meet women! Sign up today to meet 5 guys in 15 minutes!

Be sure that if you’re promoting a dating offer that you include a call to action that will suggest to users that they’re leaving POF, so ‘Sign Up’, ‘Register’ are good examples (click here isn’t convincing enough).

 Now it’s time to upload the creative. Click on the ‘Browse’ button to bring up your creative of choice -- making sure that it is exactly 110 by 80 pixels in size.

 Finally, enter your click-thru URL that you’ll be sending users to when they click on your ad. If you’re an affiliate, this URL should include your affiliate link so that you get the credit for promoting the offer.

DATES

Okay up to the top right, we’re going to look at the dates. It’s pretty simple -- set your start date, and if you only want your ads to run for a set amount of time -- enter an end date. If you leave it blank, your ads will run indefinitely.
 

DELIVERY

Below that, we have ‘Delivery’. Here we’ll enter the amount we’d like to spend per day. The minimum that can be entered here is $15, so I’ll set it at that for now. Right below that, I have the option to ‘Distribute ASAP’ or to ‘Distribute Evenly’. Typically newer advertisers want to distribute evenly so that they spread their daily spend throughout the day. For those who want to spend more in their campaigns, the ‘Asap’ option is the better choice.
 

FREQUENCY CAP

Next, we have the ‘Frequency Cap’ what this represents is the number of times that you’d like your ads to be seen by a user in a 24 hour period. If you set it at. You can choose to have your ad seen by a user 5 times per day, for example, or you can choose for them to see it 5 times per hour, or per login. If you’d like to limit your impressions in the beginning, then choosing a low frequency cap and setting it to the ‘per day’ option would be beneficial. For those seeking more volume, you’ll want to choose the per visit option.
 

VALUE OF CONVERSION

Below that, we have “Value Of Conversion”. This is a purely optional place to place the amount that you will make each time you make a conversion so that you can see approximately how much money you’re making. This number won’t be tallied unless you’ve implemented our conversion tracking pixel -- and that’s a lesson for another day. Feel free to leave it blank if you prefer!
 

UPDATE CAMPAIGN

Lastly, we’re going to click the ‘Update Campaign’ button in the bottom right half of the screen. Voila! You’ve created your first campaign.