Ex-Poker, Startup guy from Vienna going into AM - Mobile app installs (25)
Ex-Poker, Startup guy from Vienna going into AM - Mobile app installs
What's up STM community? 
A short intro about myself; my name is Manu, I'm 24 year old. I've been living in Vienna for the past 2.5 years, moved from Romania (home country) to start a company with some people I knew. It was with ups and downs like all companies have, and in May came the time to look for more, new business opportunities. Before moving to Vienna I used to play poker for a living and got in touch with a good number of players, one of which was Rio, member of STM too. We've kept in touch quite regularly and I followed his AM progress from a distance. When I talked to him about business, of course he suggested AM and, since I had an idea of what it can do, I just jumped right in.
I've been through The Appetiser, read other mobile related topics, follow alongs, looked through different newbie guides, etc. I launched my first campaign as soon as I got approved on an affiliate network and traffic source (Avazu and Decisive; F5 are not taking applicant at the moment). For this follow along, I will post brief results and A LOT of questions. I am not very interested in the results per se, but I want to progress in relevant knowledge. Coming from poker, I know short term results can be very deceiving. I still got a nice kick from my first conversion though, it meant that Decisive, Avazu and 
.
The campaign I am running is an entertainment mobile app, CPI. It's at -80% ROI, but I have learnt:a) how to launch a new campaign faster and b) small changes can have a visible effect.
I will have a questions section for each of my posts here. I saw the community is very helpful with that so I will try to use this follow along to the max The questions are not in a specific order, they are just things that come to mind that I couldn't find an answer to, or that I want more opinions on.
Questions sections:
1. What are 3-5 good questions to ask a new affiliate manager, especially when you are not an established affiliate marketer?
2. What is a reasonably significant sample of impressions to trust the CTR and CR stats for mobile banners? I checked the confidence intervals calculator posted in the guides but I'm curious for more input here, if anyone has a rule of thumb, suggestions to track more efficiently, etc.
3. If budget is not very limited, is there any downside towards testing 2 angles at once, instead of one like the guide suggests? I can't think of anything aside from not being able to understand the data, else it seems like the faster way to test and also learn.
I won't post daily updates, it will be once every few days. Looking forward to connect with more people here. I will also look into Masterminds at some point soon.
Manu.
Rio is one cool dude. Welcome to STM! Hopefully you will hit it out of the park like Rio has.
Hi Manu
welcome to STM, I'm sure you will find everything you need here in order to upgrade your game and learn a lot.
I always find Poker very similar to affiliate marketing from analysis of the offers/competitors and the fraud 
, Im sure you will manage to grow and become successful using methods from the poker world
"Always try to think out side the Box"
here are some answers for your questions
1. question 1 should be basically split in 2 ways one for you and one for the AM.
in order for your AM to give you the best answers he will need to ask you quite the same questions and according to your answers he will know how to guide you to the best campaigns he have.
once the AM knows your best performing offers he can suggest you similar offers so your questions should be:
A)which offers have the best EPC ?
B)according to your promotion methods - what is the best traffic sources can you recommend me?
C)What are the top 3 campaigns (in any vertical) that I should Focus on?
2. I am always focus on results so instead of counting the impressions i always analyze cost Vs profit - ROI
My Rule was always to not cross X3 the cost of campaign Vs the payout of 1 conversion, if you pay more than 3 times than the payout i recommend to pause the offer
between 20%-30% there is still a room that the campaign can change but above it I would pause.
The budget for the test can change according to the offer - i had test campaigns of $500 and test campaigns of $10K,
3. Always limit the budget with new campaigns as you never knows what happens when you are away from the screen.
I always used the rule of 3 split test 3 different creatives, 3 different copy’s / call to action and see what gives the best results.
I'm sure there are many STM Users here that might give you other answer and insights that are working for them so always check what is the best method for you.
Cheers.
Originally Posted by affiliaxeguy
Spending $3 total on a $1 offer before cutting it will tell you absolutely nothing - chances are the spend is split between tens/hundreds of placements and none of them have been given a good run yet.
3-4x payout on each placement, not the offer, is a much more realistic rule of thumb.
well when you set a budget and you analyse the results after the test budget is over this rule works, it worked for me in the past and it made me a decent profit.
when there are lots of campaigns running in parallel (over 100) I managed to control them all with this "rule".
as I mentioned there are sure other ways to run a campaign and determine the results, this specific method works for me.
Right, gotcha. That makes more sense!
As you can see everyone has their own methods of testing and their own cut off points.
The rules set out by Caurmen in his Appetiser are a good place to start - as Stitch was saying, make sure you’re not cutting yourself short by only spending a small amount testing something broad (e.g. a banner) over hundreds of placements.
Looking forward to seeing some stats and watching your progress!
Cool, thanks for the welcome and answers so far guys. I should be updating pretty soon, meaning more questions
The campaign I was running got paused. The timing was OK, I would have stopped it anyway, since it was not promising enough. I started another one on Avazu, recommended by my AM but that got paused like 12 hours after I started it. At least I gave them my 2 cents.. LITERALLY!
In the meantime I signed up and got accepted to YeahMobi and Oasis Ads. I got a shortlist of offers, launched one from YeahMobi yesterday and will look into Oasis while the YeahMobi offer is simmering
It's a bit early to say for sure but my angle and banners for the YeahMobi offer are quite bad since I didn't put the time into finding angles and significantly different banner designs and themes. I was in a bit of a rush with other things so I wanted to go through setting up a YeahMobi offer and making sure all the tracking works, which it does.
I also started and finished reading Ca$hvertising. Plenty of hands on advice based on research. I quite like that. My plan for tomorrow is to take what I learned from the book and what I read/applied so far on STM and map it on a whiteboard. Writing things down and having everything in one place help me see the bigger picture. By the time that is done, I can also gain enough data to prove that my angle and banners are a total fail and will try a different angle. I know the appetiser says to go for a different offer but this is one of the top volume offers on the network and I know it's 99.9% my fault for the failure given how I prepared to launch.
Questions section:
1. What is with the WhatsApp branded branded stuff (banners, landers) for mobile apps? Is it allowed to use the WhatsApp brand to promote unrelated products?
2. What are the characteristics to consider for a traffic source's inventory? What qualifies inventory as premium?
3. Does anyone have experience in India geo? Do you use English or do you hire translators?
Cheers,
Manu.
Heyo,
Still alive.
The offer from YeahMobi was total fail on my part but also couldn't get enough traffic for it so it's now put on hold. The offer itself should be decent (high volume, very popular, exists on different aff networks too). In the meantime I got accepted to AppFlood as well. The offer I'm currently running is from Avazu. It's the quicker network with getting approvals to push their offers.
Ran into some random events with Decisive and their creatives approval process as well, which delayed launching for a bit. I applied to push a popular AppFlood offer.
The plan for the rest of this week is to get a VPS, do some spying and also split test DL vs LP on next offer I launch, while also improving the current offer. If I get the offer application approved tomorrow, I should be able to launch my first offer with an LP today. The other offer just started today, so not enough data to update but I will do so tomorrow.
Since launching the first campaign (1st May), I have spent $83.7 on traffic and converted $10.59 worth. Since my plan is to add LPs, the questions I have are related to that.
1. What VPS service do you recommend? Easy to use is more important than price really.
2. Appetiser vs Main Course? Given that I will jump into LPs, and I'm not a complete tech noob, I can handle some more complexity on that side. From what I read, that and the budget are the main differences from Appetiser.
Ran into another unpredictable problem. If anyone can help, much appreciated: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...edirect-lander
Hey hey, good to see you still hustling!
I think you mean a “VPN” rather than a “VPS” for spying. I have a Hidemyass Pro VPN and I think it’s definitely worth it
Yes I also think you should be playing with LP’s. They’re generally pretty essential and you’ll find you should be able to boost your ROIs!
Looks like you also got your other problem sorted too?
Stats coooooming!
Ah, I meant VPS for landers. Spying I used wrw trial to get a quick look and got Mobile Ad Scout for one month for now. VPN also only my list to get but don't wanna get info overflow. I used the trial and Mobile Ad Scout to spy specifically on one offer I want to setup this week.
Yeah, all those problems sorted out for now. Stats will come in my evening or tomorrow morning (CET here).
I found a really great article about cutting placements. This explains it quite nicely I think, plus having a spreadsheet already done is excellent. I know the Appetiser suggests some numbers but playing around a bit and seeing where thresholds appear based on ROI, payout, CPM, impressions, and conversions gives a much better insight of the inner workings and thought process for making decisions.
The article can be found here: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Banners-Part-1
Oh sorry, misread "to get a VPS, do some spying" as being the same action :P
Looking forward to those stats!
Update time.
The current stats for the campaign are in this screenshot.
As you can see, the spend differences are quite huge. None of my previous campaigns had an even spend, there was always 1-2 that lagged behind a lot. It's not looking promising but I didn't kill it yet, waiting to get the 80% confidence using the calculator I linked before. It's an iOS only campaign. The Android version of it I had to kill earlier. That one had 1.5% CTR but 0 conversions. iOS has abysmal CTR but some conversions.
Questions:
1. Does anyone have tips/info regarding the spend difference between the 4?
2. iOS vs Android CTR differences normal for 320x50 banners?
The Mastermind will be up and running soon, I think enough people applied, with a nicely balanced skillset. Added everyone on Skype, hope we get it going today.
In other news, I wanted to get this campaign copied to Go2Mobi as well, just to see differences in CPM, CTR, get a bit more info about different report types, maybe also different conversions . As a newbie, it's hard to imagine how traffic sources perform very very differently. I had quite a pleasant interaction with the support there when I ran into some problems with creatives approval. A+ support. Those campaigns are too early too judge though but they are very different from Decisive at the moment.
Spend problems are going around just now - they can be really frustrating.
The usual approach I'd take is two-fold:
1) Try pushing your CPA goal up for the things that are under-spending. Decisive's SmartCPM seems to be, well, not always that smart about how it spends, and seems to err on the side of "don't spend too much cash".
2) If it's still not working, flip over to regular CPM and just keep boosting your bid until the traffic starts flowing in.
Hope that helps!
Yep, thanks caurmen, I will try that too.
Funny story regarding bids: One of our projects in the company is a mobile advertising network (it never really took off, now paused) and we wanted to implement a 'smart bid'. We never got to testing it in production and it was never what you would call that smart. I'm too much of a noob in that to know specific reasons but to really make it smart, you need quite some maths skills.
Hello hello
I have been spending more time launching and testing than on the forums. The previous offer I tested was not promising enough so I switched. The mastermind is also up and running, will be interesting to see how that develops as well.
Not sure how much I will keep this follow along going actually. I don't have any motivation problems, I am 24/7 on affiliate marketing now. I still read and re-read good articles/books. The follow along thread hasn't seem to be worth the time investment so far. Launching a different angle, geo, optimizing/testing seems to be much more productive than updating in here :P
I didn't add the question section before but something came to mind.
Decisive bidding seems to be very strange. Many have reported problems when using smartCPM that they don't get enough traffic. I switched to manual bidding to try to fix that. Then there's a different problem that appears. In the 1st minute of launching a campaign, Decisive spends like 25% of the daily budget. Is there a way to fix that? Is that normal on other sources (shouldn't be, and it's a sign of very poor programming and not enough testing, quite a red flag for me)?
Buna Ziua! (Romania is fabulous. I loved Brasov.)
Figured I would chime in for bidding questions. Smart CPM is fairly conservative as Caurmen says. It will try and match your CPA goal and will not look at new placements if it is too restricted. It needs an exploratory period.
For manual CPM you might be running into the quick spend on the Daily Limit because it goes from midnight to midnight EST so if you start at 11pm EST it thinks it needs to spend fairly quickly. Or the other alternative is that your targetings are very wide open.
Final note: I saw that you mentioned What's App. We don't allow any What's App because of the incredibly aggressive cloaking we saw people use when they ran it. It made sense for us maintaining our traffic partnerships to avoid it.
Please let me know if you have any more questions and I will pm you my Skype too.
It wasn't evening EST, it was closer to noon or early morning. It also wasn't a single occurence, it happened a few times already. The amount of money was small of course, a few dollars, but the percentage spent from the daily budget and the number of impressions bought is huge in such a small period of time.
I remember when lookin for a pacing algorithm that there was a version that needed past data and if it didn't have said past data, it just spewed out many big bids initially so it gets that data. What happens on Decisive with flat CPM, or at least what happened to me, seems very similar to that.
I added you on Skype, we can chat there more when you are around. Thanks for stopping by to help!
2. Appetiser vs Main Course? Given that I will jump into LPs, and I'm not a complete tech noob, I can handle some more complexity on that side. From what I read, that and the budget are the main differences from Appetiser.
if you are asking this, it means u need to use the appetiser first. get started, get used to the way things work, and then move in deeper.
and on offer pausing, that is part of the trade, many new offers you work on will get paused, but those that dont, makes up for it
What's up everyone!
This thread almost dropped off the 2nd page of the Follow Along section
Although I haven't updated, I've been very focused on the offer that showed potential and making it work. I went through probably like 100 banners, 6-7 landers, 3 copies but now it reached the point where it was profitable for the past 3 days. The offer also got paused mid-way, then there were new things added to the compliance rules. Other small issues in between as well, hard to list all of them. The reason I'm mentioning all this is that one of the purposes of a follow along is to show us newbies how the actual process goes. There are problems we expect but there will also be many problems we don't expect. It happens to everybody so it's not unlucky if you have many issues.
I will not update this as a follow along at all. My time is definitely spent better in talking to others and looking through threads that talk a topic I'm interested in at the time. I will also start posting more and try to help with my limited experience. If you read this and want to get in touch, shoot me a PM and we can chat. Would be glad to help you!
Manu.
Guess we'll just have to wait for your Success Story post!
Originally Posted by manusit
This thread almost dropped off the 2nd page of the Follow Along section
Although I haven't updated, I've been very focused on the offer that showed potential and making it work. I went through probably like 100 banners, 6-7 landers, 3 copies but now it reached the point where it was profitable for the past 3 days. The offer also got paused mid-way, then there were new things added to the compliance rules. Other small issues in between as well, hard to list all of them. The reason I'm mentioning all this is that one of the purposes of a follow along is to show us newbies how the actual process goes. There are problems we expect but there will also be many problems we don't expect. It happens to everybody so it's not unlucky if you have many issues.
I will not update this as a follow along at all. My time is definitely spent better in talking to others and looking through threads that talk a topic I'm interested in at the time. I will also start posting more and try to help with my limited experience. If you read this and want to get in touch, shoot me a PM and we can chat. Would be glad to help you!
Manu.
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