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What are the chances of this happening?! (17)

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Hey everyone,

I've been direct linking a pin submit offer with a ~$4 payout using a new angle I wanted to try.

Within the first few hours of launching I got 3 conversions from 3 separate placements bringing me to a ROI of -30%. The best launch I've had since starting AM. However, I haven't had a conversion since those 3. The campaign has been running for 2 days now and my ROI is decreasing every hour...

So did I just get really lucky with those 3 conversions and are they not statistically significant? Or am I missing something here?

Thanks for any input.

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Haha I had the same frustrations when I was starting out.

I'm afraid to say it's not statistically significant.

You get on this super high buzz when your campaign works off the bat. Then it just dies. What's even more annoying is some dating and email submit advertisers allow you to achieve high CRs off the bat, then turn the scrubbers on.

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DAMN. lol

Thanks Mr Green. I'll test this angle out on a different traffic source.

Sorry for the newb question but I hear a lot about scrubbing. What exactly is 'getting scrubbed' off an offer and how do I know if it is happening to me?

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It's when advertisers start not firing a % of your conversions - either because they want to make more money by not paying for e.g. 30% of leads, because your leads already exist in some database, or because lead quality is poor.

Some advertisers and particular types of offers are known for scrubbing voraciously.

You can't always know when it's happening since there are many, many reasons why a campaign's conversion rate may go down - most people want to blame the advertiser and scrubbing as a first resort while being ignorant of, or too lazy to investigate other possibilities.

Generally speaking, the tell-tale signs of scrubbing are days to weeks of X performance followed swiftly by 1/2X performance (or less) with no apparent issues or changes in any part of the system.

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I personally think that calling out "scrub" on this particular campaign is to easy.

3 leads is far from significant data and so many factors come here to play. By calling out that 3 different placements made 3 leads also means that you will get a bunch of traffic from other placements.

ANY traffic source in the world will sent traffic from all kinds of different placements and it can most likely happen that several or one placement is picking up over the converting ones that are sending you traffic.

You get A; 20 clicks from a converting source and 200 from a none converting source depending on your bid.

First of all I have no clue which traffic source you are working with which makes your question VERY hard to answer in the first place.

This all sounds like a normal campaign to me that you just have to run a little longer to actual get some good DATA instead of basing it on the 3 leads leads you got.

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Here's a thought. Run traffic from those three publishers and see if the conversion rate is still viable. Its a form of accelerated testing.

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Thanks for the input guys.

Yea, I definitely don't think I'm being scrubbed on this offer. I just found it a bit strange that my campaign did so well at the beginning and then took a sharp turn the other way. I guess I was just very lucky with those 3 conversions.

I am running smart CPM on decisive at 2x payout by the way. I split tested the campaign with Manual CPM to see if it made any difference, but no. Still nada. No conversions.

Campaign is now at -90% ROI so I've decided to pause it for now.

I'll also try targeting the individual placements like jennatalia recommended. Cheers guys

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Targeting just the individual placements that made the leads will most likely end up in way to little volume.

I would personally throw a few campaigns at it and gain as "little" optimizing as possible from your initial setup. Decisive is in my opinion a low volume "shit" quality traffic source that has been overran by affiliates making it very competitive as well. I mean It's a great way to test certain campaigns but I have yet to hear anyone pulling great numbers from it. (Someone do correct me if I am wrong with proof yeahhe).

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I think MrGreen did a pretty sick pin sub in the Netherlands a while back using Decisive...

What do u mean by throwing a few campaigns at it and gain as little optimising as possible? Do u mean testing out different traffic sources? Angles?

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I would love to get a link to that and actually see which "shady" banners he managed to get approved and which ROI it ran with...

What I meant with throwing campaigns at it is that I would personally test several /banners/angles/offers that would run a decent ROI on several placements instead of just a couple as you won't get to much volume from decisive.

If you have to optimize your campaign TO much leaving just a couple of leads per day it will be hard scaling it to other sources with confidence it's going to work.

All in all what I mean to say is the following.

App developers will most likely choose the most trusted advertising platform and the highest paid one out there... If admob and certain other high quality sources disapprove such app it will most likely end up @ decisive or other second hand traffic sources (lol no offense), because their approval is less strict and they are "more desperate" for the traffic.

This often leads to much lower quality clicks.

So in fact you could use this to your advantage... If you get a campaign to work on decisive without optimizing to much it will most likely do much better on higher quality traffic sources.

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Thanks mvanejik

Correct me if I'm mistaken but isn't Decisive a DSP, meaning it doesn't have it's own inventory, but brings together multiple ad exchanges. So it should have similar inventory to other ad networks/DSPs (provided Decisive is connected to those networks), and the only difference between DSPs being that they have different bidding systems and algorithms?

I do agree that Decisive has a ton of traffic and you have to sift through the bad ones slowly to find the occasional gold nugget. And you're right..it's highly competitive.

Hope you don't mind me clarifying. Just trying to get a better understanding of it all!

BTW, the link to MrGreen's Pin Sub --> http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ile-Case-Study

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This is correct.

Decisive will be almost identical to other mobile ad networks like Inmobi, Tapit, MMedia, ect..

They all get most of their inventory from other exchanges. You can even get Google inventory through some of them, although it will be remnant. Sure, some of these sources may have some high-quality exclusive placements, but the bulk of the traffic is from other exchanges. Hence why you typically need to do lots of testing to find winning placements. If you're on a low budget it might be best to test specific categories at a time, if possible, so your budget will be better spent, as opposed to spending $20 on 2000+ different placements.

You're running a pin submit, so I'd be looking very closely at what carriers/ISPs are converting for you. You may also want to exclude all non-carrier traffic, as the conversion flow is generally much worse on that, if it converts at all. Another thing with pin submits/click flows is that carriers/ISPs conduct "maintenance" on their end (not even quite sure what exactly that entails) which affects conversions from going through. Which would also account for sudden periods of no conversions. You might notice a pattern, other times it's random. Hopefully your affiliate network is nice enough to let you know ahead of time if they know of any carrier maintenance going on in the countries you're running traffic in.

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Inmobi, Tapit, MMedia all have their own inventory which is different to Decisive.

DSPs tend to be more competitive as well, but also hold more volume.

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Thanks Integrity.

I ran the offer only on Carrier traffic, but I did not target individual carriers. I am targeting the top converting carrier only now (2/3 conversions, with the other being listed as "unknown carrier") so hopefully that narrows it down enough.

Also, IF in the case I am being scrubbed, or the advertiser is doing something to the conversion rate, will my AM tell me this? Or will they even know? How does it all work in the backend?

Thanks for your input

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Thanks Adivity.

Yep, I've had some good CRs coming from mMedia, they have some good traffic there but are still a blind network, which is why I like DSPs. Same goes for Airpush. Good quality traffic in general, but blind. Does your DSP contain any mMedia inventory through their exchange (MMX)? Or does any other DSPs that contain their inventory? Or is it best just to advertise through their self serve platform?

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Had the same, even at way more than 2/3 conversions

- Whatsapp wallpaper $2.50 payout got 5 conversions at almost break-even - when I had a total of 21 conversions the CPA was up to -65% ROI

- Low payout app installs - somehow for the GEO I was running for some time it started off around $1 CPA for the first 10-20 conversions, then converted almost nothing until the CPA was up to over $2 - then got a bunch and went down again to almost $1 CPA...

But nothing has been over such a long time period or so much volume that I could identify what the issue was.. There are so many variables, especially as a newbie you just gotta live with it and go at it again and again...

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MM is 100% independent, they don't allow DSPs access to it. Which sucks, because they have good quality and volume. So you have to go through their platform

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