One Of My First Ever Campaigns: Mobile, Germany, Networking App Installs. (32)
One Of My First Ever Campaigns: Mobile, Germany, Networking App Installs.
Hey everyone!
Quick intro of where I'm at:
I'm very new to AM, been doing this about a week. I've run a few campaigns so far. I'm just putting together a fresh campaign and want to make it a follow along from the get-go.
So far based on the little data/trialing I've done, my CTR has been average to low and my conversions low. I'd like to improve both, obviously!
I have learned the basics of campaign setup, some optimization (mostly to do with stats), basic landing pages, basic banner animation, and dabbled in both English speaking and foreign language.
Today my aims are to practice landing pages a bit, put up some new campaigns, try out creating ads with things on different layers (make them easier to edit later), and get this follow along going to hopefully get some advice and guidance.
I'd appreciate any feedback/help you have along the way. I don't really know what's good to focus on and/or try out yet, so if you'd do something differently (be that a specific thing with banners/landing pages, campaign option optimization like carriers/targeting etc, even spend and that kind of thing). Basically anything - all ideas welcome.
The offer/campaign:
What we've got here is a social media app on iOS targeting Germany. Big focus in the app is finding new friends and/or love interests very locally, real time, chatting, that kind of thing.
We are on Decisive, whom I have heard don't like anything risque. So our pictures are all quite tame.
First off I sat down and tried to come up with a bunch of angles, and then picked one (basically "hot men/women nearby" - I don't know if something so generic was good/bad to start with, but I figured as something to test an offer 'hot people' is always wanted). I've run the hot men campaigns already and got zilch from them. I'm now going to try the hot women version.
The banners/ads:
First thing I'm doing is running 8 banners of each size with a different picture each; same text, same button/CTA per size, and running to 2 different landers to split test those, along with direct linking also.
(Future iterations could be different text, CTA, etc, but I'm going for different pictures this time. Feedback on what you differences you would test first welcome.)
The main text is from a paid translation service: the button text is from Google translate.
I'm running the banners in 300x250 and 320x50 (different campaigns per size).
I'm also specifically targeting mobile/site, as I read in an STM guide that was a good first test. Again though, discussion on this welcome (intuitively I'd have thought in app rather than on site would be better, for example).
Here are a couple of my banners for this campaign to give you an idea of the look I've got (feedback welcome on format/layout/anything):
(Text in banners reads: Pinpoint* Hot Women Nearby. CTA button reads: Touch Here.**)
I'd like to try testing things like borders and animation and google translate text vs paid-for translation, but to start off with I figured it's best to keep things simple. I don't quite know how to tell when it's good to test things like borders, like animated, etc, though.
So simple decisions I've made with these banners include:
- text size - to me this feels like something that merits experiment, although perhaps moreso at a later point when you're trying to target smaller things to optimize. For now I've tried to make the text big and clear while working with the fact that German has a bit of a longer-words problem.
- text alignment - - (in 300x250) Most of my other campaigns feature ads with left-aligned text. This one is centre aligned: it just feels like it looks better to me. I have no idea whether left/centre align is better (or if it even matters that much).
- borders/no borders - I kind of want to go border crazy but felt less-is-more to start testing with. Can add borders later. I always border my CTA button with a contrasting colour to make it pop out more though.
- CTA button colours - tend to have 2 contrasting primary colours. I feel a bit like this makes the ad fugly, but I've also had it pointed out to me that at least it gets noticed. (Although I've just realised I've accidentally used different button colours for the different sizes).
- The main text is paid-for translation: I figured it was better to go for 'probably right' translation first rather than 'free but maybe more dubious'. Would like to test google translation though.
- 320x50 CTA button: The CTA didn't fit the 320x50 CTA button space (gogo long German words) with my normal 12-14-16 size font + bold: it had to be smaller than I liked. So since bold/larger font didn't fit, I underlined it to help it stand out.
The landers:
The landers are a work in progress. I would've actually been posting this up and getting the campaigns running an hour ago, but I'm waiting on the translations to come back.
I'm going to get the banner ads/campaigns running for now and will add the landers when the translations come in.
I'll update this post with the landers + info when the translations are back and the landers are running - hopefully first thing tomorrow.
What now:
I'm just about to set up the 2 campaigns in Decisive now: 1 for 300x250, 1 for 320x50. I'll set it to .2 bid and a low spend, and leave it running while I find some more offers to test out! And will add in the landing pages ASAP.
Meanwhile, all feedback very welcome. Thanks for reading this far - if you have any questions or want more info to be able to advise on how to improve here, please just ask.
Have a great day!
* I think the translation has given me 'locate' rather than 'pinpoint', but I've let that be as I guess it might be to do with word-equivalency discrepencies between English/German.
** My other campaigns went with more generic button text like "Click Here" or "Download Now" - I read in one of the mobile guides that other things may work more intuitively for a mobile user, hence trying "Touch Now". Plus sexy.
Edit: forgot to make clear I was starting the campaign running without landers for now.
Quick update:
Landers:
Translations came in. Landers are finished and running. You guys can see them:
I'm split testing 2 different landers. The text in them has been translated by a paid-for service, so hopefully is a decent translation. Feedback welcome on the landers.
Here they are:
I'm also running direct linking alongside them, as I said earlier.
I've run both landers in a mobile phone (specifically iPhone 5) emulator in Chrome via the dev tools, to check they fit/are readable on an iPhone screen since it's an iOS offer, etc.
Some current decisions on the landers (again, advice on things you think would work better always welcome):
- Pictures - lander 1 has 2 pics side-by-side. Normally I'd do 1 pic but in this case it looked a bit lost: 2 looks nice. I could try 1 pic on its own anyway, or maybe even a grid of a few different pics, that might be fun. Not sure what works best though. Lander 2 has no pic at all, as a very basic difference test. Also another variable could be completely different pictures - like maybe of the app itself. Again, don't know how big/good an idea that is.
- CTA buttons - lander 1 has a button right at the end, which I worry people won't see/get to if the rest of the page doesn't grab them. But it's also the logical place to find it. Lander 2 has a CTA button above the fold as well as at the end: hard to miss. I wonder if 2 buttons make it more likely to get clicks, or less likely because it feels pushy. Again, a difference I thought might be worth testing.
- Title is not a question - in my first landers yesterday I just used the banner text (which was a question) as the lander title. Here I wanted to introduce my app's name as well, so the user knew what I was referencing with all the bulletpoints down the page. So I combined the app introduction with referencing back to the banner text. I like it, but I worry it's not as strong as a question, nor that 'find' is a strong command to lead with - but I can't think of a better one.
- Font - the font throughout both landers is a Google font I thought was nice and clear.
- Colours - mimicking the iTunes colour scheme iPhone users should be familiar with. The CTA buttons are a mix of colours from the app logo, as iTunes is a bit sparse for colours otherwise and it felt like a nice way to introduce the app logo for when they click through.
Mobile+site - change:
Mobile and site combination was getting absolutely no traffic. Have changed mobile to wifi and kept site as site, to see if it gets any more traffic. Logic is that if people are at home (on wifi) and randomly browsing websites, they probably aren't too busy - whereas if they are browsing apps they probably are already doing something. So we'll see how this combination goes. Thoughts welcome.
You should get traffic with carrier/site and wifi/site just fine. Are you sure the ads were approved and live? What was your bid - $0.2 CPM of CPC or Smart CPM? I would think you'd need to bid a lot higher than $0.20 for German traffic.
I'm a bit confused of your combo theory, but i recommend splitting WIFI vs carrier traffic, and track separately. They usually are a big difference and WIFI is usually purchased at a lot cheaper rates.
Looks like a good, thorough start.
Landers: test BIG changes first. Ideally, test two completely different styles of lander - something very interactive vs a conventional three-bullet-point sales page, or something very minimal versus something with more design. You're looking to see very different results between your tests - if the CTR/CVR are similar, you probably need to test wider.
My experience in the past is that a button near the top of the lander gets quite a few clicks, but that those clicks tend to convert worse, presumably because they're not as sold on the offer. But as always, the data is king!
To get more ideas for designs, one of the killer sites is http://pttrns.com (for iOS). There are dozens of examples of phone app designs there, which can inspire some great landers.
Let us know how the data looks as it comes in - and keep launching campaigns!
Originally Posted by zeno
Is carrier/site the same as mobile/site? If so, didn't seem to be getting traffic
My bid is $0.2 CPM. It's the same as I was initially setting for my American campaigns with a different offer. I'm not sure what to put bids at, it's all a bit "roll forehead over keyboard" at present, so I just went with the same as those earlier campaigns for habit's sake
However, I think I did try setting the bid higher for a bit earlier, and it didn't seem to change it (with mobile/site).
I have played more with different bid amounts, partially guided by my first dig into Decisive's Planner tool. I still don't know what's not too low/too high for a bid, so advice welcome on knowing how to optimize spen
Originally Posted by stackman
Quick q: What do you mean by combo theory? Do you mean my combos on mobile/wifi and app/site?
For some earlier campaigns before this one, I did 4 separate campaigns each running a different combination of mobile/wifi and app/site. They started getting kinda expensive and I read Angry Russian recommending starting an offer with mobile/site to see if it's profitable + also just getting loads of offers going. So generally in the past couple of days I've gone for starting a bunch of offers in a bunch of countries, but mostly only tried 1-2 combinations of mobile/wifi and app/site for each of them (rather than 4).
Mostly gone for mobile/site BUT I have found Decisive's Planner tool, which lets you dig down into traffic by country, and have been playing a bit with their info on mobile/wifi site/app per country and made a couple of different choices for some countries.
I'd still say I have very little clue for knowing what's actually good to do rather than what looks like it might be good. So if you've got any advice I'd definitely welcome it!
Originally Posted by caurmen
Re: landers. What would you call 'something very interactive'? Would you be able point me to any good examples on the forums of interactive/minimal landers, please? (Don't know if that's cheeky to ask!) Meanwhile I'll take a look at that site you linked, ta for that.
Thought I'd update my thread with what I've been doing today! Mostly to do with different campaigns/offers to the one the original post talks about - quick update on that at the bottom of this post.
(My brain is a bit frazzled so this might be a little muddled.)
Task 1: An old app friend, different countries + networks
I've been testing a cleaning app offer all week in America and it hasn't been going anywhere. Today I launched a bunch of campaigns for this app in other countries with its international offer.
I launched my most uptodate folder of 320x50 banners for this app (which is a mixture of original content and some premade stuff, just for testing), launching separate campaigns focused on India, Ireland, and Canada.
I attached my most uptodate landing page to the Ireland and Canada campaigns, and am split testing it alongside direct linking. My plan was to add another lander if these got anywhere.
I translated most of the banners into Hindi via Google Translate before starting the Indian campaign. I didn't add a landing page to the Indian campaign at the time.
Then it was "ohnononononono my URLs are broken" time for a while.
The Canadian and Indian ones are set to target mobile/site. The Irish one is set to target WiFi/App because the traffic looked a lot better for those in Ireland in Decisive's Planner thingy. Again, not sure if these are the best combinations (or even if it's not a case of "best" but "try more combinations.")
I also got this offer on a different aff network, so am split testing 2 networks for these as well.
At time of posting, India and Canada are getting a lot more clicks than Ireland, yet Ireland is the one that's had a conversion. (Any ninja-fu reasoning behind this I don't know, or is it just "that's how it goes" ?)
Task 2: Something completely different
While waiting for approval on the above campaigns, I started on a completely different offer. It's a game offer. I created a mixed bag of banners from premades and original content again. I found myself automatically making my original-content banners to be animated, rather than static, but went with it. It seemed that game banners were a lot more busy than others, so some kind of movement/call out seemed needed.
I set those banners running in Ireland, targeted specifically at WiFi and App combination due to some advice from the aff network. I made 2 campaigns here, one targeting specifically roleplayer subcategory and one targeting chess (app) subcategory.
These two campaigns have not seen any traffic in 3 hours. They have maybe seen 5 bids between them and no wins at all. I don't know why this is - only idea I have is maybe I'm targeting too specific by using the subcategories.
Advice here would definitely be welcome - for example, should I remove the subcategory targeting and just let it target Wifi+App (/another combination of those)?
Haven't put landers on these yet, was concentrating on getting as many campaigns as possible up.
Task 3: something else completely different
Another different offer. Got some banners ready for it, primarily my own creations with a couple of premades mixed in. Unfortunately this is a US only offer, but I've launched it there anyway.
No landing page on this one yet, figured I'd see if I got any positive signs from the offer with direct linking first.
Task 4: Try the game offer already set up in Ireland in other countries
The game offer can be run for a few different countries. While I tried it first in Ireland as an English speaking country, I wanted to try it in some other countries too.
First up I looked at Decisive's Planner thingy and had a look at the CPM for the targetable countries, and then at the average costs for app/site wifi/mobile. I decided to try Brazil first, and set about translating my game banners that I had created earlier into Portuguese.
This proved to take a long time and be quite a headache. I've done it, and am now waiting for approval on the banners from the aff network before I can start a campaign with them.
Task 5: whoa, what's happening with India and that cleaning app?
I noticed that the campaign I had launched in India with the cleaning app earlier today was getting a lot of traffic and quite a lot of clicks, but no conversions.
I wondered if people were clicking the banner and being put through to the app page in English, and getting confused (my banners are in Hindi but the app download page on Google Play is in English).
So I bit the bullet and translated my primary lander for this offer into Hindi, making sure to explain that when they tap the button below they should click "install" (the only English word on the lander now) on the next page. Hopefully it will help explain things, plus also generally help strengthen the sales pitch to have the rest of the lander in Hindi.
It is only Google Translate at the moment, and I suspect it's very bad Hindi. It will either do wonderfully or awfully. Might be worth getting a paid translation on this in a day or two, if it doesn't seem to be converting as is??
I've attached the lander to the Indian campaign (still alongside direct linking) and we'll see how it does.
Summary:
Head frazzled. As always, I'd appreciate feedback on anything you think I can do better or change for the better in any of the above campaigns. I am having a bit of "why are all my campaigns getting clicks but almost no conversions" panic, so reassurance on this also welcome. I've heard "this is normal" but I can't help think that it must mean there's something wrong with my banners and/or landers that they're getting clicked but not converted!
Also I'm still very much guessing with bid amounts and wifi/mobile + app/site stuff, so guidance welcome there, too.
P.S. the German "find hot women" campaign in the original post - that didn't get approved for a very long time (Decisive seems to have been having some problems today) hence I haven't got much news on it. It is getting some traffic now but not enough to definitely work out anything.
Each banner in that campaign has had some clicks, but no one of them is at uber click%. Also no conversions.
Just a few lines regarding the content...
Where did you get the translation from? It's not good.
Change it to:
Body:
Finde heisse Frauen in deiner Umgebung
CTA:
Tipp' hier!
The landing page copy is okay for a first test. Just change the CTAs to "Tipp' hier!" as well. "Berühren" is the wrong verb in this context.
Originally Posted by ibanez
Where did you get the translation from? It's not good.
Change it to:
Body:
Finde heisse Frauen in deiner Umgebung
CTA:
Tipp' hier!
The landing page copy is okay for a first test. Just change the CTAs to "Tipp' hier!" as well. "Berühren" is the wrong verb in this context.
I got the translations for the banners and the landing page from 1 hour translation, but I think from different translators.
Perhaps I'd do better with another translation service - at least for German...
Going to change these first thing in the morning! My other half is dragging me away from the keyboard for now.
(P.S. - I'm guessing the ' at the end of Tipp' is part of the word/meaning?)
I'm getting driven closer and closer to just finding some kid on a relevant forum to do translations for my stuff - I'm finding some people on OHT just don't read instructions, miss out pieces of text etc. and take a while to respond. Gets a bit irritating. That and I tend to use the gaming specialisation and repeatedly get people who clearly don't play video games...
However, it's better than Google Translate, which is a bad option for a lander translation. It works OK for short sharp sentences but often gives unnatural results, though sometimes these increase CTR!
In regards to your lack of traffic from the Irish campaign, definitely remove those subcategories. Chances are there are few Irish visitors using wifi to play any of the chess or roleplayer apps in the inventory... Those apps might not have any Irish users at all!
Originally Posted by zeno
Thanks for the tip on the Irish campaign! I did that over the weekend and they started getting more traffic. More full update on them to come (hopefully) shortly.
I've done quite a lot over the past few days so figured I should post some updates! I'll try to split it up into readable/navigable chunks, per campaign.
(This update on German/Hot Women has turned out pretty long, so I'll make this its own post and other campaign updates in a separate post, likely tomorrow morning.)
CAMPAIGN UPDATE: "Find Hot Women" in Germany - the campaign the original post is about
After ibanez was kind enough (thank you again!) to give me a better translation for my banners on Friday evening, I decided to re-do them. I cringed at the idea that my original translation was that awful, and felt that it should be a big thing to fix!
So on Saturday (yes, I'm hooked enough to be working Saturdays at the moment ) I started in on redoing the banners.
I had heard elsewhere on STM (can't remember where exactly) that it's a good idea to test big differences per banner in mobile. So I rolled up my sleeves and jumped in. My original banners for this campaign were all quite similar, just with different pictures.
Version 2 of this campaign is not so. By the end of Saturday I had 7 new banners. One of them used the idea from my the banners in v1 of the campaign. Two of them were inspired by Whatrunswhere.com and were nearly the same, but for the fact that one is in English rather than German (the only English banner in this campaign).
Several of them are animated as 2 slides back-to-back, looping 3 times (Decisive rejects them if they loop more than 3 times). I found that doing this I could get more words/message/intro to the app across, and also hopefully grab more attention, while hopefully not overwhelming the user with info and/or nitwibbling them off.
I made banners testing a bunch of stuff. One has lots of pictures. Some have borders, others don't. Some are bright colours; some are soothing colours. In both bright and soothing cases I tended to favour colours from the iTunes store and the app logo/pictures, to try to familiarise the user. Many of them try to mention the app name and/or logo, to call forward for people who click through.
Various things flash or go out of frame. I even managed to fudge some gradiated buttons in Paint.net (I'm still using that: learning Photoshop is on my to-do list).
I also tested different phrases and combinations of words (I'm not sure whether they do/don't count as different angles...). Given previous lack of success with OHT and the fact I was trying out a bunch of different phrases, I used a combination of Google Translate and Bing Translator to get my translations: what I did was put my English phrase in one, then copy/paste the German phrase it gave me into the other translator and check that it too said the same thing back in English. I suspect it's still not wonderful, but hopefully not as awful as the previous versions' translations!
Here are some examples of the new banners:
- Banner 1
- Banner 2
- Banner 3 (This is the one that's also up separately as English text - though apparently 'chat' and 'flirt' are the same in German...)
- Banner 4
I'd welcome feedback on the banners. What do you like/not like; what do you think is good/not good? What might you do differently?
I put the campaign up on Saturday night but didn't check Decisive until this morning (tried to have a day off!) Unfortunately today I found that it had been rejected as something had gone wrong technically, so I didn't get the traffic I had been hoping for over the weekend.
I rectified the problem today and resubmitted the campaign. I got approval about 6 hours ago. It is set to split test between direct linking and the landing pages linked in the original post.
So far, the stats on this v2 of German women are: nearly 12k impressions, 26 (0.22%) clicks, and 0 conversions. CPM is currently $0.2 and CPC is $0.09.
I will be taking a look at the live report stats and tracker stats tomorrow and trying to optimise (should there be anything worth optimising). One thing I notice from a quick glance at the live report on the creatives is that no single banner is doing particularly well - there's no clear winner or favourite for clicks.
So as far as this campaign goes: what are your thoughts? How can I get my clicks/conversions up (or is that a very noob question to ask)? What would you look at next? Or would you archive this one and move on?
First round of optimization on Hot Women in Germany TAKE 2 (i.e. v2 of campaign I re-introduced last night with fresh banners).
Overall stats: 45 clicks (0.16 CTR), $0.13 CPC, 28k impressions, 0 conversions. Running just shy of 24 hours. Bid currently set to $0.21.
So I let this campaign run since it got approved yesterday, and am just now doing my first optimization round. Given it's only been running a day, I'm only really looking for things that stand out as hugely underperforming for now.
I'm still very new to this optimization stuff so feedback very welcome on things I may have missed, forgotten about, done wrong, or decided was too important/not important enough. I've also included a specific question (or 'feedback point') for each sub heading - would really appreciate tips on those points if you've any thoughts!
In general, what I am doing this round is looking at things in the live report in Decisive and sorting by both impressions and CPC.*
Now delving into specifics in the live report...
Categories
I looked at categories first for no real reason - it's just what I clicked on first.
Top of the list is 'sports' category - 9k impressions, 0 clicks. I've blacklisted that. Surprised though, thought sports might be something that might have guys interested in hot girls nearby.
Next one down is Arts and Entertainment with 9 clicks and 4k traffic - not great but something. Although leaving it running means the CPC stands at $0.11, so it might be worth retiring also soon. It's also by far my next highest spend - with no conversions.
After those the impressions in other categories drop off. So maybe we'll get more traffic in these categories now the Sports category is blacklisted, if I'm understanding impressions/wins/bids right. For now though, these categories with lower impressions have a range of CTR% and CPC. Here's what's notable:
- Arts + Ent: 9 clicks (0.2% CTR) / $0.11 CPC / 4.4k impressions
- News: 4 clicks (0.24% CTR) / $0.09 CPC / 1.7k impressions
- Business: 9 clicks (0.57%) / $0.04% CPC / 1.6k impressions
- Hobbies + Interests: 3 clicks (0.27% CTR) / $0.07 CPC / 1k impressions
- Tech + computing: 2 clicks (0.3% CTR) / $0.07 CPC / 700 impressions
Feedback point: I think I need more data. But I'm wondering if given some more data, it might be worth targeting business category specifically if it's still out-performing all other categories. Also it looks like I could do with getting my CTR% up generally, any tips on how to do that (better banners, but anything specific?)
Site traffic
On site data, one particular site (uniquetour.eu) had 11k impressions (which was 95% of the bids for that site) and 0 clicks. Large spend so far too. Retired/blacklisted that.
Unfortunately no other site has had anywhere near as many impressions - next best is pressportal.de with just over 2k impressions and 4 clicks (0.19% CTR / $0.11 CPC). That one looks like it might be worth retiring as well, but I'm not sure if I should let it run for now and see if picks up after getting rid of the other site draining all the traffic?
Third best is exchangecash.de with 2k impressions and 13 clicks (0.66% CTR / 0.03 CPC). I like the look of this. Also it looks like it matches up with what we saw in categories - this sounds like a business site.
Two more things to note here:
- There are a few sites that have had 1-2k impressions but low CTR (0.2-0.35%) and higher CPCs. I'm wondering if I should blacklist those too, but they are now some of the sites that have highest impressions, so not sure if I should wait and see if they improve
- Some other sites have had tiny amounts of impressions but a higher CTR+lower CPC and are looking more promising (although such tiny amounts of impressions it's almost certainly not statistically significant).
Feedback point: now that I have blacklisted the site that was getting most of the impressions and no returns, should other sites pick up more impressions? And should I blacklist some of the underperforming 2k impression sites/how long should I give them to improve before I do so?
Device
The offer says that it is for both iPhone and iPad, so til now I've been targeting both.
iPad so far has got 16k wins and only 7 clicks (0.04% CTR) and a CPC of $0.47, and has so far spent a lot compared to anything else. I'm shooting iPad traffic in the head. Right. Now.
iPhone meanwhile only has 8.5k impressions, and 26 clicks (0.3% CTR /$0.07 CPC). I'll leave that and see if it gets more traffic now the daily spend isn't being drained by the badly performing iPad traffic.
(As a side note, my guess would be bigger banners + a different size/spec'ed LP might work better for iPad traffic - am I right?)
I also seem to be getting some traffic on iPod, with an actual decent CTR (0.93%, although over a much much smaller sample size). The offer says that "This app is designed for both iPhone and iPad" but doesn't mention iPod at all - whether it is or isn't useable for the app.
Feedback point: does the fact that the offer doesn't mention the iPod mean the app won't work on it at all and I should definitely just stop traffic for iPods here?
Carrier
We're running the offer on WiFi rather than mobile/carrier, so this doesn't apply.
Creatives
We haven't spent that much yet so I'm only doing a first sweep on creatives to see if anything is clearly underperforming in comparison to others.
They're all doing pretty terribly on CTR and CPC tbh, and there are none that stand out as better or worse than the others. They all fall in the 0.11-0.21% CTR and $0.10-0.18 CPC.
There are few immediate similarities between the two at the top of the narrow CTR range, other than that they're both in German. The one ad that's partly in English is one of the worst performing.
I think for now I'm going to leave them all running and get more data, especially now I've knocked out a couple of variables in other parts. I am worried at the performance of these creatives, though, and am not sure how much I should be.
Feedback point: are my banners just doomed on this one? And/or anything you can suggest that might get their CTRs (or *gasp* conversions) up?
Last points
I have not yet gone through operating systems, will probably include that on the next round of optimisation.
My 2 LPs seem to be doing pretty terribly, although I suspect not enough data yet to tell anything useful.
That's it for the Hot Women in Germany today. I've updated this thread a lot in the past 24 hours so I'm going to leave it to cool off a bit
Meanwhile, I'd welcome any thoughts you have on things to improve.* I realised halfway through that I had forgotten to change it from "today" to "all time" on the data. Luckily this didn't matter too much this time as the campaign had only been running since yesterday late afternoon, and so the data I had been looking at for "today" wasn't wildly different once I switched it to "all time" and double checked all my decisions. But it's a lesson learned for next time to remember to change the date data range!
I've gone through and updated what I wrote to reflect all time (well, since yesterday when it went up) stats, rather than today's, which is what I had written down.
The translations of your banners are far from good in my opinion. Hit me up on Skype and I'll help you out a bit. 'Lokale Singles' is understandable, but reads horribly.
Originally Posted by fjk87
I'll be sending you a Skype in a few min!
Don't be too quick to blacklist anything - site, app, whatever. If it's only had a couple of thousand impressions the CTR (never mind the CVR) is still too uncertain. However, as it approaches 5k impressions at usual mobile CTRs you should be a lot safer to cut anything that's doing unusually poorly.
How many clicks have your LPs had? And what's the payout of the offer?
Originally Posted by caurmen
LPs have had 24 and 25 clicks respectively. Direct link has had 22 clicks.
Still no conversions as of now (roughly 6 hours after my last post here). Though I have paused it overnight, pending better translations when I catch up with fjk87.
The payout is $1.05
OK, that's not enough data to make any decisions yet, really. However, I'd be watching the CTR on this campaign - 0.22% max is very low for mobile. Hopefully the new translations will help.
Also, the Business category sounds promising - if that higher CTR continues, it might be worth making a separate campaign just targeting that. Your volume will be low, but it might turn into a nice little niche campaign to start getting some revenue from.
I've got less # of things done today, but I think some of them have been really important.
Making sense of angles
I have been really struggling on coming up with angles up to now. Today I have figured out and written down a step-by-step process, which will hopefully help me with angles.
As part of that, I did some reading about a country's mobile habits before running a campaign there. This not only helped me with my angle process today, but has given me some ideas for the future when I am about to launch a campaign in a new country.
A new horizon
Using my new step-by-step, I came up with some angles for a new antivirus offer in Brazil. The hardest thing I find about it now is putting my message into as few words as possible. I'm finding this problem is compounded by translations into other languages, which tend to come back even wordier in the other language.
German Hot Women update
While I waited for the translations to come back from OHT for the new antivirus campaign, I talked to fjk87 and updated the text in the German Hot Women banners.
They've gone live now. Here are some of the latest versions:
The new horizon goes live
After that, the Portuguese translations had come back from OHT so I set to creating banners for one of the angles on the antivirus campaign. I'm quite proud of them, but they did take a very long time. Here are a couple of them:
After some of my translations from OHT recently turned out to be stinkers I am a little worried about these Portuguese ones, but we'll see.
Unfortunately these are my only two campaigns at the moment. Some of my others are paused while the Android t/c thing earlier in the week gets figured out. The Irish gaming offer I think I mentioned in an earlier post has been retired due to a lack of uptake. It's a shame, I was really proud of my landers for that! But hopefully what learning went into the landers will inform future landers, so they'll live on in spirit.
As always, feedback welcome. I'm going to leave these to run overnight and hope for some data by morning!
Update: "Hot Women" in German campaign
Hokay. My German Hot Women banners had, this morning, barely done anything. I have culled them down to the top performing 3, all of which have around .3-.4% CTR.
Still no conversions.
I think this one might be close to being retired.
I'm not sure if it's worth keeping it going and just targeting the variables it's doing well in, though?
(By 'well' I mean variables that have a much higher CTR%, but still not conversions - as we're still at 0 conversions.)
This would mean targeting a couple specific sites and categories.
What do you guys think? Try that, or just retire it now, given the complete lack of conversions?
Update: Brazilian anti theft
The Brazilian anti theft campaign had had a conversion overnight, although only one. The banners seem to be getting a fairly decent CTR and have done so throughout the day.
Some stats/info on this campaign:
- Overall - throughout the day - they are at a 0.87% CTR.
- "All time" CTR (i.e. since yesterday) is 0.66%.
- 1 conversion.
- Payouts: .41 and .45 (split testing 2 offers that seem to go to the same app but be offered as something different)
- Current spend: $0.26 CPM
- Total spend: $4.25
- CPC (since yesterday): $0.04
I am thinking to add some (Portuguese) LPs to this one tomorrow: the offer does go straight to an app page which is written in Portuguese but maybe a lander will help get my conversions up, as people seem to be clicking through but not installing.
What do you think? LPs good next move, or other things first? I haven't yet drilled down into other stats on live report.
Update: Brazilian anti virus
I didn't get time to create anti virus campaign last night but have done so just now. I'm waiting for approval on it.
Its payouts are the same as the anti theft one above: 0.41 and 0.45.
In the meantime, here are some of the banners:
This time I got 6 different lines of text translated, 2 each for 3 angles.
Instead of use them all, I have used 4 lines of text and created 2 banners for each, for a total of 8 banners.
The thinking here is to a) be able to see if any 1 line of text does well (i.e. if both its banners do well) and b) test a whole bunch of design ideas at once. (And then hope I can figure out which ones are working!)
I am dubious about the Portuguese translations - as with the German banners, I got these done on OHT, a site which has rather lost my trust this week.
I forgot to get CTAs done at the same time though (mostly) so those are Google Translated, and cross referenced with 1-2 other free translation services.
What's your total spend on the Hot Women campaign so far? Sounds like it might be time to kill it.
Okay so I've been away for a few days but back and ready to go.
Here's where we're at:
- I retired the Germany hot women campaign. It wasn't getting anything on clicks (0.07%!) and no conversions. Time to move on.
- I left 2 campaigns running on my days away to gather data - 1 antivirus angle, 1 anti theft angle. They are in Brazil. I will be posting about my attempts to optimise them below, with questions - please help if you can.
- I have a new offer to run. I hope to get that running today. If I do I will post a reply about that in this thread too.
So onwards, to optimising anti theft and anti virus campaigns!
Following along on: Anti theft angle in Brazil, optimisation round #1 after 1+ week of data accumulation
Overall stats:
- 156k impressions
- 1716 clicks (1.1% CTR)
- 16 conversions (0.93%)
- 0.02% CPC
- $2.18 CPA
- $34.91 spend
Extra note: both my landing pages on this seem to not be working at all. No-one who has clicked through to the offer from the LPs have converted. I am looking into whether there is a problem with the LPs that is causing this before deciding that they just don't work at all. Input as to what might be happening would be very weclome!
Optimising by variable:
Creatives:
Sorting by conversions
All banners have a CTR of 1.1-1.2%. Finding it hard to cut based on that.
3 banners have a conversion rate higher than 1%. 3 banners have noticeably lower conversion rates - 0.74%, 0.48%, and 0.42%.
I've blacklisted the ones at 0.48% and 0.42%. I did this after running them through the statistical significance calculator: it thinks they can only max do 3x better than they are. Given they have both spent between $4-5 and the payout here is .45$, I don't see them bringing in more revenue than they spend. So those are paused.
This leaves me with 4 banners on this campaign. Question: is 4 okay or is it too few, and if too few how many new banners would you recommend adding - why?
Carrier:
There seem to be 2 carriers that are getting way more traffic than any others. Focusing on those two specifically for a moment, carrier #1 (called Tim Celular S.A.) has these stats:
1.1% CTR
0.41% conversion
$4.70 CPA
$14.23 total spend
Carrier #2 (called Claro S/A) has these stats:
1% CTR
1.3% conversion
$1.68 CPA
$13.42 total spend
To me it looks like Claro S/A is more promising because CPA is considerably lower, and conversion rate is considerably higher.
Looking at carrier data as a whole, there are also other carriers which are getting a lot less impressions (like 1.3k or lower to date, compared to 58k for Claro S/A).
I am not sure what to do here (partially due to landing page problems on this angle). Please see below for options/questions about this!
Device:
I can't see anything obviously underperforming here. No changes made.
Site:
No changes made here either. Landing page problems/possible data misrepresentation making me very conservative to blacklist on variables.
Anti virus optimisation:
I did the anti virus optimisation this morning, and forgot to write down what I did. However, I did have some things I wasn't sure on, and wrote down questions.
Questions on optimising at this stage:
On both anti virus and anti theft I am unsure about what I should do for carrier optimisation (with the caveat that anti virus' LPs are working and anti theft may not be so data may be less reliable for anti theft).
Here are the options I can think for actions to take on carrier optimisation:
- Option 1: leave them as they are. Thinking: both the top two carriers are getting some conversions and the other carriers have not spent enough to tell anything useful yet (next highest total spend on a carrier after the top 2 is 0.29$).
- Option 2: kill all the other carriers that are getting miniscule amounts of traffic and just focus on the top 2 carriers. I don't think there's much point to doing this though (other than to make it look tidier) given the other carriers are getting such small traffic that they haven't spent anything or got data to speak of yet.
- Option 3: leave carrier targeting as is on these campaigns but clone the campaigns and just have the clones target Claro S/A only, as that carrier seems to be best performing on both anti virus and anti theft. Thinking: following the advice in this post.
- Option 4: kill Tim Celular S.A. and just let both campaigns focus on Claro S/A (no cloning). Thinking: Tim Celular S.A. looks to be underperforming in comparison to Claro S/A judging by spend, CPA, and conversion rate.
Please let me know which option you think might be best for carrier optimisation!
On a similar note, while I have not made any changes to device as a variable, I had some thoughts. Should I
- a) leave them as are (can't see anything standing out as doing particularly well/badly) or
- b) make a clone campaign targeting only handsets that ARE converting? (possibly the same clone campaign that targets Clara S/A only on carrier, as suggested above - i.e. make a 'winning' campaign targeting the most profitable variables, as suggested here.)
Lastly, on the anti theft angle I mentioned that my landing pages have got 0 conversions and I wondered if they have a technical problem or something (looking into it) rather than are just not working.
Would you recommend:
- Making very few optimisation changes to variables in the anti theft campaign until I know for sure whether the LPs are broken or just don't convert, or;
- Optimise variables anyway, while trying to figure out what's going on with LPs.
Thanks for reading - and for any help you can give me!
The carrier data is quite interesting although unexpected - looks like Claro shows generally lower performance and availability compared to Tim Cellular.
http://www.dropmocks.com/mDvhWR
Could it be that certain placements that are giving you you're conversions are predominantly accessed through certain carriers or devices? E.g. site A is predominantly accessed through smartphones of a decent viewport size, and those smartphones 90% of the time are bundled with a specific carrier. There are a lot of potential causes of carrier bias apart from network performance.
With your landing pages, can you confirm these clicks have come through affiliate network side? How is the link structured - does it invoke a popup or load in the same window? Have you tested your landing pages using an emulator like BrowserStack or your own phone?
There are a lot of ways to go from here but I think your LP performance is one glaring issue. It could be that the LPs just don't work well but you'll want to be 100% confident on technical issues first.
Thanks for the great input zeno
Originally Posted by zeno
Originally Posted by zeno
Originally Posted by zeno
Link is a normal link, and loads in the same window. Have tested the LPs using BrowserStack but not my own phone. Also tested them using dev tools/phone emulator on Chrome.
Interestingly the LPs for my anti virus campaign seem to be getting some conversions but the anti theft just got no conversions - but they did get some click throughs.
Originally Posted by zeno
For reference, here are pics and stats/details of my LPs on the anti virus/anti theft:
- Anti virus 1 - only running 24 hours compared to the others running for 1 week, but so far it has a CTR of 11.86% (for a total of only 7 clickthroughs) and a conversion rate of 3.39% (for 2 conversions). This LP checks the handset and uses that info on the LP displayed on the user's phone, hence why it looks like the h2 text isn't complete here as we're looking at it on a PC browser.
- Anti virus 2 - this has a 16.67% CTR (for 190 clickthroughs) and 1.05% conversion rate (for 12 conversions). The idea here was to use a quote from a trusted source (specifically a trusted source from the target country) to assure the user of the app's usefulness and legit-ness.
- Anti theft 1 - before it was paused, this one had a 6.95% CTR (for a total of 28 clickthroughs) but 0 conversions. The idea behind this LP was that the offered app calls itself an anti virus app - not an anti theft app - but it is also anti theft. So my hypothesis was that people click on my banner and get direct linked to the appstore, read the app's name, and think "it is called an anti virus app not anti theft, why have I been told anti theft" and click away before reading the app's description and finding out it's also anti theft. So this LP tells them specifically that the app they are about to see is an anti virus app which is also an anti theft app.
- Anti theft 2 - before it was paused, this one had a 9% CTR (for a total of 36 clickthroughs) but 0 conversions. The idea behind this LP is telling the user how the offered app is anti theft - i.e. what specific anti theft measures it is capable of.
All of them have code that resizes them depending on the screensize of the handset. I believe this resizing works, as I tested it before they went up 10 days ago.
I am wondering whether it would be worth re-doing the anti theft LPs with some of the elements from the anti virus LPs, which seem to be working much better. In fact, just looking at all 4 side-by-side, I think I might whip up a 3rd anti theft LP later and see if that does any better.
Thanks man, i read every single line of your thread. Thanks again. I want to start mobile soon.......
Thanks for everything.
Update on my progress today:
Anti theft campaign - LPs:
Last we heard, it looked like my 2 LPs for this campaign were not working. They both received 0 conversions.
I have created a new LP for the Brazilian anti theft campaign.
You can see a pic of the new LP here.
The idea in trying a third LP on this campaign is to see if a new LP helps the campaign at all (in a way, double checking whether it was just that the last landers failed because they did, rather than for any technical reasons).
To that end, I took some elements from the anti theft LP that had got the highest CTR, and some elements from the so far best performing LP on my Brazilian anti virus campaign, and combined them.
... I also added a couple of new changes. I was only going to test a combination of elements that seemed to work so far, but I got a bit carried away with new ideas.
This LP took quite a long time - I'm still very much learning html/CSS etc. But it was good practice.
If this new LP gets at least a couple of conversions, I will look to creating a 4th LP and split testing that alongside this 3rd LP. I will look to trying something completely different in the case of a 4th LP.
I have no ideas for 'completely different LPs' at the moment, but I'm guessing there are some good threads about mobile LPs on STM to read.
(If anyone wants to suggest a couple of their favourite mobile lander threads to get me started, I'd really appreciate it!)
New campaign:
Yesterday I made creatives for a new Mobogenie Market* campaign targeting India. Today I got the campaign up, and it is waiting in Decisive for approval.
Starter info for this campaign:
- Network: Split testing 2 offers from F5
- Payouts: 0.32 and 0.34
- Creatives: 8 total
- OS: Android only
- Format: APK not Google play store (my first APK offers)
- Targeting: carrier and site
- Bid: 0.21$ CPM - this was just a number I picked out. Not sure how to decide on bids yet. Will go back to Decisive Planner and check info for India, but other than that am not sure how to decide on a good bid.
- Daily spend limit: $5 - a bit like bid, not sure if this is a reasonable amount, just a number picked out of my - well, y'know.
You can see some of the creatives below - the aim was to go for a range of different things and see what worked. Translations were mostly done by OHT.
Other stuff today:
I started a spreadsheet tracking daily spend/revenue/profit/ROI per campaign today. It was a bit of a headache to get going (formulae and I don't often get on) but now it's working, I can see it's going to be useful. At the start of each new day, I'll add the previous day's stats into it for each campaign.
I upped the daily spend limit on both the anti virus and anti theft campaigns from $5 to $10. The thinking behind this was, once my spreadsheet was done, I could see that my campaigns aren't spending much at the mo so aren't getting much data. To that end, I'm just going to let them spend a bit more to get data and haven't made any other optimisations (except adding the new LP for anti theft).
I've also started a habit of noting (by way of cell notes and background colour change) any changes/optimisations I make to campaigns in my shiny new spend/profit etc spreadsheet, so I should be able to clearly see what happens to the figures after I've made changes.
* Newbie thing, but am not sure what the etiquette is on saying what the name of the app I'm creating a campaign for is. Thing is, for this one I couldn't find another way to refer to it as it's not an easily pigeon-holed app like an antivirus or dating, etc!
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...azy-New-Angles
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Quiz-Code-FREE
And there is a general landers thread here - http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ing-Adult-more
There are loads of good mobile LP tips and tricks in the mobile index tips section: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post146132
I was going to link the threads individually, but when I got to 6 highly recommended ones I figured it was simpler to link the whole index
Originally Posted by zeno
Originally Posted by zeno
Originally Posted by zeno
Originally Posted by zeno
Originally Posted by caurmen
I was going to link the threads individually, but when I got to 6 highly recommended ones I figured it was simpler to link the whole index
Thanks! Definitely going to put some mobile index reading on my to do list today.
Here's what I did today!
Optimisation
Only changed a small amount on my running campaigns. I am starting to realise/think that it's better to change one or two things rather than a bunch of stuff, as then it's easier to see how each change makes a difference.
- Anti theft Brazil: I left this campaign alone today to give the new LP some time to gather data.
- Anti virus Brazil: I have put the spend up from 0.26$ CPM to 0.36$ CPM, to see if it gets more traffic (I seem to be seeing very small amounts of bids/impressions on Decisive compared to what is apparently available from carrier/site in Brazil, and want to see more bids/traffic).
- Mobogenie India: left this one alone to let it get some data.
New campaign
I've spent a while researching and thinking about angles for another new campaign. Along the way I've also set up some new docs where I will record any country specific research, and to help me prepare angles in the future.
Anyway, this new one today is a campaign for an antivirus + other tools app, targeting Malaysia.
My research on Malaysia indicates that it's a country of many prominent languages.
With that in mind, my first campaign for this offer will split-test different languages only to see if any one of them performs better. So I will first try 3x2 identical banners, the only differences being that the text will be one of 2 phrases, each phrase presented in one of 3 different languages.
I've stopped on this for the night as I'm awaiting translations from OHT.
Other stuff today
- I have cloned the anti virus campaign so I can also test mobile/app wifi/app and wifi/site, as per the advice in this awesome thread and this one.
- I've bitten the bullet and downloaded Photoshop's 30 day trial. I expect a slowdown in creative ... creation ... while I learn how to use Photoshop, then a speed up once I'm comfortable with it. I'm planning to try to create the banners for my new campaign using Photoshop tomorrow.
- I've spent some time today with technical things like trying to track down some click discrepancies - that's a work in progress. I've also had some issues with Decisive not listing conversions on a particular campaign that is showing conversions on both my aff network dashboard and tracker, so have been trying to figure that out. I also found and fixed a 2-part issue with some LPs.
I have a very busy Easter weekend starting tomorrow afternoon, so I'm not sure how much I'll get done with Photoshop/new campaign banners, but we'll see how it goes. Whatever I get done using a new piece of software is a good step
In the meantime, if anyone else has seen very small amounts of traffic on Decisive and/or knows how to up the amount of traffic you seem to be getting, I'd love to know. According to Decisive's Planner, Brazil has millions of mobile/site impressions available, but I'm only getting to bid on 35-40k/day.
Ninja, as a native German speaker, I am afraid to tell you that your translation sucks. 
"Touch here" - "Berühren Sie hier" - is a literal translation, but no German speaker would say that. Probably more of "Tippe hier" or even "Klicke hier" (click, even if it's technically not correct 
).
Whoever translated that, don't use that source again.
Feel free to PM me if you want me to have a look over translated stuff, I'll be happy to help!
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