1st Mobile Campaign - Journey of a thousand miles begins with one step (24)
1st Mobile Campaign - Journey of a thousand miles begins with one step
Hello everyone! I'm a complete newbie to affiliate marketing and decided to start my first campaign following the Mobile Cookbook. Here's some info about my campaign:
Offer - [WAP] PSafe Suite - Android - CPI
Angles - Slow & Anti Theft protection
Budget - $8/day
Bid: $0.48 Smart CPM CPA Goal
I'm not really good with Photoshop and fortunately read about numerous success stories of using ugly banners. So I created 2 ugly banners and 2 angles to test out my first mobile campaign offer! It's been 2 hours since I launch my campaigns and I'm learning a lot in the past 2-3 days. 
I blacklisted 1 campaign (PSafe Brazil Theft Wifi) since I wasn't getting any conversions and I have spent more than 3x my offer payout. The wifi campaign numbers increase very rapidly. Will continue to check my campaigns every few hours and post some new stats later.
For tracking I just added Decisive traffic source to my
Working on 1 more banner and another angle tonight to get more data.
Best of luck! I am just starting my first mobile campaign today also. Feel free to add me on skype: laurence.stanley and we might be able to help each other out!
Have you managed to get any stats showing up in
Man, if you could get your CTR up on the two camps where you had conversions, you would have something going for you.
Good start!
I'd recommend being a bit less quick to blacklist campaigns: there are a lot of variables in mobile campaigns, and so going for the usual "4x payout" rule from conventional Web campaigns is likely to end up with you killing campaigns too fast. If you want a payout multiple to follow, around 9x payout is a (very rough) solid guide - but it very much depends on you rigorously cutting placements according to the Mobile Cookbook guide.
I'm looking forward to your next updates!
Updates
- Created one new banner and different angle last night. Campaign was approved a lot faster this time (1st two campaigns took about 48 hours).
- New campaign only had one conversion since last night but CPA was high - $2.79.
- After logging in to Decisive this morning, I noticed I lost 2 conversions (1 for PSafe Brazil Slow Mobile and 1 for PSafe Brazil Slow). I changed the campaign name and URL around from "PSafe Brazil Slow" to "PSafe Brazil Slow Wifi" for better readability with all the campaign listing.
- After changing a campaign name "PSafe Brazil Theft" to "PSafe Brazil Theft Wifi", Decisive rejected my creative stating it was misleading content and the statement on the creative look like an alert to the user! The same banner was approved for 3 previous campaigns!
- Taking Caurmen's advice and remove the blacklist on the campaigns for now to get more data for mobile. Will stick to the 9x-10x payout before blacklisting a campaign.
Here's the new stats for this morning:
Sounds good Laurence, just added you on Skype! I just check
Fishinseo, my plan is to see which campaigns have the most conversions first. Then start drilling into the campaign data to see if any variables are affecting the CTR. Then try to improve CTR by working on new banners (new images or icons and different colors) for that angle. I'll have to do some more research to see if that strategy is effective.
Thanks for the helpful tip Caurmen and following my first campaign!
It's exciting just to see 1 conversion go through! Haha.
Whoops...just found out yesterday I had 3 conversions and today I had 2 conversions. Didn't know that Decisive automatically filter to today's stats!
Answered my own question about why my conversions were missing! Haha 
Updated stats for last 20 hours:
Attachment 6475
Attachment 6476
Ran into a productivity roadblock yesterday. Sent in my laptop for repair and it'll take 3-5 business days to get back. So plan B now which is working off my iPad for the next few days. Will need to search for some web base tool to create banners.
So here's my stats for the last 48 hours:
Conversions - 12
CTR - 0.474% 
Conversion - 0.238% 
Spend - $32.55
Revenue - $3.84
3 Creatives:
1st campaign angle is on improving speed of phone.
2nd campaign angle is on battery life.
3rd campaign angle is theft data protection. This one is the worse performing one.
Plan to print out the reports for the campaigns and start reviewing the data. In the meantime, just going to let the campaign spend up to $15 budget for more data. Start doing research today on mobile spying competitors for some inspiration! Love to hear any feedbacks or advice.
Originally Posted by laurencestanley
Hey, you said you simply " just added Decisive traffic source to my
Do you mean you set up the traffic source on
Updates
- Received the corporate kit for the S-corp company that I formed for AM yesterday. This will help me in the future with taxes and make a solid commitment for the long term.
"Do or do not. There is no try." - Yoda - Joined Udemy.com and purchase a $10 Photoshop course. Lot of free tutorials online but I need to learn the fundamentals faster. I think it's a good investment.
- Signed up with oDesk and posted a job listing for banner ad design. I need to find 1-2 reliable designers to quickly push out banners. They will be working on the nice banners while I'll be doing the ugly banners as I learn more about Photoshop.
My goal is to focus on speed of implementation when ideas come up and to be able to launch quickly to test.
In Progress
- Set up a company bank account
- Research on different credit cards and travel hacking
- Learn about mobile spying
Cool beenskilled..added you on Skype this morning!
Originally Posted by Ruby Tunes
I like your attitude and your focus on speed, living up to your name :P After all, the more you can throw at the wall, the faster you’ll find something that sticks!
If you haven’t seen it yet, Zeno can guide you through the whole process in setting up that tracking: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ll-Video-Guide
Keep doing what you’re doing!
Originally Posted by Ruby Tunes
Btw, that was an awesome guide posted by Zeno and Caurmen is excellent at simplifying things with his style of writing! I spent an hour going through Caurmen's and Zeno's tracking guide and everything is so much clearer now. I do come from a technical background so these documentation just speeds up my learning curve by several folds.
Got my laptop back yesterday so I can stop working off the iPad now. Feels like going from a bike to car again! Haha.
On day 4 one of my campaign actually reached the $15 spend mark. Instead of following Caurmen's guideline to pause the campaign if it reaches $15 total spend but doesn't convert at least $7 of revenue, I let it ran for an additional 1-2 days to test some things out. Sometimes the best way to learn and understand is through trial and error.
This campaign had the most conversion and revenue but also the most spend. After reviewing the data I noticed that Sau Paulo had the most clicks but poor conversion rates. My CPA for it was $4.97, so it was quickly blacklisted.
Attachment 6584
Also sorted by total spend and blacklisted location that had a high spend but no conversions.
Attachment 6585
Another area I noticed is that most of my conversions were from Android 4.x + so I'm thinking of blacklisting all ads below version 4.x.
Attachment 6586
View the time span of when most of my conversions occur which is from 9:00 through 23:00 Eastern time.
Attachment 6587
Updated my ad time day part. Is there a faster way to do this instead of selecting each time slot individually?
Attachment 6588
After all these changes, by the end of day 5. I had the most conversions (13) and CTR has gone up to 1.48% but my conversion rate was terrible at 0.264%. Perhaps there was more click through since it was on a Friday.
Attachment 6589
That campaign was eventually paused on Day 7. I let the rest of the campaigns run through the next few days waiting for another one to reach $15 total spend.
Attachment 6590
Just wanted to share with you guys my thought process and my test so far. Now that I got my laptop back, going to create 2-3 more creatives for the angles that had the most conversions so far and test some more.
I can relate to you there, I often have to remind myself to take action and stop being a perfectionist and prioritising finishing essential tasks!
Your attachments didn’t work so I’m unsure on your stats at the moment. I upload my pics on imgur and find that works well
Firstly I would say perhaps don’t always be too quick to cull some things e.g. Sao Paulo which has the biggest population in Brazil and therefore is a good chunk of your traffic. I would focus smaller first e.g. placements. This also goes for day parting. I would definitely not focus on day parting before you’ve even run one week. It requires a good amount of stats for you to be sure about this.
Also, assumptions do not always work, as sometimes things really don’t make sense in AM. One random low Android model may actually be a top converter.
Good work so far! Keep testing and keeping us updated!!
Updates
- I created 2 more banners yesterday. Clone the previous campaigns and just added new banners
- Ready to launch. Check my email in the afternoon and found out F5Media drop my offer payout by 45%. Decided to pause all my campaigns.
- Got the company EIN (employer identification number) from IRS
- Filed election for small business corp (it's a S-corp)
In Progress
- Setting up a business banking account today
- Narrow down to 3 companies for business credit card. Going to apply for one today.
One of the books that I've read and found extremely helpful was Getting Results the Agile Way. A core concept was called the Rule of 3s which helps for people like us where everything seems important. I use to feel my high expectations and quality was a badge of honor, but I realized as I got older that mindset limits my output and results.
Anyways, back to the campaign info.
Think there is a bug somewhere, initially after attaching the files I can see a small thumbnail and view the image when I click on it. Maybe it's when I try to edit or view in Go Advanced mode, the thumbnail disappears and display the "Attachment xxxx" text. Unfortunately, I deleted the images after uploading to STM. I'll try imgur next time!Sorry for the newbie questions Ruby, what's placements? I thought placements was originally location or geo. Thanks for the feedback here, I'm logging these tips into my daily campaign journal. Would you say an ideal mobile campaign should be run for 7-10 business days before data mining and tweaking things? Need some advice from experience marketers - when your offer payout gets cut dramatically and you're still not close to break even; is it best to find another offer or continue to focus, test and find a way to break even?? Felt like I was getting closer and improving daily but that kind of drop is difficult!
Also for beginners, what's the recommended number of concurrent offers to tackle? 2 or 3? I noticed that it takes awhile to collect adequate data to see how a campaign really performs.
By placement I mean the sites/apps that your ad is shown on. You’ll find these under the “Apps” and “Sites” tabs in your live reports.
There are hundreds of these apps and sites, some will work, a lot won’t. It’s all about picking out the gems that do.
I wouldn’t touch geo/location to start with. Think about it like this… Your OVERALL campaign data when you start out will look crap - you may be achieving a $2 CPA on a 20c offer (getting one conversion for every $2 spent). This will mean that “Brazil” will have a $2 CPA and will look crap. But actually, there may be gems within Brazil that are working. E.g. people in Brazil that are on xxxxxxx.com may be converting like crazy. If from your data you go and pause Brazil, you’ll lose all those people in Brazil that were on xxxxxx.com. So you want to look a lot closer and see what’s actually working/not working within the data as there are so many variables within (apps, sites, os’ etc).
I wouldn’t say you look at data according to how long it has run for (unless you’re looking at day parting). It’s about how MUCH data you’ve got. If you follow Caurmen’s guide he suggests $15 spend for a low payout offer campaign to check for potential and a 3x the payout rule for culling placements (sites/apps).
Yes that sucks about the payout cut - you could look to other networks and see if they have the same offer also so you could just rotate that in instead.
Regarding the amount of offers/campaigns to test - this is totally up to you and how much you can throw at it. The more the better! But especially when you’re learning keep it to an amount that you know you can handle (not forgetting what is what and being able to spend adequate time looking at/interpreting data).
No such thing as silly questions - we were all newbies as some stage
Any other questions fire away! Keep the work up!
Ruby, thanks for sharing your thoughts! Looking over my campaign data there seems to be a lot under Undefined for Apps / Sites. I'll remove the geo/location blacklist and day parting, review the data for the campaigns that has the most data and check my placements.
I'm going to relaunch those campaigns and set up
Nice work
Can’t remember if you’ve already got landing pages in the mix? If not, these could be good to test now you’ll have
Looking forward to the next update!
I'm currently looking into a problem with
My goal was to improve my current CTR first before I incorporate landing pages to improve conversion. Or is it better practice to create landing pages for all mobile campaigns? I'll start looking into JQuery mobile documentation today.
Did a quick search on STM and found a follow along thread post that answered my question.
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...+visits+clicks
Originally Posted by kepe95
Yeah when you’re direct linking it just shows them as visits, clicks are just for when you’re using a landing page.
Looking forward to seeing some stats!
Updates
- Decided to go with a Chase Ink Plus business card. So I went to a local branch and applied for the card, they waived the first year annual fees. Here's the promo: http://thepointsguy.com/2015/05/6000...-for-ink-cash/. Once they mail me the card I can setup a web host.
- Contacted my account representative for WhatRunsWhere after the trial period. She offered a 1st month discount for signing up which I will most likely do after seeing the importance of this tool through the forum tutorials.
- Not getting much applicants for my oDesk job post for a banner designer, so going to make some changes on my job post today.
- For web hosting, I narrowed it down to Bluehost, WireTree, LiquidWeb or Rackspace. Need to do more research to decide on what's most cost effective with the fastest hardware for my usage.
Even though this is a follow-along campaign, I still like to share my updates about the admin and business set up. I don't view AM as a sprint but a marathon, so it's good to build a solid foundation or base first.
After Ruby Tunes suggested using landing pages, I started doing more reading and research on mobile landing pages. It seems that speed plays a HUGE factor on conversion rates so I'm planning to use HTML5 and CSS3, also exclude using JQuery libraries if I can and stick to good old Javascript. Only issue I need to do more research on is if HTML5 and CSS3 is compatible with most of the mobile browsers. From what I see, most of the landing pages can be handle with just the client side javascript, HTML and CSS. In the event that I would need something to be dynamically handled on the server side; I will use Ruby / Python. Going to look for a plug in for Sublime Text 2 where I can preview a web page quickly like in Visual Studio .NET. Then sign up with BrowserStack Live subscription plan (unless someone knows of a good alternative that is cheaper?).
Whenever we create a report in Decisive and an offer payout changes, that throws off the revenue or profit numbers for old data. How are you guys handling this? Log this down daily in a spreadsheet to keep track?
After re-launching one campaign to test out if
So for
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