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POPing Along In The Mobile World LIKE A BO$$ (5)

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Hey guys,

I'm Saurabh, 22, from Delhi, India. I've finally decided to take action and get started! I have $3k budget for all of the campaigns I run as part of affiliate marketing. I'm planning to run with mobile right now, both on POP and banners. This follow along is tracking my journey with POP. Right now I'm starting with ZeroPark. Welcome aboard on this epic journey!

Some of the things I did prior to 19th were reading a bunch of posts, getting familiar with the entire concept of AM, signing up for networks, getting approved in a few, signing up for traffic sources, getting hold of spying tools and the likes. Finally I started on the 20th June with launching a campaign. So here's what I've done on or till the 20th:

• Chose the UC Browser Google Play offer in India with a payout of $0.48. This offer has been running for 2 years as shown in my network but decided to go ahead based on my AM's recommendation that it's still doing good.
• I spied on landers in Mobile Ad Scout and found one appealing. I ripped it completely and decided to run with it. I have attached the LP to show how it looks. I'm using Voluum for tracking and using ZeroPark as the traffic source.
• The average bid of Popup Non-Adult traffic on Android in India was $0.0032 so I set my bid at $0.002 (I guessed this bid based on an approximation from Ruby Tunes' post).

Here's my landing page:



Here's how I made my rules about stopping the campaign. So based on the 'if no conversion till 3 times payout' rule, I decided to stop the campaign at $0.48 * 3 = $1.44. I started the campaign around 1:47am IST on 20th June. Initially my bid position (BP) was 1 and I was getting a lot of traffic. I decided to pace down the traffic in order to run the campaign over 24 hours so as to get a variety of users who are active at different times so decreased the bid to reach a BP of around 4-5 and kept it at that. My campaign ended at around 5:30pm IST on 20th June after it burned through the daily budget. Here is the result that I got :



I had 814 visits on my single landing page, 26 clicks on the 'Install Now' button and 0 conversions with a CTR of 3.26%.

Next things to be done were:

• Creating more LPs and split testing them.
• Running the same or similar offer from other networks and split testing them.

One of the questions I had was that I had normally heard that POP traffic is cheaper than display traffic, however my CPV was around $0.0017 on ZeroPark which is much expensive than the CPM of $0.008 which I got on Decisive, even though POP traffic quality is lower.

I was travelling till 21st morning.

(A question related to posting on STM: how do you insert an image in the middle of your post and have it display a preview of it instead of a link without a preview which needs to be opened in another tab?)

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Hey Saurabh, thanks for sharing.
To insert an image in your posts, just click on the "IMAGE" icon
or

tags works aswell.

i.e:

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26 clicks on 814 impressions is not bad at all. pops on mobile generally have a very high CTR but low CR so conversions will come once you drive more volume. what's the cpm your paying?

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Well, doing that puts in the [ATTACH=CONFIG]attachment_id[/ATTACH] tag for me, instead of the [IMG][/IMG] tag. I tried enveloping the ATTACH tags within the IMG tag but that didn't work. I found a workaround though. Once you click on 'Insert Image' or the IMAGE icon and have selected and uploaded your image to STM, simply click on 'Manage Attachments' at the bottom of your post and then close the window which would have popped up due to your click. Ta Da, you see a preview of the image

I think you meant CPV, well it's $0.0017 for a single redirect/popup on ZeroPark for the kind of traffic that I want which is quite expensive considering I would get a single impression on Decisive for $0.008/1000 = $0.000008 instead.

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On the 21st, I was working with my designer to get banners for my display campaigns. In the remaining time, this is what I did:

• I was initially running my LP on a friend's VPS. I had gotten the domain from Namecheap. I started facing some weird DNS issues around 8pm IST on 21st June. Tried fixing it but couldn't get it done till around 4pm on 22nd since I didn't control the VPS and couldn't get in touch with their support.

On the 22nd, I continued with fixing the DNS issue along with coordinating with my designer (who is a newbie as well) regarding the banners. The issue got sorted out around 4pm, but even then the DNS checks on sites like dnscheck.pingdom.com weren't passing but the domain name was getting resolved to the IP address. Started looking at alternatives for hosting like Amazon EC2 servers. Setup an AWS account, spun up an Ubuntu machine, installed Apache and slept.

On the 23rd, even while sticking to my friend's VPS which was working intermittently, I wanted to have a backup in Amazon EC2, so I went ahead with setting it up. After having spun up an Ubuntu EC2 instance, the only remaining thing was configuring subdomains, since I wanted to serve the LPs for this campaign from a particular subdomain instead of the root domain. I tried configuring Apache on my EC2 Ubuntu instance to allow subdomains for my domain but wasn't able to configure it. In the meanwhile thought of testing the load times using GTmetrix after reading some post somewhere. I remember having tested the load time for my single LP initially before launching my campaign on ZeroPark and it showed under 1s load time, but that was probably some non-India testing server and LAN connection. Since I was running an offer for Indian geo, I decided to test with Mumbai (the only Indian location available in GTmetrix), on a 3G connection with Firefox Desktop (probably GTmetrix doesn't provide mobile testing for free users or it doesn't have mobile testing infrastructure in Mumbai). I saw a load time of 5.5s for a 17KB pagesize. I was shocked!

So I started optimizing the webpage. Here's what I did:

• I turned on gzip from the cPanel of my friend's VPS (yeah, I was still using it since I couldn't get the subdomain configuration right on my Ubuntu EC2 instance) which saved a lot.
• Inlined small CSS and moved the script to end of body. Basically followed most of the recommendations of GTmetrix. The only recommendation I didn't implement was about turning on caching for my static resources since anyway I don't expect (or want) the same user opening my LP twice (since if he didn't convert once he wouldn't convert again. I've set the frequency filter in ZeroPark to 1h).
• Optimized my images, changed the .pngs to .jpgs and ran them through Kraken.

After all these optimizations, the load time came down to 2.2s. Even after running through PageSpeed Insights, I got 98/100 (the 2 remaining was for caching which I didn't have plans to implement anyway). The only thing remaining was using a CDN. I signed up for CloudFlare since it's a free CDN and let it propagate it's DNS settings. In the meanwhile I'm again stuck with that VPS having DNS issues. Again 24 hours of waiting time I talked to a few guys and they recommended Akamai and Amazon CloudFront instead over CloudFlare since they said CloudFlare specializes more in DDoS protection than CDN services.

Next steps:

• Setup Amazon EC2 instance for good and get the subdomain configuration working.
• Get a CDN working, if EC2 gets working then move to CloudFront, otherwise checkout Akamai.

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