So I have been dabbling in mobile for the past 6 months or so. I have launched dozens and dozens of campaigns. I have learned a hell of a lot and am definitely seeing progress.
The best I have done so far is a small adult campaign which made $50 - $100 per day for a couple of months but now has burnt itself out. This campaign was lazer targeted however and only included 3 placements.
I don't have a huge budget at the moment so what I usually do is run low payout offers and test for around $50 at first. Then when I have some data I start cutting and tweaking LP's and placements.
With some good LP's, the right offer and some testing and optimising I can get a few campaigns to go green like this to a small profit per day.. Which is great. However the only way I can scale this on the same traffic source is to bid higher. Say a campaign is currently CPV 0.0041 and EPV 0.0051 I then increase my bid to 0.0051 to get more volume and straight away the positive ROI goes.
So this has got me thinking, How can you scale campaigns with like a 30%/40% ROI? Everytime I increase my bid with these types of campaigns to get more traffic they lose profitability.
Should I be looking for a bigger ROI first before bidding higher? Say 150% with a low bid and then when I bid high there will still be some profit left? Or is my bid strategy just shit in the first place?
Should I be bidding higher in the first place to open up more placements and give a more realistic idea of what bid I can get good traffic levels at? Or what should I be doing?
Any comments/advice appreciated!
Thanks
Usually when I scale I'm going to 10+ traffic sources. And 80/20 rule style usually 80% of the profit comes from just 20% of the traffic sources , which that are depends on the campaign.
Maybe you can get the ROI up higher by testing (banners,landers,offers,networks,angle...), but even with 30/40% ROI you can do good numbers if you scale the volume high enough.
If it's something you can't scale further , I'd shift towards something that's more mass appeal and scale-able.
You now clearly have the skillet to make this work. Look more towards scale and less for the super good bidding strategy - I rarely bother much with individual bidding and getting those extra 10% ROI , rather scale to several other sources in this time. And generally super targeted works well but try to open the targeting up further, as far as you can. More volume = more $$$ , which GEO you're running in also has a big impact , and if there are carrier restrictions and so on ...
I have to ditch many interesting offers now because I'm not touching something that could not possibly go to X.XXX / day
yeah. i second what kepe said. i don't use bidding for volume really. just for ROI management.
you definitely want to expand to new traffic sources, new geos. similar offers in your vertical. if you're doing pops, try out display. or vice versa.
some offers just can't scale. and some traffic sources can't scale.
if your doing one pop source and it's working. do all of the pop sources.
if you doing rtb display, look for more exchanges. more placements. or try to go direct.
and like kepe says, you want to keep your targeting as loose as possible.
This is more or less where I am at now. I have been doing Mobile for 9 months and can finally create green campaigns. I am making progress and had a campaign that I scaled to 11 traffic sources.
But the important lesson that I have learned in the past few days after joining STM is how you need to think long term right when you pick the offer and I didn't know that before.
Its what kepe95 said:
i have the same issue as you, so i took on a new perspective to scaling.
old definition - buy more traffic for the same offer. go to similar traffic networks, open up frequency cap and budget. and usually with this approach the best i could do with this scale was make the profit go up total of 100%
new definition - are there similar offers? is there another way to promote the same offer? different traffic source? different ad type? pop/banner/textad? adult traffic for make money online offer? text ads for mobile app? with this approach, usually it totally flops, but if it works, its big too. and the effort is not too far away from the first.