First Mobile Campaign: A Retrospective - and Brighter Days Ahead (25)
First Mobile Campaign: A Retrospective - and Brighter Days Ahead
I’ve been lurking for a few weeks, spending lots of time reading as much as possible on these forums and elsewhere, and getting myself acquainted with how to run mobile advertising campaigns. I wanted to try a bit on my own to work through the technical details by myself - my hypothesis was that if I couldn’t even figure that out without needing help, then the chances of actually being successful going forward were pretty slim. Happily, I was able to get a campaign up and running, complete with functional tracking, rotating landing pages on my own hosting, and I even got to experiment a little with data analysis and optimization. In this post, I will briefly discuss my initial campaign...and more importantly, my plans for future campaigns. This thread will be for me to document my progress, keep myself accountable to my goals, and hopefully get some input from the pros!
This might end up being kind of long. So if seeing the affiliate marketing world through the eyes of a clueless newbie doesn’t appeal to you, go ahead and skip to Part 2 where I will start talking about my process for subsequent campaigns. I doubt anybody would blame you!
Part 1: Baby’s First Campaign
The offer was for an instant messaging app (ICQ), converting on install and open in Brazil and Argentina. My traffic source was Decisive, and I started off by using banner ads directly linking to the offer in Brazil. If it’s not obvious by now, I basically followed the mobile appetiser guide word for word! I won’t completely reveal all the details here, since in retrospect my angles and methods were pretty stupid and frankly I’m slightly embarrassed by them. Anyway, I did get a few (!) conversions on my initial direct link run...precisely 7 on about 1000 clicks. I saw that my banner CTRs were quite high (around 2%) and the conversion rate was low, so I started sending the clicks to a crude landing page. This didn’t help at all, and I never saw another conversion again. Obviously, I’ve kicked that campaign to the curb, but oh! The things I learned!
What IS a banner ad? How do I make one? How about landing pages?
I’ve been an avid internet user for about the last 15 years, and have had an ad blocker of some kind installed since about the first month they were available. So getting started, I hardly even knew what a banner ad was, let alone how to make one. The most useful thing I did was drilling down through the planner data on Decisive and visiting the various websites listed using a VPN in the target geography with an Android emulator. From these observations, I could actually see what banner ads were! And even a few landing pages...at least the “You have 27 viruses on your phone!” kind. Not much, but it got me started.
Tracking and Hosting
I spent probably the better part of 3 days figuring out what a VPS was and roughly how they work, and began installing the STM mobile tracker on the one I picked. Unfortunately, I learned only after purchasing the MaxMind database that I would have to upgrade to a better hosting plan in order to use the STM tracker. So I gave up on that, and signed up for a
Picking Your Battles
Although Brazil doesn’t speak English, there are still a shitload of people living there. For my beginner aspirations, I probably should stick with smaller countries. Optimizing campaigns starting from RON with advertising chump change might not be the most sound strategy for countries with 100+ million people. This may be entirely baseless conjecture on my part, but in the future I will try less populated countries.
Various Oddities and Other Observations
Getting the mechanics of the campaign working was absolutely an invaluable learning experience, but I am really starting to see how having good angles and a complete understanding of your traffic source is where the real money is made. It was really remarkable to see how banner types behaved very differently on app vs site, wifi vs mobile, etc. One particularly interesting thing I noticed was how well a banner I made which was just a big button that said “Download Now!” did on a certain format vs. another. Turns out that there was a lot of exposure to a software downloading website, and I can only imagine that people must have accidentally been clicking on the banner when they wanted to download their precious files. Unsurprisingly, the site was just flooded with similar looking banners, most of which linked to scary pages saying that your phone is full of viruses and to download Psafe immediately! I kind of doubt I would ever come up with something like that, but I bet its made a few people a lot of money. Stuff like that I never would have even dreamed of until I actually started looking at the data and trying to make sense of it. Now if only I could find a way to make that 20% CTR I was getting from the drag racing app game actually convert...hmmm.
Part 2 in next post....!
Part 2: The Future is Bright
Enough of the past, on to the future! Here are the tools and resources I currently have at my disposal:
Offers: I’m going to stick with app installs for now. It’s something that at least makes sense to me, and there seems to be plenty of demand
Traffic Source: I will be using something that isn’t Decisive from now on. It is a source that has been recommended on these forums before so I think it is legit. I plan on sticking with it and learning it well.
Hosting: I have a Beyond Hosting starter VPS for now to host my landing pages. I may switch to a CDN in the near future if I can ascertain some benefit from doing so, since I try to keep my landers very simple and non-reliant on PHP.
Tracking: I will stay with
GTmetrix: I use this for analyzing my landing pages and making sure there isn’t anything horribly wrong with how they are coded.
Modern.ie: Provides at least a couple screenshots of how my landing pages might show up on different phones. I think I have 3 or 4 minutes left on the Browserstack free trial as well.
Other Misc: I have a VPN account and experience using Bluestacks for reconnaissance and, more importantly, making sure my offer funnel actually works.
Time: I work full time at my day job, so this is in short supply. I am guessing I will get in 20 to 30 hours per week on AM, mostly on evenings and weekends. I know that to overcome this limitation I must make the most of the time I have available, by being efficient and deliberate with decision making. That’s where the plan comes in!
Budget: I work full time at my day job, so this isn’t in short supply! I’m not going to go out and spend 10 grand on traffic tomorrow, but I don’t think my budget will be a limiting factor.
Goals
My goals will be fairly simple. I have short term goals, which are things under my direct control, and long-term goals, which I hope will fall into place.
Short Term:
-Launch at least 2 new campaigns a week. May be for a new offer, or a significant variation on an existing offer (new angle, etc).
-Post in this thread twice a week. More than likely this will correspond to launching new campaigns. If an offer completely bombs, I will post all (or most) of the details here.
Long Term:
-Get a campaign with some traction so that I can get experience with optimizing based on conversion data. Make money.
The Plan
This is my plan for generating campaigns. It probably falls somewhere between the appetiser and main course mobile guides, with some slight tweaks that I have made to correspond to my own peculiar train of thought.
Angle Generation:
-List 15 benefits the app could provide the user. Find these from user reviews, product descriptions, or from actually using the app. These can be fairly broad at this point.
-Align these benefits with the “Life Force 8” or “Secondary Wants”, from the Ca$hvertising book (and elsewhere)
-Based on the alignment, come up with an angle for each. Try to be creative with these angles.
-Get 1 night of sleep, then try to drill down to more unique or creative angles. Get at least 2. These will be the potential campaign angles. Pick 1 to start with.
Banners:
-Make 8 different banners. 8 seems like kind of an arbitrary number, but whatever. I will use the same text on each but try to vary the design greatly. Different banner styles:
- Include a national symbol (flag, etc.) for the country. CTA: Rounded rectangle button
- Include a face on the banner. Probably cartoon style, maybe a real picture. CTA: Rounded rectangle button
- Black text on white background. No images. CTA: Blue underlined text
- White text with a black stroke effect over a colorful gradient background. CTA: Official looking google play store button.
- Include some kind of crazy picture. Marge Simpson eating her own hair was something that has worked well for me. CTA: Blue underlined text
- Free handed letters. No images. CTA: Free handed blue text with a crude underline
- Some kind of photo-style picture, not a face. CTA: Rounded rectangle
- No words other than CTA. Maybe just a giant button. CTA: Rounded rectangle
Landing Page:
Initially rotate landing page evenly with direct linking. Landing page will be very simple; minimal file size and maximum device compatibility.
-Headline: Reinforce benefit offered by angle. Subheading should encourage visitor to proceed.
-Next Section: Offer some kind of information about how the app will provide the benefit. Maybe just explain what the app is. Have a bullet list with 3 points to support this.
-Images: Include a small icon of the app to the right of the 3 point list. Run all images through smush it and convert to base64 to embed directly in HTML.
-CTA: A big round button, above the fold.
-Remainder of page: A specific call-out to the visitor, perhaps their phone model (get from URL tokens). Continuing below the fold should be increased reinforcement to follow through. Maybe translated user testimonials or a countdown of some kind (social appeal, and urgency). The last thing on the bottom of the page should link to the offer as well.
Here’s a picture of my landing page concept, viewed through a Samsung Galaxy S III on the Android browser, I guess. The file size is under 50 kb. I truly have no idea if this will ever convert or not but its what I’ve got!
Campaign Setup and Management
4 campaigns will be created, following the usual guidelines of app/site wifi and mobile combinations. I will let them spend about 15 dollars each, cutting terrible banners and placements along the way, and then see if there is any potential. If it looks like the offer could potentially convert but is doing so at a very low rate, I will try the other angle. If the offer doesn’t convert at all, I will trash that peice of shit and try a different offer. Once I have something worth optimizing, I will attempt to do so <somehow>. That process is yet to be determined, but I am sure that when I get there, there will be sufficient motivation to come up with something.
Next Steps
I have applied for an offer through my network with a very low payout (well below 1 dollar) and decided upon 2 angles. Assuming I get approved to the run offer on Monday, I hope to have my translations completed and start running traffic soon. I will post back mid-week with a progress report!
Sounds like a good plan, I am sure you will do it!
This is a solid plan and write up, zymest!
Looks good! Well done on thinking through what you learned from your first campaign.
One tip - be very careful with "reviews" on your landers. If you're going to use them, use real ones. Fake reviews can get you in serious hot water in most juristictions.
Hah thats a good tip - the thought did cross my mind! I'll probably just test some other kinds of approval and or urgency methods. Having more words on my landing page probably wouldn't help anyway.
First offer for this week was tested, and it was a huge flop! 110k impressions and ONE conversion. Honestly I think having that many impressions and clicks and just 1 single conversion is more surprising than having 0 conversions. I did test the whole banner to conversion funnel myself as well, and it worked (so I guess I got 2 conversions, including my own)...so, I feel pretty confident killing this one. Continuing with this rambling debrief...I learned some important things about traffic sources. Namely, this one worked WAY differently than I was used to! The "Site" campaigns almost immediately blew through their budget, giving me no real time to kill placements. And, in looking at the data, there was only a single placement anyway, so there wouldn't have been anything I could do! The "App" campaigns had much lower traffic. I killed one placement, but then the traffic completely stopped since it was were about 99% of the impressions were coming from. To top it all off, I paid way more CPM than I expected to. It seems like there was no RTB going on or something because my maximum bid just straight up WAS my bid. I don't know...whatever. I have some other ideas for traffic sources...and as much as I hate to be the guy jumping from one to another, I think I am going to have to change it up for my 3rd campaign. Sticking with mobile app installs though, so there's some method to the madness. There's a better than 0 chance that my translations were completely incoherent as well...I was going for "Do you want to UNLEASH you phone?". I don't know how well that crossed over.
Here's the sordid details. Not a lot of actionable data, but at this point I'm still thrilled to be paying for the experience.
Offer: Apus Launcher Android CPI, 0.16 payout
Geography: Colombia
Total Spend: A little over $50
Banners: See if you can match them up to my "plan" I wrote about in the first post! They behaved wildly different on the different platform/connection combinations (as differently as you can possibly imagine, in fact) - as expected. Looking at CTRs, some certainly were better than others, but with no conversion data I really have no idea which ones could be the most profitable. I had a lot of fun making some of them, though.
Landing Page: As planned, I rotated this 50/50 with direct linking. My single conversion came from the landing page, which is kind of nice I suppose. I think it has WAY too many words, and that's something I'm going to be working on.
Data: Here's some data. You all know what a bunch of 0's look like so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. There are some things going on that I haven't made total sense of yet though.
Remember...half the total clicks went to the landing page, so that's where the LP CTR is from. LP CTR for the mobile campaigns looks pretty good huh?
Oh wait...
WTF is going on here? Did somebody go nuts and just keep clicking the button over and over? Curious that something similar happened to both mobile campaigns and skewed the numbers. Not enough data anyway for the mobile campaigns - like I said, I cut the one bad place that was taking over 50% of the total impressions, had spent 3x the payout (way more really), and had 0 conversions...and that was the end of it.
What's Next
I've been working hard to keep the offer pipeline full. It's been tough this week, since my inlaws were here last weekend and my wife is home on her week off between teaching summer classes and going to graduate school. Been some long nights figuring out what the hell I'm doing and trying to keep things rolling. I've got another offer lined up to hopefully start running on Friday if my translations come back in time and I get it in for approval before the weekend. It will be violating one of my initial rules, but I want to try it anyway, if for no other reason than I've got nothing else in the queue. This weekend, I'm going to come up with a couple more landing page templates: One super-minimal "app style" page with maybe a headline and a short sub-headline, and one page with almost no words. I want some contrast for what I think is a very wordy landing page I'm working with now. This may also minimize risk for translation errors. I will focusing on short and concise banner headlines, with a clear meaning and benefit. And I need to figure out how people in other languages say "Mobile phone". Phone? Mobile? I'm guessing "telefono" and "movil" have way different meanings. Another one of life's mysteries....
Your banners look good - a very wide range of stylistic choices in there! Well done. You might want to try a couple of different versions of the CTA (not all rounded buttons) and probably 2-3 different CTAs too, but other than that, nice work.
Lander: yep, definitely try a LOT less words there!
Looking forward to your next update!
Alright my second update this week!
I'm embracing the new strategy of avoiding huge walls of text, both in my posts here and in my landing pages! Also, I've sort of shifted my initial goal of launching 2 new campaigns per week to just launching as many campaigns as I can as quickly as possible. The more I see and hear, it seems like the really profitable campaigns are not borne out of long periods of contemplation, but rather a single moment of absurd inspiration.
I've got a few things rolling right now that I might talk about later. For now...
Apus Launcher Round 2!
After I made the last post up above, I actually had a couple more conversions come through. I don't know how or why this happened since the campaign had been stopped for several hours, but it made me decide to try it again, sort of, in a different geo and with a different angle.
Angle: Make your Android better than an iPhone
Geography: Saudi Arabia
Total Spend: 14.72
Conversions: 1
Revenue: 0.16
I killed this pretty quickly (much quicker than the recommend 15 per wifi/site/app/carrier combo & almost all of the spend was between the 2 wifi camps) for the following reasons:
-With such a low payout, it was pretty obvious this wasn't going to be profitable, at least I think...
-The Arabic language is completely mystifying to me and I think all of my text might be backwards or half backwards
-I am doubtful that my angle and imagery is compatible with the culture (see above)
I was fully aware of the last two points going into this, but I figured I would give it a shot because why the hell not?
Landing Page: The one conversion did come from here. CTR was a dismal sub-10%. The two buttons on the bottom are supposed to say something like "Yes! Download the App!" and "No, I'm too lazy right now". Naturally, both of them link to the offer.
Banners: I decided to put the CTA on the left side of the image, since they read right to left. Was this a good idea or not? Who knows!
CTRs were actually pretty decent, between 1 and 2%. I got many clicks for a fairly low price. That is what I had hoped for in picking the geo, but unfortunately it didn't seem to convert well. Again, the banners performed almost as differently as you could imagine between the different platforms.
^This one did perform consistently the worst, from a CTR standpoint. Probably because its almost impossible to tell what is going on.
For my next campaigns I am including CTAs that look more like download buttons, per caurmen's suggestion. I think maybe this will get people into the mindset of wanting to download something, which they haven't been doing so far. Stay tuned!
Wow I like your testing, wonder what the advertiser would say. nice one.
Nice progress mate.
You are correct - launching persistently will bring results.
Hah, nice image!
Try a different design. It looks like your CTA would be below the fold on that lander, which will often (not always - this is AM - but often) result in a low clickthrough rate.
Originally Posted by caurmen
The next LP I am making will have a more clear CTA though. I think just a giant button that says FREE DOWNLOAD would be better as a base case. When I get some traction I will start testing more unique buttons. Gotta start simple!
Nice follow along, subscribed. I'm doing my first mob campaign with the same offer too.
really great stuff, inspiring infact. I aim to write something up like this, once I get my first campaign set up properly - I did a half asked job at it, but can clearly see from threads like this that the more detail i put in the more I am going to get out.
I haven't update in a while, but have been working on some pretty off-the-wall stuff. I have something I think might have some potential that I am trying to optimize. I'm not terribly optimistic but I have at least learned how to make a variety of different landing pages and optimize them for various devices. I'll post back in a few days when I get some results!
UPDATE
The stuff I posted about most recently did not end up working. What DID end up working was cranking the absurdity up to 11, going super-niche on cheap traffic, and very specifically crafting my ads to the target audience. I can't imagine this campaign will last very long, but its nice to see some positive ROI, and to see my audience actually responding to my advertisements in the way I had hoped.
After several weeks of experimenting and finally seeing some results, I think its time to start taking this seriously. So over the next week, I am going to "go legit", and set up an LLC, business bank accounts and credit cards, etc. If anybody has any suggestions on that, it'd be appreciated. I'm not really sure how to best contain my business - is an LLC the right choice?
Bonus content! Operation: African Terror
Here's some stuff I tried that didn't work. I was fairly amused by my efforts, and I hope you are too! I probably need to enroll in some cultural sensitivity classes now though.
Offer: Armor for Android
Angle: Confusion and/or HORRIFYING FEAR
Geography: Nigeria
Total Spend: 36.7
Conversions: 6
Revenue: 1.20 or so
This was essentially a direct linking campaign to the offer network's landing page. I suspect many of you are familiar with what I'm talking about. From the first round of banners, I got 4 conversions. So, pretty shitty, but there was a particular placement that I thought had promise.
Round 1 Banners: The idea here was to string together some phrases of pidgin english and see what happened.
^ Highest CTR banner, by a slight margin
CTR on these was about 1%. I thought if I could get way cheaper clicks and maybe through some fear into the mix, I might be able to break even. Thus began round 2:
While the round 2 banners did get an astronomically high CTR, the traffic unfortunately did not convert well at all, and there was no money to be made.
Perhaps when the campaign I am doing now fizzles out I will post some details about it too. It is so ridiculous it would be a shame not to share!
I guess I'll start posting some daily stats.
August 30th
Spend: 15.46
Revenue: 34.32
ROI: 122%
General Notes: Starting from the un-optimized campaign, the conversion rate was about 1%, which returned a profit. There were 4 banners that were vastly outperforming the others. After cutting the poor performers, the conversion rate increased to closer to 2%. Unfortunately, the CPM has also increased since I started, so my current ROI is about the same.
Next Steps:
- Make a shitload more banners: Done, some totally new ones and many variations on existing good ones
- Collect data to further optimize banners: In progress
- Optimize landing page: Coming soon!
With most CPI offers the conversions happens when the user opens the app, not when he installs it. Thats why you had late conversions, while the traffic had already stopped.
Yesterday was a great day!
August 31
Spend: 68.46
Revenue: 125.84
ROI: 84%
Today...not so much!
September 1
Spend: 47.26
Revenue: 29.12
ROI: -38%
General Notes: Yesterday, I tested out an absolute SHITLOAD of banners, found some big winners and big losers, and basically doubled my conversion rate again. My campaign setup was a bit of a clusterfuck, with 4 different campaigns running for the same placement trying out different angles and variations. I set each one up with an enormous maximum daily budget, and slowly increased my bid until I started to get impressions...at which point I got ALL the impressions. I was watching the site as I did this and it went from being none of my banners to 100% my banners when I hit the magic number. The price required to keep getting impressions slowly increased throughout the day and I kept matching it up until the end.
Toward the end, despite continuous campaign improvements, I was barely breaking even. At that point I wanted to test out a few landing page variations, so I ran at a loss for a while (see day 2 stats). I had to bid an absurdly high amount to get any impressions - a full 20 times higher than what I started at. I've paused the ads now and am waiting for the bids to "cool down" a bit. My hypothesis is that since I was bidding on every single placement - with 3 or 4 separate campaigns even - I have been driving the price up myself. I am hoping that the bids will decrease again to the point where I can stabilize my campaign and make a consistent, if small, amount of money. Now that my ads are paused, the site once again seems to be populated by mostly systematically generated filler ads that I cannot believe anybody would ever click. Surely there is not somebody paying the price that I was paying to get those shown. I certainly have much to learn about how this bidding shit works.
If bid prices drop back down, I will try decreasing my maximum daily budget so that I am only bidding on a fraction of the total impressions. If I could get even half of what appears to be totally unused banner space right now at a reasonable price I could make a satisfying amount of money for my simple newbie desires. Conversation rates have remained remarkably consistent for my optimized creatives. The primary factor now on ROI is the bid price.
This pause is fairly well timed anyway, since I need to switch campaign links (no more free custom tracking domains starting tomorrow on
Next Steps:
- Finish filling out paperwork to register company LLC, get a TID# and a business bank account
- Create "greatest hits" campaign to store best banners and manage bids in 1 place for this geo, with new
Voluum link - Figure out how to direct to a specific LP in Voluum based on the creative ID
- Make a few more LPs - Still plenty of room for optimization!
Zymest, thank you very much. Great thread. I have a couple of questions -
1. "the site once again seems to be populated by mostly systematically generated filler ads that I cannot believe anybody would ever click." What is the best way to see where your ads are being displayed. I already experimented with HMA, android emulator and add ons for chrome and firefox. I just can't get to see any ads, let along my ads. In my example I switched HMA to Russia, launched the emulator with some free games , tried running a few sites in the google app and no luck. Any help or a reference link would be appreciated.
2. You mention that you're using
thank you!
Hi pk63606, thanks for reading my thread!
1. To see ads, I simply have HMA on my smartphone and load up whatever app/site I am interested in and keep hitting refresh, or doing whatever action is required to make a new advertisement show up. You are likely using decisive, and so it is generally quite easy to see which sites your ads are being shown. For example, I bet if you set your HMA to Sao Paulo and went to tubidity.mobi you would see banner after banner running some kind of anti-virus angle.
2. I started using
Anyway...second update for today!
My angle is good for this demographic, I mean really good. Any new banner that I make with a significant twist on the existing ones goes fucking bonkers when I start feeding it impressions. My "greatest hits" campaign got approved, and I let it run wild for a while. Even on fairly expensive traffic, it got me a decent ROI and made me start to feel much better about the day as a whole. I really can't just keep buying out this entire placement though - it's very obvious that my banners are getting rapidly burnt out when I am getting 100% of the impressions. I did incorporate a few new banners into the greatest hits campaign, and one of them converted like nothing I have ever seen before, while some of the banners that did well yesterday are now struggling. For now, I've tempered my expectations for this particular placement and geography. It's probably more like a 20 dollar a day campaign, really. I've set my bids back to where I think they ought to be, and am limiting my maximum daily budget from here on out to try to prevent banner blindness. I can't keep making 20 new banners a day!
I'm going to make some variations on the really high performing new banner and try to mix them in. Also definitely working on setting this loose in different geos, I think the angle has some serious potential.
September 1 - Final Stats
Spend: 66.52
Revenue: 61.36
ROI: -8%
Hi again! It's been a while and that's because I have been very busy, both with my day job, and with affiliate marketing. I have successfully set up my business and am now operating under that, which feels kind of neat. As far as my campaigns...
I had naively thought that bid prices may come down to closer to where they were when I started - they did not. I continued to optimize my campaign though, and am now turning a solid profit even in this midst of fierce competition. I can only hope they are losing their asses with their shitty creatives bidding against mine! Today I was able to extend my campaign over to 2 new geographies, and initial results look very promising. I am rapidly closing in on +ROI over this whole AM experiment (including many many failed campaigns initially) and am looking forward to moving far beyond that.
This will likely conclude my newbie follow along. My goals have been achieved, and I thank those who have given me advice along the way. Certainly, membership to this forum has paid off tremendously and I hope to be able to start contributing to the success of others in a meaningful way now, rather than just taking advice. There are few things in life more satisfying than helping others succeed, in my opinion! The most valuable thing I have learned as part of this is to just try everything you can think of - especially the stupid stuff you don't think has any chance of working. You will likely find initial success when and where you least expect it!
Thanks for writing up this topic, zymest! It's a great read, educative and amazing for motivation as well! Haha the enthusiasm and energy you send out in some of the posts in this topic is just great!
The best of luck to you in achieving your goals further!
Congratulations, and good luck expanding and extending things in the future!
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