Super Easy Campaign Profitable on the First Try (8)
In this thread, I am going to document the details of a campaign that I recently ran.
The purpose of this campaign was:
1. To get a basic introduction to the world of CPI / mobile app installs.
2. To test out a new traffic source I'd never tried before.
3. Maybe make a profit? 
It turns out that for #3, it did make a (small) profit, but that is a moot point, as you'll see below. Since I am choosing not to scale this campaign and instead will look for a new offer (and probably new source too), I figured I would share all of the details in case it can help someone else.
OFFER - APUS Launcher [ClickDealer] - Payout $0.25
For this campaign I did not really care about payout or anything like that, since I just wanted to test and see if I could actually get things working from the perspective of "put money in on one end, get money out on the other end." In that regard, it was a successful campaign.
Prior to running this, I had no experience with mobile app installs or mobile CPI campaigns on Android.
My affiliate manager at ClickDealer recommended APUS Launcher and said it was doing really well. I had never heard of it, but it looked interesting. I decided to go with the angle, "Phone too slow?" and target smaller countries, where there would be less competition.
TRAFFIC SOURCE - Airpush [Push Notifications] - Targeting: Lithuania
According to my AM, the offer was converting well in Lithuania. So I fired up Google Translate, and got the words "Phone too slow?" translated into Lithuanian. Then I did another line of text too. It said something like, "Install APUS - Faster and Easier".
On Airpush, there's a Push Notification ad format. It just requires a Headline, a second line of text, and an icon. For the icon, I just used the actual APUS Launcher icon.
The ad looked like this:
I decided not to make a landing page, and send the traffic straight to the offer, since I just wanted to get my feet wet.
I had some hassles getting the ad approved (the one above is after a few iterations of submitting different variations to get approval), but eventually, the traffic was flowing.
Good news, conversions were flowing too. The campaign was slightly negative, and nearly break-even. I let it run for a couple of days, because it was only spending $2-3/day with the budget I had.
After I had about 20 conversions, I looked at the data and realized that all of them had come from Samsung devices. But I had been targeting all devices, of which only about 60% of them were Samsung. So, only 60% of my clicks were from Samsung, but 100% of my conversions were.
So I set up another campaign that targeted just Samsung devices in Lithuania. I was worried that we were getting to a pretty small universe of potential devices and impressions, but I still just wanted to play with the different tools and learn the game.
My optimization was successful, and following that, I had a profitable campaign.
Here are the stats from the first day of profitability:
Spent $2.56 on 256 clicks at $0.01 per click, 8071 impressions, 3.17% CTR.
Made $5.25 from 21 conversions.
Great!
Unfortunately, it seems like the APUS Launcher offer is on its way out, as my AM contacted me to let me know that the payout was about to drop drastically, and I noticed in another network that it says "ending soon" next to the offer. For that reason, I have decided not too invest too much more time on this campaign, or try to scale it out further.
I also got really annoyed with Airpush and their very stringent ad approval process. I had trouble getting the "Phone too slow?" headline approved in other languages / geo's, and wondered whether the only reason it got approved in Lithuania was either an accident or because it just slipped through the cracks.
Anyway, this was my first intro the world of mobile / CPI affiliate marketing, and I'm psyched for what's to come! I think the opportunity with mobile is absolutely amazing, and this was a great taste of how things work to get started
Hope this might help some people out there who are also just getting started.
Subscribed! This is great. I just started with AirPush tonight.
It's awesome to see a fellow Entrepreneur in California with similar interests. Are you going to ASW?
Hi sportstraffic,
Haven't decided on ASW yet, but there's a good chance I'll go. Last time I was there in 2013, but skipped this year. I am new to mobile, but not new to affiliate marketing in general. (Also did a lot of SEO back in the day)
Airpush has generally been annoying to me with their approval process. For example, I was trying to run the offer Psafe - Brazil, which is some kind of legitimate virus checker. I understand that we can't say "You have a virus!" and whatnot, but I literally could not get ANYTHING approved by them.
I mean, I'm talking about ads with a headline like, "Free Antivirus Software" or something like that. To me, that is basically about as plain-vanilla, non-misleading as you can possibly get. It is literally just a description of the actual software. But Airpush would reject it and say it "resembles a system message". Super frustrating.
That said, I do like their Push Notification format, because it's easy to set up ads (no need to create banners), and the traffic is very cheap.
I also tested a German sweepstakes offer with one of their other formats, but sent 200 clicks to it and got no conversions, so I paused it.
Thanks for the post intresting ! Which you all good luck and learn more mate
Thanks a lot for this interesting post and amazing experiment.
Airpush is easier to lean and manager, but as you said, their approval process is quite annoying.
Freakin APUS! Killing a great run for me as well.
Originally Posted by confucius
Haven't decided on ASW yet, but there's a good chance I'll go. Last time I was there in 2013, but skipped this year. I am new to mobile, but not new to affiliate marketing in general. (Also did a lot of SEO back in the day)
Airpush has generally been annoying to me with their approval process. For example, I was trying to run the offer Psafe - Brazil, which is some kind of legitimate virus checker. I understand that we can't say "You have a virus!" and whatnot, but I literally could not get ANYTHING approved by them.
The beauty of these apps, being able to targeting countries like Lithuania
Small testing amounts, but you definitely had the right idea with everything. Could have scaled it. There's 3-5 very similar apps out there right now, i'd get testing
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