Road to the Green - Sweepstakes - FOCUS (29)
Hey STM!
This is my second follow along thread. The last one wasn't too delicious as I either couldn't get enough traffic or bot traffic.
I will focus on Sweekstake Offers now, period! Jumping around between Utilitiy Offers, App Installs etc. won't help. I will master this niche and push it to the green!
Why Sweepstakes?
- You can be very creative with angles and promote in a compliant way
- Who doesn't love Free Stuff?
Details about my campaign:
Offer: Win iPhone 6
Country: South Africa
Traffic Source: Decisive (maybe others)
Networks: Matomy Media Group & ClickDealer
Payout: $3.85 & $4.85
Daily Budget: $40
I just started sending traffic and tons of clicks flooded in within a few minutes. I got 1 conversion as well. I seperated the campaign into two campaigns:
1. WIFI Traffic Campaign
2. Carrier Traffic Campaign
My next steps: Collect more data & eliminate bot/bad placements.
Thanks to @Itay Vilenchuk as well! He got me accepted to Matomy Media Group and is a great AM! Definitely recommend to work with him.
Will post updates soon.
Thanks for the kind words pal, i really appreciate it 
Good luck!
Sweepstakes have been doing well for years now, it's one of those evergreen niches.
Keep us updated once you have some more data!
looking forward to this
Day's coming to an end and this is how it looks like so far:
I killed already some placements that weren't getting any click throughs. I will integrate the bot detection script by caurmen soon to see how much bot shit traffic I'm actually getting.
Tons of visits on the lander but very few clicked through. It's a bit hard to optimize properly if you're not getting enough conversions & offer clicks.
Any tips regarding killing placements?
Right on phlong!
I'm in the exact same boat as you and and just launched into sweeps as well, on a different traffic source, so I'll be watching this.
It's reassuring to hear that you got a conversion already!
I'm with you guys as well - also posted in the bot detection thread just like you did earlier today trying to get it to work :-)
This is how my campaigns went yesterday:
Ended up with only one conversion and an LP CTR of ~3%-4%.
I just integrated the bot detection script as well and so far more than 50% of my traffic are bots!
As well I setup a campaign on Leadbolt, bidding @$0.12 (I was told by my rep that people bid $0.10+ which is expensive?). I will play around with the bids as well to see how it affects the performance.
I need to find a way now how to block those bots.
How do you know they are bots? maybe its your landing page and not convincing people to click through? has your landing page worked in other GEOs?
Originally Posted by peterpan
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...highlight=Bots
50%+ of my traffic closed the landing page within less than 300ms which is very unlikely for a human.
Update:
The Landing Page CTR of Leadbolt Traffic is 12-13%. It's not good but better than Decisive Traffic.
I also got another conversion from Leadbolt. As I checked my bot detection script, 66%+ of my traffic are bots (They closed the LP in less than 300ms).
I'm thinking right now about about leaving Decisive forever. It has tons of volume but unfortunately most of the placements give you bot traffic. I will keep killing bad placements though. I raised my CPM to $0.50 as well to see whether I get some HQ placement traffic. For now I will need to create two more landers so that I can split test the landers.
I decided to start with a new angle as this angle didn't seem to work well.
10 Banners & 2 different Landing pages are already created. One of them is self coded (I'm so proud!).
I will also try some other traffic sources out (Go2Mobi & InMobi). My AM recommended InMObi so I'll definitely try it out!
For the curious ones, this were the 10 banners of my angle "Football Quiz":
My next angle is broader.
I think you should check if the offers allows you imply that "you win an iphone" it's posible to ask you to change into you could win an iphone. Just my opinion so you wont have troubles with the payments.
Originally Posted by blackemil
PS:
Does anyone know how to reduce the DNS lookup time? I'm hosting my LPs on a MaxCDN and using CNAME to connect it with the actual CDN domain name.
I tested my lp on dotcom-tools.com and it takes 1.9s time to look up the DNS (from ZA). But when I test the LP on Pingdom, I get "200ms" as website loading speed.
Originally Posted by phlong
PS:
Does anyone know how to reduce the DNS lookup time? I'm hosting my LPs on a MaxCDN and using CNAME to connect it with the actual CDN domain name.
I tested my lp on dotcom-tools.com and it takes 1.9s time to look up the DNS (from ZA). But when I test the LP on Pingdom, I get "200ms" as website loading speed.
As for the DNS lookup, don't worry about it. What DNS service are you using? The lookup may be long for cold-starts depending on provider, geo, connectivity etc. As long as you use a decent DNS provider it's usually not a big issue.
Update:
My new campaign just got approved at Go2Mobi and the angle is "Only for Android users that can't afford an iPhone 6".
Go2Mobi is very strict so I had to make the banners compliant. I don't have to worry abot that anymore
@Zeno
I'm using Namecheap. From I've researched you can't do anything about it. Theoretically I could use the URL of my CDN directly but the URL would contain my first name and last name which isn't cool lol.
These were the stats of yesterday on Go2Mobi:
I spent $50 for that traffic and it's not good at all. Actually I can conclude that DSPs do have probably High quality traffic but you most spend a ton to find them.
I have taken my decision to not run display traffic at this point and try Pop Ads & Redirect Traffic. I set up a campaign on Zeropark yesterday and the traffic is much better.
LP CTR increased + I even got one conversion an hour ago. Right now I'm not Top 3 with the bidding position but I'll let it run to see whether I can spend my $50 daily budget. Will report back tomorrow.
Can anyone experienced recommend me a bidding strategy? I obviously don't want to cause a bid war as it's not helpful for anyone.
Tip: I recommend Webflow.com to create mobile responsive landers! It's free to use.
$50 daily budget reached!
Here are the stats:
Spent: $50.48
Revenue: $17.00
Conversions: 4
ROI: -66.32% / -$33.48(which is imo not bad for RON)
Overall I'm satisfied with these results even though I'd wish some more data but that'll come the following days.
Something that worrying me is that I cannot target ISP on Zeropark. Vodacom is converting very well for this offer while other carriers don't. Actually 3 conversions came from Vodacom and 1 came from an ISP that the offer actually doesn't allow. I expect a lead reversal for that one. Only $8.15 were spent on Vodacom traffic.
Also, how am I supposed to analyze this data? (only profitable ones)
Obviously that is not enough data to say whether the placement is good or not but I'll put those placements on my "to target" campaign that I'll be launching once I gathered enough data.
Your opinion is now needed 
I just woke up seeing all the $50 daily limit spent already (even though it's just 8AM in Germany). Lesson learned: Daypart. I expected that my traffic would be sent through the whole day so $50 are spent for 24h and not as fast as possible.
Anyways, $30 were spent on carriers that can't or don't convert well so I have to find a solution for that. Probably find an generic offer that could convert.
Am I doing everything correctly so far? This is my first time working with Redirect Traffic.
If your offer only accepts a particular carrier and you have no option to exclude other carriers from your targeting then you're wasting a ton of traffic and it'll be tough to get this campaign profitable.
You'd be wise to see what alternative offers you could funnel your 'currently unwanted' traffic towards.
The beauty of pop/redirect traffic is you're not restricted by the content of a display creative you've uploaded. You can try a lot of different funnels and verticals split over the same campaign, see what responds best and then adapt from there.
nice to see you are making progress
Originally Posted by prof
I have kind of a problem now. Nearly all South African offers only allow the carriers "Vodacom, MTN and Cell-C". For me Vodacom is the best converting one. I spent $50+ on the other carriers and they only got one conversion while Vodacom has a ROI of -45% which sounds promosing for a campaign that isn't optimized yet. What would you do? Sending that "rest" traffic to other offers is not an option as most of them are from the same advertiser. Vodacom seems to perform best from all offers. Should I change the country? I tried DNTX once but the traffic wasn't so good there. From 300 visitors there, only 7 people clicked through (horrible CTR). On ZP my CTR is 30%.
If you are at -45% ROI on just Vodacom. Focus on that cut the others and optimize to make it profitable. Every offer is different and if you have to focus on one carrier, so be it! Go through the motions and get yourself a profitable campaign that lasts. -45% isn't a bad start before you optimize.
@infotrainer
Unfortunately Zeropark doesn't have the Carrier targeting feature so I'm forced to drive traffic from all carriers
Update:
Stats from today
I'm trying to find placements right now that might work.
Here are the stats of them:
I usually get conversions from placements that have only 1 available redirect...
I will continue letting this RON Campaign running to see whether I can find some good looking placements.
Maybe test some traffic sources that have carrier targeting? Keep doing what you are doing. Looks like you are getting closer and closer.
Originally Posted by infotainer
I just sent the targets where conversion occured to a target campaign to see how it is performing on there.
Super interesting to read and interesting bot numbers, I have a lot of experience with DNTX and ZP so maybe I can help you out with some questions. As I am looking into sweepstakes as well
Originally Posted by phlong
Thanks lazylobster
To the readers:
I killed the ZA campaign days ago already. The reason was that I could not collect enough data.
I would have had to probably spent much more than $50 daily. Once I paused the targets and moved it into a seperate campaign, I got 0 conversions the next day on the RON.
What I did in the last days was promoting a lead gen offer in Germany on Leadbolt. It's a shopping voucher offer in Germany and pays $1.80. The unoptimized campaign had a -40% ROI. The only problem is that I cannot spend more than $20 on it since the traffic is very limited to the audience I target.
My decision:
Instead of trying to master a vertical, I'll now master the traffic source (Redirect & Popunders). This means that I'll need to find offers that work well with that kind of traffic. From spying I see 80% App installs and in some GEOs PIN Submits as well. I'll retry with a German lead gen Sweepstake Campaign though.
Thanks for reading.
Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns