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Pops/Redirects 101 (A Step-by-Step Guide) (56)

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Part I - Introduction

Looking to make your first campaign with mobile pops and/or redirects? You’ve come to the right place! This guide will hold your hand through setting up your first simple pop/redirect campaign.




Newbie: Great. What is popz?

• Pops are adverts that pop up as a new window while a user is browsing the web. The pop up can either contain your landing page or the offer landing page.
• Redirects are where a user’s browser is redirected to your landing page (or offer page) when visiting certain (“parked”) sites.

Newbie: Soooo.. the mobile version of the most annoying ad known to mankind?

Correct. Popups (“one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit” according to their inventor) and redirects on mobile provide us with an excellent way to promote offers!





Newbie: How much moniez can be made?

Well I can confirm top advertisers spend $20k+/day on one source alone. I’d say they’ll be making a few dollars back from those kind of figures



What do I need?
This guide is going to assume you already have and know a few things… If you don’t, then your first piece of homework is to go learn/acquire what is missing and then come back.

• An account on a network
• A pop/redirect traffic source (we will use ZeroPark, but there are many other sources, e.g. 50onRed, Popcash, Adcash, Popads, Plugrush, Propeller Ads etc)
• A tracking platform (for this guide we will use Voluum)
• Network and traffic source set up on Voluum
• The know-how to build/edit & host landing pages

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Part II - Setup

Phase One: Planning

1) Select an offer
Firstly, we need an offer. Ask your AM for their top offers list sorted by revenue and find an offer you’d like to promote.Things to consider in selecting our offer are...

• Vertical: ZeroPark lists their top 5 verticals as surveys/sweeps, adult/dating, binary options, mobile apps/games and downloads.
• Payout: the higher the payout, the more budget we are going to need to test the offer.
• Geo: Tier one countries such as the US tend to be more expensive and harder to make profitable.

2) Choose an angle
Check out the offer landing page - if it’s in a geo different to your own then you may need to use a VPN (such as Hidemyass) to view it from that country.

Think about how you may want to promote this offer and write down a list of possible angles. Keep in mind when coming up with our angles that there is no banner that the user has clicked on - they’re not expecting to come to our page. We need to get their attention and convince them they want to click through.

Newbie: What kind of landers work?

The following are examples of possible landing pages for your inspiration but would likely need serious modifications in order to be profitable.
I can tell you now that trying to copy these landers exactly is not going to get you anywhere.
Using spy tools or A VPN pro account on Hidemass will give you a better insight of what’s currently working.








Phase Two: Building the Foundations

1) Build a selection of landing pages from our chosen angles
2) Add network to Voluum
3) Add offer to Voluum
4) Add landing pages to Voluum

• Click on the “Landers” tab in Voluum, then click “New Lander”

• Name your landing page, select the country and enter the url to your landing page and repeat this process for your other landers.

5) Create our campaign on Voluum

• Click on the “Campaigns” tab in Voluum, then click “New Campaign”
• Name the campaign, select the country, add the landing pages, add the offer and hit “Save”
• Copy our newly created “Campaign URL”

6) Place our postback pixel (from Voluum) on the Network

• In Voluum, click the settings icon in the top right:
• Click the “Setup” tab, and copy your “Postback URL”
• Paste this in the Postback URL section for your offer on your network, making sure to replace values for “cid” and “payout” - ask your AM if you’re not sure about how to place this.
• Save!

Phase Three: Building the Campaign

1) Gauge average bid levels

• Open up https://zeropark.com/volume and click “VOLUME” and “MOBILE”.
• Choose your source (pops or redirects), OS and whether you want adult traffic, then hit refresh.

• Find your country and note down the bid level for pops and/or redirects (whichever you’re doing).

2) Create Campaign

• Log into Zeropark, click the “New Campaign” tab in the top left.

• Select either “Domain” for redirect traffic or “Premium PPV” for pop traffic.
• Select RON (run-of-network) so we get all available traffic to test on our offer.
• This next page has a lot of options...
  
  i. Campaign name: Give our campaign a name
  ii. Country: Choose our country to target
  iii. Bid: I like to start slightly below the average that we noted down above and work my way up if I don’t see enough traffic
  iv. Daily & campaign budget: enter the maximum we want to spend daily or on the entire the campaign
  v. Traffic Filters: Choose “Mobile only” and specify the OS type, and whether or not we ONLY want carrier traffic
  vi. Frequency Filters: Set frequency filter
  vii. Adult filtering: Choose whether we want adult or non-adult traffic or both
  viii. Day parting: we can leave this for now until we get more data
  ix. Destination URL: this is where we enter our Campaign URL that we got from Voluum earlier. (NB: The benefit of running Zeropark and Voluum here is that everything is done for us. Conversions will be tracked values also passed from Voluum to Zeropark.)
  x. Save!

• [OPTIONAL] Duplicate for pop/redirect
  • This option allows us to create a copy of the same campaign for the type of traffic we weren’t yet targeting. Follow the same steps and be sure to adjust the bid levels!

Boom. There we have it. Your first pop and/or redirect campaign set up and ready to go!

Once you have your campaign up and running, read on for the next part: optimisation.

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Part III - Optimisation

There are two main elements we need to focus on when optimising pop/redirect campaigns. These are landing pages & placements.

1) Landing Pages

There is plenty of debate over what stage to cut landing pages. As a very general rule I like to spend about 10-15x the payout on each lander before I make decisions.

Ideally it’s best to rely on statistical significance before making decisions ( this calculator will help you out - http://www.peakconversion.com/2012/0...al-calculator/)

Focus in on styles of landing pages that are performing the best and rotate in fresh new landers with a similar style.

Keyword: Test test test!

2) Placements

Luckily for us, Zeropark and Voluum make it easy to see which placements are working.
By clicking on “Action” → “Details” we can see the spend and revenue from each placement.

• Again, people have different rules for when to cut placements. I like to pause each placement that has spent 2-3x the payout and is not profitable.
• Placements that ARE profitable after spending 2-3x the payout, we will move to a new campaign of profitable targets.
• NB: be sure to pause these in the main “Testing” campaign so we know which targets we have already tested.

• Our next step is therefore to create a new “Winning” whitelist campaign which targets only our profitable targets (this is a "Target" campaign as opposed to a RON campaign).
• From here we continue the process of pausing losing targets and shifting winners into our winning campaign.

Now go out and TAKE ACTION!

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Nice tutorial, will be giving this traffic source a go soon! Will post a follow along when done.

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One question as I just started this yesterday. I have placements that are converting, and actually bringing in the most conversions, but, they are running -30 % to -50% ROI. Do I just cut them, or do I blacklist them and put them in a new campaign with a lower bid?

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Damn, what an awesome guide good job buddy. I'll revisit this after I've mastered Fb with CB. Need to stay focused on one thing now, this is a really well written and detailed guide, good job. Exactly the reason as to why STM is a fantastic investment.

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Good question - I was wondering about mentioning this but kept it to the basics.

On some sources it can be good to start two whitelist campaigns - a high bid profitable targets campaign and a low bid profitable target campaign.

ZP however allows you to change your bid for individual targets. So yes, if you’re after all the profitable targets you can get your hands on - go for the potential ones too and give them a customised lower bid

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Ruby, thank you for the guide. Would it be possible to list your optimization process for Plugrush & Popads? thank you,

KK

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thank for you tutorial, maybe this can help me

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thanks Ruby! this is what exactly i'm looking for.

i've a question about bidding. Here is the case example:

1st we start RON overall bid 0.003, after running we found target "india-xxxxxxx01" profitable @ auto bid
2nd we move that "india-xxxxxxx01" to new whitelist campaign. What bid should i put? manually 0.003 or auto with overall campaign bid 0.003?

problems get more complex here:
at the 1st RON we increase the bid let say to 0.006 (just e.g case), after running we found target "alpha-xxxxxxx02" profitable @ auto bid
2nd we move that "alpha-xxxxxxx02" to the whitelist campaign. What bid should i put? manually 0.006 or stay auto with overall campaign bid still 0.003? or i just change the overall campaign bid to 0.006 (but this may result in over bidding for "india-xxxxxxx01" right?)

hope you understand the problem that i address.. Thanks so much!

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Hi Ruby,

Great stuff.

I am with popcash now. The challenge is not able to choose which carrier traffic as some offers only allow certain carrier. Is zeropark possible with that?

What's the lowest CPM I can go with zeropark? Anything lower than $1 per cpm?

Is their rep responsive and fast to reply?

And last question, is it straightforward to apply zeropark? Or do I have to submit an application for approval?

Thanks

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- Zeropark at the moment cannot target by carrier, but i hear they're upgrading this soon (don't know when)
- Lowest CPM 0.2, but not sure if you can get any traffic with that.
- Their staff response is ok, anw to get even more, a dedicated account manager you have to spend 1k/ month
- Submit application

Hope answer you well

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Great guide,

I find that on Zeropark it's hard to get traffic from 3 tier countries.

What is your process when you fail to spend your daily budget?

Raising the bid just gives slightly higher amount of traffic for a much higher price, nothing considerable.

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^ Each traffic source has their own algorithms on how they distribute traffic. The easiest way to figure that out is to talk to your rep. Will save you quite some time trying to figure it out by yourself.

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Already did

His answer was to up the bid even if i'm number one bidder on the network so I can win more impressions from their overall exchange they are buying traffic from.
Even on 0.4 per pop... not a lot of traffic.
Wondering if it's the geo or me doing something wrong.

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@duck_noodle - I would use the manual bid once the whitelist targets are in their own profitable campaign. So in your test pool campaign, hit the "auto" switch and it will show you the bid level it's currently bidding at. Copy that value and use it as the manual bid for the new campaign

@omrikos - The only way you can find out if you really are receiving all the traffic is to test it yourself. Boost the bid very high and watch to see if more traffic starts rolling in. The traffic can be expensive, but this is because it's good quality.

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Hi ericchuawc,

You can check out our volume/cost estimate tool here https://zeropark.com/volume/ for a more detailed guide of avg costs/volume.

We have a support team constantly answering questions from 11am-8pm CEST Mon-Fri so any questions asked during that time will be answered fairly quickly. Questions on the weekend will take some time as they are answered on the following Monday.

You just need to register and answer the questions to get your account approved.

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Awesome tutorial Ruby!

I think you should also include the fact that pop/redirect traffic will have an average click loss of 20-30% from traffic source to Voluum so that guys can somehow mark up their cost on Voluum to have it reflected properly. Of course in this instance Voluum will be posting the exact cost since the platform is from the same company.

When I'm running on pop/redirect I always mark up my cost by 20-30%.

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That's pretty sensible.

I would say though that once you have a campaign 'keyed in', you can remove Voluum altogether and go straight to the offer (or your landing page). This can add an extra 20/30% to ROI, at the expense of seeing the data.

Ironically, the greater the click loss on your traffic type, the more there is to gain by running it blind.

Always something I keep in mind as a late stage optimisation.

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wow, that never occurred to me. i'll def try that. thanks finch!

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If you want to have your cake and eat it with tracking vs no tracking, and you're using a single server rather than a CDN, you can also do tracking via log file analysis on your server if your traffic source sends unique identifiers (bidhash, cid, whatever) for each click. That means that you've got no tracker in the way slowing things down, but you're still capturing data.

That's rather out of the scope of this comment, but Apache, LiteSpeed (I think) and Nginx can all log query strings from incoming visitors. That data will include the unique identifier for that click. If you then use Javascript to send the unique string to your offer (as s2 or whatever) you can subsequently reconstruct all the tracking data with a bit of post-processing magic and no slowdown.

It MAY also be possible to do this with some CDNs - I'd be surprised if not.

The downside with this approach is a) it requires some scripting and thus possibly some outsourcing, and b) it's a bit of a pain in the arse. But it is a way to get speed AND tracking all in one handy package.

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Will be waiting for the next tutorial!

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I have put it on my list

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Great guide Ruby, thank you!

I'm too having problems with receiving mobile redirect/pop traffic from ZP... I'm bidding quite higher than the first bidder (at least it seems so), and getting very little traffic.
Tried desktop campaigns and got loads of traffic.. Weird.

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I have submitted my application but nothing from zeropark even I have emailed them with my answers That's like 1 week++ already.

Any idea?

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Thanks Ruby Already been running pops for a short while but it's very helpful to go over all the stages again/make sure I haven't missed anything!

Much appreciated

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Any idea why this is? They just can't handle all of the clicks?

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@ lanikai87 - a lot of the time users will quit out of your pop before it has a chance to load. This highlights the importance of speed!

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Thanks for the tutorial. I'm going to give this a shot tonight.

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Can anyone give me a general guidelines regarding how many landing pages i need for one angle? 3 to 4? and with how many angle should i start? two?

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When i dont put in a lander but only a banner i have to add the banners in Voluum as a lander?

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What's the rationale behind your bidding strategy? Why start so high (relatively) rather than starting from a low number and slowly increasing?

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If you bid too low there's a higher chance you miss out on higher quality, higher converting placements. Hence why Rubytunes said he increases if he doesn't see enough traffic. Best way is just to test, I'm currently noting down the differences I see when increasing my bid over several days.

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Love this tutorial! been very helpful in getting my first profits!

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Is it better to put the winning placements into one campaign, or is it better to create a new campaign for each placement once they're profitable?

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Hey Ruby - great post!!

I actually tried this method a few times, but...

2 things always happen to me:
1) I isolate the good target(s) and all of a sudden - they turn to be losers(!)
2) I isolate the good target(s) and all of a sudden - I hardly get any traffic to the targeted campaign.

Is there anything else I should be doing?

Bid stays the same at the main and targeted campaign.

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me too

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Hopefully someone can answer this question.

I currently have my campaigns setup this way, for optimizing:

1 higher bid whitelist campaign.

1 mid bid test campaign.

1 lower bid whitelist campaign.


I am removing placements/landers after statistical significance that are working in my test campaign and putting them into the whitelist campaigns.
Question is, since I spent time removing placements that are positive into my whitelist campaigns.. how do you recommend I rotate in new landers?
Should I, recreate the test campaign as a RON again, or just throw those new landers into my whitelist campaigns?

I hope this makes sense!

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@Ruby Tunes
Hi, I'm very newbie, just read this thread and taking action but confusing for optimization step.

from this sentence...
"There are two main elements we need to focus on when optimising pop/redirect campaigns. These are landing pages & placements."

Why we shouldn't to consider for other elements, cities / devices / browsers / platform... , please explain??

If yes, Can I use the same rule as Placements before cut it (2-3x offer payout)?

THANKS

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When optimizing pop campaigns, the key focus is on improving landers/placements because for landers you can adjust landing pages a certain way and it would help increase your ROI overall. I remember stackman or Mr. Green mentioned in one of his post that to make a pop campaign successful, you have to at least get rid of 50% of your placements in order to be profitable. Once you found a winning lander/offer, the rule of cutting placements should be more strict. There's no reason why I shouldn't get more conversions from one placement after I found a good lander/offer that converts fairly well. So, when you have a winning lander/offer, I would cut a placement(2x payout offer). Use caution too, if the placement is generating most of your traffic, and your cutting it, then reconsider testing your funnel.

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Hey Caurmen I know it's been a while and it made the list, has it completed?

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@chanlow - Yup! Here's a more detailed tutorial on "tracking without tracking" : http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l-Track-Anyway

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new to zeropark...

safe to assume the process is similar if we used it for desktop?

anyone have experience between their mobile v.s. desktop traffic?

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Great guide!

That's the same question I wanted to ask. Is this tutorial ok for desktop popups? Are there other rules or traffic source in order to set up a pop/redirect campagn for desktop?

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Absolutely, this guide is suitable for pop traffic on desktop as well! In fact, I used to do quite a bit of desktop pop traffic. There's both pros and cons to running desktop traffic.

PROS:
- Don't have to worry that much about lander speed as you do for mobile lander speed. The internet connection you have on your desktop is usually faster than the connection you have on your mobile phone. But, then again still optimize your lander to the point where you can make it as fast as possible.
- The lower amount of competition. Nowadays, people are heavily involved in Mobile because that's where it's still at. And it's still growing.
- Don't really have to worry about the targeting factors. In my opinion for desktop traffic, you don't have to focus on Wifi and Cellular connection and the vast majority of OS,Devicenames and browsers that are targeted for mobile. For Desktop, you only really have one connection:Wifi(I don't think people live in the stone age anymore and use 56k dial up), only a few OS(Windows, Mac, Linux) and Browsers(Firefox, Safari, Opera) to worry about.

CONS:
- The limited availability of traffic among different pop traffic. When I was doing pop traffic, there were sources that were very limited on desktop pop traffic even in the United States.
- Scale-ability factor. Continuing on from the comment above, if you don't have much pop traffic on other sources how are you going to scale?

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Where in this process flow do I need to get my LPs approved? Do I have to submit to both the traffic source and the affiliate network? Which one first as I figure I want speed but I don't want to submit to one if the other is the bottleneck? Just not sure of the specifics of that process.

Thanks.

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Traffic source will automatically approve/reject the LP when approving the campaign. Every campaign is screened for compliance so don't worry about contacting sources first. You should only do this if you plan to add a new LP to an already approved campaign. In case the affiliate network requires LP approval, or you're planning to use something on the edge, send it to them for approval first.

At the end of the day, the LP has to be ok with both the source and aff network, so doesn't matter where you submit it first

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I am using PopAds for traffic and Adsbridge for tracking, would placements be referred to as website IDs?

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Yes.

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That was fast. Thanks lol

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Wow, surprised to see that you're supposed to let them run so long. 10-15x payout even if they are not getting any conversion? Even if you have landers that are getting conversions in the same campaign? Sounds so expensive.

EDIT: Another question: Finding profitable placements should get increasingly harder and more expensive. Do you at any point stop the enitre "testing" campaign?

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Thank you soo much for running through this! Sounds achievable!

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Thanks so much for the tutorial. Very useful!

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Hi Finch, could you please explain how come doing this can give you an extra 20/30% ROI..
let me know
thanks

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He's saying that 20/30% of what you're paying is to Voluum. So if you get rid of Voluum and go direct, you'll make more money.

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I believe Finch was referring to the speed boost you get on loading speeds by removing tracking.

Tracking the classic affiliate way adds significant overhead to your loading speeds. On pops in particular, the impact on your conversion rate can be significant.

Basically, anything you can do to make your pops faster will generally reap big rewards on a campaign that's working.

However, particularly on a tracker that charges per event, you'll also save some money on tracking that way. Probably not very significant figures unless you're running a very low CVR campaign, though.

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