BACK ON THE GRIND - Pops To Freedom (49)
Hello!
I'm starting a mobile pops journey, verticals are open to pins, AV and utilities..
I've been somewhat successful in sweeps had a pretty profitable campaign that ran it's course in a month and then a few campaigns that showed promise but didn't really get anywhere. I've kind of decided after spending a lot of money on sweeps on pop that it's a bad combination. Confirmed with sebastian_r through private messages too. So i'm going to focus on pins/utilities and AV as I hear they're pretty hot on pop. I've taken too many breaks and haven't truly focused on AM as much as I should. I think a fresh follow along should help me.
With everyone focusing on natives, I still feel there is money to be made in pops. Also I just dont' have $5-$10k testing budget required to break into native right now and there's a wealth of information on this site to help me with becoming profitable on pops that I think it's worth sticking with it.
My ad networks are: ClickDealer, f5media, MundoMedia, MPire, Adsimilis
Might be too many ad networks haha. I work closely with Mundo and Mpire have a great relationship with my AM's there.
Current budget: I have $2.5k of disposable money i'm willing to throw at learning and gathering data. I've decided i've already lost this money so let's hit it up.
Goals: +xx/days
Sticking points: I rely too much on finding a profitable offer early, I find i've thrown a lot of money at testing and I get super discouraged if I don't see an offer with more than a >-50% ROI after an initial test. That's how my profitable camps worked before, I found a profitable offer and just threw money at it til and optimized it into green. But I find that process is pretty inconsistent, I don't cut enough placements at the start and I could be throwing away lots of potentially good money-making offers with this rule. I need a better process.
So feel free to help me and follow along with me on this journey. I'll be interested to hear your thoughts.
Thanks 
What would Jebus do?
Subscribed.
Good luck. Keep going hard.
This looks great so far! I'm doing sweeps with pops right now and I still think it can work.
Best of luck on your journey!
Your success will stand and fall with finding an offer that allows you to run it aggressive, or if not the case your decision to run it aggressive anyway. Read the offer description carefully and stay away from offers that are threatening non-payment.
Take one of the proven antivir landers (adplexity will enlighten you within seconds) and invest all your time into finding offers that take aggressive and an GEO that hasn't been hit too hard yet.
Now the fun begins, its time to get your hands on decent amounts of carrier traffic....and learning to cloak. Even on pops, aggressive antivir is not welcome anymore.
Don't bother with improving / inventing creatives, you won't beat the control anyway.
Same applies to iphone pins.
Offer: AV
GEO: BR
Payout: $0.36
After searching through adplexity to see different landers, it seems “google-themed” landers are all the rage in this GEO. I ripped one and now it’s time to test the actual offer.
It seems as though some of the landers on adplexity seem to be optimized landers that are targeting specific phones and model types.. maybe those specific phones are converting well and I should tailor my campaign to that?
Originally Posted by randomman
Offer#1: AV
Geo: BR
Budget:$40
Max Bid:$0.038
Setup my campaign for the AV offer in BR. Bid level puts me right at bid position #5. I don't know if I should be spending more on test or less.
I specifically setup a cellphone campaign, excluded stuff like desktop, tv, etc.
Connection type; cellular/carrier + unknown (prob means wifi)
Going to hunt for more offers.
Good start as usual.
You also need a bidding strategy. This is crucial if you plan doing this right. You need to do the math here.
1. How much do you need to bid to break even
2. How much do you need to bid to make 40%, 60% and 100% ROI
For the above you will need to use realistic landing page CTR, offer CVR. Right now you are just bidding and hoping for the best.
Figure this out and you are one step ahead of the game.
Originally Posted by kash50
I was always under the impression for a test you just adjust the bid so that you're in at least bid position #5 but i realize now that's just poor planning.
Originally Posted by randomman
So first test over here are the results:
Impressions: 3777
Clicks: 821
Conversions: 7
Revenue: $2.52
Cost: $41.24
Profit: -$38.72
CTR: 21.74%
CR: 0.85%
ROI: -93.89%
Now to me it still looks like I don't have much data. I ran the test at 9am and budget depleted by 11am-ish.
3.7k impressions is very small. I'm probably going to have to spend another $40-$50 for more data and continue to run the test. However stats don't look too promising, normally when I see something like this, i'll run the offer a bit longer probably until I reach a sizeable amount of impressions like 10-15k and then i'll bail on the offer if I don't see a good enough ROI% or CR%..
Definitely not the type of results you want to see from the jump. But it is, like you said, still not a ton of data. However, would definitely prefer to see at least another 10 or so leads fire to justify continuing down that path and dropping another $50-$100+ on optimizing. I'm sure you've already done this but if not ask your AMs you're working with on this deal to just make sure that tracking is 100% in tact and that there wasn't any breakage from initial test. Would hate to see you work on optimizing a campaign having not received confirmation that tracking was on point before hand ya know? I mean even if there's just 5-7 leads missing, that number really compounds if you were to ramp up and in turn, 5-7 missing leads can quickly become 20-40 missing leads, or what have you but either way it adds up.
Also, from what I read above (and perhaps I missed it) but it seems you only tested 1 offer from 1 network so far? If that's correct, definitely try and find same offer with one of your other preferred networks (ideally the same offer with same offer page/flow) and split test the offer at different networks. Clearly this isn't your first rodeo though so not trying to come off as insulting with that suggestion but figured I'd drop a friendly reminder as sometimes when testing new campaigns we can forget the small details like this and could be missing out as a result.
Keep it up and hopefully you can get back in the black on this one!
new stats
Impressions: 10449
Clicks: 2312
Conversions: 24
Revenue: $8.64
Cost: $65.63
Profit: -$56.99
CTR: 22.13%
CR: 1.04%
ROI: -86.83%
so let it run for a bit longer with some more budget and .... it looks like ROI went up a little, CTR went up a little and CR went up a little... hmm. Should I cut some placements and let it run for longer? I mean the most important stats went up, albeit only a little which I don't know what to think to be honest, maybe i still don't have enough data? If I should continue running it, at this point I think I should think about bid sizing and doing the math to figure out an optimal bid price.
@Ryan Hurry thanks for the advice.. you didn't come off as insulting at all, please never think that haha. I'm definitely going to ask other networks for same offer, thanks. I've also compared the tracking to the network and my
Alright so let it run today again, this time removed all iOS placements / browsers as I forgot I had them turned on.. this is an android offer. DOH.
Adjusted bid and also turned on DMR since it's an aggressive lander and I will eventually have to turn it on I decided to test what would happen if DMR was turned on.. spent $35 annddd..
Impressions: 10567
Clicks: 1767
Conversions: 14
Revenue: $5.04
Cost: $35.98
Profit: -$30.94
CTR: 16.74%
CR: 0.79%
ROI: -85.99%
If I didn't know any better I'd say because of DMR the CTR went lower and so did the CR.. clickloss is noticeable too. oh wells.
I think it's time to say goodbye to this offer, spent $100 and figured out it's not converting as well as I think it should even with iOS targetting removed.
Decent progress so far. consistency and analyzing your data is vital to stable profits.
I would incorporate the back button, vibrate, etc...scripts in your landing pages.
Alright testing two AV Pin offers
GEO: VietNam
AV Viet Pin Offer #1
Budget: $25.00
AV Viet Pin Offer #2
Budget: $25.00
My question is: In Popads they offer for connection type option "Cellular, Unknown, DSL/Cable, Dial-Up", I chose cellular obviously because it's a pin submit. However does Unknown refer to Wi-Fi? Shouldn't I be testing Wi-Fi too? I made a separate campaign and copied everything and targeted unknown but I found that the traffic is VERY low so it's almost not worth testing..
Also should I be making 3-4 seperate campaigns each for a different carrier ? I figure i'd run it RON this time around since i'm just testing the offer and then focus on targeting carrier..
Hello,
Unknown is usually a mix of everything, no carrier detection service is perfect so thats what unknown usually stands for This traffic is different from network to network, I've seen traffic marked as wifi/unknown to perform just fine on PIN submit offers just because the traffic source had the wrong IP ranges, but I have also seen the other side of the extreme. You really need to test this for every network and unfortunately, also for every GEO. Generally speaking, you dont want to send wifi traffic to a PIN submit offer - tho there are exceptions where it works too, this is totally GEO specific - from my experience, in at least 90% of GEOs, wifi performs for shit on PINs.
The best practice is to test every carrier in a separate campaigns, in case of networks with SMART bidding, you can initially test them all together but later on you should split it up by carrier. You will be able to bid better and also optimize better that way.
Ran those two offers and got some weird stats..
AV Viet Pin Offer #1
Impressions: 3741
Clicks: 2727
Conversions: 1
Revenue: $0.58
Cost: $25.67
Profit: -$25.09
CTR: 72.89%
CR: 0.04%
ROI: -97.74%
AV Viet Pin Offer #2
Impressions: 3790
Clicks: 3886
Conversions: 0
Revenue: $0
Cost: $25.47
Profit: -$25.47
CTR: 102.53%
CR: 0.00%
ROI: -100.00%
So I don't even know what to make of this. On one hand the amount of impressions doesn't seem statistically significant BUT there aren't any conversions so i think these two offers are duds.
That being said, wtf is up with the CTR's? has anyone ever had this happen to them? What is going on.. ? I have such a high CTR but absolutely no conversions at all?? I always feel like it's a discrepancy between lander and offer...also how does the clicks on the 2nd offer exceed the number of impressions? hmmm..
CTRs can go up like this in some GEOs with clean simple landers, but usually its wrong setting and the use of backbutton or some other redirect script. Dont you have something like this on the LP?
As for the data, its really not possible to do anything with it, 1 conversion is really nothing im afraid. Maybe look at the sources, isnt there a handful of placements that ate up almost all the $ spent? If thats the case, you could cut those and continue. If not, the offers are most likely not working indeed.
I got really high CTR on one of my landers - turned out it was due to the use of pre-render tags (looks something like this <link rel="prerender" link="LINK_TO_YOUR_OFFER_PAGE">). The tags cause the page to load even if the user don't click the link to the offer page.. it helps with page load time for the offer page, cut messes up your stats. May be worth checking if it's used in your landers...
Originally Posted by bradh_
I found this script in offer #1
<script type="text/javascript" src="go.new.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function () {
setTimeout(backtrap, 100);
};
window.onpageshow = function (e) {
if (e.persisted) {
location.reload();
}
};
window.onpopstate = function(event) {
if (document.location.toString().indexOf("redir=1")>0 ){
window.location.href = "http://xxxx.xxxx.com/click";
}
};
</script>
(function(window, location) {
* * history.replaceState(null, document.title, location.pathname+"#!/index");
* * history.pushState(null, document.title, location.pathname);
* * window.addEventListener("popstate", function() {
* * * if(location.hash === "#!/index") {
* * * * * * history.replaceState(null, document.title, location.pathname);
* * * * * * setTimeout(function(){
* * * * * * * location.replace("http://xxxx.xxxx.com/click");
* * * * * * },0);
* * * }
* * }, false);
}(window, location));
</script>
However, removing placements where it ate up the most traffic seemed to be useful. As a friend suggested it may have been bot traffic, so I deleted those placements and ROI went up a little. Should I continue with these offers? CR seems pretty low.. I think offer #2 looks promising.
New stats:
AV Viet Pin Offer #1
Impressions: 3525
Clicks: 1700
Conversions: 12
Revenue: $6.96
Cost: $24.59
Profit: -$17.63
CTR: 48.23%
CR: 0.71%
ROI: -71.70%
AV Viet Pin Offer #2
Impressions: 3415
Clicks: 2111
Conversions: 14
Revenue: $8.12
Cost: $24.63
Profit: -$16.51
CTR: 61.82%
CR: 0.66%
ROI: -67.03%
Im no script guy so cant really comment on those.
Removing placements that eat up really too much and dont provide conversion is always the first step you should make after an initial test. Hard to say if its worth to go on with the offer tho, look at the data, is there anything green in there or all red?
Originally Posted by matuloo
Alright so ran it some more.. I want to see if there's any carriers that are worth focusing on. Problem is i'm getting pretty low traffic as it stands..
AV Viet Pin Offer #2
Impressions: 5284
Clicks: 3148
Conversions: 32
Revenue: $18.56
Cost: $50.02
Profit: -$31.46
CTR: 59.58%
CR: 1.02%
ROI: -62.90%
Couple things; CR went up, ROI went up, albeit very small. So the trend seems to be that this offer MIGHT be worth while. This is the point where I get stuck. Based on all the data, is it safe to say this offer isn't worthwhile to continue? Like Matuloo said, there's nothing green..most of the traffic seemed to be Wi-Fi and converted the most but still losing money.
If its all red, then the offer either sucks or your LPs are not good enough. You might also be paying too much for traffic or buying bot traffic.
Its really hard for me to judge here, since I dont see your numbers. What I see tho, is that you went from negative %90-%100 to almost -60%, so thats a big improvement and if nothing else, you have learned a bit of the optimization process here.
You will probably not make this one profitable, but I would at least use it as learning ground. Throw more LPs in the mix and test them. Play with the various targeting options and see how well you can improve the results. Im sure it can go up some more and you might actually find some small pockets of profit in the data. Try to learn the most from the data you collected.
What bradh is referring to isn't a script - it's a piece of HTML.
If you want to find it in a page, you're looking for
rel="prerender"
Originally Posted by matuloo
ran two more offers today.. both iphone pins
Malaysia Iphone Pin #1
Impressions: 4384
Clicks: 202
Conversions: 0
Revenue: $0
Cost: $25.78
Profit: -$25.78
CTR: 4.61%
CR: 0%
ROI: -100%
Vietnam Iphone Pin #1
Impressions: 5963
Clicks: 1371
Conversions: 0
Revenue: $0
Cost: $25.88
Profit: -$25.88
CTR: 22.99%
CR: 0%
ROI: -100%
Safe to say both offers aren't converting if I haven't gotten even ONE conversion yet. I don't think I need to spend any more money here.
Going to update soon. Had a lot of problems getting offers approved the past week, minor setback I guess. Also had to get some finances in order.
Running an offer right now and trying to setup more. Big problem for setting up offers has been traffic, PopAds has really low traffic for the geos I want to target, the biggest geos have a lot of traffic but some of the smaller geos that haven't been touched by super affiliates yet have pretty low traffic. Going to adcash now. It seems with adcash you need a bigger budget especially since you get a ton of traffic and a bigger % of bot traffic that you have to look out for but might be a small price to pay to start pushing hard in t2-t3 geos.
The issue is what vertical should I stick with and what geos should I focus on? I'm thinking right now I might want to do AV in asian geos like VietNam and Thailand. What do you think?
AV in asian geos would be a GREAT place to start! Starting with those exact geos.
If you can make your landers look like they came from the device itself, many people won't know they're not real. Think system messages. Think all text. Google screenshots of actual system messages and imitate those.
DISCLAIMER: To succeed on pop you need to run aggressive, but make sure the affiliate network and the offer's advertiser are fine with you running aggressive or risk having your commissions withheld. As well, find out each traffic source's rules and make sure you comply with requirements or risk getting your account banned.
There is an especially aggressive lander floating around - look on adplexity for 5 seconds and you'll come across it at least once. It has a google logo on it. Running that may get you into legal hotwater, but I've heard that it's working extremely well. Touch this at your own risk - I don't recommend it though.
Another tip regarding antivirus landers: Once you have a good lander it may very well work for other geos. So if you want to quickly test offers to gauge promise, you could just translate your best couple landers for one geo and use those to test other geos.
Test Asian geos, LATAM geos, African geos. One set of landers in LATAM Spanish will work for most LATAM geos (except Brazil which speaks Portuguese). For africa, Arabic landers will work for many geos.
Start testing on 1-2 "go-to" sources (ones you've had the most success with in the past). Every time you have a profitable camp, scale it to all major pop sources. Don't bother with smaller sources until you have at least several profitable camps to scale to them. Focus on the bigger camps and pause the ones that have so little traffic or would take too much work to optimize. They will only occupy time that you could be using to test other geos, or scale to other sources.
Good luck and I look forward to hearing about your progress and success!
Amy
Alright so split testing two offers in Poland GEO. Only reason is because AM pushed it, said it is diong high volume and converting well, so I figured why not. I will definitely break into asia if these two offers don't go well.
GEO: Poland
Payout:$4.80 (Offer1) and $5.60 (Offer2)
Vertical: AV
Some bot traffic results in poland:
Anything under <60% ive dropped, too much bot traffic to make profitable probably.
Now for both offers i'm attaching 5 landers, gonna split test and see whats good! I figure a $100 test is fine for this.
Got some testing done on the offer!!! the ROI seems pretty good.. traffic came REALLY slow. I started campaign on friday and it like it took two days to get in all the traffic (about 40k impressions).
Here are some stats:
Split tested two offers with 5 landers...:
ROI looks promising for both..
Lander stats...:
Offer 1:
Offer 2:
Based on stats here, I think Lander 2 and Lander 5 are winners and require further testing to see which is the better lander..
So what do you guys think? I'm thinking of cutting some placements and running again here. I think I got a lot of good data here, just not sure what to do now. ROI is at -48% for both which seems very promising.. traffic is coming ultra slow and it doesnt seem like PopAds has that much for Poland.. i could be wrong.
Need more stat sig. Too early to judge with only 2-3 conversions...should have a lower payout offer
Originally Posted by eddiezhan
You can continue, it's just with higher payout it'll take you more money to reach statistical sig on split tests - whereas if you have a low payout offer you can get statistical sig for less money and optimize your LP faster.
Exactly. If you're not afraid of spending money on testing then go for it. These 2 offers shows some signs of promise
So what do you guys think? I'm thinking of cutting some placements and running again here. I think I got a lot of good data here, just not sure what to do now. ROI is at -48% for both which seems very promising.. traffic is coming ultra slow and it doesnt seem like PopAds has that much for Poland.. i could be wrong.
Simply duplicate your camp a couple times, and assign higher bids to them. Assign $30 to each and run all three camps at the same time, then see which one does the best. Don't be afraid to test high bids - I've been pleasantly surprised many times in the past by how much higher the conversion rates can be just by bidding high. You may want to set lower budgets than $30 to the higher-bid camps though - maybe $15 and if you don't get at least 1 conversion then stop testing that bid.
There isn't a whole lot of PL traffic on popads to start with. So you'll need to bid higher to get more traffic volume.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to set up this camp on another source to see how it does - a quick test using offer 2 + landers 2 and 5 should give you an indication on whether you should continue with that new camp or not. Of course you'll want to test on sources that have more PL traffic. ZP for example.
The camp is DEFINITELY looking promising! Yes the higher payouts will require more cash to optimize, but you're profitable right off the bat so it's not like you'll be losing a ton of money while optimizing it. Looking forward to seeing more stats!
Amy
Thanks Vortex for the advice
Quick update:
Haven't really been hitting it hard lately, got sick, then made excuses, got lazy, a whole list of things. But i'm back on the grind, hopefully this time more focused. The poland offer from before got paused actually shortly after I was working on it, the biggest problem I have with AV offers right now is they're not stable!. Because everyone runs these offers super aggressive, the advertisers pause the offer, usually most offers have a life span of liek 1-3 weeks.. so now i'm thinking of jumping verticals altogether.
Anyway, here are some new stats on an offer
This offer is from VietNam and is AV:
I targetted smartphones, tablets, and pc, now i removed tablets and pc since no conversions on them and all the conversions came from smartphone. Narrowing it down should help!
06/09/16 Update:
So dropped the last offer, wasn't converting well. Tested two more offers.. both duds :/ More testing needs to be done, more offers!
Sorry to hear about the temporary setbacks!
Since you have a good lander for PL AV - why not test more PL AV offers?
You're right about everyone running AV offers super-aggressive. There are offers that allow aggressive - just need to ask your AMs. Offers do get paused which is why you need a system so that you're always testing something new and scaling the winners hard and fast to keep up with the dying camps/offers.
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Where there is competition there is money to be made. Don't be afraid of competition
thx for the advice guys:
i've thought of a new strategy; I'm going to start testing offers using ONLY previously converting placements from older campaigns from same GEO. What do you guys think?
Adsimilis offers a wide variety of verticals! Lately our top have been Adult-Dating and Casino/Bingo/Lotto! Glad that you're working with us!
Originally Posted by randomman
Just gonna stick to RON campaigns and optimize as i go along. For the above, I had 2 offers attached and 2 landers. Both weren't converting well. Maybe the strategy is ok but the offers sucked?
Originally Posted by randomman
Just gonna stick to RON campaigns and optimize as i go along. For the above, I had 2 offers attached and 2 landers. Both weren't converting well. Maybe the strategy is ok but the offers sucked?
In general though, I'm leaning towards what you're suspecting - that it's because the offers suck. Another quick check though: Are you using a proven lander?
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Yeah, the landers I use are from adplexity. I simply go to "running longest" and rip whatever I see there, unless its google-themed.
Originally Posted by randomman
If you rip 5-10 landers and test them, and one wins, then you have a proven lander.
So if you're running a proven lander AND proven placements and not getting desired results - then yes, you can probably say safely that it's the offers that suck.
Amy
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