Working the Arbitrage. Only because I suck with banners. (73)

So I've been using thedudeabides' arbitrage strategy for the last two weeks, and here are some overall stats:

Spend: 2,225.90
Revenue: 1,510.50

ROI: -32.14%

Last week, my ROI was -60%, so I know I'm working in the right direction.

I've had one country that made up over 1/3rd of my revenue, and have been running since day one. I'm at the point where I'm focusing half my budget on that campaign in an effort to turn that one to consistent profits. The remaining half spent on testing other countries and GEOs to help reduce my exposure to the advertiser of that country totally screwing me over.

So in my supercountry, I'm down to the point where I'm week-parting (is that even a term?!) in an effort to identify the hours that I'm most likely to turn a profit. Pruning the individual source IDs seems to help a little bit, but I suspect the hour, and more importantly the hour of the week that I'm paying for traffic plays a stronger role in getting a conversion as opposed to simply the source ID.

I have 6 GEOs with conversions and ROI greater than -40%. Looking to maximize each and every one of them from this one traffic source.

I'm also communicating with other traffic sources and trying to ensure that they will be compatible with YTZ's monetization methods.

There is also a lively discussion on the $1k/day rev thread started by thedudeabides between myself and YTZ in testing the offer load times. If it turns out there is a discrepancy, that will especially help identify hours that are losers, and further allow me to manually prune them on top of my semi-automated sourceID pruning.

I've already reached $150/day rev, and once my country is stable, there is no reason why I can't ramp up to $1,000/day rev for that one country within the next two weeks, if only to beat thedudeabides in spend-required-to-reach-1000-a-day-revenue. The current target is to spend less than $12k to get to $1,000/day.

So another day has come and gone, and here are my stats.

Spend: 52.48
Revenue: 46.79
ROI: -10.84%

I now have 5 profitable campaigns, and am slowly ramping each of them up. Don't want another scare similar to what happened with the main supercountry advertiser on YTZ.

Week-parting seems to be helping a lot, and pruning faster definitely helps spread the traffic around as many different domains as possible.

August 19 is about to come to a close and I have a full day of profit!

Spend: $43.73
Revenue: $60.16
ROI: 37.55%

There are four profitable campaigns on the day. A fifth one is at -5% ROI, so I'm sure it's just a matter of removing certain hours from that campaign to bring it back to the land of profit.

I started testing two new traffic sources, but they have so many rules! (No pops, no sound, etc) And they are painfully slow to respond to emails / tickets. I'm just hoping their traffic is worth all the hassle.

I have also increased the bids on my successful campaigns to 80% of the EPV, and increased my daily budget accordingly. I still have my pruning tools in place and now a VA backing up the pruning tools. This is gonna get better--provided conversions and uptime are still good.

Spend: 2,329.00
Revenue: 1,843.00

ROI: -20.87%

Today was not the best day. Overall -48%. I agree with you here. I was wondering if you were receiving a click discrepancy with YTZ and your traffic source? I'm finding all my potential profits in these discrepancies. Thanks.

There are definitely click discrepancies. I'm writing some code to publish the load time(s) over time to see if there is any variation.

Hmm I see. I emailed Kate, they suggested it had to do with unique clicks, but I've had an average of +30% over that last week. Do you plan on working with this method longterm?

Just long enough to have good cashflow, and until I can afford to test campaigns that work well with landing pages. I'll probably end up using profits to write a WSO

Testosterone is right, I need to find a unicorn if I'm to become exceptionally wealthy. Problem IMO with being a 100% full time affiliate is I'm at the mercy of advertisers.

So, I figured I'll imitate ViperChill's Local SEO model and grow that side of my investments.

So I know others are looking at this thread. I have a question for you all,

When scaling up, I know raising the daily budget is the first step, but what happens when the traffic spend doesn't reach the daily budget? For me the logical answer is to raise the bid. But in doing so, I seem to get lower quality traffic.

Is this just a case of raise bid, optimize, raise bid, optimize, raise bid?

August 20

Spend: $78.62
Revenue: $90.82
ROI: 15.52%

Overall:

Spend: $2433.90
Revenue: $1735.10
ROI: -28.71%

I guess some of my anxiety over a campaign underperforming is unwarranted. Almost half my conversions came during one hour from one traffic source. Still have a scaling issue. Will likely have to break out bidding by hour and bid separate amounts based on the conversion I'm experiencing.

I'm also well on my way to a free iPad mini. Demi-affiliate swag FTW.

Looking like you're making good progress!

August 21:

Spend: $96.69
Revenue: $100.71
ROI: 4.15%

So raising the bid, and pruning didn't really help me here. I ended up taking off a couple more hours from the week and will just sit around pruning some more. I ended up dropping one of the traffic networks largely because they are just not good for tracking and identifying which individual sources on their network are worth perusing.

Now that Voluum is going paid, I'm looking for higher ROI activities to do on top of my arbitrage traffic.

I'm also on the search for cheaper ppv traffic out there that is worth purchasing. I've just about completely sworn off PTC traffic largely due to its unreliability. Traffic exchange traffic is looking pretty enticing, I'm just not sure how traffic exchanges are able to generate moderately higher quality traffic.

Edit:

So I guess some postbacks took their time to fire. I'm net profit on the day after seeing those new postbacks settle.

August 22:

Spend: $75.49
Revenue: $83.35
ROI: 10.41%

Scaling these things up is harder than it seems, or maybe I'm doing it wrong. Any suggestions?

No immediate suggestions, but I'm finding the follow-along very interesting! Keep it up!

Hmm - actually...

1) I don't know this particular monetisation source, but is there any way you can ask for a bump in order to help you with scaling? Always worth asking!
2) I'd prioritise looking for untapped traffic sources. If I understand the model correctly, a traffic source others haven't found will be your biggest advantage in this approach.

I reread thedudeabides thread again, and found a couple more nuggets.

By the time he was doing $1000/day revenue, he was spending $700/day--including testing budget.

He also was pushing xxx,xxx hits/day to YTZ.

So, 100,000 hits in $700 is 0.007/hit, or the maximum I should be spending--on average--for my traffic.

Turns out I'm spending way more than that for traffic, so I'm off to find obscure networks.

August 23:

Spend: $85.50
Revenue: $81.97
ROI: -4.13%

I got an amazing number of high revenue conversions, and during the day, I raised the bids of some campaigns in the hopes of getting more of those conversions. Nope, didn't work. The conversion rate after the bid-raise stayed the same, so I lowered the bid on that high rev offer country back to the previous levels.

I'm also re-expanding back to other traffic networks. I first tried PTC networks, and while I did get some conversions, it ultimately wasn't enough to cover the cost of traffic. Now I've found a couple more non-PTC networks and am hunting for places selling traffic from the countries I want for less than 0.007/hit.

The ROI is small enough and it's potentially possible that any delayed postbacks will put me in the green. Time will tell.

I've been reaching out and emailing a bunch of traffic networks lately. I have a handful of countries that I know convert fairly well, and it should simplify my testing at least in finding alternate ways to scale my traffic source.

It's getting to the point now where I'm looking into buying adult traffic from fairly low traffic volume sources (think 50k views/day). The good news is this traffic is very cheap. (0.10 / 1000 hits). As for the quality, I've seen this type of traffic on other porn websites while I was conducting my research. If someone else is willing to pay for that traffic, then I guess there is money to be made. I'll know more in the next 2-3 days or so.

What I find fairly interesting about internet marketing is how relatively slow the market moves. It takes maybe 2-3 days to get set up on some traffic networks, and another day to get a campaign approved. I currently work at a french bank, and even with their reputation for being lax, things still move considerably faster.

August 24:

Revenue: $77.41
Spend: $102.38
ROI: -24.39%

Not a good day by anyone's imagination. Even my supercountry is -7% ROI. I'm still week-parting for the campaigns where I'm at least showing some positive ROI on an hour-by-hour basis.

I'm hoping the other networks I'm working on getting cheap traffic from will come through.

So, how have you approached finding obscure networks?

No need to out them, obviously, but some insight into your approach to this would fit right in to this thread :-)

In terms of finding obscure networks, there are plenty of directories. Hard part is going through all the networks on their lists.

There are also some newer traffic types that I haven't really heard of, but I've definitely experienced. Example would be exit traffic. You know how some websites--particularly warez--send you to a different page when you click back? That seems to be profitable enough to give a try.

August 25:

Spend: $53.28
Revenue: $63.08
ROI: 18.40%

I'm more or less coasting on my original two traffic sources. Waiting for the approvals on the new networks sucks.

August 26:

Spend: $33.36
Revenue: $49.20
ROI: 47.48%

Today kinda sucks because none of my campaigns hit their daily budget. So the bids are definitely low. The problem is that raising the bids does not increase the conversion rate, so it looks like I'm stuck at that level with the traffic source. Gonna have to test more.

Overall, I'm about $250 away from the $2500 free ipad mini level--my second free affiliate swag. (The first was a chromebook)

August 27

Spend: $66.46
Revenue: $42.01
ROI: -36.79%

So this loss is my fault. I let a bad traffic source run longer than I should have. Just need ~$150 more in revenue to YTZ to qualify for the free ipad mini.

I'm finding that there is a lot of difficulty scaling up my optimized campaigns. Is this a normal phenomenon? I raise my daily budgets higher, but it seems that the traffic--at the price I'm willing to pay--is simply not there. I've raised the bids to the 20% ROI point, and that's where some of my profitable campaigns are sitting.

If the level of targeting isn't fully scalable, then it seems I'll be spending more of my time and money just looking for more sources of traffic to buy traffic from. There are plenty of obscure, shady traffic sources out there. I'm just keeping a strict eye out for bots.

I'm also finding that my better days happen when I get a $17+ conversion. I guess that means I'll be on the hunt for more of those. Problem is the cost of getting more conversions is moderately higher

August 28

Spend: $62.28
Revenue: $43.85
ROI: -29.60%

I had a pleasant surprise from one of my new traffic sources. But otherwise, same-old.

free traffic? lol

Nah, cut and switch.

are you finding success with pop-ups mostly? or pop-unders?

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: Yes, really.

The categories are especially useful for targeting.

is YTZ giving you the goods as you hit certain rev amounts?? I don't see anything on their website that show's what you can win at each level? Or do they just send it to you as they please?

January 7

Spend: $31.55
Revenue: $73.52
ROI: 133.038%

I started up a weight loss campaign focusing on new years resolutions and wow did that sucker convert. Let's hope these people don't have buyers remorse.

I also got a couple sales from a TID that I couldn't find in Voluum. I suspect my landing page was copied somewhere and the defensive code kicked in.

Decent stats lately!

So are working your own offers and not doing arbitrage with YTZ anymore?

I'm transitioning to my own offers, as well as more traditional ppv marketing.

Arbitrage takes up the most cost while the ppv campaigns have more of the profit.

I'm trying to scale up but getting my lp ctr up has been trying.

just wanted to say that i've been a big fan of this follow along.

great numbers.

January 8:

Spend: $29.92
Revenue: $22.51
ROI: -24.790%

No additional conversions outside what I usually get. Trying to find another amazon penny auction conversion.

January 9

Spend: $13.00
Revenue: $9.98
ROI: -23.223%

I spent most of today working on my funnel. I got a clickfunnels account and am working out the sales copy and pages. It's a lot easier than trying to hard code all of those functions by hand.

January 10:

Spend: $16.17
Revenue: $10.07
ROI: -37.749%

Some new placements and completely different campaigns are rocketing toward profitability. Time to manually investigate.

January 11:

Spend: $27.91
Revenue: $19.67
ROI: -29.536%

Interestingly, one of the low bid RON campaigns got a lot of conversions. Time to break them off into individual campaigns.

January 12:

Spend: $22.62
Revenue: $40.62
ROI: 79.576%

Finally got an autoresponder, and stripe hooked up into my sales funnel. Need to do one last run-through and then re-open the gates from Facebook.

thank you thedudeabides and jennatalia for this method. I am following this thread and decided to follow along with my own traffic and accounts.

I am using 50onred and dntx as source. PPV and Direct Nav. I find that in the last 7 days redirect.com gives me better conversion compared to ytz. please take a look at the stats below



I am going to test for another week, if still same stats then going to drop YTZ

Depends on the country @faridkhan. Redirect.com doesn't seem to work well for Africa.

January 13

Spend: $23.65
Revenue: $78.44
ROI: 231.611%

I found a couple landing pages thanks to a mastermind member's google search strings, and I'm applying some of them in my own funnels. Copying does work--and I'm ashamed to admit it.

January 14:

Spend: $19.34
Revenue: $24.33
ROI: 25.789%

January 15:

Spend: $21.50
Revenue: $10.81
ROI: -49.740%

Incidentally, I have a clickbank link that I have no idea how it's giving me traffic, that gave me a $109 conversion today.

January 16:

Spend: $15.02
Revenue: $25.09
ROI: 67.021%

I've been taking successful campaigns, and am splintering them off into segments based on their placements. Each placement has a bot monitoring the performance, and adjusting the bid accordingly.

I'm also in the process of applying to Yeahmobi. Is this a good network to start working with mobile offers? Or should I focus my effort elsewhere? I'd like to stick with one 'generic' mobile CPA network so any earnings I generate hit the payout limit sooner and I can quickly reinvest the money.

The biggest thing I like about yeahmobi is their weekly payout ($50 minimum).

I'm beginning to realize that mobile is likely an ideal place for me to start largely because the offer payouts are low--reducing testing costs--and a number of more recent success stories draw their success from the mobile space. It used to be facebook and ppv. Time I try to get to the edge of the curve.

I realize this will require that I develop banners / landers. And I might as well face this weakness of mine sooner rather than later.

January 17:

Spend: $12.75
Revenue: $22.42
ROI: 75.739%

Pretty idle today while waiting for the results of my yeahmobi application. Is there anyone here on STM that can vouch for me?

January 17:

Spend: $12.75
Revenue: $22.42
ROI: 75.739%

More of the same really. I got a bunch of sales over the weekend on clickbank that I still can't track--so likely from something I worked on a very long time ago.

January 18:

Spend: $22.17
Revenue: $40.13
ROI: 81.053%

More splintering off and I had to rewrite one of the autobid bots. A competitor I guess figured out the bidding and found a weakness. Closed that hole up good and tight.

January 19:

Spend: $14.67
Revenue: $12.41
ROI: -15.447%

More of the same. I am however rewriting a bot that will pause offers that hit a cap. I forgot to take into account multiple pages worth of offers.

January 20:

Spend: $14.81
Revenue: $53.48
ROI: 261.045%

A couple more big conversions. Need more of those.

January 21:

Spend: $14.35
Revenue: $17.05
ROI: 18.830%

One of my staple campaigns seems to be having a dry spell. No conversions happening. The bots correctly stopped targets that spent too much money. Interesting seeing what happened.

I'm also currently working on some software that will pay attention to the landing pages for all offers, and all countries where an offer received traffic in the last 30 days. I'll likely be tracking two things:

1) The url of the final landing page of the offer.
2) A MD5 hash of the final landing page. I'm hoping there aren't too many dynamic elements on the page that change on a regular basis.

The software will use the offer links in Voluum, as well as pretend to be from each country that is associated with the offer, or where traffic otherwise went to the offer.

I really think you're putting the cart before the horse and over complicating things to the nth degree with all this automation and software stuff. Others have already made the arbitrage method work without any special tools, and a few have reached that 1k/day mark with it or something like it.

If it was a 10k/day campaign or even a 1k/day campaign with a lot of variables there would be grounds to make a case for it, but if your goal is to build all these tools now so when those day comes you'll be ready to automate things, I think you're making a critical mistake. Maybe you're good or even great at that type of thing, but its only going to hold you back right now if you goal is to start making good money this year as an affiliate.

Focus on growing daily revenue and less on cutting costs. You really need to get your spend/day up and expose yourself to more opportunities. Perhaps you should try out a spy tool like similarweb for free, take the urls of those offers being recommend by your AM and see where and how people are running them. Ideally something under $5 cpa to start.

@thedudeabides,

I'm guessing that once I have the websites from similarweb that are linking to the offer, I buy my own set of placements from that website pointing to the offer?

After mulling over what thedudeabides told me, I went back into my CPA network, and looked for the offers in my 6 year history with them where I had significant conversions.

I found an offer that I heavily promoted back in 2011 where I was bumped from $1.20/lead to $2.00/lead. I figure I have a strong advantage there, so I'll keep pushing.

A peek at similarweb and other like analytics tools showed that stay-at-home moms seem to be the new black for this kind of offer.

While setting up a campaign to target this original offer, I came across some keywords that had no competition, decent volume, and should in theory work very well for another genre of offer that Maxbounty offers. It should also be a perfect application of a rules lander, but in a completely different vertical. I'm gonna run a direct link initially to get the campaign up and running followed by my variation on the rules landing page.

Any critiques on this rules lander for jobs?

http://bot.huskysteals.com/Jobs/Job.htm

The questions will likely need some work.

Originally Posted by jennatalia

Any critiques on this rules lander for jobs?

http://bot.huskysteals.com/Jobs/Job.htm

The questions will likely need some work.

I ripped someone else's lander and edited the text and images.

Its a bit dark and scary for a job site imo.. but might work!..

Clean seems to be what works for the big guns.. so..

Once I figure out the color scheme in CSS, I'll make a white version.

Test some headlines too.. "This is not a traditional job site.." might not appeal to someone who is broke, who would do any old job, answering a phone or whatever..

Originally Posted by avn_0903

Just curious, how did you make a pop up like the one on your landing page to show?

<div id="popup-wrapper" style="display: block;">
  <div id="popup">
    <img src="./warning.png" alt="intro image" id="intro-image">
    <p id="intro">
      <span style="color:#FB8A0B">
        WARNING!            
      </span>
      <br>
      Most Jobs are unlisted. Do Not Share This Page.        
    </p>
    <img src="./ok-button.png" style="cursor: pointer;">
  </div>
</div>

#popup-wrapper {
  position: fixed;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  z-index: 1001;
  background-color: rgba(0,0,0, .7 ) 
}
#popup {
  width: 300px;
  background-color: black;
  border-radius: 10px;
  -moz-border-radius: 10px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
  position: relative;
  top: 40%;
  left: 50%;
  text-align: center;
  margin: -210px 0 0 -150px;
  padding: 10px;
  border: 1px solid #313131;
  -webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px 0px rgba(255,255,255,1);
  -moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px 0px rgba(255,255,255,1);
  box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px 0px rgba(255,255,255,1);
}

$(document).ready(function() {
  $('img:eq(1)').on('click', function() {
    $('#popup-wrapper').hide()
  }
)

Privacy settings were borked. It should be working now.

Originally Posted by jennatalia

For those of you who met me in person, I had a small camera on my shirt.

January 1

Spend: $291.43
Revenue: $308.64
ROI: 5.904%

The good news is that I'm back to increasing spend on a campaign. The bad news is the conversions and resulting revenue do not linearly follow. It's possible I'm using the wrong metrics to drive my decision making which is why I'm using some of my 2015 profits to hire a couple statisticians and a post-doctoral research fellow in machine learning to create their own algorithms in parallel and beat my current one. This current algorithm gives me a consistent and repeatable advantage over human media buying equivalents. The biggest problem is I feel I have hit a plateau. I had a chat with a mentor I had back during my hedge fund days, and she basically told me that the algorithm's present goal is to beat humans. Humans are inherently emotional, and through that emotion, irrational.

Originally Posted by cmdeal

This is beyond creepy.

Did you ask the people you were talking to if you could secretly take pictures of them?

If not, in pretty much every country, doing something like this would be considered very rude and showing very bad manners at best. In other countries, this would be illegal and land you with jail time at worst.

I certainly would be pissed off if I found out that someone was secretly recording me without my consent, especially if I was having a private conversation.

January 2:

Spend: $207.24
Revenue: $342.60
ROI: 65.315%

ROI became a little more exciting. Looking for confirmation in tomorrow's run to see if the new metrics I'm following make more sense than what was originally planned.

Do please upload a picture of yourself please before the Berlin AWE, so I can avoid you for miles.
Surely that shouldn't be a problem right , since your consider other people's privacy worthless.

I consider being recorded without my knowledge as an absolute invasion of my privacy.
Same same to me if you do it for your private amusement or for later publication.

Originally Posted by cmdeal

This is beyond creepy.

Did you ask the people you were talking to if you could secretly take pictures of them?

If not, in pretty much every country, doing something like this would be considered very rude and showing very bad manners at best. In other countries, this would be illegal and land you with jail time at worst.

I certainly would be pissed off if I found out that someone was secretly recording me without my consent, especially if I was having a private conversation.

Damn this was the only follow along I read in its entirety on the forum
(I mean your lander one's OK).

I like all the automation leveraging. It's like Wall Street meets popunders or something...I hope you're just
busy traveling for the holidays and/or ASW? Was interested to see if this follow along was heading somewhere
BIG - not kidding.

Dare I say automated trading is in media buying's NEAR future....

Also did you have experience doing this anywhere else if ya don't mind me asking? The sh-t your doing sounds very quant-like;
if you started posting heatmap stats next it wouldnt suprise me all that much.

January 3:

Spend: $252.26
Revenue: $372.54
ROI: 47.680%


January 4:

Spend: $183.84
Revenue: $228.23
ROI: 24.149%


January 5:

Spend: $189.16
Revenue: $292.24
ROI: 54.497%


January 6:

Spend: $218.85
Revenue: $327.05
ROI: 49.442%


January 7:

Spend: $281.34
Revenue: $325.46
ROI: 15.683%


January 8:

Spend: $231.76
Revenue: $388.29
ROI: 67.543%


January 9:

Spend: $214.03
Revenue: $236.70
ROI: 10.595%


January 10:

Spend: $198.38
Revenue: $159.18
ROI: -19.762%


January 11:

Spend: $242.01
Revenue: $297.77
ROI: 23.036%


January 12:

Spend: $171.13
Revenue: $186.95
ROI: 9.245%


Things got interestingly busy with the post-new year commitments (new year, new you and what-not) as well as the run up to ASW.

It's nice to get back up to these levels of spend, although I haven't changed the bidding algorithm in a while. Don't get me wrong, the algorithm is still self-optimizing itself now. But at least the underlying framework is my creation.

What I've noticed are certain placements that convert well regardless of the offer that YTZ may have in rotation at the time. Now I'm beginning to track those changes to see if there is anything useful that can be applied to the other follow-along.

It was great meeting those of you that went to ghost bar, and it was especially gratifying to see familiar faces from AWA. I didn't opt for a ticket this year, and instead booked a myriad of back to back meetings with various traffic sources, advertisers, and other vendors looking for ways I can leverage the technologies I've built to our mutual gain. Overall, I was far more productive here than over in Bangkok and it feels good to be heading back home for a chance at some normalcy again.

The biggest takeaway was the realization that there are plenty of people in this industry who have our mutual best interests at heart. I'm looking forward to building the relationships I have with those people and becoming our own crew of specialists. With any luck, 2016 will significantly impact the old fashioned 'affiliate marketer' and give rise to the 'performance advertiser'.

That's pretty badass journey mate. I read it a week ago.. all pages and I was impressed. I'm starting with Zeropark and hoping to have some success there (coming from 50onred and TV). I tried YTZ too, but their net30 didn't amuse me so I had to pass it. I'm trying to do the same thing with regular CPA offers.

Anyway, good luck with your journey, looks like you are doing real good

Which type of offers are these? Private or General Offers available on Networks? Just finished reading! Refreshing & many tricks to put into action

January 13:

Spend: $192.31
Revenue: $184.70
ROI: -3.958%


January 14:

Spend: $177.12
Revenue: $222.53
ROI: 25.641%


January 15:

Spend: $153.42
Revenue: $234.58
ROI: 52.900%


January 16:

Spend: $132.58
Revenue: $130.76
ROI: -1.371%


January 17:

Spend: $129.44
Revenue: $170.45
ROI: 31.676%


January 18:

Spend: $104.75
Revenue: $118.19
ROI: 12.832%


January 19:

Spend: $124.13
Revenue: $186.66
ROI: 50.377%


With the Super Bowl fast approaching, I've been putting together a number of campaigns and soft-testing them out. I've been soft-hiring the last few weeks trying to grow my team now that my cashflow has become more stable once again and I'm not in a feast-or-famine mode. A lot of people who are familiar with my capabilities showed me some opportunities. It's interesting seeing how those opportunities will mature but I'm sure I'm positioned in a way that I can best benefit from them.

@vpaldi: www.ytz.com

Their focus is more on downloads and sweepstakes. There are a couple more offers in their inventory since I first started with them back in the summer of '14.

My biggest frustration thus far with this whole follow along is when the algorithm finds a publisher / offer combination that works brilliantly on YTZ, the offer is replaced with something else. What I've been looking into lately with my team is finding ways to take educated guesses in lieu of true statistical significance. Quantifying the risk-taking element that most human affiliates are capable of has been exceedingly difficult. That should--in theory--shorten the learning curve for the algorithm in terms of what offers perform well. We've seen this sort of success in other campaigns running on behalf of my client base. There's no reason why it can't happen on this follow-along.

January 20:

Spend: $132.23
Revenue: $110.30
ROI: -16.587%


We were in good profit by noon. As night came, the losses against campaigns that were once profitable started stacking up. One of my statisticians has started looking into the correlation between campaigns. It's possible that we're double-spending our risk in placements that basically mirror each other.

January 21:

Spend: $162.83
Revenue: $153.00
ROI: -6.037%


January 22:

Spend: $116.12
Revenue: $184.86
ROI: 59.196%


January 23:

Spend: $129.21
Revenue: $144.76
ROI: 12.034%


January 24:

Spend: $150.43
Revenue: $124.39
ROI: -17.315%


January 25:

Spend: $172.68
Revenue: $241.94
ROI: 40.108%


ROIs are starting to climb again--which is nice.

I'm also pivoting this follow-along to use the known countries, browsers, os, etc and their associated EPVs to test other traffic networks. The current set of traffic networks that I run have a fairly steady whitelist of placements that respond well to the YTZ campaigns. I've been using those whitelists to give life to the other follow-along and get back to earning what I once was on the affiliate side of my efforts.