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High CTR but no conversion (so far) (15)

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Hey Stackers,

I was lucky enough to hit some xxx conversions days right off the bat with this particular offer a few months ago; and for a newbie like me, the experience was truly eye-popping. Unfortunately, the offer was paused by the advertiser before I had a chance to optimize it.

It came to my attention that it had come back from the dead just recently, so I decided to run it again.

Wasting no time, I sent in the best banners from last time and they got approved quickly. Set up Voluum and DSP and doing DL for now. The numbers started to come in, data after eight hours as follows:

Impressions: 10000
Clicks: 700
CTR: < 6% ~7%
Conversion= "0"

I have to say that I am a little surprised that there was no conversion with such CTR.

My analysis so far:
1) The current exchange is not the same one responsible for the previous conversions (Still waiting for approval), maybe this is a main reason?
2) Bots? (But the IPs seem to spread out pretty evenly)
3) There is a leak somewhere in the funnel. (I wonder how a test can be done if my VPN service does NOT have this GEO on the list? Maybe purchase another VPN that has it?)

Before sending out the new banners which I will be working today, what are your thoughts on such case so far?

Thanks.

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That's brutal to say the least!

Could you ask your AM to trigger a lead for you just to make sure the link is working?

If you'd PM me your campaign url and let me know what the target geo is, I can try to trigger a conversion for you (I have HMA which has almost all geos in existence).

Have you checked with your AM to see if other affs are experiencing the same?

Other than that I can't think of anything else....anyone?

Amy

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Hi, Amy,

Thanks for your response, let me purchase HMA and try it out first. After all, I have run a few campaigns in the past without properly testing the funnels as Astrill did have the same GEOs neither. Dangerous living! I will ping my AM and have a little chat, maybe it's a tracking issue on their end? Good tips.

Update: Just tested it with HMA as well. The funnel seemed okay. My forced conversion did NOT get registered in neither Voluum, traffic source nor network, could be due to a VPN IP?

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Update: Other Exchanges also kicked in. Finally, I started to get conversions, which confirmed to me that the funnel is fine.

However, staring at the First exchange numbers, how is it possible that having between 6~7% CTR (close to 1000 clicks) but not even one conversion? The cost with this Exchange in particular is not extremely high, but could it be just Bots?

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It's hard to say what is going on if you don't have a prelander. it could be bots or trash or mix, and it would be easier if you reveal your DSP at the first place.

for example, recently, when I was trying to scale a profitable campaign, I've got a bunch of pure bot traffic from Adiquity



Imagine that! LP's CTR is as low as 0,27% and the same prelanders with the same banners from the same placements show me at this very moment about 40% LP CTR from a couple of another DSPs. I'm not trying to say it's Adiquity fault, I'm just saying anything possible and shit happens.

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Bingo! The exchange in question is Adiquity!

But your number of clicks was quite low though (CTR= 0.27%). Compared with mine...



By the way, I am running the offer on Avazu mDSP.

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Update:

I was running this campaign over the weekend and I was able to identify one Exchange doing particularly well in Avazu. So I singled the Exchange out and did a separate campaign on it to squeeze out the best placement.

Here's a screen shot:



It turned out that the first placement was responsible for 95% of the conversions. You can also notice the CTR is 5.35% though CR is quite low. I am hoping some landers will help as I am DL only at the moment.

However, when I ran my numbers with Amy's calculator, it's unfortunate to say that it is telling me to KILL IT. (Minimum ROI: -50%). If I do kill it, then that would only mean I should give up on this offer, which I don't think I am ready to do. Did I set my ROI goal too high in this stage for the calculator?



Upcoming Actions I should take this week:

Try different traffic source to test it.
Set up Landers~ FAST.

By the way, this offer has been on the top five for the last month or two in the GEO I am running, so I don't see how it's an issue with this offer.

Could it be possible that my very best converting placement is also ridden with BOTS? If so, how do you separate them effectively?

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For your best placement, you spent $74 and made $30 - and with the large number of impressions (900k+) it's not difficult to see why the calculator is telling you that the placement is unlikely to ever reach -50% ROI.

At this point in time, you'll need to decide whether you want to keep investing money to optimize this offer. How many angles have you tried? How many banners? If you feel you have some great angles you think may do significantly better than your current one(s), I'd say go for it! However, if you've already given it your best shot, then it may not be a bad decision to move away from the offer either.

If you do decide to keep working on the offer - then testing lots of banners and landers would be the next thing to do. If this is the route you wish to go, then I'd suggest that you stop cutting anything based on ROI - because your aim would be to get enough traffic to test your creatives. The calculator spreadsheet is best used on a campaign that has a good offer + creatives combo that's already making profits, to cut placements that aren't profitable / profitable enough. Using that calculator to cut placements before creatives are optimized is really being unfair to the placements. (EDIT: However, you'd still want to pause the big budget-drainers to keep your testing as cheap as possible. After optimizing your creatives you can always go back and retest placements you've cut before.)

And if you're happy with the traffic levels you're getting from that one placement, I'd say just whitelist that and use it to test your creatives.

Trying a different traffic source and comparing results would be a good thing to do as well!

Regarding the possibility of bots - I don't think there's a way to separate bots from a single placement. Any pros care to comment on this?


Amy

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Hi, Amy,

It sounds good. I am gonna stick with this and learn in the process. It's just the high CTR kinda concerns me to be bot traffic in this particular placement, though at the same time, I am getting some conversions. But I am unsure if these clicks are the result of my 'misleading' or 'overly-interesting' banners? I am throwing in some landers today so let's see what comes up.

Having said that, I will cook up some different angles and see what results might come up. Thank you for the calculator, and I hope that I will tweak and use it properly to bring out its best potential.

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just to provide some heads up regarding your concerns on bots from our mDSP, we apply several pre imp filtering mechanisms to eliminate bot ips before bidding, this includes proxy and satellite ip list, system maintained blacklists and several other machine learning algorithms for traffic pattern detection.

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I'm moving this great follow-along to the mobile follow-along section.


Amy

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Happened to me as well and is a very addictive and exciting feeling :-)

Yes you can keep testing, but just make sure you're not doing it to chase that same feeling with this offer, because it's months later and someone might have been running it internally to scoop up all the easy conversions.

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I was surprised that I was able to push the CPA lower than the offer payout, hence in the green after one week of optimization (Laser-focusing on a couple of placements only and testing new banners everyday and using different landing pages).

At the end, the offer was paused AGAIN so that was the end of that! Should have tested out the offer using pops? Anyone had some great experience using pops on App installs?

Mindfume, you reckon someone would be big enough to cause the network to pause the offer so that they can run internal?

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Wow that's tough! Something similar happened to me a few months back. I was all gung-ho in wanting to promote app installs - picked 3 apps and 3-5 geos for each app, made hundreds of banners - and all 3 apps got pulled within the same week! I didn't even have a chance to start some of the campaigns lol! I took that as a sign and moved away from app installs altogether.

Pop traffic works for app installs for sure. There are people doing massive volume but I suspect most of them are cloaking, because most app install offers don't allow pop traffic. You can check with your AMs - ask them for apps that allow pop.

Most APK installs on the other hand will allow anything (pop traffic, aggressive tactics, you name it). I have very little experience with apk downloads though so can't give you any advice there, but I'm sure there are lots of people that could.

Good thing is, now that you know how to optimize a campaign, you can apply this experience and knowledge to a new camp. Pin submit offers and mobile content subscription offers typically live longer, and if you stick to the more popular verticals, when one offer is pulled you'll be able to find another to take its place. More reassuring than promoting an offer that can be pulled at any time, that you probably won't be able to find a replacement for.


Amy

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I was more thinking about the networks themselves.
Some of them have internal teams so if they see that a brand new offer is converting like crazy, they might 'pause' the offer and just start running it themselves.

I'm 99,9% sure this is what happened in my case.

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