Process over Product. (7)
Hey ho stackers and stackettes! Gene and John here. Ready to start our first follow along campaign, take action and make a mess 
but preferably a profit.
This is not actually our first campaign but our second, the first having been killed according to the appetizer at the appointed hour, the poor offer led inexorably to the scaffold, guilty of a lack of conversions.
This time around, we are trying a winner which we were able to spot with the aid of adplexity, we are hooked up with go2mobi and F5 as directed. We are now focused on mobile, and starting with DL to keep things as simple as possible. We will try to keep things short, and hopefully stick to relevant information so expert stackers will feel a tug at their heartstrings watching the blunders of the young and reckless, and be moved to help a brother out. We are starting with a direct link campaign to minimize the number of things we can fuck up 
We have selected an offer we feel good about, which is clear and logical, has a real benefit for the customer and has been running a healthy amount of time for other affiliates. We've got nine 320x50 banners to commence testing, one is basically ripped, the rest are all different angles with a similar template, the idea being: get an angle that bites and then adjust other variables in further testing. We submitted yesterday afternoon and are awaiting approval with baited breath!
A journey of a thousand miles...
Good luck!
Good work Gene & John! Are you following Caurmen's newest cookbook? I'd highly recommend you check it out.
Other solid resources for our platform:
Keep us posted!
Hey Gene! Great start to a follow-along!
Sounds like you're doing everything right - a case of so far so good. Direct-linking first and testing lots of angles is a very good strategy (like you pointed out, one fewer thing to potentially "fuck up"). Once you find a good angle, all other optimizations will be relatively easy.
Is this offer in an evergreen niche? Meaning if it were to get paused/terminated tomorrow, would you be able to find a replacement? If so, then I'd suggest to go all out with testing. If not, I'd suggest to just test the best angles you can come up with, and if you don't see promise from any of them, to consider ditching the offer and moving onto another.
Also: Does the offer target one geo or is it an international offer?
Will be waiting for updates... 
Amy
Thanks all for the encouragement!
Go2Mobi- We are using Caurmens newest cookbook, and thanks for the helpful tutorials.
Amy- I think the offer we selected is an evergreen niche if we understand what you mean by that. In general it looks to me like most of the appetizer category offers are something of a piece, broad appeal or somewhat generic if you will..
Speaking of which got our first conversions! two to be exact We did end up pausing this campaign as well according to the metrics of the appetizer but it was nice to get a sale! I believe we bumped up to about -99.89 ROI haha On the right track!
We have decided to go ahead and invest in setting up a CDN as we continue to run DL campaigns and try to improve them. We were first looking at Rackspace but felt decidedly out of our depth, then switched to Amazons service as it seems very good and also a bit friendlier to the wide eyed noob. We have found
That is where we are right now, we have a great MMgroup with some fellow STMers all sharing and trying to get everyone whatever is needed to get after our goals. We would like to get competent with landers so we can see with our own experience what the difference is like testing DL along side landers. Hopefully we wake up tomorrow to some fresh approvals!
John and Gene
We went live with our first clone campaign this morning, getting good traffic but no conversions yet.
Question: The appetizer has a procedure for blacklisting elements of the campaign based upon cost versus revenue essentially, is it also a good idea to blacklist based purely on CTR when you aren't yet seeing conversions? like if one of your banners has a much lower CTR rate than another even though neither is converting?
OK great progress guys!
If the offer is in an evergreen niche - I would suggest to split-test offers from the start if it's possible. Not knowing what the vertical is I can't make any suggestions there. But you can ask your AMs for very similar offers to split-test with.
The most important thing that can make or break your campaign, aside from having a good offer, would be having a good angle. What I would suggest is to spend significant time and energy on researching your niche and brainstorming angles. Try to come up with as many angles as you can, then pick 5-10 that you feel have the best chances. Create 3 banners from each and test them. If you want to throw in some landers that would be alright, but be sure you also assign a good rotation weight to direct-linking to give those banners a chance to shine just in case the landers are not very good. If you need a sample banner testing strategy, please see here:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post248574
Getting a CDN is a GREAT idea! It's almost a must considering how much page load times can impact on conversion rates.
Will be looking out for further updates!
Amy
Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns