is this how its meant to work... (16)
is this the learning curve of mobile AM?
you pick an offer, you create a campaign... it bombs.... -100% ROI
you pick another offer, you create a campaign... it bombs.... -100% ROI
you pick another offer, you create a campaign... it bombs.... -100% ROI
you pick another offer, you create a campaign... it bombs.... -100% ROI
you pick another offer, you create a campaign... it almost bombs.... -70% ROI
you pick another offer, you create a campaign... it bombs a little less... -30% ROI
you optimise the campaign and get to break even 0% ROI
you pick another offer, you create a campaign, you optimize ... is ok +10% ROI
you pick another offer, you create a campaign, you optimize ... its good +40% ROI
you just gotta keep throwing money at the learning process until you finally start to sing?
That's the general idea, but usually progress isn't that consistent. You could get lucky and find a campaign on the second try, or you could do everything "right" and not be profitable on your 10th campaign for various reasons.
There are a lot of variables outside of your control, so you have to keep building campaigns, learning from them and trusting that you're making progress.
thats pretty much what i thought! you just gotta trust the process... out of interest, what variables have you found that are out of your control?
I think if you've launched 10 campaigns for 9 different offers and 1 of them has produced a +40% ROI, the chances are... you got lucky.
It's difficult to learn much by simply getting rid of whatever doesn't profit straight out of the gate.
I'm fine with scrapping -100% ROI campaigns. But if you've got -70%, at least you have some conversion data. That's worth exploring before hopping to another offer.
Keep in mind Finch doesn't mean that you got lucky to have a +40% ROI campaign once in ten tries.
What he means is that your methodology, as described, lacks a process for refining and optimizing campaigns. If you're at -30% ROI and giving up then you're depending on hitting random home-runs to make profits.
A reliable and sustainable campaign methodology would refine that -30% campaign into a winner and then scale it out.
Hope that helps!
Originally Posted by Finch
Originally Posted by allthegold
I would say that if you set-up 10 campaigns and only 1 has a positive ROI then you're not that good.
Most people are to lazy to work and the only thing they are doing is spy/copy and HOPE to make money.
If I start a campaign my mindset doesn't hope to make money I can tell you that.
you spy another traffic source, get an idea, setup a campaign based on variations of what you spied.. it doesnt bombs.... -100% ROI and you learn much by spending less 
Originally Posted by Finch
You gotta launch new campaigns to answer new questions.
Once you have your system set, you are launching new campaigns to keep freshness high. Take adult and FB dating: launching a campaign every day meant 100%+ ROI easily daily (on large spend). Charles Ngo wrote about this too -- the top affiliates know that you just smash and pound through the dangling carrot that is "campaign on auto-pilot". Never rely on auto-pilot. Go with the daily work option. Once I realised this it changed me forever. I'm still not done running my last FB accounts down (ROI too good) but when I start mobile I know it will eventually be the same thing.
So you are advising to keep pushing the boundaries of campaigns to squeeze them as much as possible, even if they hemorrhage money at first? This has been my approach so far.
You are launching campaigns to answer questions. Is wi-fi or cell better for this traffic source? If you don't know yet, launch more campaigns. When that question has been answered, you can make your campaigns answer new questions. When you have all your questions answered, it's time to be ruthless and launch new creatives for freshness/profit daily. Outside of a mastermind group you will not be given the answers to questions that have been answered with somebody else's money. Only launch more campaigns if it helps you split-test/get answers more quickly. If it doesn't contribute to the speed or quality of the answer, it's a wasted campaign.
If you start with an offer that converts and you stick to just 1 traffic source then you can eliminate a lot of variables already. The vast majority of campaigns will end up with a neg ROI but rarely is it -100% (maybe its comes with experience).
Like Finch said, when you see some potential in a campaign you just keep building on it. Maybe you saw no conversions but you saw a good CTR on your banners...or you landers or vice versa.
Te fastest way to loose all your campaign capital is to throw shit at the wall from one campaign to the next and from one traffic source to the next.
You need to trust the "process" but that implies that you have a process and follow it.
Spray and pray is a stupid strategy.
Throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks is not a process.
Instead, focus on maximising your speed to learning and minimising your cost to failure.
Find ways to learn much faster and fail much more cheaply.
No I personally think you got it all wrong. Sure you got some of the steps right but you are missing the key elements / factors.
First before starting your first campaign, you study angles, learn landing pages, learn how to implement scripts, learn how your chosen traffic network works, learn what other people are promoting. etc etc.
Then you take action, set up your first campaign, yes it more than likely will not profit... then you take that and learn again why it didnt profit and what you did wrong. Learn how to improve it. If you realize you totally fucked up you start a new one.
Once you have repeated analayzing what you did wrong and learning more things about your chosen campaign, you do another campaign implementing all the new things you learned. If done properly i would have to say its guaranteed you increase your ROI. Maybe not into positive but it should increase. Then just rinse and repeat while consistently learning and getting more data..
This is as much as bulletproof as you will get.
There are a lot of moving parts to this question.
Probably the key one is the offer/traffic source combination. Finding that takes a lot of testing, a lot of luck, or some smart networking. Once you've got it, though, things become a lot more consistent (and it's time to start looking for a second offer/traffic source combo for when the first one goes down ).
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