Hello. I've just read your post twice, but still can't correctly understand the idea
Is your "Tutorial" just about how to pick a correct offer, or what? Can you please give an example on how the whole process of content locking works.
Nice tutorial. One thing to do is run all offers and wait for data. You can never know which offer might convert with your niche, so better run all and when have atleast 100 clicks on all of them, disable the lowest converting ones. Well that's just how i do it.
I agree that the network global EPC is not very relevant. The offers that perform best for me are never the same as their list.
But I never micromanage offers because:
1. Even though an offer might perform better that doesn't mean it's the best. Keep in mind that on the content locker there are more offers and users might prefer other ones. You can see that based on the actual clicks on the offers. To be more detailed, an offer might have a better EPC than the others, but the people interested in it might be fewer than the others. If the others didn't have other options the global performance might be worst. So I think it's better to keep a mix of them.
A better test would be to use group of offers and see which group earns more money. I don't think there's a way to predict how the interaction between them would be based on individual data of each.
2. I use content locker with mostly free organic traffic and it would be too much work to micromanage every country. Making a test with groups is hard as well because conversions sometimes varies from day to day so you can't get a clear idea on earnings.
I noticed that the networks do a pretty good job at optimizing what offers to use based on each day's performance. But sometimes they use a very bad offer that stands out from the rest and you should definitely remove it.