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The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step. (16)

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Hi guys, this thread is slightly overdue.

Let me give a brief introduction about myself. My name is Zenith Tan. I'm 26 this year from Malaysia. Like many others, I've been struggling to succeed financially for years since I've graduated from college.

Throughout these years I've lost a couple thousands of dollars doing miscellaneous stuff online. But I've never involved in AM because of the relatively high threshold. It was until last year I stumbled upon Charles Ngo's Blog and I knew it back then this is the way to go.

Initially I was just trying to do some freelance job online to make an extra $500 to invest in AM. I thought I could do AM parallel with my job but the workload was overwhelming. I ended postponing AM journey for 6 months. The good thing is now I've enough budget to go full time. Actually I hesitated whether to quit my job. But days after joining STM I figured strong focus is important to make it work. Also I'm not good at multi-tasking.

Okay let's move on to the things I've done so far.

- I've applied for 10 affiliate networks but only accepted by Matomy and ClickDealer (Just joined today, I have to say this network is awesome! Actually I applied weeks ago but something came up and I did not respond to them. I thought they will not give me second chance. But they hit me up again after so long and approved me!)

- I've applied to multiple traffic sources and got 3 approved.

- I've set-up hosting and CDN.

- I've launched a campaign but is still pending for approval.

Campaign Details:
Offer: Food Panda
Geo: Bangladesh
Payout: $0.26
Traffic source: Decisive
Affiliate Network: Matomy

Here are my banners:







Apparently, I'm still not good at coming up with angles. For now I just want to get familiar with the process especially tracking. I'm using Voluum for tracking but I'm not sure if it will work as expected.

For ad placement, I follow the appetiser guide but I lowered the daily limit to $4 because the payout is lower. I'm quite confused about how much total to spend to test a campaign. If I follow the 10x payout rule then the budget to test this offer would be $2.6? Seems a little too low... Can someone help me with this?

Okay that's it for now. I will post my progress regularly until... indefinitely.

P.S. I really like the culture here, it's better than I expected! People like Caurmen, Zeno, Mr Green, Stackman etc. are amazing and decent!

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The tracking doesn't seem to work. I tried to open the campaign URL on my phone and install the app but the in Voluum it still shows 0 click and no conversion.
How to troubleshoot tracking? I really have no idea where is the missing link.

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This will depend on how many angles and banners you're testing, whether some of the placements are big budget drainers, how many camps you're setting up (4 = WIFI/Carrier/App/Site combos?), etc. If you'd post some stats every day, I'm sure we can give you an idea on whether the offer will be worth pursuing further after the first few days. But as you've pointed out, $2.6 is way too little to spend when gauging an offer.

I quite like your banners! I usually suggest against testing colors at the start, but for food I've read somewhere that the colors red and yellow can trigger people's appetite. I just did a search on google and found articles that talk about this - here's an example:

http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articl...ng-habits.html


As for tracking - if you'd send the following info to me in a PM I could take a look for you:

1)Your offer url in Voluum
2)The Voluum postback url you pasted into Matomy
3)Your voluum campaign url

Nice follow-along! Will be watching this space for further progress...


Amy

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Thanks Amy! you've been extremely helpful to beginners. I've sent you a PM with my tracking links. I'm still not very familiar with tracking yet. But I've decided to use it in my campaign right from the beginning because I think it's a very fundamental part of AM.

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Thanks Zenith for the nice comment! I only know the basics - just enough to be helpful to new fellow stackers.

OK - all your links look like they're correct. And when I pasted your Voluum camp url into my browser I was redirected to the correct app on the playstore.

You're obviously direct-linking from banner to offer without using a lander. This is why you don't see any clicks showing up. The 253 visits are the number of times your banners were clicked. The "clicks" in Voluum are what would be lander click-throughs to the offer page if you were using a lander (which you weren't - thus no clicks were registered).

If you have further questions let me know! Will be keeping an eye out for your next update....

Amy

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Your banners are actually super nice! Which software did you use, if you don;t mind me asking

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Sure! Just photoshop with the timeline animations tool. It's not every complicated to use. To open the timeline window, on top menu Window > Timeline. Play around with it you can create awesome animated gif in no time.

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Yay! My ROI is not -100% for my first campaign! Lol.

I set daily limit too low the first day ($4), so not much data for the first day.

The second day I doubled the amount and start seeing some significant data.

I've created 4 campaigns as taught in the appetiser guide. Almost all conversions come from Wifi-App campaign, so I paused the rest.

I spent most of my time today learning how to create a mobile optimized lander. I want to see how much ROI can I boost with lander.

Even if I can't make it into a profitable campaign I want to learn using lander to boost CR.

My ROI so far is -63% which is far better than I expected.

Here's the stats for past 2 days

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Good luck bro!

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Thanks Charles! Thanks for all the inspirations and wisdom that you've shared.

This thread most likely wouldn't exist if it weren't for you.

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I've stopped running my first campaign yesterday. It doesn't show much promise and my AM is taking forever to get my landers approved.

She hasn't been very responsive and was on vacations for the past week.

I'm not aggressively launching new campaign at the moment. I've been trying to join a mastermind with people sharing similar common ground because I'm a firm believer of masterminding.

I've been a lone ranger long enough to realize that working alone in the corner gets you nowhere.

Past couple days I've spent quite a lot of time figuring out an efficient way to track campaigns. I want to track everything including creatives. It requires much more effort though.

I've also learnt to create and optimize landers. There is a code editor that I find very useful, it's called "Brackets.".

It has 2 handy features, live preview and code assistance and the interface looks clean and sleek.

My priority now is to join an awesome mastermind group but I also want to launch new campaign asap.

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You're progressing very well, keep it up man!
If you are looking for another network to join, don't hesitate to reach out to me. We have +800 worldwide campaigns live and always looking for motivated affiliates like yourself!

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I can't believe it's been 2 weeks. Been hustling everyday, but have not been launching campaign aggressively. I've spent most of my time organizing myself better, organizing mastermind, planning stuff.

The campaign I'm running is 360 antivirus app.

Vertical: App installs
Geo: Ireland
Payout: $0.40
Traffic Source: Decisive & Go2mobi

I tried running it on Go2mobi but I was shocked by the cost. The CPM is $1.20!


And then I run the exact same campaign on Decisive and the difference is huge! Only $0.09 CPM.


Why is the traffic on Go2mobi so expensive? After almost $12 spent I had to stop it. It's way too expensive and the CTR is terrible compared to Decisive.

After moving to Decisive, I let it run for a day and got 4 conversions after around $5 spent. The conversion stops after that. I checked the offer on ClickDealer and found that Ireland has been moved to other campaign. I guess this could be the reason.

I made a mistake!
After getting some data, I've decided to launch 8 campaigns with different angles all at once without much placement cut because I did not have enough data for most placements. I only cut mobile placement because all of the conversions I made in the first campaign came from Wifi.

Out of those 8 campaigns, I got only 1 conversion after almost 500 clicks for each campaign. Then suddenly I realized I've made a mistake that I would not have done if I had spent some time to think and not let my emotion/excitement to affect my judgement. From now on, I will not test more than 3 angles all at once without having more data and promising ROI. For this campaign, I'm gonna test new geo because Ireland doesn't look promising enough to me.

For banners, I have a feeling that aesthetics does not matter much. I know I don't have enough data/experience to conclude this. I will keep track of the stats of every banner.

So far the networks I've dealt with, ClickDealer is the best and the worst is Matomy. They do not respond 90% of the time! My offer application has been pending for almost a week now!

At the moment, there aren't too many app installs offers to choose from. I had to run utilities offers like antivirus and phone cleaner even though I don't like to run these kind of offers. The angles are quite limited.

Next milestone: -50% - 0% ROI

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I'm no expert on this, but my observations are similar to yours. I find that the 2 biggest elements that influence CTR and CR are 1)how eye-catching the banner is - the better it is at drawing people's attention to it the better, and 2)the effectiveness of the ad text - big and easy-to-read words, short and sweet, something that can be understood at a single glance. Most professional banners are too cluttered IMO. This is also why "uglier" banners work. Simple and effective does the job.

My AM there is extremely responsive and helpful. If you'd PM me the email you signed up for Matomy with and/or your skype ID, I'll ask him to get in touch with you.

There's been a serious lack of good app install offers over the past few months. For some good vertical recommendations and traffic sources, see this thread by caurmen:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ticals-EXPOSED


Amy

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Can confirm

Some of my most successful banners have used Comic Sans.

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A quick update before heading to Charles Ngo workshop.

For past two weeks, I've been hustling as usual except a couple days off for family vacation and friend's birthday celebration.

Here's a quick look on my recent campaigns.


Not looking too good. The only green is from a Global Responsive Redirect campaign.

I gave in to my impulse and ran that offer. I managed to optimize it to pitiful positive ROI but I decided to stop that campaign anyway because I don't think it's worth the time to scale it.

I also ran an offer that I really keen on testing it heavily. But unfortunately there were a couple roadblocks.

The offer is only available on Matomy and they're one of the worst network for newbie. They don't even bother to approve offer applications most of the time let alone responding to us.

The other reason I stop running the campaign is because I barely get any traffic on Decisive. I tried smart cpm with 2x payout CPA($1.2) and manual CPM with 4x the average bidding price for that country. But I still don't get much traffic, only around 10% wins.

Is there anything wrong with Decisive lately?

My confession

I have to confess that I still have not completely overcame the fear of losing money, hence not testing more aggressively. It's not just the money and the many months of hard work, I have some stress from my family and it's complicated. I feel like I have most of the ingredients to start making profit, but that fear holds me back a lot. I don't launch campaign as much as I'm supposed to and I tend to end campaigns prematurely. The following quote is from Mr Green and I can relate to it so much.

"It certainly gets easier the more you do it. It's crazy what decisions you make on a tight budget compared to a open budget. You actually make more stupid decisions on tight budgets due to fear of losing."

That's the most important thing for me to tackle right now.

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