A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins wtih a Single Click (23)
Hello!
I'm Scott, a 21 year old guy from Melbourne working with a mate of mine to try and get a nice consistent income from CPA. Why? I've never seen myself as someone who makes a good employee - mostly because while I like working, I think there should be a direct correlation between $ and effort and I've found, especially in big companies, there's often not. I've got a little bit of experience making SEO sites and working with Clickbank but I prefer the speed and type of work (optimising, testing, looking at data) compared to SEO work (writing articles, finding keywords, etc etc).
I've been at it for about a week now, most of which was spent getting accounts approved and set up. Now that everything is set up and I've had a couple of campaigns running in Decisive. The traffic has been very low, spending about $0.07 in the last 4 days (averaging $0.06 CPM). The biggest hurdle so far has been creating banners, I just don't really know where to start and for these campaigns I've only created 3 banners. MrGreen's article here is very insightful and my next banners will probably be based off of his musings as a starting point.
I'll update once I've got some more banners created 
Scott
I started creating banners with the pixlr plugin for Chrome. Its free and easy to use. I still dont know how to make a banner any other way, but I am fast with them in Pixlr now.
Thanks for the heads up. Does it offer templates for buttons and such? That might be enough to get me to jump over from Photoshop 
Nice start. Looking forward to this.
Out of interest - are all your banners in English or are you trying Portuguese too (assuming you are actually running in BR)?
Thanks Ruby. All banners are currently in English because the offer landing page is in English - I've just messaged my AM to see if they have a Portuguese lander to test that as well. It is running in BR, so far about 80% traffic is English, 20% Portugese.
As far as I can see Decisive doesn't have a direct way to target by language so not sure how I'd split test (or whether it'd be cost effective if 80% of the clicks are English)
Okay right. You could always just throw up a translated version of one of your banners and see how it performs against the English one.
Looking forward to seeing some stats!
So I've had campaigns with English and Portugese banners running for a couple of days, stats are not looking fantastic, but also a lot of clickloss:
English Banners, Wifi - $10.21 spent
125,000 impressions, 2700 clicks, 2 conversions
English Banners, Cell - $3.61 spent
49,000 impressions, 711 clicks, 1 conversion
Portugese banners, Wifi + Cell - $6.12 spent
72,000 impressions, 1150 clicks, 3 conversions
My biggest concern at the moment is clickloss, as I posted here. Over the same period only 1600 gross clicks have been reported by Tapgerine. I'm thinking about setting up Prosper to test if
Scott
Following The Appetiser guide, I've paused the campaigns at $15 spend. The numbers aren't fantastic but I'm happy to have made a couple of conversions of my first ever campaign
Total spend - $26.15
Average CTR - ~2%
Total clicks - 6,159
Total payout - $2.25
Looks like I'll be putting this aside and looking a new offer.
Nice work. You’ve got your feet wet and you know how it works.
Now it’s time to test some more! Looking forward to the next update!
how are you deciding what offers to choose? what geos to target? and what placements?
Im from MX, your translations are weird, the improvement of the ctr could be there.
This is a great approach - however, I'd recommend testing at least 2 banners per angle. I'd usually use around 5.
Why? Because it's hard to tell with just one banner whether it was a bad angle or just a bad banner. You're being sensible by using the same design for each banner, but it may well be that the banner design and image works much better for one angle than the others - which doesn't imply it's a good angle, just that it's a good fit for that banner!
I'd probably also recommend split-testing a second lander for each angle, with a lot less text.
I know this all adds quite a bit of work, but it's worth it to be certain that you're not choosing your angles by chance, but rather by science!
Good stuff so far - looking forward to seeing how this one progresses.
Originally Posted by hlyghst
GEO wise, most of the offers are only available to one country so that's easy. As far as specific geos within that country, I am taking the same approach as I am with placements: run it everywhere and kill the ones that are bad (rather than what I suspect you're hinting at in the target the ones that might work well). If I had more data I could certainly look at targeting specific placements or locations, but I just don't know so to me it makes the most sense to target everything and gather as much data as possible. Plus the volume in my target country is quite low so it's cheap.
@strato thanks I'll definitely take that on board. How are they weird exactly? Is it the phrasing? (My partner did the translations)
Originally Posted by caurmen
you can't make tests when there are important translations errors. That can be the difference between a great campaign and very bad one. I speak spanish and the translations are pretty bad, difficult to follow inclusive to me
Make some changes and test
Keep it up!
After reading the comments from dominaweb and strato and went and got new translations done on One Hour Translations for the banners and LPs, then set everything to go. I also duplicated the landing pages in English and sent users whose language was English to the English page, and Spanish to the Spanish page. After running for a few days, here are the stats:
Total Spend: $17.95
Total Revenue: $0
Total Impressions: 164,930
Average CTR: 0.75%
Average English LP CTR: 0.635%
Average Spanish LP CTR: 2%
I've paused it for now, since it doesn't look very promising. It looks like scrapping the English LP will help, and their might be some room to optimise if focus on the 2 angles with the best results.
Did you have any further luck here?
I decided to pause it and move on to a new offer after $30 spend and 0 conversions (for a $1.90 offer). Perhaps I paused too quickly? It just didn't seem promising enough to continue optimising.
You'll really want to get your CTR higher than that I would say.
That would be the first thing I'd work on. If no one is clicking your ads then it doesn't matter how much you spend - you're not gonna get any data in the end.
By adding new banners, or removing low-performing placements?
It's my first campaign in the German GEO but I agree the CTRs seem super low.
I was talking about banners, but this will actually depend on how many banners you have (and more specifically, how much data you have on each banner).
I've had some suuuper broad campaigns on Decisive with CTRs between 2-4%
Back again!
It's been almost a month since I posted here, after running several more campaigns at -100% ROI, I saw Caurmen's guide and decided to try a pin-submit offer following mobile cookbook main course. Here are the stats after 3 days:
Traffic: Decisive
Offer: Funny Videos, $1.80
Geo: MY
LPs: 1
Bid: SmartCPM, CPA goal of $2.70
Wifi-App Campaign
Impressions: 102,600
Spend: $11.90
Rev: $0
CTR: 1%
LP CTR: 20.4%
CR: 0%
Wifi-Site Campaign
Impressions: 62,510
Spend: $8
Rev: $0
CTR: 0.4%
LP CTR: 11%
CR: 0%
Mobile-App Campaign
Impressions: 59,656
Spend: $7.70
Rev: $1.80 (Finally got a conversion!)
CTR: 1%
LP CTR: 20.4%
CR: 0%
ROI: -76%
Mobile-Site Campaign
Impressions: 25,427
Spend: $3.38
Rev: $0
CTR: 0.3%
LP CTR: 20.4%
CR: 2.86%
ROI: -100%
Thoughts:
Firstly, traffic is very slow; Decisive planner says they have 26mil impressions per day at $0.10 average CPM (for 320x50). I ended up raising my bid to $0.20 in an effort to get more traffic but still only got a trickle. Not sure why this is 
I'm starting to feel a bit overwhelmed with all the info on STM and the web, and I'm not quite sure what to do - should I stick with app installs or try sweeps or pin submits, should I try new traffic sources? The Angry Russian's guide recommends starting with display (if I understand correctly), "If you can master mobile display marketing, the other forms of mobile marketing will naturally come easy to you." I'm aware it's something I need to decide but any thoughts from people who've been in a similar situation would be greatly appreciated
After some thought and reading around the forums, I've decided to pick one offer (Booking,com) and stick with it using mobile display traffic, investing money into testing as needed. I'll test as many angles, banners and landers as I can as well as split testing across a few networks and see what happens!
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