Startapp Bot traffic - experience? (13)
Hey STMers!
hope you guys returned safe home from London, it was one of my Goals to attend there but I could not reach it
I have mainly been doing pops and redirects with app installs since August with some little success here and there, nothing huge thou .... due to app installs regulations I have started getting my feet wet on display, and I think I have encountered one common problem : Bots :eek...
I have changed verticals since then and moved to Sweeps, leadgen (mobile)
Correct me if I am Wrong
While i think my Banners CTRs are great in Startapp
test1
test2
my Landing page CTRs seem to be really really fucked up, the lander works good, tested in different mobiles, tested in browsersstack as well, and used to run it on Facebook before they shut my account down with an amazing 50 - 70 % CTR
FB Results
more FB CTRs with the same lander style
now see my results on Lander CTR on Startapp
Startapp Results
on my First test i had 3% CTR, and i did some tweaks to make it better, i need at least 10-15 % CTR... added exit pop up, added back button redirect, which has given me some conversions already, added countdown, added social proof, the lander is GOOD.. and the second test turned out to be even worse at 2 % CTR..
the difference is HUGE, one could say it's because of FB targetting options which I'd partially agree with, but I am doing a pretty broad angle, kind of IQ Quiz thing, and in theory banners are being clicked through, which should mean they show interest in the quiz, unless 100 % of the are clicks by mistake, which I don't think so since they are interstitials because that's where they have more traffic..... so my question is why aren't they going through the lander then?
Do you guys have any experience with Startpp traffic? any help?
thanks!
it's been a couple of days where I feel I don't wanna do anything, kinda burnt out, but it's good read STM and get my ass to work again!
In my opinion, Startapp traffic is about 30% bots
I just experienced almost the same landing page CTR and conversion rate as you with sweepstakes on Startapp traffic. Then switched to DSP - same thing, only now on top of that problem a lot of my budget is eaten by zero click placements at DSP, as on DSP we pay for impressions.
I also think that both these problems are mostly due to bots.
Anyway, the only solution to this problem I see is to throw as much money as we can at the traffic source, gather conversions and then blacklist placements that are not profitable. I am sure that the amount of bots as well as demographics is different on each placement so some might be profitable for you while others are not.
hmm , that kind of sucks, how do ad networks allow their publishers do that? it's kinda fraudulent practice in my opinion
anyone else have more experience in startapp? I am considering getting my pending funds there back, since so many BOTs
Hey guillermo, that's not exactly what I recommend for you to do. What you should do is create a separate whitelist campaign, in which you put only those placements that are profitable for you in the first campaign. Keep running the original campaign with transfered placements blacklisted, gathering data on new placements with not a large budget and open the budget on the whitelist campaign.
Also your CPV is pretty high, try 320x50 banners - since you are paying for clicks anyway, there is no reason for chasing high ctr interstitials. Minumum bid is 0.02 i think, so right now you are paying 4 times higher.
thanks Katim!
thing is their minimum CPC for Australia is 0.07, and at first I tried 320x50, but the majority of their traffic is intersitial, I contacted them and ask em that question, no 0.02 possible 
I am following your advice with the whitest campaign, and will continue to run the other one...
what i don't like about startapp though, is that if your CPC is 0.07 ( which is the minimum for AU) they only let you set a minimum day budget of 70 $
same if your CPC is 0.05, you can only set a minimum of 50 $ .....
did you manage to make startapp profitable for you?
thanks!
I just started with it same as you. Only in DE, here the minimum bid is 0.02. On any dsp AU traffic is pretty expensive.
But traffic quality is pretty decent with startapp.
So to answer your question - not yet profitable, gathering data, and I am split testing a lot of things. When I cut the bad stuff probably it will be profitable. I will write here when this happens so that you know it worked.
The problem I had with StartApp was the huge click loss I was getting there.
I was losing like $30 out of each $100 spent, which to me is just unacceptable and makes it hard to get a campaign profitable.
I see you're running interstitials, but from my experience it's very lq traffic and mostly misclicks. I had the best results with 320x50 banners.
hey Kati, did you manage to make Startapp work for you?
From my experience the most of interstitials clicks on Startapp are by mistake. Because it's hard for user to close it and he just clicks on ads.
There are a few very shady pubs on Startapp. They have Appwalls and they buy traffic to these app walls from pop networks
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