Noobie Mobile Follow Along (21)
I've been launching/optimizing campaigns at random for the past 2 months without much of a real method or system. So this time I'm following the cookbook approach with a few differences here and there.
Campaign details:
GEO: Poland
Payout: $3.75
Networks: Mundo Media
Offer type: AntiVirus
Ad network: decisive
Tracking:
1. Research Offer - Random notes from my research that I may/may not turn into an angle.
-Offer is approved as a high volume performer in the network.
-Offer is for Mobile Android AntiVirus software. In my research I found some statistics like 71% of all Android devices will encounter malware. These kinds of statistics stood out in my mind. McAfee AntiVirus predicts Mobile Malware is the prime target for hackers in 2014. 97% of mobile malware is targeted at Android devices. Android malware rose 600% in 2012. Mobogenie users typically complain of apps on that platform that have malware.
2. Chose 2 Angles
1st Angle - Information/facts Angle
-Banners/Lander talks alarming statistics, tries to get the download out of fear.
2nd Angle - Scan Angle
-Typical "you could have a virus" thing everyone else seems to do.
3. Made 2 Landing Pages (1 for each angle)
I registered a website, downloaded a simple, responsive Wordpress theme, hacked it up a bit so it just displays my landers & nothing else. I used Chrome's "inspect element" feature to preview how the lander would look in mobile devices. Pretty neat tool. I kept the landers as simple as possible to decrease load times. My hosting is with Hostgator (simple business package).
4. Made 4 banners per Angle
First time using Pixlr to make banners. Using some GIF banners from the offer provider as well as these:
Yea my creative skills are off-the-charts. One time I had a POF banner outperform of all my ads and it was some stupid thing I drew in paint. We'll see how these do.
7. Made 2 campaigns in
Each campaign will be A/B testing the given lander VS direct linking.
8. Deposited $350 into Decisive and setup 4 total campaigns
1. Info Angle - APP
2. Info Angle - Site
3. Scan Angle - APP
4. Scan Angle - Site
Targeting & Details:
-All targeting is for mobile traffic (not wifi), my aff manager told me this offer does best on Mobile 3g traffic.
-Targeting Android only.
-I'm bidding .70 CPM for these (slightly above the Poland average of .68 CPM).
-Each campaign is getting $10/day for the next 4 days (maybe longer) to give me a first look at the data.
Questions/Random stuff that is annoying me:
1. It annoys me my landing page looks like a wall of text. The CTA is below the fold.
2. In my lander I mention quite a few statistics, so I have a section at the bottom that says "resources" and links to the resource I found the stats from. Should I care about this?
3. My hosting is just some hostgator small business package. It seems to do fine, but should I upgrade?
4. Especially with the factual banners (white), they seem wordy. I don't imagine many people can read that stuff at 320x50 sizes.
I'm new to Decisive, so not sure what to expect. All campaign creatives have been approved and are currently being paused. I wanted to launch this thread first and see if anyone saw any glaring issues before I press fire.
1. Reduce the amount of text. Simple. Be more concise. Long copy often does well but usually when it's your intention for it to be long.
2. Not really.
3. I would avoid HostGator completely. Use a better VPS host or host the lander on a CDN.
4. They'll be able to read it I'm sure, though the banners might not do well. Just another thing to test.
Any suggestions on a decent VPS host for a small affiliate?
Don't forget BeyondHosting for managed VPS service.
They know the affiliate marketing world better than other hosts, are active on STM, and have some pretty awesome tech under the hood.
So after ~ 24 hours of running the campaigns, here's the first look at the data.
Of the 1382 clicks total in
It's looking pretty bottish so far. I'm going briefly pause these campaigns while I figure out what to do.
Costs:
After 1 day I've spent $33.03 on this offer, almost 10x payout. CPCs of .09 and .12 (while being chalk full of bot traffic) is pretty bad. I've managed to make this offer roughly -20% ROI (direct linking) on another APP traffic source, so I thought I'd see the same here.
Bot Update:
See screenshot for bottish IP sorting.
Not visible in pic, but the clickthroughs I got to my landing page were from IP's that only visited once (which would indicate a legit visitor instead of 20 visits/IP).
Also, its a shame
I know that feel bro.
Last time I ran in Poland on Decisive I was overwhelmed with "suspicious" traffic.
Carriers will pool users into the same IP so it's normal to have multiple clicks from 1 IP - in fact it would be abnormal for them to all be unique unless you're running very low volume.
Not saying that those aren't bots, just pointing the above out.
At your network you should show gross clicks i.e. include dupes. If the network only shows unique IP clicks then for mobile you'll get a tonne filtered from display due to the IP pooling.
To determine if they're bots... I would use other methods + on landers look for 100% CTR or similarly supicious CTRs.
Originally Posted by zeno
Bots aside, after doing some further CTR reading on STM I feel like my banners (and lander) are pretty weak and/or average. There's nothing unique about what I'm doing. Gonna use worth1000.com for some wilder creatives to test. Also the lander text will be reduced & design adjusted to reflect the offer conversion page (I *assume* legitimacy is a big factor in AV, so message match needs to be better). I'll post updates sometime tonight.
Lost track of this thread for a few days.
Progress
1. After rereading the Appetizer Cookbook meethod I decided the Polish AV offer ($4.00 payout) I was running is too expensive to fully test via the Appetizer Method. It takes away from me learning the fundamentals when I have budget constraints.
2. Started fresh again and ran 2 angles at a UC Browser offer in Brazil (payout .36c) - one angle did terrible, the other angle sucked too but not as bad. Both were not worth pursuing further.
3. Ran 3rd angle at UC Browser in Brazil - also flopped.
--with each of these campaigns I dug into the data/carrier/placements etc. after ~$15 spend/campaign and there hasn't been much of a gold mine of conversions. The places I spent more at (lost more) had the conversions. Places like 4shared are soaking up a lot of budget and trickling in conversions. Had to blacklist them (did it a little late though). The rest of the placements didn't spend much or do much. Overall the campaigns didn't have much traction at all.
4. Got some data from my affiliate manager about some LATAM offer that is doing solid numbers and it fits the Appetizer bill. I sorted the decisive planner by cheapest CPM and matched up countries with cheapest CPM with HIGHEST volume countries in the data my affiliate manager gave me. So I'm direct linking a battery saver download in 6 LATAM countries right now to see if anything has life. So far its been tough to spend the $. No conversions either. Still letting data bake for this one, overall costing me like .005c/click so not a huge budget burner to let run.
My next steps are to head back to chopping and peeling and do another offer.
Questions/Things Annoying Me
1. I hate giving up on a campaign. I think Malan Darras referenced a quote one time, "its not the offer, its the affiliate." So I feel like I can't do it when I quit.
2. My Banner CTRs for these campaigns seem to be hovering around 1.5-2.5% for sites and .4-.8% for Apps. Typical?
3. My landing pages CTRs so far have been 9%. This might be crazy low for a clean page with a heading, 2 sentences, and a big "download now" button.
4. So far direct linking/landing pages have had nearly identical conversions. Is this maybe the sign of an angle that isn't very convincing?
5. I feel like I'm just bidding/getting nothing but crap traffic on Decisive. It'd just seem like good affiliates have sopped up the decent traffic. How do I carve in good data if I never get to even see the data from specific sources?
6. I'm probably staring at the same simple app installs dozens of other affiliates are running on these networks (and probably have optimized a good amount). Do you guys ever see the power of an unseen offer really rock the house? I may try something less beat-to-death next.
I have quite a different take on #1. Both options are viable options though.
I give up on offers ALL the time, and my method of testing is very "throw it at the wall and see if it sticks" style.
I seem to find profitable campaigns easier with this method, especially the BIG ones which is what i'm usually aiming for.
Originally Posted by stackman
Then guys like you say F that, hop to 20 different offers and launch them fast, one works out and you run with it.
A few posts ago I mentioned a little quickie campaign I launched on Decisive just to see if something stuck.
My AM showed me some 4% conversion rate data for a Du Battery Booster app install (international). I said hey looks good lemme fire this up in Decisive targeting 6 different cheapo CPM LATAM countries just to see if there's any traction!
>>Direct linking these banners my AM scraped from WRW:
CTR averaged around 1-2%.
I wanted to direct link because I just wanted to see what'd happen first before I get into all the landers/angles etc. Now it looks like a good thing that I direct linked.
All in all via Decisive I sent 3904 Mobile site/app clicks for a price of $13.98 -- 1,400 of which got recorded as unique clicks at my affiliate network. Paying about a penny per unique click that got through to the offer.
And 0 conversions
My question is, how can this offer do so poorly? I've had this issue before on some other networks. Send 1k clicks to some silly Du Browser download and 0 conversions to go. This/others are just free app downloads that help people. Weak battery? Download this to boost it FREE. Simple. I guess I thought it would've converted better by default.
I don't understand how this simple install can convert so poorly.
Just sent him an email.
AM showed me conversion data in 5% range for the last week that I've been getting 0%, but also said he'll look into the SubIDs and ask if the advertiser can comment.
Did you use exactly those banners? Because those are in french and italian...
@ricemed
Yes. Darn my AM just gave me those when I asked for Spanish. That may play a big role in the failure.
Updates: Got an itch to just blast out campaigns a bit with direct linking after some of the iffy Decisive results I've seen lately. I'd rather just get a quick direct linking sanity check before going all in.
*all campaigns given all 4 combos of connection/audience placements as well as live monitoring for placements that soaked up too much budget.
1. Ran a direct linking PSafe offer in Brazil
-10052 clicks sent via Decisive's reporting
-2690 clicks received via Aff network reporting
-34 Conversions
Spend: $50.03
Revenue: 13.60
ROI: -72%
2. Ran a direct linking campaign on Decisive for a Gaming AppWall offer
Geos: Colombia, Argentina, and Chile
-5215 clicks sent via Decisive's reporting
-2382 clicks received via Aff network reporting
-1 Conversion
Spend: $77.70
Revenue: $0.92
ROI: -98%
*Gave up on this campaign after 1 day the numbers were so awful. Maybe appwall redirects were a terrible choice? At first I was happy to try out the cheap CPCs in LATAM on Decisive, but now after these losses I'm not very impressed at all with the quality of LATAM Decisive traffic (aside from Brazil).
FWIW, I thought this campaign had my best looking banners/gifs.
No matter how good/shitty I think the banners look, they all get roughly the same CTR. Some number between 1 and 2% pretty much always. It makes me suspect there's so much unintentional CTR from fat thumbs. I look more at CVR to see banners that actually attract.
3. Ran a direct linking campaign on Decisive for OLX classifieds app in Colombia
-1390 clicks sent via Decisive's reporting
-575 clicks received via Aff network reporting
-0 conversions
Spend: $11.34
Rev: $0
*Also quit on this because I'm just suspicious overall of the LATAM traffic.
4. Ran an Apus offer Vietnam
Via smart CPC I couldn't get enough traffic to make this worthwhile because the payout is so small.
PHEW that was a rough round. This isn't that easy; morale is low. My best performer Psafe was still -72% which is borderline "ditch it" from the cookbook standpoint. I had one connection/audience on Psafe do -50% or so, but I upped my bid there and didn't get much more traffic. Just seems like a tough spot to grind out a profit all things considered.
Not sure where to go next. Back to chopping and peeling? Or duplicate these efforts on another platform...
What made you choose those offers to run?
1. Psafe is tried and true.
2. Appwall was just a test. An attempt to offer something different than UC/Du/Psafe offers that every noob tends to go with.
3. OLX also something different.
4. Apus was a high volume offer on my network and I found some banners premade in Vietnamese so I threw them up.
Keep testing new offers and geos.
Not everything will work on Decisive.
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