Getting my feet wet in mobile (36)
Sup STMers!
Today I am starting my first campaign, so I just wanted to keep y'all updated on how it goes!
So about my campaign.
GEO: Russia
Payout: 0.42-0.55$
Networks: Clickdealer & Yeahmobi
Offer type: UC Browser - Android app
Ad nwtwork: decisive
Tracking:
What I've done:
Came up with 4 angles. Made 3-5 banners for each, as different as possible. Also made 1 lander for each, 2 of which are the same in terms of template. All landers are very basic for now, as I'm just testing.
So I have 4 campaigns - one for each angle, 3-5 banners on each campaign. I split test lander / direct linking 50/50. I've set Decisive to spend 7$ on each campaign per day, and I'll be running them for 48hours without touching anything except if I notice some real red triggers as outlined, if I'm not wrong, Mr. Greens tutorial.
Right now all campaigns, all landers and banners are approved by decisive so i started running them. Winning slightly above 50% of bids, 0.08$ average CPM.
Didn't get anything approved by aff networks, but I felt pretty confident so i started running anyway. Will show em my creatives today.
Right now stats look shitty but it's early Sunday morning in Russia, so let's see how it goes throughout the day.
Banners
A few newb questions:
Will Decisive spend my daily budget evenly throughout the day?
How do I compare path stats in
Landing page (a few are based on some landers floating around here, hope you don't mind guys!)
klik
klik
klik
klik
Nice work! The ads are well-varied - should give you a good test.
There's a few areas you haven't covered - if they don't perform, try:
- Primary colour backgrounds, or "happier" backgrounds. You've got no pure blues, reds, pinks, gold or metallics, or pastel colours here. Everything's quite high-contrast too.
- Different fonts. Try comics fonts, or script even.
- Cartoon images. You've got icons and photos, but no cartoons.
- Borders on coloured backgrounds.
- More whitespace. You're using most of the space on most banners - try a less even composition or more space on the banners.
Hope those suggestions are useful!
Originally Posted by caurmen
But I think there is something wrong with the offer / my tracking setup, or I just failed hard with my first try
As my landing page CTR is almost nonexistent and I have overall CR of 0.0527% ?! (1 conversion, almost 2k clicks)
Also tried disabling landing pages, doing just direct linking, and although I got a few hundred clicks for each campaign on Decisive, my Aff networks only added some 20 clicks each so 40 total..?
What's your guess guys?
Edit: Just got OverPlay VPN to check what's going on with the offers. Too bad I'm not able to connect to Russian servers for about an hour now. Well, Ill just keep waiting
Update
Some time has passed and I feel like I have enough data to mark this campaign as failure. I don't see any particular banner/angle/placement/category heavily under performing or eating up all impressions. Still, I'd love if any experienced marketer could take a quick look. Thanks 
I will wait till i get approved to another web browser offer for Russia, test that one and if nothing improves I think this is a no-go campaign
Angles
Apps (Undefinedare all sites combined)
Sites (Undefined are all apps combined)
Categories
Landing pages. I don't get why are so little clicks going through(P.S. - most of the excising ones are mine, in reality there are only like 4 clicks through the landers)
My fu**ing OverPlay won't connect to Russian servers so I'm unable to see what's going on...
One of two things: either the traffic is crap (bot-like), or the offer is not doing well.
Given your LP CTRs.... I would look closely at the traffic.
In
Originally Posted by zeno
I'm setting up test lander to see which placements are fraud.
Bro it seems Russians do NOT like Browsers lol. i tried them several times for different browsers
and it was very bad. Same banner and Landers that were performing well in other geos just
would't work out for me in Russia may be try other geos, just from my experience though!
Originally Posted by fontavals
I ran the bot test and it seems like 99% Russian traffic coming from Decisive are bots
I'm thinking of running Turkey
Originally Posted by tomsko
I ran the bot test and it seems like 99% Russian traffic coming from Decisive are bots
I'm thinking of running Turkey
Anyway, it's highly likely it's bot traffic. If it is, please do everyone a favour and flick a report to Decisive support. The best way to get rid of fraudulent placements is for users to report them.
Originally Posted by zeno
Aight so I contacted Decisive support, showed em screenshots of stats. Hopefully I'll get my few dozen $$ back too lol! They wont hurt wouldn't they?!
Here are the placement stats for you too guys! Anyone or anything that's not clicking through is probably a bot or Russian without Javascript
Gameplan
I'm working on one abit sneaky campaign right now just because I saw ton of this being done after spying on competition. In mean time, I'm working on TR campaign for Dolphin browser too.
Some thoughts
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be easier for a newb to work in small GEOs or laser targeted demos? i mean, no big guy even bothers small demo, so the competition is 100 times lower. Of course money made is probably in the 2 figure range, but still, it could be easily made profitable and then possibly scaled to larger audience?
Yes, targeting smaller geos is likely - but not certain - to be easier. I'd generally recommend it.
Bot traffic - you've got some quite small sample sizes there. I'd tend to agree that they're likely to be bots, but you should probably get at least 20 clicks per placement to be sure.
Originally Posted by caurmen
Ok so I'll pause the Turkey and try my own geo as I probably will be able to do badass copywritting for it!
Update
So i did research on my own country. Decisive says about 800k daily Android impressions, which is def enough to work with. But what seems very weird for me is the CPM price - 0.21$ on average. seriously? I doubt there are that many marketers doing Latvia. Anyway, I'll just run some tests and see how it goes.
After spying I didnt see ANY banner translated to latvian. Tbh I dont recall seeing one ever I think.
Made 6 badass banners, will do direct linking
Also still waiting for sneaky campaign to be approved. it's been like 15 hours -.-
Unpaused my Russian UC browser campaign, targeting only one placement which seemed non-botted. It still gets almost 2m daily imps so should be enough
Allrighty!
So my supersmallscale test in my own geo was successful. I got some real good data to work with.
My ROI is at -59.5% which is not that bad to be honest!
I will optimize banners a bit more and probably throw a lander in to see how it does.
So overall:
Spent: $34.85
Revenue: $14.08
Profit: $-20.77
ROI: -59.5%
Clicks: 2,742
Conversions: 44
One thing though... I feel like Decisive is ripping me over. For example my most profitable placement is costing me 0.35$ CPM. The placement is Android app. I checked it on my phone, and yeah, my ads show up nice and pretty, but as soon as I stop my campaign there are NO other ads running, so noone else is bidding. Why the heck am I charged for 0.35$ CPM, which is quite high? I will lower my bid by a lot and see what happens. Could it be that Ask.fm is just a premium placement and they charge that high always?
I guess this might be one of these ad network tricks I have to master you guys talk about...
Some stats
Creatives (there were other ones, but these seem to work the best so I made variations)
Placements. almost all traffic is from apps so i wont even show the site tab.
As for the sneaky campaign, I'm still collecting data, optimizing n shit. ROI was really bad but some placements were eating up all budget and performing awful, so I'll cut those and see what happens. Will report once I have something solid.
Good job man!
Just FYI some of the banners for UC are not making sense in Russian. Not that its crucial in terms of your results, but just a heads-up.
Just because there are no there advertisers, do you expect the CPM to be $0.01?
That's not how ad networks work.
Certain placements will have minimum CPMs that they charge, and networks may set minimums as well based on a lot of factors. Minimum CPMs might also be based on historical data. I really don't know how these CPMs come about outside of competition, but you can be sure it's well thought out.
Also, if you don't see ads it doesn't mean no one else is bidding. It just means they don't have 100% fill rate for that geo. If there are two other advertisers spending $100/day each, and there is $1000/day worth of impressions in Latvia, then the rest will simply go un-monetised. You'd hope that ad networks would lower the CPM to compensate but maybe the publisher has a minimum set.
Anyway, stats look good - have you tested variations of those shown creatives, i.e. dark background/contrasting colours, flip it sideways, etc?
You are winning a high % of your bids. Break Ask.fm into a separate campaign and drop your bid to 0.21. If you don't get anything, slowly push it up until you get traffic
@Zeno Thanks, now it makes perfect sense when you explain it.. 
Didn't try variations yet, thats on my todo list today
@deondup
EXACTLY what I did while still in bed via remote desktop...
I'm actually winning 90% of Ask.fm bids with just 0.12$ CPM
The ask.fm placement today so far is giving me 242.8% ROI. Overall ROI is a bit under the 0%
Will update late evening (more like early morning) with more stable data. Too bad there is only bout 20-30$ revenue to be made per day on that placement.
Goin nucc. def will be replicating this in larger geo .
For some reason I stopped getting any bids on Ask.fm placement no matter what I do with the bid. Update - Cloning the campaign and running it fixed this problem
Update2 - Everything stopped again after 10 or so minutes. Cloning again doesn't fix this anymore.
Update
Replicated the same placement and same style / angle banners to gazzilion more countries that have the same offer. Hoping to cross that xxx$ profit a day with this, which should be doable.
Signed up with Popads, will promote another app there to Egypt.
Contact Decisive support and ask them what's up with the bids stopping! Looking good - just a couple of hurdles to get over.
Originally Posted by caurmen
Not getting much traffic with this small geo and placement, but ROI in it overall is 111.9%. Only 5$ profit for like 3 days
I dropped the sneaky campaigns, didn't produce results I wanted.
Today I'm starting another serious campaign, hope it works out. Targeting Malaysia, Whatsapp PIN submit paying 2.xx$. Finished banners just now, working on landers. I have 2 angles.
hey hey hey how is it going?!
So what has happened so far:
My small scale latvian campaign is still churnin slowly in the background.
My attempt to ''serious campaign'' I mentioned ^^^ failed, the end demo was way too small to make any moniez or even collect decent data.
Today I'm starting to work on new campaign. It's going to be PL sweep. No PIN submit, just 3 step SOI. Some great angles to be made for this, so wish me luck!
If I have some decent data / results, will def post em!
Anyone here from Poland? I need to ask a few quick questions about one of my angles!
nice work man , so Decisive refunded you for the bot traffic?
Originally Posted by lior_o_o
No :/
Didn't ask for that. Should I?
Definitely. If you've got proof they're bots, get in contact and ask for a refund.
Hey guys! Haven't been updating lately.
So Decisive REP wasn't really responsive to my request so i just wrote off the few dozen $ lost on bot traffic.
Joined newb mastermind group, we were working on Dolphin browser android app. Made some conversions, ROI was awful though and I never really pushed the campaign, also volume seemed way too low. Other guys in our group are doing a bit better on diff ad networks, but tbh I kinda threw this project away, I like working alone and didn't see potential in this campaign overall.
Big news
I finally have a profitable campaign, I'm promoting PIN submits on an Asian country and doing some ok ROI, here are some stats. These are not stats by day, but about weeks worth of data by landers. cost is not accurate at all, don't look at it. My ROI is 40-100%, depends on the day
I had real massive shit going on in my life lately so I could not pull myself together and scale this campaign. I'm in trouble with law Well, this week I def will.
Also guys since I have very low budget I feel like I won't be renewing my STM membership just yet when it runs out in 4 days. I could better use the 100$ on my campaigns and I feel like I've already red most of the good stuff over here. Don't get me wrong, I love this forum and I will get my membership back again, but not just yet as I'm low on $$.
nice work !
If you dont mind, how much $$ did you start with before seeing some black ?
Originally Posted by amaranthe
Well you're doing great Congrats!
Campaigns in the green! Woot!
Focus your time and energy on milking those as much as possible.
We'd much rather you took a break from STM and used that $99 to make $299, then came back later to tell us of your success :-)
Awesome results man, green we love it!
Exactly, focus your energies and resources at what will make the most profound effects towards your goals, so happy to see this man!
@tomsko - You know what man? Send me your PayPal. I'm going to pay for your next month of STM.
Congrats on the success!
Thanks for the kind words guys!
Hit another 1k$ profit day yesterday! Pushed almost 1,3k PIN submit leads, how sick is that?
Let's make it 5k by the weekend.
I've sorted out my legal stuff and now I'm paying taxes etc. Also as I mentioned, I moved into an office to better control my work and life, otherwise it was a mess. Here is a pic of my office. Joined 3 friends of mine already renting it.
Started getting up at 7AM instead of 1PM.
I'm planning on saving up at least 10k$ before I start spending my money. And I mean some new clothes and fixing my car, not unessential expensive stuff. After I save at least 50k$ I will feel comfortable getting something expensive to reward myself, like a better ride and renting new apartment. I know how valuable play money is in this industry so I'm definitely not blowing my profit away.
It's starting to seem like I'm going to upcomming STM London meetup!
1k profit? That must be a sick ROI!
Originally Posted by erikgyepes
300-400% ROI
Originally Posted by tomsko
You are doing great... if you don't mind me asking are you using FB at all for part of your traffic ?
Congratulations man. Really awesome!
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