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Noob and ready to rock.. the cookbook appetiser way! (51)

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I read it everywhere in this forum! "ACT, ACT, ACT!!”

So here i am!

Noob and ready to rock.. the cookbook appetiser way!

Here’s what i have done so far.

I have registered with Decisive and applied for F5Media. But since i had no new form them so far, i am going with Avazu.

They look good! I have already talked to my AM and I have picked an offer to target.

Details
Offer: Apus Launcher Global
Payout: 0.30$
GEOs: I have picked Nigeria (English is their first language, population 150mil and 97% Android)

Creatives
5 banners in English

Angles
Your phone is SLOW! - Fix it with Apus.
Your battery is dying! - Fix it!

Voluum
I have not figured out how that one works and how to link Decisive and Avazu with it.
Am on it though.

So, i have created 4 Ads in Decisive. You know Wifi_apps, Wifi_Sites, Mobile_apps and Mobile_sites and i am waiting for approval.

Thats all i have done till now.

Im determined, bit lost but full of positive vibes!

Any comment, help, discussion is highly welcomed!

Let’s do it!

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Good start!

Recommendation 1: MOARRRR angles!

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So, my campaigns had very little traffic at the beginning. But i did find out what was wrong.
I wanted to target for androids 4.0.3 and above, so i entered “android 4.0.3” in the campaign target thinking that it means 4.0.3 and up.

When i removed that, traffic started coming in.

Again, a bit slow maybe. And the spending is not very high as you can see.

But i did the "android" change only a couple of hours ago.. so, i may have to wait a bit more.

Currently I'm preparing some new angles as Zeno suggested.

Till now, here is the picture:

Decisive


Avazu


Looks like tracking is working.

Any comments? Anything looking strange so far?

All welcomed and appreciated.

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TINY UPDATE

I just got my first conversion (yeahhhyyy!!).

The thing is, its been recored in the Avazu, but not in Decisive, so i know i have done something wrong here.
Maybe its a good thing to bring Voluum to the game.


not sure, still looking.

any help would be appreciated!

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Current status

Attachment 4151

Still conversions not recored to Decisive though.
That way, i cant track which angle works and which not.

I need to fix that ASAP!

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yeah, take care your Voluum, and be careful. I'll follow this.

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Thank you tiger!

Any Voluum related tutorial around ? A step by step guide ?
couldn't find anything in STM so far..

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Ok, im kind of figuring out the tracking part.
This post helped a lot:

Current status



Any commends are welcomed!
I know i have to test more angles, but is the traffic enough ? I have spent more less $4.
Whats next ?

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We don't have an explicit tutorial but there are quite surely dozens and dozens of threads from people trying to figure out Decisive > Voluum > Network tracking. Dozens.

With regards to your Android targeting, was this the app minimum version? Decisive doesn't have a minimum version targeting, I think it's granular. So when you picked 4.0.3 you were targeting only 4.03. Add all the appropriate android versions or just leave it off. If you check the planner data for your country you will get an idea of what % are below the minimum version and whether it's worth your time adding them all. And of course check your live reports to see the versioning.

What is your campaign budget/bid? Is your account balance below $50? Low volume = either bid or budget too low, acct balance low, or country has low volume. I don't think Nigeria does!

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Update.

I have 9 conversions till now and im very close to make Voluume work.



CPM, Conversions and other stats from my campaigns


The problem is that without proper tracking, i cant tell which banners trigger the conversions.
I can see which campains do trigger conversions, but not which banners.

My spending is still low i think. It's about $10 for all 4 campains.
What do you thing ?

@Zeno
My balance is way more than $50 and my bidding for all my campaigns is the following:


Should i change it?

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I'm fairly new to Decisive and running my first campaign, but if Decisive is tracking conversions, as it obviously is for you, it appears you can go to Live Reports: Creative ID and see which creative your conversions are coming from.

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Hi webeminence,

Thank you for your tip.
The thing is that Voluum wont update Desicive and at the moment i have to do it manually.

Im working on it though

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Oh, I figured it was working since your Decisive screenshots are showing conversions.

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Any feedback on the above would be appreciated !

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If you update Decisive manually by firing off postback URLs, then it is exactly the same as if Voluum did it. You should be able to see conversions in every tab, including that showing the banners.

Just use the live reports.

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Update,

I have sorted out the Voluum thing. (I will write a tutorial on it so other people will get helped).

My campaign runs for 4th day.

Last 3 days i got 6 conversions each day.

So totally i have spent $17 to make $5.70 (not sure if thats too bad).

I have stopped my 2 SITE campaigns, as they were burning money without any conversions.

So i have running:

Mobile / App - with current all time stats


and

Wifi / App - with current all time stats (some banners disabled)


Not sure if campaign is a good or bad one to be honest.

Im a bit lost. So please an experienced person give some feedback.

What i have done, is adding 3 more creatives/angles to the mix (waiting approval).

Did i do good till now ? Any mistakes i should take care of ?
What should i be checking ?
Nest steps you would take ?

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Focus on the lowest CPA banners.

Now, add in more and more banners that test new variations and improve on what is already working.

Blacklist placements that are a long way from break even (e.g. -30% ROI or less) and let your aggressive banner testing do most of the work.

Your CPAs aren't too far from $0.30, you just need a lot more data!

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Doing that... Cool!

Another question that came up.

Is it better to on/off campaigns when its night in the Geos picked (like 2-6 in the morning) ? I have noticed that during those times, im just burning cash.
anyone noticing the same?

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So you have significant data that shows the ads don't do well in those time periods?

Then you should day part. As far as I recall Decisive doesn't have dayparting so yeah, pause/resume manually and go for gold.

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Update

Here is my todays stats till now.



Some inside the campaigns screenshots




i have 2 campaigns running for each offer (2 offers as well).

I have some banners doings quite ok (CPA close to Payout).

Im not sure how to check stuff here.

We are looking for winning banners right ?

So, some newbie questions!

1. And how does a winning banner look like (stat-wise)?
2. How long we test a banner till we kill it ?
3. If a banner is doing quite well, we just create more like it and do some more testing ?
4. If you see my last 2 campaigns above, they have spent $2 combined today and they will never reach even near their $8 limit. Why ? Can i fix that?
5. What i need is a set of "rules" i can use to kill campaigns or not and move on. Any available ?

Thank you so much Zeno for the reply (i know you will be replying :P )
You are helping me so much!

Any more feedback by anyone highly appreciated.

G.

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..continuing to above post....

I have added like 4-5 new creatives to the campaigns, based on the "winning" angles so far.

Running 2 hours now, and i see a drop in Clicks. (0.2 - 0.3%)

Is that normal ?

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OK...

1) A winning banner, at the end of the day, is one that makes you money! If its CPA is lower than your payout, it's a winner. However, when you're considering banners, it's worth remembering that they're affected by bad placements, bad carriers, etc. So initially, I'd keep banners that are achieving close to your payout (say, +-30%) whilst you cut bad placements. And if you had a truly terrible placement running at high volume (say 50% of your volume), ignore the stats from that day altogether or drill down in your tracking to exclude that placement.
2) I'd recommend, as a rule of thumb, giving the banner at least 4x the payout before you kill it. And as mentioned above, weed out godawful placements first.
3) Keep it and learn from it. Try and figure out what made it work, then do more banners like that!
4) The simplest way is to increase your CPM. You're winning less than a third of bids - boost your spend to get more traffic.
5) If the campaign's not getting more than -50% ROI after you've cleared out really bad placements and ads, kill it. That's a very simple rule of thumb to get you going!

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OK, heres what happened.


YESTERDAY
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Yesterday i thought i had found a "winner" in one of my creatives.
So, i stopped all other banners from running and created 7 new banners based on the "winning" angle.

Interestingly.. my ctr was lower by the hour and i had no conversion for the rest of the day.
I even tried to up my CPM to get some more quality traffic, but no luck.

I have currently stopped both campaigns i was running.

FROM NOW ON
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I have set some ground rulls (that i gathered from the STM forum) - please COMMENT OF THEM

1. I kill every banner that has spent 3 times the payout with no coversions values at least half that.
2. I kill a campaign that has for a day a CPA 3 times the payout or more.
3. I keep trying and testing till i make it

TILL NOW
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I have burned $100 to get $20, but i have learned so much the last 3-4 days!!

NEXT
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Im launching a new champaign with a new offer TONIGHT!

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$100 spent with $20 revenue is not a bad start at all.

As for your rules, these do make some sense. Rules are important here as if you jump to conclusions early - as you may have learned, things don't always go so well.

However, you may want to focus on placements rather than banners. I would kill placements that have spent say over 2-3x the CPA without a conversion. Or placements that have spent >25% of the payout with zero clicks.

Banner performance is the sum of all the placement performances so it makes sense to kill banners that are performing worse, all else being equal, when you are split testing them against other banners. If you have 5 banners and all of them spend $10 across the approximate same placement distribution, then the banner doing $1 CPA and 10 conversions is probably a better bet than the one at $5 CPA with the same number of clicks.

But, if you had the $5 CPA banner alone, with no other options, killing it without considering the placements first would be foolish.

The same can be said for campaigns. It's easier to compare multiple angles to each other, or app/wifi to app/carrier, rather than looking at app/carrier on it's own and killing it because it's spent $5 today without conversions on a $1 payout offer...

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Thank you for your feedback! Always valuable!

A noob question:
How you focus on placements rather than banners? I mean what's the process, I didn't know you could target placements

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Placements are in the app/site tabs.

They are by far the most important thing you should optimise by first, i.e. blacklist poor performers.

This is covered in the Mobile Cookbook.

You can also target individual placements but this is only sensible when you want to target high volume placements that are proven to convert.

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UPDATE

So, killing wasteful placements is very important!

Heres my new campaign.

Is a CPI offer
GEO: India
Payout: $0.5
5 banners (3 angles) - the same in every campaign

I have launched 4 campaigns based on wifi/app.

The thing is that with daily limit $8 these campaigns lasted only a couple of hours. 2 of them spent even more ($9).
I have already killed one of them as id had 300 clicks and no conversion.

The others, after 10 hours running are like this:



So, i have some conversions, but the CPA is huge!

If i keep this up, i will just continue to loose money i guess. Or it is too early ?

the thing is, that i will need $20 or more to run each campaign for a whole day to get some more data.

What should i do now? Test some more angles?

THINKING LOUDLY!
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i am going to try some new banners / angles… i believe if i get me a better ctr., this campaign maybe will start to make some sense.. with 0.5 ctr… 3-4 conversions are not bad.. but i need more to bring down my CPA .. Am i thinking right ?

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I'd go for some new angles.

I'd also recommend testing for bot traffic - that might well be harming your CPAs quite a bit.

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So.. here's what happened!!

I created 4 new banners (4 new angles) in English and in Hindi (google translate).
So 8 new banners.

I removed all the old ones and added the 8 new in the campaigns.
I even activated the Wifi / Site one that had paused with the previous angles.

I run the ads for 30 minutes.... and something wired happened.

My CTR went to 0.7-0.9 (from 0.5-0.6) to all campaigns and i had 10 new conversions! (when i had 9 before with campaigns running for 16 hours).
Check this out.


Ok, i guess this is a good sign.

another weird thing is, that Decisive didn't upload all my banner to the Mobile / App campaign (by accident i guess).
It did upload only one of then and in English.
Well. that banner alone did the 6 of the 10 conversions and had 1,7% conv.

CONCLUSION
Maybe the new angles (especially the single banner) are much better.
Or the time of the day was better

CPC is a bit lower now but the CMP is still high i believe!

PLEASE, advice. What is your opinion on that ?

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Stats update to the above post



Advice, thoughts, suggestions ...anything is appreciated!!

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Nice! When CVR jumps like that it's probably because your angle is better or you also managed to hit some higher quality placements.

Angles seem to work though, right?

IMO you should focus on the Wifi and Carrier App campaigns. Find placements that are doing well and cut aggressively.

If your CPA is 4x your offer payout you're going to have to cut the fat that isn't contributing. There is probably some placements amongst the Carrier/App campaign for example that are running much closer to $0.50 CPA!

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Thnx @zeno
Today I find hard to spend.
I get low bids and wins (19-29%) so I guess the competition is high?

My ctr is at about 1% (which I guess is ok).

With cpm at .25-.30 should I bit higher? If yes what's the highest I should go?

And something else. Is there a way to up the cpm bid for a specific placement?

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For specific placements you'll have to break them out into their own campaigns and use manual CPM bidding.

I would let the campaign run as is for now and see if volume picks up - if it does, it's an indicator that things were more competitive today = other advertisers are day-parting.

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Heh, always good when something like this happens!

Randomness is random. This is why we spend so much time talking about "statistical significance" - it's very easy to pause a campaign too early.

Dig into the stats! Which placement did those conversions come from? Is it new? Which banner? Etc.

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Thank you all for your thoughts.

Heres whats happening today.
The campaigns roll VERY slow. Till now im 15hours in and $4 spent only. I guess the competitions is very big.
One is for sure. With 17% wins, im getting very little and very bad traffic. I need to fix that!



The offer has a cap at 1500, and it reaches it every day.
Yesterday i activated the campaigns when the offer was 85% caped, so i guess the big advertisers had paused. So i got some crumbs.

Im not sure if am thinking rights though. What do you say ?


The thing is, is there a way to fight this ? I mean not having to wait till 85% is sold and get a piece of the cake ?
How ? Better ctr ? Larger CPM ?

Please point my thinking to the right direction, because its even im starting to make some sense, or im just talking bs

And some questions.

@zeno - day-parting ? Please explain.
@caurmen - if i spot a banner or a placement that converts better, what is the best way to covert it ? Campaigns with everything else "blacklisted" maybe?

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Good stuff Globy, this one'll either be a winner or you're gonna learn heaps, either way you win

Zeno, what do you mean by quality placements?

How does one go about getting them? Bid higher? Get a better ctr?

Thx

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hi,
i would love some feedback to my previous posts.

Thnx

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Higher quality just meaning they convert better for your current campaign, for whatever reason.

Usually you need to bid higher as, if it works well, it's probably being bid on competitively by others.

If you're getting low impressions it's probably because of a low bid, budget or account balance.

When you say the offer cap, this is on conversions so has no effect on your front-end ad performance. If the offer was 85% capped then there was still quota left... only if it was 100% capped would it affect your campaigns. That being said, if an offer has a daily cap that is being filled up, don't start campaigns so late in the day...

You should just test as you normally would now and pause your campaigns every day when the offer budget caps.

Day-parting is when you run campaigns only in specific times of the day or days of the week. Scheduling.

With regards to the better converting banners and blacklisting, just make a new campaign and make it whitelist only - i.e. it only targets the apps you specify.

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Hi, I subscribe to this thread
Me and my friend are really new at this, we just started our first campaing yesterday and we have the same problem you had. Decisive is not tracking our conversions but they show up in volumn.
Could you tell how did you fix that? Thanks !!!!!

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If you're spotting a placement that converts particularly well, you could create a new campaign just targeting that placement. Generally only worth doing if the placement has significant volume, but it can be a good way to get some easier, albeit smaller, wins.

If you see a banner that converts better - start focusing on figuring out what makes that banner work! Make similar banners, pause banners that aren't working as well, and try to identify the "secret sauce". Once you have a few banners that convert well, just pause the rest and you've got yourself a winning campaign!

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Hi natasfx.
You need to add this link "http://win.crwd.io/convert/{externalid}' to your campaign in Voluum (postback url).

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Yeah I finally fix it, thanks anyway !

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Hi all,

I'm back with a new campaign and many new questions.
I just need to make sure am thinking right at this point.

First things first.

Details
Offer: ZeroLauncher Global
Payout: 0.60$
GEOs: I have picked Nigeria (English is their first language, population 150mil and 97% Android)

Creatives & angles


An this point i have 4 campaigns site/app - wifi/mobile running since last night (16 hours) with he "appetiser" setup.

Here are the results so far.



In the "Appetiser" guide is stated "If there is an App or a Site which has had more than a third of the total spend on your campaign since that campaign began, has not had a conversion, and has spent more than 3 times your offer payout, blacklist it."

Im not sure i get that.
Is it 3 times the payout or more that 1/3 offer spent so far ? Or one or the other?

My campaign spents very slowly so far, so im $3-$4 for each campaign. Very far from $15.

Check two examples

One is App and the other is Site targeting.

Site


App


So, at this point, having all the data i have, how would you proceed?

Most of my campaigns get to this moment, and im not sure if i need to cut some placements or kill it all.

I do have clicks, but they do not convert (and im directlinking). so is the offer not converting? Is it too early to say?

Can you please think loudly so i can understand how you look at this?

Please Advice!

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Can you please think louder please? lol

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There are some optimisations you can do already - overall you don't have enough spend on placements to do much.

However, in sites I would kill uc.web, videoking and videomaza. The latter two aren't getting clicks and simply won't work. Uc.web might work but so far the CPC is looking quite high given your offer payout. 10% CVR probably isn't going to happen.

I'd keep an eye on the second waptrick and m.en.softonic.com as well.

As for apps, get rid of uTorrent.

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Update.

So here how things ended last day.



I have killed some placements (most Zeno mentioned above) and i have waited for more that 20 hours today.

Here is the current status.



And here are my thoughts.

Today only, i have more that 500 clicks to my offer and only 1 conversion. The campaigns roll like yesterday, VERY SLOW.
According to my AM, this offer coverts big time.

So, i guess my traffic is shit. No?

I have targeted Nigeria, and i'm thinking of switching coutries.

I would try some more banners, but the thing is i do have almos 1400 clicks those 2 days.
So banner do work at the moment. Of caurse i can improve on them, but something else is wrong here.

I mean 6 coversions on 1400 clicks is too low, no?

At the moment i do beleive i get shity traffic quality.

Another thing is, that although i have raised my CMP manualy from 0.15 to 0.22, nothing happends. I mean, it does stay fixed between 0.15-0.16. Shoudl i raise it much more?

Please advice.

thank you all for any comment. Its gold to me!

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With regards to your bidding, a higher CPM bid won't give a higher CPM paid if you are already bidding well above the competitive CPM for the placements - due to the auction system involved.

You likely won't be getting as much traffic as you want due to budgets, and potentially other bidders who are bidding even higher and with higher budgets.

The traffic behaviour so far is nothing out of the ordinary to be honest. Just kill placements ruthlessly and see if you can find any that do OK.

If not, and after testing multiple angles, just ditch this country on this traffic source.

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thank you Zeno.

Looks like the country i chosen (Nigeria) and Decisive are going along very well.

Do you know any countries Decisive is good to work with maybe?

Thanks again!

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Update.

So, new campaign.
This time is a Voucher offer for AU.

Offer: [WAP] Supermarket vouchers - SOI - AU
Payout: $2.24
Geo: AU
Traffic: Decisive
Network: F5

Banners


Stats so far


Comments
Things do not go well. This is my 2nd campaign with no conversion. I know its early thought.

I think i will make some more banners as my CTR is hell low. I need to work on my angles.
Another thing i am thinking about is switch traffic source. I dont know, but i believe Decisive may have some low quality traffic.

Please feel free to help me with any comments

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In my very limited experience I kinda feel the same. Other networks its easier to see conversions, but I'm paying higher CPC too.

Decisive feels like a garage sale - the inventory is there you just gotta root around for it a little more than you would at Target.

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For the supermarket offer, are you using a lander? If not, I think it would increase your chances at conversions, make them feel unique/entitled to receive the voucher. Make it look real too. My reasoning is, let's say you click on the ad, you get to the voucher selection instantly, people may think it's fishy/unreal, why would I receive a voucher worth 1000 for nothing...Food for thought!

Edit: Decisive didn't get me any results too, I heard pushing higher payout offers on it is better, but then you need a higher budget...sad life haha

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