Mobile - Journey to my first success story! (10)
Hi all,
So this is my second follow along. My first one kinda died because I got really busy with my day job (I was working from 8.30am - 11pm every Mon - Fri) so I decided to take a break from running campaigns during that time. Figured that it wouldn't be wise for me to run anything if I didn't have time to maintain it.
However, one good thing came out of that nightmare - I realized how much I hate working my corporate job and that the only way I would be able to be truly happy is to succeed doing AM so that I can be my own boss where I decide my own future and how I want to work. I want to be able to spend more time with my family at home and give them a good life (I have a 5 month old baby and my wife quit her job to be a full-time mom..so the pressure's on me to keep the food on the table 
)
So now that I have availability again (FREEDOM!!!! 
), I have started running my campaigns again and I figured what better way to get help from you guys than to start a follow-along! I've been doing AM for almost a year now but haven't had any major success. Had a good profitable campaign going last November but the offer died just when I was about to scale.
All in all, I think I've 'invested' (I'm trying to be positive by using the word 'invested' instead of 'lost') about $4k since I first started. And these are my goals:
End of Feb: $25 profit/day
End of Mar: $50 profit/day
End of Apr: $100 profit/day
End of May: $200 profit/day
...you guys can see where this is going. I am taking baby steps but I want to double my profit by the end of each month.
So what am I running?
Vertical: Pin submits
Traffic type: Pop/redirect (Why am I not doing banners? Because I want one less variable I need to test. I want to focus on angles and LP design first, and once I am good at those - I will move on to banners).
I just started running 6 campaigns across 4 geos. They are all the same type of offer and I am running the same angles across all of them. The purpose of this is because I want to see which angle works best across different geos. I figured that by doing that, I would be able to know which one has more potential to scale once I find a profitable campaign.
Also, I figured I'd put a note here as well on what I need to improve on:
1. Removing all emotions when looking at stats: This is a big one for me because I have to be cautious about my spending (since I'm the only one with a job in the family). However, I also know that I need to spend to get the data I need. So here's a question for you guys - How do you guys manage your emotions when you start spending to get data and all you see in your tracker are 'red' campaigns?
2. Proper A/B testing: I think this relates to my first point above. Before this, my first reaction would be to switch my landers the minute I see that I'm not converting. However, I know I really need to be disciplined about this and let it run a full 24 hours before I make any decisions. Also, last time, I used to run 4-5 landers at the same time in hopes that one of it would stick. I've also learned that by doing that, it's like throwing shit on the wall and hoping one would stick.
3. Sticking to one vertical: Last time I had the 'shiny object syndrome'. I jumped from FB to POF to mobile. And when I was running mobile, I was doing antivirus, whatsapp, app installs, sweeps, etc. I realized that it's hard to focus and after a while, the data gets overwhelming and I couldn't get a clear understanding of what actually worked for each vertical because my attention and focus was divided. So from now, I am focused on one vertical and I'm not moving on to anything else unless I master that vertical. And when I say 'master', I am defining it as making at least $100 profit/day on it consistently for 7 days straight (I am trying to be specific with my goals but at the same time, keep it realistic).
I will keep my list updated every now and then as a reminder to myself of lessons I've learned, and hopefully for you guys to read and avoid the same mistakes I've made.
Thanks for reading! I will post my first update tonight once my campaigns have ran for a full 24 hours.
Great thinking. I will be following your thread for learning purposes.
So here are my results of Day 1 and what do they tell me?
Campaign:
Landers (I'm only attaching the lander stats that matter):
1. Campaign 1 has potential but it didn't do so well because I ran it with Lander 1 and Lander 2. Lander 2 bombed which was totally unexpected! I initially thought that it would perform the best because I tried to mimic the Google Play layout.
2. I can't conclude on Campaign 2 yet because it is a high payout offer (the highest among all the campaigns I'm running) so the data that I have is not significant enough to make any decisions. I also need to figure out a way to get more traffic. At the moment, that offer is carrier specific so I may run it another 1-2 days to see if I can get more volume with a higher bid position. If not, then I might have to consider another traffic source.
3. Campaign 3 was surprising! It is essentially the same offer by the same advertiser. The only difference was that one was a 1-click flow and the other was a MO-flow. I would have thought that a 1-click flow would convert better but as you can see, the MO flow got twice the number of conversions than the 1-click.
4. I will continue running campaign 4 and 5 because I only started running these 2 at mid-day so they didn't get the full 24 hours like the others.
5. I was also testing 2 different types of landers. I used the same 2 angles for all of them but I was surprised that my static lander performed better than the non-static ones. Again, I would have thought that the non-static ones would have converted better.
6. As you can, except for lander 2, most of my landers had a pretty decent CTR but I need to find a better way to get them to convert. I am thinking that I might have to (a) add some text to explain the PIN submit process to the user, (b) increase the size of my headline or (c) change my headline. At the moment, I will do (a) and (b) and run them again for another test.
What I learned today?
The importance of split testing. As I explained above, there were a couple of surprises and I wouldn't have known that if I didn't test them. My next test will be a proper A/B test where I will only use Lander 3 and Lander 4 across all 5 campaigns to see if there is a clear winner.
Very good stuff. You're being thorough and your conclusions all look reasonable!
Thanks @caurmen
Update for day 2:
I've paused all campaigns that either did not convert since yesterday or have spent more than 3x the payout.
So out of the 5 campaigns that I had yesterday, I am only keeping 2 as they gave me a ROI of -50% and -61%.
Yesterday, I also mentioned that I was running two campaigns for one offer where the only difference was one was a 1-click flow, and the other was a MO flow. Today's test proved that the MO flow converted much better.
MO flow: 6 conversions
1 click flow: 1 conversion
I did an A/B test and as expected, MO flow had a 200% chance of converting better. Hence the reason why I paused the 1 click flow campaign.
Also, I made some changes to my landers and I noticed a drop in CTR and a 50% drop in CR.
The changes I made were around explaining to the user the 3-step PIN submit process and also an increase in the size of my headline. I can't be certain why this occurred (I would have thought that it would have improved my CR), but I am guessing that by adding the extra texts, I might have pushed the CTA button below the fold on certain devices.
The test has also given me a winning angle between the two landers. As you can see, Lander 1 did 2x better than Lander 2 and according to the A/B test - Lander 1 has a 96% chance of converting better.
Lessons learned today:
1. Check your campaign settings! I made a rookie mistake today because I wasn't paying attention when I was creating my campaign, and I forgot to change my traffic type from 'desktop + mobile' to 'mobile only'. As a result, I lost $12 to desktop traffic before I realized my mistake.
2. Now that I know which campaign and angle is converting, I might have to start thinking about optimizing and scaling. Optimize by removing placements that have spent 3x the payout and did not convert, and start testing out other traffic sources.
Update for Day 3
Finally hit some green! Not a lot but it's better than nothing, thanks to a conversion from one of the high payout offers I'm running. I've also added a couple of new campaigns but I can already tell that they weren't working well so I've gone ahead and paused them.
On one hand, I kinda wish I was back in the days where I was making between $25-$75 profit/day. On the other hand, I know that it was mostly pure luck. My fundamentals back then weren't strong and most of the time, I was just sitting in front of my laptop, refreshing my stats every 5-10 minutes and hoping that I was making profit. Back then, I wasn't doing proper A/B testing and 90% of the time I was letting my emotions get the better of me because I would pause or change a campaign without proper stats to back up my action.
However, the last few days have given me new insight. I can see that my campaigns are getting better because I can see improvements in my ROI and I can now know for certain which landers and offers are statistically better.
Yesterday I mentioned that I saw a 50% drop in CR and CTR when I tried to add some verbiage to explain to the user about the 3-step PIN submit process. I thought that would have improved my lander but it didn't. Based on today's testing, it is proven that it definitely made my landers worst. I did an A/B test again to measure both landers and I got a 94% certainty that the lander with less text converted better than the one with the 3-step process.
My next challenge:
1. I am getting a lot of unwanted traffic that is eating away from my profit. I can't exclude that because I do not have the option to target carriers (which usually happens with pop/redirect traffic). I've tried to redirect the unwanted traffic to direct link to an app install but it's not converting either.
2. Scaling - I think I am ready to scale. Anyone can recommend some good pop/redirect traffic sources?
Thanks for reading!
hey jonmic2k
2. Would you link me that AB-Tester please?
Originally Posted by marvster
http://getdatadriven.com/ab-significance-test
@marvster: I am focused on one vertical so I ran the same vertical (6 offers in total) across 4 geos. Unfortunately all my campaigns stopped converting and after my last post. I had a pretty significant loss across all of them over the last couple of days so I've decided to pause all of them for now. I'll probably speak to my AM again to find another offer to run.
And yeap! that's the one I use for my A/B test.
Hey guys, I know I haven't updated my follow along in a while.
I guess my problem is that I haven't had any success lately. My campaigns have been pretty stagnant with little to no conversions - which is kinda depressing just when I thought I was gaining momentum. So I'll be honest - I kinda ignored this follow along until now because I was embarrassed that I didn't have anything positive to show.
But I'm still working on it in the background and hopefully, I'll still be able to hit my goal of reaching $25 profit/day by the end of this month.
In the mean time, I want to pose this question to all the readers out there. How do you overcome a bad spell with your campaigns? How do you take out the emotional part of it and keep chugging along, and still be confident that the money spent on testing isn't going to waste?
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