Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns

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Get Money, Get Paid: A Mobile Journey (20)

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Ok so here's my story. I'm 24. I have a strenuous day job that I have mixed feelings about sticking with. I'd like to build up an online income while still employed so that I can feel comfortable about getting out. So far I've tried countless online ventures. I've dabbled in affiliate marketing (poorly), I've built ecommerce sites (poorly), and built SEO/niche sites that all flopped. But I have learned a lot, so I guess I've got that going for me.

So anyways after my last ecommerce and SEO venture failed miserably, I resubscribed to STM and I've been studying for a few months. In that time I ran some really terrible campaigns. I mean really bad. I also attempted "thedudeabides" arbitrage strategy but could not optimize past -25% ROI.

So from all that I learned the basics, but most importantly I figured out that I can't be lazy. All the previous campaign I just threw up complete garbage and expected it to work. I'm working to change that.

Financially I can't continue to throw money away. This follow along will hopefully keep me on the right track. If this fails then I won't be in a financial position to continue with my online ventures for a long time. So let's get to it.

I chose a grocery voucher offer. These seem to be popular and run in many countries. I figure if I can figure it out in one country I should be able to scale to other traffic sources and then other countries.

To start out I made a basic landing page. This landing page tells the viewer that they won, and if they just answer a few questions then they will receive their grocery voucher. They answer a few simple questions and then they are taken to the offer. I had all of this translated by One Hour Translation.

I had a few dollars left over on some zero click / pop traffic sources, I decided to validate my landing page by running the traffic straight to the lander.

Here are the results:





Ok, so obviously there are some good and bad things going on here.

Good: I have three conversions and a 10% conversion rate. Only 29 visits so not exactly statistically significant, but I am glad there are some conversions.

Bad: My tracking is wrong. First of all the costs are wrong, I input a manual CPC number and in reality I didn't pay that much. So overall I am actually positive ROI, but just barely. More important is the fact the conversions are not being passed to Voluum. And the tokens for the traffic source aren't right, so I cant see which site IDs are sending the traffic, or which ones are converting etc. So basically its impossible to optimize. Big problem. Everything has been paused while I try to figure out where I went wrong.

I'd appreciate any feedback. Let me know what information I need to provide and I will post it. Not to worried out revealing to much information at this point. I would rather get quality feedback.

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A few other notes:

Here are the results for the website speed test for my lander.




The lander is hosted on Rackspace. It isn't loading super fast, but seems to be decent enough.


Here is the offer link I input into the traffic sources:

http://xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&s1={campaign.id}&s2={clicki d}&s3={var10}&s4={var1}&s5={var2}

Then in the Traffic Source tab in Voluum I input the tokens specific to the traffic source under {var1} etc.

Anyone weigh in on what I am doing wrong?

Fixing the tracking is priority, and I am still waiting on the funds for one ad network to be accepted. Hopefully tomorrow I will be ready to run some banners.

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For a 63 KB lander that load speed is really slow.

When you say Rackspace, do you mean the CDN (so an HTML-only page) or on a Cloud Server?

As for your offer link, you are using Voluum tokens - but your traffic source is not Voluum, right?

At the traffic source, you need to use to use the tokens that the traffic source provides. These are the only things the traffic source understands.

In Voluum, under traffic sources, you put in placeholders that correspond to these traffic source tokens, so that in the generated campaign URL, you have tokens that the traffic source comprehends.

Note the bold stressing that specific platforms have their own tokens, and you should not mix them up - because they won't work by magic.



However, in the offers section in Voluum, you can use Voluum's tokens like {var1}, {clickid}, etc. to pass information from Voluum to the affiliate network link.

Depending on how you have configured the traffic source in Voluum, the {var1}, {var2}, etc will contain custom information (strings of text) that you passed to Voluum from the traffic source as part of the ad link.



Make sure you fix this, then test the hell out of it.

You can't really test dynamic tokens without deploying the live campaign as the traffic source will replace these in live ads.

However, you can load your Voluum link in your browser and manually put different values in the URL, e.g. &c1=derp&c2=something, etc. and then check that they a) appear in Voluum's stats, and b) get passed as subids to your affiliate network as you have configured.

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Thanks for this input. Should get me on the right track.

As far as Rackspace. I create a container and select a static HTML only page and upload files. I imagine this probably isn't as fast but it's very cheap. Is this why my lander is loading slow?

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Hmm - that's on their CDN? That should be pretty fast. Can you show the Pingdom waterflow view so that we can narrow down what might be going wrong?

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Here's more detailed speed test results:



Also, I'm pretty sure I figured out my tracking problem. My tokens were setup correctly but I just gave the traffic sources links that weren't updated with the tokens.

Question: In Voluum under the Traffic Source tab where you input tokens etc. do you need to have a postback URL in order to see conversions in Voluum? In the picture I circled in red places where I didn't know what to input.



Still waiting on campaigns to be approved and funds to be accepted.

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that image.jpg is way too big and you should swap out jquery for zepto (find a programming friend to help with that)
that will cut atleast 30kb from the size of your lander.

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Thanks for the suggestions, I'll look into making the image smaller.

Today's Results





So my tracking is passing on the device/webiste id/os etc. So that's good. But its still not passing conversions. So I cant actually tell which websites to exclude in order to optimize. Also the costs are completely wrong. I don't know how I fucked that up but I didn't spend nearly as much as you see in the screen shot. Look below for actual spend.

Traffic Source 1 Spend: $13.65
Traffic Source 2 Spend: $4.48

Total Spend: $18.13

Revenue: $9.98
Profit: -$8.15
ROI: -55%

So yeah. Need to fix tracking. I'll keep troubleshooting. I strongly suspect that the traffic source that only spent $4 is responsible for the 3 conversions. Still waiting on other traffic source to approve funds.

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What URL are you using in that Pingdom test?

It looks to be redirecting first. The redirect time is much slower than I would expect from Voluum if you are using the campaign link.

For your cost data you will need to manually set a CPC in the campaign settings (i.e. use an average for that campaign/traffic source) or just ignore it all together.

As long as you are passing [WEBSITEID] you should be able to compare Voluum data to your traffic source for specific placements to get an idea of overall cost vs revenue.

Conversion tracking happens further down the track.

You will need to pass Voluum's click ID with the {clickid} token in your offer link - as some subid, e.g. s3={clickid}.

In your affiliate network you then need to pass back the corresponding value to Voluum by setting a postback URL up to e.g.

hxxp://abcde.trackvoluum.com/postback?cid=##s3##&payout=##payout##

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I just used the actual domain name that I register and have the website content on. Apparently I fucked it up somewhere along the line. I think I have an idea on how to fix it.


Yeah I did this but I input the max bid, not the average of what I am actually paying per click/view. All I can tell is what I am paying per 1000 views not per click. But its fine I'll just calculate it manually.



I did these things but must have made a mistake somewhere. I'll just redo the whole process.

Thanks!

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Update:

Popads: I am geting close to a breakeven ROI without optimizing. I've spent $40 and generated $33 in revenue. But I am still am doing something wrong to not pass conversion data so I can't optimize.

This is how my traffic source is set up for Popads in Voluum. I assume the problem is my lack of postback URL? Sent some emails out to figure out what should be in there.



Offer URL:

http://f5mtrack.com/?a=xxxxxxxxxxx&s1={campaign.id}&s2={clickid}&s3={v ar10}&s4={var1}&s5={var2}

Campaign URL (input to traffic source):

http://xxxxxxxxx.trackvoluum.com/xxx...xxx?websiteid=[WEBSITEID]&keyword=[KEYWORD]&categoryid=[CATEGORYID]&country=[COUNTRY]&categoryid=[CATEGORYID]

Landing Page URL (where the button that says "Click Here" takes the user):

http://f5mtrack.com/?a=xxxxxxxxxxx&s1={campaign.id}&s2={clickid}&s3={v ar10}&s4={var1}&s5={var2}

Not sure if this is correct. Maybe this needs to be different?

Postback URL (inserted into F5):

http://hwxxe.trackvoluum.com/postbac...payout=#price#


Can anyone offer advice of what I am doing wrong with the tracking?



Mobfox


No conversions. So I can't tell if conversions are tracking properly yet. I have some good ads (I think) that are 300x250. This size doesn't get a lot of traffic on Mobfox. But what little traffic they do get has a good CTR, but with only 800 impressions per creative and 8 clicks per I can't tell much. I made some crappy 320x50 creatives that sucked up most of the spend and didn't convert. These 320x50's didn't really fit the angle my other creatives and landing page are geared for so this may be the problem.



This is an example of the angle I am using. Answer a question and get rewarded with a prize. I think I need to make some 320x50 versions of this type of angle.


Your input and advice is appreciated.

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The URL you use on landing pages to send users outward should be:

hxxp://abcde.trackvoluum.com/click

You can find this in the options/setup part of Voluum.

This is universal, every landing page, use it.

If you send people to F5 Media directly on your lander... how does Voluum know that they have clicked out? How would it rotate offers? You need to send users back to Voluum for that.

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Thanks. Makes sense.

EDIT: Your post fixed conversion tracking. Now to collect some data.

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Since you are running grocery offers try and test creatives that simple say "Free $100 Grocery" voucher, or exactly what you are promoting. I've had success in the past doing that.

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I think that redirect shows up because of entering the domain into pingdom as www.domain.com instead of www.domain.com/

It automatically forwards to www.domain.com/ . Try it with the "/" and that first redirect should be gone.

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Pretty sure I fixed the landing page speed problem.



Today's Results:

(Pop Traffic)
Costs: 15.93
Revenue: 22.82
Profit: 6.89
ROI: 44%

Cool. Saw profit today. Also, I definitely refreshed Voluum about 100 times today to see if I made more conversions.

Next Steps: I could make another lander and split test it. I have an idea for one but it will take me some time to make it. My current lander asks about 4 easy questions. I could try cutting this down to one to see if that improves conversion rate. Any thoughts?

Optimizing: I don't know if I have enough data to start cutting placements/site IDs... should I make a whitelist campaign that only runs sites that have generated conversions, and blacklist those from the original campaign?

Banner Ads:

I created some more banners as suggested above on a different traffic source. Waiting for those to be approved.


Also, according to F5, 6 people today got redirected to the "credit redirect." I assume these are people who didn't belong to the target GEO. My guess is that I should redirect these people to something other than the credit redirect. Not sure how the best way to go about this. How could I redirect them to a voucher offer of the correct GEO?

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You should read this - http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...lling-Your-CTR

Implement that if possible to see where people fall off your questions list.

Regarding the whitelist campaign, I would do this - but only for placements that have generated at least 2-3 conversions profitably. If you do it for 1 only... you are really jumping the gun your whitelist campaign's performance would be all over the place.

Definitely split test your current lander with another.

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Nice! Speed up landers, see profit.

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Update:

Voluum stats:


Pop Ups:


Decisive:


Total Cost: 23.11
Total Revenue: 13.08
Profit: -10.03

Broke even (close) on pops. Decisive failed to generate any conversions. I haven't spent very much so I guess I'll continue to test and see what happens.

I started a whitelist campaign, but it only has one siteid so far so it hasn't got much traffic.

I am working on a new landing page to split test and working on implementing the suggestions that Zeno gave about figuring out where the clicks are falling off.

Hmmm so yeah, no drastic changes to make, just more testing and building another lander to test.

Thoughts?

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Slowly optimise the pop campaign and work on that lander test.

Your to-do list is clear :-)

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