Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns

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Watch an SEO struggle to wrap his head around paid traffic! (38)

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Hey everyone - I'm basically looking to make arseloads of money but have no idea what I'm doing yet. Watch my post progression go from embarrassing failures to positive ROI!

The feedback people get around here looks priceless, so rather than just consume all the delicious content, I'm going to jump in with a follow along. The point is to add value to anyone else running around here with a noob tube and of course to get a bit of feedback from anyone who wants to be so generous.

Quick background...

Quit my job in 2012 to move to Vancouver before we had our first kid. Dicked around with some random contracts for graphic design and political campaigns. Started making a few bucks with Adsense through SEO sites in the meantime. Fall of 2013 decided to stop pounding the pooch and jumped fully into SEO with nothing but 1 $50/month site under my belt and the hope that the course I just bought wasn't out to bone me. Have been making most of my money that way ever since.

I'm basically aiming to do the same thing with paid traffic. I'm putting my SEO sites on maintenance mode for the next 3 months, selling one of them to give me a bit of capital to play with to make this work, and am going to just jump right in here and force myself to make it work.

I'd really like this Follow Along to be a place where you can see me go from hilariously pathetic to churning out profitable campaigns over the next few months.

Want to share as much as I can to both help others and gain feedback.

Goals

• Learn a shite ton
• Get a positive ROI day by August 1
• Make at least 2 legit contacts through this forum
• Break even over the course of this 3 month 'training period'
• $500/month profit by Dec 31

Assets/Things Set Up So Far

• Min. $3K over 3 months, likely $10K over 3 months depending on when the site sells
• Beyond Hosting VPS2048
• STMTracker
• Photoshop
• 4 Affiliate Networks
• Multiple mobile traffic sources
• Basic HTML/CSS knowledge, a bit of server knowledge, and 18 months of relatively vanilla IM experience
• Huge motivation

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Campaign 1

Alright so to get into the actual follow along bit, here's some info.

Offer: Mate1
Traffic Source: Decisive
Country: Canada
Other: iOS, 25+
Payout: $2-$3 depending on the network (rotating on 3 networks)
"Method": Mobile Cookbook Main Course...4 campaigns/angle - Wifi/Mobile, Site/App (slick guide, thanks caurmen)

I spent the last week wrapping my head around tracking, servers, landing pages, animated banners and other technical things, and spent a bunch of time choosing angles and making banners/landers for each.

As it stands now, I've got this campaign pending approval in Decisive, so banners are done (8/angle), landers are done (1/angle), tracking is set up to the best of my knowledge (my links seem to work after multiple tests and I can see clicks in Cake and STMTracker).

Assuming my campaigns get approved, this should get under way tomorrow so I should be able to share some data.

Note: I did run a quick campaign as soon as I could after reading the mobile cookbook Appetiser last week. I paused it after a bit of a spend and realized that while taking action is the bees knees, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and even if it had been successful, I wouldn't have learned much. This time I really tried to nail down everything as it fits together in a cohesive campaign with the right messaging across the board, etc. It did give me a tiny bit of an idea as to how I should tailor my banners, and helped me get familiar with the traffic source.

Next Steps

Assuming the campaign is approved, I'll let it run. Monitor for statistically significant shit banners, etc. Spend a bit and then re-assess based on thoughts, Mobile Cookbook, and hopefully any feedback anyone has here.

I'd like to find a lower payout offer like an app install that I can run, too. Something that is totally different than dating and will give me even more data for cheap. The advice to think of 'losing money' as 'buying data' has been an incredible mental shift by the way. I'll ask affiliate managers for recommendations, cross reference them and then pick something. Have my eye on a sweepstakes deal in eastern Europe...

Questions

1. How much is sort of 'safe' to share on here? I mean things like stats and creatives. I wouldn't mind throwing up banners and whatnot to give some context to the stats when they come in, but if that's something you don't do when the campaigns running, I should just like to know this kind of thing.

2. Does anyone have a Master spreadsheet of some kind that they use to keep track of everything? I've got a couple financial and SEO related spreadsheets that keep me sane, but building one for this kind of thing is a huge challenge at the moment. Not sure what to track, where to track it, how each piece relates to one another, etc. Would love to see what others use so I can have some sort of base to start with.

Thanks guys, looking forward to this. Hope this eventually adds some real value.

Best,

Curt

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For an adult offer you should try some adult sources also.

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Solid start! Your plan of testing low payout offers is a good one.

To answer your questions:
1. As you're completely new to this, there probably isn't any harm in sharing banners or LPs. You'll get much more useful advice that way. The exception is "outing" other people's campaigns.
2. There was one posted here a while ago (I'll try and find it) but I think most people just make their own.

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Looks like a good start!

The one thing I'd change from your initial goals is to remove the fixed date for becoming profitable. This is a poker player tip: because you can't control when you win, don't set yourself goals involving "winning by x". Instead, set goals of things you can control, and if they're smart goals, money will come.

I'd recommend goals like "launch x campaigns a week", "learn how to optimise intelligently", "spend $x,xxx effectively on gaining data and learning". The last goal there is the one that I use whenever I'm learning a new traffic source.

1. Definitely share as much as possible. The more you share the more we can help. And in the start, you're probably not going to be making such killer landers / ads that you need to worry about outing them.
2. I'd just recommend making your own. Everyone has a slightly different approach to their spreadsheets.

Hope that helps!

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Subscribed. I'm an seo trying paid also. Interested to see how you get on.

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hey man im from vancouver too originally
welcome to stm

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Hey guys, thanks for the responses.

Glad to hear that it's cool to share creatives, I think that'll add a lot and maybe we can dissect why/how things work the way they do.

And caurmen, re: the goals, really good advice, thanks for that. Will have to revisit and figure out what I can do consistently to point me in the right direction.

I'm hoping to be able to talk to everyone in order to pick a smaller payout offer tomorrow so I can get cracking on that for the weekend.

The ads are running now, and the spend is less than $10 collectively so I'll let it run for awhile to get some data to post. Will throw up some numbers at the end of today, along with some creatives. Thanks again!

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Alright time for a Day 1 update.

No conversions, so things aren't great, but I am really not sure how to judge the CTR or CPC or anything really in terms of good vs. terrible. I don't have a great feeling about the offer (Mate1, iOS, Canada), so I'm looking forward to running a smaller payout app install or something (hopefully starting tomorrow), but I'm willing to make this work if it's got any hope.

Campaign 1

These are running on Wifi-App, Wifi-Site, Mobile-App, Mobile-Site campaigns.

Angle 1

So for as much feedback and value as possible, I'll share pretty much everything.

The first angle I went with was summer related. Basically, summer is better with a date/girlfriend, or the perfect time to find one.

Banners in order from highest CTR to lowest...will post related stats below (4 animated/4 static...gifs are set to 3 runs, not sure if they work inserted as images like this?):

















Lander - just using one for now, based on one of the mobile lander tutorials by caurmen:



Results (again, these are in order of the banners above):



STM Tracker is showing almost 2 times as many clicks as is Decisive so I've clearly set up something incorrectly. Taking that into account, the lander stats overall are:

113 clicks to landing page, 14 clicks to offer = 12.4%

Angle 2

I went with a call out of sorts, something like why are you wasting time on your phone when you could be meeting a hot date?

Banners are again in order from highest CTR to lowest (just realized I didn't limit the rotation of one of the gifs to 3 so it was rejected, so here's 7 banners):















Lander:



Results:



Same thing with the clicks as above, but:

123 clicks to the lander, 7 clicks to the offer = 5.7%

Next Steps / Questions

I've got to figure out where I went wrong with the tracking.

I see that the first angle has a better CTR on the lander if those numbers are to be believed, but a bit lower CTR. So the lander is better than angle 2 or the intent of people clicking is more geared towards actually meeting a girl as opposed to the 'time wasters' who may just be looking to click stuff and waste more time..

There's one banner that may be ready to be pulled from the first angle that has a sub .1% CTR..

Honestly what I'd love is to figure out what exactly I'm looking for in these numbers.

So while I flail here, does anyone have any input in terms of how this performed today, whether it should be continued as is, what tweaks should be made if it is OK to continue, etc. Willing to take action on it, just for this first round am dying for feedback to give myself a bit of a baseline to move forward.

Thanks!

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I'd give it some more time and more data before making the call on the landers. Currently you've got a reasonably small sample size.

I'd also recommend split-testing two more landers in VERY different styles to make sure that it's not the lander design that's giving you problems. Or alternatively, split-test a direct link to get you a benchmark on likely conversion rates.

In terms of the ads, CTRs aren't bad but could be higher. Try testing more images of girls in particular, in a wide variety of different styles - full-body, face only, eyes only, emo, punk, different ethnicities, different ages, etc?

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Spent too long figuring out what to do, but decided to rotate landers and add another banner to each set, then run them for some more time.

For the banner, I am trying my hand at a 'rules' lander. Loved the post by Finch so here's what I'll be testing on both angles:



I took out the lowest banner in Angle 1, which was statistically significantly worse than the top banner (used this: https://vwo.com/ab-split-test-significance-calculator/), and added in:



Made a new one to replace the one that was rejected for Angle 2 that looks like this:



I also signed up for the $1, 3 day trial of What Runs Where. Saved a few banners that had been running for quite awhile, for reference.

Just applied to run a 48 cent payout offer in an Asian country where Decisive is showing $.19 CPM for 320x50 ads. It's a single opt-in, email submit grocery voucher offer. Creatives need to be approved so it may take a bit to get traffic going. Seems to be topping a few lists sent out from AMs in other countries so I thought I'd give it a shot in a less costly area to get some more data than I will get if I only ran this $2+ dating offer.

So, waiting for Decisive to approve the new creatives on Campaign 1, then I'll see how that's doing after a day or so. If there's some positive in it, I suppose I'll run a bunch of new banners with much different pictures as caurmen suggested.

And waiting for approval from F5 to run the new offer (Campaign 2)...actually just got approval for that so I'm going to brainstorm a bit.

Question...

In order to split test direct link vs. landing page, do I need to just make that into 2 campaigns, 1 with DL, 1 with LP?

Many thanks!

PS. Got an interested party looking at the SEO site I have up for sale, so hopefully that ends up closing and I can feel a bit more comfortable running bigger tests and trying more things. Still feel totally overwhelmed by all the nitty gritty stuff but I'm thinking about how basic this will feel in a few months and how I'll thank myself for pushing through.

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A Vancouverite on STM?!? lol I'm from Vic PM me, looking to a little meet up in Van or Vic with some noob / intermediate affiliates.

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I had some issues getting campaigns going on Decisive over the weekend. They were approved and set to Active, but most didn't get traffic until like 12-24 hours after approval, and even then, one of my campaigns sat blank. I must also have screwed up the tracker, because only one campaign is showing clicks to my landers under Analyze > Landing Pages.

I've paused them all after seeing no conversions and just for shits and giggles threw up the top 2 and 3 performing banners on the top performing other variables and direct linked it, just to see what I get for a few bucks of spend (though nothing's happened yet...emailed Decisive so hope it gets going shortly here).

Here are some stats over the weekend...

Angle 1

3 banners with highest CTR...







Total stats over the 4 campaigns:



Wifi had a much better CTR than Mobile (.381 to .181) and App had a .382 to Site's .3.

Of the tiny landing page data I have, it's showing 5.33% CTR for my original banner and 8.96% for the new 'rules' style one.

Angle 2

3 banners with highest CTR...







Total stats over the 4 campaigns:



Wifi barely edged out mobile, but mobile had just 1/10 the traffic. App had a .357 to Site's .266.

Now What?

So this doesn't look all that promising. I'm sure those better experienced than me could make this work but I just don't see spending more than a few extra bucks to test direct linking is going to be worth it.

I am going to start looking into the voucher offer I've got and send creatives away to get approved.

One thing I've been thinking about is that proven, converting offers with the right creativity will likely be a good way to go, and unproven new offers can hold promise (good offers have to start somewhere, right?). I think I'd like to start finding newer offers that I can test. Spend a few bucks here and there, and who knows maybe something good will turn up. In regards to proven offers, the voucher I've chosen is sort of along that line. There were like 5 of these (in diff countries) in the top mobile offers one of my AMs sent me. This was one of the lowest payouts and was in a different country, but I am willing to risk that it will convert elsewhere and I should be able to get some data for cheaper.

What I've Got To Do

Figure out my tracking. Not sure what went wrong, but clearly I've done something incorrectly. For this next campaign I will be paying close attention and maybe posting some screens as I progress to ensure I'm not doing something stupid.

Figure out some angles for the new offer

Do up some creatives for the new offer

Get some creatives translated to split test vs English

Keep reading on STM - So many enormous knowledge bases plus loads of golden nuggets here, it helps round me out plus seeing others make conversions puts some faith in the process.

I ended up finding some pictures of places with views both in Van and overseas and set my desktops to them. Need a bit of a 'tangible' motivator as I wade into this stuff.

Question about voucher/sweepstakes

From what I can tell, sweepstakes are all about the "you've won", "1 new message", "congratulations 1 trillionth visitor", "how many ipads are bouncing", "who's better Kobe or Big Country Reeves", etc. Then they go to your landing page, you explain a bit that there's some sort of giveaway they are elegible to enter, maybe ask them a question or two to get them committed to clicking, then send them to the lander if they are 'eligible'.

This offer is a grocery voucher...I'm sure you know the style, I think it's like the top offer on one of the networks right now. Pick a $1000 voucher for a grocery store or a travel place, etc.

Is this indeed what you'd consider a 'sweepstakes' offer? I'm trying to figure out some angles.

- "You've been selected/You are Today's winner/etc.", just answer a few questions like what would you spend $1000 on, travel, shopping, or gas, do you want to win $1000? Congrats, you qualify, click here.

- "Answer a survey for a chance to win"

- "Win $1000 to Voucher1/Voucher2/Voucher3" or "Win $1000 toward shopping/travel/gas"

Basically the premise is to make up a landing page (as I've read, landers are vital for sweepstakes) and then treat the voucher/offer as the 'prize', correct?

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I'm from Van, in Colombia right now, actually flying back to van for 3 weeks next week, then Brazil.. Also come from SEO. The way I got into paid was through finding offers for my sites, some were hard to find. Then retargeting added %15 revenue onto the seo revenue. Then dig into the analytics of the seo sites and use that data for advertising your hard to find offers. I'm all about competitive advantage.

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1. Use a proven offer when starting out rather than trying to pioneer on untested offers.

2. Definitely fix your tracking.

3. For sweeps, yes you can treat the voucher as a 'prize'. There are an number of angles you could take. I would suggest making the user feel like they have done something to earn their entry rather than just being today luck winner on the internet.

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Hey Zeno thanks for the feedback.

Should I be choosing from the top 50ish offers by volume sent out by my affiliate managers, or is there a better way to dial in to a decent offer as I get my bearings in mobile?

Looking forward to figuring out some angles and creatives for this new campaign, I appreciate your input on that. Will post whatever I come up with and will likely post nitty gritties of the tracking set up process this time in case I've really buggered something up.

And @wanderer, yeah using paid to increase existing SEO revenue or to drive traffic to a site built as usual but around a higher ticket KW is what I am looking at eventually, but I wanted to completely start fresh and throw myself into the deep end. I figure sure, I could probably help myself a bit if I started trying to get traffic to my sites with adverts, but I think if I struggle for a bit and come away with a much stronger set of skills and a broader knowledge, by the time I come back around to applying this to my existing portfolio, I will be far better suited to have success (plus have the knowledge and skills for future projects). It's a long ball game!

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The network volume list is useful and you can find stuff in the middle that has OK volume, converts but isn't getting smashed.

If in doubt ask your AM for some advice on what mobile offer is working in X geo, or what's working and has a <$1.00 payout for example.

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IMHO, first bulk of the banners is about summer (?) and the second bulk sounds pretty desperate. What solution to what problem are you selling?

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Be sure to run enough traffic on each test. The reason we recommend running $15 of traffic to each combination of wifi, app, site and carrier is that often only one of the four options will convert, and within that 1 in 4 campaign, often only some placements will convert.

So if you only spend $17 across all 4 combinations on a dollar payout, say, you might think that you've thoroughly tested, but in actual fact you've only sent about 50 cents of traffic to the combination that could be profitable!

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Right, so after figuring out a couple angles and creatives and finally getting them all approved on the advertiser side, it's time to put Campaign 2 (Malaysia voucher) into the tracker and traffic source.

I've decided to start with English and if there's promise, I will test translations.

So quick layout...

Offer: Grocery Voucher - SOI
Geo: Malaysia
Payout: $0.48
Traffic Source: Decisive
Network: F5

One angle is very time sensitive, but I want to see how it will work. If I can get a few conversions, I'll 'see the light' so to speak and perhaps be able to branch off into something similar quickly.

I've got 18 banners, 9 for each angle, with 1 lander per angle for now.

What I'd love in this post is to get a bit of feedback in terms of how I'm setting up tracking. Last time I clearly had something wrong and would really appreciate any feedback on my set up. I'll post screens and brief outlines on how I do it below. Thanks!

1. Traffic Sources

Just added Decisive and my account email

2. Categories

Created a new one called Voucher

3. Campaigns

So I'm creating a campaign for each of the 4 breakdowns (Mobile-App, Mobile-Site, Wifi-App, Wifi-Site) for each angle. Therefore, 8 campaigns total.

I added a campaign specific identifier as &s1= and added [[subid]] for &s2=



4. Landing Pages

Uploading 4 of the same landing page, making one for each campaign (Mobile-App, Mobile-Site, etc.).



6. Get LP Code

Clicked Simple Landing Page.

Added php code to <head> of my LPs.

a href="<?php echo $clickThruLink ?>" in all cases.

8. Get Postback/Pixel

Chose the postback. Copied and pasted into Cake Postback URL (Server Pixel).



7. Get Links

Choose network, campaign, LP, PPC network, PPC account, put in a CPC, click Generate Tracking Link



Over in Decisive, name the campaign, throw up the link, and put up the banners.



...

Now I wait for it to be approved on Decisive.

In the meantime, I traveled to Malaysia (via VPN) and typed in my final link, clicked through my LP, clicked to the offer page.

So far, I'm seeing my click on both the main overview page in STM tracker and the Landing Pages tab in Analyze. Looks like that tracking is working. However, not seeing any clicks on F5.

Continuing on, I was so enthralled by my offer that I just had to fill it out for my chance to win! Anyway, F5 is showing a conversion, but STM Tracker is not.

So, it looks like I have conversion tracking working in F5 and click tracking working in STM Tracker, but not both.

Does anyone have an idea as to where I went wrong here and how I can remedy it? Any help would be amazingly appreciated.

Many thanks,
Curt

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You'll need to add #s2# to the end of your postback in Cake - that should tie everything together.

Also, you'll want to add {{{creativeid}}} to the end of your URL in Decisive so that you can see which ad triggers conversions.

Check and see in the F5 reports to see if your conversion is tied to a unique number in S2 (your subid). If so, everything's working!

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Thanks caurmen!

Just made those changes and now to wait (again) for Decisive approval. We'll see how this works and I'll aim to get $15 on each campaign.

In the mean time I'll be culling bad apps/sites/carriers/etc. But like, really bad, of course. I may post for a quick confirmation that I'm cutting the right things at the right time. But I'll base it on caurmen's previous posts about starting campaigns and statistical significance.

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Just wanted to throw this up while it's real fresh:



Thanks for all the help on this!

It's not a lot, and it's a tiny sample size, but pretty cool to see.

Cheers again for the assistance.

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Congrats!

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Campaign 2 Stats

OK so I've got my first day down and I've just paused my second day so I can take a bit to look at the data and see if I can cull anything. Good news is that I've actually got a few conversions, which makes a world of difference in terms of one's mindset. ROI is brutal but at the very least there's a tiny bit to work with here.

Day 1

Spent: $33.03
Revenue: $2.40
Profit: -30.63
ROI: -92.7%
Conversions: 5

Day 2

Spent: $20.11
Revenue: $2.40
Profit: -17.71
ROI: -88.0%
Conversions: 5

There is just a ton of data and a ton of ways to look at it, so I'm having a bit of trouble locking onto what exactly to do. Combine that with the fact that I didn't get the Decisive pixel in there so I can't see what ads gave any conversions, and I'm a bit blind.

Some stats:

Campaigns from STM Tracker


Landing Pages from STM Tracker


Broad view from Decisive


One of the things I'd look to cut is banners with no conversions and a CTR of less than half the average of the top 3 banners, but seeing as how I have no conversion data, I can't do that.

I'm thinking my biggest potential lies in my landing pages. Would that be about right?

If I added say 2 extra landing pages and compared them to the current one, would that be my best next move? And if so, should I run it to all campaigns or is there enough here to say that one is likely not worth continuing on? Will take a day or so I imagine to get new LPs up and campaigns approved on Decisive, so want to make sure I'm setting it up as well as I can be.

Landers look like this and are just about the same for each. The other is targeted for Ramadan Giveaway obviously and one question is how often do you shop during Ramadan.



Questions: Over 18? Have you ever shopped at AEON, Petronas, or Club Med (the voucher choices)? When is Hari Merdeka (Malaysian holiday)?



In regards to Angles, I'll need to shut A1 down anyway in a few days because it's time sensitive (Ramadan). Perhaps I should brainstorm another angle, too, and this time run A2 and A3, each with 3 landers.

Plan

I would be tickled if I could get some feedback on this, but here's where I think I'm at...

Come up with another angle and banners.

Come up with 2 extra landers for A2 and 3 new landers for A3.

Run all campaigns again to test landers...? (Here's where I wonder if I should cut campaigns yet)

Questions

Other than the general plan above....

Conversions aren't showing up in Decisive.

I see on their Help page, it says this:

I think I'm missing the c1=bidhash in my set up and haven't got the Decisive pixel in my STM Tracker. Based on my set up above and edits thanks to caurmen, where do I need to make the change to get this bidhash in there correctly?

Editing for a guess...

Do I add &s3=[c1] to the end of my Affiliate URL in STM Tracker after I throw that Decisive postback in there? Just not sure how the [c1] fits into my aff link. Or, do I just change my Decisive link to URL/redirect/tracker.php?t202id=XXXX&t202kw={{{creativeid}}}&c1 ={{{bidhash}}}? Or both...?

It is currently /redirect/tracker.php?t202id=XXXX&t202kw={{{creativeid}}}

Thanks for the help!

Thanks again!

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Definitely get the tracking working properly first - although having that many conversions on an initial test is definitely a good sign!

Decisive link - you're correct, you want to add &c1={{{bidhash}}} to the end of your link (in all campaigns). Then, follow the advice in the Decisive help page - add http://win.crwd.io/convert/[[c1]] to Setup > Traffic Sources > Pixel Code

That should get your conversions tracking back to Decisive, and then you can start optimising.

I'd agree - your LPs definitely have some optimisation work to do, just from looking at the CTRs. Try something much simpler - a single line of text, an image, and a button - to start.

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Caurmen
Thanks. Doesnt that attitude/value to spend $x go completely against an entrepreneur's drive to make profits? One could have a goal to spend $1,000 per month learning a traffic source, and achieve their goal every month until they run out of money. Thats not the goal - the goal of course is to make money.

How can one have a goal which goes in the wrong direction from what they really want?

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Once again, thank you for the feedback. You've seriously helped me move forward by getting past these technical hurdles, and I appreciate it. I look forward to the day I can provide some real value here to give back.

I've got 2 new landers in for approval for A2 (which I'm now calling A3 for ease of tracking purposes), and 3 landers, 9 banners in for approval for A4 (new).

Now to wait, but in the mean time, here's the new landers. Much simplified to begin with, as caurmen recommended. The alignment is good on a phone but I just snapped some quick screens on my computer to give you an idea.

A3 (still using the original on this to test as Landing Page 1)





A4







Will update if/when things get approved and I get some traffic going. Thanks again!

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Looks good!

I'd try something even simpler, too! Maybe just "Congratulations! You Could Win RM1000! Choose Your Voucher!" .

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TECHNICAL ISSUES

Alright I've gone and done a stupid again. Still not getting Decisive conversions tracked. Your help is greatly appreciated as always (please!).

With a rotating lander, the link gets an extra "&ver=3" at the end of it.

Before, my link was like: /tracking202/redirect/tracker.php?&t202id=XXXX&t202kw={{{creativeid}}}

Then, to get the Decisive conversion showing up, it would be: /tracking202/redirect/tracker.php?&t202id=XXXX&t202kw={{{creativeid}}}&c 1={{{bidhash}}}

However, the link I got was like this: /tracking202/redirect/tracker.php?&t202id=XXXX&t202kw=&ver=3

So, I figured that I'd just make my link thus: /tracking202/redirect/tracker.php?&t202id=XXXX&t202kw={{{creativeid}}}&v er=3&c1={{{bidhash}}}

Basically, I wasn't sure how to add creativeid on to the end of the link after the &ver=3, so figured I'd put it where I had it before that new URL variable came into play, then add the bidhash to the end to get my Decisive conversions tracking.

I've got a conversion (can see it in my tracker and F5), but it's not showing in Decisive. Did putting {{{creativeid}}} before &ver=3 mess this up or am I doing something else incorrectly?

In my Setup > Traffic Sources, I've got a postback set up as: http://win.crwd.io/convert/[[c1]]

Thanks again for all the help. Looking forward to finally figuring out the technical bits on a general level so I can focus more on just running campaigns!

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That all looks fine.

In Tracking202, under group overview, can you show C1 values and see the bidhashes there?

If they are there and a conversion is listed for one, the issue will be in Tracking202 firing the 3rd party postback URL - I do recall this having issues.

Fear not! The beauty of postback URLs is that any server/client can trigger them, even you.

If your conversion shows up in t202 in the group overview, copy the corresponding bidhash string of gibberish.

Then open Chrome > Incognito mode > paste e.g. http://win.crwd.io/convert/23e980jwdfsjkdasda2 into the address bar > hit enter > page will give an error if bidhash wrong or congratulate you > conversion has been communicated!

Now check Decisive to see if it shows up. Give it 10 minutes.

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Almost like you know a thing or two. Ha, this worked very nicely, thank you!

So it may accurately call some conversions, but not others then?

Time to unpause.

Now I'm worried about LP load time running on a Beyond server trying to do Malaysia...From the sounds of it, the only options are to use Voluum and a CDN or to get a VPS in Asia, basically? Otherwise obviously I'll be leaving money on the table. Just not sure that's an expense I should make being so green, seems like something one does when they know there's a decent chance of a worthwhile campaign. Is that fair, or am I hamstringing myself from the get go by not being perfectly speed optimized right now?

Thanks again for the quick assistance, will put up some more numbers after I get some traffic.

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Zeno, why is Incognito mode recommended? Thanks.

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To prevent any sort of cookie or caching-related problems.

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P202 wise, for postbacks, it will be all or nothing - the postbacks work, or they don't.

Server-to-server tracking is generally very consistent.

If you have no experience in MY, no reason to believe campaigns will work, just run tracking through your BH VPS and offload static content to a CDN - they latency will be detrimental but it won't be the difference between 400% ROI and -90%.

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Alright so I'm manually calling conversions, but at least I can now see all the data.

I ran another $27.84 at A3 and $28.00 at A4.

So, over Thursday/Friday:
Spend: $55.84
Revenue: $3.36
ROI: -94%

TOTAL:
Spend: $109.25
Revenue: $8.16
ROI: -92.5%

Here are some stat screenshots..

Account Overview

That angle on Wifi Site was the best campaign. Earlier in the week, this angle (A2 at that point) had 4 conversions, so overall, this accounted for 7 of 17 total conversions. I wonder if that set up would be best to continue on, if this was a campaign to be continued?

Landing Page Overview

People seemed to click through on Mobile App campaigns but just the single conversion across both angles. The top CTR one with the conversion is the WAIT lander that asks if they're 18, in Malaysia, etc. then the button says YES.

A3 Decisive Ad Overview (4 conversions should actually be 3)

Again, one campaign had all the conversion and the highest CTR.

A3 Decisive Creative Overview (2 conversions on that banner should actually be 1)

All banners performed similarly CTR-wise average across all 4 campaigns. In the converting campaign they were between 1.65 and 1.95%.

A4 Decisive Ad Overview (conversions hadn't come through into the report yet, so added manually)

Wifi Site again with highest CTR but not a good CVR in this campaign.

A4 Decisive Creative Overview (added manually again)

One banner clearly outperformed the others.

So...

Some conversions, which is cool, but perhaps this is looking like a good learning experience and not much more?

I think I've figured out most of the basic technical aspects of launching a campaign and getting tracking to work. I think my 'can handle the basics' include:

Setting up a campaign in Decisive
Setting up tracking with STM Tracker
Rotating offers
Rotating landers
Creating landing pages

And I think there's slightly less "holy shit there's so much to think about to get all the pieces to work together".

Perhaps the biggest thing I need to do now is create processes and systems and rules. Not sure exactly how those will look or if they will be effective from the get go (likely not), but now that I can start to envision a campaign from start to finish, rather than just each step as I plow through it, I may be able to set things up better and get things more efficient.

I'd welcome any comments on this campaign, but I think after $100+ it's time to test something else. The first $50 was sort of wasted in so far as I didn't get conversion tracking working properly. If there is 'hope' left, please let me know and I'll gladly keep working through this to learn an optimization process.

I will look through the top volume offers again and choose something similarly low payout and try again. May start with a direct link test and move from there. See if it converts after $X, if so, add landers. Test banners, landers, offers, etc.

Thanks for all of the help so far, especially caurmen and zeno. Really appreciate you coming in here to troubleshoot for a rookie.


If anyone's in a similar position to me and wants to chat, one of the things I wanted from this is to meet some people and make good connections. And if there are any pros who want an apprentice, I'd jump at the chance. Just throwin' it out there.

Thanks again.

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@kurt_s: Have you considered the Newbee Hivemind? It's a group of newbees pooling their brains and information together to eventually make a profit. I think it would be great for you. I am a part of the group. Search for it in the newbee section of the forum. Good luck, whether you join or not.

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Great thread. -93% ROI is not motivating though for me as a newbie(!) - I hope normally it is better!

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Yep, definitely move on to a new campaign at this point. You've learned a lot, but this campaign is not looking super-promising - time to Test Moar Stuffz.

(I should make a Teespring T-Shirt with that on it. )

Nice work so far!

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