It's time to start testing out mobile.. Facebook is stressing me out a bit too much, and Google banned my ass pretty quickly (I managed to get some e-cigarette campaigns approved on Google, finally hit a low maintenance profitable campaign, and got banned.. Google knew what I was doing.. haha). I'm planning to invest 100% of my capital into mobile, so either I'll make it work or go broke.
-I'll be using the STM mobile tracker. I'll likely switch over to the MobAff tracker pretty soon. I'm used to CPVlab, so p202 is a serious pain in the ass for me to set up.
-Traffic source: Star-Advertising.com to start off with. I've been talking with a rep and he's been super helpful so far.
-Country: France, BeNaughty.
Initial Strategy:
-Start off testing out 5 placements with low competition which my network rep recommended to me.
-Create 2 campaigns for each placement: 1 for iOS, 1 for Android. 10 campaigns total.
-For Star-Advertising: setting frequency capping at 5. I'm not targeting ISP yet. I'll try to optimize that as I collect more data.
-The same [10] 300x250 banners in each campaign. 8 jpg's, 2 gif's for now.
-Individual campaign budget: $15
-Daily Budget: $150 (10 campaigns, $15 each)
-Total Budget: $1,050 (7 days total)
-After collecting enough actionable data and optimizing campaigns, test out some higher volume placements with more competition.
-For now I want to start off with smaller traffic sources like Star-Advertising, and maybe AdJizz, but when I get better I'll likely try out ExoClick and other super high volume sources.
I'll update this thread until I start to make sense of mobile. Time to get to work and upload these banners!
Interesting stuff! Sounds like a good plan so far - looking forward to seeing more.
Just a couple observations if I may...
Freq cap at 5 seems a bit high to test with, personally I'd go 1 or 2 until you know what sort of ctr you're getting, remember ctr is king with cpm bidding. Particularly as you're not targetting carriers, you could blast your budget fast.
Also I'd advise you to try the 305x99 banners, always found the ctr to be higher than the 300x250s.
Hope that helps, interested to see how you go with French inventory on Star-Advertising.
I've been lazy with updating this thread. This post is going to be a bit unorganized, but I wanted to update it anyway...
Basically things started off slowly, but they're picking up a bit. I'm finally starting to make sense of how to track things efficiently. When I first submitted campaigns my tracking URL looked like this: STMmobiletracker.com...kw=country_placement_adsize _imagename. This was too confusing, so I started to manually put my placements into c1. I also realized that mobile trackers are able to detect the country, ISP, carrier and OS, so it's pointless to put these into the keyword. When I started doing mobile it was overwhelming to look at all of the data, but utilizing c variables helps a lot.
Initially I started off by targeting low volume placements in France. Yesterday I starated testing out high volume placements in Germany. After I finish posting here I'm going to cut all of the low volume placements and go for the high volume placements. I've been testing 305x99 banner sizes. My issue with low volume placements is that I'm not getting data fast enough. It's a bit frustrating to have to wait 4 days just to optimize a campaign because I don't have enough data.
Star-Advertising and TrafficJunky both have some of the same placements. I'm split testing both traffic source to see which performs better. I'll give more specific data when I have it. Tomorrow I'll give a more organized update.