Say no to average - Balint's road to AWA Bankok (17)
reserved for linking my upcoming success stories 
I am a business student from Hungary, studying and working in Vienna, Austria.
What I have:
2500$ for AM to test, for hosts, tracking etc.
living costs + STM membership covered if I work once-twice a month
I speak: Hungarian, German and English (should be enough to make copy, but not slang level on the latter two)
some knowledge of marketing, but rather theoretical (read eg. Influence, ca$hvertising)
I don't have:
skills in programming, photoshop, copywriting
directly transferable experience
I used to make a living from online poker, so experienced both sides of an $XXXX day, that can help me go with the swings, and be less emotional about losing days. It still sucks, though- haha.- Also, I had to give up on it, as I lost quite a lot, even though I my coach told me my game was good, but my capital did not last so well. Actually it happened twice in a year, so maybe I overreact the capital issue now.
Btw. I think the two things are quite similar, but AM could give me transferable skills, which is more important for me now. Don't want to waste any more time spending away from the market.
I think AM will be great match for me, as I like data, direct, objective feedback and psychology. So could imagine my future leading a company about big data/advertising etc.
About the title:
I haven’t really found out yet what is my main drive in life, but definitely fear living an average life knowing all the possibilities life can offer. My very first aim now is conversion (then -50% roi, then profitable campaign, the profitable day etc.)
Middle term goal: Bangkok, AWA. !!
After a couple of days of reading around, my first campaign, mainly Mobile Cookbook Appetizer style:
As it is my very first campaign, will write every data, nothing blurred. In the highly unlikely scenario of finding a profitable and scalable campaign, feel free to copy and remember helping me out when I struggle later.
Traffic source: decisive
Vertical: Utility Apps
Offer(s): Omni Swipe, $0.18 payout, Yeahmobil
Geos: HU
I chose it because it is cheap to test, I actually liked the app, and thought it would be great to start with my mother country (is there a good word for that?) .
CPM Smart
Budget: unlimited, $8/day
CPA Goal: $0.27
Angles: I will be testing out several angles - apps fast accessibility, increase app launch speed, having a big phone → click here, too slow phone?---> we help you etc.
Note to self: always put benefits over features, no one cares what it is, everybody cares about what it means/gives to them.
Campaign structure: I started out with 4 banners (I know, very basic), angles. I know not much, but just wanted to start, take a look at the numbers, have a feeling about the whole thing. I don’t think I will test Wifi vs. Carrier, in Hungary it is just not so likely that many people use the latter for downloading app. I paid once a heavy bill, for overusing my internet on a busride! (in two hours for the month). So I rather test different angles and banners.
Question:
what are the wins? I guess where it was not blocked? So is there a loss between what I pay (bids), and what actually shows up (wins)?
The wins is the bids that you actually won, at each display of a banner all bids for the specific placement / config are analyzed and the one bidding the most on that specific configuration is the one who has his banner displayed.
Judging by your win% your cpc looks high enough to get most of the volume, so that's up to you if you want that much traffic at that price, you can lower your cpm for less volumes.
Mehdi
Thank you Mehdi.
I have smart CPA goal (1.5x payout) set up as caurmen suggested in the appetizer and 8$ daily limit(his offer was $.45 payout)
Not sure why he suggested $15 to be spent for each. Quickly searched for statistical significance, but haven't found yet what I was hoping for.
So when do I have enough data? I saw somewhere as 15k impressions (is it wins?)would be good.
It seems that my traffic is really small, so far I have around 5k wins, 72 clicks (1.4%) and 0.16 dollars spent. I blacklisted the offers without 4.0 android or higher (yeah did not set up properly) as the app requires.
I guess I will look for tier 3 countries with high population, so I can test a lot faster (Indon., Philippines, Brasil comes to my mind, where it is still cheap and big pop.).
Hey Balint,
I don't know how cheap Brazil is really but best way to find out is to test. Also, if you read around the forums, you might have found out that Decisive has/had some traffic issues with some/one of their exchange partners so their traffic has significantly decreased the past 2-3 weeks. Last time I contacted support they said they hope to be fixed this week. I didn't get any email that it's fixed so I don't know what the status is there. My bet is on the issue not being fixed.
You don't need the absolute highest population in Tier 3 but probably higher than Hungary. 
Asia and LatAm have plenty of good countries in terms of price/impressions to check out for such offers I think. If your offer is global, you can work on it more than the guide suggests. Overall, the guide suggests giving up too early in my view. You won't hit all the things you need with 2 angles tried and only direct linking, I'm pretty sure about that. At least not with app installs in 2015. Secondly, an international offer can be scalled so it's worth putting in a bit more effort to make it work, because then you know you can make more money with it than a local and very restricted offer.
Manu.
yo time to update, I stopped that Hungarian offer as the traffic was slow, and later also the offer was withdrawn.
Unfortunately, the data did not teach me much, but was a great start to start a campaign.
Meanwhile, I was upgrading my laptop a bit, so it is much faster now, it should hold till I hit some good $XXX days then I buy a new one.
New campaign:
(tried to find the guide on posting follow alongs but did not find it, sometimes I feel the search function is not that useful, but still I find some other stuff so it is not a complete waste of time; anyways I just post what comes to my mind)
Traffic source: Go2Mobi
Vertical: Utility Apps
Offer(s): Super Battery, payout: $0.22
Geos: ID
Some of my banners were rejected (alarming battery), the remaining 5 were split on two angles, having all about the same CTR of 0.5 %, so it does not say much except that I need better ones.
So now I am cutting placements I think are not that profitable, I will be rather cutting more and adding them back again later, as I improve my campaign. Also, I think it is better to cut more as a newbie with tight budget, I may leave some money there, but it is cheaper to test if it works well.
Got my first conversions, but CV is only 0.44% so I just paused the campaign, and what I do now is:
blacklisting some placements
adding new banners with new angles
optimising and also testing a new LP, as well as direct linking (I screwed up the setup at first)
I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of days(weeks), the mastermind is really helpful, also a big shout-out to Manusit spreading knowledge there, hopefully we can give back a lot soon.
So back to work now, I need to learn to work more effectively, so I can start campaigns faster and learn faster
Question:
As I will add new banners now, do you distribute the traffic equally with the old ones, or stop some of the old banners till the new banners reach about the same views? It is a little bit unclear for me how to interpret mixed data, I also now how my old banners perform, so probably don't want to spend on them too much anymore.
It doesn't have to be evenly distributed, but rather gathered from the same pool of data. So when you add banners, you can add 90% weight to one of them and 10% to the other for example. You will hear many people running 80-90% of traffic to what is working and testing on the other part that is left. So you should just start them at the same time and measure from the time they started running together.
Thanks for the shoutout, haha 
so I added 3 new angles with a total of 5 banners, I after a while a cut an angle out as it had only 1% change against a better performing one (Amy's when to cut a banner guide...)
I cut all the placements on the way that were:
1. spent more than 3x payout w/o conversion
2. had more expansive CPC than $0.06 and had over 2k impressions
3. were attended mainly by foreign traffic ( go2Mobi tells me traffic is from Indon... and that user use proxies so I can do nothing) (I will redirect traffic but did not find the best global one, also probably stop campaign) (about 10% of my visits were not from Indonesia!)
Also I spent about $24 so far on this campaign, only got 4 conversions, my best CTR% for banner is 0.68%. Not sure if I should try different angles and LPs or try a new offer. Or spend some time more learning/searching(spy) for banners, landers as seemingly my angles aren't good enough. My LP has the headline that I stopped as a banner, so definitely room to improve.
What do you think? Shall I post the copy of my banners/landers in English?
Also will apply to some other networks, as there are definitely differences between offers and payouts so I should look into that.
Cheers
So I could not decide what to do, whether I want to try different angles or start a new campaign. My problem was that this campaign after trying different angles did not improved essentially. I also left a lot of room to optimize my landers, but the low banner CTR% did not encourage extra effort there. But from now on I am using Cloudfront as well. Interestingly, could not discover any speed difference between Cloudfront and just only S3 so far.
At weekends it is not so easy to have new creatives approved so I chose to pause the campaign and do some learning (coding, copywriting), was a busy weekend anyways.
So on Monday I asked my AM for advice, and whether the offer converts well at all. He gave me a similar, but I think better offer, now working on that, update will come soon.
So I was working with that offer, actually whitelisted a great placement and even had it green for a while and tested different landing pages in the meantime. Was a great feeling to have consistent conversions and buying data while not losing money
I had some troubles with landing page speed, I tested a lot of things around Amazon S3 and CF with the number of requests, page sizes, base64 etc.
I still wanted to test a couple of things before I say ok, cannot do any more without help, also prepared a post already, just wanted to get more data with pingdom.com. But unfortunately got banned from my offer as my AM misunderstood my plan landing page and thought I ran that LP with the offer, now waiting for the approval again for more than 30 hours. For the same lps and banners that were already approved. It is kinda hard, because I want to maintain a good relationship and don’t bug him, especially with the low traffic I have, but c’mon, I am waiting for something because he thought I was running something I did not, just to be in a position I was a week before…
Anyways, I am strongly considering switching to sweeps/pins/lead gen.
I was talking to a couple of people recently and it could make sense imo, especially known that I did not invest too much time into app installs. I think my budget could be a determining factor, now I would have like 2.8k to test, I was told it is harder for sweeps to find good, low payout offer eg.
For now I just want to make a decision quickly and go all in, testing a lot, buying data. I’ve wasted so much time so far, better not to think about.
Any thoughts on lp load times or deciding on sweep/lead gen/pins are welcome.
I can probably help on the loading time issue! What loading times were you seeing, from which geo? Were you using Real User Monitoring or just Pingdom's load tester? And what was the total file size of the page including images?
A switch to sweeps or pins is probably a good call from app installs. You should still be able to find reasonably low-payout offers if you look around - not as low as app installs, but on the upside they may also be a bit more realistically priced for the difficulty of getting leads.
So I was not moving ahead in term of landing page load time, actually, I was also unable to set up an own domain with CF and CDN, not sure why. The latter does not have a high priority though. I just want to replace the xxxijiw4ewy.cloudfront.net lp urls to own domain some day.
On the last couple of days spent some time on codecademy.com pretty useful, I really like the way how practical you can learn there. Just imagine you could have tried everything during your school years like this. Probably it could be only better if I was directly working on my LPs and someone would watch over my shoulders and teaching on the spot.
Yesterday finally launched my first sweeptakes offer. Shoutout to bovver for helping me with approval of networks and to Dandyman with help with Italian translation. Hopefully he makes up his mind, and joins me testing the offer.
So the offer is Italian Iphone6 Sweeptakes
Payout: $0.62 (was looking for offers where the payout is low, and also the traffic is cheaper, but still have a decent size traffic on it)
TrafficSource: Popads
First run after spending $10 dollars on it, on popups.
I had a little bit higher bid at first, at least it was spending the budget quite fast. ¾ of the traffic is from two placements(categories) that I did not cut, just after this initial 10$ burn.
What I was thinking about is that it is maybe too low payout for my current traffic: $2 CPM, so it needs a higher CV to be profitable.
It was a little bit slow with the approval as I got my first draft rejected. But my AM is great so far. Anyways, I have to be faster next time, also my my work input does not match my plans on the long run… I waste too much time if I don’t really know what the next step should be. Took some time, but figured out some optimization opportunities at popads.
From Monday on, I will be working together on some offers with a friend. We plan to test similar offers on different Network or different landing pages, depends on what offers we receive. If anyone has great ideas how to make such a collaboration work the best I am ready for it.
Some things I’ve learned so far:
#There are always unexpected things come up that makes the whole thing slower
#Networking with people is great even on my level as well- I have learned so many things just because of talking to ppl on skype and the masterminds I am in. Masterminds won’t work the way you would like, but still very helpful.
#I have to pay attention not to waste time if there is a new obstacle on the way. Yeah, it sucks, but it won’t solve itself if I waste my time on youtube instead of actively seeking for results
# AM requires a lot of skills, and a lot of them can be used also outside of AM, which is great.
#If I continue at this speed I am progressing now (even though I’ve learned a lot looking back), I am just not gonna make it, and just wasting time and money. New time- and project recording is under implementation. Also, I am more motivated working with others vs. solo, so I know this collaboration will help on this as well.
* typical sry for not updating long, was a busy (excuse heavy) period blablabla*
Adsimilis Meetup Review
So as some of you know I was thinking about whether I should attempt the meetup in Prague or not. Well, I think I had my solicitudes fade away already after 10 minutes getting into conversations. Briefly, what were the main benefits?
Friends
Practical and valuable information
Inner belief
Friends:
I found it very easy to talk to people, we are on the same track, everyone was open to talk and did not back off when they heard I am just starting out.
I followed on iamattila’s advice and did not force to talk about business, which came naturally easy to me as I am interested in other people’s stories and know that the loud nightclubs are also not planned to discuss work in details.
Also, Andrew mentioned this in his speech. Was nice to hear a lot of stories, different backgrounds. I could really resonate with most of the people.
Also, I am not a stalker type and minimize time on social media or general hunting for information online (as I know testing is more valuable), but still managed to recognize two persons of the web I did not meet before (fbqueen and Rohail (suitcasemarketer, not sure what his nick here is)). Both of them were nice and could have a great talk with them.
Practical and valuable information
As stated above, I usually was not the first one who brought up the topic of business, campaigns, etc. but in most conversations it was a significant part of it (as expected on such a meetup). The opening night was also great for me with some information, but was nothing compared to the second day, where we had the speeches. I took detailed notes on all speeches, and also still waiting for the slides as well. I am not going to write concrete things here, but will share some things with my contacts/masterminds. The private talks are more valuable as people are more willing to share, and they are more flexible/not as general as some of the presentations. Eg. facebook cloacking was interesting for me, but was less useful than Rohail’s speech.
Inner belief
I think it is a vital part of building a business. Throughout playing poker and trying other businesses I figured out that having a great inner mindset is of crucial importance. This trip was a reinforcement for me that affiliate marketing is real. I met people who were already travelling for several months and building their business. This is what I want and this is what I will do pretty soon. Some people were making thousands of dollars daily, which helps me being more optimistic when I bump into another - 80% Roi Campaign. I set a goal of achieving constantly 100 dollars a day by the end of November, and it seems way more realistic having the comparison. And all that matters that my mind truly believes that it is possible and will find a way to get me there.
Fortunately, I managed to pass my important exam two days later, so I am very happy that I was there. But I think even if I did not pass, it would have been worth it, I probably would have had a bigger chance of earning more than my prof when I finish uni haha.
My next goal is AWA Bangkok I hope I meet many of you guys there. As I'll need a couple of green campaigns for that, it is a great opportunity to give Adsimilis back on the way.
I started to work more closely with a friend on sweepstakes offers.
We tested several landing pages in the last couple of weeks, I saw a big difference between the different traffic sources, as a good newbie, I tried to stay only with popads, but I will start testing also different pop traffic, as the difference can be a negative 40 or break even on start.
Currently I run an iPhone offer in Turkey, which is around negative 80 for mobiles, but ipads only -30-40, so I see some potential in it, but not sure if I manage to make into green, as I killed already some placements and carrieres, and don't want to narrow it down too much.
For now I think it is better to just test a lot of offers, and see how they work with our best lander, compared to trying a lot of different landers or copies for the same offer. Even though I know that these offers are profitable, I may miss some important components that I would probably have instantly/easier at other campaigns.
I am getting more familiar with popcash and adcash now. I feel it is more like a hit or miss with popcash as you have fewer opportunity to optimize. With adcash I made a topic about some of my questions:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post245626
The approvals need your personal attention, as neither of them let you slow down the traffic, so you better check when they start if you test low payout offers.
Today I made two more campaigns in adcash, waiting for approval, set them to start on saturday. so I have better control, unfortunately it is not possible with popcash, so I will only do it tmr and check frequently/set low budget.
Also I think a great way is just to test more offers at the same time (tmr I start same GEO, similar offer from Mundo, Adsimilis and ClickDealer) so I split the traffic budget. Also stepping up and not to be a little cheap complainer haha.
PS.
A funny extra how I see Tinder now. I stopped the traffic in late June, but still got some clicks and even leads last week. I think that it is because many uni chicks come back to Vienna after the holiday. I may play around there later on (when I have already made some $$$) and heavily split test.
PSS.:
yo, I must confess, I did not give 100% lately and the results were consequently shitty with full time uni and side job going on. Also, just turned out on Friday that I have one very important exam during AWA so cannot fly to Bangkok.
That being the case, and having no near BE+ campaign running, I decided to take a break from AM.
I put too much pressure on myself for succeeding and making ends meet while spending on testing. It works for some very well, I may not be the right type for that. I wish I could do it this way.. But look, I should finish my thesis in 2 months and then I will be almost completely finished with my studies. Now I have the opportunity to finish faster. That's the goal for now, and coming back as soon as possible with laser focus My STM subscription runs out today, so the timing is good, I also will spare some money on
You guys rock, cheers.
PS.: I write my thesis about how becoming an online entrepreneur impacts one's job satisfaction. If you are interested about taking part or the results you can reach out to me in LinkedIn.
PM'ed you.
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