Finding an Offer:
I’m a complete beginner to affiliate marketing, but here I am. These are some of my thoughts I’ve had as I started working on this today.
I decided to start following the Appetizer. I have 10 working days left at my 9-5 job then I’ll be working at this full time. I’ll have a good $4000-$6000 available as a budget over the next few months.
I just got accepted to a few networks and have been talking back and forth with an AM at Mundo Media. Told him I wanted to get into Pin Submits, possibly Sweepstakes.
He sends me a list of top offers by CR and EPC, apparently they won’t send by volume/revenue? Anyways there are a handful of pin submits that are all $3-$20, and a few sweepstakes that are all US offers. Nothing here is under $2, so I ask what he has for offers with $1 payouts or less. He sends me another list of offers under $1. They show clicks, CR, leads, EPC and affiliate $$ for the day.
Not sure how to judge the volume on these. I also don’t even know the volume on the top offers. So, these are rated top to bottom by affiliate $$. More than half the list are app installs for UC Browser for Android. Now some research.
I check out AppAnnie and see the UC Browser app is in the Top 10 in some intl. countries. But after reading a few follow-alongs I looked at the graphs and it looks like this app may be too saturated and mature.
I go into the Google Play store and see the app also has 100 million+ installs. I think I may need to look for something else, but I don’t really know. Is it worth trying if it’s still ranking as a top app?
I wanted to do some spying anyways. Ok, I got a free 3-day trial at WRW. I look up the app and see most of the traffic is coming from Leadbolt. Does this mean if I were to use this offer I shouldn’t use Decisive? Or is it something to just split test?
Anyways, I’m continuing to look for an offer, and vertical for that matter. Looking for under $1 payouts so I can gather as much data as possible. I’m reading through more threads here to get more insights and came across one by kepe95, “Travelling the World…”, which is a great read. I know I can’t spend too much time surfing around and that I need to just take action and try stuff.
At this point everything is new to me and it's very much an "information overload" stage, but I'm going to follow the process and learn what I can.
I debated whether I should post this now before I even launched a campaign. But, I watched a great youtube clip the other day saying it’s important to just get your information out there to people no matter what stage you’re at, and to be part of a community and able to get feedback.
Welcome to the forum Wyatt!
I'm a newbie myself and still trying to grasp the knowledge about mobile marketing piece by piece. But, I'm going to try to give a tip when you're starting out.
1) If you're following the appetizer that could be a good route and that's how I started off too. But, as I researched more it seemed to me that mobile display(Decisive) might be a harder route to go to than it is using mobile pop traffic. The main reason I believe is the variables associated with it.
If I work with Decisive, I would have to worry about banners and the landers I'd have to create. One could argue that you could just do banners and then direct link to offer page, but typically I don't think direct linking a campaign might last a long time.
However, if I work with a Pop traffic source like Popads or Zeropark then I'd only have to worry about landers and then optimizing it at that point.
Now after you've become skilled in the pop traffic source then you can scale it at the end to mobile display traffic. But, the route I see people take with pop traffic is that they scale it to different pop traffic sources first and then possibly go on to mobile display sources.
Hope this helps!
Simon
Thanks for the tip Simon! I'm doing some more research into Pop traffic like you mentioned.
I launched my first campaign a week ago on Decisive. I set it up as shown in the Appetizer: I made 8 banners and set up campaigns for Wifi/App, Mobile/App, Wifi/Site and Mobile/Site.
Offer:LEO Privacy Guard (App Install)
Payout:$0.20
Geo:Russia
I set the CPM for $0.30 and let it run. Wifi/App and Mobile/App each saw bids and clicks like below:
~20,000 bids
~10,000 wins
~200 clicks
No conversions
My spending the first day was only pennies. At this point it's only direct-linking. I thought if I increased the CPM I might see more numbers, so I increased it from $0.30 to $1. Nothing really changed.
Then the next day I saw that Decisive rejected my ads for Wifi/App and Mobile/App because of "Alert style lander." This is confusing because I'm direct linking and not linking to a lander.
Anyways I've been spending time this weekend going through html/css tutorials and I'll be making my first landers.
I budgeted to spend $20 on PopAds today but forgot to include offer #2 so this is data for one offer and 4 landers. I noticed an additional $7 spend on top of the $20 that was spent this morning and I paused the campaign. Right now it shows $7 spend for today, which is strange because it’s evening in the U.S., so it might be based off of the intl. geo. Although I’m not sure why because I have “America/Chicago” as the timezone. Anyways…
Conversions: 8
Spend: $27.03
Revenue: $14.72
ROI: -45.54%
Plan going forward: I’m creating a new lander to test. I’m going to keep testing with PopAds and possibly test another traffic source. I know iPhone 6 offers have been around a while but I don’t want to give up on this yet and I’m looking forward to getting data from another offer and additional traffic sources.
On 8/31/15, your campaign had an ROI of -0.52%. That's awesome!
Pardon my ignorance but at that point, don't you just increase your bids to get more traffic and optimize your lander even further? You're close to being in the green on that campaign.
@dtalexone
I tried to replicate it yesterday, and I should have posted that data. I had spent about $10 with no conversions and according to my targets the available visitors were only in the hundreds. I don't know why that was so much lower than other days where it might be in the 10,000-20,000 range of available visitors. I wasn't getting any traffic and even upping my bid to $0.05 and higher didn't help. At that point I decided to cut it off for the day.
Thanks for the input, I'm looking for any way to get in the green.
Quick suggestion: if you include a couple of screenshots of the landers you're testing, you'll probably get a lot of useful suggestions and feedback.
I know some people aren't comfortable with outing their landers, so no worries if you don't fancy doing that. But in my experience, it's one of the really fast ways to improve - and also to get a bunch more ideas to test, which can often be a stumbling block.