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Chasing the green for the first time (3)

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Hello everyone!

This is my first follow along. We’ve been working on the internet from the last 15 years (my business partner and i) , but this is our first attempt at affiliate marketing. We’ve been reading all the information on STM, amazing tips, tutorials and personal experiences.

After several failed attempts, losing money because we were doing things without thinking properly :P, we decide to be more thoughtful about the process.

After talking to an affiliate manager from Mobidea, we decide to start with adult pin submits in India (because of cheap traffic, and because of the recommendation from the AM for us to start), using the smartlink offer from Mobidea for adults.

DETAILS

GEO: IN
Offer: Adult content/chat - Pin submit - Mobile
Payout: $0.30 (payout isn’t always exactly the same, but is very similar)
Traffic source: Exoclick - SmartCPM

We spent like 200$ on a RON campaign to collect data from 10 different banners and select the best ones. Also the best carriers, categories, devices, websites, etc.

6 March

Clicks: 1504
CTR: 1.81%
Conversions: 19
Spent: 9.08 $
Revenue: 4.47 $
ROI: -50.77%

7 March

Clicks: 1357
CTR: 2.14%
Spent: 6.73 $
Conversion: 14
Revenue: 3.04 $
ROI: -54.83%


8 March

Clicks: 1705
CTR: 1.84%
Spent: 9.94 $
Conversion: 20
Revenue: 6.59 $
ROI: -33.70%

9 March

Clicks: 1469
CTR: 1.46%
Spent: 11.42 $
Conversion: 14
Revenue: 3.69 $
ROI: -67.69%

10 March

Clicks: 1363
CTR: 1.94%
Spent: 9.18 $
Conversion: 11
Revenue: 3.05 $
ROI: -66.78%

11 March

Clicks: 2059
CTR: 2.18%
Spent: 11.46 $
Conversion: 19
Revenue: 5.91 $
ROI: -48.43%

12 March

Clicks: 1120
CTR: 2.83%
Spent: 5.42 $
Conversion: 15
Revenue: 5.18 $
ROI: -4.43%

13 March

Clicks: 1125
CTR: 2.92%
Spent: 5.06 $
Conversion: 18
Revenue: 6.51 $
ROI: 28.66%

This is what we have done until now:

- Spy banners with the adultspytool
- Frequency capping 2 x 24hs
- Chose the best category (price/conversions)
- Chose the best 4 browsers / cut the bad ones
- Chose the best 2 Mobile OS / cut the bad ones
- Chose the best 2 carriers / cut the bad ones
- Chose the best websites / cut the bad ones

Things that we are going to do:
- Landing pages (we are spying some LP and we will try at least 2 or 3)
- New banners
- Day parting (no enough data yet)

The questions that we have:

1- What do you think we shouldn’t have done?
2- What things do you think we are missing, or what else we should test?
3- We are getting a low amount of traffic, eventhough we have 100$ daily budget but not spending more than 10$ a day, should we increase frequency capping or cpm to get more traffic?
4- Should we test other traffic sources? Which ones do you recommend for adult?
5- Is our banners CTR ok or should be higher?
6- After testing new banners/landers, which is the best way to scale the campaign?

We know that we made a lot of questions, but we are new at this game and we are trying to learn as much as possible.

Thank you so much!

Bruno & Diego

P.S. Sorry if my English isnt very good

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I think your strategy is a good start.

Although if I were you guys, I would have used a premium placements and not RON to test banners first, and ONLY move to RON when I have some very good banners doing good ROI. That would have been cheaper.

If you want to see another strategy, here's one:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post200678



In adult, banners will "burnout" (i.e. lose effectiveness) quickly. So by testing just 10 random banners and running the best one or two, your luck will not last.

Try to come up with more angles, create a few banners for each angle (at least 3 banners with different headlines and images), and test them to see which ones have potential, and then make more banners for those and test them. Test lots of angles. A banner will burn out, but an angle will last a while. So once you know which angles work, keep making banners based on those angles.



You can try increasing CPM - that way you may get traffic from better placements (i.e. sites) that convert better. One thing you can try, is set up a separate campaign with a higher CPM, but in the new campaign blacklist all the sites you were getting traffic from in the original campaign. This way you'll see if you can trigger traffic from new placements. (Warning: You may have pages and pages of sites to blacklist - I haven't run Exoclick RON in India so don't know.)

Frequency capping - usually when you open up frequency, the conversion rate will drop. Since you're not currently getting a high ROI, I would suggest not to adjust the frequency yet.

As for traffic volume being limited: This is because you tried to cut your way to profits rather than spend time improving your funnel.

I believe you will get better results if you spend more time on testing banners, landers and offers. That way, you will make more of the traffic profitable. Trying to cut OSs, carriers, browsers etc. before you have a good funnel, will usually leave you with only a small amount of traffic at the end.



There are tons of adult sources. The list at the end of the first post here should be a great start:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-Adult-Traffic



The CTR will be different for every traffic source, geo, location on the page it's displayed, and many other factors.

More importantly - CTR isn't the main metric when you're trying to get profitable. CR (conversion rate) is the important factor.

I've had a lot of high-CTR banners that have lost money. On traffic sources that will "optimize" your campaign for you automatically by sending more traffic to banners that have higher CTRs, a banner that has high CTR but low CR can lose a lot of money for you (I had to learn that the hard way).



-Different ad formats (banners vs. popunders vs. text ads)
-Different banner sizes
-Other traffic sources

And of course, new geos. However, it would be wise to start from testing angles again. Because every geo is different, it's not as easy as just translating the best banners from the first geo and using them for the new geo.



Your English is great! Very clear. Thanks for starting such an informative follow-along!



Amy

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Thank you so much Amy!

Very detailed and amazing tips! We will take your advice and keep on chasing the green!

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