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Yet Another Mobile Sweeps and Pops Journey (74)

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Hi everyone. I decided I should make a thread since I can see how helpful this community is and figured I could use all the help I can get.

I am very new to paid advertising, however I have been around dabbling with AM since 2008. I mostly focused on content locking, and the only "good" money I made was back when viral FB apps first came out.

These days I am looking for something that I can actually treat like a business, so I am going to master the art of paid ads, starting with mobile pops and sweeps.

In preparation, the first thing I did was sign up to this forum about a week ago. Since then I have been reading a lot and have begun setting up everything I will need to be successful.

For starters, I purchased Adplexity and ripped 4 different landers so far. They are the major ones being used with sweeps. I have been modding them to my liking over the past few days. I have made a JS template to help enable/disable certain features such as vibration, entry/exit alerts, second chance alert, etc... I am also working on optimizing page load speed to the best of my ability. I just spent about 2 hours getting one of my landers down from 2.5s to about 400ms.

This was achieved by following this guide:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...s-Loading-Time

Also, I found this amazing tool to build a sprite sheet out of all my images and get the css code. This reduces the speed a lot.
https://draeton.github.io/stitches/

The next step is to get the rest of the landers to load that quickly too.

The geo I have decided to start with is France, as well as a few other French speaking countries such as Belgium and Switzerland. Right now I am waiting for a good friend of mine to translate my LPs for me. He speaks and writes fluent French/English so I know it will be high quality work.

I have found a few different offers that payout around $0.50 - $1USD. About 5-6 over 3 different networks. My plan is to test many different offers over a few different geos and pick the best one while also testing different LPs. I want to find a decent offer before I get into cutting things.

So that's basically where I am for now. Tomorrow night I will most likely have my translations and should hopefully have all my LPs load times optimized. Then I will be making my campaigns in Voluum and Popads and let it fly. Really hoping to get the camps up in 2-3 days max.

Questions:
Say I start advertising my French LPs in Belgium/Switzerland, but the user happens to not speak French, what should I do? Is there a way to detect this without PHP? Should I send them to YTZ or just have more languages ready before sending traffic to those countries?

If there are any questions for me I will be happy to answer them.

Cheers,
Brad

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You can add a rule in Voluum by language and show LPs accordingly.

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Popads itself also has language targeting you can play around with. Popads' targetting is actually one of the most comprehensive I can recall so use that to your advantage.

Also talk more to your AM about your offer. 50c-$1 seems a bit low for France. Ask them for the top offers so you can test with more confidence.

Offer trumps everything else. If it doesn't convert, even the best angle is useless.

Hope this helps!
Jeremy

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Thanks Jeremy,

I actually looked specifically for offers that paid about $1 or less since I have read they are typically easier to convert and will cost a lot less money during the testing phase to get to stat sig. Once I get a campaign working with a lower payout offer I plan to ask for a bump and also test some higher payout offers along side.

On a separate note, last night I attempted to optimize my spin the wheel LP and it was a nightmare and didn't really seem like I could figure out how to do it. I decided to scrap that page and look for a new one on Adplexity. Within 5 minutes of downloading a bunch of LPs I found one that is insanely optimized already. All the html/css/js in on one page and minified, all images are in a sprite sheet, and something else I noticed, base64 used for some other images I believe in the css. Perhaps this is an advanced technique of speeding up the load time. Will have to look into that.

I will keep you guys posted with any further news.

Cheers,
Brad

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Yep, referenced it in my OP. Cheers though.

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Ran into a roadblock. Networks are telling me most advertisers do not like the "instant winner" style LPs. A little unfortunate since I have been spending a ton of time on optimizing these pages.

There is one offer I am able to run although it is an AU offer (high traffic cost) and the payout is $3 (high testing cost), so I'm not sure if I should even try with this offer at my level. In the meantime, 2 of my less aggressive pages are in review for a BE offer with about a $1 payout, so we will see what happens there.

Looks like there are a lot of cloakers out there. I do not want to start out with cloaking so I'm going to try and find some more offers that are a little less stringent on the LP requirements.

Questions:
Should I try out the AU offer?
Should I join more networks and look for more offers? Any specific ones?

Edit: One of my networks has approved my LPs for a few BE offers. Going to start testing as soon as possible. Here's the run down on my camp:

English LPs -> Dutch BE offers. Probably a bad idea, but I am targeting English speaking people in popads. I will also be testing French LPs -> Dutch BE offers later on when my translations are ready.

Have 4 different offers although all are from the same network. Payout around $1 for all of them.

Getting excited to test and see what happens!

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Brad your load times are insane! Taking the time to optimize for speed can really pay off.

You can STILL use the same landers! Just modify the words a little. For example instead of "you have won!" you can say "you've won a raffle ticket to our iphone draw!" or "you stand to win an iphone!"

If you word it right, the conversion rates may not be as different as you may imagine, or even at all!


Simply ask your AMs for offers that "allow aggressive and don't require lander approval".


Testing costs will be higher, yes, but returns could be higher as well. Nothing's stopping you.


Which networks are you already with? See the end of Ruby Tune's post here for newbie-friendly networks: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-First-Network


This set up is OK, but you'll need to split-test English and French LPs by rotating them at the same time. When comparing stats from the 2 landers, please remember to exclude the stats gathered for the English LP prior to adding the French LP to rotation.


Equally excited to see your test results!



Amy

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Just realized that I was targeting all devices in Popads. One of my conversions even came from Windows surprisingly, but for now I have changed it to smartphones and tablets only on both camps.

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So I just realized one of my leads didn't show up in the AU camp for some reason. I went to the errors in Voluum and it showed that it tried to pass the click ID plus some other stuff appended to it. This happens for some reason if the lead comes from clicking the back button and is taken to the offer and they fill it out there. There was some code in the script that appended some info when they clicked back. I changed it so all postbacks should work fine now.

However, I tried to upload the conversion manually. It worked, but I didn't specify the payout, so it says I have a lead but for $0.00. If anyone knows a way to edit this that would be greatly appreciated!

In other news, I have cut 3 offers. Not sure if I can cut landers yet but I'll get into that eventually.

2 leads on the AU camp and it is now showing some promise. I'll post detailed stats when I can, although I will be busy the next few days so not sure if I will have time.

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Go Brad, go!

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Cut my first ad placement using Amy's kill-whitelist calculator. It only told me to kill one placement so that's what I did. Not much else to report yet.

EDIT: Going to try and bring in a big variation of my best performing LP on the BE camp tomorrow if I have time, although it is probably unlikely. I ripped one from Adplexity that looks super optimized out of the box though so there's a chance I'll be able to get it online soon.

I also lowered my bid on both the camps. I think I am bidding too high and it is unnecessary and costing me money. Popads estimated traffic seems way off too. I was bidding that high because it said it estimated 3000 hits, although I ended up with like 15000.

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Traffic is still coming in with the adjusted bids and it is A LOT cheaper. I haven't had any conversions yet but hopefully the lower bid doesn't effect conversions. My EPV on BE yesterday was 0.0007, and my CPV TODAY is 0.0008. So I should be super close to breakeven if I maintain the same conversions.

EDIT: Just found out the AU offers was taken off but was supposed to redirect to a new one that is basically the exact same. Unfortunately I am not approved for the new one so I was basically sending my users into the abyss. Going to have to get in touch with my AM and get sorted before I continue with the AU camp.

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Reached stat sig on my 2 remaining LPs for the BE camp. 92%/8%, so I am now down to one LP. Woo! Going to be uploading variations soon.

In the mean time, the camp is almost breaking even now that my bid is lower, and better landing page is actually GREEN! I am really excited to see what happens once I get some variations up and running, including some in French.

Question: Should I bother testing all the French LPs or just use the one that's already performing the best?

The AU camp is now back up and running as well. Will hopefully get some data coming in soon.

Another question: Since I lowered the bid on the BE camp, should I unblacklist the siteID that I cut previously? It was bringing quite a bit of traffic.

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Nice Brad! Lots of progressed made over the past couple days. Your plan sounds good. And I agree that the camps look promising.



LOL - yeah the estimator can be inaccurate sometimes. At least it's not erring on the other side (i.e. telling you there's lots of traffic when in reality there isn't).

That kill-whitelist spreadsheet is best-used AFTER you've found a good lander+offer. You can still use it, but keep in mind that you need as much traffic as you can get to test landers etc., so only cut sparingly, and only the budget-drainers.

Regarding the bid: Bidding high doesn't JUST get you more impressions - the traffic quality will often be better as well. One of my favorite bidding tactics for pop, is to set up a few identical camps at different bids ranging from low to high (sometimes really high), then running some traffic to each camp to see which one gives me the best ROI, and use that for my lander/offer testing. You'll be surprised at how big a difference your bid can make on the CR. Sometimes when I look at the different CRs across several staggered-bid camps, I'd see a high-bid camp making good profits and a low-bid camp converting so badly there's no way to make it profitable. And I'd think to myself gee, I'm glad I didn't just launch one campaign at the low bid, because otherwise I would have just ditched the camp after seeing the low CR.


Again, this is a common misconception. I used to think the same way: I'd start with a low bid thinking that if the camp showed promise I would increase the bid. I've since changed my thinking. Please read my previous paragraph above.


Ouchies! Most affiliate networks have a notification system where you'll get an email when an offer is changed/paused. Ask your AM about this and make sure you're set up on it.


Can you find more of the same offers to test for BE? I think another round of lander testing plus a round of offer testing should push you into green. Looking forward to it!



Amy

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Thank you for all the tips Amy!

I just signed up to a few different networks. I am trying to figure out where to join Kobi Digital but could not find a signup form so I added someone on Skype. I also signed up to Mobusi and ClickDealer. Will hopefully hear back from them all soon. I think Kobi Digital has a bunch of BE offers, so I hope to get in with them soon.

I have added a new LP to the BE camp. It was ripped from Adplexity and is in French. I tweaked it a bit and made a few text changes. Will see how it performs tomorrow alongside my other LP.

I have also added a few more offers to rotate in the AU camp. Might as well since a good offer is probably the most important part of the campaign.

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Congratulations on the green!! And getting excited is ALWAYS a good thing - it's when a person gets so afraid of ending up disappointed he wouldn't let himself feel excitement that's sad.

Suggestion: Focus on the AU camp and only continue to test BE if you've done everything for the AU camp and just waiting for stats to roll in. You have a couple of offers now that seem to be converting, so the next task on the list is to improve your landers! I would suggest to start preparing the next batch of landers to test now, so that as soon as you cut down to one offer and lander, you can start another round of lander-testing with the new batch. Try not to cut too much traffic if at all (placements etc. - except for the obvious budget-drainers).

Eagerly awaiting more green!



Amy

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Thanks Amy. I am just testing one pin submit on the BE camp right now. I have strong suspicions I won't have any conversions with it and I will probably pause the whole camp tomorrow and send the rest of it's budget to the AU camp.

Not much traffic coming in on the AU camp right now, but I assume that is expected since it's like 4:00AM there right now. Hopefully it will start picking up in a few hours.

In the meantime, I sat here staring at my stats because I don't feel like messing around with LPs today, but sometimes you just have to get things done, so I've cracked open a beer and am getting to work.

I started by spying AU landers in Adplexity. There seems to be a major trend with people calling out ISPs. I have ripped a page doing that as well as one other page that asks questions about some pictures which I'm sure most people have seen around on the spy tools. Neither of these pages are optimized very well so I am going to see if I can get them loading to my liking, around 500ms or less.

Should I add them in to the rotation right away or just continue testing the offers with the current LPs? I think I'm just going to toss them in unless someone says otherwise.

Amy. Just want to thank you again for taking time out of your busy day to drop by everyone's follow alongs. It's rare to find an expert willing to offer so much like that for the noobs. I'm supposed to be moving to TO in a couple of years and can't wait to have a drink you you and the rest of the TO STM crew.

EDIT: Pausing the BE camp until I can find some better offers. Mobusi did not have anything for me and looks like ClickDealer doesn't either. Talking to my AM to see if he can find anything. Still waiting to talk to someone from Kobi.

EDIT: New offer added to the AU rotation. Recommended to me by one of my AMs. They said it should convert better than the other one I am already running. New ISP callout LP is finished. Took me longer than expected, about 2 hours, but it loads in under 400ms and I am happy.

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NONE of my offers are converting. I decided to try them in cake with the testing tool and could not trigger a conversion on any of them. One wouldn't let me "enter a valid phone number" no matter how hard I tried. Going to try and hunt down some more offers.

EDIT: One of them converted after going through the entire funnel. Wow.

I decided to go and look at the very first offer I was running. It has an updated tracking link so I'm not sure if something changed but I am going to try running it again. I thought I would be able to find a ton of AU offers but I guess not.

I feel STUCK. I don't know what to do at this point. I keep trying to contact Kobi via Skype, they ask me a question, I answer, and then I don't get a response back. This has been going on for 2 days now. I am super frustrated. How hard can it be to just send a few messages back and get me approved? They could at least give me the contact of someone who has the time.

I really do not know what to do. I know AU is a huge geo and I can make it work, I just can't find any offers to promote. The only thing I can think of right now is to start a new camp in a new geo, but I don't think that is really necessary yet. I will probably launch in France next though. Maybe I will start that today, I don't know.

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Whao there! What happened? You had a couple of AU offers that started to convert, you were testing landing pages. Did the conversions stop coming in? Can you post some lander stats?

In AM, most campaigns will only be profitable after testing multiple offers and lots of landing pages. Hardly anything will just work out of the box. You need to be patient and have a strategy, and stick to it.

For example, don't just randomly add landing pages and/or offers to the campaign when you're still waiting for statistical significance. When you do that, the data can become majorly skewed. The lander stats you ran yesterday may have high ROI for example because it was a good day of the week, and when you add new landers to the test today which may be a low-CR day-of-the-week, you can't compare the old with the new landers or you'll arrive at wrong decisions.

I may sound a bit harsh but I mean well. I've seen too many people - including myself - waste a ton of money due to:

1)Being impatient.

2)Being too afraid to lose money.


Either or both can cause a person to make the following mistakes:

-Randomly adding and pulling offers and landers from the campaign, without waiting for statistical significance, and then wondering why the campaign isn't improving over time.

-Make decisions based on emotions and not objective evidence. For example constantly checking stats, and when failing to see a conversion after a few dollars' spend, pausing the campaign or concluding that an offer isn't converting - when it may just be having a bad day or a bad hour, or even just experiencing a delay in conversion postback!


Sweeps in AU is a good vertical and geo to start with. Competition levels aren't as high as for some of the other English-speaking geos. You speak English so no need for translations (additional savings there). There are a TON of good AU sweeps offers around. Payouts are low so you can spend less money while collecting more data...

If you could just stick to a strategy - something as simple as this:

1)Rip and mod 5-10 landers.

2)Ask AMs for 3 good recommendations of AU sweeps offers.

3)Test them and cut offers and landers when they reach statistical significance.

4)Start another round of testing.

Ideally the ROI will improve with each round of testing. By testing multiple landers and offers from the start, we increase our chances of finding a combination that will work.


I'm not saying we need to stay married to a vertical and geo, but before you ditch that camp, at least post some stats so I could see if there's anything we can do before you throw all that money you spent on it down the drain.

If you need more offers from more affiliate networks, send me a PM - I'll hook you up with more.

Thanks for your thanks - it makes my job very rewarding when I see people benefit from the forum. Looking forward to seeing you in TO! Who knows - we may meet at a conference way before then! You should aim to be making 3 figures/day before AWE and make the trip a self-reward. Would be amazing to see you there!


Amy

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Thanks Amy,

Maybe I did just get a little impatient and ran on emotions yesterday. I was constantly changing my bid trying to get more traffic and testing a ton of offers because the conversions just stopped coming in and I wanted to speed up the data to see if more would come in.

Here are the offer stats for the last 3 days:


And here are my lander stats from the last 3 days:


My AM at ClickDealer told me to focus on a single offer they have that he is sure is converting. I am now just running to that one offer. Still no conversions though.

Since I kind of went crazy with this camp, should I start a fresh one since the data may be screwed up now?

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Wow - so those 2 top offers with 2 and 1 lead respectively, haven't converted at all after the initial $1.50 in spend each. That's pretty tough. I can understand why you got impatient. ALTHOUGH, -60-70% ROI isn't the worst for initial testing.

With 9 offers and 5 landers though, you haven't spent enough to even gauge promise. Including more offers and landers in the testing will maximize your chances of finding a good combo, but it will also take more spend before you can start cutting stuff. And when you're running a vertical for the first time, you don't know which ones are good offers, you don't know what types of landers work, so when you don't get conversions you don't know if it's your landers or offers or what it is.

If you want to turn this camp back on, feel free. Since you only got 3 leads, they probably won't screw up your data by much. Or, you can wait until the next day before turning it back on - just so the data would be separate so if you just want to look at the "new" data, you could.

However, I can understand if you're reluctant to keep running that camp. How is the new offer looking now? Which geo and what type of offer is it?



Amy

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The new offer was in the screenshot. It has zero conversions even now at 371 clicks. It was part of the AU camp. I also threw back in the original offer from Mundo which isn't converting either. I think I should look for some new offers. I tried searching Adplexity trying to figure out which offers people are running but can't really narrow it down to anything. Big Bang Ads keeps coming up but I am not with them and can't remember if I applied. Might just apply again and see if I can get in.

I feel like I am in enough networks to make something happen though. I've paused the AU camp for now and will be doing some research to try and find some geos/landers that people are running with the networks I am in.

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Your journey has come to an end brother.

Ping me on Skype so I can send you your log in & our top offers in AU. Account has already been created.

We've got the highest epc's out there so things will be on the up and up from now on

Skype: floris.hummelinck

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If you're already in at least a couple of the bigger and more reputable networks that have a wide range of offers, then I agree with you!

You have Adplexity. That's a great tool. Pick a popular vertical that you KNOW is working for a lot of people, check popads' inventory chart and pick several geos that you feel have lots of traffic but are not very competitive (you can tell by the number of advertisers and how high the bid price is), rip 5-10 landers for each, get 1-2 recommended offers for each vertical+geo from AMs, set up 2-3 camps for each at staggered bids and assign $10 to each camp. For a low payout offer of around $1, $20-30 in spend should give you a rough idea on whether the offer has promise.

This way for $100 you get to test 3-4 geos. It's VERY rough, and you can argue that the spending isn't enough to fully give each offer a chance to perform. But I've found this method to work pretty well for me personally whenever I want to cast a wide net. Just a suggested strategy you could follow if you're really undecided.



Amy

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Just received a PM with a couple questions. Figured the answers would have more use here in order to help others with the same questions.

2 conversions can be enough to test the waters. By using the split test calculator it showed me that this offer has a 92% chance of being the best. At this point I figured the testing can stop. The offer is also a very high paying offer, over $10, so that also had an impact on my testing. Had it been a low paying offer that converted more frequently I would have definitely tested longer.

As for moving away from Popads, pretty much all the major traffic sources are good. I actually use Popads the least out of all of them. Popcash, Propeller and ZP are my go to sources. I realize the issue for a lot of people are the limited targeting options of other sources, however it is more of a blessing in disguise. By not focusing on those extra targeting options like browser, city, etc... you keep everything broad and can rake in more profits when you find a winning offer. I don't think anyone has made $300+/day off some super targeted options like that where you can only use one traffic source to even do it. Plus, if you REALLY need those options, you can always setup Voluum rules so those specific options go to the offer that is converting well, and send the rest to a new split test or monetizer/YTZ.

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Ok thanks for answers man.

I don't get this "If it would be frequent converting offer, I would test longer" - in my mind this is exactly the opposite of what I would do. If I have an offer that converts frequently, I get a statistically more significant data with less traffic - you could have gotten very lucky with the two 10$ conversions when in fact you are realistically getting like one 10$ conversion for every 20$ spend and you can't know that from this sample. But when I get 100 0.2$ conversions, I now know that it's much more likely that it wasn't luck that got me those 100 conversions. In my mind the deviation is bigger with smaller number of conversions.

Please correct me if I'm wrong - I just wrote this so you can understand my look at this and why I'm asking this question about small sample.

Great, I will try those once more - yeah, targetting options on Popcash are very small... ZP I got rejected twice - even now when I have green camps up. Propeller is good yeah, but can't use them for aggro antiviruses. With other offers I do use them.

Thanks again for your reply, good luck!

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Typically the lower paying offers convert a lot more easily. That is the reason why the general advice for people new to AM is to start with low paying offers. Basically if I was testing a few offers that paid under $1 I would be able to get a lot of data and CLEARLY see a winner because I would have a ton of conversions. However, in the case of high paying offers, it's different because the offers convert a lot less.

My goal is always to hit the ground running as fast as possible, so I went ahead and took what appears to be the best offer and rolled with it. If my scaling attempts don't go over too well it's not a big deal because I'm testing other geos/offers in the background and I'll try to scale those after.

EDIT:
Just decided to dig into some of the other offers. One of them has 2 conversions but with a -85% ROI. Decided to check out carrier stats and they are both from one carrier. ~150% ROI. Bam. Going to try and scale that carrier as much as possible. Might not be a ton of traffic available, but we'll see.

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Ok I get your logic.

Nice one with the 150% ROI

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This is really exciting! How are these doing now?


More gold nuggets from Brad!

One exception to that: 1-click carrier billing offers can convert with very high ROI, which will allow you to make considerably more profits for the same amount of traffic compared to wifi.

The big takeaway here is that it's better to test lots of offers and landers so that you can monetize more of the traffic, instead of focusing on cutting and only targeting little traffic segments that are profitable for that single offer that some of you are limiting yourselves to.


LOL I love this kind of serendipity! Seconds after I mentioned carrier traffic and high ROI, I read this. Nice find!



Amy

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Finally found a potentially winning offer! Yesterday I managed to do $130 profit on one offer at 180% ROI. Unfortunately though, CR is varying quite a lot day to day and today it is only at +5% ROI. Either way, it's profitable and I am trying to scale it has best as I can. It was really nice to hit $xxx profit yesterday and I'd like to see this trend continue. Top pub is doing about 2k in revenue daily so there's definitely room for me to scale some more.

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There you go! This proves that once you do it once, it's only a matter of testing and not giving up to make it again. Great job!

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Hi Brad,

Nice talking today. Glad to see you testing so many offers and landers in AU. You've been working hard. I can see you are just on the cusp of making it happen.

As mentioned, Track Revenue's machine learning will help you optimize those for you. Just load all your AU offers and landers into a campaign dedicated to AU per traffic source and let us figure out the winning offer/lander.

You've been working hard on changing your bids, and switching out your offers when conversions stopped coming in. Again, if you can pass the dynamic bid as a token using &cpc=[BID] and rotate multiple AU offers and landers to split test, machine learning will take over from there so you can start testing other campaigns. Like I said, a winning offer today might not win next week, so when ML adapts and keeps testing the alternative offers/landers, you'll always get the highest EPC.

Amy's right if you are optimizing manually. You might be able to achieve even greater efficiency with ML.

Regards and Cheers!

Jason
Track Revenue
Skype: jason.trackrevenue

P.S.
AMY: I am loving your threads. I don't media buy, but my customers do, and I help coach them to use my software.

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Just when I think I'm getting something going, it flops again. Really need to get to the bottom of this. Seems like every campaign I find that is doing well goes downhill in a week or less. The only thing I did was try to scale on the same source on different bid levels, all separated by $1 CPMs. But even on the sources I left alone, they are now doing poorly as well.

Here is what my CVR looks like from day to day:
0.4, 0.35, 0.46, 0.84, 0.2, 0.2, 0.07(today).

As you can see, the first 3 days were great, with the 4th day doing incredible. One camp was over 500%ROI that day. The next day, however, the CVR dropped drastically, and now today it is even worse. I really wish I could do something about this. The only thing I am trying is to test more offers. I tested one overnight that didn't get a single conversion and have just added one more offer to the mix to start a new split test.

I'm really frustrated by this. I have really only seen one stable offer in my AM career that did really well for me. I've spent over 80k on pops and have found about 3 good offers that had a lifespan over a week. What is going on here?

I should also mention a previous campaign that I was recently running. Ghana antivirus. Found an awesome offer that was doing 200% ROI for one day, then down to breakeven the next and then hardly any conversions the next.

The only thing I can think of doing is to hop on the trendy geos. Everyone knows US/UK/AU is always on top and I'm thinking about diving in with some UK sweeps. I've been scared off by this forum but I think it can be done now that I have some experience. I just want to see what these geos are all about. I'll probably avoid the US until I have a system to auto cut placements, but the UK should be manageable. Of course, compliance is a major concern with the UK and I am in pursuit of a lander that will work. Hopefully I will get something up and running soon.

Any input from anyone? Any pros have any recommendations? I feel like I need a bit of guidance right now.

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I completely hear you Brad - about pop camps not living very long, and the inevitable sudden drops in CR we know all too well, but can't identify reasons for.

Sometimes it's because of the offers themselves - when you see a sudden and drastic drop in CR across all sources you're running the offer at, you can just tell something's going on with the offer - shaving and/or scrubbing by the aff network and/or the advertiser. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do to prevent this.

More often though, the problem lies with the traffic source - this is evident when you're rotating multiple profitable offers in one camp and see a drop in CR for all offers. Several suggestions here on how to make camps last longer:


1)Sometimes the reason for the CR drop is because you're no longer getting traffic from some of the best-converting placements. This can be cause by changes in the bidding landscape that results from changing competition (i.e. getting outbid). Another possible reason - which is my speculation only - is I'm suspecting that some traffic sources may be sending better-quality traffic to our new camps to make them look more promising just so we'd keep running them, so that when the "honeymoon stage" is over we'd see drop in CR.

No matter the reason - sometimes when you identify those best placements and try to get some of the traffic back, you can turn things around. Usually you'll need to start a whitelist and bid higher, unless it's a source like zeropark where you can just bid higher for those specific targets.

2)I find that when I'm targeting carrier traffic, that camps are lasting longer than when I'm targeting wifi.

3)I'm also finding that when I'm running on small geos that have little competition, camps last a lot longer.

4)Some traffic sources will give you more stable CR for longer than other sources will. You just have to test more sources.


I wished I had more tips on how to make pop camps last longer, because this is an issue I'm having to deal with myself daily as well. It's a real chore having to constantly find new profitable camps to replace dying ones. This is why I've been suggesting for people to move away from pop, to expand into other traffic types such as display, native, and FB. Pop has become so competitive and volatile, that unless you have an advantage other people don't, it would require major hustling to make half-decent profits. Since you're good at coding, developing automation tools may just give you that advantage.

Anyway - don't mean to sound all doom-and-gloom! When a door closes another will open. I'm sure you'll continue to progress in spite of these setbacks - either by finding better traffic sources, coming up with more efficient optimization methods (e.g. automation), or by expanding into other traffic types. Best of luck my friend!



Amy

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Thanks for the long response Amy! I am looking into it as best I can. So far it seems that on one source there were 4-5 really good placements. I actually added them to a whitelist which got approved today and noticed there wasn't much traffic there. I'm thinking the placements may have disappeared or something. I had the whitelist set to a high bid of $12 CPM, but just raised it to a massive $20 CPM to see what happens. I also paused my staggered camps, except for the best 2. I had camps for 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 $CPM. Perhaps I am fighting against myself here and just paying for extra pops from the same visitor. Perhaps I can make a tool to check for this.

I also made another camp that isn't a whitelist at $14 CPM, just to rule out being outbid and see what happens there.

Hopefully this will fix the CR issue on this TS. The other sources go unexplained still though. Maybe it's just a bad day, or maybe the placements ran away there too, I'm going to look into it.

EDIT: All the conversions are coming from a bunch of tiny placements. Most only have 1 conversion (high payout offer). I'm going to dig further and see if I can get more traffic from these placements, especially the ones with more than 1 conversion.

Also as far as coding goes, a friend in my Skype group has started coding some stuff and it's starting to get me wanting to code some things as well. I think in the near future I am going to code some APIs to access the traffic sources to cut placements and possibly some other fun stuff. I'll probably release here as open source software because frankly, I am a terrible coder and there are people here that I think would enjoy getting in on the project. I was going to go with PHP, but I think I'm going to start learning python and go with that. Anyway this is all just "maybe sometime" talk. We'll see what happens.

Also, I finally got a lander setup for UK. I've been so on the fence about launching there because it's such a PITA compliance wise. I've sent the lander for approval and will hopefully be able to test the waters soon.

---

Decided to go back to basics and do some serious spying, the kind of spying that got me on my best offer to date. I've managed to dig up 5 geos, 6 camps total. Basically I will be setting these all up with only 1-3 landers and then the offer I found spying on 2-3 networks. 3 are app installs, 1 is a sweeps offer for a coupon and 1 is an AV pin. I am currently awaiting approval on the offers but am going to stay up getting these landers up and running.

---

@xxf8xx - great follow along. I've just recently hit $200/day with app installs on pops and have detailed it on my follow along. If you're interested in collaborating, PM your skype.


@Amy - great tips!

---

Alright so I'm finally back to some decent days right now. $100-200/day. Pretty good, but not to my full potential. I'm not really too sure how to scale this or how much I even could possibly scale it. The geo has roughly 5 million people. I'm already running on a few different pop sources. For now I'm going to let this camp sit on the back burner and watch it for a couple of days while I launch some more camps.

App installs seems to not really be my thing, but I did manage to get one geo just above break even. There's a possibility to scale there for sure and I will be looking into that over the next couple of days.

My next order of business is to go back to my sweeps roots. App installs has really shown me the power of testing multiple landers. It's really sad that's it has taken me multiple times to realize this as it is a very basic concept in this business. You can't just go out testing 1 offer/1 lander combos and expect things to fall in place. I think it's because that's how I found my best campaign that made over 10k profit that I got stuck in those ways. This time around I will always test 3 or more landers in one campaign, basically as many as I can find. For the app install camp I tested 10-12 landers and there were only 1 or 2 clear winners.

Time to get back into business and hit some 1k days. They're just around the corner.

Cheers,
Brad

---

There are some small geos that have virtually zero competition. Camps can last a long time doing stable profits making passive income without much/any maintenance. The best I've done was targeting a single mobile carrier in a geo that has only 1.3 million population - was making $40/day in profits on my best traffic source. Not much but considering I didn't need to touch it for weeks, that was practically free money on autopilot.


And if you were running clean, you could try your luck on mDSPs as well.


If this forum had walls I would make that statement into a poster and put it up everywhere lol!

It's really interesting (and a bit frustrating at times) how most people wouldn't think twice about spending the time and money optimizing thousands of placements, but are a lot more reluctant to test 10 more landers and offers - when the latter is what will take their xx/day to xxx/day or even xxxx/day.

Everyone's looking for secrets or some edge they're currently in no position to access, when something simple like testing more offers can easily give them that edge, and its something ANYONE can do.

The same applies to scaling to other traffic networks.


Go Brad Go!!



Amy

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Thanks for the detailed post Amy. Always great to get replies from you here.

I think my problem has been that when I see numbers like -50% ROI, I just pass it by. I'm pretty sure I have missed out on quite a few campaigns because of this. Right now I am going to focus on making a campaign work to the best of it's abilities. Basically by testing multiple offers and landers instead of just 1/1. I think this will be a better way to go about doing things instead of launching 3 new campaigns every day with little to no luck.

I launched a new campaign yesterday and the best lander is pretty much at break even, just slightly under. Carrier traffic is doing pretty good, however wifi is not. I'm going to test a couple new offers to see if any of them convert with wifi and if not, maybe test sending the wifi elsewhere.

---

Not only will your chances of hitting on a profitable offer+lander combo be greater, but when you test all the common landers on adplexity, and mass-test all offers you can find on 5-10 aff networks you're with, and NOT break-even - you can basically write-off that geo+vertical, at least for the next while until a new batch of offers come out.

That way you're not having to jump around, testing one offer from GeoX+VerticalA today, testing another offer from GeoY+VerticalB tomorrow, and then test another offer from GeoX+VerticalA the day after...and because you tested offers separately instead of split-testing, you're always having to start your testing from scratch.

Whereas if you're testing all popular landers and all of the major offers available in that geo+vertical, you spend the money ONCE to get a more-or-less complete picture of the geo+vertical.

You'd actually be SAVING money by testing more offers at a time, because what will typically happen is that a couple / a few of the offers will perform significantly better early on, allowing you to cut a lot of the inferior offers. The more offers you test, the higher the chances of getting a wide range of performance, the faster the best offer will reach statistical significance - and the more money you'll save.




What's keeping you from targeting JUST the carrier traffic?



Amy

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The source that I was using to test this campaign does not have carrier targeting. I tested on another source with carrier targeting and ROI was -90%. This was of course before I finished lander testing though. I am running some traffic there again now and have cut a few really bad placements.

---

Do you have a rep at that traffic source? If so it wouldn't hurt to ask whether they could tweak things in the backend to give you JUST carrier traffic.

For example, my best buddy just asked PopCash and they've said yes - but you need to ask them to do this for specific camps, and they can't just do specific carriers - they can only give you all carrier traffic for a certain geo (i.e. exclude wifi). And they can't apply this to your entire account - just to individual camps on a per-request basis.



Amy

---

Thanks for the tip Amy I had no idea you could do that. That's a really awesome tip. Unfortunately the campaign went downhill on all carriers anyway.

The good news is, my AM recommended a new offer to me that looks really promising so I went ahead and launched it with 6 landers. Literally every single lander is converting and doing positive ROI so far. Overall ROI is sitting around 300%. I have only run this offer for 3 hours and it has netted me $35 profit. The offer is only for one carrier in one geo but I think there is a lot of traffic out there so I'm going to go hunting for it.

I pray to the AM Gods that this is not another one of those offers that converts for one day and then nothing the next.

Anyway, I'm going to scale this to a couple other sources and see what kind of damage I can do with it.

---

I don't know why I ever get my hopes up when I find a killer offer. It's always too good to be true. I was literally making $20+/hour on the wee hours of the night for this geo. It would have easily been a 1k+/day camp with scale, but all good things seem to come to a very quick end for me.

Apparently the advertiser had an influx of people sending leads through non compliant landers, and also the wrong carrier traffic, and so they decided to put a cap on the offer. The cap I could maybe deal with, but my CR dropped so drastically it's not even funny. Also, shouldn't it be the advertiser's problem to make sure they are not getting leads from the wrong carrier? I mean shouldn't they have had something setup to deal with that in the first place?

Here's a screenshot of the drop:


Anyway, I'm waiting to hear back on quality and maybe I can get the cap lifted and the scrubbing will stop. In the meantime, I've got another network getting in touch with the advertiser and have sent a lander for approval with them. I couldn't find the offer live on any other networks unfortunately.

So who knows, maybe my goose that lays golden eggs will make its way back to me when the heat blows over. In the meantime, I've setup a couple new campaigns. They're both based off of offers my AMs recommended to me out of the blue without me asking.

One of them I launched with 3 landers and 2 offers. Right now the best combo is at 53% ROI, but I'll need at least 24 hours to see the final result. I'm hoping this one will pick up nicely and I can begin to scale it soon.

The other one I launched with 8 landers and 1 offer. Only a couple leads here so far so not much to report on.

Something has to give soon. I think I've put in more than enough effort to make pops work. But I still don't understand, why after so long, I still can't hit a steady camp. Every time I find something it seems to get taken away from me just as quick as it arrived. I would be more than happy to get into automation if I had at least a steady income, but I don't think anything I could automate would really help me at the stage I am at.

Every day I am still questioning if it is really possible to achieve even a steady $100/day profit with pops. It seems the only way is to launch 10 campaigns/day and hope for the best, but who has the time or budget to do that? I'm so up and down with the whole idea of pops as a business model, but I'm in it for the long haul now. I just hope I get some kind of steady campaign going soon because I'm getting pretty tired of the whole idea of it.

I think it's time to do some serious research and see what I can dig up. Maybe I'll launch a few more camps today and see what happens.

Anyway, wish I cam here with better news. Pretty much every other post of mine is positive and then negative and repeats though, so hopefully the next post will be a lot more cheerful.

Cheers,
Brad

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Aw Brad!

I just came from mypayne's follow-along where we were discussing the volatility of pop - although in your case it's about the volatility of offers going up and down the discussion is still relevant:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post286298

I know it was a really good offer you were running. But how many offers have you tested for that geo and vertical?

You now have all this useful data you've collected - you know which placements convert the best for example, and which lander is the winner. You could hop on ALL the aff networks you're with and compile a list of ALL the offers you can find for that geo+vertical, and test them using your best lander and on your best placements!

Alternatively, try a different vertical for the same geo and placements. Check adplexity to see which offers are doing the most volume (as I've also mentioned in the post referenced above).

It may be time to take a short break. Maybe give yourself one full day where you're not checking stats or doing research or brainstorming angles. Trust me you won't get to do this often (only when you're in-between profitable camps - like now). Do something you enjoy. I know some people will advise to keep your head down and break through, but when you're in a state of frustration, hustling harder never helps. And you've probably been giving yourself quite a bit of stress to make AM work since you quit your job.

Everything always works out in the end, even if temporary setbacks make it seem not to be the case. It's something I firmly believe in - not just saying that to make you feel better.



Amy

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Thanks Amy. I'll probably look into testing some more offers for that campaign. The thing is though that with that original offer I didn't have to cut a single placement or lander. It was the probably the best offer I found in my entire time doing AM. It's almost like every offer has some kind of scrubbing enabled, but they forgot to enable it on this offer so it converted like crazy. Anyway I'll try and find some more offers to test.

As for taking a break, I'm heading to the cottage this weekend with my girlfriend's family for a little R&R. I'll probably still be checking camps as always, but I'll still get some time away from screen.

Oh, and I have been masterminding with Mrpayne for a few days now so I know all about what he's going through. We've had some good discussions lately for sure.

Cheers,
Brad

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LOL so you're the mastermind partner mrpayne was talking about! Small world indeed!

Together you guys will be able to do some synergistic damage! I'm sure of it - very much looking forward to seeing what you guys can do!

Have a fun and relaxing weekend with your gf and fam!



Amy

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Not really sure what happened yesterday but the CR on one of my offers that I've been running for a couple of weeks now just decided to go crazy yesterday, like super duper crazy! I actually almost had my first 1k profit day ending the day at $920. It just kept on going up and up and up, meanwhile I was at brewery drinking beers and having a good time. It was absolutely fantastic.

Here's a screenshot for fun:



I also have a couple other camps that are starting to look pretty nice too. One of my AMs got me an offer to fill in for the one that I originally said I could do 1k/day with. It's in the green, but not nearly as nice as the original offer. Still, I am awaiting bumps on all the offers I am running so that should help me scale more.

I finally have a few camps doing some decent numbers. I know I won't hit anywhere near 1k again today but I should still do low xxx which is ok with me. Once I get home I'll try to scale everything through the roof. Well, actually I'm out of cash so I need to wait until Tuesday to get paid, but after that I'm going to try and go nuts with these offers. HOPEFULLY they will last this time!

Cheers,
Brad

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Ended yesterday at $278 profit. Not bad considering I am strapped for cash and trying to make due with what I have. Today I am at $10 profit. It probably could have been higher but I was testing a CPL campaign with Propeller which basically only gave me like 1% of the payout. I also believe if the CPL campaign was not running then I could have got those same leads on my regular campaigns giving me a lot more of the revenue to myself. They offered to reduce the cost but I just want it paused.

EDIT: I asked for a refund and they had no problem refunding my account for the over cost.

In the meantime, I am out of cash for now. I'm supposed to be getting paid tomorrow but I'm not sure if it will hit my bank tomorrow or not. Once I get home I can at least use my spare credit card to top up one traffic source and hopefully get a few more dollars coming in.

Also not really sure why my ROI dropped to -80% on one campaign today. Mind you it's not a big campaign so it has only lost $10 or so, but still need to check it out. Could be another fly by night offer, but not sure yet. Already checked all landers.

Anyway, I'll post back with more news when I can.

Cheers,
Brad

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Brad! So happy for you!

This is AM for ya! It can be a real roller roaster ride. You went from this 4 days ago:

To this:

You'll get used to it. Eventually, you won't even bat an eye when revenues drop from 5 figures to 3 figures - because you know you'll be able to do those numbers again.

Just focus on testing and scaling, and tweaking the winners - and let the revenues and profits take care of themselves. You're already reinvesting all you have and running out before the next payment comes in. That's the best you can do. And this is how the money will grow.

Couldn't see your screenshot BTW - it's better to host images on something like imgur.com than trying to attach them to posts directly - the latter doesn't work every time.

Sounds like you'll be doing 4 figures/day any day now. Should keep some champagne on ice for when that happens...



Amy

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Alright, so I'm still awaiting payment to hit my account. Not sure if it will come in today or not. I still have a couple hundred dollars left in one account so hopefully that gets me through until my payment comes in. In the meantime, today is a day of planning. I am currently making a list of traffic sources I can scale my camps to. I had 3 camps that were doing positive ROI but today one of them jumped down into the red. I'm still going to keep it going just in case it decided to pop back up. Will do some more digging there soon.

For now I will be working with my 2 best camps and scaling them fast and hard as soon as that money hits my bank. I have a list of 7 traffic sources to scale each camp to. It should be very interesting to if I can make this scaling process go nice and smooth and allow me to hit my first 1k day.

So that is my short term planning that I have figured out, but I am also working on some long term planning. I'm sure for many people the long term strategy is to be bought out by a larger media buying company. In order to do that you need systems and assets. What I want to do is develop my own backend system that is a tracker and spy tool all rolled into one, with custom APIs made to launch, test and cut automatically. Even though I went to college for programming, a tool as sophisticated as this is way over my head so I'll definitely need to hire a proper coder, which of course will be another asset to the company.

The thing is though, I'm still new to paid advertising and I still can't even imagine the kind of feature set I want this tool to have. To aid with this I have started reading a book on data science that helps explain how companies use data to get an edge. The book is mostly in laymen terms and is easy on the math side of things and basically tries to give the reader an understanding of the data science field without confusing algorithms and such. I think this will help me to understand the inner workings of AM and how data can be more useful than I previously thought.

After this book, if I am still motivated to keep reading, I will probably look into the algorithm side of things and code a basic data miner using python.

Another thing I will be planning to today is my grocery list/meal plan for the week. Trying to stay on top of this as best as I can and eat clean every day.

---

Just had my first chargeback. Luckily it was only a small campaign I was testing so the amount was pretty small. However, in light of this I am improving my cloaking mechanics. For starters I am making it so that it is impossible to view my page by direct link and the user must come through my tracking URL. I am also looking into blocking spy tools although I'm not really too sure how to do that. I've seen some landers in Adplexity that don't show the click through path and I am trying to figure out how to go about doing that.

EDIT: So to keep up with the happy post, angry post routine, today I put in a lot of hours trying solve problems that can't really be solved.

The first thing I wanted to do was to block users that's didn't come from my campaign link, but after a couple hours messing around with this I realized I use DMR and so it is impossible to achieve this.

The other thing I was trying to do was come up with some kind of way to block Adplexity. I've looked into many different ways and the best thing I could come up with is to honey pot their crawler to a link a regular user wouldn't see, and block them if they access it. I'm yet to find a way to actually implement this and don't know if it is even possible.

Moving forward I will be focusing on manually getting camps green with no automation and no fancy tools or blockers. The chargeback scared me, but I think this happens to every affiliate at some point. I think 1 small chargeback in 7 months is fine in my books. I'm just going to keep moving forward, asking for quality checks along the way with my campaigns, making sure everything is OK.

In the future I will look into setting up some more advanced tools.

---

Alright just got off the phone with my bank and I have some money on the way, about $3500 USD. This should give me enough to play with until I get paid from a couple other networks in the coming week.

I am all ready to launch a couple new campaigns and offers that have been recommended. One of them looks very promising so I will be launching that first. It is also a camp I used to run with decent results so I still have some campaigns ready to relaunch and hit the ground running. Also have another camp with a couple of offers to split test. Still need to get some landers up and running though. Both offers look incredible. Finally, one of my AMs also recommended a new offer for me to test on one of my current camps that allows aggressive and has higher pay. This makes me feel a little more safe running the campaign.

I'm also going to try and scale my campaigns I was running before the cash dried up.

Will post back with results on how these campaigns go. If the new offers are as good as they look and my previous camps can jump back there should be no problem hitting a few 1k days in the near future.

EDIT: MONEY IN THE BANK! Time for a launch spree.

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First off I hope november is a good month for you, I'm sure with your focus on positive habits and what you have learned it will be! I was just reading through this follow a long and enjoyed your journey. I'm also into all those positive habits meditation/exercise/reading, and have read Seneca, and now also joined that book club. I'm sure you know this since you've had success, I found the thing that helped me the most when forming those habits was just starting small like 5min meditation a day for a month then 10 and so on, kinda like what you said about just getting the habit of exercise with what you had.

Stoicism is super relevant to someone starting affiliate marketing like myself, Seneca said "you will stick to your purpose even though the crowd may surround and seek to distract you." Anyway, Cheers!

---

Awesome journey man. Thanks for sharing.

---

Hey everyone. It has been a long time since I have posted here but I thought I would update you all on my trials and tribulations and where I currently stand.

It's been another pretty huge roller coaster ride. I finally found a solid pops combo that works very well and can make lots of money, but of course it's not easy to pull off. I don't want to get into too much detail here but basically we are building out our own custom backend to automate a lot of things and also analyze certain data more closely. At the moment pretty much all of my camps are on pause as I am also dealing with some other interruptions right now which are a huge hurdle, but once I get over this hurdle I can easily see $xxxx days on my horizons.

In the mean time, I decided to look a lot more deeply into the Facebook world. Part of me thinks I've made a huge mistake here because, my God, is it ever expensive to get started with Facebook, and I haven't even launched a camp there yet. Setting up a farming system alone has already racked up thousands of dollars and I haven't even tried to make a single ad account yet! Luckily, I think I may be over this hump soon as well. I am currently in the testing phases and will be trying to create my first ads soon. Once I can at least do that things should be on the up and up. I've also joined a Facebook MM and am waiting for that to get going as I think that will help propel me a lot further, more quickly.

So, I'm back here once again, on probably the biggest down swing of my entire AM career so far. But as we have all seen in my previous posts, soon after the down swings I post about an up swing. Seeing as this is the biggest down swing of them all, I fully expect to come back from this with more force and ferocity than ever before in my journey. I mentioned I expect to see $xxxx days very soon, but that may even be an understatement.

For anyone that is reading and looking to get into this industry, I strongly urge you to NOT do what I did, which was to start with debt. Hopefully when you start you will have at least 10k of your own money to burn. The stress and depression that comes with building a large amount of debt is considerable and I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy. I'm so deep now that the only way out is to succeed by hitting those numbers mentioned earlier. Low xxx days don't even get me excited anymore because at the drop of a dime (no pun intended) those numbers can change right back to red.

Another thing I should mention is that the only reason I see a light at the end of this tunnel is because of networking. Sure, lots of what I have learned has been from trial and error, but you can not underestimate the power that a single sentence from someone on Skype willing to lend a helping hand can have. For a couple examples, an old Skype friend and I just started chatting yesterday. We exchanged some solid info. I told him what works on pops and he gave me all his notes on farming FB accounts. That info is priceless. Before I knew what worked on pops, I tested many things over and over again, failing every time, but what I know works now I learned from a couple of Mastermind groups that I have been in and the grateful people willing to exchange data. Even the custom tools that are being built right now probably wouldn't have happened without networking as I have no experience hiring outside workers. And finally, in a time of great desperation, I have even been straight up handed over a winning campaign that made me over $1k.

And for all those things, I would like to give a huge shoutout to everyone who has gotten me to where I am today. You all know who you are. This includes not only the people mentioned but extends to anyone who ever gave me the time of day, including my amazing AMs and the fantastic mods and other users here on STM. I could make a huge list of names, but if you are reading this you already know who you are.

And of course, if any experienced AMers see this and think "I need to network with that guy" please do it. My doors are always open. I am online almost 24/7. Drop me a PM and let's get to chatting.

Can't wait to see you all on the next up swing.

Cheers,
Brad

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Expanding away from pop is definitely a smart move Brad! Congrats! And thanks for all the valuable tips!!

Once you do have some experience with FB and is ready to take your biz to the next level, do consider consulting with Christina:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...milia-(50-OFF)

I've heard nothing but great feedback about her service.

I trust that you'll be doing bigger numbers very soon! Very much looking forward to seeing them!



Amy

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Hey Vortex, regarding this information, I would first take 1 LP and 1 Offer and setup 3 campaigns giving each one a different bid range (low-mid-high) before I start my lander/offer testing. Few questions. How much cash and time should I let these campaigns run before I can decide what bid range I should use for my lander/offer testing?

---

There's no hard-and-fast rule to this. I wouldn't aim for too much accuracy here either - because:

1)The bidding landscape is always changing, and the "best" bid today may no longer be the best by the time you're done testing offers and landers.

2)Your targeting may change during testing, so for example you may start by targeting wifi and find that bidding low or average converts best, but then you end up wanting to just target a specific carrier due to the high CR, where a high bid would be necessary to even get carrier traffic.

So basically by testing bids first, you'd be aiming to find a good bid that will help save money while you're testing offers and landers. I would run 10x payout to each bid and just see what would happen. If I don't even get conversions (10x payout x 3 bids = 30x payouts which is quite a bit) I would just switch to new offers.

Again, it's really not necessary to choose the bid accurately - you can't with so many placements involved. No need to wait for statistical significance or whatever. Just run some traffic to each bid and pick the one that seems to be doing the best ROI.

And as was mentioned, if your targeting changes (e.g. you cut out some traffic segments, or decide to just target the best ones), then retesting bids after finding your best offer+lander+targeting combo would be appropriate.

Lastly - if you want to take optimization further, you can run staggered bids camps simultaneously and "sort" placements into the different camps. E.g. Best-performing placements into higher bid to see if the extra traffic volume will result in greater profits, and in-slight-loss placements into lower bid to see if the lower cost will push them into green. Pop camps are typically short-lived so if you're looking to make some quick money, this type of extra work is not ideal. However, if you're looking to run in a given geo on a given traffic source over and over again, spending the time and money to set up this kind of arrangement can give you a big edge.

Hope this helps!



Amy

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Hey guys, been a few months so I thought I'd drop in just to let everyone know how I'm doing.

As you may know from my previous posts I dug myself a HUGE hole. I thought I was going to be filing for bankruptcy at some points. I still have tons of debt to pay off but things are finally starting to come back around. I've been working on some new techniques in order to help give myself an edge. The funny part is that these techniques ended up doing nothing for me, and what's making me some money today is just a regular campaign with a solid offer. I'll still be testing new things but it just goes to show you how much the offer really matters no matter what. It just seems that these days these offers can take months to pop up sometimes.

Moving forward, I'm still sure there is something I am missing in pops. I know it's incredibly volatile but I'm sure by the end of 2017 I'll have it completely mastered. I feel as if I know almost everything there is to know about pops but at the same time there are still a lot that I don't know. Another thing I will be doing soon is starting an ecommerce store. Obviously it's the next "big thing" and I want to get in on it now. So as soon as possible I'm going to start building a store or 5, learning the ins and outs of Shoppify and then eventually getting some ads live and drive some sales.

One thing I also wanted to mention. I did my taxes yesterday and I came out about -10kCAD but I had $140k in revenue. That's a jaw dropping amount of money that passed through my bank account. And with such a small overall loss, I know for a fact I can make a nice profit this year with what I know now. In fact, I could have easily saved 10k by just sticking to a better plan. Trying to move into FB alone probably cost me 10k. Not to mention all of the campaigns that I let run for so long even though they had no hope. This year I plan to be much more aware of the money I am spending.

Another thing, I was supposed to retain HST (taxes) from certain aff networks that are based in Canada. Of course near the end of 2016 I almost lost my shirt and spent all the money I had. So right now I have until Apr 30th to come up with ~5k or I need to get on a payment plan with the Government to pay it off. Learn from my mistakes people. Don't screw around with money that doesn't belong to you. Retain your tax money and for the love of God don't start this business on credit cards. I know I'll be out of this hole soon enough, but we all know how many people end up hating this job and quitting. You don't want to end up like one of those people who racks up a bunch of debt and then quits.

Oh and just for fun, here's a screenshot of this month's earnings so far:


Can't argue with that ROI! If I had the cash flow I could probably scale this like crazy but I got switched back to monthlies in Feb so I'm really strapped for cash again. Anyway I think this camp will last long enough to see some higher revenues in the near future!

Oh, and if anyone wants me to continue to post in this thread and bring it back to life, let me know. I'm sure I can at least post here once every few days.

Cheers,
Brad

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You got this Brad!




Andrew

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This one looks nice!

I wouldn't wait all too long with scaling.

Those campaigns die quickly.

If you cannot find outside funding, I would look into running a joint venture with another affiliate you already know & trust (who can help with the funding) for this particular campaign.

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Hey Brad so nice to hear from you! And even nicer to hear that you're getting the hang of things!

Thanks for sharing such valuable insight gleamed from all your ups and downs - AM is not an easy game to play, especially in the beginning. But if you stick with it until it gets easier then your chances will improve.

Just one question: Why did the aff network switch you back to monthly? You're doing well with the offer - no reason for the aff network to refuse helping you scale it! Hit me up on skype if you need someone to vouch for you (which shouldn't even be necessary as you're making profits for them already - but let's see what we can do). I'm with sebastian - don't wait a month to get paid before scaling this thing!



Amy

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The thing with this network is their accounting department is very strict. If you aren't doing 1k/wk in rev for 3-4 weeks straight they switch you back. I was only doing about half that amount.

And of course, as far as that campaign goes, it just dropped hard today. Going to have to try some new networks once I get that cash flow coming in again. Should be able to revive this thing pretty easily. Will keep you all posted how it goes!

Cheers,
Brad

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Have you told them you're having cashflow issues? Often that's all it takes to get them to make an exception for you.

Also - is the offer an exclusive? Perhaps you can run it with another aff network? Or run it direct with the advertiser?



Amy

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Just felt like giving everyone an update here. I've been doing pretty well with pops doing consistent mid xxx a day, sometimes higher, but it's getting harder and harder every day. I'm currently moving into native and have spent close to 3k over the last week over 2 campaigns. Right now they are sitting around -50% overall which is a pretty damn good start for my first native camps.

Good news is, quality is backing out nicely and I'm getting a major pay increase so I think in a week or 2 I'll have a solid native camp doing mid XXX a day. Super stoked to start getting this working. Once I figure out native I plan to develop my own fb farming system and hit them hard.

Anyhow, just felt like dropping by since I have nothing better to do while I wait to board my flight en route to Berlin! Woo! Didn't think I'd get so far so fast but here I am.

Stay focused, make of happen. If I can do it anyone can.

See you all in Berlin!

Cheers,
Brad

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Aw Brad thanks so much for the update! Many follow alongs end abruptly as soon as people start to get profitable and don't want people asking for details.

Can I ask you a favor? Could you please if you can spare a few minutes, make a post in the "Success Stories" section?

It doesn't have to be long - you could just duplicate the post there ([note to other members: This is normally not allowed except in special cases - which this certainly is!]) and link to this FA thread. This is one of the longest-running FA threads and a nice ending would be amazing!

Thanks in advance - and I'm really happy to know that you're doing well!

Onwards and upwards!



Amy

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Hey Brad, I'm rooting for you here. I've spent hours reading through all 14 pages of this thread. Very inspiring. Keep up the amazing work and I'll continue to refresh to see your latest updates!

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Hi , i follow your thread , as you say " getting harder and harder every day." why is harder ?
Im interested because i learning mobile pops and i cant get profitable campaign .

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While you're waiting for Brad (xxf8xx) to respond, I'll offer what I know here.

Pops has gotten harder mainly due to these reasons:

-More competition: As affiliate marketing is becoming more well-known, more and more newbies have started entering the field, and pop traffic is the best/easiest starting point.

-More junk traffic: Publishers (website owners that allow pop traffic networks to pop our ads on their sites) are becoming more saavy at trying to make more money by creating bot traffic. And they're not the only ones: Some affiliates will flood a placement with bot traffic because the placement is converting well for them, so they do this to discourage other advertisers from targeting the same placement - so they could hog all the good traffic to themselves at lower bids (due to the lower competition).

-Shrinking traffic volume: As adblockers are becoming more advanced and widespread, there's less available inventory.

So - to make pop traffic work nowadays, you need to be more creative, or work harder, or both. Here are some of the things you need to do:

-Test more landers.

-Test more offers.

-Test more traffic sources to avoid the worst competition.

-Do more research before launching campaigns (spying in the wild, spying using spy tools like Adplexity, networking to stay on top of what's hot).

-Have systems and methodologies to get things done systematically, and faster. (Automation + outsourcing would fall under this category as well.)

-Leverage relationships (bigger payouts, exclusive offers, find out what's hot and working, etc.)

Lastly - and I've been suggesting this to everyone for quite a while now - use pop to get your foot in the door and learn affiliate marketing, but once you get some experience and are comfortable with paid traffic, move onto other traffic types: Mobile Display, FB, Adwords, Native, whatever else. Don't be complacent - I don't see pop getting easier, and it may get a lot worse in the near future.




Amy

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Boom! Great progress.

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Just finished reading this entire thread. Mindblowing how much I've learned. Thanks everyone for your extreme generosity in sharing your knowledge, and best of luck to you Brad.

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Thanks! Glad you got some value from this! Feel free to continue following my journey here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ay-in-6-Months

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