Go Big or Go Home: My First 30 Days (13)
I thought about keeping my first 30 days to myself, but that's boring and doesn't help anybody. So, I'll be documenting all of my failures and victories here. I started reading about affiliate marketing about one month ago, and my goal is make $XXX/day within 30 days.
What I've done in the first 30 days
Got an LLC, registered with about ten affiliate networks, registered with about 20 traffic sources, got a VPS through BeyondHosting, installed STM Mobile Tracker V3/4.
My plan for the first month
I just didn't want to deal with Facebook's bullshit because I would lose my patience, and decided against POF for no reason other than I like big numbers. After reading hundreds of posts and Finch's book, I decided to go mobile. In looking for offers, I decided to go adult. I'm hearing this is a challenging path for a beginner, so we'll see how it goes.
Day 0
I started getting stuff ready about two days ago. I decided to stick with ExoClick for the traffic source and Cupid for the offer.
For the creatives, I spent about five hours learning the basics of Photoshop. After a bunch of fails, I now have a system down to create dozens of similar banners in the matter of seconds. All I do is download the images I want to use, click a couple buttons and Photoshop does the rest. If enough people want to know how to do it, I might throw together a quick video. I created 50 variations for my first campaign.
For the landers, I'm using Sublime Text for writing code. I followed caurmen's post and created a lander that looks very similar to the offer's lander. Tested it on BrowserStack and everything is good to go. The @media thing is a pain in the ass!
Hired someone on Fiverr to translate the campaign to Italian and created the same 50 variations of the banners and a new lander to match the Italy offer in Italian. I'm going to run the same campaign in US and IT to see how they compare, but only planning on spending about $80 combined for the first day.
Day 1
Spend: $111.78
Income: $7.70
ROI: -93%
Once the ads were approved by ExoClick, I just let the campaigns run. All I was looking to do the first day was get one conversion to make sure everything works and just gather data. Ended up getting five conversions. I'm not sure why, but for some reason the postback URL wasn't being triggered on conversion, and I even had my Cupid AM verify it was setup correctly. Gotta get that figured out. Here are the numbers for day 1:
Obviously the clicks aren't matching up, and I'm not sure why yet. I was running two campaigns withing STM Mobile Tracker (US and IT) and ran two different banner sizes for each category.
Biggest thing I learned
The thing that stood out the most to my untrained eye was that I was getting a lot of clicks from people using Opera Mini, and none of them converted. After downloading the browser on my phone, it was obvious. I was using CSS for my CTA and it had a gradient background, which doesn't display correctly on Opera browsers. Turn out when they got to the offer's landing page, the buttons were severely hidden and messed up. Instead of just cutting the browser (which was my first instinct), I found a different landing page for that offer and created a new campaign to redirect Opera users to.
Day 2
I changes out some of the non-performing creatives, so I have to get the new ones approved. Turns out, ExoClick wants people in the US to wake up at 4am to do so. I slept in, so I couldn't get the new creatives approved or run any campaigns.
In the meantime, I came up with four new angles that vary slightly and will test those out in the next day or two.
Biggest thing I learned
Get the campaigns you want to run on the weekends approved on Friday.
Day 3
First $XX day 
Spend: $126.25
Income: $155.20
ROI: 23%
I optimized my first campaign a little bit, basically cut some devices and changed the lander a bit. I also created a lander that was specifically designed for Opera and setup a redirect for it.
I created 20 creatives and a lander for two of the five new angles to test. Also setup a Opera-specific lander because I was going to end up with the same problem here.
I started all three campaigns and found that the campaign from yesterday needs some tweaking. The CTR was decent (0.28%) but the lander's CTR was not (16.25%) so I obviously need to work on new copy for the lander. I ended up pausing the first campaign early in the day.
The first of the two new angles was doing great to start the day, but ended up dropping off significantly. Ended up pausing the second campaign about halfway through the day. Ended up with a 0.14% CTR but a lander CTR of 46.19%, so there is potential. I looked into the creatives and found that three of the ten I was testing had an ROI at about 200% and the others were negative, so I killed the seven non-performing creatives and ran the rest of the small budget on the three winners. Those three campaigns ended at 113% ROI.
The second of the two new angles did very well. It was profitable about 10 minutes in and there were some pretty obvious optimizations to make. I basically killed a few devices along with Opera (just wasn't converting even with the custom lander). Only one of the ten creatives I ran were negative, and I killed the negative one pretty early. It had a 0.29% CTR, 70.61% banner CTR and a 81% ROI.
Biggest thing I learned
If you have a winning angle, you'll know it quickly. I can see where someone could end up struggling for days or weeks trying to optimize a campaign just to reach it's peak of 10% ROI, but their time would probably be better spend putting together 5-10 new angles to find one that starts out at at 50%+ ROI and scales to 100%+ with some tweaking.
Awesome results! congrats on taking action and your first $XX day!
Wow, congrats. Maybe I should try mobile after PPV, haha.
Day 4
Thanks guys! Another $XX day
Spend: $126.15
Income: $224.92
ROI: 78%
Today I took the successful campaign and tested black backgrounds vs white backgrounds, as well as tried a different offer that wasn't specifically for web. Turned out the white background were converting better. I also optimized the targeting to only iPhone and Android since those were the only two that were above 50% ROI.
I also removed all but the higher ROI banners so the CTR went up to 0.34% on the day, and the lander CTR was 63%. 71% ROI on the optimized campaign, the rest were losers.
The web campaign was a tougher offer to convert because the form to signup had more fields and the offer's lander wasn't great, but I threw $20 at it and converted three leads. I'll probably look into some different offers with a more user-friendly lander and send it some traffic tomorrow.
Biggest thing I learned
I learned the importance of how simple the the offer's landing page should be to convert. In general, the more complicated the offer is to convert, the more you have to sell the offer.
Hey w3061
You are doing a good job. Try to get more volume and keep testing new banners for your mobile campaign, also try to scale to other networks with those winning banners/landers
Day 5
Spend: $209.07
Income: $218.80
ROI: 5%
@marcovandaar
I'm limited to 100 leads per day right now with the best converting offer. I've tested three different offers and none of them are as strong. Also working on joining another network that supposedly has some good dating offers. I tested 20 more banners today and quite a few are over 100% ROI. Once I get an offer without a cap, I'll send some more volume and get some better numbers. Hopefully tomorrow
I don't have screenshots today. Basically the campaign that has been converting converted near 90% ROI and the new offer and Canada tests I did were -54% and -16% respectively.
One thing I'm confused about is the difference in clicks reported from ExoClick and STM Tracker. Today, ExoClick reports 3,101 clicks and STM reports 4,816 total clicks and 3,560 unique clicks. Is this normal for everyone?
Day 6 and 7
No ads ran today.
So after five days of pushing Cupid's offer, they let me know the quality of traffic wasn't good enough. She told me that the conversion rate was 0% so it doesn't get much worse than that. I believe I had some good numbers in terms of CTR for both the banners and landers, but the sign up rate was nada. So, I need to fix this. Is quality of traffic from adult sources a pretty big issue?
To my understanding, I won't be paid for the leads because I ran the offer direct through Cupid. Am I right that if I would have ran the same offer through a network that I would have been paid? Either way, I want to make sure that both sides benefit, not just me.
I looked into a different offer at a different network and changed the banners and landers slightly as to prescreen the leads a little bit more, but now I'm converting hardly anyone. My EPC is like $0.03 for an offer that is supposedly doing very well. Obviously there is a happy medium that I will need to find, but I'm not seeing it at the moment.
Should I change the angle completely? What are some way you look to improve the quality of adult traffic?
What banner CTR's do you shoot for? (Mine were at 0.30% pre-change)
What lander CTR's do you shoot for? (Mine were at 60% pre-change)
What sign up rate do you shoot for? (Mine were at 6.3% pre-change)
What EPC do you shoot for? (Mine were at $0.10 pre-change)
Hey man, awesome progress so far! Although that is a serious bummer about Cupid, I have seen a few threads around here that were staying the same thing. I've avoided them like the plague because of that.
I haven't done mobile, but everything looks decent. Just started playing with Exo after getting a good handle on TJ, so I have been shooting for a much higher EPC, around the .40-.60 range due to costs. Payouts are probably higher from non-mobile too. Either way, you are definitely on the right track as far as I can see, just keep testing!
Hey, awesome job man! I read the same about Cupid, but honestly, a lot of what I've read is to test things before you make any assumptions. Looking back on it, it's probably not a great idea to go direct for someone that is new. If you know your quality is good, it's really a no brainer in my opinion.
I haven't worked with TJ yet, but here are some little things about Exo that I liked/didn't like. I like that you can target mobile a decent amount (Android, iPhone, Opera, iPod, etc.) Didn't like their accuracy in terms of clicks or especially their budget. I ran one ad with a cap set at $20 and it ended up running until like $59. I totally understand you can't stop it on $20 exactly, but 200% over in pretty ridiculous. When you get close to your budget, pause it and it seems to shut down a little quicker. Good luck man
I need some help.
I had some success with a SOI dating offer above, but the quality of traffic was poor. Outside of that one offer and that one specific offer LP, I have tested about 5-6 different offers that are hot according to a couple of different AMs and only had 3 conversions. All I'm trying to do is find my weakness and improve it quickly.
Recently I've been testing more "hot" offers in three countries outside of US, UK, CA and AU. They are all mobile subscriptions instead of adult dating and I am running premium traffic only. I am direct linking them to gather data, cut creatives/OS/carriers/handsets, but the problem is none of them have conversions, so it's hard to optimize something with a -95% ROI.
Banners - Tested about 50, some mine, some theirs (0.20% to 1.4% CTR)
Lander - Tested 0 (direct linking to start)
Offers - Tested 10 (1 conversion, still very negative ROI)
Hosting - Beyond Hosting VPS (2nd tier)
Tracking - Working with 2 (STM Mobile and iMobiTrax)
Targeting - All mobile, specific carriers and countries per offer
I'm not quite sure what I should be doing differently. What is your no BS advice?
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