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Mobile pops/redirects & sweeps! (45)

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Hi all! This is my first mobile campaign. I'm going to run PopAds traffic to a "win iPhone 6" SE offer. The first offer I'll run is an offer my AM at F5 recommended me. I've ripped 5 landers all running for at least two weeks on multiple sources, looking promising, well made, and translated them all into target the swedish (target geo).


Progress so far:
* Ripped, tweaked and translated 5 (seemingly) promising landing pages and uploaded them all to Adsbridge
* Registered at PopAds
* Deposited some start funds and submitted the campaign

Creatives:
I would post screenshots of my LPs but I don't want to out any fellow members though I'm sure some of the ones I ripped has spread like wildfire. I can write which angles I'm using though. Most of them use timers and exit/entry pops.

LP1 - Every <day> we pick one <device> user whos also a customer of <carrier> to...
LP2 - Are you a real Star Wars fan? Answer these three questions and...
LP3 - Are you a <carrier> customer? Every <day> of <month> we pick a few <carrier> customers to...
LP4 - In honor of the king's name day we're holding this quiz, if you answer right on all questions you can WIN an...
LP5 - Dear <carrier> customer: In honor of the king's name day we're giving you (1) FREE spin!

It was convenient that the king's name day is coming up. All I did was google a calendar of eventful days. There's enough days to "honor" throughout the year, if these kinda angles do work. I'm actually excited about testing this, it reminds me of fishing...


Difficulties:
* Even ripping and tweaking LPs takes time and isn't THAT easy. I encountered problems like...
- Site will run in Dreamweaver but then suddenly not in Adsbridge.
- The lander as downloaded from AdsXPosed won't run, but manually ripping it will make it work.
- Customizing scripts, css and html is a tiny bit time-consuming and tedious

*Adsbridge not calling out carrier, ...or is it?.. Carrier won't show when I access the site via WiFi, I tried going to it with a 3G iPhone manually but it still showed {{carrier}} instead of the actual carrier. For now I've cut out calling out the carrier and tweaked it a bit, which is sad Sent a support ticket last night though and Adsbridge support has been great so far. The actual tracking did show the carrier so it is tracking the carrier, just not displaying it on my LP.

* PopAds targeting and campaign setup is ok but the estimated volume I'll get is 2,000 impressions per day at about $3-$4 per CPM which is too little. Need to look into more traffic sources. Choosing one is hard because there's really no way of knowing, it can have shitty US traffic but great SE traffic and so on.

Other notes/observations:
* Ripping LPs is still super helpful to get started and to get a bunch of ideas
* Some LPs were really badly coded and were more tedious to tweak
* Some LPs REALLY well coded and designed, but the translation into my native language was outright terrible. Might be someone scaling and it's been running for some time with a shitty translation so it must still be paying off.
* If translating from english to any germanic language beware of using the words right/left since most the time it turns into just the word for the right/left DIRECTION so the result looks silly.
* The spy tool really does give a feel what runs on the different pop networks and what's working/what's probably not.
* Most of the landing pages seen the most were fun, creative and engaging, and had some justification as to why they were giving away a gift card, iPhone etc.
* I'm feeling a bit more confident on creating LP's, though driving traffic still confuses me. There's so many places to buy ads and I don't know which work with which GEOs and stuff. I have a proven offer, some "proven" LPs and translation better than 90% of what I've seen on spy tools.

Questions:
* How many impressions do I need to run to reach statistical significance, is there any way to calculate this?
* Should I run it to statistical significance on PopAds before trying it out on multiple sources due to the low volume, or should I set it up on some other source right away?

My hope is that even running it with low traffic will give me SOMETHING to work with...

Update: 1.6k impressions and 1 clickthrough, something must be wrong... Just tested them all on Pingdom from a SE server and load speed is around 400-450ms with page size ranging from 70 to 150kb... Paused traffic, possibly they aren't displaying right... In Google Chrome using device mode, they did display right... Are mobile in-browser popups not covering the entire browser window? I put the mobile LP as the link on Popads.... So, I need to make an intermediary smaller site to interface between the lander and the... Yeah I think I just confused redirects and popups unless it's right to server the mobile LP as the popup itself, jesus. Confused Anyway something is wrong so the campaign is paused for now. Browserstack to test is up next.

Thanks for reading, any suggestions is appreciated!

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Used testize.com to test the LPs, one of them don't display right, and font size seems a bit small. In the 100% zoom it looks fine but to imagine this crammed to a phone it seems it's too small though I don't know. I lost my phone while snow-sledding a day ago so I can't test it on my own phone, yet


Next is to use Pingdom and run a few impressions from Popads and see results. I pasted the script and loaded it 5 times myself to see it was okay:


Okay so now I have tested it some via Pingdom and I'm not sure how to interpret these results:


Only mobile safari gets to the actual landing page, whereas chrome doesn't? Possibly flagging it as a shitty site or giving a warning? Though testize shows it is "clean" on safe browsing:


Not really sure what to do right now, though I have narrowed it down somewhat with this. Maybe something with Adsbridge, though they have data centers and cdn and load times seem okay. Maybe just PopAds...

Any help interpreting what might be wrong would be super appreciated. Though from all this I've learned why it's important to actually do the cross-browser testing, speed testing, pingdom and all that.

Update: Ran test with help from a fellow member: Tested BeyondHosting VPS starter vs Adsbridge vs amazon S3 CDN.


Conclusion from this is: Adsbridge is GOLDEN, it must be my ripped code. Just got through caurmens mobile LP tutorial and from now on I'm just going to hand code my LPs and look at the spied ones as templates..

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So I haven't posted here in a long time. Partially because it felt like it would never work.

I still don't know IF there even is anything wrong with PopAds+Adsbridge, the CTR is still EXTREMELY low but somehow I got a conversion and it seems real again! My PopAds spend is actually really low because the volume I'm getting is really low. The ROI of this campaign is positive but it's still just one conversion and $2 spend... I have no idea why CTR is low, maybe because the bid is low and my pop appears after all these other pops?



This is the LP that gave me the conversion, the rest of the landers are ripped and translated benchmark landers, all same really really low CTR.




Since I last wrote I have started 3 mobile pop campaigns, each with 5 landers each. It seemed PopAds+Adsbridge isn't working but I really don't know if that's the case anymore. I always assume something is wrong because the CTR is so low and conversions are at 0 so I pause it. I have registered on Mobicow, Popcash and Zeropark (awaiting confirmation call from them right now, actually).

Using Testize.com for device-testing was a mistake, tested it against my actual phone and it was WAY off... Picture below shows a comparison, also shows some of the LPs I use:


For my PopCash campaign I haven't even spent $1 yet so my data is really low. Summed up I have ripped and spied many landers, built myself a little library of skeleton landers plus made some of my own, took note of all the angles/themes appearing so I have a feel of what is "normal" within the sweeps:

• You are todays lucky visitor!
• Your device has been selected!
• You won (1) FREE SPIN!
• Answer our survey and as a reward...
• iPhone 7 questionnaire, how would YOU like iPhone 7 to be?
• To celebrate our _ year anniversary we're giving away prizes from our sponsors!
• In honor of ____ we have decided to...
• Every <day> of <month> we have decided to...
• Play this game and win!
• Answer all these questions right and win!
• Are you a true ___ fan? Answer these questions and...
• Who's best/better/strongest/fastest/etc? X or Y? Vote correctly and win a...
• You are the 999,999,999th visitor!
• You won X FREE spins!
• Lucky wheel!
• Wheel of fortune!
• ___(a brand or implying it is a brand) MEGA GIVEAWAY
• The new ___ has been launched and you have a chance to win!
• Hello visitor!
• We're celebrating the new SOMETHING(iStore, Apple Store, anniversary, celeb birthday, etc) in YOUR CITY!
• You are selected to participate in our EXCLUSIVE ___
• As thanks to our loyal customers we of brand XXX are giving away YYY to device ZZZ users
• Test your iq with these 5 questions, you only have 1 minute... IF you score higher than 90% of all people you can win a...
• There is a reward in one of these 9 boxes, but you only have ONE try!
• You won this FREE scratch card, scratch to see if you won a reward
• Any kind of game where the offer is the reward
• Etc

Other than that I'd be most grateful for pointers/advice.

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@Henry Hey thank you for the input!

My library of copy is still small, though I just noticed it's becoming a mess already so I'll probably need to cut down, or find/write some kind of management system to make it easier to keep track of it. I want to break the process down into little parts and automate all that can be automated.

My current workflow for prepping a campaign is this:
1. Copy a bunch of templates into a new folder and move the folder to the "campaigns" folder
2. Navigate them all through Dreamweaver and make sure everything is all right.
3. Maybe change the angle, add extra features if it seems reasonable, here it saved me time to just go and look up code for fb comments, scripts, copy etc instead of rewriting it. If something is brand new it'll be added to the swipe file.
4. Upload to Adsbridge
5. Check if it is working again, most times it still needs some tweaking to work as it does in Dreamweaver

What's taking up most time is creating, uploading and tweaking landers.

Campaign status
My PopAds traffic volume is extremely low, only got spent around $1 today so no conversions.

Finished up 3 new landers and deployed them at Adsbridge. I even got one of my more landers up with full-on obfuscated js.
The user logs on, "wins" a scratch card, on which he "wins" an iPhone, then onto the loading screen "unlocking" the iPhone, then the winner page inspired by Stackmans tap game winner LP. Just waiting for a new subdomain to register before submitting the campaign to DNTX. DNTX has about 30-40k pops in sweden per day, most of the traffic is WiFi, and the highest bid is 0.09 per pop. My start bid will be 0.003 which is the same as PopAds.

Will update when I have sent some more traffic at my landers

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Hello! Wow I don't know how I missed your follow-along. I'll start reading from your first post and comment as I go.

That's very creative thinking! Of course not every angle you think up will work, but you only need one of them to.


Hope you were able to get this resolved! I've never used Adsbridge, but in Voluum when you're adding the lander to the tracker, there are tokens you can add, and {carrier} is one of them. There must be a similar function in Adsbridge as well.


You can ask each traffic source how much inventory they have for your geo and other targeting (OS, device, etc.). Some traffic sources have inventory charts that are accessible from your dashboard. Here are some traffic sources that have swedish traffic:

Zeropark - 399,621,210 impressions/month total (I looked this up just now)
PropellerAds - 1,266,169 imp/day for desktop; 876,954 imp/day for Android; 622,445 imp/day for iOS (from my records from June 2015 - a bit outdated)
Mediahub - 120,220 imp/day total (checked just now)

Big sources like Adcash probably has lots of Swedish traffic as well. I wouldn't know since I haven't run much in this geo.


Very insightful observations and tips - thank-you! Especially this:

If you'll focus on testing just these 2 elements you should have a winning lander in no time.


Spying will help you determine what types of offers are suitable for what types of traffic. Beyond that, it's down to testing different things to understand how each specific traffic source works - e.g. different bids and targeting options. There are so many ways to optimize a campaign - we'll cross that bridge when we get there.


You can't calculate how many impressions you'll need in order to reach statistical significance. I'm assuming you're referring to landing pages? This will help you:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Banners-Part-1

If you wish to collect data more quickly, by all means try a traffic source that has more swedish traffic. The low traffic may or may not collect data quickly enough for your liking - that would depend on how patient you are as well as how many conversions you're getting. In general, it would be more efficient (budget-wise) to do your initial offer and landing page testing on a single traffic source, and then scale your best offer and perhaps the few best landers to other sources. It wouldn't be a bad idea to test more than one traffic source, see which one you like better, and then using that one to carry out the rest of your testing.


Holy cow 1.6k impressions with only 1 clickthrough - I agree with you that something does look wrong. AFAIK, popups should span the entire window of whichever device they're displayed on, if your landers are mobile-friendly, i.e. responsive in nature. If you have a mobile phone, try installing a VPN on it and browsing to your tracker link to see if everything is displayed correctly, and to make sure that when you click through, you can 1)see the offer, and 2)your clicks are being registered in the tracker. To "copy" your tracker link to your mobile phone, give pushbullet a try if you aren't already using something else. This little utility has made my life so much easier.


Amy

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The fact you got a conversion means your tracking setup should be good. Have you tried running on another traffic source? How do the lander CTRs between the traffic sources compare?


Great! Popcash doesn't have much traffic for SE though. Zeropark has more. Don't know about Mobicow but I guess you'll find out.


This is a good collection of ad text/angles to try for sure! Another major component is the template/appearance of the lander, so be sure to test both. Taiwo (who's also a member here on STM, but also has his own membership site) gave some good examples of lander templates, as well as great tips on how to promote sweeps offers in general, in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIdKwJXZjGc



Amy

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For what its worth from a fellow beginner: I run sweeps as well and have things that are ROI+ with a CV of 0.10% so 1.6k with no conversion is not exactly an outlier but that said, its unlikely you will get rich off a campaign like this since you can't scale it.

Anyways very detailed update, will definitely follow this with interest and I'm sure you'll eventually get there with this kind of approach.

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True enough! However, getting only 1 click for the 1.6k impressions - that's a CTR of only 0.06% - is alarmingly low by any standard.

ysekse - Thanks for the detailed stats! It seems that you may not be bidding high enough if you're just spending a few dollars a day. But you've just set up some camps with higher bids (BTW - way to take action so quickly!) so let's see what happens.

Another thing that caught my eye is: For your PopAds 2nd camp - all 4 conversions are from iOS. If this trend keeps up, you may want to stop targeting android altogether.

Your landers are great! I normally suggest not to play with colors during initial testing of an angle or lander style, but red headline against a brown background makes the text very hard to read. Changing the background to white will alleviate that problem.

Adding a backbutton script can make a BIG difference to ROI, so by all means give that a try.

Also: Sweden is already not a high-volume geo. And if you only target prime-spot placements, or the basketball category, the traffic volume will be further restricted. Even if you manage to get the campaign profitable, you may only make a few dollars a day which probably won't be the best use of your time. Therefore, it's definitely worth testing broad, at least at first, and then only cutting out certain targeting when you need to.



Amy

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awesome stuff keep it up

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You're right - ROI is the main consideration. However, if CTR is unusually low, it may mean that something isn't working as it should.

If that is in fact the case, imagine what doubling/tripling/quadrupling your current CTR will do to your ROI. Wished I could give you suggestions on what to check for, but I'm out of ideas, unless you want to test using another tracker, or change your domain...


Backbutton should work for both. Basically, instead of allowing your visitor to go back to the previous url, you redirect them to a url of your choice. You can send them anywhere you like: Directly to the offer page, other landers (for the same or different type of offer), monetization networks such as YTZ, or even sell the traffic back to a traffic source.


Sounds nice!


Actually tracking costs can be a real concern when you do pop. You'll see this once you start scaling. Self-hosted solutions like FunnelFlux make much more sense budget-wise when you buy pop traffic at high volumes. Just something to keep in mind for the future.


Yes you can cut the 2 landers that had 0 conversions.



Amy

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Good evening! And thanks for the awesome feedback Amy! Here are my stats for today:
(Feb 13 stats)
PopAds high bid:
Spend:$6.53
Rev: $6.32

PopAds mid bid:
Spend: $1.87
Rev: $0

PopAds low bid:
Spend: $3.04
Rev: $3.16***
*** I pointed all my PopAds campaigns to the low bid campaigns so this could very well be from the high or mid bid one!
*Spend is actually a bit higher but not that much, some inaccuracy in PopAds [BID] token it seems...

The low spend with medium bid, and high spend with high bid + the conversions etc. Intuition says lower the high bid a little and kill off the medium bid campaign and possibly the low bid one (which has eaten up the most budget actually!). Like, the big gap between the high bid and the low bid, it is... something... I can't fully point out what it is or might be.

I can do one of the following:
1. Kill off low bid,
2. Kill off mid bid,
3. Kill off low and mid bid and increase high bid
4. Kill off high bid and increase mid bid (wousame as killing off mid bid and lowering high bid )
5. Kill off high bid and leave mid bid alone
6. Kill off high bid and mid bid and increase low bid a little

Not really sure which one to go for...
I know the top bid takes in the primespot only, and the mid/low takes in secondary. I think if I improve my landers I might be able to justify higher bid... One of my landers has sound, the others don't. On some of them the exit pop won't work on Adsbridge but it will in Dreamweaver, I know for sure the exit pop doesn't work on iOS but it is doing okay in spite of this.

Having this styled as a button:
<a href="affiliatelink" onclick="alert('Well done, congratulations and thanks for playing! Now all you have to do is enter your email and answer a few questions. Registration is super-simple and takes only 30 seconds!');"></a>
for some reason does not work, like it goes to the link but the exit pop never pops... 100% surely there is a way around this though.


Other sources (total stats)
Pops: $9.52 spend, $3.16 revenue
Redirects: $7.27 spend, $9.48 revenue(!)

Should I cut out pops at this source? Also I playe

6:54 PM
5503 pop auctions, 190 wins,
-> adjusted bid 0.004 to 0.005
300 redirect auctions, 40 wins
-> adjusted bid 0.010 to 0.015

7:14 pm
5625 pop auctions, 194 wins, i.e 4 out of 122
-> adjusted bid 0.005 -> 0.006
309 redirect auctions, 40 wins, 0/9
-> adjusted bid 0.015 to 0.02

7:34 PM
5861 pop auctions, 213 wins -> won 19 out of 236
-> adjusted bid from 0.006 to 0.007
320 redirect auctions, 44 wins, i.e 4 out of 11 PRETTY GOOD
Bids not adjusted

8:11 PM
6114 pop auctions, 240 wins -> won 27 out of 253
-> adjusted bid from 0.007 to 0.008
332 redirect auctions, 47 wins -> 3 out of 12
-> adjust bid from 0.02 to 0.025

9:00 PM
6349 pop auctions, 264 wins -> won 24 out of 235
-> adjusted bid from 0.008 to 0.009
349 redirect auctions, 51 wins -> 4 out of 17
-> adjust bid to from 0.025 to 0.031

9:35 PM
7230 pop auctions, 339 wins -> won 75 out of 881
-> keeping bid the same
475 redirect auctions, 76 wins -> 25 out of 126
-> keeping bid the same

This would look way better on a graph Increasing the bid didn't increase the win rate as drastically as I had thought though. And 2 of the redirect conversions came from the low bid I started at, so I don't really know what to do with this information. Keep the bid low or try to bid higher for more volume?

On PopCash I increased my bid and it ate through $10 in 2 hours, much higher CTRs than PopAds and others, but not a single conversion. Not sure what to do with this information either

Yeah :/ I just bought a new domain and I'm registering it as a subdomain at Adsbridge and I can use that for my domain name! If that doesn't work, well... Amazon S3 and/or recode the 3 landers using vw instead of percentages which might work, who knows

I added a back button redirect script and it upped my CTR and ROI too soon to tell. Sadly, my plan of making a redirect campaign was much much easier said than done, though mainly I was being lazy! So I ended up just linking it to the offer.

Awesome, done aaand done!

To do tomorrow: Get sound, entry pops, and exit pops working for all 3 landers. Add the new domain to Adsbridge and rewrite the 3 landers from scratch.

Quick update Added sound, entry and exit pops to all 3 working landers, paused pops campaign on one source since it has spent $14 and only given one conversion.

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Update for today:
Cut down to 3 landers, adding entry pop, exit pop and sound (apparently backfix doing .pushState stuff isn't working because cdn something something, need to fix that)

PopAds spend: $8.23
PopAds revenue: $12.64

Other: $19 spend, 0 revenue
This had a good ROI just a few days ago

Plus my PopAds traffic is really low, this might be a bidding war without me knowing it. Anyway, looking for more traffic sources! I know for sure the offer works, and the landers work. On PopAds there is about 36k impressions/day available BUT with obscenely high bid and Primespot only it says 3k available...

This COULD also be my frequency capping kicking in since it is 1 / 7 days. I don't know but if it is it would be a disaster to up the bid imagining it is a bidding war when really I'm just running out of volume........... Other traffic source also has pretty low volume, and no frequency capping, which might could explain the initial good conversion rate followed by the drop. No idea really though

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Not sure how much I should comment since I am a competitor at a similar stage but here goes.

Might want to check you are not bidding against yourself if you are operating in a low traffic geo.

Popcash - check your site ID, might notice some odd sites sucking up all your traffic with no conversion

PopAd - always difficult to get high traffic volume with this think its because its too strict with the primespot function, have yet to run campaigns without.

I'm also at the same stage as you and looking for more sources so we could share if you find anything interesting since i dont run the same geo as you at the moment.

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Update: No more conversions entire yesterday, though spend / volume has been low - only $2 on PopAds and $10 on other sources. Deposited another $50 into PopAds and $50 to other sources, and changed the domain name.

One problem with the domain name... The entire thing displays in my alert pops and so it looks like this: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx-2016.xyz in the alert windows, which might make it seem even less legit because .xyz. Noticed this first after I had set up new campaigns all pointing to the new domain though, will run some traffic to it and see if it yields conversions.

Just bought another more legit looking .com domain which I'll use for subdomains, if the current one doesn't pan out, I'll try the new one.

CTRs is still an issue (possibly!). To do today: re-code the 3 winning landers as clean and minimal as possible and see if that makes a difference.
Need more traffic, I have an account at Adcash and tried setting up a campaign but they want me to upload a creative, no idea what that's supposed to be since all they need is a LP link? Screenshot of lander?

One question:
Is it usual to get less conversions during weekdays during work/school time, and more during weekends?

The campaign was looking quite promising but now it seems somewhat dead. Not giving up on it yet though..........!

Same day update:
Analyzed the data by day/hour:

By day:
Monday: 1 conversion
Tuesday: 2 conversion (16:00, 22:00)
Wednesday: 0 conversions
Thursday: 2 conversions (17:00 & 18:00)
Friday: 3 conversions (21:00, 22:00, 15:00)
Saturday: 6 conversions
Sunday: 5 conversions

By hour:
00:00 - 2 conversions (Sunday)
23:00- 0
22:00 - 5 conversions
21:00 - 1 conversion
20:00 - 1 conversion
19:00 - 0
18:00 - 1 conversion (Thursday)
17:00 - 1 conversion (Thursday)
16:00 - 1 conversion (Tuesday)
15:00 - 2 conversions (Friday & Sunday)
14:00 - 0
13:00 - 1 conversion (Saturday)
12:00 - 0
11:00 - 0
10:00 - 3 conversions (Saturday/Sunday)
09:00 - 1 conversion (Saturday)

Part of why it is low in weekdays is I spent very little, but I also have a theory. Since the swedish people is my dear brother people I know somewhat how things go. In the daytime tons of kids at school, often browsing the web instead of studying, probably enough to make up a significant amount of traffic. Also I would assume people at work would be less likely to fall for this stuff. All week day conversions are either at the very end of the work day or in the evening, and in the weekend it converts early.

At the end of the work day a substantial amount of students and office workers are browsing imgur or similar sites just to pass time, possibly not in the mood for a "free iPhone 6"...

Today, so far I have spent $33 with one conversion, and that one conversion happened just now. Or it could be my domain, however I feel fairly safe on parting it up on week days, in Sweden!
I was freaking out earlier from refreshing my stats and seeing no conversions, it was super hard to just leave the campaign alone...

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That exercise you did with bid vs. win rate is interesting! It's willingness to do this type of testing that will allow you to really understand how a traffic source works.

With that said, conversions are what you're after, and you're right in pointing out that you're not getting enough traffic at the moment.

Right now, your main focus shouldn't be on staying profitable. You need to either target broader (target all traffic and not just premium, and all categories except adult) or conduct your testing at a traffic source that has more volume. I see that you're looking to do some testing on adcash - that's definitely a good move!

Your main focus should be to test landers and offers, and identify winners by cutting losers, so that with each round of testing your funnel improves overall. In order to do that you need traffic. It's always better to try to improve your funnel as much as possible first with a few rounds of offer and lander testing, and THEN cut underperforming traffic to optimize further.

As for the decreasing conversion rate - one possible reason may be because your audience is so limited, that saturation is starting to kick in. This is yet another good reason to target broad and improve your funnel instead of refining your targeting from the start and restrict your traffic. The larger your audience, the higher the visitor turnover, and the more likely your conversion rate will hold up.

As for dayparting - again, you need to find a traffic source that will give you enough traffic volume for you to be able to carry out your lander/offer testing IN SPITE OF implementing dayparting (which will restrict your traffic). Also, you need to have enough data to even decide which hours/days to exclude in the first place.

All this testing you're doing, and your observations and speculations of possible reasons behind the trends you're seeing, are very interesting indeed. Having additional insight into visitor behavior can be helpful. Me on the other hand, I mostly just test broad and let stats tell me what converts better and decide from there.

You're progressing nicely! But just think how much faster you can optimize stuff once you get more traffic. Did you manage to get that camp set up on adcash?


Amy

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Hi Amy thanks again for taking the time to write this feedback!

No adcash campaign yet. Did not figure out what "creative upload" they are asking for but I'm just gonna upload a screenshot of a lander and see what happens. From reading their TOS it seems I'll have to make some changes to the landers.
So far today I have:
Rewritten landers, added more sound to them, and gotten a bunch of new pictures and "won iPhones" for some new testimonials.

Furthermore, it turns out back button, and exit pop when user tries to close the window isn't working for some reason.
It works in preview mode, but since it's on a CDN or something like that it simply won't trigger.

Will deploy the updated landers and post data when I have it!

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Oops I forgot to answer this in my last post. "Upload creatives" means they're expecting you to upload your banners. Perhaps you didn't select the correct ad format? You're looking for pop traffic, correct? If that's the case, in the "General Information" section > "Formats Selection" section, click on "Exclusive Format" and choose "Site-Under Mobile (Pop-Under)". Then click "Continue" to go to the "Creatives Upload" section, and just click on "Create a Campaign" and you'll be all set.

Hmm! That shouldn't be the case. I'm using a CDN and use backbutton and exit pop and they work just fine. My coding sucks so can't give you any advice there. Perhaps rip a lander that already has those and compare the code with your current lander? Also, is your code written in php by any chance? That's the only problem I could think of that's CDN-related when it comes to code execution.


Amy

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One more conversion! Volume is really low, though I could get more if I bid much higher.

Set up an Adcash campaign now, hoping it'll get approved!

Spend on traffic source 2: $11, though it is all these multi-bid campaigns, 3 levels, one for pops, one for redirects. Spend on the converting one which is high bid redirects is $6.5 which leaves me at about -50% ROI for that...

PopAds: $8 spend, 0 conversions

It seems on DNTX you only enter an "auction" if you're within range for a certain bid because my high bid campaigns have way participated in many more auctions than the low bid ones. Don't know if the high bid overlaps with low bid though... Just letting things run as they are out today, then tomorrow I'm switching out the LPs with the polished ones, and hopefully starting up the Adcash campaign. On PopAds it's pretty obvious what's going on though and their targeting is really good.

And hmmh the exit thing, I'll test it some more maybe it's just on my mac it's not working on the campaign link but is on preview link

More updates soON!

Update: Adcash campaign rejected at almost 1 in the morning their time, got this:

Reason: Suspicious/deceptive behavior.
The landing page provided was considered to have suspicious or deceptive behavior (cloaking / sneaky redirects / malware).

Rotating offers
Advertisers may use rotating offers with their campaigns (one URL, that serves multiple landing pages), provided all of the different pages in rotation are of the same category and comply with the Adcash terms and conditions. You will need to directly contact support for validation of these types of campaigns. Please email contact@adcash.com for more information or assistance.


If they are checking it from Estonia they get directed to a huge wall of offers when clicking through, how can I control this?
Also some other stuff I'm using is in clear violation:
- No sound that starts playing when the page loads, putting sound to play after entry-popping should be okay though(?)

So what it seems like is I need to contact their support directly to get it approved, plus I need to remove the sound, though if it is the offer redirect-wall causing it I'd love some input on what to do. Just sent them a mail and will see tomorrow what the response is.

Even on PopAds there is 36k daily pops available, my bid is still low compared to the highest bidder. I've now "mapped out" and the highest bid so far has been the most profitable. Should I try increase my bid even more?

I also want to split test some LP variations, though since I have 3 converting landers I'm not sure how to go about it... I would like one to clearly stand out and be best, because then I could test multiple variations, but now I have three, so just testing two variations of each that's 6 landers to test-run traffic to, at $5 CPM for simplicity on say, AdCash that'd be $60 to run 2k pops to each lander...
Should I make variations of all three, or just run one variation of each until I find the best performing ONE, and then run variations of that one?

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My experience is I usually leave time parting optimizing last especially early on where just 1 random conversion would skew your results significantly

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Yes! I ALWAYS do this for campaigns with positive ROI. In fact, try to set up more than 1 camp with higher bids and see what happens. (Remember to set a low daily budget!)


Either way would be fine. Just do what feels sensible.


I'm assuming you compare each lander to the current-best one at a time. Your conclusions are correct. And yes - would be nice to figure out the Case of the Low CTR!


Will keep my fingers crossed for you. And that lander looks nice! Make me wonder: If you do find the cause of the low CTR and fix it, it may be a good idea to retest all your landers because you may get very different results (depending on what it is that's been holding back your landers).


Amy

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Would love to see whether your results improve with snabbt.js! Very interesting.

Just a thought: Given that you are using entry pops, the first second that you are still "loading" your page the entry pop would keep viewers on the page anyways so in a sense a 2 second load time and a 1 second load time is unlikely to have much impact from a logic standpoint (I have not tested this since I have been unable to get mine below 2 seconds with my inferior coding abilities).

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Holy batman! Nice troubleshooting! I wished I was more technical so I could help troubleshoot stuff like this. But have you seen caurmen's tutorial?

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...s-Loading-Time

I've also used https://gtmetrix.com/ which I found helpful as well.

I'm really surprised the entry alert is responsible for slowing the page to a crawl, because I have them on many of my landers and haven't noticed a delay in loading speed. Perhaps it's the way it is coded? Have you done the same test on other landers (i.e. compared load times with entry pop vs. without) and observed the same results? May be worth rewriting the entry pop coding to see if it makes a difference.

Oh and I checked out Snabbt.js as well. The animations are really neat! I'd imagine something like that can be effective in grabbing visitors' attention, especially when used with interruption marketing such as popups/unders.

Can't wait to hear how your new lander (the faster one) does and whether you're getting better CR!


Amy

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awesome job with the success mate.

what vertical are you running?

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@randomman sweeps/AV, but it all works but different offers work better for different sources, some sources do ebtter with certain types of offers.

Update for today: Profit has gone down some BUT I now have conversions coming in from 6 sources, and I haven't turned the volume up completely on all of them...

On some of them I am targeting the cheapest+highest converting placements as seen on other sources - to build a blacklist before bidding higher for carrier traffic.

Conversions are coming in from (7) sources, didn't get to spend that much today either because damn wire transfer delays but all sources are now fully funded... They aren't giving a ton of conversions each but I feel like I can get some more volume after weeding out some of the crap placements and upping the bids.

This is the stats for all TSes I haven't given up on:

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Music to my ears! Congrats!


As sensible as this plan may sound, I would suggest to actually run carrier traffic and cut placements based on those stats, instead of running wifi to identify the cheapest+highest converting placements and then running carrier traffic to just those. (This IS what you mean right? Just want to make sure I understood correctly.)

Reason being: A placement can perform VERY differently when you're targeting differently. This is especially true when it comes to wifi vs. carrier traffic. Meaning, placements that convert like shit for wifi, can convert miraculously well for carrier. I'm not sure why that is, but my guess is it may be because wifi traffic is a LOT easier to make bot traffic for (anyone with an internet connection and a VPN can create fake traffic) compared to carrier traffic.


This is exciting - eager to see what kinds of profits you can pull when you've optimized all these camps on all these sources.




Amy

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thx for that carrier-advice Amy, i let the carrier high bid campaign run over night at the most expensive TS and it broke even! The blacklists are slightly different for carrier and wifi traffic yup! BUT I did find some of those weird 0% CTR placements drilling down into only carrier traffic : /

Results today (Well now it's yesterday but w/e)

$266 profit @ $824 spend

Weirdest thing on the campaign I'm trying to scale up... This is the stats for it at mid-day, NOT looking good at all!


Then suddenly conversions come in and it's a bit above break-even!


So it just lost and lost and lost , I considered just pausing it many times because I have another campaign doing like $250-$400 profit / day and still going up slightly as I blacklist more placements. I did check if it was postback delay but that was not the case, weird...

I also looked into dayparting using the data by exporting results from tracker, and it seemed that clearly offer A was better than offer B, but then when looking at stats @ network the dayparting did not make sense at all and offer B was actually best, dodged a bullet there lol.

4 other campaigns lost about $20 each and I decided to kill them all for that particular TS and focus on the current winners. Need to get another LP split test up on main campaign but otherwise it's going all right!

Other than that, starting @ uni again and will definitely have to become better at managing my time instead of just "winging it"

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I hate it when conversions get posted at random times - it screws up our stats making it hard to make dayparting decisions.

When in doubt, I would just block out the night hours, e.g. 12am-9am, and then observe the average profits over the next few days after the change and compare that to before the change, and if the after-results are better I'd just leave those hours blocked. By doing this I wouldn't have to care exactly when conversions are being registered/posted back - god knows what's happening at the aff network.

That camp you're trying to scale up - have you tried to run it on a second traffic source? Are the conversions coming in as erratic as on the first source? Just trying to figure out whether it's caused by the traffic source or your aff network. (And you've already ruled out postback as a potential issue.)

I admire your trying to juggle uni and AM at the same time - that will be a great opportunity for you to learn to manage your time. This is something I have trouble doing as well - so I understand how challenging it can be at times. You have a couple weeks left before school starts so make the best of it!



Amy

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The camp is running at... 8 sources, the screenshots in prev post is grouped by traffic source. Maybe the tracker has delayed click-recording, not sure really. When I compare time of click to time of postback @ tracker the max difference is like 3 minutes, and at network dayparting makes no sense so. And the tracker has some messed up stats since at some point the clicks weren't recording to offer so I have a few "blank" postbacks, I'm already disabling it during the night time.

I have blacklisted a good bit of sites though so possibly it'll pick back up. Hoping some lander tweaks can fix it because the lander I'm using is pretty old. If it tanks though I still have like $150-$400 / day from the other camps but I have big hopes for this one campaign, potentially it could turn into another $xxx / day profit campaign if it works out as planned with the scaling

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Looks real nice. I started doing mobile pops in my journey too, I hope I'll have some success too. Good luck!

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Really nice to see threads like this here, looks like you're on the right track, keep it up.

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Scaling results: It is now profitable after optimizing some sources, $320 profit so far today.

Regarding one of the campaigns: I messaged AM about pay bump & lead quality but lately AM hasn't responded to anything, sensing a red flag here and wondering if they won't pay anymore.

Prior to all this AM has been responsive and enthused though so idk what's going on. Will keep pinging once per day though AM has not been in the habit of responding during weekends... Worst case I stop the traffic and limit the losses but hopefully this is OK!

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Is this a major aff network? If you want to PM me their name, and if I have an account there, I could try to get in touch with them.

Hopefully they're either on vacation or at a conference somewhere. Putting traffic on pause for now would be wise. Are you already on weeklies? If not, that should be a priority....


Amy

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Thanks to Amy putting me in touch with a contact it is resolved (99.9% sure of that, and it was probably not a problem to begin with)...

idk if it's just me but even though I'm actually profiting - I start thinking of all the shit that can go wrong/leading to not getting paid and stress levels go way up to and I start double checking stuff, like comparing numbers @ TS to numbers @ aff network to make sure tracker isn't showing like 30% less cost or anything like that...

I did get assured there is someone there and I'm on weeklies so it should be fine... I still want feedback on lead quality etc though and see if I can make my lander even more aggressive and pump out more $$$! This is the highest ROI of that campaign so far. $200 profit for that one campaign...

Meanwhile my previously biggest campaign has slowed down like hell and did only 20% ROI and about $70 profit, BUT some really bad siteIDs had shown up and if I get these two campaigns to peak together I might hit a new record. The prev. biggest campaign has a record of $425 profit, if it had that today that'd be a new record.

I think I can scale the current biggest campaign up some more, it did really well at a TS I thought was utter SHITE because it failed to scale many times for me on multiple campaigns...

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Clickloss is normal, and it's good practice to check the actual/real costs at the traffic source regularly to make sure you're not running a camp that's showing 30% ROI on your tracker but is actually running at -10% ROI.

Asking for feedback on quality regularly is also great!

And you're already on weeklies - most networks can't do better than that in terms of payout period.

And it's also great to always be aiming to break your own record. That will keep you motivated.

So - knowing you're doing everything right and have already taken all the safety measures you possibly could, just stop putting your focus on worrying about stuff you have zero control over.

If you're a realist: Worrying will take away energy you could be using to be more productive.

If you believe in energy: Worrying will actually attract the unwanted thing you're worrying about.

Either way, worrying is bad, and futile. DUH right? And the best way to stop worrying would be to replace those negative thoughts with something else instead. So what do you redirect your focus to?

You already have a solid testing and scaling approach - so just focus on taking action. Optimize currently-profitable camps further, scale to new traffic sources, or set up more tests for new offers.

You'll be fine. I'm not worried about you.



Amy

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Well the last 2 days hasn't been the best, in total I got attacked by 1.5 mill fake visits on my tracker and still trying to find a way to block it : p so yesterday was about -$100, and today is -$60, taking the overage cost of fake traffic into account. THOUGH yesterday's -$100 was at $6xx spend and some of the losses (about $100) was from testing new things that did not work and is now killed off...

I have one campaign I was hoping to scale big but it is the one that is "under attack", and a few smaller ones still generating $xx / day, feels like it's time to start elsewhere but the campaign I had was SO hot this weekend but now it has dabbed off :/ If I can't get it back up in the weekend I will drop it I think, as much as that sucks since AM gave me a pay bump because I would turn the volume up...

Summed up:
For the one big campaign that is also currently under attack:
Keep trying till over the weekend and drop it otherwise, maybe try resurrect it later if a new offer happens to come out though.

Other smaller campaigns:
Keep running though margin is decreasing slooowly and they have been providing me lots of profits the last 30 or so days.

Feels like it's time to start looking for new GEOs/offers to run the same lander in, mehh : /

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Hang on a second - what do you mean by fake visits to your tracker?

Did the traffic come from a traffic network? Or is it a malicious attack from people that somehow got a hold of your tracker link or campaign link and are triggering them repeatedly to make you lose money?

I'm not an expert on this kind of thing, but if you'd provide more details I could ask around to see if anyone has a solution!


Amy

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Yeah it is the latter. There were no extra costs from TS, but the guy blew up my tracker. First with 450K visits, then I disabled camp and resumed and woke up to 1.1M visits.

He has gotten a hold of the campaign link I enter @ TS, and is spam refreshing it through 20-30 proxies local to the GEO, most of them having IPs appearing as legit ISPs.

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@ysekse... not sure if you've tried this but why don't you just update and change your domain / tracker link / lander url and update your campaign link at the TS? Disable the domain and URL he has found altogether. Setup redirect rules to filter out all IP addresses he's using to slam you and also try to find IP addresses that have shown up in your tracker outside of your target area and redirect them elsewhere.

If you know his lander url or something, just redirect it back to him haha

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Do not know his lander url but this is a great idea!!! thx. And yeah, it does seem the only way to avoid this is multiple TS links and switch link when attack starts.

And now because you wrote that I figured a solution based on that... Thankfully my tracker has the ability to set the index page of an added domain, so my campaign link can look like this: legit-stuff.org-123.xyz. Then when the attack starts all I have to do is disable the campaign at TS and reroute the traffic via DNS, if that is to his campaign even better. I have not implemented this at the moment but will be ready next time it happens, only pitfall is what if he catches me when I'm asleep but it is still better than being completely helpless.

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Update:

The campaign that was under attack, and that I was considering to kill is still alive but it has been seemingly dead a few random days on a few sources... But some days the TS that did -100% ROI will come back at like 100%+ ROI... It is a low $xx payout so results are a bit unstable in the short run but overall this campaign has profited soon $2k over the last 30 or so days. Split testing landers is slow due to the high payout, and results are weird, here is a graph that shows conversions / day for the 3 landers:

Total:
original 83864 visits, 30 conversions
original + A 81854 visits, 19 conversions
original + A + B 81760 visits, 30 conversions

A / B here stands for an extra element / tweak added to the original... Plan was to test smt else by making variations of the winner but from this testing [original + B] vs [original + A + B] seems to make sense because what if A pulls it down and B pulls it up...

TODAY this campaign is actually -$82 @ -60% ROI across multiple sources but I will run it over the weekend and pause it until next weekend if it doesn't yield any results for this weekend because in the weekends it has been really really good. Highest rev day has been $500 and that was 2 weeks ago. One source is -$50, another -$12 but in the past this campaign has been this deep in the red and picked back up at the end of the day so I will see... lol

There is a new offer for the GEO available, but the one I am running now is paybumped + has way higher payout, should I still test the new one vs it?

Another campaign came back so hard after being close to dead for a few days, no idea why these drops happen but it has been staying alive and now the ROI is unreal. It being the start of the month as opposed to the end might be it because it sucked so hard in the end of august, but from yesterday on it has been good, these are the stats for yesterday:


I tested about 10 or so campaigns that all failed. I still have the campaigns making me money so on avg it is between $50 and $250 / day, though I have lost money a few days, $50-$150 but it is exceeded by the earnings thankfully... The few campaigns I do launch I try to research to the max, for most of the failed campaigns honestly I've just been lazy and not tested enough landers/offers, but I know of the top placements on multiple sources and that I can check the campaigns there, and check how many are bidding above me (and sometimes also see what they are paying/bidding for the imp) on some sources, and check which offers they are running, check trends across similar GEOs and build on that...

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Has the attack stopped? Hope so!

This kind of stuff makes me sick to my stomach. There are dirty tricks, and then there are unethical dirty tricks. Not wanting to ill-wish anyone, but karma's is a bitch, and what goes around will come around.

Up to you really - cause these things could go either way. May make more sense to finish the current round of lander-testing first though. Then maybe pick one of the traffic sources you're running at to test the new offer against the current one.



The end-of-the-month shaving we know all too well.

Fluctuations at the traffic source is of course another possibility. I used to kill a camp as soon as I saw a sharp dip in CR. Now I try to run at least a couple days more to see if it would "come back". Very perplexing sometimes as to what may be causing these fluctuations.



Great tip - I really should do that more.



Amy

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It did stop lol, but there's 2 backup campaigns up just in case now. Honestly though if I had some time + resources at my disposal + his links i would hit him back 10x as hard, or out his campaigns&domains,but at the end of the day it was like -$60 in tracking overages and i made more than that so it's not that big of a deal at such small volumes.

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Well well well the campaign that "suddenly died"... the fucking offer page is down and giving http errors, so note to self: check if the offer page is working when a sudden drop like this happens.

Other than that: $474 from another campaign that just exploded in terms of ROI, so today is a new record! 147% ROI today! I have opened up most of the previous blacklist and it has given some extra profits, all placements that were previously between 0% and -50% ROI are now 50%++ ROI.

University work is taking up quite some time so I haven't gotten to do much more than maintain & launch just a few campaigns lately...

Finances: I finally did my fucking accounting - I noted down how much went in, and how much went out since the start of 2016 using spreadsheets... This is taking into account tracking + STM + other tools. I may still have to get an accountant because when I read the "how to do accounting" guide from the government tax people, holy shit it is tedious and full of head-exploding accountant-jargon abstractions My hope is that it is OK to hand in a simple statement saying what went out and what went in, broken down by transaction-date+description to save me and whoever is checking this some time because I don't have any business assets or anything like that...

My spend has been around $50,000 dollars!!! $3,000 of those have been STM + tracking + tools
Total profit is about -$3000 USD
I have about $1300 balance across ad-networks, with current margin that can turn into maybe $2000-$2500 depending on how well it goes, and if it keeps going I'm just a few days away from a complete break-even.

Plan now is just to get ahead some on uni work and then launch some more really really really thoroughly researched / reverse engineered campaigns. The campaign where the offer page went down might be OK when the offer page gets back up, it did around $100-$200 profit / day during weekends

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Definitely get an accountant mate, that shit will drive you crazy!

And depends on your country but "a simple paper saying what went in and out" probably won't cut it, especially what went out (deductibles), you need invoices etc ..

Congrats on finally breaking even, keep it up !



Mehdi

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I like your attitude! Revenge is always a waste of time, and hating will always do nothing but drain your energy - and you definitely have more worthy causes to spend your time and energy on.

Eek! Nice catch!

I've been caught off-guard like that too many times than I care to admit - it's especially easy to dismiss a massive performance drop as typical fluctuation when you're only running on one traffic source. It's a lot easier to link the drop with a problem with the offer when you're running on multiple traffic sources and they all tank at the same time.

The hardest part is learning how to test, optimize and scale effectively and efficiently - and that part is over for you. You've climbed out of a deep hole. Now continue trekking up that mountain of cash!




Amy

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