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Learning how to scale (49)

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Hi, Krass here.

I'm new to this whole thing. Just started around January, and had my first profitable campaign in April. Made $xxx profit on my best day, but then the bidding war started and as a newbie I felt way in over my head. So now I've calmed the heck down, and I'm learning how to scale a profitable campaign.

Background:

The campaign is mobile sweeps in my native geo. After tons of testing the offer converts on a very specific segment of traffic, os, and carrier, so it's very challenging to scale.

I made my first $xxxx revenue in Popads, and bid as high as I could while still being profitable. Got a 20% payout bump from the advertiser, and then the camp went down to break even, even though it was still converting like crazy.

Then I ported the campaign to Propeller ads, and was doing xxx days again, and then the competition followed me there. So I'm now considering bidding as high as I can but I'm feeling a lot of fear because of newbie cashflow issues. I'm at 100% ROI, so if I increase my bid to 20%, with the 20% payout bump I should still come on top right? Let's see.

At the same time I also think it's smart to port the whole thing to display traffic sources. I signed up to Go2Mobi, created the campaign, uploaded the ad, yeah only one ad because I know jack shit when it comes to banner creation, and proceeded to get almost no traffic there. I'm totally new to display so this is a whole new learning curve for me.

At the same time I'm foraging for other offers that might have potential, found an offer that converts at 0.015 epc with just ripped landers.. eh.. not really great but not bad either.

So I'm setting up my main campaign to the increased 20% bid for the weekends and see what happens, and also I'll be working on landers for the other offer. What weekend? Haha.

Also, I found another pop traffic source that has decent traffic (200k/day) for my segment, which is mouth-watering volume for my dinky little campaign. Asked my rep on the traffic source, he said the top guy is bidding $0.3cpm for that traffic. I know for a fact that most offers in my geo have payouts less than $5 so how on earth can you bid that high? The maths just seems impossible to me..

So yeah here goes nothing.

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So according to PropellerAds I'm supposed to get 42k visits from bidding 3x my payout. But it's not happening. Not nearly enough traffic at all for my liking. And ROI is in the red since there's not enough traffic in the first place.

I have a whitelist I've built since the start of the campaign, but it's only 100++ placements, so volume will still be a problem most likely.

I see people bidding up to x4.5 payout. How on earth are they able to still be profitable.. blows my mind..

Meanwhile my campaign in go2mobi isn't getting any traffic. I did several adjustments and will wait a few hours and see what happens.

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I just checked: I have 500 placements in my Propeller Ads whitelist. Forecasted traffic according to the planner is 30k per day, which is reasonable enough. Maybe I'll try the blacklist campaign/whitelist campaign method. I'm setting everything up tonight to test this tomorrow.

I've also tried depositing $100 in go2mobi, after doing some research turns out they have quite a lot of traffic in my geo. So it's time for me to grow in the direction of display ads, since I've been relying on pops all the time.

I've also signed up to buzzcity, and created a campaign. Hope it gets approved.

Buzzcity doesn't have carrier targeting, so that's a bummer. Signed up to YTZ and got a sweeps rotator link to monetize remant traffic.

I'm not getting any traffic from go2mobi for some reason. The campaign has been approved and has been live for several days now.. I drilled down a lot into specific os and carrier, so maybe that's the reason, but then again, I changed the setting to include all mobile traffic in the geo including wifi and I'm still not getting any traffic. This is weird.

In the meantime I'm gonna get to work creating some banners. I have only one banner now and that's from the advertiser lol.

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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have a feeling that you're under the assumption that by bidding higher, you're lowering your profit margins - which isn't necessarily true.

On many real-time-bidding traffic sources, average bids for the good placements (ones that convert the best) will be higher due to there being more competition. So often, when you increase your bid, you'll trigger traffic from higher-quality placements as well, which will increase your conversion rates.

This is one of the reasons why on many pop sources, the pros are bidding high and snapping up the best-quality traffic, while the newbies are bidding low and fighting for the shitty traffic.

Of course there's a point beyond which traffic costs will be so high that the conversion rate will no longer keep up. This is why it's a good idea to duplicate your camp several times so that you have at least 3 camps, and set them to different bids low-average-high (or even 5 different bids), run some traffic to each to see which bid will give you the most bang for your buck. I've seen too many cases where the ROI at higher bids have exceeded that at lower bids - sometimes by a LOT more!

In light of this, bidding 4.5x payout shouldn't seem so impossible any more.

So don't be afraid to bid high - even crazy high if you have a decent lander+offer - because you may be pleasantly surprised by the results! Just please remember to set a low campaign budget when testing higher bids - just in case!



This is pretty darn good for pop traffic! I would definitely suggest focusing on optimizing for this offer, and to also test other offers in the same vertical+geo.



Weird indeed! Why not contact go2mobi support? Those guys have always been super helpful whenever I had questions.



Haha yeah that won't be good! Try to start by brainstorming angles, then create your banners and landers from those angles. There are lots of posts on how to come up with angles. If you'd like some feedback please feel free to write out a plan and I'll do my best to provide suggestions.


Great start! Congrats on your success so far and here's so achieving a lot more!



Amy

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Wow.. thanks for dropping by! So many gems you've just dropped on a noob! Thank you!

So TIL:
1) x4.5 can still be profitable depending on how much traffic you get for the bid and of course traffic quality. I'll try bidding max bid today and go down from there.
I did try bidding x4 payout offer on popads but the ROI wasn't worth it. I ended up with just $10 profit per day all told. I'll try again this time with a new and more aggressive lander. Maybe on a traffic source that has more traffic x4.++ payout bid will still be in the green. If I've learned one thing these past few months it's that volume is power. I'll try bidding as high as possible to where the volume is still there but it's not too high that I lose money.

2) So $0.015 epc and above is actually good? This is very important info for me since as a noob I don't even know what good looks like lol. So I went back to my data, and sure enough, I actually have two offers with $0.01 epc. I bailed on those since I spent $150 testing three offers and only got back -86% ROI. Which I thought was really bad.

3) I messed up the settings on go2mobi, so that's why no traffic. Bad noob.. bad noob..

So now i see some potential new campaigns for pops and I'm getting traffic to test out on display. My next steps:

I found one of those Google themed landers while spying on my phone and ripped it. $0.05 epc on my first test. Not bad. But these are super aggressive with the Google logo included so I have to find a way to modify it else I get into trouble. Also I need to brainstorm new landers since the ios themed ones I'm using are getting less clickthroughs.

Also, how much revenue do I need to have before I have a good case for weekly payments? I'm at 4xxx revenue for april, but payment isn't until 30th may so cashflow is a pain in the ass currently.

That's all for now. Will keep this updated.

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Just to add, please critique this strategy:

I have an offer that only accepts a certain carrier and os. Now that I've read Amy's reply I have another offer that accepts same os but different carrier. Would it be a good idea to buy up traffic for both carriers and funnel them to the respective offers in one campaign? I think it's cheaper that way.

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The best practice is to target different carriers in separate campaigns. There will be different bids for each of them, so by mixing those, you are almost always overpaying on the one with lower bids. Its a bit better with networks that allow smart bidding (paying just a bit above the closest competitor), but I dont recomend doing it with networks where you pay exactly what you bid.

As for the weeklies - general rule of thumb is $1000 in revenue per week with most networks.

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I'm a bit confused about go2mobi. I only got traffic when I opened up the targetting to include anything and everything including wifi. But I need to target a certain carrier and os. According to the campaign planner, there's a lot of that traffic in go2mobi. I guess I need to experiment more with this.

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This will most likely be a problem with something in the campaign setup or a low bid.

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Spent $100 dollars trying to familiarize myself with the go2mobi ad platform.. EPIC FAIL:


What's the difference between bid rate and win rate? 770 clicks for $99 dollars lol..

I contacted go2mobi support and she said for sweeps, Mopub will never get approved. So ok. Also to get rid of the redirect in the tracker. I have a redirect setup because I can't get traffic with my specific settings so targetted really broad - redirected everything that's not the target audience.

I did get 1 conversion though, so hopefully there's hope .. I'll start getting some banners designed and will update today

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Update: banner idea:



Just a straightforward one. I'll just change the button colors for now to see which one gets better ctr.

Is this too simple?

How do you get into the minds of the audience? I was running sweeps on pops before, and since it's blind targets it's super hard to get to know the people you're marketing to, which websites they frequent, etc. Is this possible with display?

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Hello

DSPs like go2mobi are actually auctions, you place a bid and in case its the highest for that targeting, you win the auction. Every impressions is a separate auction so to speak. So the # of bids is actually the number of available impressions that matched your targeting. Win # is the amount of auctions you won, so the amount of impressions you actually bought. If you bid crazy high, the numbers will almost match, if you bid too low, the amount of Bids will be waaaaay higher than Wins.

As for the banners : they look very simple, but sometimes simple works the best, its a matter of testing really

With these broad auctions, its not really possible to target based on websites that you buy traffic from, there is simply too many of them and a lot of them are too small. Your goal is to come up with angles that appeal to as broad audience as possible.

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Haven't reached the $50 spend limit yet, but so far they are averaging 0.5% CTR. What's a good target for ctr? 2% at least? No conversions yet. I hope I'll get one at least before the budget runs out.

It's very weird to see I only got 81 clicks for $10 spend. In pops it would be in the xxxx's by now. Where should I go for banner design inspirations?

Anyway I'll just spend the cash and buy the data for now.

EDIT:
I'm following the Mobile Cookbook Go2Mobi version by @caurmen. It says to spend $30 for two days minimum before making decisions. My payout is $2, and minimum daily limit is now $50. Should I stop before $50 or should I just let the campaign spend all of the cash?

This is a campaign that's done well for me on pops, low xxx per day. Then competition stepped in and flooded my traffic source with bids. So it's time for me to learn display. Should I just keep the exact funnel or test direct link first?

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Just got an email saying my campaign has been disapproved. Yup.. this sucks. Shot an email to go2mobi and asked what the problem is so I can fix it. It's one of those "win an iphone s6" offers that worked really well for me on pops. I just created some more banners for it too. Maybe my pop landers are too aggressive? In that case I'll just direct link for now while I modify the lander to get it compliant.

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Use adplexity for banner ideas for example, or some other spytool.

Note on buying data : data without conversions isnt really useful all that much. So if you already spent close to $50 on an offer paying $2 per conversion and didn't get a few of them, its safe to assume something in the funnel sucks. Since you know this offer works and you have proven LP too, it will probably be the banners.

Cant comment on why the campaign was disapproved, Im sure they will give you a reason.

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I've sent out an email to go2mobi support. No answer yet. Ok so maybe the landers are too aggressive. I'll have to depend on the banners to get my angle across for now.
Got some new banner Ideas going:


Saw some icon style banners and decided to test it. From the initial test blue and red variations had better ctr. But ctr is useless w/o conversions so yeah.

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This is totally blind un-targeted and misleading banner, cant see it doing any good for iphone sweeps, you need to put the angle on it somehow. It will produce cheap traffic for sure, but Im not sure about the conversions

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Noted, man, thanks for the tips. I've worked on a few new banner ideas to replace this one.
This is the stats for my banners before I got disapproved from smaato. Not sure if these are good results.


go2mobi replied, suggesting that I try the other exchanges that are sweeps friendly. I created a new campaign for Pubmatic. Less traffic than Smaato and Mopub, but more than pops, so it'll have to do for now. Campaign not approved yet but it's the weekends so I'll wait for monday.

I also split tested direct linking to see if it converts better than using landers. It's daunting to see smaller volumes of clicks, being that I'm used to having xx,xxx impressions on pops.

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Are these new banners still misleading? If they are, the CTR is not high enough, if they are not, it could work. I see no conversions in the screenshot, were there none or you don't have conversion tracking setup with go2mobi?

Direct link will most likely not work better than an LP, but test it of course.

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These are the first set of banners above, not the icons one. No conversions yet, the campaign got disapproved before any conversions. My campaign hasn't been approved yet by pubmatic.

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I see, well don't let it stop you from trying. Get another offer and resubmit, there is no point in waiting too long

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The campaign was approved on pubmatic together with all my banners. Yay! I've spent $12 so far on the campaign, here are the stats:



No idea if those are good stats or not. No conversions yet. The traffic seems to be trickling in evenly, which is good I guess. I followed the Mobile Cookbook Go2mobi version so I put daily budget/placement to be 3x offer payout and set it to autobid. All that's left is to wait I guess.

In the mean time, I also found a new pop source with good volume for the traffic I want. Bought 20k clicks to my campaign and only 4 conversions. Maybe my landers are getting stale due to getting ripped mercilessly? Time to get some new banners done. Also, how to protect landers?

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You're paying insane $ for the traffic, $12 spent and 33 clicks? 36 cents a click, that's not gonna work I'm afraid.

What kinda targeting this is, more than $3 CPM is really a high number.

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Yeah I thought it was high, but I'm not sure so I just let it run. Thanks for the heads up. I'm just targeting specific geo, OS and carrier. Everything else remains wide open. Not sure why it's so expensive.

Maybe because it's autobid? What should I do now?

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Turn of autobid and set the bids yourself, anyone can use auto-bidding, your competitive advantage can be the ability to play with the bids yourself and find the sweet-spot. Start with way lower bid than the auto-bidding option has set for you and raise it as needed. Lets see if you can still win some impressions.

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From the affiliate network point of view, payments periods and cashflow shouldn't be a problem for a potentially good affiliate. It shouldn't be a rule set in stone for the network but something to consider for each affiliate.

That is why a good relationship with your affiliate manager is a must to grow as media buyer, something that will understand your needs and recognize a good potential affiliate quickly even if he is just a newbie.

Nothing better than being helpful with a new affiliate that will always remember who helped him at the beginning and will keep loyal to your network

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Thanks for the insight. I paused the campaign and shot an email out to go2mobi support and asked them to take a look at it. Since my payout is $2 I think it would make sense to bid 0.02 cpc, so I need a conversion within 100 clicks before I decide on anything.

Meanwhile I'm foraging for other offers because I haven't made a profit in a while and that's not good. I only have had one profitable campaign making xxx per day, so I'm still pretty much a noob. One thing I'm weak at is interpreting data. I don't know how much data is too much, so I tend to overspend.

Here's an example of some lander/offer combos, hope you guys can take a look and maybe comment a bit. I just learned the concepts of statistical significance in this forum, but not sure how to apply it yet:



Thanks for the input, guys! I'm learning so much here!

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I couldn't get any traffic from go2mobi for some reason. I these are stats after a few days:


Not getting any love from them. Email was unanswered as well. Moving on.

I did get some impressions from Buzzcity, but no conversions. I'm starting to realise that scaling isn't as simple as it seems. So I'm taking a step back, and I have a new strategy in place.

So I looked at my stats and found that my previous campaign isn't actually dead. The offer is still converting pretty consistently. It's just that I'm being outbid so I'm not getting as much traffic from my sources. Also I learned some tricks about identifying bot traffic so that should help with my roi a bit.

New strategy:
1- Get a steady stream of profit from different traffic sources. RIght now I know the offer is profitable on at least 2 pop sources. So I just have to play with the bids and get to the sweet spot where I'm still in profit even though not much traffic. I used to do xxx per day on 1 traffic source alone. But I guess the honeymoon's over.

2- Explore new offers and traffic sources. I got approved for a TH offer, but they are really strict with landers. No fake review comments, no showing 3 products and claiming the other 2 are out of stock, etc. I've sent them the tame lander for approval, but I'll still test the aggressive one to see if the offer actually converts. Cons: there's a cap of 1500 leads per day and it's first come, first serve.

I also found a AV offer in MY that might be good. I'm testing a very aggressive lander - it's the one in the screenshot above that's getting 6 conversions out of 114 clicks. I'll hide this one behind a backbutton redirect for now to really see how it converts.

Speaking of, what's a good way to implement backbutton redirects that also allow you to track conversions for all the redirects? Let's say my setup is this:
Traffic source -> LP1 -> backbutton to LP2 -> backbutton to LP3 -> backbutton to offer

I tried creating different campaigns for each backbutton redirect but now the tracker is randomly sending traffic to unrelated campaigns. This is a huge headache. I create different landers for each traffic source because of the redirect. Not sure how to solve this.

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The screenshot looks like your campaign might have been rejected, its weird to not get any traffic at all, that shouldn't be the case. I would try to submit one more campaign and see if the win-rate is so awful too. Did you change anything in the campaign after it was approved? New LP or Offer?

Your strategy looks good, its a good idea to get back to the offer that is still working for you and build a stable foundation with it. Play with the bids, sometimes its really all it takes to get back into nice profit.

When picking new offers, try to find offers without CAP, its sucks to have an offer paused at night when you are sleeping - it just puts more stress on you. The sad part is, these offers sometimes convert the best

I approach backbuttons in a more simple way, I simply send them to another LP or to an offer directly. Whatever extra it makes is a bonus that I simply add to the original campaign when analyzing data. I don't utilize a long chain of backbuttons as many networks don't like it. It will get mixed up anyways pretty soon, so it creates one big mess that's not possible to track.

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Yeah I'm getting that right now. Total mess. On the brightside, it's working. I'm getting back into green now with these three traffic sources. Too early to say though, I'll have to look at tomorrow's results. I found that the bulk of the conversions happen from 8pm-12am in my geo, that makes sense because it's prime time. I have day parting scheduled for the wee hours of morning.

The offer converts really well, But I find that the profit is a lot more stable using some redirects. Not too much, just 2 landers and then redirected straight to offer. How's your setup for backbutton redirect? I also find it tough to track. I reached out to my tracker rep (i'm using Adsbridge) and they told me they don't have a solution for this atm.

I need to find info about this. I can't track anything as of now thanks to the system sending my traffic all over the place.

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Thanks, Amy! After persistent follow ups I finally got my payment. I'm so relieved! I started 2 new camps already and they're starting to get traffic now.

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Haha yeah I was so relieved to hear about that when you told me on skype! Non-payment is not uncommon and I don't wish that for anyone, but I especially hate to see it happen to new affiliates who may not have a lot of cashflow to start with. Luck is on your side my friend! Now let's see that luck manifest in the form of some green camps!


Amy

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Thank you, Amy! You've been very supportive throughout the ordeal, thanks a lot!

Moving on, I have a new camp going, looking good.

I separated the camp into two camps because the offers allow two carriers. So far here's how the data looks like:

Camp 1 Carrier 1:
ROI: 12.82%

Camp 2 Carrier 2
ROI: -50%

So this is after a day of data. Now I'm still learning how to optimise properly, don't quite have that down yet. Here are some doubts in my mind:

- I used a blacklist for a previous camp that was in the same vertical and geo. Is it ok to recycle blacklists? Or am I limiting my traffic too much?

- the offer only accepts a certain carrier, and a certain os. So the only thing to optimise are os versions and browser versions. At what point do I optimise these?

- let's say I can make both carriers work somehow - should I keep the camps separate for each carrier? Or should I lump them into one campaign? Or is it better to choose the carrier with best ROI and scale from there?

- let's say that in the near future I'm in profit and I want to retest some of the placements I've blacklisted. Is there a method to it? Or just remove everything and start over?

Thanks Amy!

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Great to hear about the promising camps!

Yes you can recycle blacklists - that will give you a headstart! More importantly, you can and should be recycling whitelists as well.

However, when building and using these lists, keep in mind that a placement can only be as good as the lander and offer, i.e. only if you have a lander+offer combo that's doing well for many placements, can you conclude that a bad-performing placement is truly bad.

Yes using a blacklist from the start WILL limit your traffic, but if you have lots of traffic available, or if you wouldn't mind collecting data over a longer period of time, then you could save money by doing so.

Regarding optimization of OS and browser versions - I seldom even drill down to these lol. I would say optimize these after you have a winning lander. IMO, the more important things to optimize are bids and placements. And of course you can do dayparting.

Regarding which carrier to keep running: You can keep running both, OR just run the much-more-promising carrier. It depends on your campaign strategy. If you think the underperforming carrier is still promising enough for you to keep optimizing it, by all means continue. Otherwise, you could spend that time testing more offers or geos.

I wouldn't run both carriers in the same camp though because the optimal bid for each carrier may be different. Have you tested bids yet?

Regarding retesting blacklisted placements: After you've found the best traffic segments and lander+offer combo, I would suggest to at least test the bigger placements on the blacklist, but only the ones that you're not sure are truly bad performers. It's important to know how they made it to the blacklist in the first place. If they got blacklisted while you were running a green camp, then maybe they're not worth a retest.

Hope that helps! Please feel free to ask for further clarification if needed. Eager to see more stats! One of the carriers looks really promising.



Amy

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Campaign just hit 50% ROI today. So will keep optimising that. In other news, I'm a moron. I was wondering all this while why my tracker is showing either 100% CTR or 0% CTR. I realised something was wrong when I deduped a list of what I thought were bad placements and the dedupe return a fraction of the placements, which means a lot of it is repeated.

So they are repeated in my tracker depending on device model, os version, and a number of other things, so just because a certain device or os doesn't convert doesn't mean the whole placement is bad. But that's how I've been blacklisting.. Bloody hell.

So good thing the camp is doing ok but I'm getting crap volume. How do I go about reanalysing and reopening the placements? Are there any excel sheets to paste the placements in and analyse them? I need more volume to scale this.. Wow I surprise myself sometimes with my clumsiness..

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Wow! I look at this completely differently from you. You should be EXCITED at this discovery! Because this means you potentially have more traffic volume at your disposal than you had thought.

If I were to tell you all the mistakes I've made so far you'd be cringing haha!


Why not just re-evaluate all placement stats, but this time based on overall stats across all traffic segments?




Amy

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What do you mean reevaluate all placement stats? Start over from a clean sheet? What does overall stats across all traffic segments mean? Sorry for the noob questions..

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Just unblacklist the placements from before

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I started a new blacklist from scratch. Campaign is now at a steady 20% ROI over a 3 day period, today being the best day at 46.1% ROI. I just added more funds and upped the cap to get more traffic.

Did some minor tweaks to the lander and split tested, got an increase of 10% ROI. Will run the split test one more day to get more conclusive data.

This offer accepts 2 carriers only, and to get this ROI I had to abandon the other carrier. Should I revisit the other carrier now and try to get that profitable? The other carrier got -40% ROI at best. Maybe there's more volume to be had if I can get that one to green too.

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Nevermind about re-evaluating all placement stats. Retesting placements like what you're doing will be a lot less confusing. I thought maybe I could help you save some money by not having to retest, but if you're still at 20% ROI then all is well.

Regarding re-introducing the other carrier: If you want to speed up the placement testing, adding that carrier back would be good for getting more traffic. If you want to save money, adding that carrier back after you cut your way back to 40%+ ROI would be better.



Amy

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I'm at a steady 45% ROI now. Just set up some camps to retest the other carrier using your multiple bids technique. Almost hit 100 profit yesterday so I'm back on track. I decided to go the saving money route and reintroduce the other carrier after I get a decent ROI from the first carrier.

Thanks a ton for your help, Amy you're awesome!

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What do you do with placements that are super volatile? Like 40% ROI one day then -60% the next day with nothing else changed?

EDIT:

Tested a few bids and found 2 bids to be profitable. Not sure if I should run both

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Oh wow almost 3-digit profits!! You rock!

And if both bids are profitable, yes you can run both. Due to the ever-changing bidding landscape, I find that running multiple bids can introduce a bit of a "balancing" effect if that makes sense.

For a green camp, I would even test 5-7 bids to find the best ones. Then if I see a sudden dip in conversion rate which is a sign I may have gotten outbid, I would turn some of the higher bids back on for another test.

Also - you may want to experiment by opening up your frequency settings a bit. See if that would result in an increase in profits (although conversion rate will mostly likely drop, you'll likely get more traffic volume).

Time to scale for sure! When scaling, only port over your best targeting (e.g. that best carrier) and your best couple of landers, and your best offer. Your main job at each new traffic source would be to test bids, and if performance doesn't bomb, to keep running and cutting placements.



Amy

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Tested a new backbutton script and it bombed hard. Shit. Made the noob mistake of not split testing, lazy ass me. Lesson learned.

A few questions Amy:

1) What do you do with volatile placements that return 40% ROI one day and -60% the next day for no apparent reason? Maybe it's bot infested but there's enough human traffic there to give some conversions

2) From what I've seen most of the traffic in any given geo comes from 50 placements. I see diminishing returns whenever I blacklist the placements that pop up after a certain point. But I also think all these smaller placements do add up and eat up a lot of budget. Any way around this?

3) So basically it's more of a bid manoeuvring phase now? Meaning I change the bids day in day out to maintain good profitability?

4) So which is the most important task now in your opinion?
- optimising bids?
- Blacklisting placements?

Thank you Amy!

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That's weird! Are you sure the backbutton script is working as it should? Perhaps drill down into OS and browser stats to see if it bombed for certain OSs/Browsers, or just sucked in general. I would definitely suggest trying another backbutton script, because think about it: It can only add to your bottom line. If you don't direct the visitor somewhere, they'd be gone when they click back.

Regarding your questions:

1)Simply put: If it's still making enough profits overall to be worth your monitoring it, keep it running. If not, just kill it.

2)Have you tried setting up a camp with just those 50 placements whitelisted?

3)That's basically it - if you've already implemented dayparting and have identified the most profitable traffic segments, and have tested bids and even running at multiple bids. Just don't fall into the trap of spending too much time tweaking bids. I would focus 90% of my time on scaling this camp to at least all the major pop sources to start. THAT will grow your profits by leaps like tweaking a few placements probably never would.

Pop camps usually don't live very long, so focus on testing and scaling, and only use tweaking bids and cutting placements as a way to combat saturation in order to make your camp live longer. I don't know if this is the way other people do it. For better or for worse this is how I'm doing it.

Also, when I see new offers come out for that geo+vertical, I would add it into rotation. If you can find an offer that converts better than your current one, you'll be able to increase the performance of all placements (or I should say most).

The big picture with pop is that you need to be constantly testing new offers and scaling on profitable ones to keep up with dying camps. Optimizing placements is a good thing to do for sure, but try to focus on just the bigger placements without messing with the small ones, because you could be putting that time towards more important tasks like testing new stuff and scaling.

4)I think I may have answered that question above as well.



Amy

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Thanks Amy for all your help!

Update:

Bidding wars have begun. I was at high xx on Thursday, now back to low xx. Yeah pop camps don't last too long. I think my strategy with this one would be to reinvest everything into testing other sources so that I can scale faster next time I have a green camp.

Traffic has gone down to about half of what it was before the bidding wars started. My cashflow position is ok since I'm on weeklies now, so I think I'll just weather this storm and stick to my best profitable bid. So far my funnel is still holding up, still green.

Not sure how long though. I'm still clueless as to when I should abandon a camp and start scaling and testing new ones. Right now I'm working on getting some new camps in line to replace the camps that dying out.

Also, I just realised I have a pretty decent blacklist from this camp that I'm not using for some reason lol. Ok time to test the whitelist then. Thanks Amy!

EDIT: whitelist, I meant decent whitelist I'm not using. Lol was sleep deprived when I typed that.
Today profit went up to $88 without me changing a thing. I guess that's just the bidding landscape doing it's thing. Just have to learn to remain calm. I think since I'm in green I'll wait to gather more data before finalising the whitelist so that I don't end up whitelisting lottery placements.

Also, I'm looking to port to another traffic source tomorrow, I need to scale this while this offer still works. Hopefully I can get this ported to at least 2 traffic sources profitably and get good blacklists for both in the process.

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So I'm still in green but profit is volatile. Some days almost $100 some days $50 or below. I guess that's just how pop traffic works. I'll try the whitelist approach to see if I can get more stability out of it.

Maybe I'll retest some of the landers to see if that can get me better ROI. Or maybe this camp isn't worth keeping due to the low ROI. It was 45% at best and has been declining ever since. Time to look for another camp maybe?

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Cutting placements is part of the game. If you're too lazy to cut placements then either hire a VA or just run whitelist campaigns at a lower profit. It's your choice.

Everything really comes down to how lazy you want to be. Just do whatever you want

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You can retest landers but I feel that it will probably not be a value-adding activity. That money could probably be put to better use elsewhere, e.g. scaling the camp to other networks! Start by scaling to at least all the major pop networks - several camps at staggered bids, using best offer+lander+targeting, and remember to set a low budget on each (10x payout/camp should be fine). If you're not remotely close to breaking even, and there aren't a couple of bad placements hogging traffic and not converting that you can cut to drastically improve things, I'd say just forget that traffic source.

You've spent the money to find a good offer+lander+targeting that works. Now would be the time to milk it by scaling!

And of course you can test new stuff - but why do that when you have a profitable camp you could be scaling? Always spend your time on the activity that has the potential of bringing the highest returns.



Amy

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