3 Months to $275 Profit a Day From Mobile (10)
Budget: $6000
Target: $275 average profit per day before end of Jan 2015. I’ve committed 3 months of my spare energy and investment money to try and get this to work. Why $275? That’s an extra $100K a year on my bottom line and pretty decent start. It’s a pretty big goal for a beginner, but I tend to be motivated by bigger targets.
My background: Normal bloke from Essex in England, although I’ve lived in Northampton for the past 4 years. Worked full time as a web designer/developer/project manager for the past 6 years . I also have experience in Adwords/Facebook ads, conversion rate optimization and graphic design. I’m also a certified Analytics professional. So I’m hoping I won’t have many technical barriers to getting started.
Why a follow along: Basically document my learning, get some tips, some public goal setting/accountability and maybe even help motivate/inspire a few others eventually.
Story up to now:
July - August 15: Signed up to STM, started consuming as much as possible, get inspired and get a sense of how the industry works.
September 15: Start to get to work by signing up to a few networks.
A4D Performance: Apply and start chatting to an affiliate manager about some possible campaigns and verticals he might recommend. Sadly he seems disinterested and unwilling to help (or just overworked). I just move on.
F5 Media: Reply to their questions and explain that I’m just getting started, from STM, briefly explain my technical background and say I’m happy to jump on the call they wanted to arrange. Hear nothing and then get the same questions from a different person. Forward pretty much the same email and my application gets rejected without explanation. Not really the response I was expecting given the general positive vibes I was getting from here. (If anyone from F5 wants to reconsider my application after reading this, then please feel free 
).
Adsimilis: Pretty much the best response I receive. Clear and fun guidelines to getting accepted. Have a couple of quick skype conversations, build a bit of rapport and I’m accepted! It takes a few weeks to book an initial chat with my affiliate manager as they’re busy with annual conference, but I get some sweep campaign recommendations and look set to go.
Then I get tied up for a month with a really good, but demanding, consulting opportunity. Any free time spend in October is spent visiting family or with my long suffering partner.
November 2015: Refocus.
After everything calms down and I’m ready to get started for real. Have I been finding excuses not to get started? Probably! I certainly suffer from paralysis by analysis, so it’s been easy to procrastinate, just read STM and not take any action. I reset my goals for the last 8 weeks of the year and make a commitment to give this 3 months of my energy.
Inspiration:
Mr Green Sweeps Guide
Caurmen: Go2Mobi Edition Appetiser
The later is particularly helpful as it gives me a framework to just stop sweating everything and get started with real testing. So I find an offer with Adsimilis and start to formulate a plan to just do some direct linking. K.I.S.S. basically lol!
First few days below:
AWesome follow along man.. I'm in the same boat. Just getting started with display and CPI for mobile. Should be fun. Good luck to you my friend.
Originally Posted by jdem02
Hi, $275 is definitely a goal that is achievable. But the emphasis should be to make profitable campaigns day in and day out. And eventually scale.
If you have 0 conversion after $40 spent. I would pause this and start a 300X250 banner campaign, or try another banner size. You will find your CTR is low however those clicks will likely convert better. (ofcourse depending on your lander/offer etc.) GL
Originally Posted by webdev
Been a long but interesting week. It’s been quite humbling to be reminded that you learn so much more by taking action and falling flat on your face. Although I’m trying to slowly soften the blow a little each time lol.
I also need a better way to diarise my changes and updates to campaigns. At the moment I’m just throwing them randomly into dated word documents. It’s hard to get a consistent feel of what I’m doing so need a framework/template for that. Also to record my thinking and questions I have regarding my decisions. So I apologise if some details are missing from this update.
Tuesday 1- Dec
Lander 1 (Campaign 1)
- Spilt test between 2 offers, as I think the 2nd offers lander might be more suited to my own landing page.
- I also update some of the testimonials on the page to sound more like British.
- Working well on tablet over mobile (-7.94 vs -69.08), target only tablets.
- Run $60 over next 12 hours.
Offer 1 (Original):
Rev: $16.00
Cost: $30.24
Profit: (-$14.24) (-47.09%)
Offer 2 (New):
Rev: $8.05
Cost: $29.36
Profit: (-$21.31) / (-72.58%)
Drop new offer. Pause campaign until I can dig deeper into placements & traffic types.
Lander 2 (Campaign 2)
- Is an awful FB lander (Can revel now it’s dead)
- Spilt into different traffic campaign at popads.
- Add intro /outro alerts.
- Add comments as for testimonials/social proof.
- It's a multi offer between an iPhone and a voucher. Spilt test lander with different voucher offer as most click interested in iPhone.
- Lower the bid of the original campaign.
Offer 1: Rev: $1.60 / Cost: $6.28 / (-$4.68) / (-74.51%)
Offer 2: Rev: $0.00 / Cost: $6.02 / ($6.02) / (-100.00%)
Wednesday 2-Dec
- Really busy outside AM, but decide to keep the data rolling in on Lander 2.
- Cut a few placements and increase my bid on the FB / campaign 2.
Rev: $8.25 / Cost: $33.49 / Profit: (-$25.25) / (-75.37%)
Minimum effort in, so I rightly just burn money. Also not getting enough conversion to find any connection/devise conversion patterns. Pause campaign for now.
Thursday 3-Dec
Have a few hours to grind out some work so have a renewed focus.
On Monday I mentioned that I thought lander 2 had an amazing conversion rate once I got people through to the advertiser. However what I didn’t realise was that Lander 1 actually had a functioning back button script on it. I thought it was just a trick for redirect traffic when there was already a browser history, so I had updated it to my offer tracking just to be sure. However the script actually artificially creates a previous viewed page on pop traffic too. So I was seeing a lot of clicks in Volumm as it was tracking all the back button pushers that had virtually no intent of converting! This actually made me ‘lol’, so I create a new duplicate offer, set-up the lander a multiple offer and have the 2nd offers for back button pushers.
So I relaunch Lander 1 if some new budget, cut a few placements. Then I dig deep into Volumm and see what’s been working. At Popads I drop Android Browser, drop IOS 8.4 / IOS 9.0 / Android 5.0, drop all Samsung tablets and finally excused two website categories that I’m passing from Popads.
Rev: $54.40 / Cost: $57.76 / Profit: (-$3.36) / (-5.82%)
So close to my first profitable campaign day I can nearly taste it lol!
I also credit $200 at Zeropark to start testing this offer there. Lose nearly $40 in VAT because they’re based in the EU, so only have $160 to play with. So any campaign I run there is already -20% ROI before I start. This is hard to take at this stage until I’m consistently hitting profit with a very decent ROI and/or until I get to the VAT threshold in the UK. I’ll probably still be at least £20K off this year, unless my AM efforts start really boosting my turnover. (Contracting is high revenue, low cost).
I put Lander 1 into 2 different campaigns, one for Pop and the other for redirect traffic. I’m pretty underwhelmed by the targeting options at Zeropark, but using the some of the main targeting from popads I get a pretty decent return straight away. Both of them do about the same:
Pop: Rev: $4.80 / Cost: $15.04 / Profit: (-$10.24) / (-68.09%)
Domain: Rev: $4.80 / Cost: $15.23 / Profit: (-$10.43) / (-68.09%)
The spend is spilt across a number placements. So need more time to dig into Zeroparks interface and see what I can do at this stage. Pause this for now.
Friday 4-Dec
Have a real dig into the Popads side of the campaign, dropped more placements with high traffic, maybe 1 or 2 conversion but awful ROI. Dropped Chrome + a big UK carrier. Day part the campaign for 5 hours that never seem to convert and then increase my hourly limit to make sure I’m still spending the same money.
Also play around with a different back button offer from the original. I spilt between 2 different offers. My thinking being if they’re not interested in the original offer, directing them to the sales page with the same prize isn’t really going to work.
Rev: $35.20/ Cost: $34.93 / Profit: $0.27 / ROI (0.78%)
WOOP WOOP! Lol, it’s not much but a profit is a profit.
Moving Forward / Thinking
- Got an email last night saying the payout for my offer was decreasing by 33% on Monday. (This is for everyone, so it’s not a quality issue my end). So will need to find a similar offer across the networks to test from the lander.
- Obviously lots of potential to spilt test the lander I’ve been using. However I feel like I’m creating too many variables while I’m testing traffic. So I know I’m putting profit aside to learn. That’ll change next week.
- I don’t have time during the week to launch completely new campaigns, so I plan to get them ready at the weekend to fire-up/test during the week.
- Need a framework for recording campaign changes, my thinking & daily questions.
- Learn more about Volumm, feel like I’m only scratching the surface in terms of looking at the reporting etc.
- Spilt test pop under vs pop over traffic in Popads.
- Read bidding strategy guides
- Would love to join a mastermind, but worried that I don’t have enough time to offer value back to group.
- Maybe need to take my working landers out of a competitive GEO like the UK and run them in a less competitive environment?
I hope everyone else is doing well!
Great read man, keep it up
Very detailed post! Keep up the journey! Soon your campaign will be profitable,
Loving the detail on this and seeing green appear, keep it up!
Thanks for the words of encouragement guys. Not got anything to stick but learning so much as I go!
Here’s how the last few days have gone.
Sat 5th Dec
# Get a pm from and have a positive Skype chat with Jack45, he’s a Romford boy too.
# In the conversation realise I’ve been using double meta refreshes when there is no need to cloak my lander lol…. (I’ve since compared the numberand the click loss is still about the same)
# Up bid in popads.net to try and get some more volume. May be competing with UK betting operators who are pushing the bid price through the roof during the morning and afternoon because of the premiership football.
# Have another go with more targeted traffic on Zeropark… set bid too high & spend $7 in about 5 minutes… lower bid, cut one big placement.
Popads: Rev: $33.20 / Cost: $47.37 / ($14.17) / -29.91%
ZeroPark Pop: Rev: $12.40 / $15.10 / ($2.70) / -17.86%
Sun 6th Dec
# Worked about 72 hours this week so decide to go out and get pissed at about 11pm last night, hungover for most of the day.
# Create a spilt test for pop under vs pop over traffic in Popads for main campaign.
# Bought adplexity.com subscription and cancel Adsxosed as it’s pretty raw still.
# Signed up for more offers to replace the one that’s going down in payment on Monday.
# More target refinement on pops ads, day parting and blacklisted placements that were under performing. Up quality settings too.
# Got new flow ready in
# Realise I’ve been passing the bid price from popads so a rough version of cost tracking is available (still need to so manual updates at end of the day)
# Pause the Zeropark pop campaign until I can dig into it.
Zeropark Pop: $12.40 / $25.59 / ($13.19) -51.54%
Zeropark Domain: $6.40 / $11.60 / ($5.20) -44.83%
PopAds Pop Under: $35.60 / $44.10 / ($8.50) -19.27%
PopAds Pop up: $4.80 / $6.98 / ($2.18) -31.21
Mon Dec 7
# Wake up & I’ve killed my popad volume for some reason, can’t seem to get any traffic now I’ve up’ed the quality and the bid… Reverse engineer it to get some volume again.
# My original offer was doing really well though (90% + ROI) but have to kill it at 9am due to commission decrease and start spilt testing 3 new offers.
# Signed up & credit PopCash & AdCash account, set up campaigns using similar targeting to above.
# Still no real traffic after a while on Popads, have to re-allow some more traffic types… must have over optimized it as still can’t much even bidding ridiculously high.
# Kill pop up campaign and turn it into cheeky go at an Ozzy version of the offer.
# By mid-afternoon I have a clearly better performing offer so I focus the flow on to that.
# Popcash & Adcash start sending traffic.
# Need to be more defined with my category traffic on adcash
# Really long days and took quite a few L’s as I probably took on too much on while I was testing new offers and new traffic sources. Pause everything to take stock.
# Take the opportunity to update Popad links with bidding variable as the
Feel like shit, and just want to go to bed lol
PopAds Main: $12.14 / $66.76 / ($54.62) -81.82
Pop Ads Oz Test: $1.60 / $5.26 / ($3.66) -69.59
AdCash: $8.42 / $47.79 / ($39.37) -82.38
Zeropark Domain: $1.60 / $14.26 / ($12.66) -88.78
PopCash: $3.16 / $14.02 / ($10.86) -77.47%
Tue Dec 8
# Popads takes all day to reapprove campaigns.
# Create new landing page variation to spilt test.
# Start sending back button script to new a new LP rather than directly to the offer (thanks anuj92 for that tip).
# Rip quiz lander and improve the basic technical errors, focus the questions to my offer.
# My voluum dash is all over the place with back button & different traffic offers. Decide that I’m going to create them as separate campaigns. Create a little JS script to vary the back button redirect by traffic source. Which in turn sends traffic to its own separate campaign in Voluum.
# PopAds campaign reboots at about 8pm
# Grab all my good placements over the past 7 days and put them into the whitelist campaign and start running that traffic at a higher bid than my main campaign.
# Cut 1 placement on popcash, will start running again tomorrow.
PopAds Main: $4.74 / $9.62 / ($4.88) -50.74
Wed Dec 9
# Traffic drops badly again on Popads
# New lander only has 70% CTR of the original but 4x conversions rate.
# Take off day parting and increase bid on white list campaign to see if I can get some volume through the door and if good placements beat day parting.
# By 2pm new lander has 92% confidence that it’s better, was nearing statistical significance and the original lander suddenly gets 2 conversions out of nowhere and it’s back down to 74%! Decide to run for another hour.
# Decide to run some more PopCash traffic, set up flow to divert all phone traffic to different lander.
# New lander goes well ahead, so make the call to go with it.
# Get AdCash traffic running again, with cut placements, add conversion tracking (to get category performance). It doesn’t perform well so I decide to kill some categories, only about 10% of them. This completely kills traffic which is a joke (so they’re pretty much pointless).
# Set-up a Widget account as it has the finite targeting I need.
# Increase AdCash bid, get two conversions, so probably need to run higher bids in the future (I had set it just above the suggested minimum bid… plenty of volume but no quality clearly). Probably the same issue with PopCash. Will leave these two alone until I have something converting on all device types.
AdCash: $3.16 / $30.91 / ($27.75) -89.78%
Pop Ads Main: $18.96 / $25.50 / ($6.54) -25.64
PopAds Whitelist: $11.06 / $17.66 / ($6.60) -37.36%
PopCash: $0.00 / $15.00 / ($15.00) -100.00%
Thoughts / Moving Forward
I’m going to give this offer one more day tomorrow, see if I can improve my lander EPV and see if Widget can send my some decent traffic for it.
I feel I’ve probably gone as far as I can go with this offer and UK traffic. It’s been a good 10/11 days of solid learning, so it’s a good platform to take forward. Unless something drastic happens I think it might be worth looking at doing similar campaigns in different GEO and just testing as many offers as possible.
Thanks for reading!
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