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General Setup Questions (7)

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Hello everyone, brand new to AM, I ve been reading the STM forums for a couple of months now and I'm now in a position to start applying to networks and setting up everything i need to get started.
I plan to go with the mobile cookbook, start with banners (get comfortable with the whole clickids and postback urls thing first, the technical part of the whole funnel setup confuses me a bit) and move along to landing pages shortly after.
So, am I on track here?
The setup I'm thinking:
go2mobi for TS
Amazon s3 with Cloudfront for LPs
VPS for Funnel Flux tracker
Is there a VPS solution preferable for funnel flux?
Would you suggest another tracker ? (e.g. Thrive). I understand hosting it, is harder to setup but I figured is worth the effort.

Thank you all in advance,

-Panos

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Hello Panos

You are doing it right, its a good idea to spend some time with reading and get the basic understanding of the whole thing.

Its also good you want to setup everything properly from the very beginning.

TS : go2mobi is considered a good source for mobile display traffic, so thats a good choice for the start I would say.

Tracking : you need to decide whether you want to use a self-hosted tracker or a "cloud" solution - hosted by the guys behind the tracker. There are 2 main differences - self hosted solution will be cheaper once you cross certain volume. So in this case, picking funnel flux and a VPS for it, is a good choice. Hosted (cloud) trackers have one advantage tho, they can also take care of mobile carriers detection, if this is something you need, you should pick a hosted tracker like Voluum or managed Thrive.

LPs : in case you decide to pick a self hosted tracker and will host it on a VPS, you can also put the LPs there at least for the beginning. So you dont really need also amazon s3. Once you start to feel the need, you can still upgrade the VPS or get some cheap CDN to put the static LPs on it. If you decide to pick some cloud(hosted) tracker, then yes, you will need something to host your LPs on and S3 is a popular choice amongst affiliates. I personally prefer the combination of a dedicated server (or VPS) and CDN for static content.

You should also start applying to aff networks soon, since you are new, some will decline your application so start now to have enough time to get accepted to some. Reach out to the reps on this forum too, it will make your life easier

Looking forward to see your first follow along

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Hello Panos,

For FunnelFlux we recommend Vultr servers.
We have installation scripts that make it easy to have a fully optimized server and Funnel Flux installed quickly:

https://www.funnelflux.com/vultr-setup/

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Hey Matuloo,
thank you for your quick and clarifying answers.
Its important for me to setup everything the best I can from the beginning (or at least have some good understanding of it) so that no crumb of data goes to waste.

By that you mean being able to split-test carriers? If so, then yes I'd like to be able to test that. I was not aware I couldn't track carriers/ISPs with a self-hosted tracker. It sounds like I have to look to a cloud solution;if I understood you correctly.
Managed Thrive is pretty much like Voluum I suppose?

VPS would also have to be close to my target geo like with a dedicated server? If so, wouldn't I need a CDN service from the start (so I can test geos with offers)?
Would you recommend a CDN service to go along with a VPS?

I hope that by the end of month I 'll have some offers to test.

Thank you again for your time and effort.

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Just to make it 100% clear, you can have carrier tracking even with some self-hosted trackers if you pay for the DB, but the cheap ones are usually not very accurate. This is a problem with licensing, with hosted/cloud trackers they can buy 1 license and use it for all users, with self hosted its not possible. I guess this might change in the future tho. Anyways, its important to know the carriers when you focus on PIN submit offers, otherwise its not so important. Moreover, you can usually target by carrier directly at the traffic source, so you would just make a separate campaign for each carrier and it would still work. There are situations where its simply cheaper to be on self hosted - lets say you run sweeps on mobile pops, carriers dont matter much there and the price per event with cloud trackers will drive the price up, as you will be buying millions of pops. Same with cheap banner clicks from 3rd world GEOs...

Im not using managed cloud so cant give you the exact answer here, but to my understanding its comparable to Voluum in the way its setup.


There is not a clear consensus when it comes to utilizing VPS in the same GEO as the target market. From my own experience : its not needed. All you need is a fast VPS somewhere and you can target the whole world with it. I have done a case studdy about it too : http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-make-you-more

What I personally do is this : when I use a simple LP, I host it on a CDN, when its some php thing, I put it on a dedicated server. They key is to have fast loading times, you can check with a tool like pingdom (google it) which lets you test from multiple locations in the world. As long as it loads around 500ms, I wouldnt worry about it too much.

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You gave me so much useful information in just one answer.
Sincerely thanks!

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Youre welcome

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