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Noob Mobile Follow along (45)

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Follow Along: Mobile

Hi all.. I am a noob & doing mobile offers after caurmen's guide to mobile. I wanna know here I am going wrong in my campaigns.
Dont have great aim's but all I want is to make a 1$/day revenue for a week.

I have chosen 2 offers. One the most volume making offer & another offer which I picked to see how it performs.

Offer#1 : Psafe suite -App install Android ( highest volume in may as per my Aff manager)
Country : Brazil ( Currently filtered to run this offer on only one city now)
Network: F5 Media
Traffic: Decisive
Direct Linking
Angles: Picked on 2 broad angles and created 4 ads for each of them

Campaign Summary: After running 2 days

Wifi + App:
Spend: $6.05
Impressions: 27972
Clicks: 257 (0.92%)
Conversions: 0


Wifi + Site
Spend: 1.87
Impressions: 3962
Clicks: 47 (1.2%)
Conversions: 0

Mob + App
Spend: 0.05$
Impressions: 176
Clicks: 1
Conversions: 0


Mob + Site
Spend: 0.02$
Impressions: 32
Clicks: 0
Conversions: 0




Offer#2: Lovoo Dating app -Android
Country : UK
Network: F5 Media
Traffic: Decisive
Direct Linking
Angles: Re-used the offer headlines from Finch's 7 deadly sins post ( I know I am lazy )


Campaign Summary: After running 2 days

Wifi + Site
Spend: 8.14$
Impressions: 22555
Clicks: 40 (0.18%)
Conversions: 0

Wifi + App
Spend: $10.47
Impressions: 20242
Clicks: 112 (0.55 % )
Conversions: 1 (0.89%)

Mob + App
Spend: $5.45
Impressions: 10666
Clicks: 38
Conversions: -


Mob + Site
Spend: $1.29
Impressions: 3629
Clicks: 2 (0.06%)
Conversions: 1

Clearly in both the offers, the wifi traffic is spending my budget than the carriers.

I am getting clicks, but less or no conversion. Soon I am planning to rotate 2 landers & also will be diect linking to the offers.
Should I have to wait till all the campaigns get 15$ spend or Can I go ahead and add them rite away?? Any suggestions is much appreciated.

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Firstly, we need more info here - it's hard to give any feedback on what to improve if you only post stats.

What angles are you attempting? What do your banners look like? What are the offer payouts?

Here are some minor answers though:

1. For this offer, or this kind of offer, you will want a landing page.

2. WiFi traffic is giving you more impressions likely because your bid for carrier traffic is too low.

3. Get rid of the city targeting! I'm not sure of your reasoning for this, unless it is tied into your angle, but it will only choke your volume.

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hey prmadhav ... i am a noob too.. seems like your first offer is doing okay.. with a high CTR on the wifi site buddy! Keep testing and keep going!

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Zeno..thnkx for replyin on a Sunday!

Here are the details
Offer#1
Payout: 0.33
Angle: antivirurs , SMS Block and anti theft- on a boarder scale.

Banner images Psafe Suite: http://imgur.com/a/MQyEv/embed


Offer#2
Payout: 0.76
Angle: how soon you can get a date
Banner images Lovoo UK: http://imgur.com/a/v97uf/embed


And for the other suggestions

1. landing page: Yep working on landing pages

2. WiFi traffic is giving you more impressions likely because your bid for carrier traffic is too low

I am doing smart CPM, so decisive is automatically placing my ads. Should I have to do Manual CPM to increase the ads placements?

3. Get rid of the city targeting! I'm not sure of your reasoning for this, unless it is tied into your angle, but it will only choke your volume.

No angles involved here. Will remove the city info.

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Wow haha, I know ugly converts but those Psafe ads are a whole other level!

Those Psafe banners... most of them I can't even read the text. Red and black is a terrible colour combo and some of the fonts used are very difficult to read. I would make an entire new batch and when doing so, remember you need to communicate information quickly - if someone struggles to even see the text in the banner, how are you going to sell them?

Same with those Lovoo banners - split test them with ones that are... easier on the eyes. Ugly works, but hard-to-read is a completely different issue.

Furthermore, I think the banners are a bit awkward. They feel like a jumble of random text, colours, borders and images crammed together with no overall goal.

I don't understand the point of 'let the smugness begin' and in some cases you have "Dating" in quote marks.

If your angle is focusing on some form of fast turnaround time, stick to it - make banners that use a consistent ad copy but different organisation of the text, different images, etc. At the moment you basically have a) fonts, b) ad copy, c) images, d) border colours, e) CTA, f) angle, and you are seemingly varying all of them at random. This is not a good testing approach.

I suggest the following:

1. Write down your angle(s) for each offer. How are you going to appeal to the audience?

2. Write out several pieces of short ad copy for each angle.

3. Create some banners for each angle. Vary them by changing the entire banner design but not the ad copy, border colours, and fonts used. Keep these small variables constant during your test.

4. Launch a campaign for each angle and see how the banners perform, and see which angle performs the best.

5. If an angle shows promise, then consider testing new banners, changing the images used, and testing new ad copy. Don't go down the path of throwing every font colour, style and border combination at the audience before you even know whether an angle does well - you will just get a clusterfuck of data that provides little insight to move forward.

So, plan out your campaigns better and have a specific hypothesis to test. Throwing shit at a wall can work for experienced people who have a budget, a process, and can interpret a mass of data, but this comes with experience and is not something to emulate when first starting out.

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Zeno.. thnx for the detailed feedback mate!!

Know what even those damn ugly banners had 1% CTR and few conversions, wonder how good the CTR rate would be , if it were a decent banner

Now I Know what shit I am trying to do !! Point taken. Will keep my adcopy, font,border same.I have paused all the campaigns and
I will come back with bannners + landing pages

I have few questions though
1) By same ad copy, you mean the same text in all the banners? or text depicting the same angles like Battery problem* , Slow charging, fast charge battery.

2) For Landing pages, Should I have to keep the adcopy same ?* or Can I have 2 landers with different text and layouts?

3) Is it fine to test in a Single campaign,2 angles with 4 banners each for an angle and still have a common landing page for them?
Say Anti Spam angle & anti virus angle in a same campaign but a single lander for both these angles? or else to split the campaign into 2 so that we give fair amount of placements to both the angles ?

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1) Same text. Ad copy is important - and can (and should!) have a large impact on conversion rate.

However, in banners, it is an important variable that should change independent of other factors - in other words, if you want to vary ad copy, don't vary the banner design at the same time. Since banner overall design is what gets eyes on and clicks happening, it should be your first priority - particularly if you are not an experienced copywriter.

2) For landers you have more freedom to vary things - it can be hard to maintain ad copy when you are changing the lander style considerably. Furthermore, the lander is wear you predominantly sell. The banner is where you get attention. So, the lander is where you will want to dedicate more time to ad copy testing.

3) Definitely split angles into their own campaigns. If using a tracking system, have separate campaigns for each angle as well - unless you are adept at, and comfortable optimising by, passed tracking variables.

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Thanks Zeno.

It took a while for me to get this info sink in. How stupid of me to run those ads, ahh it's all on the game. Be back in couple of days with my creatives.

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"Let the smugness begin >>"

Best CTA ever

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Hey stackers...

I am back.... after running those terrifying banners..I look up with whatrunswhere and got some
ideas for mobile banners.. tweaked them & running for psafe. 8 banners with the same ad copy, yep I am testing the same angle.

plus have 2 landers created with different ad copy and below are the stats,
and yeah no conversion so far !!
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Day1 & Day 2 :

wifi + App :
Wins: 36,038 (13%)
Clicks: 184 (0.51%) - $0.26 $0.05 -
Spend: $9.38


wifi + Site:
Wins: 15,900 (28%)
Clicks: 163 (1.0%)
Spend: $6.47

Mobile + App:
Wins: 12,010 (7.4%)
Clicks:38 (0.32%)
Spend: $5.75

Mobile + Site:
Wins: 5,858 (29%)
Clicks: 36 (0.61%)
Spend: $3.27
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Landing page data:


Landing Page 1:
Clicks: 150
CLickthroughs: 21
LP CTR: 14%
Conversion: 0

Landing Page 2 :
Clicks: 133
CLickthroughs: 7
LP CTR: 5.26%
Conversion: 0

Clearly... I need to do a lot of improvement in mobile landing pages!!

And yeah.. gonna test a different angle for psafe with another set of 8 banners!!

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Have you tried running direct-linked for comparison? That's a good idea to see whether there's a problem, or it's just that your landers aren't working so well!

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hey caurmen... yeah I missed out on direct link.
I have paused the ad now. Will rotate the landers with direct link and re-start the campaign again.

Meanwhile, I was running another offer for brazil country and rotating it with 2 networks. and for tracking, I am using Prosper.

The consolidate info:
Spend: 18.18
Wins: 54908
Total Clicks: 322 ( F5media: 206 + oasis: 116 )
Conversion: 9 ( f5media: 8 + oasis: 1 )

Now my question:

1) I have stopped rotating the offer between networks. I am now using only F5media which is performing well.
IS there any criteria or any thumb rule where we stop rotating offer?
I read somewhere for web based offers, send 300 clicks to each network before taking a decision. Is there any such thing for mobile?

2) Is the tracking below is correct?




and the url which I will be placing in decisive will be :
http://domainurl.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=3157&c1={{{ad_name}}}&c2={{{creative _id}}}&c3={{{placement}}}&c4={{{category}}}&t202kw ={{{bidhash}}}

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1) Understand that it's nonsensical to apply some sort of 'click threshold' to these decisions because it ignores what actually happens in reality.

If your conversion rate for one offer is 25% and the other is 2%, would you wait for 300 clicks to go through before making a decision? Absolutely not.

Use something like http://www.peakconversion.com/2012/0...al-calculator/ to compare conversion rates when comparing offers between networks.

2) I'm not sure where that's even from? Your tracking URL looks fine though.

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I should bookMark all these links.. The screenshot is from prosper.

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Psafe update: Still have to rotate direct linking with landing page but caught up with some issue in my other campaign. I am confused whether its still worth to run psafe? One of the senior member here had a x,xxx/day with this offer which equals about converting 3k mobile/day . Crazy stuff .

Other campaign problem: I am direct linking an offer and use prosper as my tracking system. This offer is for Brazil country and the network is f5 media.
I used the tracking url in my earlier post.

The clicks reported by decisive for yesterday is 220 but in f5 media the reported clicks is only 120. There is a difference of 100 click loss. The total conversion is 8 out if 120 clicks.

I couldn't figure out why it is so. Is this normal? My prosper202 shows only 8 clicks, it shows only the converted clicks. I am struck in here

I know something is wrong in here but couldn't figure out what. Any pointers is much appreciated.

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1. Check for duplicate clicks at F5.
2. Check the number of overall clicks recorded by p202.

Where is your server located? Don't expect a server in the US/EU to be great for mobile traffic from Brazil - you will lose a decent % of clicks just because your tracking is slow, i.e. the load time.

This is something you should be keenly aware of if you run mobile. Speed is key, phones are slow, as is their internet service (usually), and your tracking/landers need to not make things worse. Sadly we can't do much about slow network/offer pages.

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Pro tip: if you don't want to source a server in Brazil itself (and I've never found a good server provider in Brazil), Miami is a very good place to locate your servers. The main internet pipe to the US from Brazil goes straight through one of the main Miami datacenters.

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Thanks caurmen. But wouldn't it be easier to subscribe for a CDN service , which would reduce the click loss rate?

Yesterday I changed the tracker from prosper to Voluum and did a test run for Brazil offer and also did a direct link without a tracker for another offer. In F5media, Both had some click loss ~30%. In Voluum at least I was able to see the whole info without any click loss. So will stick up with voluum for now and resume the follow along testing today.

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Using a CDN has no impact on your tracking speeds.

Voluum does not have a data centre in South America, but in the US, so again latency will be comparable to your VPS - in terms of tracking only, assuming both systems process the redirection equally quickly.

You will lose clicks going to any Cake-based affiliate network because.... well their data centres are mysterious but can be quite slow.

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Getting the bigger picture now... No point in worrying about click loss.. have to concentrate on converting the incoming clicks..

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Need some help in setting up tracking in Voluum

1) I created a sub domain and added it to Voluum Domain. xxx.mydomain.com I didnt want to use their own domain.
2) After that I tried adding the landers in
xxx.mydomain.com/folder/landingpage.html
3) Now when I create a campaign, it gives me a campaign url like :
http://xxx.mydomain.com/ebf788e8-1374-4083-91d1-83d634ef0929?bidhash={{{bidhash}}}

When I add this to decisive and test it out, it says 404 error. And because of which my campaigns are being rejected.

I confused here. Is there anything I am missing out here.

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1. Always test links. You say you had campaigns rejected, which implies you never even checked if your links went were you want.

Don't let this happen again.

So, have you added a CNAME entry to your DNS records for the xx domain that you are using for Voluum?

Is xxx.mydomain.com/folder/landingpage.html is on a completely different subdomain?

If you make a new subdomain i.e. track.mydomain.com, you can only have that point to Voluum, or you can have it point to your server for hosting landers.

You cannot do both.

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Hi... I am back... Have fixed the Voluum tracking problem and started to run offers. Wanted to write this followup for past 2 days.

So here is the summary....

Offer1# psafe: I have stopped psafe antivirus. Looks like everyone is running the same offer and when I read somewhere
a senior member here made 4figures in that offer, I felt being late to the party. may be there's a lot of steam left out in this offer. but I prefer to move on, applynig my angle in a different antivirus offer still working on it though.

Offer#2 Android app install; brazil from F5media paying 0.32
Running this for 3 days with direct link & 3 landers. here are the snapshot

3 Days of Data:
Total Spend: 17$
Earned: 3.20$
Creatives have an average CTR of 1.5%
Lander1: 147clicks ; 58ctr, 6 conversion ( lander CTR - 39.46% ; lander CR - 10.3%)
Lander2: 122clicks; 20 ctr , 1 conversion ( lander CTR- 16.39%; lander CR - 5%)
Lander3: 120 clicks; 15ctr , 1 conversion ( lander CTR:12.50% ; lander CR: 6.67%)
DL: 251Click and 2 conversion

I am culling placements, blacklisted couple of placement. Looks like Direct linking is worst performing of the lot.


1) Is it too early to cut out direct link ??
2) The Smart CPM I have set for this .32$ is 1$. The total spend is low for 3 days.(just 17$)
Is it still worth to double the smart CPM(2$) so that I can have more data soon??


Offer3# Dolphin Broswer: f5 media
So I got this mail from F5 that dolphin browser is performing well.
Simple creatives like " Ultra fast browsing " and "browse 10X faster" and call to action as "Download Now".
I created campaigns targeting countries "Jamaica" and did a direct link to the offer.

Total Spend: 12$
I got 283 clicks of about 1.7% CTR and only 3 conversion.

I am pondering whether to discontinue or have a lander for this offer??

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Still a long way to go & this forum has been a great support all along the way... STM ROCKS!!

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I think your data is quite clearly saying focus on lander 1.

As for your smart CPM bid, look at your data - specifically the bids and wins.

If you are winning a low % of the bids, you should up your bid and/or budget.

If there aren't many bids in the first place, you may have a bottleneck somewhere due to your targeting.

As for offer 3, it's hard to give advice without more data.

How many angles have you tried? Have you tested WiFi/Carrier/App/Site? Different banner types? I would plan out a proper test for this, set aside a budget for the test and the different sub-campaign, feed them all and get a decent amount of data - then see where you can go from there.

283 clicks, 1.7% CTR and 3 conversions is rather vague - but at least you got conversions, which tells you the offer converts and your tracking works!

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Thanks Zeno.

Stopped direct linking and added a modified Lander 1. I have increased my scpm bid and budget. And cut across few placements as per caurmen's cookbook. Now the campaign spend is increased. Will update once I have more data.

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Day 6 after launching the brazil .32$ campaign:

Cut out direct link
Culling placements
Modified top performing lander and added along with other landers. So now total 4 landers with 25% weight.
I have increased my smart CPM bid and budget and targeting the whole of brazil. Removed all the categories too.

Here are my stats below, with all budget as unlimited and all daily spend to 20$.








1) Less spend for mobile + site campaigns. Anything I am doing wrong here ??
2) Wifi+App gonna near 15$ campaign limit & After 6 days, is it time to replace the banners??
Or should I have to wait for all the campaigns to hit 15$ mark.

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Strange I update this post in here ,started the campaign...and went to sleep, came back to saw the campaigns are running well. Couple of them hitting their 15$ mark. Dunno whats the issue. Anyway will have more data to post by tonight.

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^ Exactly dude, you just gotta let the data work its magic. Next post we will have something more to work with, hopefully more good news!

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hey maynzie... yepp more work !! Interesting part of AM .. Data analysis..


Wow!!! Yesterday I saw my campaigns were not spending their budget limit... Today they ran up to their budget;( at the time of writing still Mobile +app was 2$ behind the
15$ campaign limit.. Guess this will complete in another couple of hours)

Overall,My first mobile campaign stats :
Total Spend: 60$
Total earned :10.56$
Avg.CPC: 0.04
Avg. CTR banners: 1.12%

One of the placement in first day ate up 10$(incl. both wifi + app ) without any conversion, I had to cull that.
So technically its 50$ spend and 10$ return. Just looking at bright side.

I know the ROI sucks here, but still wanted to go for one more round with an optimised campaign. Just give it a one more shot....

Finally the takeaways for the next round of Optimized campaign:

1) Angle:was better than the other angle. Will take that 1 angle to next round

2) Landers: One lander was better from the start and one of the modified lander had a better performance. 2 same landers from previous campaign to start off with next round + 1 modified lander for the next round

3) Banner choosing: Only three had a CPA of <5x the offer payout. Will make more variations of them.

Question#1: Is there a way in Voluum to figure out which banner went thru which lander??

4) Placements : Only 8 Placements had good conversion. Gonna target only those 8 placements.

Question#2: Many placement has just 1 click and with no conversion. Is it ok to ignore them ??Since I am targeting only few placements, Can I ignore the category & Sub category?


5) Day Parting: Well I didnt set any start date and end date for any of the campaigns. Instead selected 18 hrs in day parting ,
leaving only the wee hrs of late night.
Question#3: I see the evening time has better conversion rate. Should I concentrate only on that ??

6) ISP/Carriers: Same as placements only 6 ISPs/Carriers has gained conversions, rest turned out to be dud. So laser target on these carriers rite.


Tomorrow, will do creatives and send them for decisive approval.

I learned a lot running this campaign, from clustered creatives to rotating landers to tracking to A/B testing ...... and Still a loooooong way to go!!!

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1. For this you really need custom variable drilldowns but it is something Voluum are working on.

A workaround is to pass banner name and lander ID and to your affiliate link using the {lander.id} token, under separate subids.

Then you can pull your click reports at the affiliate network and use a pivot table in Excel.

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Thanks Zeno. I will try that out.

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Round 2 Update: Created campaigns targetting placements, with 4 landers. All variations of the best performing Lander in round 1.
Created new banners.
Awaiting for decisive to approve them.

For round2: Initially I had thought of laser targetting placements, hours of day, carriers et al. But since my cpa is high, it wouldn't make any sense to laser target these now. May be if this angle clicks and at the point of breakeven, I can think about laser targetting. Who knows I can be wrong too.

So for the moment gonna cull placements and tweak campaign for more data and ultimately for a better ROI.

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Yep nice bro, just have to let the data roll in not much you can do until it does, then make a decision there. Post the next 24-48 hours of data and we will move on from there but great to see you split testing your best performing lander thats where the magic happens

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Still awaiting for Decisive to approve the campaign... EDIT: after dropping mail to decisive support, got my creative approved. Will have some data tomorrow.

Yess maynzie... thats the plan for now to get more data so that I can have something to optimize....And I don't expect a great ROI off the bat.. just concentrating on increase CTR & CVR... all the while learning & enjoying the process...

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Data! Data!! Data!!! ( So far my favorite part of Affiliate Marketing- Data Analysis )

Stats for Round2 of 0.32 paying offer, Geo: Brazil :



Landers performance:



Initial thoughts:
The ROI overall sucks May be cause of the angle or banner or Lander or combination of all three?? Have to figure out with more testing
Have to increase CPM of Mobile Site to get more quick data
Clearly Mobile App campaign does slightly better with -80% ROI, which can still be tuned by culling placements
Lander variation 3- does well than the top performing lander in Round1.

Positive:
Overall CTR is ~1.3% Thats an improvement.
Lander CTR is good than the last round


Things to do:
1) This Android offer has its counterpart ios offer. have to start split testing to see how this performs
2) Check with AM for a payout bump. I haven't asked him till, such a noob thing
3) One of the placements had an ROI of 400%. Gonna separate all the converted placements. All placements with
ROI > -10% will go into a campaign. No other filtering on this campaign other than Geo & Time. Gonna throw it another 20$ to see how they perform. More testing.
Don't ask why -10% ROI , I just picked a number Noob thing may be

Finally F5 media top volume list has this offer. So someone somewhere is making money with this offer in F5 too! That's a good thing to know !!

More work to do...

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Don't make too many decisions yet - wait for the $15 or so spend per campaign, other than cutting placements which are just doing terribly badly.

Meanwhile, I'd recommend testing a completely different offer at the same time - that's still quite a low CVR there, and finding a good offer is key.

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Hey Caurmen, thanks for your suggestion. Its just that I am sticking with one offer for a follow along. I also run another offer offline,which is also having low CVR so far

For this follow along, I have already spend 15$ per campaign and this is my second take at this offer. Just as a last resort I have singled out performing placements and created campaigns, which I am running along with my second round of campaigns. If this fails, I shall pick up a new follow along offer. I just want to ensure that I give everything before I move to next offer for my follow along post.

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No data still.. spending is very little for the past 2 days .. I am noticing a trend here for past 2 week, during the middle of the week, spend becomes automatically very low for BRAZIL geo... No matter how much I increase my bid and budget in smart cpm- spend is loooowwwww.... Will up my bid again and have a look,,,

Meanwhile will analyze other offers to start a new follow along.....

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Same problem for. I received a very low volume of traffic for the past 2 days. Not only for Brazil.

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hmm thats interesting romburg, I thought this was only for brazil geo !!

I have even mailed decisive; asking why such a drop in traffic.. No response yet... Looks like its all part of the AM game...

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Got the same problem for France using Decisive..... Also sent an email yesterday still no replay

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It sucks for not to have traffic for the third consecutive day. anyways all part of the game. I havent paused them; its still running but at snail's pace. No pointing in waiting for it.

On to next offer... last follow along was for offer an app install.. This time have to stick with a vertical... app install but I am looking at mobile gaming vertical... to promote android/ios gaming apps. I have no Photoshop skill and I use GIMP for my banners; The aim for this follow along is to have banners with 1% CTR .and to take it from there.

As of now finding it difficult to get good offers performing well in different network. For now only one network have good gaming offers. Going to stick with it; its a shame I cant split test it with different network. Am still on the lookout...

thats much for now... Will be back with more updates....

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Got a mail from decisive now... there is a traffic loss...

We saw a drop in traffic from past 2 days, and we are working on resolving this issue.

Thanks for your patience!

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Got the same one just now. Seems to be affecting several geos aswell.

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Mee too ,

it started on Tuesday, no volume for the last two days. I thought my account was screwing up so i wrote support
and here is their reply:

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