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Becoming a Master Chef by Using the Mobile Cook Book (20)

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Hey guys,

I’ve finally got all the ingredients together to throw them into a big pressure cooker and see what comes out in the end. Haven’t done much cooking before, so we’ll see how it goes. Hope it will be palatable. I’ve never been a dessert kind of guy and would rather have two starters instead, so the Appetiser will be tackled first!

But enough of the whacky cooking analogies (Caurmen has done a much better job at that) – let’s get stuck into it:

I recently left my job to find something I’m more passionate about – considering various paths, among them joining a start-up in Silicon Valley, starting my own business or looking into social entrepreneurship. However, I've always enjoyed travelling and being independent, and I find the digital nomad lifestyle quite appealing. That’s why I want to give AM a try.

I’ve dabbled in it before, trying to promote Clickbank offers on FB and PoF. Didn’t have much success; had no idea what I was doing and consequently didn’t see a single conversion.

But I’m determined to give this one more shot, and this time I’m serious about it. I signed up with STM (stating the obvious here), will have a go at it full-time and have set a testing budget of $10k. Moreover, I have decided that I will spend all this money on traffic no matter what happens. If it works - great. I’ll keep going then. If it doesn’t, I’ll at least know that I gave it my best shot, and can confidently move on to something else.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve done the following:

It took me a while to get some offer recommendations, but I chose three offers (all app installs) that I want to start with.

So here we go – kicking off the follow-along:

Vertical: App Installs
Offer: PSafe
Payout: $0.19
Geo: Brazil
Initial Angle: “You may have a virus”
Banners: Mix of self-developed and “borrowed”
LPs: None – direct linking to start out.

Some comments re: offer and angle:




I created 4 campaigns on Decisive and Voluum as per the Appetiser instructions. Switched the campaigns live last night, and this is what I woke up to:



Observations:


Actions:

1. Blacklisting Placements

The first thing I did was look for blacklisting certain apps:



As a reminder, the criteria are:

Blacklist all Apps or Site which has had:


The total spend on the campaign has been $1.44 so far, and Grindr has used 1.08 which is way more than a third. There are also no conversions, and it has spent more than 3x the offer payout.
Grindr is now blacklisted.

There is not enough data for the other campaigns yet because they haven't even reached a cumulative spend > payout. No action at this stage.

2. Trying to increase impressions for other campaigns

The first thing I did was increase the CPAs:

a) Increased WIFI Site bid from 0.30 to 0.35. Will check back shortly to see if there is an effect
b) Increased MOBILE APP bid from 0.30 to 0.38
c) Increased MOBILE SITE bid from 0.30 to 0.40

This didn’t really have much of an effect – here’s the same screenshot a few hours later:



I noticed that the number of impressions is roughly proportional to the general breakdown of Decisive’s planning tool:




But still, it is annoying that the spend on the first three campaigns is so low. Having read Zeno’s post about CPA bidding (http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...te-on-Decisive), I’m now trying to increase the daily limit for the three campaigns to see if that gets them to spend faster. Reluctant to increase CPA further as I’m already close to 2x payout…

If anyone has any suggestions on how to deal with vastly different spending speeds, please let me know – cheers!

I’ll keep you posted on how I go.

Stats so far:

Total Revenue $0.19
Total spend $2.42
Profit $-2.23

ROI -92%

Remaining ad budget: $9,997.58

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This is awesome, im going to start with the Appetiser method today, Only downside is i only got 2k to spend. :/ anyways, Good luck with the campaigns

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ONLY 2 k ? Some people started with a lot less, so appreciate you have 2000 usd to spend , use it wisely . Its a myth really that you need a lot of money to make money ... If you start of with a lot of money its easier to just try and risk more and fail and don't analyst enough as you should have done with small budget.

If i am not wrong another STM guy Smitas had 300 usd per month to spend online cos of visacard or banking restrictions in Nepal.. And he overcame it .

Start Small, Dream Big .

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Good motivation for me thanks

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Thanks, mate - good luck, and let us know how it goes. Agree with globejohan - $2k should definitely be enough to get you started!

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Alright, time for my first update:

Before I went to bed last night, the campaigns had been running for 24h, but none of them came close to spending the daily limit of 8 bucks per campaign:



Zeno mentioned in a post that Decisive's Smart CPM bidding is driven by three factors: the CPA goal, the daily limit and if the account balance is below $50. The last point is not the case for me, and I'd already increased the CPA goal, so I tried increasing the daily budget - first from $8 to $12, and when that didn't have much of an effect, I increased it further to $25.

This is what I found this morning:



Observations:

Actions:

1) Continue work on increasing the daily spend per campaign

Increasing the daily limit seems not to work in this case. I'm starting to think that I need to spend more in terms of CPM to be competitive. Despite having read some information on how Smart CPM works, it's still kind of a black box to me.

I will try the following:


2) Blacklist more placements

I blacklisted some more placements, and was finally able to do this for some of the other campaigns as well because they have a bit more data now.

Questions to the experts:


Stats:

Today
Total Revenue $0.76
Total spend $3.40
Profit $-2.64

ROI -78%

Total campaign
Total Revenue $0.95
Total spend $6.79
Profit $-5.84

ROI -86%

Remaining ad budget: $9,993.21

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I'm back with a fresh update.

When I rushed to my computer this morning, this what I saw:



I had set the CPA goal to an outrageous $0.60 (3x payout) to see if this made a difference, but the results are mixed:

This is a bit frustrating, so I decided to do the following.

Actions performed today:


The result is this:



As you can see, there is hardly any effect and the campaigns seem to have slowed down even further, if anything. However, this could also be due to the fact that Brazil is currently asleep and there is just less going on at the moment. I've decided to let it simmer for another night (i.e. day in Brazil), and then see what happens.

Further action items:



In any case, it would be nice to see some of the experts weigh in here - what's the deal with not getting the campaigns to spend enough? Am I making a rookie mistake or is this normal?

Any comments are highly appreciated. Cheers

Stats

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Here we go again! First , yesterday's stats:





Hmm - I feel I'm taking a step backwards here. As mentioned, I switched to flat CPM bids, but it didn't really have much of an effect. The campaigns are still not spending more money. See picture below; this is today's snapshot after 22h.



I started with CPM bids close to the national average, then began edging higher to include the apps / sites that I was most successful on previously. I have since increased the bids even further, but it still doesn't seem to make a huge difference.

I'm a bit frustrated because, after more than four days, there is only one campaign (WIFI MOBILE) that is coming close to the $15 target spend. The others are not even 1/3 of the way there.

Recap what I did to improve this:

Question to the experts:

What am I missing? Brazil is not a small geo on Decisive by any means, so why won't I reach my target spend? Do I have to go even higher with my CPM bids / CPA goals?

Other actions I took


I'm hoping to launch the new campaign tomorrow, and am yet to pick a target geo for it (just certain in won't be Brazil!).

In other news, I have defined my objectives for the next few weeks and months. Based on Caurmen's advice in one of his posts, it's a mix between monetary and action-oriented goals

Action-Oriented goals


Monetary goals


Comments on goals are welcome!

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I recently did a similar offer. Decisive, similar payout, same niche. I had to switch my CPA goal for smart CPM up to ~$1.60 in order to win the majority of the bids.

I also tried flat CPM of ~$0.05, which also made me win the majority of the bids.

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Thanks mate - that's helpful. Just baffled that you would need need to set such a high CPA goal. I'll give this a try just for sake of experimenting, but it will be hard to make profitable I guess

As for flat CPM, I had to go much higher than that and the best I got was winning ~30% of the bids...

I think my main problem, specifically with MOBILE SITE, is that I simply don't participate in enough bids. Yesterday there were only 44,000 bids, but I estimate that there should be roughly 2.6M bids per day for that segment. Weird.

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No problem.

Zeno actually posted about this here.

Even though more traffic is available, Decisive won't bid on all of it because it knows your daily limit may be breached, among other things.

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Thanks! Yeah, I'd already found that post, and subsequently tried increasing my daily limit up to $25 (i.e., 3x recommendation from Mobile Cookbook), but maybe it needs to be even higher than that? Will look into it again.

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I have never ran any traffic on decisive so I won't be much help there.
I have however ran the hell out Psafe Br. And I wouldn't touch it at .19 man! When it was hot I was getting 5x that amount. It's burnt bro unless you have a solid funnel (very aggressive!) and are just milking the last drops out of it. That offer has run its course! There are a ton of other offers out there that would offer you a better opportunity at profits. Ask your AM and Good luck!

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Thanks, mate! This could explain why low CPA goals don't work if everyone else is getting $1 payout!

Will have a chat with my AM...

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Low CPA offers work! You just have to catch them at the right time. 😉

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That's good to know, thank you!

In this context, I'm just wondering if the Appetiser process is the right approach then: PSafe was the network's top offer, was recommended to me by an AM, and fit the criteria of payout <$1.

How do I know if an app install is already burnt?

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Took one day off from updating the follow-along as I was trying to decide what to do with my PSafe campaigns.

I have decided to pause them for now even though some sub-campaigns have not yet reached $15 spend. There were three reasons:

These are the stats:

WIFI APP
Revenue $2.85
Spend $15.35
Profit -$12.50

WIFI SITE
Revenue $1.33
Spend $12.03
Profit -$10.70

MOBILE APP
Revenue $2.85
Spend $15.35
Profit -$12.50

MOBILE SITE
Revenue $0.38
Spend $3.08
Profit -$2.70

However, I don't want all this effort to be in vain, so I want to learn a few things from the data I have invested in. I'm hoping you can help me make sense of it.

The main issue was that I had to pay upwards of $1.00 CPA when the offer only paid $0.19. Take WIFI APP for example (as I have the most data here):



So, in order to make this profitable, I would have had to (all else being equal):


As marketone stated:
This statement makes a lot of sense now, and a $1 payout surely would have saved my ass here. But my AM declined when I asked.

I would be interested to hear from you:

1) Do you think I made the right choice in pausing the campaign, or was there potential that I missed?

2) Is 1.5% conversion realistic without a lander? Or even in general?

3) Is a 9% CTR achievable with compliant banners (I've had some pretty tame ones declined by Decisive)

4) Lastly, I'm confused that there doesn't seem to be much difference in CTR on my ads - they're all in the 1.60-1.80% range (see screenshot below). It doesn't seem as if I had an outlier ad. Is this normal / to be expected?

Would appreciate any comments from the experts

PS: Next campaign with different offer is already up and running - will update tomorrow!

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Hey Dan_and,

Appreciate your updates. I am new to AM and trying out the mobile cook book as well. I am wondering what happened since March??

Thanks

Chris

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Yeah I'm curious to see how this panned out in the long run also.

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Good job, any updates?

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