Mobile: Kamikazi Going for Broke! Need Help from STM!!! (25)
This is a follow along for my AM career in mobile. i've been doing this for slightly more than 1 month now, and 100% fulltime for 15days already(quit my fulltime job being a poker player). still not profitable!
so its time to step my game up even more!
Charles Ngo
i've been reading up/following charlesngo and trying to understand the way he behaves and thinks. this guy is an absolute beast and i'm glad i got to know him!
had a very great experience at the charles's talk in BKK, and had alot of questions about improving answered(thats worth like $1.5k according to his $3k/hr rate 
).
my very first step is to model after him(aka copy)! once i'm able to replicate majority of his though processes, then i will think about how i can personalise and improve on it.
followed alot of his recommendations kanbanflow, rescuetime, stayfocus, mindmapping, reading books, meditate, etc, the whole package(except knock 30% off lol).
Goal
my goal at the moment is not to have my first winning day, find a winning campaign, hit the jackpot campaign or whatever. my goal is to be able to create a system that can help me create profitable mobile campaigns over and over agian. so my focus/goal each day will just be on the processes. i've learnt to not be results oriented from my days of playing poker. it's definitely easier here because when im testing i expect to lose $ consistently and the actual results cannot be any worse unlike poker. a match in expectations definitely helps my mindset alot!
ALL-IN
Mobile is my "ALL-IN' bet, i'm going for broke. I will sell everything away(not many things lol) if i have to to make this work. i hope this makes an exciting story for you guys, the very fact that u can participate in the process of building up/bringing down the main character(me) should make it even better!
(well i definitely hope there will be more people trying to help the main character in this follow along suceed than to fail!)
lets start with chapter 1!
Looking forward to your updates!
Chapter 1
i've ran about 7 offers now and so far nothing really worked like -90% or so. with very few conversions.
there are few possible problems.
1) offer sucks. but i've always done the recommended offers from AM(based on my criterias like volume/freshness) and i ocassionally go 1 step further to find out about the offers vs country(usually in countries im familiar with).
2)my first test on an offer. i think this is definitely a key area here i need to work on. there are various different approaches and various ideas as to how to first approach and offer.
my strategy is just to throw out 3angles of 3banners each and to test them till they each have gotten 5k impressions(total about 45k) and see which banner works, if none does, i'll throw more banners up or just move on. issue is i did not break down into the 4 carrier/wifi/wap/app, i just chose what i thought would best work for that app, so example games wld be wifi/app combo probably the best. i'm not sure if this is a good strategy or not when my focus is mainly Apps/games downloads.
Game Offer 1
so i decided to test a game offer recommended by my AM. payout is $2.50. i've 9 banners running 4 campaigns on decisive with each a $20 daily budget ( that will be $80 in testin which is pretty alot?) i know a high payout offer is somehting i shouldnt be tackling. but according to stackman, on a $0.80 payout he would test $0.80(payout)x9(banners)x10=$72 to see if the offer works, so thats still quite abit, but does that mean i should be testing more? cant seem to work out where the 10x come from.
3)back to the problems, i've realised another thing which is that my redirects were really slow. that was possibly because i was running a tracker hosting on a VPS in America when my traffic is from asia. charlesngo mentioned in mobile you gotta use dedicated servers to track, or voluums which is free and hosted over 3 locations around the world. so i decided to tackle the same offer which i've gotten tons of clicks but very few conversions
Game Offer 2
just right at this point, i've spent about $2 for 200 clicks and have gotten 1 conversion which is $2 payout! will update again in 24hrs
Goals for the day
to complete translations for 2 new offers today
to continue to monitor offer 1 and optimise it as much as i can.
to read 30mins
to meditate 5mins
to continue to work on my systems
Good luck with your follow along!!
Wooooo! Slow down cowboy.
Forget about everything, and get the basics down first.
You mention:
"I've ran about 7 offers now and so far nothing really worked like -90% or so. with very few conversions.
there are few possible problems."
That is data right there. Use that to make your next steps, find out where you went wrong. You mentioned there could be a few errors, but you didn't really come to any solid conclusions. Show us some data and what offers you worked with, I'm sure you can help you get more clarity where you are going wrong.
Originally Posted by supeyrio
Now you should focus on analyize result & repeat modify / uploading campaigns , plain and simple.
@mr Green: hey very nice to have u try to give ur inputs to this movie script!
will definitely start updating with some new data come tomorrow. problems are mostly narrowed down to 2 areas now since slow redirect issue is now none existant now that i've upgraded to using
@delash: i think you've kinda misunderstood that. kanbanflow, rescuetime, stayfocus are apps that help improve workflow so that i can be more productive in my work. mindmapping helps with angle creation which is recommended alot everywhere even in STM, and reading books+mediate for 35mins a day is a good getaway from AM especially when i'm grinding it daily 12hrs+ with no off days.
i do appreicate your kind intentions 
Originally Posted by supeyrio
There is quite a lot of experience on this forum ... take advantage of it!
From what you've said, one initial recommendation I'd have would be to take a look at the data split by wifi/mobile and app/site. The difference you'll often see in conversion rates and CTR between those is huge.
Also, how many networks have you taken offers from so far?
Chapter 1.5: Midday updates
@Caurmen: i have at least 5 networks i get offers from. can see that different networks do have different strengths in different niche, also gotten some help with AMs like they would give me stuff that are supposedly working so that i can improve on my materials quicker etc.
i'm definitely spliting those variables up like u said. i'm currently working on another offer, which is a pin submit so therefore i can only target carriers. i have come up with 3 angles and 1 lander for each angle. campaign creation wise how should i split test since i have 3 carriers x 3 angles x 2 types of traffic(app/site)?
i think the way to go is probably 1 campaign for 1 angle so i'd have 3 campaigns, then optimise stuff like carrier/(app/site) subsequently?
or should i do 1 campaign each 1 angle for app and another 1 campaign for the same angle for site? this will me a total of 6 campaigns which will be harder to micromanage.
Game offer 1
i culled this offer after the CTR just cldnt get higher than 0.21% after $15 spending and very low traffic despite proactively managing the campaigns on decisive. i've never gotten good CTRs with gaming offers with Decisive compared to other traffic networks.
Game offer 2
after getting 200clicks($1+ spent actually) and getting a conversion ($2 payout), i went on with another 600 clicks(another $3+) with no conversions. ROI wise it seems decent, but conversion rate is horrible. i'm running this offer on Inmobi and used a very focus targeting => soley on game app traffic. the logic behind this targeting strategy is that this group shld be the ones that gives me the highest conversion rates and if i can make this group profitable, i can gain some padding(revenue) to further widen my targeting to test for a greater income(possibly lower ROI but its ok).
however my traffic rep actually advice the opposite. he says " i would suggest that run for all categories and audience and give it a try for a day or so", "not huge budgets, you can go with $50 as daily cap for 1-2 days, and then analyzing the reports we can optimise them". i do agree my targeting may be too focused, but if i cannot convert the best target group, how can i expect to convert the rest?
whats your take on this?
Goals for the day
translate all my landers and banners for my new pin submit offer and get ads approved
work on a new communication app offer
i can start to see how this follow along will get abit messy here with me working with quite a few offers. but i just wanna keep working to my max output. coming up with systems will definitely help me not get disorganised and lose track of things
OK, that's cool then. Just wanted to check you weren't getting all your offers from one network.
I wouldn't split-test by carrier: you can check whether carriers are converting later provided you're using tracking (you are, right?) that tracks carriers.
Game Offer 2: am I reading right that you've spent $4 on it so far? If so, I'd recommend spending quite a lot more on it, split between app, site, wifi and carrier, to start seeing patterns in conversions. Seeing a $2 conversion in your first $4 spend is a good sign but you need to know if it was a fluke.
Yeah if you see a $2 conversion on $4 spend, that's a good start.
Even if the next $10 produces no conversions, you should at least have one placement that converted at a profit.
That's a signal. A very small one, but a signal all the same.
I would be careful about hopping around offers too soon. You'll end up with a heap of deleted campaigns and fragmented data that says nothing.
Make sure you're mixing up your creatives with these gaming offers. Try some copy that appeals to a user's competitive streak. Don't just slap up a stock character with 'Play now'.
Good luck!
@caurmen: spending some $ on it! await data!!! thanks for the advice!
@finch: thanks for that advice!! thats basically what i did for the most part up till now! willl definitely try to "troubleshoot" the problem!
Chapter 2
its only been awhile since i've started this follow on and i've already gotten quite some advice. i really thank you to those who try to help me in my journey. this motivation will drive me on, pushing even harder. i have so much to do now, a day is barely enough!!! this is so unlike 2 weeks ago, where i would have time to grind poker at the side to try supplement the income. some might even mistaken me for making it big in AM now that i've forsaken poker almost entirely(which unfortunately is yet to be the case)
insanity
today we decided to go really cheap, only 1 meal outside, and had gf whip up some food twice.
first we had fried rice with sausages and sunny side up
next we had white rice with ommelete wrapped in mix peas and sausage
my brother who's focusing on creatives said, THIS IS ANGLES!!!
App Offer 3
as i mentioned before i was putting in some translation work for a new offer, ran the offer, and had the BEST results of my AM careers so far, 21 conversions in a day!. even when though we were losing $, we were super happy to have gotten results that we can optimise!
i ran 4 campaigns as suggested wifi/carrier/app/site traffic and realise that the traffic's all coming in from wifi. the 1 key problem was that i actually fucked up my tracking, linking both wifi/app and wiif/site to 1 tracking link. so i couldn't get a very precise idea on which exact combination works, so i have to split and test them up again. this time round, i'm not putting the data to waste!!
Carrier/App => 686 clicks, $13.72spent, 0conversions, Culled this one
Carrier/Site => 13clicks, $0.26 spent, 0conversions, cant get traffic, gotta increase bid?
Wifi => 1566clicks, $31.32 spent, 21conversions, revenue of $10.50, ROI -66.48%
Looking around the data, Device, Os, ISP, Browser, can't see anything that makes too much sense to cut out.
took a look at publishers.
what's worth to cull ? publisher 1 is losing, but still has potential, publisher 2 is totally not converting, so thats a very obvious cull.
then i took a look at banners and i start to see a pattern.
3 out of the top 4 converting banners are from this 1 angle. and theres 1 angle out of the 3 angles that just didnt convert.
so by culling the bad angles, i can pretty much gain at least 20ish% ROI! going to cheapen my cost of extracting data!!!!
so we've made another set of banners around this angle already, just gotta get them translated tomorrow and push them out!!
if anyone has any advice on the data/strategy/anything, please chime in, it is very very much appreciated!
Good stuff.
First thing: enable the EPV (earnings per view) column in
I would definitely focus on the particular angle that is converting well - if there's a banner in there giving -30% ROI it can surely be brought into the green by culling off placements that work poorly (specifically for that angle!).
@zeno: thanks for that advice, will include that in screenshot in future(i thought ROI was sufficient lol).
slept 5hrs today, gotta catch the traffic rep early to start getting traffic and testing early.!
will put in some updates closer to the end of the day!
Wifi's looking good!
Test more banners in lots of different styles - you'll probably find that there's a banner in there that will at least get you to breakeven. From there, start optimising placements, carriers, devices etc, but the banners should definitely be doing most of the heavy lifting getting your campaign to profit.
Chapter 3: bad day
i woke up early today, slept only 5hours because i wanted to catch my traffic rep and push another offer and optimise my campaigns. did manage to get everything up but because he was in a meeting, i couldnt get my ads approved till really late, and i didnt want to launch an offer at a ghostly time where most peeps are sleeping or drunk.
Offer 3
i dont know whats wrong with this offer/ad network today. i couldn't get too much traffic if any at all, they took a couple of hours to start running and then kinda died down again. i have now 3 campaigns, wifi/site and wifi/app (now split apart) and carrier/site(untested). so wifi/site got traffic(50k impressions), 140 clicks and 1 conversion, carrier/site had 30k impressions, 50 clicks, 0 conversion, and wifi app got no traffic at all.
so out of a sudden, my ads had horrible CTR, 0.24% and 0.16% each overall for both campaigns that ran. what a dissapointment! not trying to be results oriented but just when i thought im starting to see some patterns, more problems come smacking me right in my face.
things are not just as easy as test=>optimise=>scale=>profit through the roof. can anyone explain what had possbily happened?
wrap up
all is good though, i'd rather face these obstacles now than later! gotta love cheap lessons! would have costed me wayyyy more $$ if these issues surface not now but later on!
im definitely loving the concepts of AM. i like the idea of using scientific approach/math/pattern recognition/scaling, its very much a way of life! i believe one has to be real lucky to be sucessful in life without having this mindset.
anyway i will start going to bed earlier so i can get more work in when most of AMs/traffic reps are awake.
before i go to bed, would like to whore for some advice. anyone if u see there's some shit mistake that im doing or not doing, please give me a shout, i will very grateful!
thanks guys cheers!
Sounds like you're having the infamous Crap CTR/CVR Day. They happen every so often - there's a festival or a holiday or a big news event or everyone in that demographic suddenly decides not to click on ads at the same time.
I'd just leave 'em running, curse a bit, and only worry about it if everything continues to be crap tomorrow or the day after.
I agree with Caurmen - give it another day, it could just be a bad day, these aren't rare.
Chapter 4
"unexpected challenges"
havent been updating for awhile. its funny how my journey is laden with so many "unexpected challenges". "unexpected" because these challenges were as big of a stumbling block as the actual expected challenges. expected challenges are stuff like coming up with good angles, bad CTR, no conversions etc.
the unexpected challenges are stuff like, u can hardly get anything done on the weekends because nobody is working, you have 3 campaigns on the same offer running on the first day but on the 2nd day only 1 campaign runs and the traffic rep doesnt really know why, and then in that campaign that is running which has 10 banners, only 1 banner gets all the traffic and not the rest, the list goes on.
its like someone who wants to get into professional gaming. he chooses to focus on being good in starcraft on the PC and he knows its a real time strategy game like warcraft so he expects the challenges to come from learning how to micromanaging units, resource management, unit combos, attack/defend strategy, etc but instead, he's having to solve the windows periodic crashes, fix internet delay issues, find how to get to the multiplayer battle mode because the game menu is just so confusing, dealing with the support of the game because he cannot bind hotkeys and support only works on weekdays and the list goes on.
i can see why most people cant do this. quitting is just too easy though.
Focus on the small wins
Charles Ngo said it right, we wanna focus on the small wins. it just like poker, we cannot focus on the results, because thats something we cannot dictate. we can only focus on our actions. we are trained from young to always judge based on results and thats not the way i want to raise my kids.
Offer 3
I've gotten more data for offer 3. i've created more banners around the best angle and even threw in a lander to help improve things.
as of now, both direct linking and lander is giving me -70%.i feel like my angle is really great because i'm greatly familiar with this country, but results are showing otherwise.
at the moment most of my variables red, except for those with small samples.
looked into publishers and my biggest traffic comes from this 1 pub thats giving me 2400 clicks but 35 conversions at -68% roi.
going to throw in another lander, and also try out diffferent adnetworks.
the 1 issue for me at the moment is i still cannot verify whether wifi/app, wifi/site or carrier/site is the best combination i should work on because my damn ad network only gives me traffic for 1 campaign regardless of my bid size(as mentioned above traffic rep is investigating).
Goals today
20banners 2-4 landers for 2 new offers.
deposit funds into 2 new traffic source to test out offer 3 while checking out how things work on other adnetworks then focusing on 1 to master
wrap up
booked flights to attend the next Charles Ngos talk in Singapore, who's coming?!
i appologise for the lengthyness and alot of sidetracking from the proper campaigns stuff, just wanna keep this more like a blog style, and hopefully one day i(or everyone else) can look back and see my journey to success in aff marketing!
also, i think its the first time in my life that i'm looking forward to mondays way more than the weekends. i already have that mentality as a poker player, but now its just greater!!
cheers!
Good stuff man... challenges and obstacles that make you pull your hair out are part of this game.
In a way it's great that you're encountering so many of these already - it will make everything seem less stressful in the future.
At least you didn't have an offer/server/tracking system go down while you slept and poured $xxx-x,xxx into a black hole.
That has happened to many, including me. Losing money without getting data is easily near the top of the list of 'most stressful things in IM'.
@zeno: this is definitely how i chose to think. how we feel is all about our perception, we can choose to focus and look at things badly, or we can look at it in a better light!
@caurmen: i feel like just talking about poker makes you tick, i've seen in in STM BKK, seen it in other posts! poker has given me a good platform mindsetwise!
chapter 5
but i feel that AM is definitely a couple levels higher than poker. for 1 its no longer a game, its real life. as a poker pro, its easy to just focus on poker related stuff(because they generate you $) and not give a fuck about other stuff(because they dont generate you $ and you really learn to take alot of things in your stride). but as a full time AM, i feel like my mindset has improved a couple notches. you cant just focus on "AM" stuff and then chill out on all the other shit, because AM is everything, u can improve your everything to improve your AM game, its so related! regardless of how well i do in this business, i'm going to come out alot alot stronger than before and this can only be good for my future!
offer 3
offer got cut! wasn't doing so well anyway so good riddance!
stackman approach
in that XX,XXX post of stackman's, he said he tested 30offers using 4$k within 2 weeks. just basically trying out tons of offers to see what works. this will be my approach now, focus on testing offers alot and not dwelling too much if the results are just trashy or soso. what do you guys think? then my approach cannot be too niche based i suppose.
offer 4
decided to try a different niche this time round on a different traffic source.i definitely should focus more, but i just thought trying out a new niche might be a good switch, might find something that might actually compliment what im currently doing(might be making some systematic errors that doesnt work too well with my current niche), or give me new ideas/approaches, etc anyway, so i did wat i did! after 12hrs, i got 100 clicks with an ad spend of $6, and i see my tracker says -$6.
in my head i went mehhhhh time to search for a new offer in my adnetwork. look at the balance and i grew suspicious, the balance seems to be more than before... i checked and i saw i had 2 conversions!!! 1 conversion =+$3, 2 conversions = +$6!!!
my ROI was approximately = 0% without any optimising! i know, silly to be start popping champagne bottles but i cant help but feel a surge of excitement. i had 1000+ clicks with 0 conversions on a free game and now i offer people something even sillier but yet i gt 2 conversions out of no where?
it was a timely morale booster, not that im feeling down or anything but this definitely make me want to try out more new things!
gotta keep my focus on my objectives though and not get carried away by results(too easy)!
going to crash and wake up asap to work on more offers test more and update this page more.
hopefully nobody gets bored by this wall of text, please give me some feedback if u have any, greatly appreciate anything constructive!
cheers guys
Chapter 6
havent update for awhile, wasnt because i was lazy, was really busy!
advice "Slowdown Cowboy" given by MR Green was definitely a right one, i was working on too many offers at one go without having a proper system!
1) i couldnt track campaigns properly. because each campaign were in different statuses and require different actions, i wasted alot of time trying to recall where was this campaign at, what have i already done for it and what should i do next
2)tracker wasn't as accurate i thought it shld be, i thought i cld just open up the tracker and have all the right numbers and figures but no it isn't
3) i also then realise i didnt have a real masterplan to follow for each individual campaigns, i was just trying to optimise everything all over the place
took me a whole 2 days to sort all the above out and i know have a better grasp of all that i'm doing and can manage multiple campaigns of multiple offers alot better
Game Offer
i wld love to talk about all my offers but i just wont have the time. so i will just talk about 1 offer which i need some help!
9000+ clicks -50% overall. i should have been profitable by now! but i'm just a noob, so pretty good to only be paying 50% for the lesson! well back to the details! this campaign has been running for a bit now, it has a payout of $1.50 and so far
1) i have cut a couple of publishers that have reached 3x payout with 0 conversions.
2) i've also cut a carrier because it has 7x payout with 1conversion.
3)now most of the conversions come from 1 publisher which currently stands at 4220 clicks and -28% ROI.
4) just cut 3 handsets which werent converting, and i feel its a logical cut because those phones are targeted for the working crowd rather than the gamers
i was actually at a stage where i manage to single out a better working banner and wanted to split test to further improve it, but i made a beginner's mistake.i created a new campaign in my adnetwork such that i can proper split test the new banners against its control, but that eventually caused me to have a full day of spending with 0 conversions. half of the day's budget went into 4 bad publishers that shld have alrdy been blocked, and eventually the CTR for the entire grp drop to an overall 0.4% whereas before it was >1%.
what should i do in this case? keep running? or shld i create a new grp and reimport those banners due to adnetwork algorithem issues? probably shld talk to my traffic rep but these guys are just overloaded with work. whats a good way to build a good relationship with them? i've tried to treat him like a skype friend and he does tell me stuff about his afterwork activities but i still occassionally get my skype messages ignored and have to prompt 1-2 times before i get a response.
alliances
my last mobile buddy didnt really work out too well. i didnt actively look for another one but by chance, i got hooked up agian. this time will be better than the last. and who knows, if my previous buddy's situation start turning for the better, we cld nw work as a trio.!
alright thats all for now, if you are reading, please feel free to drop me some advice or comments, really appreciate them as they keep me going!
How many banners have you tested, and how many landing pages? I'd recommend either a) testing more banners and more landers if you haven't tested many, or b) killing the campaign and trying a new angle with the same offer.
Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns