My 1st mobile campaign on Decisive (12)
Hi All!
I have done media buys in the past but with terrible results and lost quite a bit of money. I think it was because I went into too competitive markets (adult dating etc.) and wasn’t ready for yet. Anyway, I’m starting again from scratch as a newbie following Appetiser guide. This is my 1st mobile campaign on Decisive.
Offer Selection
I chose “India - [WAP Android] CarWale” offer for following reasons:
• Payout 0.48$ - so it should be easy to get data without spending a fortune
• It’s India – so traffic should be cheaper than USA. I don’t have any VPN or proxy yet but I can see the landing page preview in my affiliate network.
• An English speaking country – I thought that most people in India can speak English when it’s one of the official languages there! But according http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ing_population it seems only 10% of them speak English! 
Hm, so should I split test it with Hindi? But that doesn’t make sense when the offer is in English only. What do you think?
Angles
I researched an offer, brainstormed and chose my angle: “Confused about which car to buy?” – I’m not sure whether this angle is good but only testing will tell. I like that it’s a question. From my AdWords experience questions in headlines often work quite well.
Banners
I’ve used one stock banner and created 7 more different banners. For now I’m using just static jpgs. Does Decisive allow animated gifs and is it safe to use them on mobile? It’s quite difficult to squeeze everything into 320x50. Do you always use image, headline and call to action? I’m testing some banners with just a hyperlined headline. I’m curious what works best.
I’ve noticed that Decisive have text ads as well. I don’t use them at the moment because I want to stick to Appetiser guide. But what’s your experience with text ads on Decisive?
Decisive campaigns
I’ve followed the guide and it seems really straightforward. Decisive user interface is good. No problem here.
Tracking
I don’t use Decisive tracking because I decided to use
Results after 2 days of testing
Spend: $49.64
Revenue: $2.88
ROI: -94 %
Unfortunately conversion tracking wasn't working. So I don’t have any conversion data in
I've paused the campaign. Is it worth to continue with this campaign? ROI is -94%! 
Wouldn't it better to try a different angle or maybe a completely different offer?
Anyway here are more stats:
Clicks in Decisive: 7,186
Clicks in Voluum: 6,235
Clicks in an affiliate network: 2784
WTF? That’s 61% click loss! Why? I know there may be some click loss with mobile campaigns but this is too much, isn’t it?
Banner CTRs are ranging from 0.85% to 2.00% Is this normal on mobile? When I did media buys on desktop I have never seen CTRs like this (it was usually in 0.1% to 0.5% range). And each of my four campaigns has a different winner. That’s normal as well, right?
Leads: 6
Conversion rate (calculated from Decisive amount of clicks): 0.08 %
That’s very low, isn’t it? Does it mean that my angle is not good? What’s a normal conversion rate for app installs?
Were your banners specific to cars? If so, that was a good CTR. My mass appeal banners usually get 3.0% CTR and my targeted banners usually get .95-1.5% CTR so you are right in line with what I see in the India market.
Your conversion rate sucks, but there are a lot variables that could cause that. LP is bad? Offer is bad?
Yes banners were specific to cars.
I'm using direct linking at the moment because I'm following Appetiser guide. I will test more angles and if it still not converting well I can try a different offer.
Originally Posted by cz_voyager
It's great to hear that you are back and ready to kick some ass so let me give you some pointers. (Mobile is a great choice)
India: I have always used english and pushed a lot of Volume in this GEO without any language issues. In my experience it is your best option and my affiliate friends from India agree.
Your offer selection: I personally would not have chosen that offer and let me try and explain the reasons why.
First of all you are working with Decisive and the targeting options there are quit broad. You can select categories and that's about it, or did this change? Haven't used them in a while. You are going to get millions of "broad" impressions so what are the actual chances that they are interested in buying a car or to be more exact to install a application to browse a car marketplace. (Especially in a country where cars are still considered exclusive).
Don't get me wrong it can still work but you are making it hard for yourself.
Some of the reasons you see the same apps (campaigns) all over the mobile space is because they appeal to a much bigger audience.
Some examples:
#Anti-virus offers. (Pin-submits, app installs etc).
The angles you can come up with here appeal to a much broader audience. Getting interest from those millions of relatively broad impressions is going to be much easier here. Slow phone? Nobody wants a slow phone and everyone wants a faster phone. Potential viruses on their phone that could expose their personal information such as bank accounts, Facebook (lol shady shady) ? Nobody wants that shit. The new android virus is causing your phone battery to drain supreme fast but with a virus clean up it will last 100 times as long? Nobody wants their battery to drain fast and everyone wants their phone battery to last longer.
#Browser offers (Dolphin, baidu etc)
Again the angles you can come up with here appeal to a much broader audience.
Speed up your Internet X2 by updating your browser! Everyone wants faster Internet right? And even more "aggressive angles" work like magic such as; The current browser you are running exposes your phone to a virus, The current browser you are running is no longer supported by "Device call out", Your current browser is draining your battery twice as fast, Your current browser is causing your smartphone to run 3X as slow, update now!
The above angles are just some small write ups but as you can already see, they appeal to a lot more of the impressions you are buying. (Keep in mind that some of the angles can get you kicked off the offer, traffic source and even the CPA network and I recommend finding that sweep spot for yourself).
Even games would have a much higher appeal to your impressions.
Since most mobile sources in general work similar with targeting especially the easy entry affiliate ones will also make scaling this offer quit hard. After you filtered out a ton of app ID's you are going to have to do this all over again on other sources and this "guessing" here will leave jack shit for volume.
One of the traffic sources I could actually see your offer work on is FB because it allows you to target a lot more.
As for your CTRs.
0.85% to 2.00% on your banners are quit normal on Mobile but I am a bit surprised with them on your campaign as explained above ^^. Decisive has a lot of shit apps that try to earn a few bucks by sending massive amounts of trashy bot traffic so keep a good eye out on that. Are your banners getting these CTRs on just a couple of placements or do you see them on a relative bigger amount of placements? If you see these CTRs on just a few ID's and you get no conversions you might want to consider pausing those.
The click-loss
Again, decisive has a huge amount of bot traffic and I would say 20% click-loss in mobile is pretty standard but NOT 60% high. Do you know if the affiliate network has some bot traffic filter? Are you seeing a lot of the same IPs?
I had thousands of clicks from decisive before that all came from the same IP and IP range, and some affiliate networks don't track duplicate clicks so that could be causing a huge "clickloss" right there. Obviously the speed of your landing page and the tracking links play a factor but not 60% high.
So to sum this all up I recommend making it a little easier for yourself by taking a different approach. Find offers that that can be used with angles that appeal to as much of the impressions you buy as possible.
^^ Great write up, bro!
Shows you really need to research your GEO
Originally Posted by fishinseo
@70times1 Thank you for your detailed reply! I really appreciate it.
First of all you are working with Decisive and the targeting options there are quit broad. You can select categories and that's about it, or did this change? Haven't used them in a while. You are going to get millions of "broad" impressions so what are the actual chances that they are interested in buying a car or to be more exact to install a application to browse a car marketplace. (Especially in a country where cars are still considered exclusive).
Most clicks are from Premium Android Games app and from Undefined. Why it's Undefined? And Premium Android Games is not probably just one app, is it?
Thank you again for your help!
Why did you spend $7 on Tubemate when the payout is .48?
Originally Posted by fishinseo
Originally Posted by cz_voyager
- The categories are not correct which leads me to my post above saying that you are basically targeting very broad.
- People that are playing video games, I don't see them convert well on buying a new car.
Undefined = a combination of low volume apps/websites all mixed up together that are not being passed on for some odd reason.
No, I didn't targeted any category.
OK. So I'll do one more test. I've changed an angle and changed category targeting to "Automotive (IAB2)". So now I shouldn't get any games etc. If the results will be crap again I'll switch to a different offer.
Thanks for your advice.
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