Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns

---

Hyperion's First time mobile follow along (17)

---

Hyperion’s follow along
Hey guys finally got around to starting a thread to track my progress doing mobile for the first time. I’m following the mobile cookbook: appetizer guide, and ill be updating this thread with stats and helpful tips along the way.

Time line
Next few months are going to be hectic, I’m moving out of my place in a week and then going to university in mid august. So I’m going to have to manage my time very carefully and set up my workflow so I can do it on a laptop and on the go.

Setup
Hosting- beyond hosting
Tracking- stm mobile tracker already set up, using decisive > direct offer atm
Traffic- decisive
Network- f5 and grab ads

Budget
2k to start
Around 10/20 a day

Goals
Make a profit on a campaign
Make a continuous daily profit
100 a day!



July 15-18
Currently running about 5 offers with 7 campaigns with a daily limit of 10 on each
(Burning money too fast so I need to optimize these and only test a couple on the next run)

Stats so far
Offer 1 – 900 clicks – 6 conv. – $25 spend - $2.22 revenue
Offer 2 – 650 clicks – 0 conv. - $50 spend - $0 revenue
Offer 3 - 900 clicks – 1 conv. - $26 spend - $0.45 revenue
Offer 4 – 660 clicks – 4 conv. - $20 spend - $2.72 revenue
Offer 5 - 900 clicks – 1 conv. - $21 spend -$.80 revenue

Lessons learned
Don’t test a lot of banners at once
(Split them up into small groups otherwise you’ll end up with 500 clicks spread out on a bunch of banners with no significant data and a lot of money lost)

Once you have some significant data, cull the placements first (apps or sites) and then the banners. (Thank caurmen!)

Next steps
Cut offers 2, 5.
Test new angles on 1, 3, 4
Start putting up landing pages for offers 1, 3, 4


Questions.
Should I just cut the campaigns with no conversions or keep trying new angles or banners?
Will landing pages significantly improve ctr/cvr on mobile offers?

Excited to finally be taking some action!

---

It's good that your are dedicated, but don't over do it by running too many offers at one time.

---

Yeah, I would only run offers 1 and 4 to start with. Maybe even just offer 4. Your budget is tiny, you're going to burn through all of it. Don't worry about landing pages yet, get a direct linking campaign profitable, then add in LPs.

---

@snacks
Thanks for the advice; I’m focusing on just a couple now and it’s working a lot better.

@hannahmcintyre
You’re definitely right, after I cut a few offers my daily spending dropped significantly. Ok I'll work on getting a direct linking campaign optimized first.

Update
Ok so now I have the top two offers
So far I have narrowed down targeting on both
Spending is down significantly
Cpa on one offer is down from $8 to around $1

Next steps
Create a new campaign for each offer testing new angles/banners
Upgrade beyond hosting vps to dedicated so I can use the stm mobile tracker

Questions
When do you finally give up on an offer that’s getting some conversions but not breaking even?

---

Definitely good progress!

You shouldn't need a dedicated server to use the STM tracker - any Beyond Hosting VPS should be able to run it (aside from, possibly, the starter plan).

When do you give up: when you've run out of things to test, or when the ROI's looking too negative to continue. Some of this is experience, but there are some rules you can follow. What's the ROI on it right now, and how much optimisation have you done?

---

Hey caurmen, I was on the hybrid plan which didn't support it so I upgraded. They also installed the stm tracker for me which was pretty awesome.

The overall ROI for the two campaigns are -88% and -76% but they're improving a little bit daily
So far Ive cut placements with high spending and no conversions and split tested more banners.

---

Update
Finally managed to get a decently converting campaign, overall the stats are



But after stopping low ctr banners and culling some placements got the cpa down to around .50/.60



Lessons learned
Be more creative with banners, most of my previous angles were pretty generic and didn’t stand out, reading up on creating better angles here really helped, I managed to get a wayyyy better cvr.

Cut banners faster
It seems after a banner has reached about 2x the payout without a conversion it’s going to have a huge cpa, so better to cut early than waste money and keep waiting for a conversion.



Next steps
Rotate in new banners
Keep optimizing to get this campaign from break even to profit
Create another vertical for this campaign
Test a new offer

---

Great job so far!

After you gather some more data you could try creating a new campaign just with the winning placements and bid a bit higher to get more volume.

---

Update

First profitable day!!

So after a slow day on saturday with little conversions I kept optimizing a little bit and managed to get my main campaign profitable!



Spent 9.43
Revenue 11.84
Profit 2.41
(still increasing)

Lessons learned
Be patient.
If I had cut banners yesterday due to one day of non-converting traffic, I wouldn’t have a profit today.

Scale slowly
Seeing a positive roi I got trigger happy and bumped up my budget and bid, which while getting me a lot of traffic in a few minutes made me go into the red because the tracking couldn’t keep and I had to rely on old data. Still seeing conversions come in from that brief period which put me back in profit.

Next steps
Cut and add more banners
Setup up new campaign split testing LPs
Get a pay bump on the offer (really low payout right now)
Test for another few days and compare cvr across the week

---

great job!
so you have succeed to become profitable without LP's?

---

Thanks, Yes it just took alot of testing different banners and offers until I found a good converting combo.

---

Update
Another profitable day yesterday



Spend 36.56
Revenue 46.62
Profit 10.06

So far I’ve created another campaign with the same targeting to split test a few LPs and another offer.



Still working on getting a better cvr than by direct linking.

Lessons learned
(Trying to give as much info as possible to help out other people starting out like me)

• One thing that really helps once you have a campaign with some conversions is to setup an algebraic equation to see what you can tweak to make it better.
  Ex.
  
  $money / CPM x 1000 x CTR x CVR x Payout - $money = profit
  $40 / .25 x 1000 x .02 x .038 x .50 -$40 = $20.8 profit
  
  Now you can easily see what you can tweak to get more revenue like getting a better payout or improving the CTR.
  
• Seems like Decisive is really cracking down on antivirus creative that are somewhat misleading like “you have 1 virus!” so changing up the copy is pretty necessary now for AV.
  
• Use the STM Mobile tracker!!
  So much easier if you need to change the offer quickly or tweak the url otherwise you’ll have to wait half the day for decisive to reapprove your campaign

Goals accomplished
Make a profit on a campaign
Make a continuous daily profit (at least a week)
100 a day!

Next steps
Keep testing new banners for a lower cpa
Change up LPs and test again
Still working on getting a higher payout

---

Looks good!

I'm not a mobile guy, so maybe somebody with more experience can confirm or deny this:

-- getting a higher payout would be the easiest way to get ROI up in your case (maybe another network has the same offer, maybe contacting one of the F5 admins here on the forum is more effective(one posted here in this thread))
-- any devices that convert better?
-- any times of day that convert better?
-- maybe upping the spend a bit if you're comfortable with that?

---

can i find out how many % of the sites do u blacklist? i have not blacklisted any sites yet and i am wondering if u end up black listing like... maybe 90% of the sites?

---

It's generally tricky to get much of a pay bump on mobile app installs. Having said that, never hurts to ask!

What I'd also recommend in this case is testing the offer on a few more networks, if you haven't done so already -that can result in an astonishing CVR bump.

---

- Pretty much, just getting a higher payout by a few cents improved my ROI significantly and made a few more banners profitable
- Seems like it, originally I just ignored them thinking it was statistically insignificant but cutting the non converting ones did really help
- Same as the devices I originally ignored this but after using day parting my cpa dropped to like 10c
- Still working on it, every time I do my cpa jumps up and I stop getting leads :/


Sure, it turns out to be like 40% after a day or two, anything that costs more than the offer payout without a conversion or really high cpa. After that maybe 2-4 each day that drop in quality over time


Haha yah I got a really small pay bump but it did make a lot of difference. I'm still working on that its just hard to find the same type of offer in the same country on a different network, but looks like my other network got a few similar offers so i'll try that next

---

Update
So after a few more days of profitably my campaign cpa started rocketing from 10c to like 2$. Seems like my niche is getting somewhat saturated, but that's my fault since this campaign was ridiculously generic.
Still i'm happy I was able to make a profit running something everybody else is.
Also I've been moving the last week or so I lost my work space which didn't help so I need to buy a new laptop and get my workflow and photoshop set up asap.

Things I did wrong

• Relying on 1 or 2 profitable banners and not replacing paused ones with new ones
• Running the same angle everybody else was
• Becoming lazy and not making more LPs and banners
• NOT WORKING!

Lessons Learned

• Set up a dedicated time and space to work even while traveling
• Put in effort at the beginning
  When I started these campaigns I kinds rushed through everything, If id put in a lot more effort at the beginning and kept it up I definitely could have kept this campaign running and scaled really well.

Next steps

• Create a completely new angel for this campaign
• Start on a few new offers
  I'm 100% sure I can CEO/10K a day If I follow everything I learned so far and avoid my mistakes. I realized all of this is ridiculously simple after a while but still insanely difficult to just sit down and take action, to actually do it (biggest problem right now)

---

Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns