You are all welcomed to my pin submit campaign follow along (39)
Hello Guys,
before starting I´d like to make a quick intro:
Used to be a developer long time ago, then moved to technology and became an IT Architect, specialized in Unix/Linux, storage and communications. During 15 years worked as an employee of big IT companies and banks.
I´m a kind of serial entrepreneur as in parallel been launching several flavor business ventures: car transporting trucks, textile manufacturing. Finally moved back to my field where I feel comfortable so I started to sell IT consultancy services. In all cases with hard work I would get a very decent life but there isn´t any way to stack any money.
Back in 2014 got in contact with a guy I used to see long time ago as we have friends in common. Went to an eCommerce conference with him and he briefly told me about affiliate marketing. He just told me: get a subscription on STM, read Charles Ngo, FinchSells and iamattila and take action.
After reading a lot I decided close all other projects and since February I´m 100% working on AM.
During the last month and a half I launched 3 campaigns. The first 2 didn´t have good results, they were SOI mainstream dating in Argentina. I guess that niche is burned out at the moment. So I decided to move and stick to antivirus vertical. The first campaign wasn´t any bad: took it to -30% ROI. I stopped it as I needed to read more about how to bid.
Today before restarting the campaign the light bulb switched on in my head and decided to start this follow along.
End of Intro.
So let´s start:
- Vertical: Antivirus Pin Submit
- Got approved 5 aggressive LPs
- GEO: VN
- 2 rotating offers
- Payout: both offers are less than 0.5
- Traffic source: adcash
Made 2 camps, one only for mobile and other for wifi.
Right now I´m waiting for adcash to approve the campaigns so I can open the traffic tap and start mapping the landscape.
I´ll post any update as soon as possible.
Talk to you soon!
Pablo.
Ps: @saveri0, @dr_ngo, @Finch, @iAmAttila, @zeno, @caurmen, @vortex, @Mr Green: Thank you for all.
First of all thanks for starting this follow-along! And thank you also for the kind shout-out.
Antivirus+aggressive can work extremely well, especially in developing countries where a lot of people aren't familiar with aggressive marketing tactics. Landers that mimic system messages work especially well - many people can't tell the difference.
For Vietnam, Popads and Popcash also have good traffic volume, so be sure to also test them later.
Looking forward to seeing some stats soon! 
Amy
Where are you based?
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Hi @vortex, hope you don´t mind, but I sent you a PM about some key points before posting updates. Thanks
What network did approve aggressive landers for you?
I got all my landers for VN denied (not aggressive)!
You're doing antivir in VN. Cool, find out how it's being promoted. Note down all commonalities between every creative you see. Now you have an "architecture" for your own creatives. Now think of a segment of your market you can target. This way you can narrow down your angle and get higher response because you're not competing with all the other affiliates. Therefore users are more likely to believe your ad as it's not something they have seen before while still utilizing proven tactics within your vertical.
Originally Posted by nomeus
I got all my landers for VN denied (not aggressive)!
If they can't give you offers that allow aggressive, join more networks.
Amy
Originally Posted by pablo
Amy
Hi guys,
Sorry about my late update. But been going over several technical issues that I still have.
As I´m using FraudBuster to keep my creatives safe I use a linode (lamp) based in Singapur.
So my entire setup is as follows: Traffic source ==> FraudBuster ==>
Here´s some data I´ve been gathering aboout the campaigns.
Issue 1: Click loss
The numbers speak by themselves. Do anyone have any experience/suggestion that I can apply to this setup? I´d like to evaluate any other option before removing Fraudbuster and upoading creatives to a CDN. In that way at least I can stop losing 20%.
Issue 2: Tokens
I was about to check bots, collect site info to cut placements and I noticed that my only placement was [zone].
So I made a test campaign:
My traffic source setup in Voluumn is as follows:
After creating the campaign the tracking link i get is:
http://my-custom-domain.com/12345678...67891234?zone=[zone]&clickid=[clickid]×tamp=[time]&lang=[lang]&campagne=[campaign]
I´ve hided my custom domain + campaign random code. What´s after the interrogation mark is the important part here.
So I used that link as the campaign URL at my traffic source expecting that the placeholders would be replaced. I gave PLAY to the campaign and checked my webserver logs and this a sample of what I get for a visit:
120.72.84.139 - - [22/Apr/2016:13:28:39 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 296 "http://my-custom-domain.com/?voluumdata=vid..00000003-8136-448f-8000-000000000000__vpid..1f004800-088a-11e6-8d9f-d88d0d5d87d6__caid..864d482f-6351-4b0f-b2e9-09b47f0b2d29__rt..R__lid..08276c25-c271-4df3-9b98-d4416bddee82__oid1..a95604e7-eff5-4d9d-a5f9-752bd61966b0__var1..%5Bzone%5D__var2..%5Bclickid%5 D__var3..%5Btime%5D__var4..%5Blang%5D__var5..%5Bca mpaign%5D__rd..__aid..__ab..__sid..&zone=[zone]&clickid=[clickid]×tamp=[time]&lang=[lang]&campagne=[campaign]" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0.1; LG-H340n Build/LRX21Y) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.105 Mobile Safari/537.36"
So then I go to
I´ll create a case with the traffic source to see what they say.
That´s all by now. I´ll keep on working until getting things fixed.
Hey man,
I've been running pop traffic pretty hard the past 5 months, spending about 1k/day on pop traffic alone and rising.
the first thing I see is that your numbers don't add up. you pay $6 CPM to promote an offer that pays less than $0.5 in a pretty competitive vertical. You are at about -70% ROI. You cannot turn this around by cutting placements man.
I see you are a tech guy and you want to focus on the technicalities of your campaigns but this stuff is really not where the money is. Your basics are off it's like you want to get your car to drive and start with cleaning your windows and vacuuming the floor mats. You should focus on the aspects of your campaign that have the biggest impact.
You may want to read my first post in this thread again to get some ideas and start coming up with more angles for your campaign, eventually set the bid lower and then go from there focusing on consumer psychology rather than on the technicalities. This is really more about people and persuasion than anything else.
~20% clickloss I'd say is normal. 45% is really extreme. there are great threads on how to optimize your landers for speed, try the search. I would definitely remove fraudbuster, I don't think that the additional redirect is worth it.
@ebaskin I´m paying $0.6 CPM not $6.
Totally agree on the first post.
I´m working on the angles now. I´ll test them against a set of LPs with decent CTR.
Is Fraudbuster necessary for all aggressive landers?
Good question. for some traffic sources it´s not, and for others yes.
Fixed token tracking issue. Bad typo in a parameter name. All zone IDs are coming.
Keep on working on angles.
You'd also need to have offers that accept that kind of aggressive tactics too - or are you doing a double meta refresh as well?
I can just the imagine the speeds going from Traffic Source > Fraudbuster > Tracker > Lander > Double Meta > Offer
Don´t need the dmr
Good luck to you man! Following this thread closely
How is it going pablo? If you need feeback on your angles you can send me a PM.
I agree with ebaskin in that you'll need to improve your funnel instead of cutting your way to green. Otherwise, even if you manage to get green, you won't have much traffic left.
Since Adcash has a problem with your landers, why not do your testing on another source? Popads and popcash both have healthy volumes for VN. Or, you can continue cloaking - the extra redirect should be OK if you keep your lander size small. For antivirus, landers that look like system messages can work well - so if you use all-text on your landers, they should load very fast.
Also, once you have a lander that converts OK, start testing lots of offers. Improving your funnel by testing offers and landers is what will cause the biggest increases to your ROI.
Best of luck!
Amy
Jumping in with a relevant question here. When it comes to pops, do you experienced guys, Vortex, ebaskin etc go with both Fraudbuster and DMR, or what's your setup there being that speed is so crucial? I take it most experienced AFM's keep their landers a secret as the spy tools only show the same beaten to death landers all the time.
Originally Posted by exclusif
Hello Guys,
I decided to temporary pause the campaign.
@ebaskin your comments were like a slap in the face (in the good way obviously). Thank you very much.
It made me realize of 2 things I need to develope:
1) Persuasion skill.
Went through several threads about angle creation as well as I started reading Ca$hvertising which is absolutely a great material.
2) Numbers: "the first thing I see is that your numbers don't add up."
So I started to research for information about numbers. Considering I´ve been able to create a good funnel (good creatives+copy) what´s the highest price I should spend in traffic to be profitable?
So I called one of my best friends who has 10 years working in the industry and has a very solid background maximizing ROI for huge advertisers. He is a corporate guy that really knows about numbers as he is in charge of maximizing a 250k monthly budget for advertising in Facebook and Google (obviously white hat campaigns). He takes the numbers and make them work. He is not a friend of pop and DSPS, neither of affiliate networks. He told me that pop is the bullshit the user hates, that has a high bounce rate, also thinks that the pop sellers are thiefs that steal your money with bots. "Any similarities to reality is pure unintentional coincidence." He thinks that affiliate networks will never put a lucrative offer in the platform as those are kept for them (preimum inventory).
He drove me through the next excercise:
1) Take Google or Facebook numbers for analysis. You don´t have to drive traffic as people is alrready there. There are high quality users.
2) Search in Google "average ctr campaign" and look for results. Here are the top 3 results I found:
http://www.wordstream.com/average-ctr
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/20...k-through-rate
http://www.smartinsights.com/interne...through-rates/
GDN: 0.35%
Search: 1.91%
Let´s take something almost in the middle: 1%.
So that means that every 1000 impressions 1 is clicked. We won´t analyze if it converts or not.
If you pay 1$ CPM why will you work a 0.65$ offer?
THE NUMBERS ARE NOT WORKING.
Let´s translate it into Pop traffic:
I was buying 0.6 cpm in AdCash.
Let´s dissect those 1000 impressions:
1) 200 impressions are lost in the way. (click loss)
2) 250 are bots (being optimistic)
3) 300 will be closed by the user
4) Luckyly 250 will be shown
Taking my campaign as an example I was paying 0.6 per 250 real impressions, or in other words 2,4$ CPM. Having good LPs that can make a good CTR and getting 1% CVR means I need to pay 2.4$ to get 0.5$. Why sould I work an offer like that?
THE NUMBERS ARE NOT WORKING.
I constantly read that I need to test and test and keep on testing.
Worth reading: https://venturi-web-design.com/calcu...nversion-rate/
Very basic, isn´t it? OK
How can I translate that ppc model into pop? How can I start testing under some "solid ground".
I´ve read @caurmen´s "Why Smaller Payout Offers Are Often Better". How much should I bid when running a 0.5 payout offer in places liks adcash, popcash, plugrush, popads, propellerads, etc?
Any advice is welcomed.
I´m confused and overloaded of information.
Regards,
Pablo.
I'm afraid I can't contribute much on the topic of cloaking, simply because I don't do it. I like to run offers that allow aggressive in the first place. Can the pros share some experience on this?
Amy
@vortex forget about the cloaking, asume i run it in popcash as they would approve the laders.
Actually they approved them.
I'm not able to find good and cheap traffic to make it track. Bidding high Will always keep me in red numbers. What Bidding strategy /approach can I implement to make it green?
I've told the same story over and over of how one of my mastermind buddies was able to run an offer that paid 0.12/lead on a single traffic source and started making 3 figures/day right away. It sounds impossible, and a lot of you (my old self included before I saw proof) would scoff at that kind of payout before actually testing the offer. But the fact is that the high conversion rates made profits possible.
Another consideration is that on many RTB platforms, the higher you bid, the higher-quality traffic you get. This is why I suggest to test at least 3 bids - low-average-high - to cast a wider net. Bidding high will cost more, yes, but if the corresponding increase in conversion rate can keep up with the costs, then you could be making more profits AND at higher ROI by bidding higher. This is not always true of course - and as always, testing is the only way to find out.
Yes - pop traffic is infamous for fake/bot traffic. But keep in mind that the bidding landscape is driven by the value advertisers are getting from the traffic. If nobody is turning a profit in a given geo+targeting on a given TS, they would not continue to bid at the same amount, and the costs would come down.
That's a general statement I know, and I haven't mentioned brand advertisers that are spending money without considering ROI which I'm sure are driving prices up and beyond their real value. But the fact remains that there are many affiliates STILL making pop traffic profitable - just look at all the follow alongs and success stories to see proof.
Your friend of course has a lot of experience and is right in pointing out that FB is better in terms of traffic quality and scalability. I don't think anyone could argue against that. This is the exact reason why I'm planning to "go into" fb soon myself - when I get tired of playing with pop traffic. Yet, FB isn't all sunshine and rainbows either - they're becoming increasingly strict and will not hesitate to ply the ban hammer. You could be running 100% whitehat, but if one person doesn't like your ad and reports it - could be game over. So to play the FB game, knowing how to make your account stay alive is key. Another thing is that the learning curve for FB is steeper due to the many optimization and targeting options. This is why I still believe pop traffic to be the easiest way for newbies to get started - because you can rip a few landers and quickly test a few offers and go from there.
Having said that - once you know how to set up and optimize campaigns, there's no reason why you shouldn't tackle display traffic (by learning one more variable: banners), native ads, search traffic, FB traffic etc. Although they are completely different forms of traffic, there are enough underlying similarities that some of your experience with pop traffic can be transferable.
Hope I've cleared things up - or at least haven't made things even more confusing!
Amy
EDIT: One last point I forgot to make, is that each offer is priced the way they are for a reason. Generally speaking, low-payout offers will convert better than high-payout offers. Most advertisers and affiliate networks know what they're doing. Otherwise, running low-payout offers will never be justified, and everyone would be running high-payout offers instead.
Hey guys,
pablo I think you've done a really great job rethinking your approach on a more fundamental level.
Regarding your guesstimates. I've had campaigns ranging from 0.5% to 20+% CTR so it really all depends on what you do. Best way is to buy some traffic. You get stats for your exact situation.
Paying $1 cpm to promote your offer is not too high. I think it may even be too low, best way to test bids like vortex said, see how it improves response. But right now you only need 2 conversions for every 1k pops to be profitable, which is very much doable especially if you go the aggressive route.
So the best way to make your numbers add up is to work on your landers. (assuming your offer is proven)
What I try to do is think like the users on the other end. What would I need to see and read to take action on the offer? What did I already see and won't believe anymore? Luckily, most work is already done for us. We can uncover this lander achitecture by analyzing popular creatives in given vertical.
It may help to google for the type of offer you are promoting. Read what consumers are saying about it. For offers like antivir and sweeps it will most likely be experiences of how they fell for it, what made them believe it was real. How they were sceptical. But how X, Y and Z conviced them act on their fear/greed anyway. This helps you to understand how the people you are trying to persuade think and how you can uniquely implement your lander achitecture and make it believable.
Hope this helps. This looks very promising.
Thanks @vortex and @ebaskin.
Today and tomorrow I´ll read and work on angles so I can relaunch something asap. Will keep you posted by 1/2 of week.
Pablo.
Unfortunately the VN offers were paused, so I´m checking for new offers on the same vertical: AV pin submit/app installs. I don´t want to jump from vertical to vertical, feel it will be to start over in a new world.
At the meanwhile I´ve applied for more affiliate networks. So far I got applied at YieldField, waiting for approval on PeerFly and YeahMobi and got rejected from YepAds. I´ll write back to YepAds to see what I can get as I heard good comments about them.
The offers came back after a while. It gave me time to get better knowledge about numbers.
So I resumed the campaign.
Background:
* Same GEO: VN
* Vertical: Antivirus pin submits.
* Did offer research in 2 networks and got 2 recommended offers. Then I picked up 5 additional offers to test (let´s say non recommended)
Recommended offers payout: 0.88
Non-Recommended offers payout: from 0.2, 0.48, 0.65
6 accept only Android and 1 of them also accepts iOS.
* Ripped 6 landers
* Made 4 test sets to test all the offers in 3g and WIFI in groups of 3 landers.
Testing explanation summary:
* Test Set 2-1 3G
Offers 1, 2, 3
Landers 1, 2, 3
* Test Set 2-1 WIFI
Offers 1, 2, 3
Landers 1, 2, 3
* Test Set 2-2 3G
Offers 1, 2, 3
Landers 4, 5, 6
* Test Set 2-2 WIFI
Offers 1, 2, 3
Landers 4, 5, 6
Bids:
WIFI: 0.0004 cpc
3G: 0.0027 cpc
Yesterday was the first day and here are the stats:
Here´s how the offers performed:
I could never imagine that just the iOS portion of a non recommended offer would work best of a full set of Android offers.
So today I made a campaign with the best I´ve seen: winner offer + WIFI (best ISPs) + iOS + 2 best landers. I´ve increased the bid in 100%: 0.0008 cpc.
PopAds:
Impressions: 18824
Spent: 15.34$
Click loss: 23.73%
Here´s what
I guess Android didn´t do well because of my bid position. In any case I don´t think I´d be profitable with the current landers.
Nex step: test a new set of landers. So far I guess I have to increase the CTR with the current bid. If that happens I´ll increase the bid.
As always, any recommendation is appreciated.
Pablo.
So far this is how "winner offer + wifi + iOS + 2 best landers" has been doing:
I´ve seen that all the conversions happen at 2 moments of the day: at noon and ad midnight.
Actions of the day:
* Created a new campaign to test 3 new landers in PopAds for WIFI + iOS
* Cloned the winner combo in DNTX
* Created android + wifi campaign in DNTX
* Created android + 3G campaign in DNTX
Will let it run and update.
Verrrry nice test approach pablo!
Just one suggestion: Test higher bids!
Clone your most profitable camp at least 2 times, and assign higher bids to them. Set 10-20x payout as the budget for each camp, and run them simultaneously. Then see which camps will give you the best ROI.
A lot of people, when they first start out, will think "oh I'll just start with a low bid, then if I start making money I'll raise the bid." This reasoning will hurt you, because in many cases, when you bid low you'll get low-quality traffic that nobody wants. Many of your competitors have been running traffic in that geo and already KNOW which placements convert well, so they'll increase their bid for those placements (either by whitelisting them, or blacklisting the bad placements and then raising the bid). Only if you bid high enough, will you even start getting traffic from the better placements!
I would often bid at max bid (to become the #1 bidder) just to see what would happen, and sometimes I would get the highest ROI by doing so.
So definitely, DEFINITELY don't be afraid to test high bids! Just be sure to set a low budget as mentioned above to avoid any nasty surprises.
Amy
Nice, i am testing the same offer on the same GEO for the past 1.5 week and i am starting to think it is very hard to get profitable with this campaign.
If you don't mind, i can post my stats here so we can compare our note. Do you have any update so far?
Last friday I spoke to an AM where I have most of the offers. I asked her how were Android doing as I was not able to achieve good numbers and she told me that for one of my loser offers it was doing better than fine.
So on sunday I created 2 campaigns, one for WIFI and other for 3G with the following config:
* best 2 landers + those 3 new landers
* 3 offers into rotation: 50% of the traffic to the "hottest", 25%/25% to the "not so hottest"
* Bid:
3G: #1 place: 0.026 per pop
WIFI: #1 place: 0.01221 per pop
* budget 18$ each.
The results were not good. I guess it´s because it was a Sunday.
While writing this post a email from the affiliate network came in stating that the offer was pausing again.
DNTX didn´t give me good results. Maybe it´s because the test has been done on a weekend (?)
Well, here are the updates so far:
Daily stats from best landers on wifi + ios:
Daily stats from new landers on wifi + ios:
Actions of the day:
* As 2 offers got paused I applied to the last available offer of this flavor (pin+av). Sent landers for approval. Tomorrow will have a hear back from it.
* Set up set of campaigns to test the new offer at PopAds with higher bids to see if it converts or not from scratch.
* Will let the current campaigns run two more days BUT with higher bids as @vortex recommended.
@Peter ngo, no problem, share your numbers!
I´m still optimistic as my best bullet reached -7.19 ROI since friday.
Yesterday got approved everything very fast for the last available pin submit android offer, so gave it Play at #1 place but again the results were not so good.
Kept on running my current campaigns and as opposite to the Android one the iOS+WIFI campaign went green.
Considering that in the last week I´ve been able to get 184 conversions with a promising performance here are the actions of the day:
* Blacklist the non converting sites and whitelist the converting ones.
* Set up 3 campaigns: low, average and high bid and let them run.
Will post updates once I have them.
Well, unfortunately the offers got paused again.
I will not push this offer/geo combo anymore, it´s time to switch.
This has been like my official first campaign. I learned a lot and I´m happy as been able to take it from -60 to -7 ROI and during some days it was +20.
Hope the next one can end in consistent green numbers.
Thank you all for your support.
Pablo.
Well done - that's a hell of an achievement for your first campaign.
Looking forward to your next update.
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