Why horizontal and why not vertical?
Because it's so much easier to take your best banner, your best lander and throw it up on many more traffic sources, than to order new translations, banners, lander variations for many different languages/geos.
Think about it, you find a killer angle/offer in Columbia, sure it's tempting to copy and paste it on the same source into all the other latam geos; but that's the wrong move.
Why? Just because they all speak Spanish doesn't mean that one angle that killed it in Colombia will kill it in all the other countries too. No one knows why it won't work, but chances are you'd be wasting money and time going vertical.
That's why It's best to go horizontal, find the top traffic sources using alexa. One thing I do is hit up google, type in top sites by by Country and then open the top 100 and mouse over the ads, see what the traffic source is.
Another option to do is to hit up the same sites using a proxy connected to the same geo - in this case Colombia and browse around - make sure you use Incognito Chrome or Firefox. This way you might experience some popups and some other kinds of ads that otherwise you wouldn't if you browsed from your local IP/non-incognito browser. If there are popups, you can install a plugin like HTTP LIVE HEADERS and see what the traffic source is.
A 3rd thing to check is if there are any different ad networks serving up mobile. For this I recommend the Opera Mobile Emulator which you can download for free and select different browser/mobile device profiles.
Spending $XXXX dollars on 10 of the top traffic sources based on the data above is going to yield better results and faster than if you were to scale the same campaign into other geos.
PS: This was posted on my FB page and well received. Thought I'd share it in case you didn't like my page on facebook yet. From the looks of the feedback from Facebook fans - i had to share it with STMers too!
Hi Attila, I 100% agree with you. Too many affiliates are focusing only on the optimization and testing phase, and forget about scaling a winning offer as big as you can before it dies out
A little plugin that's gold for finding networks: Ghostery. Looks like this when installed http://puu.sh/jYsVf/6a5831daba.png and saves a LOT of time to research networks.
Their coverage is quite good, though checking source code / headers is also a good way to find potentially a network that's not covered by them.
Thanks Attila.
IMO its also better to scale using more traffic sources than more GEOs. You find something good? Milk it!
Although, while you add traffic sources, try working on other angles/geos (without launching) so you could scale like that also once you are ready because as you mentioned this takes time. So scale horizontaly while you are preparing to scale verticaly.
Great reminder Attila! This is something I just realized not too long ago. It doesn't mean we stop optimizing creatives etc. - in fact, for a campaign that's been scaled out to a tons of sources, the testings of creatives can go so much quicker, and each time you find a better creative you get a bigger pay raise because the increase in CR is applied to so much more traffic. Plus when you're doing volume you get bigger pay bumps from networks/advertisers which allows you to bid higher.
Thanks Attila for all your phenomenal posts here - and I love your blog as well!
Amy