Home > Mobile >

---

The Mobile Cookbook: The Main Course (Part 1) (49)

---

Making Mobile Money With The Main Course

Mobile is where it’s at at.

Big Facebook and Adult affiliates are all jumping over the the mobile money bandwagon. If you are reading this Cookbook then you are at the right place, at the right time.

This “main course” recipe for mobile profits was written to make you some delicious, delectable, drool-able (possibly not even a word) mobile profits.

The Main Course incorporates landing pages as well as banners into our mobile campaigns. They’ll generally lead to higher conversion rates, and thus, more profit!

We also explore some more scaling options, split-testing and using statistical significance calculators, and look at the options available on other mobile ad sources.

Let’s go!





Summary Of This Recipe

1. Choose an offer - Payout below $10, non-US, popular, available on as many networks as possible
2. Create 15 angles for the offer. Pick 2.
3. Create banners and 1 landing page for each angle picked.
4. Run 4 campaigns for each angle, rotating direct link and lander and all network options for offer. 4 campaigns are wifi/app, wifi/site, mobile/app, mobile/site.
5. Give each campaign $15 spend. Cut terrible placements and banners whilst waiting.
6. If ROI above -50%, create 3 landers and optimise banners & best offer. If not, check if there is potential for a breakout campaign in sub-targeting.
7. Run another $15. If ROI not positive on breakout campaign, kill it. If ROI not positive on campaign that was initially above -50% ROI, continue optimising for another $15.
8. Kill any non-positive-ROI campaigns. Test variants of winning lander and scale to other traffic sources, geos and higher spends.

Ingredients: What You'll Need

An Affiliate Tracking System - Unlike the Appetiser, here we use a separate tracking system to track our ads and our landers. You can use the free STM Mobile Tracker for this if you don’t have another tracking system set up. Other good tracking systems for mobile include CPVLab ($295), Voluum (free until Sept 2014 then monthly payments after), and many more.

A server - You’ll need this both for your tracking system and to host your landing pages. We have a detailed summary of good options for affiliate hosting on the STM Web Hosting Guide - if you’re in a hurry and are planning to target America (north or south), Beyond Hosting offer some excellent servers with discounts for STM members.



Accounts with several affiliate networks - You’ll need more than one account with an affiliate network in order to compare and split-test offers. Here’s STM’s directory of affiliate network contacts - it’s always a good idea to reach out to an affiliate network contact after applying to speed and smooth your application.

An account with at least one mobile traffic source - Good traffic sources to begin with include InMobi, Decisive, Admob, Adiquity, but there are hundreds of potential mobile traffic sources. Here’s a massive list of mobile traffic sources to look through and try - and more appear by the week!

A budget - You’ll need a decent budget in order to start testing. We’d recommend slightly more than the Appetiser: around $1,500 to $2,000 although more is always good! If you have around $1,000 available, you can still use The Main Course, but be sure to choose lower-payout offers - see Why Lower Payout Offers Are Often Better. Note that you don’t need this all at once - having the budget available over the course of 2 months should be fine.

A graphics program - We would strongly recommend Photoshop for your graphics editing unless you’re very experienced (professional-level) with another package. You can get a 30-day trial of Photoshop from http://creative.adobe.com and it’s then rentable by the month as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud for approximately $50 a month (or $10 a month, currently, for just Photoshop). Initially, the online tool Pixlr will also provide most of the functionality you'll need, and it's free.

Do You Need: A mobile-capable web page designer? Currently there aren't any great options for graphical creation of mobile landing pages. You're probably best working either by hand or with a package like Adobe Muse initially, then fine-tuning using our guides on STM.

---

Dicing The Vegetables: Preparing To Launch Your Campaigns


OK, let’s get started! We’ll run through a single campaign setup here: however, for success, you should run quite a few campaigns, testing different offers and angles. The recipe will indicate where in the process is a particularly good place to start working on a new campaign.

1: Choose An Offer

Look through all your affiliate networks’ offers, ask your affiliate managers for their top mobile offers by volume, and ask your affiliate managers what offers they recommend. Then, pick an offer that fits as many of the following criteria as possible:

• (Vital) It has a reasonably low payout. Under $10 is fine. If you’re working with a very tight budget, aim for an offer with a payout less than $2.
• It’s available on multiple networks. This allows you to split-test between them to find the best network for the offer. Conversion rates can vary a startling amount between networks!
• It’s being run at high volume on at least one network. This shows that someone’s making money from the offer, which implies there are no killer flaws with it.
• It’s not targeted at the US. The US has huge mobile volume, but also huge competition. Try targeting outside the US to begin with.
• It’s either an app install or a PIN submit. Those offer types have been shown to work well with this style of campaign.

Your chosen offer doesn’t necessarily need to fit all these criteria. It will need a reasonably low payout, though, unless you have a much higher minimum budget - if you have a budget for testing of $10,000 or more, you can cheerfully test offers with payouts up to $50. Beyond that, aim for an offer that has as many of these criteria as possible.



We ask our affiliate managers for recommendations and their top volume lists, and look through all their mobile offers. We find one offer, an iPad sweepstake offer, that is US-targeted, but is running at high volume with a $2 payout and is available on 3 networks. We also find another offer, an antivirus app targeted at India, which is running on one network at high volume, with a $.50 payout and isn’t available on any other networks. And finally, we find an insurance offer with a $100 payout targeted at Germany, running in volume on two networks.

We ignore the insurance offer because we don’t have the budget for it. Between the other two, there’s no clear winner - we decide to go for the iPad sweepstake offer for now but make a note to test the antivirus offer in future.


2: Brainstorm And Choose Two Angles

We now come up with two different angles for the offer that we’ve chosen. By “Angles”, we mean different ways to sell the offer to the visitor - focusing on different benefits, different features, or different approaches to the offer.

There are as many approaches to creating angles as there are affiliates! Start out by researching the offer as much as you can. Look at the offer’s landing page, translate the text if you can’t read it, Google for reviews of the product, and research the country it’s targeting if you don’t know it well.

Then, start brainstorming angles. I like to use a mindmap for this, like the ones you can create with XMind or Mindmeister.com, but a regular list on a text editor or even a pen and paper works just as well. The important thing is to create a lot of ideas - I aim for 15-20 at least.

Some ways to generate angles:

• Consider the benefits that the offer promises. What benefit will it give the user?
• Think about the pain or problem for the user that this offer solves.
• Think about the culture of the country that this offer is targeting - how does this tie in?
• Think about the user’s subconscious needs - shelter, food, companionship, social status, etc. How does this offer enhance one of them?
• Think about ways that the offer could be tied into events or dates. Is there a holiday, a news event, or something similar that the offer could be tied to?
• Think about ways to make the offer more plausible. Many offers sound too good to be true - is there a “frame” you could give the offer to make it sound more reasonable?
• Think about how the user will use the offer and what other things it will affect. If it’s an app, how will it affect how he/she uses his/her phone? If it’s content, how will he/she use it?

For more tips and tricks on angle generation, read the following posts:

• What I Mean By A Really Good Campaign Angle
• Stop Ignoring Angles!
• Crazy Ways For Creative New Angles
• Angle Creation With The Seven Deadly Sins
• The Swiss Army Knife Approach To Angle Generation

Once you have a huge list of potential angles, go through and pick the two most unusual and plausible ones that you’ve come up with. By “Unusual”, I mean that you’re looking for an angle which is unlikely to have been tried so many times that your audience is blind to it. By “Plausible”, I mean that you can see how it could convince a user to sign up!



We come up with a whole load of angles for the iPad lander. From “subconscious needs” we think about “social status”, and come up with the idea that by winning an iPad, the user could appear richer and more successful. From “Culture”, we think about the popularity of NASCAR in the South, and consider running a NASCAR-themed quiz with the iPad sweepstake as the “prize”. From “More Plausible”, we consider framing the offer as a testing program where the user will be entered into a “testing pool” who may be “issued” an iPad.

Eventually, we choose the NASCAR and the “testing pool” angles.


3: For Each Angle, Develop 10 Banners And A Lander

Now that we’ve got our two angles, we set up the content we’ll need for our campaigns.

To start with, put together 10 banners. You should use a variety of sizes as appropriate for your traffic source (usually including 320x50, 320x250 and other sizes specific to the individual traffic source).

If you’re not sure what the available sizes are, ask your rep at the traffic source or check their documentation. If possible, check that there’s actually significant volume available in the country that you’re targeting for each banner size. You don’t want to spend time on a banner that never gets any traffic. (In Decisive, for example, you’d do this under the “Planner” category on their menu.)

Make sure that your banners also use very different images, text, and designs: you are aiming to test as broadly as possible on this initial test. Mix in some banners that are just aiming to get the click (image with a play button, for example) along with some that are selling the offer right from the banner. Also, make sure you’re testing animation in at least some of your banners.

After that, create one lander for the offer. Make sure it’s compatible with mobile phone displays - see How To Create A Mobile Lander That Actually Works - and aim for less rather than more words, particularly if the payout is below $2. Keep the design simple and don’t worry if it doesn’t look great: this is just intended to test if there is potential in the offer! Focus on solid copy text.

Go through this process for each angle you’ve developed.

---

Great guide, Caurmen! STM rocks.

Do we need to have a good website up? I've never bothered to finish the site for my business, and have been accepted into all the CPA networks I wanted to get into, but when applying to ad networks, I read (in the Mobi Manifesto) that it's better to have a website making you look like an agency (rather than an affiliate). Any tips you can share? I haven't even been accepted into Decisive yet (applied last week) and maybe it's because my site is not done. I know some ad networks are picky...

---

Caurmen. Another quality guide you've created. Thanks.

Just a question (feel free to move/delete it if not applicable).

I was wondering when choosing an offer do you recommend spying on competition through some sort of tool? (As you can see, I'm new to mobile and unsure whether spying is realistic/there are tools to spy (apart from WRW) especially when targeting non US countries?)

---

^^ put VPN through your phone and check ads! If you don't have the option, put VPN on your router and connect phone via WiFi. If you don't have that option on your router, install Android SDK/OS on your desktop and set VPN on your desktop network settings, then download apps on your virtual android. Yes it's worth spying, it also removes a lot of headache when designing your own landers... Some of the lean landers being run by volume affiliates are slick and easy to modify

---

Thanks Redrummr - although most of the info has flown over my newbie bald head! A couple of questions. I'm in Melbourne and want to check ads in, for example, France or Brazil. Would I use a VPN to spy on ads not in Australia? Also, are there any guides on how to set up VPNs for mobile? I've searched the forum but can't find any info relating to VPNs.

---

Awesome stuff Caurmen cant wait for part 2!

---

http://wiki.hidemyass.com/Tutorials:...or_Android_App

I think this applies to other VPN aswell, since OPENVPN is open source.

---

For VPNs just use something like Overplay or HideMyAss and follow their instructions - most will allow you to connect to their VPNs through your mobile device, you just have to configure proxy settings.

Redrummr, it's definitely a good idea to get a site up. I just have mine hosted with Rackspace as a static website. It doesn't need to be fancy, just 'corporate'. I ended up buying a theme from ThemeForest and editing that.

---

@Maynzie - you don't have long to wait! Click the arrow next to "On To Part 2" and you'll be there!

@redrummr - Definitely agree with Zeno on this one. Personally I've always found having a site set up - even if it's not one directly associated with AM - helps a lot in making you look legit. It doesn't need to be fancy - many completely legit agency websites are very minimal.

---

I've run volume on all of those sources, and I've never used a website. None of those networks knew I was connected with STM, or knew me, so I was a nobody to them.

If you want a good relationship with a network then run complaint campaigns. Chat to them, ask them for feedback and advice.

Their focus is not whether you are an agency, whether you have a cool looking website or not, they just care about what you run. They don't want to burn their bridges with publishers by letting advertisers run super aggressive campaigns.

If you want access to premium inventory, once again, run complaint campaigns. I know decisive open and close premium inventory based on your individual campaigns and creatives.

Example:
- I created an antivirus campaigns and had 7 traffic exchanges were opened up for me.
- I created a Hotel.com app campaign and had around 10 traffic exchanges opened up for me.

Whether you have a website is irrelevant for most part.

If you want to get traffic and offers direct, that's when you need to put your business suit on and look the part with a website.

Don't over complicate things at the start. Get some campaigns running.

Sign up to all those networks without a website, you will have no problem getting an account. Don't worry you won't be at any disadvantage to those who have a website.

---

Hey caurmen i made a guide on how to host landers on rackspace cloud. Its on my blog feel free to use it for the part where you have the image if you are using Voluum you can host on a cdn.

---

@iamattila - Cool! What's the URL?

---

How to Configure Rackspace CDN to Host Landing Pages

---

Hi Caurmen,

This is awesome. We can't go wrong anymore! Thank you so much.

I read everything thoroughly and I have only a few questions (pure out of curiousity). I might sounds a bit nerdy, but it is better to be clear than sorry:

- When choosing an offer, you have to choose an offer with a high volume on the network, however, what do you consider as 'high'?
- When creating 10 banners. You mention I should create differen sizes. Now, do you actually mean i should make 20 banners if they have two different sizes? Or just have 10 banners create 5 different styles and resize all five so you have ten?
- You write down: set up 8 campaigns 4 for each angle. This means you choose out of the 10 banners--> two banners?
- Just to be super clear: targeting suggestions are mainly about the countries, and combinations of (device/wifi/carrier)?
- When cutting bad placements: you you mean: a country that is performing badly, or any banner size? Or...?
- At 2.4 optimization: You write: cut your offer as explained in part 11...., you only have one offer...do i have to cut that one :P?

Thanks.

---

1) "High" volume is relative, but at least 3 figures of leads / day / top affiliate is a good sign. Basically, you're looking for a signal that people must be making money off this offer - no-one's going to spend enough to generate 400+ leads of a $3 payout offer day in, day out unless it's making them money.
2) 10 across the various sizes. So you could have 2 320x50s, 4 320x250s, etc, etc. Provided you've got 10 of them and you're running a couple in each allowable size that has decent traffic volume, it's all good.
3) 10 banners per angle, run them all on each of your 4 campaigns. So 10 banners in app/wifi, the same 10 banners in app/mobile, the same 10 in site/wifi, etc.
4) Yep, those are the main targeting options.
5) Sorry, I used jargon there by accident. By "placement", I mean the individual app or site that your banners are running on.
6) If you've only got one offer, Part 11 will never tell you to cut it You'll cut that campaign based on its overall performance.

---

Hey caurmen, so people arent scared away by the $50 price tag on adobe cc suite, they should know you can also get just Photoshop CC for $10/month.

awesome set of guides you have put together here, thanks again!

---

Get hidemyass pro VPN and download the free app from the play or apple app store

---

Also you can use the free online tool pixelr.com. Which has most of the functionality you need.

---

Good points both, updating!

---

Hey Caurmen,

Just wanted to get your thoughts on why 10 banners/1 lander for 1 angle. I've heard of 3 banners 1 angle and multiple angles, etc. Is it because it kind of gives you a clearer picture on whether it's the angle working and not the banner?

---

Yep, that's correct. I'd be very worried about only testing 3 banners before concluding that an angle sucked - the chances are far higher that it was the banners that sucked and the angle might well still be fine.

---

What is meant by "Make sure that your banners also use very different images, text, and designs"? So should the adcopy for all the banners be same or different? What do you mean by different designs?

---

Different designs:

• If some of your ads are colourful, make sure others are black and white.
• If some of your ads use a CTA as a button, make others use blue link text for a CTA.
• If your image is on the right in some ads, make it on the left or in the middle for others
• If some of your images are photos, make others cartoons.
• If some of your ads are image-heavy, make others image-light or just text.
• Use different backgrounds.
• If some of your banners are pretty, make others ugly

And so on.

Here's a great checklist for this: http://www.codeandvisual.com/banner-...ent-checklist/

---

What about the adcopy? Should it be the same for all the 10 banners under 1 angle?

---

You'll often be forced to change ad copy slightly because of your design changes.

Just vary it while keeping within the same angle.

You can later split test only ad copy changes within a banner design.

---

What I've seen is that depending on the time of the day I start my test, my campaign budget could get exhausted in a matter of hours. Also the conversion rates vary throughout the day. So the $15 per campaign could get spent really quickly. What should I do in such case? Increase my daily budget or decide whether to optimise the campaign or not based on the data collected within those few hours?

---

A really noob question. Do I need a offer specific URL? Or can I use a generic company URL then create a page within?

---

You really need even data. Lower your bids and/or up your budget. These are the fundamental ways to smooth out the traffic distribution.

No. Your URL is borderline irrelevant. You can have "Win an iPad" ads going to iloveponies.com/lander/dickbags.html if you want to, it likely wont matter (don't do on Google lol).

Just buy a generic domain for your traffic source/vertical.

E.g. top-androidoffers.com or excitegaminguk.com etc. It is really a low-priority issue.

---

Thanks to this guide I managed to almost break even in my frist mobile adventure,

Offer type: Antivirus
Spent: 680
Revenue: 500
ROI: -26

Problem is I run out of volume in Decisive in every country I tried to scale, time to move on in another traffic source.

Thank you Caurmen!

---

Hi Caurmen,

angry Russian recommends:
• Mobile Path (Silver-Path) - not sure what that is
• Ringtones (Thumplay and Jamster)
• Crush Quiz (Private Offer)
• Dating (MeetMoi and Adult Dating)
• Promo Offers (Win an iPad)
• Lead Generation (Pre Paid Cards)

in his thread Mastering Mobile in 14 days from year 2011
but you recommend installs and PIN submits.

So I'm a bit confused which one would be good.

Thanks

---

Oh, sorry. I've found the answer here:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...018#post234018

---

I have a question about this point.

Lets say I want to run Samsung Galaxy S6 sweepstakes offer. Different affiliate networks, Same payout, different offer landing pages. Would it still qualify as "available on multiple networks"? Or I need to find exactly the same offers, with the same landing page etc.?

---

@nomeus - Good question! Yes, that should qualify as the same offer, provided the landers are pushing the same angle.

In other words, if they're both pushing "Win Galaxy S6 here!" then you're good. If one of them is pushing "Win Galaxy S6" and the other one is pushing "Win iPhone 5" then that's too different.

---

I asked about this to my AM, and she said that it has to get approved from both advertisers who have these offers. I wonder if they are willing to work like this? How do they look at this situation?

---

@nomeus - what exactly was your AM saying there? That you'd have to get approval from the advertisers before split-testing the two offers against each other in a campaign?

If so, that's not standard practise at all, and I'd definitely go back to her for clarification (or pick another network / AM). What network was this?

---

I asked:
"If two advertisers approve the same creatives, is it allowed to split test(their) offers?"
ClickDealer AM:
"In General - NO, cause diff offers/adverts/geos have diff rules. "

Then I explained that I mean that the offers have the same GEO, same rules and same everything except landing page. Then she came back with:
"need to approve."

I was: "Ok! Got that." Did not know what to answer or ask after that.

---

@nomeus - I'd clarify with her that she's definitely saying "You cannot split-test offers within a campaign without advertiser approval.", rather than, for example, "you can't run creatives on multiple offers without having those creatives approved by all the offer owners.". Sounds like there might have been some miscommunication.

If she is definitely claiming you can't split-test without advertiser approval, I'd ask for a new AM.

I'd also recommend signing up for some more networks if you haven't already.

Any Clickdealer folks on the forum who can offer additional insight here? Is this really a Clickdealer policy?

---

Just sounds like a miscommunication.

If the advertiser has approved a creative within the conditions you are working in, you can run it. Any traffic being sent by that creative to anywhere else is not their concern, unless it was for example branded with their IP and you were sending to a different advertiser (e.g. having X game creative with their characters/logo and sending to a different offer - then it kinda is their business as it would be IP infringement).

---

I also think this is miscommunication or a poor AM. If you have the same creatives approved for both offers, there is no reason to not split test them. You shouldnt even need to ask for it in the first place. So the AM either misread what you asked for or dealt with you in a hurry or simply failed in this case.

---

Ok, I got it, thanks!

Maybe I did not explain myself clearly to AM, but thats exactly what I wrote there, and those are responses that she came back with.

Thank you for all the answers!

---

My mind was set on running campaigns only in Africa, Latin, and SE Asia. But the top offers and my affiliate manager recommendations are in other countries.

Should I override my previous decision on running in specific GEOS and, instead, test top offers recommended by affiliate managers?

---

@lloydmc - Yes, unless you're sure you have a huge competitive advantage in the geos you listed. Test widely and see what sticks.

---

Hey just curious, you didn't do the insurance offer because you said you didn't have budget for it. How do you determine whether you have enough marketing budget for it just by looking at something to market?

Insurance is a tough market in the SEO world but just curious how do you determine which product to market will cost you a pretty penny in AM?

thanks!

---

@dtkw969 - As a rule all required budgets will be a multiple of your payout. That's because in order to test for success in the usual range of ROI expected for a campaign, we'll always end up spending a certain multiple of the payout before we can be sure that, say, we won't make our money back on a placement or lander.

As a very very VERY rough rule of thumb, assume that you'll need to spend about 40x the payout to thoroughly test a campaign. That's an average - sometimes it will be a lot more, sometimes it will be a lot less. (For example, if you run a campaign with 10 landers on mobile pops, spend 7x its payout on traffic, and get no conversions at all, assuming there were no obvious problems like broken links or single placements eating most of that spend, I'd usually say "drop that campaign".)

Why does that work? Because 99.99% of the time, a product with a higher payout will be harder to get to convert. It's harder to get someone to fill in a long-form insurance offer than to click "install" on an app. It's harder still to persuade them to buy a $99 ebook. So you get paid $1 for the app install, $12 for the insurance offer, and $70 for the ebook.

Hope that helps!

---

Hey @iwarrior - what traffic source are you using right now and what geos are you targeting? A lot of affiliates use go2mobi but I've seen success with mobusi.

Also, check out Adsimilis for tons of antivirus offers in multiple geos over here! You can sign up at the link below and shoot me a Skype once you've done so. I'd love to help you out!

http://myadsimilis.com/affiliate_signup.aspx

Skype: aprilpollock.dqna

---

Caurmen, thanks so much for taking the time of putting this tutorial together!

Now, I'm wondering...

1) This is 2 years old and you are using banners here so I guess, this is mDSP. I've read in recent posts in the forum that DSPs are hard right now and the recommended traffic source for beginners is POP. What do you think? Would be better using pop traffic now and leaving a DSP approach like the one you describe here for a second round?

2) Have you tested this kind of offers in Destop POP/DSP sources? Or this kind of approach and offers are exclusive for mobile traffic?

3) Can you recommend reputable DSP traffic souces that carry both, desktop and mobile inventory?


Thanks in advance for your help!

---

Yes, I'd recommend going for pops rather than display right now. I'll be updating the cookbook to reflect that in the New Year.

This approach is for mobile. 90℅ of it will also work on desktop, but you should loosen the restrictions on offers (sub $6 payout is ok), and you might need to tweak the spend amounts a bit. Check the Getting Started Guide for more info on running desktop.

---

can someone still use this guide in 2018?
-thanks

---

Home > Mobile >