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Road to 1 Jillion Dollars! (27)


09-13-2015 08:52 PM #1 1jilliondollars (Member)
Road to 1 Jillion Dollars!

Hey everybody

I decided to be the first to ever make a jillion dollars and what better way than AM right ?

My wife and I are newbie doobies and we took a week off to launch our first campaign together!

We launched it over the weekend (finally) after almost 5 days of creating banners, landers and tracking all of which we learned from complete scratch!

Hard work was put into this campaign but we kept our expectation extremely low. I'm glad we did, you'll see below why

We are following the mobile cookbook (main course) and everything looks great so far. I'll provide some details on the offer and traffic stuff below along with some screen shots of banners, landers and current stats.

Offer: : Ali Express app install
Payout : .28 - .40 (Depending on the network as we are split testing 5 networks)
Geo : Turkey
Networks : Addiliate, Mundomedia, Ascend Media, BlackFox, Leadhug
Traffic Source: Decisive

Screenshots of Banners:
http://prntscr.com/8fyy6l - 1st Angle
http://prntscr.com/8fyz5a - 2nd Angle

Most banners have 3 frames. Hence, some might look strange or with no text.

Screenshots of Landers:
http://prntscr.com/8fz1w3

Landers look exactly the same, the only difference is the angle. There is also a picture in the white box.

Campaign Setup
The campaigns are setup exactly how it's described in the tutorial:

I am split testing 5 ad networks that have the same offer.
I prepared 8 campaigns shown below (4 for each angle):

OFFER-ANGLE-WIFI-APP
OFFER-ANGLE-WIFI-SITE
OFFER-ANGLE-MOBILE-APP
OFFER-ANGLE-MOBILE-SITE

Each campaign has 50% of the traffic is sent to lander and 50% directly to download page.

TESTING TESTING TESTING!

Results so far
Results are a lot worse than we expected considering it's a popular product and a simple app install. You would think such a popular offer, free, app install would easily make some revenue (not necessarily profit) but damn.. see screenshots below.

See below current overall stats in Decisive:
http://prntscr.com/8fzajq

Today I increased the bid price by 10-15c on some of the campaigns that you can see with very low win rate. It wasn't said to do that in the tutorial but it probably is the best choice as it would've taken forever to get that traffic otherwise. Please let me know if that was the right move.

I also received some info from Mundomedia as to what devices etc are performing best with this offer and blocked everything else for all campaigns.

See below current overall stats in Voluum for each campaign:
http://prntscr.com/8fzck7


What we will do next
As per Caurmen's amazing tutorial.

"Until your campaigns have spent $14 each, do not make any changes aside from the following:

If, after 5,000 impressions, one banner is showing no conversions and a CTR of less than half of the top 3 banners’ average, cut that banner.
If a placement has spent more than 3x the payout of the offer and is taking more than 50% of total impressions, kill that placement.
If a placement is running extremely high CPCs (more than 3x the average) and has spent more than 2x the payout, kill it unless it’s profitable."


We should have our first campaigns hit the 5k mark tomorrow night but I have a couple of questions.
"If, after 5,000 impressions, one banner is showing no conversions and a CTR of less than half of the top 3 banners’ average, cut that banner."
Question:
By conversions, we are talking about clicks on the banners and not the actual app install conversions, correct?

"If a placement has spent more than 3x the payout of the offer and is taking more than 50% of total impressions, kill that placement."
Question:
I already asked this question in the tutorial comment section but I'll also ask here as I didn't get a response yet there.
What is meant by "placement" I know that it's a place where the banner is presented for impressions but is Caurmen just referring to the banners or maybe the campaigns in this case? And by "kill that placement", does that mean to kill the whole campaign?

"If a placement is running extremely high CPCs (more than 3x the average) and has spent more than 2x the payout, kill it unless it’s profitable."
Question:
Can someone explain how this can happen? How can CPC's become high when all I am paying for is a steady CPM? I am 100% I got this idea completely wrong

Newbie questions but we all got to start from somewhere

Conclusion
We would appreciate ALL the feedback we can get but what will help us out a lot more is for people who know their game to show me their thought process.

I am eager to know the thought process and hence, the only reason why I made this follow along. What would be your next step? What key factor are looking at in Decisive and Voluum to determine whether to keep a campaign? When would you scrap a campaign immediately or begin making changes to banners and campaigns to make them more profitable? etc

I'll keep this follow along running even after we begin making 5k a day if you all help us out a bit every day to understand and achieve our goals

Please do let me know if you require any further information (screenshots, stats etc) and I'll be happy to provide them.

Looking forward to reading some awesome constructive comments!

Thank you !

Aris


09-14-2015 11:12 AM #2 kepe95 (Moderator)

Even if the banners and landers are crap.. at least 574 people went to the download page and knew exactly what they were going to see. How can there only be 1 conversion?
I was surprised by this as well when I started But that's just how it is. You can get a better conversion rate of course, but overall to someone starting out it will likely always look like a lot of banner clicks / lander clicks compared to the conversions. Probably a lot of accidental / "mindless" clicks + a hundred more reasons why they may not got to the point where the conversion is being registered.

This depends on your material as well. If you got a more honest approach, less will click through, but more will convert of those who have clicked through. And with a more "bending the truth" approach it's the other way around. The latter will usually work better though, especially for apps where it's a fast reaction. You don't want to pitch all the features and benefits of the app, simply get them to commit to a fast emotional action.


09-14-2015 11:28 AM #3 vierka (Member)

Hi,
I launched my first campaign on decisive.is 2 weeks ago and had no conversions (US traffic). I added tracking link to it (clickmeter.com) which
was free for first 1000 clicks and it told me that 46% was non-unique (46% of users visited my offer in the last 30 minutes).
I strongly recommend you to add a tracker. I'm thinking of trying a different traffic source.

Vierka


09-14-2015 11:42 AM #4 1jilliondollars (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by kepe95 View Post
I was surprised by this as well when I started But that's just how it is. You can get a better conversion rate of course, but overall to someone starting out it will likely always look like a lot of banner clicks / lander clicks compared to the conversions. Probably a lot of accidental / "mindless" clicks + a hundred more reasons why they may not got to the point where the conversion is being registered.

This depends on your material as well. If you got a more honest approach, less will click through, but more will convert of those who have clicked through. And with a more "bending the truth" approach it's the other way around. The latter will usually work better though, especially for apps where it's a fast reaction. You don't want to pitch all the features and benefits of the app, simply get them to commit to a fast emotional action.
Good thing I prepared my wife (and myself) for the worst possible scenario Still a bit of a shock but nothing unexpected.

You have good points there and it's all about testing. I think our material is good and will only get better. I believe we are lacking the marketing techniques and little twists in banners and text that can grab peoples attention. Your points are very true and agree 100%

Thanks

Aris


09-14-2015 11:45 AM #5 1jilliondollars (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by vierka View Post
Hi,
I launched my first campaign on decisive.is 2 weeks ago and had no conversions (US traffic). I added tracking link to it (clickmeter.com) which
was free for first 1000 clicks and it told me that 46% was non-unique (46% of users visited my offer in the last 30 minutes).
I strongly recommend you to add a tracker. I'm thinking of trying a different traffic source.

Vierka
Of course I use a tracker and pay $100 a month for it I use Voluum. A solid tracker is a must. Investing $100 a month for a tracker is better than losing thousands per month because you didn't use one.

Thanks for your reply

Aris


09-14-2015 01:08 PM #6 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Amy, thanks a million and im glad to have you follow along as I can definitely use your expertise.
YW! I'm actually not that much more experienced than many newbies are. It definitely pleases me when other people start chiming in (like kepe95 for example).

I don't know how to use the multi quote function yet :
To quote something, simply copy and paste it into your reply area, highlight it and click on that little text bubble icon above the reply area (it's the right-most icon). Alternatively just surround the text with the [ QUOTE ] [ / QUOTE ] tags (without the spaces).


So when Caurmen says "kill the placement" to clarify, im killing that entire campaign with 8 banners, correct?
Edit: To avoid any confusion, each campaign has only 1 placement. It's either app or site and never both.:
No - a placement is a SPECIFIC app or site. For example the grindr app, or a flashlight app. You can find a breakdown of placements in your stats.

Thank you for the clarification but I am still having trouble understanding this. Let's say I have 4000 impressions, 24 clicks and .34 spend. 0.34/24 = 0.01 cpc. Great. What is meant by "more than 3x the average" ? "Has spent more than 2x the payout", is straightforward and in this case it didn't as the payout is .30 approximately.
I'm assuming the 4000 impressions are from a single placement (i.e. a specific app or site). You would then need to compare this to the average CPC calculated based on ALL your stats across ALL the placements for that campaign. Once you understand what a placement is you should see what we mean.


It works perfectly. I spent 15-20 hours going back and forth with my AM's, literally driving them crazy with constant testing. I read tutorials , watched Youtube videos and tested them via VPN to make sure my landers and links were working every single time flawlessly. It didn't take us a week to do this for nothing I know tracking is a major issue for us newbies but I was determined to spend as many hours required to give it a good kick in the ass and I succeeded My wife said we can make a living if they keep testing conversions at this rate
LOL! That's fantastic! Always nice to rule out something so basic in the beginning so we won't keep wondering why there's no conversions.


I don't know if this is normal but for such a popular offer, the stats look horrendous. I don't mind it not making a profit but only 1 conversion from 574 direct link clicks and 574 to lander seems ridiculously low.
Like what kepe95 said. Also know that a large part of the game is about the angle and banners (in addition to the offer and traffic source of course). Of course some offers are easier to make profitable than others. Just give it your reasonably best shot and if it doesn't work out then move on. As to what you'd consider to be a "reasonably best shot" - that would be up to you to decide. It's no good doing a half-assed job jumping from offer to offer (which I don't need to worry about with you I'm sure!), but knowing when to move on is important as well. As with most things in life, it's about finding that balance that suits you.


Amy


09-14-2015 01:36 PM #7 1jilliondollars (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
YW! I'm actually not that much more experienced than many newbies are. It definitely pleases me when other people start chiming in (like kepe95 for example).



To quote something, simply copy and paste it into your reply area, highlight it and click on that little text bubble icon above the reply area (it's the right-most icon). Alternatively just surround the text with the [ QUOTE ] [ / QUOTE ] tags (without the spaces).




No - a placement is a SPECIFIC app or site. For example the grindr app, or a flashlight app. You can find a breakdown of placements in your stats.



I'm assuming the 4000 impressions are from a single placement (i.e. a specific app or site). You would then need to compare this to the average CPC calculated based on ALL your stats across ALL the placements for that campaign. Once you understand what a placement is you should see what we mean.




LOL! That's fantastic! Always nice to rule out something so basic in the beginning so we won't keep wondering why there's no conversions.




Like what kepe95 said. Also know that a large part of the game is about the angle and banners (in addition to the offer and traffic source of course). Of course some offers are easier to make profitable than others. Just give it your reasonably best shot and if it doesn't work out then move on. As to what you'd consider to be a "reasonably best shot" - that would be up to you to decide. It's no good doing a half-assed job jumping from offer to offer (which I don't need to worry about with you I'm sure!), but knowing when to move on is important as well. As with most things in life, it's about finding that balance that suits you.


Amy
You are like 2 steps ahead of me the whole time. You're right.. I just realized there was a placement tab in my stats I didn't notice that before and so assumed that it was 1 placement for all campaigns, hence, killing the campaign.

Right, let me absorb everything said so far in this thread, do my research and banning and I guess the next step would be to try and get more conversions rolling in.

To-do list:
1) My wife and I think of 3 new catchy angles
2) She makes 9 new banners (3 for each angle)
3) I create 3 new landing pages ( Same format but different pictures used this time and different background color)
4) Go analytic mode and begin banning asap (Learning good practice and saves cash)

Anybody and everybody is welcome to add more to the above to-do list if they feel something will helps us out at this current stage.

Until the next update

Aris


09-17-2015 09:28 AM #8 1jilliondollars (Member)

Hey everybody

We have three campaigns that have reached their budgets with traffic and I am currently awaiting for the rest to do the same.

The overall campaign so far generated only 1 conversion after over 500k impressions and 8131 clicks (Half of the clicks are to landers and other half directly). I am preparing 3 more angles and 9 more banners with 3 landers but my wife asked me the jillion dollar question, "Why don't we just try a new offer?".

There's 2 things that came to my mind. First, she's right. Common sense says that the offer should've converted much better no matter who I am and my experience. I agree totally to some comments I've read and to what Amy said, offers should be quickly tested without a lander (especially for app installs). I did make landers but 50% of the traffic was sent directly as well. Second, I am 100% sure, 1 of the biggest mistakes new affiliate make is believe an offer is to blame for low conversion and jump from offer to offer and always remaining in that loop of the initial testing phase and just never move on. You end up just investing constantly in the test phase of a campaign , losing money, getting discouraged and giving up. My wife and I don't want to be in that loop but we would want to know if this is a campaign you would give up on because it simple...doesn't ... work.

I am trying to master the traffic source and not the offer. I am not afraid to ditch an offer when it truly just doesn't work with my traffic source. What's important to us is that we understand when it is the right time to ditch an offer. Over 4k clicks where sent directly to the offer (other 4k to lander) and only 1 converted. Our banners don't look bad (see above first post) and they did generate 8k clicks so far with only 3 out 8 campaigns reaching their budgets.

Question:
1) What would you do? I legitimately believe in this specific case and at this current time of the testing phase, that the offer is to blame. Keep in mind that this offer is (was?) hot a couple of weeks ago when I found it. It had over 55% conversion in the specific network. Now it's down to 1.43%...

2) How many times have you seen campaigns like these start rising again? This offer is relatively new (August 28th in most networks) I am sure there're a lot of people making money from this campaign but they obviously have the right traffic for this and optimized campaigns for that traffic. A better question would be, is it even worth spending more money on this? I am not going to go traffic hopping here. Like I said, mastering the traffic, not the offer.

3) How much traffic would you send directly to the offer for a quick test on conversions? And what conversion rate is the "promising" percentage you would feel comfortable/confident to spending more time to optimize and not ditch the offer right off the bat? My goal would be anything higher than -50% ROI would be worth investing time, money and effort.

Really looking forward to hearing from you all soon

Aris


09-21-2015 12:58 PM #9 vortex (Senior Moderator)

1) What would you do? I legitimately believe in this specific case and at this current time of the testing phase, that the offer is to blame. Keep in mind that this offer is (was?) hot a couple of weeks ago when I found it. It had over 55% conversion in the specific network. Now it's down to 1.43%...
An offer normally doesn't go from hot to cool in just two weeks. The decrease in conversion rates I'm guessing may be because as more and more affiliates joined in, traffic quality started to vary which brought down the CR. However, some offers are easier to promote than others. How easy an offer is to promote will also heavily depend on the affiliate's past experience (including life experience). For example in the case of aliexpress, if you do a lot of online shopping on similar shopping sites you may be in a better position to come up with angles etc. I would suggest to just do adequate research, come up with many angles, choose for example 5 that you think have the best chances and test them. And if the results are not where you'd like to see them, leave the offer and try something else. The key here is that you want to try your reasonable best so that when the ROI is far from ideal, you're not left with the question, "would this camp have been profitable if I had tried harder?"


2) How many times have you seen campaigns like these start rising again? This offer is relatively new (August 28th in most networks) I am sure there're a lot of people making money from this campaign but they obviously have the right traffic for this and optimized campaigns for that traffic. A better question would be, is it even worth spending more money on this? I am not going to go traffic hopping here. Like I said, mastering the traffic, not the offer.
Same response as for question 1 - basically if you've tried your reasonable best, and don't believe you could come up with angles that are any better than your existing ones, then move on.


3) How much traffic would you send directly to the offer for a quick test on conversions? And what conversion rate is the "promising" percentage you would feel comfortable/confident to spending more time to optimize and not ditch the offer right off the bat? My goal would be anything higher than -50% ROI would be worth investing time, money and effort.
-50% sounds good. It really depends on what type of traffic and which particular traffic source you're working with. For example, some traffic sources have a lot of bad traffic, in which case you could set that ROI to a more negative number because you know that once you've blacklisted a few of the biggest worst sites your ROI could improve significantly.


So what did you end up deciding? Did you ditch aliexpress and try another offer?


Amy


09-22-2015 11:10 AM #10 1jilliondollars (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post

So what did you end up deciding? Did you ditch aliexpress and try another offer?


Amy
Great to hear from you and thank you for your reply!

I ditched Aliexpress. I don't believe for a second that 8 campaigns, 2 landers and 8 banners each failed so hard to bring in any conversion after 500k impressions. I paused the campaigns and moved on.

I've been reading around and seen that a few people mentioned they had successful campaigns with utility offers in Decisive. So, that is our next step. We are working on getting some solid angles here and this will be a much larger campaign then Ali as it will include multiple tier 2 countries. I feel kind of confident with this one and believe this will have some statistical significance to work on.

Amy said:

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
-50% sounds good. It really depends on what type of traffic and which particular traffic source you're working with. For example, some traffic sources have a lot of bad traffic, in which case you could set that ROI to a more negative number because you know that once you've blacklisted a few of the biggest worst sites your ROI could improve significantly.
I was planning on running around 2k impressions per banner for testing. If there was no conversion, I will ban it. Otherwise, if it had anywhere from -90% to -70%, I would let it run to 5k. Caurmen's method with $14 budget per campaign with a low payout offer was great, but i think it may have been overkill in the case of Aliexpress. It generated 0 conversions even after 5k impressions each.

I am bringing this up because you stated above that a traffic source may have a lot of bad traffic from certain placements. It makes me wonder now if 2k impressions will be enough to justify banning a banner (or 5k even). It's about learning how to be efficient and not waste to much time (and money) on campaigns that don't work.

The traffic source I am using is Decisive and it was recommended in Caurmen's tutorial. .. Although, I don't see many people using it based on all the threads i read. So any feedback on their traffic would be great. I would prefer to master 1 traffic source and then move on to running multiple traffic sources, but if there's any reason I shouldn't stay with Decisive, please do let me know.

Game plan for the time being
1) ANGLES ANGLES ANGLES - My wife and I have a lot of work and research to do here.. We want to nail this one.
2) Search for someone who can make affordable and attractive landers. I'll look around the forum (Possibly in Fiverr too?).
3) The offer is exclusive in some ad networks and managed to get access to 2 of them so far.
4) Spy on some banners and landers for inspiration.

That's all for now

Have an awesome day.

Aris


09-22-2015 01:50 PM #11 whitefox (Member)

Make your own landers! I had no idea what a lander or coding was 3 weeks ago and with the help of codeacademy im realy making headway with it, if I can do it anyone can.

Plus you know what they say, money saved is money earned.


09-22-2015 02:39 PM #12 1jilliondollars (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by whitefox View Post
Make your own landers! I had no idea what a lander or coding was 3 weeks ago and with the help of codeacademy im realy making headway with it, if I can do it anyone can.

Plus you know what they say, money saved is money earned.
Thanks for your message

I made my own landers with the first campaign but I don't really want to code landers this time around. I want to actually use Photoshop to design an image that will look like a landing page with a cta. Basically it will be a background image that's linked to the offers. That way, wherever they click, it will take them to the offer. Even accidental clicks or clicks while scrolling might trigger it but they were there because they clicked on my banner, so i'm not so concerned about that.

My wife knows Photoshop good enough but will also split test them from a couple on fiverr and wherever else I find.

Aris


09-22-2015 02:41 PM #13 whitefox (Member)

One giant CTA button. Nice.


09-23-2015 06:35 AM #14 1jilliondollars (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by whitefox View Post
One giant CTA button. Nice.
umm, yeah, more or less

What's your thoughts on that?

Aris


09-23-2015 01:55 PM #15 vortex (Senior Moderator)

I was planning on running around 2k impressions per banner for testing. If there was no conversion, I will ban it. Otherwise, if it had anywhere from -90% to -70%, I would let it run to 5k. Caurmen's method with $14 budget per campaign with a low payout offer was great, but i think it may have been overkill in the case of Aliexpress. It generated 0 conversions even after 5k impressions each.

I am bringing this up because you stated above that a traffic source may have a lot of bad traffic from certain placements. It makes me wonder now if 2k impressions will be enough to justify banning a banner (or 5k even). It's about learning how to be efficient and not waste to much time (and money) on campaigns that don't work.
I would suggest to NOT gauge anything by number of impressions alone, because this way you're not taking into account of ROI which ultimately is what you're after. By "-90% to -70%" were you referring to ROI or?

When it comes to cutting banners, the usual approach is to compare them using the split-test calculator and cutting the ones that do relatively poorly. When there's a total lack of conversions, you can't cut anything - because no banner would be better or worse than the others.

I don't know how other people decide whether to ditch a camp or not, but like I've said before, I would just do my reasonable best in coming up with angles, then choose a few angles and make 3-5 banners/angle, and just spend the budget I've allocated to testing the camp (e.g. $50 for a low payout offer like app installs), and cut the worst placements in the process. Then I'd look at the best banner and see how close it is to breaking even. I also look at whether there are bad placements that I caught too late, that ate up a significant part of my spending. So for example if my best banner is at -70% ROI, but if I could exclude a couple of bad placements from the calculations and arrive at a -50% ROI then I would consider continuing optimizing the campaign.

Like you said, there has to be a balance between not giving up too easily and wasting time and money unnecessarily. This is where experience will help a bit. My feeling is that there are so many offers out there, that I don't need to try to get each one to work. Like I've said time and again, I would just try my reasonable best, and if the camp doesn't show promise, I'd just move on.


The traffic source I am using is Decisive and it was recommended in Caurmen's tutorial. .. Although, I don't see many people using it based on all the threads i read. So any feedback on their traffic would be great. I would prefer to master 1 traffic source and then move on to running multiple traffic sources, but if there's any reason I shouldn't stay with Decisive, please do let me know.
I would also recommend go2mobi.com. Trying to master a single traffic source is good, but testing 2 at the same time can't hurt either. See which one you like better, then make that your "go-to" source.


Game plan for the time being
1) ANGLES ANGLES ANGLES - My wife and I have a lot of work and research to do here.. We want to nail this one.
2) Search for someone who can make affordable and attractive landers. I'll look around the forum (Possibly in Fiverr too?).
3) The offer is exclusive in some ad networks and managed to get access to 2 of them so far.
4) Spy on some banners and landers for inspiration.
These are all very good tasks to include. For landing page creation service check out link removed by vortex.


Basically it will be a background image that's linked to the offers.
2 potential problems with doing it this way:

1)Mobile-responsiveness - Or rather, lack thereof.

2)Size - Which will affect page load speed.

But I haven't tried to split-test an image vs. a "properly-coded" lander i.e. using css etc. instead of one giant image. So I don't know how much this could affect conversion rates. Testing landers as one big image may be a quick and dirty way to gauge effectiveness, assuming the loading time isn't long enough to single-handedly break the campaign. I wouldn't know...


Amy


09-23-2015 02:23 PM #16 1jilliondollars (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
I would suggest to NOT gauge anything by number of impressions alone, because this way you're not taking into account of ROI which ultimately is what you're after. By "-90% to -70%" were you referring to ROI or?
My apologies, i was referring to ROI. I meant 2k impressions and at least 90% - 70% ROI, or else I would cut the banner.

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
When it comes to cutting banners, the usual approach is to compare them using the split-test calculator and cutting the ones that do relatively poorly. When there's a total lack of conversions, you can't cut anything - because no banner would be better or worse than the others.

I don't know how other people decide whether to ditch a camp or not, but like I've said before, I would just do my reasonable best in coming up with angles, then choose a few angles and make 3-5 banners/angle, and just spend the budget I've allocated to testing the camp (e.g. $50 for a low payout offer like app installs), and cut the worst placements in the process. Then I'd look at the best banner and see how close it is to breaking even. I also look at whether there are bad placements that I caught too late, that ate up a significant part of my spending. So for example if my best banner is at -70% ROI, but if I could exclude a couple of bad placements from the calculations and arrive at a -50% ROI then I would consider continuing optimizing the campaign.

Like you said, there has to be a balance between not giving up too easily and wasting time and money unnecessarily. This is where experience will help a bit. My feeling is that there are so many offers out there, that I don't need to try to get each one to work. Like I've said time and again, I would just try my reasonable best, and if the camp doesn't show promise, I'd just move on.
Some awesome tips there and totally agree. Placements can screw you over big time. Hence, why i questioned my 2k impression test. Perhaps 2k might not be enough but i'll test it anyway with various amounts. 5K like Caurmen mentioned might be the sweet spot.


Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
I would also recommend go2mobi.com. Trying to master a single traffic source is good, but testing 2 at the same time can't hurt either. See which one you like better, then make that your "go-to" source.
1 step ahead of you. I want to master a single traffic source but i thought I should broaden my reach and test as much as my budget can allow on traffic source. I signed up to go2mobi a few hours ago and will be running it simultaneously with Decisive. I have a good feeling about this one. I believe we will get good amounts of data this time around.




Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
These are all very good tasks to include. For landing page creation service check out link removed by vortex.
Malware detected when I click on that link. You sure?

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
2 potential problems with doing it this way:

1)Mobile-responsiveness - Or rather, lack thereof.

2)Size - Which will affect page load speed.

But I haven't tried to split-test an image vs. a "properly-coded" lander i.e. using css etc. instead of one giant image. So I don't know how much this could affect conversion rates. Testing landers as one big image may be a quick and dirty way to gauge effectiveness, assuming the loading time isn't long enough to single-handedly break the campaign. I wouldn't know...
I have the impression you can make pictures be responsive. I'm not an expert but as along as the image is higher than the resolution of the devices you are targeting, it should resize accordingly. It might require a small piece of code for that but i assume it's something you can copy paste for each lander. Not sure if this is all making sense. As for the size, I believe if it's hosted, it loads up much faster and in certain file formats i.e. .png. Again, not 100% sure about this but will do my research.

Thank you once again for your reply

Aris


09-23-2015 06:08 PM #17 caurmen (Administrator)

Responsive images: they'll resize according to width if it's set in %age (usually, barring a few uncommon problems). However, the full filesize of the image will be downloaded regardless of the resolution it's eventually displayed at. If you're planning to do a whole lander as a single image, that'll probably hurt, even if you're using the maximum compression reasonably possible.

Also, the quality of the image when eventually presented will depend on the quality of the resizing algorithm the browser uses, which won't be as good as Photoshop's resize function. That's not usually a problem for images, but if you're resizing an image containing lots of text, particularly small text, it can be an issue.


09-23-2015 06:47 PM #18 1jilliondollars (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by caurmen View Post
Responsive images: they'll resize according to width if it's set in %age (usually, barring a few uncommon problems). However, the full filesize of the image will be downloaded regardless of the resolution it's eventually displayed at. If you're planning to do a whole lander as a single image, that'll probably hurt, even if you're using the maximum compression reasonably possible.

Also, the quality of the image when eventually presented will depend on the quality of the resizing algorithm the browser uses, which won't be as good as Photoshop's resize function. That's not usually a problem for images, but if you're resizing an image containing lots of text, particularly small text, it can be an issue.
Thank you Caurmen for your reply.

I have done some research and will attempt to make a simple one and test it out a bit.

I decided that coding is the way to go so I'll continue with that.

Thank you

Aris


09-26-2015 10:13 AM #19 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Malware detected when I click on that link. You sure?
Geezus I'm sorry about that! I thought they were back in biz somehow but maybe not. If you're interested here's their story. I'll remove my recommendation link from the original post. Again, I do apologize for this oversight!


Amy


10-21-2015 01:09 PM #20 1jilliondollars (Member)

Riiiiiight....

Hi all !

After a horrendous long wait for approval... my banners and landers finally got approved. I hooked up my campaigns last night and launched them!

I went to bed and was totally looking forward to some results in the morning. So today I open up Decisive to see what is going on with the campaigns and I see hyphens where there was suppose to be numbers!!!

I don't understand why, but there was 0 bids 0 wins and of course 0 clicks for all 35 campaigns!!!! And these 3 geo's (which are tier 2) are huge with hundreds of millions of impressions...

So I am a bit mind blown today. Not sure what is going on but i decided to play around a bit with the settings. I increased the bid amount x2 to see if anything changes but nothing. I added more "store" option to some of them but again.. nothing changed. Three campaigns began getting some bids (5, 3 and 1) but they have been stuck there for a while. I even tried increasing the bid price to $5 (which is ridiculously high i think for these geo's and banners) and still nothing.

All this time I was looking at decisive's tracking. I went over to Voluum and noticed that traffic is coming in to ALL campaigns and there is currently around 1600 traffic sent already..... wth is going on! There is no wins , no placements, no money spent, but there's traffic coming in to Voluum. It can't be bad traffic that Decisive discarded from the budget because I have no placements won as of yet.

General info:
Each campaign has a budget of $12 with a $1 bid ($6 daily max). CPM is about .40, payout of the offer is around .20-.40. I set some campaigns at $1.5 and $2 and one at $5 but nothing is changing as of yet. There is 3 geo's all of which are LATAM.

Does increase bid even have any effect in this situation? Shouldn't Decisive show me all the placements available for bid for 320x50 banners anyway?

I'm just baffled as to why there isn't any bids at all!! and where in gods name are these visits coming from in Voluum!.. They're are constantly coming in. I currently see one more campaign that obtained 1 bid but there are 0 wins. I contacted Decisive support as well hopefully they can advise on what is going on.

I am also thoroughly looking into each campaign and I see nothing wrong with the setup.

Any suggestions will be highly appreciated.

Aris


UPDATE
Decisive got back to me with this:
Hi Aris

We want to inform you that sweepstake, dating, antivirus, technology, launchers etc are no longer getting much traffic because many publishers have started blocking these.

We apologize for the inconvenience.


Soooooo....... Is this a Decisive only issue ? Should it be fine if I move to another source?

I also found out that the impressions coming in are from Decisive test impressions/clicks.


10-21-2015 04:17 PM #21 berzerkerz (Member)

I had the same issue with decisive! You can try go2mobi with the smaato or mopub exchange. One thing though if you use mopub they have strict guidelines you have to follow. My creatives were rejected because I didn't add the brand of my app launcher, which sucks! See below


"MoPub has the strictest compliance requirements, so you may simply want to clone this campaign over to another exchange.

MoPub strictly prohibits any content that may mislead users, including:
- Shaky, flashy, gimmicky, misleading, low quality ads
- Windows Dialog or Alert Style banners (ie creatives that look like an OS- or application-level notification instead of an advertisement, including creatives that mimic buttons or icons)
- Any style of call to action that looks like a button – ie the "download arrow" image
- Warning colours such as red (including in the frame), or warning ad copy
- Unclear/warning/misleading call to action like "Start", "Fix", "Clean", "Upgrade", "Protect your phone now!"
- Red notifications/alerts, low battery imagery
- False statements, false urgency, false celebrity endorsement

Best Practice for MoPub creatives:
- State the app name clearly
- State the app's function clearly
- Use the logo that matches the landing page
- Use a call to action that is a word, and relevant and clear like "Download app"
- The creatives must clearly match the landing and offer page(s)"


10-21-2015 07:44 PM #22 1jilliondollars (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by berzerkerz View Post
I had the same issue with decisive! You can try go2mobi with the smaato or mopub exchange. One thing though if you use mopub they have strict guidelines you have to follow. My creatives were rejected because I didn't add the brand of my app launcher, which sucks! See below


"MoPub has the strictest compliance requirements, so you may simply want to clone this campaign over to another exchange.

MoPub strictly prohibits any content that may mislead users, including:
- Shaky, flashy, gimmicky, misleading, low quality ads
- Windows Dialog or Alert Style banners (ie creatives that look like an OS- or application-level notification instead of an advertisement, including creatives that mimic buttons or icons)
- Any style of call to action that looks like a button – ie the "download arrow" image
- Warning colours such as red (including in the frame), or warning ad copy
- Unclear/warning/misleading call to action like "Start", "Fix", "Clean", "Upgrade", "Protect your phone now!"
- Red notifications/alerts, low battery imagery
- False statements, false urgency, false celebrity endorsement

Best Practice for MoPub creatives:
- State the app name clearly
- State the app's function clearly
- Use the logo that matches the landing page
- Use a call to action that is a word, and relevant and clear like "Download app"
- The creatives must clearly match the landing and offer page(s)"
Hey man and thanks for the tips..

Sadly I didn't see your post before as I just finished adding my campaigns in go2mobi just now. I used Mopub for just 3 campaigns out of the 24 (I cut it down from 34).

The requirements above are absurd though, why would anyone want to work with them. CTA can't be a button??? It can't even be an arrow.. that's just stupid...

I'll go ahead and remove it before they even review it, thank you !

Aris


10-23-2015 04:05 AM #23 ocean25 (Member)

The requirements above are absurd though, why would anyone want to work with them. CTA can't be a button??? It can't even be an arrow.. that's just stupid...
I believe MoPub has much more traffic than Smaato.


10-23-2015 06:48 AM #24 1jilliondollars (Member)

They do ... A LOT more... but the restrictions are absurd. Your CTA can't even look like a button


10-23-2015 08:00 AM #25 1jilliondollars (Member)

CAMPAIGN UPDATE

Campaigns have been running for 2 days now. I've been playing around with bids attempting to get in the mid range and high range to test out the traffic at various bids. I also paused it during working hours reactivated it during peak hours but this is all like a deja vu from my first campaign.

Campaigns that have high volume have hit the 6k impressions mark per banner and I have 200k wins in total but 0 conversions once again.

I have 1 campaign (with 5 banners) at 1.43% CTR average (1.71%, 1.62%, 1.44%, 1.38%, 0.98) and the rest below 0.70% average.

Now, what I was expecting to do is use the Bayesian calculator to find out what can work or not and start cutting out banners/landers... but all that requires conversions.
I guess there's no way to know if placements are bad since i don't have any conversions!

I am not entirely sure how I need to be thinking about this now, but common sense tells me to take all banners with the highest ctr (is 1.5% ctr even good?) and make variations of it. But again not entirely sure if that's what I am suppose to do. What would you do here?

The angle used for these specific banners that did better than others, are creative and unique. I would understand why people would click on it, I would out of curiosity too I suppose, but I don't see myself downloading it for that reason. Should I be aiming for new creative angles instead of working on the ones that generated 0 conversions so far? Angles that will reflect a FACT and not just the CURIOSITY...

Perhaps I should choose specific categories for placements to run my campaigns as I have it open to all categories now.... not sure.

Please provide your feedback.. I feel a bit bummed out on this one. I was really looking forward to getting some conversions so I could have with something this time around.

Thank you

Aris


10-31-2015 04:27 AM #26 vortex (Senior Moderator)

First of all, if it makes you feels any better, Aliexpress isn't the easiest app to promote. The main thing is you're learning a ton and taking massive action. Not every campaign will work out - even pros like some of the STM admins will not make every camp profitable. So there's no need to feel bad about the lack of conversions.

Having said that - let's see what you can do next...

You're right in saying you can't use statistics to cut anything because you don't have conversions.

The angle used for these specific banners that did better than others, are creative and unique. I would understand why people would click on it, I would out of curiosity too I suppose, but I don't see myself downloading it for that reason. Should I be aiming for new creative angles instead of working on the ones that generated 0 conversions so far? Angles that will reflect a FACT and not just the CURIOSITY...

Perhaps I should choose specific categories for placements to run my campaigns as I have it open to all categories now.... not sure.
You definitely have some good ideas there. Now would be the time to try them. I would suggest that you keep coming up with more angles, making more banners to test them. It may also help to show your angles and banners here to get feedback from people. I have zero experience promoting ecommerce apps - but have you tried just showing products from different categories (e.g. electronics, women's fashion...) to see which ones people are most interested in? Also, if I remember correctly, they have "hot" items that are on sale for limited time with count-down timers. I wonder if making banners with just those hot items would attract people or not.

And as you've noticed, curiosity clicks are often not a good thing. You want to attract people that are interested in what you have to offer, so you'd want to design your creatives accordingly. Piquing people's curiosity will get you high CTRs, but when that doesn't translate into good CR then what's the point?

Another thought: Which banner size are you working with right now? Try to expand into sizes other than the ubiquitous 320x50. There are at least a couple to several other banner sizes that have a lot of traffic but a lot less competition. For ecommerce especially, having more real-estate to show off the merchandise can make a lot of difference. So that's another thing you can try.

At the end of the day, you won't be able to make every offer work. If you feel that you've already tried your best angles and still not seeing any promise, by all means call it quits and move onto another offer. The learning process and experience you've gained from promoting this app is more than worth the money you've spent on it, IMHO.


Amy
[EDIT: I can't believe I made this mistake - you mentioned you ditched Aliexpress in an earlier post - I just remembered this! What ARE you promoting now then? Tell me that and I'll do my best to suggest angles etc.]


12-15-2015 01:03 PM #27 addiliate_bvm (Member)

Hi Aris,

I just joined STM and see you were promoting Aliexpress from Addiliate. It seems you have given up on it although you were on the good track.
Let me know if you need any more advice on how to optimize your results. Like it was mentioned before the Ali_Express campaign is a rather difficult one to promote and make some big $$, so seeing it didn't perform like you planned it might be an idea to try some other campaigns on your traffic.

Let me know if you want any further help !


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