3 Guys 1 Blog - Former Poker Pros going mobile [Cookbook approach] (20)
3 Guys 1 Blog - Former Poker Pros going mobile [Cookbook approach]
Yo boys and girls!
To Introduce ourselfs, we are a team of 3 pokerplayers living in Bangkok. Each of us played poker for more than 5 years and at some point we just stopped enjoying the game. Nowadays its all about the moniez and too much of a daily hustle. So it was finally time to find something new to focus on. Gladly a good friend, who also used to be a pokerplayer, introduced us to his new business. After realizing how much bank you can make, we all joined the boat instantly, haha. Props to supeyrio at this point, since he helped us out with a lot of tips and was always available for any kind of questions we had.
Personally I am pretty much done with poker and am going to concentrate on AM fulltime for at least the next 6 Months. I will use this time to get my head free of poker since this is a really stressfull job. I want to learn as much as possible during this period of time. So far I seem to be on a pretty good way, although I get overwhelmed by all the new informations on a daily basis. Once you think you understand something, you get proven wrong 1 hour later, haha. Anways, the other guys will post with their accs here also, so you will get to know all us 3 lads a bit more.
Sounds cool, but whats your plan?
Basically we had the idea that 3 brains are more powerful, we have 3x more budget, can put 3x more work in the same period of time, 3x less variance in term of risk of ruin and of course the motivational aspect. Since we all live close by (2 already together), we can meet up on a daily basis, exchange ideas etc. To Keep things easy, we will rotate every offer on a different trafficsource account, so each of us will gain some experience in order to set up tracking etc. With this system nobody will lack knowledge of every process.
What have you guys done so far?
So far we made a pretty good progress. It took us longer than expected, but finally we run our first campaign since yesterday. At the moment we run the offer DU battery saver via AppFlood in 2 different countries. We started 4 different campaigns on Decisive. As we try to make the cookbook approach, but have 2 countries to split test, we choosed to make the campaigns like this. Country A/Wfii, Country A/carrier, Country B/Wifi, Country B/Carrier. The start of the campaign was pretty nice, we had 4 conversions in 12hrs, but something went wrong with the tracking, since we tried to implement
Whats the plan for tomorrow?
Most important is to figure out, if conversions show up in Decisive. We have some sources, that spent way too much (3x payout) and most likely didnt bring up any conversions. So we have to blacklist them, but first we have to make sure, where conversions are actually coming from. The rest of the day we will collect data, till we reach $15 spent on each campaign ($8 daily spent). In the meantime we will work on new angles and banners. Tomorrow we will also post some stats and a lot of questions. The thing that concerns us most is, that we only win really low percentages of our bids. Mostly 2%-20%. We are currently using intelligent CPM of 1,5x payout ($0.42). Is this normal or should we raise our bids a bit more manually?
If you guys have any questions or also want to hear about the crazy Bangkoklife, just shoot. I used to blog for more than 2 years on a pokerforum and people really liked it, so just post, if you want to hear some stories. I am out for now and deliver some updates tomorrow. Hopefully the other 2 dudes from the team will post here some stuff too.
peace out.
Good luck dudes! You should come to Vegas this year for Affiliate Summit West. Would be cool to get a big poker game going with STM guys.
Originally Posted by sportstraffic
Good luck on your follow along guys!
Yo, I'm one of the other dudes on the team.
So we had some problems with the tracking and when we manage to fix it our data was kind of useless since we couldn't see where the conversions came from. At least we find out which country was performing better and we focus on it.
We are running 4 campaings on Wifi- App / Wifi - Site / Carrier - App / Carrier - Site. We add some new banners + angles and started yesterday. Here is our current data:
Seems like the sites are doing OK for the start but we are not winning many bids. Any idea why is this happening or how could we work on it?
One question about Volumn. Is it worth it to pay for it at this stage or should we wait? We see the same stats that we already have on Decisive so we are not sure..
Last question: could any of you guys say what's a decent CTR and a decent conversion rate?
Our plans now are just collect data till we reach the 15$ spend per campaing, analyze everything and make a new approach from there.
Any comments/suggestions and help is really appreciate it! Thanks 
@ims2014 @sportstraffic That poker game sounds great! but first we have to see how things are going + flights from bkk-vegas are a big pain in the ass 
3guys 1blog vs 2girls 1cup?
heh
you'll automatically be made to pay once u hit enough traffic on
good luck guys ill be railing
Originally Posted by supeyrio
))
@matuloo SHIT! you are late... that was disguasting!!! LOL!!
@aaaart welcome! i will be following your progress.. good luck dudes!
Looks like a great start! A couple of those campaigns are looking very promising for a first round of testing.
To boost wins, you'll have to boost the amount you spend. If the volume you're getting isn't spectacularly low, I'd wait until you spend $15, then analyse from there and consider swapping to manual CPM.
Originally Posted by globy14
@aaaart welcome! i will be following your progress.. good luck dudes!
Originally Posted by matuloo
GL this is much more relaxing Pretty much same game - get data & destroy.
yo! So here is our current data:
We have only reached the 15$ spend on one of the campaigns by far, but we didnt get to 7$ in payouts. The Appetiser says we shouldn't continue with any campaign that didnt make at least 7$ in payouts BUT 4 of the 10 banners are apparently doing ok:
Would be worth it to give it a try again and optimize with this banners? Since we are cutting half of the banners, our conversion rate should be double as high right?
We also have this one which is getting most of the clicks but not a single conversion on this campaign but has some on the others. We are not using landing pages. Should we still give this banner a try with the other ones?
Whenever you find some time between watching 2girls 1cup videos, your thoughts will be really appreciate it ! thanks!
Yo man, I am looking trough the reports at the moment and recognized that most of the conversions at the Wifi/Site campaigns are coming from "nopageurlspecified". Is there any way to find out exactly from which site conversions are coming from?
I am a bit concerned, because the volume there is pretty high and it would be uncool, If all the conversions come from a specific site and we can not scale it up to the best.
Yo guys, a couple days went by and we collected a bit more data. As I read in the new uides Zeno uploaded, I tought it would be nice to give you a better overview of what we are doing here. This applies for the first offer we tried to advertise so far.
Traffic source: Decisive
Vertical: Utility Apps
Offer(s): DU Speed Battery Booster
Geos: Argentina, Peru
Budget: $8/day per campaign
Bid: $0.42 CPM
Angles: We brainstormed a couple ones by using the 7 sins I read in a guide. Dont know the links anymore, but can take a look at it, if you guys are interested in it.
-Laziness: Tired of charging batteryall the time /Charging your phone a lot? / Forgot to charge your phone?
-Horny: Never run out of battery while chatting with your love / Endless calls with your loved one
-Greedy: Quickcharge your phone / Highspeed charging / Gain more batterylife
-Envy: Our useres enjoy 70% more batterylife
-Wraith: Are u mad because battery drains fast?
-Pride: Want the highest batterylife of all your friends?
Campaign structure: We started to split with geos first. Started with Argentina/Wifi, Argentina/site, Peru/Wifi, Peru/Site. After $15 spent we decided to keep on going with Peru and splitted again in Carrier/App, Carrier/Site, Wifi/App, Wifi/Site.
Banners: This were the results from Peru/Wifi/Site
Landing pages: We dont have any landingpage yet. We are doing directlinking for the start, but gonna try landingpages soon.
Spend so far: -$84
Revenue: $14,56
Net profit/loss: -$69,44
Actions we took: We blacklisted trafficsources, which spent more than 3x payout and didnt have any conversions. Some of them didnt even have clicks, so I guess there was a lot of bottraffic going on there. After the Peru/Wifi/Site campaign reached $15 spend, we figured out the 5 best performimng banner and created 5 new ones, who have similarities to the top performing ones. The other campaigns are still waiting for $15 spend, but dont look promising at all. The optimized Wifi/Site campaign isnt doing that good so far, but lets wait till we reached $15 spend and then decide what to do.
Current tasks: At the moment we wait for the data and blacklist sources that spend 3x payout without any conversion. Also we are working currently on a new offer. Updates for this one will follow as soon as we are finished with the banners and can start the campaign.
Questions: We think about to splittest our biddings in combination of the Wifi/Site. Seems like we only win 15% of the biddings and we dont know how much this affects the quality of our traffic. If we splittest fpr CPC, sCPM and Manual CPM, how much should we spent then? Payout is $0.28, thank you!
Sorry I didn't respond on this one earlier!
Yes - if you have a few banners that are doing better than -50% ROI on the first pass, I'd keep testing them. If they don't get close to break-even after you've killed most of the loser placements, though, kill 'em and try something new.
Nice writeup!
Very structured and cogent if I do say so myself 
Very nice banners and variation and honestly your results look great so far - conversions across the board!
I would focus on getting a bit more volume (e.g. a few more days @ $10-15) and culling off placements, while also stepping back and assessing whether some campaigns in particular are worth pursuing more, e.g. the WiFi ones are doing consistently better than carrier.
Your CPAs are barely 2-3x the offer payout which is good!
Time for some small updates. As caurmen and Zeno suggested, we created some more new banners including the style and angles that were performing best. We collected some data and spent like $20 on the optimized campaign, which we named Peru/wifi/site/v2. Surprisingly some of the old top performing banners didnt make that much conversions anymore, altough we got like 10k+ impressions. So not sure how much variance is included. SHould we still keep them in the campaign or remove them and fill the spot with a new similar creative?
We started to adjust a little bit and blacklisted banners with a cpa bigger than 2x payout and also blacklisted trafficsources, which spent more than 3x payout and didnt have any conversions. Also the ones who had a really bad CTR. You can see the blacklisted banners and sources in the pictures below. Would you do anything different? (As a sidenote: the white banner on the top was doing really good in the previous campaign, and the third one in yellow also. I just flipped a coin and removed one of them and give the other one a chance to catch up a bit. What do you do in this situation?)
We also made new variations of the 3 banners we didnt blacklist and filled them up to 10 new creatives and will resume the campaign as soon as the new creatives are approved. We set the daily spent to $20, so we hope data will flow in a bit faster. After we collect come data we plan to splittest the campaign in manual CPM, smart CPM and CPC. I got already some advise from caurmen, which I follow. Do you think it makes sense to splittest if the campaign doesnt get close to breakeven?
We also tried to figure out how to set up a landingpage, but this is more difficult as we tought. Since we all dont have any experience with domains, servers, DNS and CDNs this is a really hard one for us to figure out. So far we registred a domain at goddady. 2nd Step I took was to sign up at NSone.com and get a CDN from Beyond hosting. Now we are a bit lost, cause most guides we found are for other CDNs. Unfortunately we found the other guides, when we signed up at the other hosts already. Would really appreciate any help on how to setup the landingpage on the Beyond hosting CDN.
Upcoming tasks:
Tomorrow all the new creatives will be hopefully approved and we will collect some more data. During that time we try to figure out how to set up the CDN and work on landinpages. Try to spy a bit on whatrunwhere and just learn how all this HTML stuff works at all. Guess this will be a long day full of reading and trying. On one hand its quiet annoying, but on the other hand I am happy if things work out and I learned a new skill. Afterwards this should be an easy task I will laugh about - at least I hope so, haha.
The other offer is kinda paused, cause the AM said its expiring soon, so all the angles we made up etc. is pretty useless at the moment. Maybe if the offer comes back online again. Focus is on bringing our campaign to breakeven at the moment!
Spend so far: -$104,97
Revenue: $22,46
Net profit/loss: -$82,51
Yo yo yo fellas, no worries, we didnt gave up on AM already, just had some fun over the weekend and then stumbled upon lots of problems - mostly lack of knowledge based things. Since the last update we made some new creatives and some of them were working pretty decent. We set our bid up to $20 daily and collected some good data. Results were almost breakeven for 2 creatives. CPA $0.36 and payout is $0.30!!! Full of excitemet we needed to figure out how to get over that breakeven line. So we paused the campaign and wanted to add new things and go online again.
1. Landingpages - Such a hassle to to find out how all that stuff works. Tried it to do ourselfs, but decided to outsource it, since its just annoying to optimize it for every resolution. Contacted the guys from BannersLanders and hopefully will get 1 Landingpage from them to see how it looks. In addition we will use the one, we made ourself. Both will have different angles, but not sure how many variations we should do. Are 2 Lps with different angles enough for the start or should we do more landers? Also I wanted to ask, if the angle of the lander must be the same as on the creative or can it vary? I am asking cause I thought about using another angle, which got declined on Decisive. Is this forbidden to do? Do I have to approve the landers somewhere?
2. Blacklisting - We gonna blacklist all the sites, which have payout 2x without conversion yet. We also take a look on the devices and OS versions, but its pretty much all mixed up, so I dont think we have enough data to start blacklisting there. Should we be fine with that so far?
3. Paybump - One thing of AM is to negotiate. Since the AM of the ad network earns money, when we earn money, we should ask for a little paybump. I thought about just telling her, that we have an offer, which is close to profitable and we think about to run big volume and a paybump could help a lot. Any ideas how much to ask for, or approach it in another way so that they offer it themselfes? (payout $0,30)
4. Creatives - Add more creatives with slightly different changes. We gonna approach it like in this thread from iAmAtilla, props to him at this point! How much different variations should we make? I thought about to start with 10 and then splittest others, or should we fire up like 30 creatives in the new campaign?
Unfortunately one of the almost BE creatives from earlier got disapproved, because Decisive dont allow to use the Android Icon anymore. Was wondering me a lot, that all creatives got disapproved, but then I noticed they also removed the old ones. Anybody the same? I kinda just gave up on them now and focus on the other one. Or should I just try to replace the logo with something else?
5. Splittest offer - We want to splittest the same offer on at least another adnetwork. Makes sense at this point?
Upcoming Tasks
Today we will come up with some Ideas for angles on the landing pages and give the order to the LandersBanners guys + work on our own one. We figured out how to setup the tracking already, but lets see if it works in the end, haha. Also we will work on some new creatives just for the case, that we have a lot to splittest if needed. Hopefully we will be going online with all the new stuff on the weekend, really excited for the data!
Spend so far: -$149,34
Revenue: $45,56
Net profit/loss: -$103,78
1. Not sure what you mean by an angle getting disapproved - did some banners get disapproved for a specific angle? It would then not be smart to repeat that angle on a lander since Decisive might find out and kick you out.
Two landers is fine. The angles should be consistent from banner to lander but just test it... drill down into your tracking system data and actually see if X banner with angle A does better when linking through LP A with the same angle vs LP B with angle B.
2. Yes, focus on placements first.
3. Run some volume first then ask... If your campaign is near profitable then get some leads in so that you can show it's worth their while to bump the pay a bit. You can always ask initially and say you have quite an expensive traffic source and would like a bump to help with testing... but there's really not much point now. It's not going to be the different between sink or swim.
4. Stick to 5-10 per campaign at any one time. For approvals, adapt. If the traffic source won't allow that specific thing anymore, try other things.
5. Yes.
Okay guys, sorry for the late update, but we were quite busy with running campaigns and testing. We gave our best with the DU battery saver, made like 60 creatives total, ordered landingpages etc but we couldnt bring it to positive roi - not even close to.
So we started to run APUS launcher, but unforutantely they paused it today - on all 4 networks we were running it. Alternatively we will just switch offer to some similar offers like GO launcher.
Altough we still have to learn a lot of stuff, its going quite good, since major things like tracking and the whole process of starting campaigns etc. seems familiar and quiete 'easy going' now, haha.
Apparently we are going to start some new offer soon and want to add some new trafficsource to splittest. Any recommendations for App installs?
We signed up at exoclick, but they seem to ban some offers, so didnt start to run anything there + we have to pay ~20% as long as we dont have a somekind small business registred, but gonna sort that out, when I am home in germany for christmas. Also tried adivity, but daily minimum spent $50 per campaign, which is a bit too much for testing, if we approach it like the maincourse of the cookbook. Just gonna leave the money there and come back at some point, when we have more experience.
Also happy about any offer recommendations of you guys. Gonna talk to them lovely AMs also. Keep it up dudes!
Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns