Average Joe Starts AM Campaign. You Won't Believe What Happens Next! (29)
pin submit / sweepstake offers work well on pop with landers. i dont know if banner runs good on those..
I'm not sure either. I was told to give it a try.
Looking forward to your updates.
Why didn't you translate the banners into FR, will be more effective imo ?
I am translating these into FR. I'm just waiting on approval from my affiliate manager before I do so.
Update #3 - 09:27 on 4 September 2015
If you have read my updates, I have two offers that I'm testing. The iPhone 6 offer in FR and €100 Supermarket Voucher in BE. The banners for the iPhone 6 are still pending approval. I had another STMer from France reach out to me to offer free translation. This is great as I save money on translations and can use that money for traffic instead. In exchange, I'm letting him use the banners he translates. I think it's fair and we'll share what we find out; at least I hope so.
So for the €100 Supermarket Voucher offer, that was rejected yesterday by MoPub exchange and GoogleAdX exchange on Go2mobi. I relaunched the 4 campaigns (following the Mobile Appetizer Cookbook) on Nexage and Smaato as recommended to me by the support team at Go2mobi. Now I'm just waiting for my campaigns to get approved. So for those following along, I have 4 campaigns on Go2mobi ready to go, formatted as followed:
[APP] €100 Supermarket Voucher - BE - CPA - WIFI
[APP] €100 Supermarket Voucher - BE - CPA - Mobile
[Site] €100 Supermarket Voucher - BE - CPA - WIFI
[Site] €100 Supermarket Voucher - BE - CPA - Mobile
I must admit, I am not too fond of sitting around waiting. So what I am going to do is come up with 1 more angle for both offers each. For each angle, as suggested in the Cookbook, I am creating 8 banners. So I will be coming up with 16 more banners for both offers in total. That way if the campaigns don't perform well, I'm ready to launch the next ones. Or I may just launch them regardless to find out the best performing ones.
I am going to stick to Go2mobi and attempt to "master" it as much as I can. I can make it work. And I am sticking to these two offers for now. Create more angles for them and implement landers later if need be.
Hey man this was a great read, i'm glad you decided to implement landers, even for split testing. I have added you on skype but 3 different option came up for your name so add me if you didn't get my addy skype: jack798k
edit: - Just looking at your angles and i honestly think they are a bit bland for example i don't think "Help Someone Else with €100 Supermarket Voucher" i mean i'm no expert but if i saw that i would be like pfff can't they get their own groceries, i'm keeping this shit and then move on but tbh try it anyway since i'm no expert on this subject although from the few camps i have run i realised that bland boring angles never work, you have to dig at your heart strings. If you haven't read the book cashvertising get it now! honestly the first 2 paragraphs i learnt so much, anyway i digress, for example everyone has 8 biologically pre-programmed desires which are:
The Life Force 8 (LF8)
1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension.
2. Enjoyment of food and beverages.
3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger.
4. Sexual companionship.
5. Comfortable living conditions.
6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses.
7. Care and protection of loved ones.
8. Social approval.
For example if you use #7 and a hiker/traveler for example along with the iPhone 6 offer you could say something like "120 People died last year when traveling (whether in the car or walking or whatever maybe you could find some real figures?) with no mobile, use iPhones great satellite navigation to make sure you and your family aren't among that 120 this year (maybe they got lost or something?)" i have no idea whether this would be a good angle/landing page or whether it would even be approved lol but it was of the top of my head, i have some more which i won't put on here but anyway remember the life force 8 above, it works very well when trying to come up with angles.
All the best and good luck!
Jack - p.s read this for more info about angles from finch Post Here
Hey Jack,
Thank you for your reply.
I can definitely see how my angles may be a bit bland. I'm in totally agreement with you that it should be pulling at the heart strings. And I'm ordering Cashvertising as we speak.
I think from here on out when I'm going to promote an offer, I'm going to create at the very least 3 angles. That way I can send all my creatives and landing pages at once instead of bits by bits. I just hadn't planned on doing multiple angles but recognize that it's best to go with a couple when testing instead of having just 1. It seems like it's the proper way to go about it.
Wooooooooooooo! Progress! Very happy to see you getting approved. You've made a ton of progress today and your campaign seems to be set up well.
I'll be watching your campaigns and hope to see you scaling soon 
Originally Posted by Go2mobi
I'll be watching your campaigns and hope to see you scaling soon
Update #8 - 03:44 on 10 September 2015
All 12 campaigns are LIVE! Now I just have to wait to see what the data says.
Way to go man! I can't wait to see how well your campaigns are going to perform!
Good Luck Bro! 
I see that cashverti$sing book 
Thank you guys!
The data is coming in so I will have an update tonight.
Hey Alexis,
Looks like you have the dedication and drive to be a successful affiliate! I hope those creatives get approved and always remember... you can never learn too much and the learning never ends!
@brodycurtis: Thank you for your words Brody.
Update #9 - 21:21 on 10 September 2015
Not much of a huge update for today other than I am still waiting for all of my campaigns to reach a spend of $15 as suggested in the Mobile Cookbook. 3 campaigns have been paused as they have reached the limit. My best performing campaigns in terms of CTR are nowhere near the $15 spend, which is great but it also means I will have to wait another day or two to reach the spend.
I have a few conversions but not as much as I would like; it's hard not to get discouraged and hard not to want to optimize now before I have gathered enough data. But I will stay strong and keep moving forward. I am not going to pause this offer and abandon ship entirely because I see CTRs and LP CTRs that are encouraging, even for campaigns that have -100% ROI. Again, I will wait until all the data is in.
I made a few mistakes here and there with my tracking set up but I think I have remedied the issue. One of my mistakes requires to update the campaign URL but I won't do that because then I'll have to wait for campaign approval. As long as I make a note of it and learn what my mistakes were, I think I should be fine. I will know how to better implement everything in the 1st phase of optimization. And what I mean by 1st phase of optimization is that I will take the campaigns that show the most promise, clone them within Go2mobi, and optimize them.
Also, I cannot in good conscience not get a CDN for my VPS. So I signed up for Cloudflare and think I've implemented it correctly. I don't want to leave anything to chance and ensure that if my campaigns failed, it's because of something I know that isn't performing well... page load times in other GEOs is not something I can see; at least I do not think so. I also see some U.S. traffic for my offer's GEO (FR); not sure how or why but I have to find a solution to this. It's not a lot by any means but I don't want it to mess up my data.
Last but not least, a part of me thinks that I should have split-tested two similar offers; this is something that I will implement in the 1st phase of optimization. Moving forward, any time I launch new offers and their respective campaigns, I will split-test two similar offers... EVERY TIME. This should become a habit.
Anyhow, not much of an update; I think tomorrow I will be posting all my data. I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of which campaigns to move forward with and which ones to kill. I will follow the Mobile Cookbook BUT it doesn't seem to take into account campaigns that have good numbers but -100%. I just don't want to kill campaigns that have good CTR numbers and/or good LP CTR numbers but no conversions because that would be giving up too early? I don't know, what do you guys think? A part of me thinks that those particular campaigns can work.
Tomorrow, while I wait for the first offer and its campaigns to finish gathering data, I will work on the next offer promoting 500 euro voucher in IT. I will come up with 3 angles for it and create 4 campaigns for each angle which will make a total of 12 campaigns, not unlike this iPhone 6 offer. What I may do different is launch with 2 style landing pages and then create 3 variations for each angle which will give me a total of 6 landing pages. AND of course, see if I can find similar offers to split-test.
Anyhow, until tomorrow guys!
Update #11 - 08:30 on 25 September 2015
I hope you guys are doing well.
So it's been about 13 days since I've updated my journal. No I did not forget about affiliate marketing or anything of that nature. Aside from having to take care of some personal things, I signed up for the Affiliate Mastery Challenge.
I've worked on a bunch of creatives for optimized campaigns of the last ones I ran but I'm holding off a bit on running them until the start or close to the start of the challenge. I'm also trying to save my budget for it.
I'll post my creatives sometime later today or tomorrow as I've been doing; I want to keep the trend going.
Update #12 - 00:13 on 9 October 2015
I've been meaning to update my Follow Along for a while but also realize that it may be of interest to no one unless I actually post campaign data. Unfortunately I do not have that as I'm currently involved in the 6 week AMC.
However, I have had people say nice things to me and my dedication to making this work. I owe it to those people to let them know that my lack of updates is not because of a lack of dedication. On the contrary, I am taking the course as well as reading blogs.
I've also started eating better and taking supplements like vitamin d and fish oil. I've also been working out. What does this have to do with affiliate marketing? You have to be at your best if you want to perform at your best. How are we going to launch campaigns day in and day out if we're feeling lazy and gluttonous because of the bad food we ingest? Take care of your body and your mind and the rest will follow. I'm not perfect as i'm overweight but I am trying. Rome wasn't built in one day.
I've been watching Malan Darras' videos. I've just learned about him but man does he inspire me. I recommend you guys check him out.
Anyway, if you read this post, thank you. I am excited about launching campaigns for the AMC and will hopefully be able to share some data.
Take care guys!
your catchy headline brought me here haha
nice progress, good luck on your journey. Health and fitness is definitely an area of your life you don't want to suppress, no matter on what you concentrate.
Thank you for your words.
Health and fitness is definitely important. All the wealth in the world does not matter if one doesn't take care of him or herself.
So you're the one running these ads in my country?
Btw if you need some help with translating for the BE market, I'm a native belgian flemish speaker.
Update #13 - 18:36 on 31 December 2015 (This was posted a couple of days ago at another forum)
I have not forgotten about my journal and despite the lack of updates, I have not gotten distracted and moved away from affiliate marketing! I've actually been in the lab, learning, launching campaigns, tweaking, etc. I was also part of the 6WAMC and it was awesome. It definitely definitely without a doubt helped me in my affiliate marketing career. Unfortunately, I'm not a millionaire... yet. However, I have had a profitable campaign. I'm in the middle of another campaign that's profitable but with very little volume.
I've recently read advice from Malan Darras about just launching campaigns or offers that are working on that particular traffic source. I've been trying to mix and match and just launch a bunch of stuff but this advice sounded solid. The first thing I did was use my spy tool, looked up the traffic source that I like to run on and found a utility app that has been running for a while in a specific geo. It was actually the same utility app offer that I had my first profitable campaign with but in a different geo. I said fuck it, let's do it. The data said the offer was still working, why not?
I ripped the creatives, created a campaign for it. I also created another campaign and used my creatives from my first profitable campaign but translated them. I even split-tested the same offer between two different affiliate networks as well as between LP and direct linking.
It wasn't long before I saw conversions come in. I did some white listing and black listing of placements, finished up the split-tests, etc. It's been a couple of days now since I've launched (last Thursday) and my campaign is finally in the green. I have more or less 200% ROI. Sounds great, right? Not if you're only making about $19 in revenue everyday. My first profitable campaign at least almost broke $100 as I had $90 profit days. But this campaign is even lower than the first.
I'm happy that I hit another profitable campaign and what excites me the most is the method in which I was able to get to a profitable campaign. With that said, my main issue with this campaign is the volume. For those who are into mobile marketing, there are certain placements that convert well for specific offers and those that don't. The key to making a lot of money in mobile (I think) is making sure that there is enough volume on the placements that are converting.
That is my current obstacle. I am trying to remedy the issue by looking for other traffic source or ad exchanges that have the same placements as well so that when you add all of them up, there is enough volume. The other way I'm trying to get volume is by launching the campaign in an adjacent country where they speak the same language as well. There is no data that indicates that the offer is working there so that goes against what Malan preaches but I think it may be worth a quick test. If it fails, I spend $30 trying to figure it out. If it works, I make more money. It's not a loss either way one puts it.
I will update this follow along with the status of my campaign as I attempt to access the same placements on other traffic sources / ad exchanges. If anyone has feedback or has run into this same issue, your insight would be greatly appreciated.
Update #14 - 18:43 on 31 December 2015
So I did try duplicating my campaign to an adjacent country that spoke the same language. I did end up getting some conversions but the ROI and the volume just wasn't worthwhile for me to put the effort in. One could theoretically have 100's of small campaigns and make money that way but then the amount of effort far outweighs the benefits. I paused this particular campaign.
Another thing I tried to address the volume issue is launch the same campaign at another mDSP. Interestingly enough, this mDSP had more volume for that particular placement than the one I first tried but not by a whole lot. If you're running mobile, keep this in mind. You take a placement on a particular ad exchange and the volume won't be equal across all mDSPs. This is new to me and something to be mindful of when I get a converting offer on a placement. So with the same campaign running on two mDSPs, I'm still not getting enough volume. I may just pause the campaigns and move on.
I think I am going to shift my strategy to focus on the high volume placements and then going from there. I've had two profitable campaigns but the lack of volume is my obstacle.
Therefore, I am going to look for high volume placements and find offers that work well on those. I just need to find a good way to spy on those placements. I've used VPN with emulator/real android phone but it doesn't seem to 100% replicate what others may see. I see more big brand ads than offers that affiliate marketers would promote. Actually the big dead giveaway is that one particular placement that I'm eyeing has about 2 million impressions daily for Go2mobi. But when I spy on that placement using a VPN and Android phone, I see ads being promoted via Adwords/DoubleClick. Something doesn't add up...
I will keep you guys updated.
Attachment 9429
Originally Posted by soulfly1
Btw if you need some help with translating for the BE market, I'm a native belgian flemish speaker.
I appreciate the gesture. Thank you.
Hey Alexis, phenomenal follow along so far! Reminds me a lot of when I was first starting out. You're doing great man, slowly but surely you'll start getting more winning campaigns under your belt.
Originally Posted by dtalexone
Originally Posted by integrity
I wonder why I see this placement in both Go2mobi/Mobfox and in GDN. Maybe the app placement's inventory is being split between both exchanges? Or maybe one is brokering it to the other? Because I think I also see brokering of placements between exchanges themselves... I could be wrong.
But when I spy on this placement, I definitely see most of the ads being displayed via Google.
Do you have any insight on this? I'm definitely going to run on both as a test.
Update #15 - 08:34 on 8 January 2016
So I'm currently trying to run a utility app install, PSafe, in a certain placement in a certain GEO that has both volume and that I've seen this offer being ran on when I did manual spying. Although, like I mentioned in my previous post, it seems that the offer is being ran via Adwords; therefore this placement is available on GDN and the Mobfox exchange via an MDSP that has it. So I figured that I will run this on both GDN and Mobfox via both Avazu and Go2mobi to see if there is any difference. Make no mistake about it, I see the PSafe ads displayed via GDN the most on this placement.
Go2mobi and GDN are still in the process of approval while Avazu has just begun to ran. GDN disapproved my ads because of a "trick-to-click" policy which I find odd because the ads I created use the same exact copy and style that I saw running on the placement via GDN. It makes me wonder if it's the advertiser itself that is running the ads as opposed to another affiliate marketer but that would be unfair if the advertiser can get away with it while the affiliate can't. We'll see what happens with this.
Anyhow, to summarize... I will promote 3 campaigns that are virtually the same across GDN, Avazu, and Go2mobi and it will run on one specific placement in one specific country with volume. I'm hoping my next update will be the results of this test.
Thanks for reading!
Originally Posted by dtalexone
But when I spy on this placement, I definitely see most of the ads being displayed via Google.
Do you have any insight on this? I'm definitely going to run on both as a test.
Originally Posted by dtalexone
The problem now is that Google won't approve the same banners that I was using back then. They've become much stricter in this regard. Chances are the guys you see running it had them approved long ago when the policy was different. Although had that been the case Google would've disapproved them by now. Who knows.. It will just be nearly impossible to get anything aggressive approved on Adwords.
I'd focus on Avazu/Go2Mobi or pop traffic.
Also, PSafe has been around a while. Not sure how hot it is now compared to back then, so it's worth noting.
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