x,xxx/day mobile sweeps Q & A (22)
so i got a few PMs from people who had read my story and wanted to know a bit more. Since a lot of the questions were similar i thought i would post the answers here to benefit others.
in no particular order
a) should a 5000 USD budget be "enough" to hit a successful campaign , if my chosen vertical is sweeps- leadgen SOI (mobile)? or am I wasting my time here and I should go out there and get a decent budget?
that should be plenty. as i mentioned in comments i started with nothing and did it with credit cards. but one has to be strategic. what is your plan? what are you buying with your testing money?
randomly choosing an offer, a traffic source, a banner, an LP, and then just throwing a bunch of money at it waiting to see what happens is not a strategy. the more variables you test the bigger your budget needs to be.
b) I am only trying pop traffic at the moment, I am pretty confused on what a "expected" CTR on those FB styled landers should be 2 %? 5 % ? 10%? 20 + %? - if you do a backscript button do you send it to the offer? which will produce +100 % CTR or is it better to send it to a more agressive lander?
i showed some of my stats in a different post.
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-Page-to-Offer
c) What would you say is a good expected CR for a proven offer on pop traffic?
i'm not sure. i do between 0.3% - 1.5% CV
d) I have read your post on how high CPM you should pay on a Display network, and I was wondering if you have any rule of thumb like that for determining how high should your CPM be on pop traffic? - Example, if your chosen offer pays 1.80 - 2.00 $, would you ever bid $10 CPM?
the same coin math holds true. it depends on CV. get some bench mark stats and do the math.
e) How fast do you kill placements for these kind of offers? 1x 2x the offerpayout and no conversion?
yeah something like that. depends on ctr. but usually something like that. you can always let placements back in later. depends on your budget too.
there is no magic "rule" that is gonna make your camps profitable.
f) I know U.S is a pretty competitive market, which I have avoided sofar to enter ,and I am not planning to do so, I see most sweeps offers seem to be in AU, DE, NL; BE- am I missing some GEOs I should try? do you recommend any specific network to run sweeps that specializes in those?
I had the most success in US. i've tried a bunch of other countries but US has worked best for me. I found it really hard to get any good volume in the 2nd tier geos. i think the people making it work there are cloaking adwords and FB.
g) How much minus ROI is good for you after a 70 USD test on a 2$ payout offer?... Ex. if after 70 USD spent you get -60 ROI, do you see potential on this campaign, or are you aiming for -40 ROI or less?
it would depend on a lot of other variables. what are you testing? are you running the network with a proven lander and offer? how many placements are you testing? i would use the placement rule for that.
are you testing landers? than it is usually pretty apparent how they compare after 10 usd or so.
are you testing creatives? offers? generally you would want to test all of these independently. each test doesn't have to be that expensive. the answer is usually pretty clear. however if you are testing all the variables at once then your testing budget will increase exponentially.
i explained my testing strategy here.
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post223462
h) do you need a dedicated server to run good volume? is it possible to make it work with a VPS? also I don't have a CDN setup, since my budget is not high enough, is a CDN mandatory?
i don't really know. I do it all on amazon s3 + cloud front. server bill is reasonable. speed is good enough. I don't really spend much time worrying about the details.
i don't think about bots or clickloss. i just think about money in my pocket. one of my best camps has 40% clickloss. no idea why.
I) are avazu dsp or go2mobi good places to start with mobile (app installs and sweepstakes)?
sure it works there. i would start with g2m first. better targeting. but if you haven't figured out your landers yet, pops can be good for that testing.
generally it seems people are looking for magic rules and specific protocols that will make them successful. these do not exist.
it does not matter if you test 2x the offer payout per placement. or 4x. you will spend a bit more and possibly discover a few more placements. this "rule" will not make your campaigns succeed.
to succeed you need a strategy. the goal is to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. always ask yourself, is it likely that this variable that i am optimizing right now going to make me a shit load of cash. 99% of the time the answer is no. then move on.
it's the over arching strategy that guides you. not specific rules.
one final caveat. as i mentioned in my story i'm pretty new to this game. I imagine my answers to these questions will be a lot different a few months from now. and other experienced affiliates probably have different opinions / methods than me. so don't take anything i say too seriously. experiment for yourself. see what works.
test everything. especially advice from strangers with silly names on internet forums 
Sweet! Ive tried pop traffic with sweeps as well, tried US, FR and IN.. Tried many landing pages, it just wont convert. May be there's something wrong with my traffic source or offer. Thats the 2 things i didnt split test.
I'm launching around 5 campaigns for mobile everyday is that too much? Yesterday for example, i kept on launching campaigns and creating landing pages till 4 am (was working for about 19 hours) and woke up at 6 am and im still launching campaigns. While most campaigns didnt work, i was able to get some on -50% roi which i believe isnt bad. Im currently using Zeropark and the biggest problem according to me is that you cannot target an OS version or carrier specifally, if that would be the case i would have been in big profits.
are you trying pin subs? those are harder and require a bigger budget. i mostly do SOI.
again there is not correct number of campaigns to be launching, or correct hours a day to be working.
what is your strategy. what is your edge. how do you reasonable expect your actions to create a stack of cash in your wallet.
imagine that stack of cash and work back from there the events that you believe are necessary to happen for your coin to materialize. then take those actions and observe the results. modify your plan accordingly.
ZP was always pretty weak for me. could never do more than a few 100 profit per day in US. i imagine it is even smaller in other countries. there are other pop sources.
it's the over arching strategy that guides you. not specific rules.
So for example you can have camps that test different style landers in the beginning using pop traffic, and then camps that test versions of the best landers to "mix and match elements" as hlyghst puts it, to make them convert even better. Then you can set up camps to test all the best sweeps offers currently available in different geos to find the best offer in each geo (and if you keep your lander angles generic, it should work for many geos). When you reach good ROI, scale to all pop traffic sources. After that, start testing banners on display traffic and scale out to display networks.
@hlyghst - Can't tell you how much I appreciate your contribution! You've basically given away your strategy, stats, and even your best geo!
@other fellow stackers trying to make this work - Like hlyghst and many other pros have repeatedly pointed out, there's really no super-secret sauce behind success in AM! It's just a matter of identifying the different variables (banners/landers/offers/placements/bids...) and having a system in place to continuously improve on each, and then test, test, and test until the combined effect of those variables yields a consistently high enough positive ROI, and then scale!
Feeling pumped - off to set up more camps...
Amy
thanks alot for your kind words amy.
you said it very well with your advice on systems.
hlyghst, you rock!
Good karma is heading your way
whats the best network for sweeps and pins at the mo mate?
Originally Posted by wildfing
i cant give away everything
Originally Posted by omrikos
Good karma is heading your way
gotta balance the scales sometimes.
I didn't mean it in the converting sense mate, a few networks I'm on are pin submit scarce so I'm looking for some with a decent amount of pins on. Sorry for the confusion, i'm not that stupid
Wow, that's awesome! 
Thank you very much, hlyghst.
I guess it also means you don't even consider spending your time on campaigns where the traffic is very limited (let's say 1 carrier, 2nd tier country), but
instead go as big as possible?
Originally Posted by wildfing
Good stuff man, some valuable info in there.
Most networks you walk on to, their top affs are going to be cloakers.
FB and Google have insane volume, good margins and good quality.
thanks finch
Originally Posted by alexlion
Thank you very much, hlyghst.
I guess it also means you don't even consider spending your time on campaigns where the traffic is very limited (let's say 1 carrier, 2nd tier country), but
instead go as big as possible?
new geos, new offers, new traffic sources. whatever it takes to double what i'm doing as quickly and easily as possible.
Originally Posted by hlyghst
Originally Posted by alexlion
mix and match.
Hey, this thread is really helpful I have a question regarding the placement optimization. How to combine it with landing pages tests? I mean: let's say I'm testing 10 different landing pages for fresh offer on PPV. At which point should I start blacklisting/whitelisting the placements? Assuming the 2x payout rule. I would have data on the placements from all of the 10 landers, which doesn't seem really reliable? Should I blacklist placements for each different lander? Or for the beginning I just don't touch the placements, choose 1 the best lander from the 10 and run tests for it again to cut bad placements? But if so, how to combine it with split testing this 1 lander (like A/B tests of the headline)?
i've never done ppv. ideally you would want to have some placement that u know converts at a certain percentage and then split test landers on just that one placement.
with ppv spying is pretty easy. i would just recreate someone else's campaign. do a little blast testing a few landers and a few placements. find a placement that converts. isolate it, test some landers. choose best lander. expand to more placements.
Okay, it's getting more clear. There's also one thing I've been thinking about lately but couldn't really find direct answer anywhere, related to your answer. How likely is it that the lander A would convert well on placement X and bad on placement Y, but the lander B well on placement Y and bad on placement X? I mean - is this split test relevant when I choose one proven lander to find few good placements and then test bunch of different landers on these placements?
I don't have any spied data on placements, I only have one proven lander but from other geo than mine. Following your advice I'd run only this one lander to find good placements and then test other different landers on them. Would it be correct?
How would you go about starting in sweeps?
Basically RIP a bunch of landers from spy tools, test an offer recommended by an AM (low paying 2$ish email submit), US or not US, then select a pop traffic source, fire up a couple of landers and rotate them until you see one that stick out of the bunch? Then do some split tests to increase ROI as you progress.
With a good budget would this approach make sense or am I missing something here?
Thanks !
yeah that's an approach. though pop is pretty saturated right now for the those landers and offers. you would need to come up with something new. or find a new traffic source. or have some special advantage on the offer side.
Sorry newbie here. It seems to me like pop is literally the best thing to do now instead of banner. Banner seems saturated because a lot of newbies are doing the same thing now.
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