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You get another hand soon after you fold (32)

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Background

Hello to everyone in the STM community, we are Yuang and Christian from Italy, currently living in Malta.
We both dropped out of college to become Professional Poker Players during the years of the late online boom in 2009 and got really successfull results, built up our life bankroll and enjoyed quite amazing experiences along the way. Unfortunately the games started to dry out in these last years and on top of that both of us were pretty fed up with playing cards all day

We started separately our journey in the affiliate world, the only thing in common is that we both moved to Malta to open up our own companies:

I started as a blackhat marketer and SEO, mastered GSA to some extent and created custom bots for many popular social networks, had my months of xxxx/days but the whole game is way harder now, the security teams have become better, ipv4 proxies are pretty much all used and the stress of repeated banwaves made me swap to regular affiliate marketing.

Christian on the other hand started immediately with Pin Submits in Europe via fb/adw and had decent results with it, averaging for many months mid xxxx/days. The new legislation on SOI pin submits in Europe and the everlasting banhammer problem on facebook and adwords made him want to try out new verticals.

Present Days

We decided to joint venture at this point and try out new verticals and traffic sources, what we both learned from our previous experiences, be it poker, blackhat botting or pin submits, is that nothing last forever, you milk as much as you can while something is hot and the skills you learn meanwhile (be it web design, coding, using a Thrive panel or learning how to recognize a bluff) are the true valuable thing you get with your hard work, money is just a consequence.

In order to forge this kind of skill we need to have a good overview on how different verticals work and we started with dsp>cpi (we hired two workers and thought that given the low cost of cpi we could make many tests to better understand how to develop our framework, we never really thought we could make decent money with cpi since they really look impossible to compete against older marketers)

Results so far

The results so far have been, as expected, really bad, we tried some top offers from avazu, appflood and yeahmobi and averaged a whopping -95% roi among all the 4 offers/geo we tried so far. What we are starting to understand is that a more wide approach must be taken, testing more offers per day. The only problem still seems the number of different offers vs number of tests before considering the offer dead, on one hand you want to test as much offers/geo as you can, on the other hand if you don't test every offer with many angles/landers you will never know if you missed a potential winner.

What we are thought could be a framework is just test every offer with 4 angles/prelanders and 4 banners per angle and if after a hundred bucks the roi is below 60% we are just going to cut it off, if the ROI is better than -60% there might be some chance, do you think it is a working method? what cutoffs do you guys use to decide a potential winner or a sure loser?

Prelanders, WTF

We are also working hard with the prelanders, reading around STM many of you have 20-60% ctr prelanders, we only managed after huge brainstorming to get our prelanders from 4% to around 10%. Spying is pretty much a daunting task on mobile, every winner is cloacked from the most used spytools and while navigating with a vpn i only see the usual prelanders per product all the time (and trying those prelanders i am far off from 30-40% ctr). How do you guys manage to get those amazing numbers? we understood that a prelander with a common problem headline and a more familiar approach is way better than a professional looking prelander, we optimized them and they do load in 0.5s (getting a cdn today) but are quite stuck atm. If someone wants to have a look at some templates we are going to share some on the next post.

Thanks!
We will try to update this follow along as frequently as possible, we are launching a new campaign as we speak and the translation have just arrived. Btw i am glad we got into this amazing community and thank you for reading this wall of text.

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Nice intro. I will be following your progress.

I love Malta ... lovely place!

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Quite a few members with poker background... will help you, especially at the buying data (lose money) part, which is important.
GL guys!

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I am sorry for not updating the last two weeks, i will try to be more consistent from now on. Huge progress were made:

Update on the dsp campaign
We coudn't get a green ROI after split testing various angles and banners, we swapped offer and also tried some facebook traffic. We did the usual workflow, finding angles, making landers and blacklisting when achieving statistical significance. We decided to start cutting off offers that performed below -60% ROI after 200xcpa. The results were decent on facebook (something around -50% without optimization) and bad on dsp.

Even though we lost money on dsp we learned many things:
-the offers, what seems to work and what seems horrible (or maybe we just haven't found any decent angles)
-a really organized workflow for 4 peoples (me, christian and our 2 employees), using asana for tasks and subtask to speed up hugely the testing of different offers
-learned what kind of prelanders work best with the category of apps we tried

POPS
Meanwhile we started promoting cpi on pops, and they performed MUCH better. We started running non compliant landers and the ROI was pratically breakeven after little optimization. Things were looking great, we even went out for a drink, huge smiles and faith and... we got banned from the advertiser. What a punch in the face! We finally had found a way to gather datas cheaply and got banned after a few days...

What we learned:
-a huge game changer was signing for spytool (adplexity) and starting to gather ideas from there.
-gathered a good collection of scripts, some are ripped (backbutton, geolocalization, refreshers) some custom made (battery level, a better phone model detection, etc)
-never give up! but we already knew it

POP round2
We signed for the same offer on a different network and worked hard on the angles and came out with "grey-zone" landers and 3 of them were -10% ROI. After a lot of optimization we were finally in the green zone, and now are running at 30% ROI! What we did was:
-taking the best converting landers from our non compliant campaign and redesigning them to look similar but less aggressive.
-bid on every placement at first
-noticed that firefox and chrome users were perfmorming a lot worse
-created a whitelist campaign, only non chrome/firefox users, with only placement that got positive ROI to test new landers, after reaching the cap in convertions for 3 days we figured out the best lander.
-We asked for a quality review and got a dailycap bump and a payout bump (25% more!)
-Meanwhile we ran a blacklist campaign using the best lander and the payout bump to find new profitable placement, making higher bids
-Also running a whitelist campaign with only chrome and firefox users with best lander and payout bump
This way, after a bunch of optmizations, we managed to get our first xx days.

What we learned:
-bidding low was a key to find our first performing campaign, but bidding higher is the way to find a lot more good placements, the blacklist campaign finds new good placement every day
-to establish statistical significance for placements don't rush it, spend a bit more if needed and wait, always remember that latent convertions are beetween 10% and 20% of the total for that period of time

What's next
-scaling the offer on more traffic sources (already doing it, but having issues erogating enough even when bidding high)
-scaling on different geo's and trying new offers that are similar
-trying dsp with aggressive banners when the traffic source permits it
-reaching the first xxx day!

Questions
-Erogation is a problem atm, we are bidding high on zeropark for pop traffic in Brasil and spending 5$ per hour at most, anyone has an idea why this is happening?
-Do you have suggestions for pop traffic sources other than popads, zeropark, adcash?
-When visiting pages on the spytool many landers were absolutely blackhat and still running at high volume with no apparent problems. How can they keep running when they are transparent to the spytool? even the outgoing links are transparent, for an advertiser using the same spytool and killing off the affiliate should be a walk in the park, can't figure out why this isn't happening.

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Quick Update with some numbers:

31st October
Spent: 31.38$
Revenue: 19.4$
ROI: -38%

1st November
Spent: 91$
Revenue: 113$
Roi: 24%

2nd November
Spent: 62,59$
Revenue: 87,65$
ROI: 40%

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3rd November
Spent: 126.98$
Revenue: 186.36$
ROI: 47%

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Im assuming your running pin submit on pop. From my short experience I can tell you, not all networks have the same restrictions on the same offer. The last campaign I ran, Network A had many restrictions, (Can't us the word 'winner' 'free', etc). While Network B, same offer told me not to use adult traffic, that's it.

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Hi Webdev, at the moment we are running CPI offers, and this type of offers seem to have a lot of restriction (no pop traffic, no "you have a virus" message and so on), but if you look at the spy tool, you see a ton of not compliant landers that are running

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Good follow along I subscribed. I had a look at adplexity today and I had the same thoughts exactly. Its a new tool and other tools didnt have the same functionality. Its easy now for any advertiser to find non compliant affiliates. Of course some of the smarter and bigger guys will be using advanced cloaking techniques to hide/block the spytool.

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Yep, in fact it's interesting to understand how the big affiliate are managing this problem. A lot of Utility/AV CPI offers are the top offers by volume in the different networks, and i'm pretty sure most of them are promoted with not compliant landers.

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Keep up the good work V1...Enjoy reading this...

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4th November

Spent: 202$
Revenue: 249$
ROI: 23%

What we are doing:
- split test 3 new landers/day in order to improve the EPC
- test new traffic sources to increase the daily impressions

Zero Park still have some sort of issues, we aren't able to buy more than 10$/day there, even if we are bidding higher than AdCash and Popads and we haven't blacklisted yet any placements.

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Yesterday we didn't run any campaign because of a problem with our hosting. The problem is now fixed, and we are ready to re-start

Today To-do list:
- 3 news CPI offers to test (in 4 different GEOs)
- speak with 2 new pops traffic sources in order to understand their Policy and the daily impressions amount of our target geos
- Keep studying PayPerCall vertical in order to start running the first campaign next week
- Keep studying Native advertising in order to start running the first campaign next week

We have defined our work flow, in order to split the tasks and be more efficient:
- 2 Employees -> keep running and testing the CPI offers
- Christian -> PayPerCall vertical
- Yuang -> Native Advertising

If somebody is running the last 2 verticals (PPC and Native) and has a decent experience feel free to pm us to mastermind

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We are keep testing the "old" offer, with other traffic sources too, in order to scale up the daily impressions available for the optimize target (geo/browser)

6th November

"Old offer"
Spent: 97$
Revenue: 121$
ROI: 24%

We are testing also new offers in different countries. According to our work flow, we test each offer with an initial 50x cpa budget, and we will try to optimize only the ones with at lest -50% roi after. They seem to have all the potential to become profitable with some optimization..so we will keep testing them.

New Offer1
Spent: 16,36$
Revenue: 11,7$
ROI: -28%

New Offer2
Spent: 10,55$
Revenue: 8,27$
ROI: -22%

To do list for the weekend:
- keep testing the 2 new offers, with other landers and traffic sources
- start running 3 new campaigns (new offers) if the traffic sources will approve them (i guess we should need until Monday)

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7th November

"Old offer"
Spent: 168$
Revenue: 259,5$
ROI: 54,5%

We are near to the first 3 figures profit day We need to scale it up more and find new Pops Traffic sources. Any suggestions is appreciated

New Offer1
Spent: 24$
Revenue: 12$
ROI: -50%

New Offer2
Spent: 32,87$
Revenue: 15,59$
ROI: -52%

We are still gathering data for the new offers we are testing, in order to start optimizing in the next days.

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First Milestone reached: 100$/day profit

Yesterday has been a profitable day It seems our optimizations work, in fact:

8th November

"Old offer"
Spent: 187,85$
Revenue: 327,75$
ROI: 74,5%

We are keep testing and gathering data with the new offers in different geo's, in order to diversify the daily budget. Their overall ROI is round -40%, but we haven't started blacklisting too much yet.

Today To-do list:
- try different traffic sources for the "old offer", in order to increase the daily profit
- keep gathering data for the other offers, in order to start blacklisting some placements and optimize them.

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9th November
Spent: 242,98$
Revenue: 433,72$
ROI: 78,5%

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10th November

Spent: 162,48$
Revenue: 242,5$
ROI: 49%

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We decided to assign all the testing work on CPI on our two employees, we have a set workflow already and they are able to explore new offers and GEO's at a steady rate everyday. One of them is more focused on the optimization/blacklisting part, the other one is responsible for landing creation, offer choosing, angles. Hopefully we can scale up the ROI and the spending. Meanwhile me and Christian are focusing on different verticals to study. We started studying everything we could find on natives. Subscribed for a spytool (nativeadbuzz) and started looking around. I am not a big fan of arbitrage sites, i think we will try a nutra vertical with cloaking, they told us that it requires a huge investment, but we don't have budgeting issues. Stay tuned!

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11th November
Spent: 256$
Revenue: 321$
ROI: 20%

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12th November
Spent: 120$
Revenue: 136$
ROI: 13%

It seems that a lot of whitelisted placements runned at a negative roi. Let's see today if something will change or not.

Monthly report of this offer:
Spent: 2094$
Revenue: 2842$
ROI: 26%

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Good stuff.. I'm following you guys.

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ad blind maybe?

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13th November
Spent: 36$
Revenue: 59$
ROI: 57%

14th November
Spent: 54$
Revenue: 71$
ROI: 32%

15th November
Spent: 220$
Revenue: 276$
ROI: 25%

We aren't too happy because of the ROI, so we are testing new landers (with different scripts) to increase the conversion rate.

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16th November
Spent: 130$
Revenue: 182$
ROI: 40%

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17th November
Spent: 158$
Revenue: 194$
ROI: 23%

We are still testing also other offers, gathering data to optimize the campaigns. Running CPI offers isn't our main goal, we are using this campaign to train our 2 employees.
In the last few days we had a lot of problem with AdCash self-managed platform. Even if we blacklisted a few placements, it still spending on them..we sent an email to the support but we are still waiting for the answer.

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Great thread! I'm following.. I read somewhere that Adcash is having trouble with its self managed platform these days.

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Yep, a lot of trouble unfortunately. This is my we have some problem in scaling the campaigns. We haven't update the follow along yet because there aren't too many news, We are still testing different offers in different geo's and the global ROI is around 0%. We need a few days to gathering more data for a lot of them.

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Are you using RUM to measure the load times of your landers because what I experienced was that GTmetrix used to report very good load times for my landers (0.5s - 0.6s) but when I did a RUM test on my landers, it was somewhere in the 2s - 3s range which was shocking.

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On another note...talking about getting a new hand soon after you fold. Will there be an STM poker tournament at ASW Vegas?

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Ahah I don't know, and we will not be there unfortunately. But if they organize a poker tournament it could be easy money

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No poker there but plenty of fish

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