Waking up the Dragon - until i see Green!!! (28)
Hey people, 6WAMCer here starting his first Follow-Along ever! :-)
As i did not make it to STM London i thought it would be a good idea to start a follow-along as soon as possible. I wish all the guys & girls much fun in London (especially to my fellow course mates!) and i hope that you'd get all the nuggets you you'd hoped for :-)
Apart from participating in the course - i am a complete newbie. So don't expect wonders here.
Offer: app install (utility), low payout 0.17 cent, tier 3 country, traffic source is go2mobi
So i chose an angle and created 10 banners for it. The affiliate network approved all of them, the traffic source rejected a lot. For example these ones:
(these are my non-translated versions...)
I mean, i get why the zombie and maybe the surgeon got rejected, but i don't get why they rejected the small banners. But okay, have to read their guidelines again...
For banner design etc i did not use tools like WRW or other spy tools so far because i did not want to influence myself before trying something on my own.
I added two landers today.
go2mobi's daily minimum budget per campaign is 20$, so i did not create 4 campaigns like suggested in the Mobile Cookbook for now. I just wanted to see if the offer converts at all. I will break it up into blacklist / whitelist campaign if possible asap, though.
My AM asked me, if i want to send more traffic. Does that mean anything? I replied that i need to optimize, before i can send more traffic.
Stats for 03/10/2015 (no LP yet)
Spent 29,89
Revenue 9,44
Profit - 20,45
ROI - 68,42%
Conversions 59
I have not enough data yet to start culling bad placements etc. Will do that in 10 hours or tomorrow morning. What i need to do today is creating more banners because i think my CTR's are too low atm. Would be good to get those up a bit.
(how can i insert images via URL? It only shows thumbnails here... )
So up to this point i feel pretty comfortable. I am a bit unsure though when it comes to optimizing things, so all comments you might have according to my campaign, data, offer, banners whatever are much appreciated - so don't hold back :-)
Finally i hope some of you will enjoy my journey to wake up my dragon - i won't give up until it's awake :-)
Hi Mate!
Another one from the 6WAMC, this has been an incredible course (Thanks Zeno).
I think that your rejected banners are really good 
but go2mobi and specially the smaato exchange seems to be very strict with their guidelines. I believe that the problem with the small banners is the red text (I have a lot of rejected banners in go2mobi too).
Have you considered promote this in zeropark or something similiar like adcash or propellerads?. It's easy to spy this and I have seem a lot of apps promotions with some strategies that go2mobi should considered totally uncomplaint.
Good Luck with your campign. I'll be here reading you 
I guess that it doesn’t seem to be bad to ROI with -68% on the first day. Hope that LP and optimize placement can help you to come to break even. Good luck.
P/s: Another 6WAMCer here
Hello,sieghart.This is alex lu from ucweb of alibaba group.I have sent you many message on skype.Can you reply me on skype?Thanks
@ jjbachiller
Thanks mate :-) Good idea. Will check out traffic sources asap!
@sieghart
Thanks sieghart! I know, we were together in the slackers group at the beginning of the course :-)
Stats for 03/11/2015
Spent 30,36
Revenue 16,64
Profit - 13,72
ROI - 45,19%
Conversions 104
I broke the best Placements out into a whitelist campaign. my problem is: all banners i created yesterday were rejected from the traffic source + my best performing banner that was approved already for the old campaign was now rejected too 
So i whitelisted the placements in my old campaign (and i paused the newly created whitelist campaign) which messes up stats for today, but i want to keep this banner 
Note for myself: Don't get too crazy with banner ideas because when 100% of them are rejected it's all for nothing...
... and now, i have to create new banners again.
Great to see that the ROI is getting better. A little more and you will be profitable in a few days.
Definitely get the "original" ideas aproved is very hard for me too. I waste a lot of time making banners that are rejected but I think they can complaints. Now I send the ad copy to go2mobi before make a new banner.
That makes sense to me! I add new banners already to the campaigns at go2mobi before i get the okay from the affiliate network. The network never rejected one of my banners up to this point, so my bottleneck concerning approval of creatives is the traffic source.
But sometimes they reject even banners with compliant ad copy. Must be a missing CTA or whatever then :-)
I had around 80 conversions yesterday, but like i wrote before, my stats are messed up for that day.
Good news is, i had an email conversation with go2mobi support and now i have all my banners approved: guess what, it's not about the zombie, it was about the battery!
And a lot of other tiny adjustments i would have never come up with on my own.
my whitelist campaign is set up now and i have a blacklist campaign for finding pocket of profits as well. So i am looking forward to tomorrows stats :-)
For today i will look at my blacklist campaign and i will create two new landers for now.
Originally Posted by es_media24
Looking forward to seeing this develop.
Try using less "wordy" words. Like reanimate, disturbing lags, etc. It just doesn't flow well, especially on mobile. These words and phrasings are probably hindering your performance.
@Worldleader
Yeah, communication won't hurt in the long run :-)
@redrummr
Interesting point. Do you have any examples for non-wordy words? I fear i don't understand a 100% what you mean atm.
Do you mean shorter ad copy in general?
hey es_media24,
which exchange are you running and why?
Great banners though! ... you would do great in Adult!...lol
@tim roth
Smaato. Because i was running it with a similar offer in the same country and it was doing well.
@MikroB
Thanks. Honestly, i have no problems with watching porn all day long - but i have no idea about long-term effects of doing that
Speaking of banners: rejected
Stats for 03/13/2015
Spent 28,79
Revenue 7,04
Profit - 21,75
ROI -75,55 %
Conversions 44
Win rate 8,40%
As i broke the best two placements out into their own campaign, the win rate dropped from once 35% down to 5% resulting in less traffic. I asked go2mobi support and they told me, that the system 'needs to learn' how to bid for these placements and will catch up again (win rates). So i could stick to auto-bidding or just do an bid override. Still thinking about that. Atm i have not enough traffic for getting enough data etc., so that sucks
I need to work on my landers as well. They must be doing a lot better, i assume:
So there is something weird about go2mobi.
What i wrote one post above happened also in the first campaign we created during the course:
When i started the first campaign it generated a lot of data etc and i had it break even / profitable pretty fast. Then i broke the best placements out into their own campaign, win rates went down and then the campaign seemed to be stuck somehow, getting slower and slower. Any ideas about that?
Stats for 03/14/2015
Spent 29,83
Revenue 8,64
Profit - 21,19
ROI -71,00 %
Conversions 54
Win rate 11,87%
My Win rate is still down. It should be around 30% but it is not. Need to ask go2mobi support about this tomorrow again.
I have spent around 200$ now for this campaign and my ROI is not that good. So i assume that means moving on, right?
Originally Posted by es_media24
Spent 29,83
Revenue 8,64
Profit - 21,19
ROI -71,00 %
Conversions 54
Win rate 11,87%
My Win rate is still down. It should be around 30% but it is not. Need to ask go2mobi support about this tomorrow again.
I have spent around 200$ now for this campaign and my ROI is not that good. So i assume that means moving on, right?
whats you're overall profit/loss? if its still under breakeven ROI after optimizing and your winrate is only 30%, I would move on
Around 200$ Loss and about -70% ROI.
What i just don't understand is that the Win Rate keeps on falling and falling after breaking Placements out into their own campaign, blacklisting unprofitable carriers and making a few bid overrides. Is that normal? Does this happen with every traffic source?
go2mobi support page (auto-bidder)
Why do we recommend using the auto bidder? Because the auto bidder helps your campaign perform evenly distributed tests. It dynamically adjusts bids to ensure traffic from each site and combination of parameters you target (for example, Site — Carrier — Placement — Creative combinations, and so on). Go2mobi’s auto bidder aims to bid enough to win 30% of auctions it enters.
A win rate of 30% gives you an idea of the value of each pocket of the traffic but not enough to cause "banner burnout" among your customers.
While the minimum budget per campaign is $20, we recommend setting a budget of at least $100 per RTB network to better test your campaign.
Actually it does not. They said that the auto-bidder needs time to adjust if it has not enough experience with certain placements. But the placements i broke out into a whitelist campaign had a win rate of 30-40% in the beginning. After breaking them out into a whitelist campaign, they got Win Rates of around 5-10% - and they still got these after 2 days.
And this happened two times already, with two different offers.
I have set up a new campaign completely from scratch now. Just to see if it makes any difference in case i do not break out placements etc and make all my adjustments in the original campaign.
Apart from that, i have no idea about setting my bid manually. Some info here would be very appreciated :-)
Are the whitelisted campaigns profitable?
I would just up the bid at 10 cent paces and see if more traffic starts coming in
No they are not. Thanks, will try the 10 cent steps...
To be honest, I would scrap the campaign and try a different approach/angles or look for a new offer, if even the whitelisted campaigns arent profitable or breakeven at 5-10% winrate
Thanks! As the offer is converting i assume my angles are not good enough, right?
To clarify that here are a few of my banners and landers etc. Maybe i should have posted those before starting the campaign:
All banners were animated, mostly the CTAs.
I switched out the image with the Battery, so in the actual version there's only the zombie head.
Additionally there seems to be a problem at Smaato especially with the Placement i broke out into a whitelist campaign atm. So maybe this also dragged my campaign down, because it was starting out really good.
Right now i have paused my campaign due to the problems at Smaato, but all in all i am not sure if it's worth it to invest more into this offer (new angles etc.), because i already spent 200 bucks on it.
On the other hand i am thinking that if the offer converts etc the problem must be my bad angles, right? So if i would be able to find winning angles, those should work for other similar Utility App Installs as well, or am i missing something here? just wondering ...
Did you test direct linking vs landing pages? I would recommend direct linking app installs at first, as then you can know if its your banners that are performing badly. Whereas if you use banners + landing page, you cant be sure which is performing badly, as you havent done necessary testing on your banners.
Find out if its your banners performing badly, create new ones, test test test
Get your campaign profitable or at breakeven direct linking and then test landing pages, especially on a lower budget. Banners should be all you need to sell an app install.
And you shouldnt need to spend that much on an offer that has a payout of 0.2~ to test
Which offer is it you are running? As the payout seems quite low, even for a utility app
It's PowerClean, Payout 0.16 $. That's pretty low, right? If i'd go for the '3 times offer payout + no conversion'-rule i'd have to cut banners pretty early.
First i was direct linking and as i saw that it converted i added two landing pages, but it was not at break even then, so maybe it was too early for the landers ...
Banners: would it be good to test ad copy first? Or would you test ad copy + design at the same time?
How much would you spend for an offer like this before moving on?
Maybe switching geos would be an option: right now i am running it in Indonesia which has a CPM around 0.15 $, Brazil has a CPM of around 0.07 instead...
btw, critique for banners and ad copy are very welcome :-)
I wouldnt say anything about your ad copy, as Im not good at that myself to be honest :P
Try to make your own rules and figure out what works for you, dont follow mine or others rules 100%. Just use it as a recommendation.
Yeah i know, that's my longterm goal. But as i am starting out atm i am interested in a lot of opinions of course :-)
thanks
Felt a bit lost over the weekend and had no idea how to continue:
My offer is converting pretty good, but not good enough to get it profitable (AM says i am doing pretty well, good CR), so i assume i have the wrong ad copy for my banners. I was thinking a lot about how to continue best, asked AMs, got recommendations etc etc and atm i feel a bit depressed - but was expecting that and won't be the last time. Problem is failures accumulate over time and i had a lot of them during the last 15 years :-)
So i decided to give my offer another round (new ad copy etc.) of testing and if the performance won't get better i will move on. The problem then is, to where?
I caught myself already thinking about trying adult dating (desktop), or FB (desktop) etc which would be jumping around without getting nowhere in the worst case, so i decided to stick to mobile for now. But honestly, 16 cent payout - in this case - just looks so damn low ...
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