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On my way to do $100/day with sweepstakes (52)

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Hey guys,

If you're interested in reading a "little" intro about me you can see my introduction post --> http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...814#post271814

So more on my first campaign

I started working on 29 March, and since then this is what I achieved.

CPA networks: ClickDealer, Adsimillis.
Hosting: AWS EC2 with apache, I will AB test soon S3 with Cloud Front, but my EC2 vm is located in the country I'm promoting and loading times and latency seemed pretty fine.
Tracking: Voluum
Got access to spy tools.
Traffic sources which I have already put money and ran traffic: PopAds, AdCash, Plugrush and Zeropark.

My focus is strictly mobile sweepstakes and I'm not gonna change it until I can make money with it.

So far I launched one campaign, spent $284 and got $73 revenue. I ran this campaign for the past 3 weeks more or less, pausing, continuing, changing landers, target specific OS, etc, etc.





I ran most of this campaign on PopAds, and the only reason I decided to subscribe to other Traffic sources (not following the "master 1 TR first") is just because I had one half day that I was green. Here goes the screenshot =P





Might be ridiculously small amount, but I was really excited

Anyways I didn't had enough traffic on PopAds, so I started trying to escalate to other TR, but issue was, my campaign was so optimised that it didn't work on other TRs neither I had the same type of settings. Then I started opening the campaign more on PopAds and also didn't work, when I went back to original settings there was no green anymore =P

I guess the lesson learned is to make the LP work first on broad traffic and get statistical significant data and only then optimise.

Also I wasn't sure about how to analyse the data, like how many conversions I need to cut bad spots, how much CTR is good, etc etc. I was trying to get a formula that would involve confidence level, risk, etc.
I did some research on A/B Testing and Multi variance testing, but you need to spend sometime to understand it properly, and after researching for one day I thought, better put my efforts instead on testing different landers and get a high CTR, well at least until I saw this magnific post yesterday --> http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...nificance-quot

This just saved a lot of time into digging statistics

So my goal for this week is:

1) Port my campaign to a different country.

I've running my campaign in a country which I don't speak the language, I basically used landers without changing text, sorry guys
I don't think I'm ready to use translation services at this stage because I don't even know what text they should use, I feel I should try first in either Portuguese or English, understand how CTR and CR reacts to it, and then yes use the onehourtranslation or whatever.

Also the country I'm running does not have that much traffic on PopAds.
Brazil would probably be ideal for me, cheap traffic, I speak the language, and a lot of volume. But the offers on mobile sweepstakes are not that great in both networks I'm in and the similar offer they had in Brazil was PIN submit instead of SOI, and from what I was advised to stick with SOI strictly in the beginning.
(If you know any network with lot's of sweepstakes, specially in countries like Brazil let me know =) )

2) Innovate Lander

Once a good lander is found, start playing with the text, images, colors, etc.

I tested several landers for this campaign, maybe around 8, all different angles

But talking about the extreme ones

Lander A - 8.05% CTR and 0.34% CR
Lander B - 0.47% CTR and 20.62% CR

Lander B made me that half day green, but again, I didn't speak the language and I had no idea how I could increase the CTR, specially because this was a very specific theme and I don't think playing with the colors would make it credible. I just tried to change from 4 questions game to 3, but didn't improved.

Another test I wanna do is to create a subdomain matching the theme of the LP I'm using, e.g www.google.com.mydomain.com
I'm just wondering how legal is to do this and that's the reason I didn't do it yet..

3) Do more reading
- Read Cashvertising,
- Re-read STM posts how to improve LPs after I launch the campaign.
- Read some follow along threads on people doing similar campaigns to me.


I think that's it for now! Feel free to comment

Cheers!

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Love the detail here - looking forward to seeing how far you go and reading updates!

One of the pieces of advice I always like to point out to new affiliates on our network, is to make your AM work for their money - this is a perfect example. Hit up the AM and find out from them what you can about whats working in that GEO in terms of language and even see if you can get feedback on the language used on the lander from the advertiser - you'd be surprised, some advertisers will give great detailed feedback on wording, language used etc.

Goodluck!

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Just one note regarding translations : people on odesk.com will do a lot of work for literally peanuts. And if you pick a native speaker, the quality will be good enough. I used to order from onehourtranslation, but the amount of text I had to pay $60-$80 for at OHT, I paid like $7 at odesk - and I didnt even pick the lowest offer. So having properly translated LPs isnt all that costly

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Sounds like a good advice Henry, thanks

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Great tip, I used odesk before but for IT stuff. Will check it out when I need thanks!

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Upwork (Formerly odesk), elance, freelancer etc. There are a tonne of resources out there for translation that will be competitive if not better than OHT - on quality and cost.

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Yeah, in the future will look more into this, I used odesk/elance as freelancer and to hire IT people, will use it for languages when needed

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Hi all!

I've been reading a lot this week and it's time to put in practice what I learned

I just have some questions in my head, it would be cool if someone could help me clear them to give me more direction.
I read people recommending and launching several campaigns, like 3 a day, because of the 80/20 rule, specially for mobile.

Now my questions are:

1) How many campaigns a newbie should launch per day?

2) Is it really per day? Or you launch 3 campaigns in one day and then monitor them until you gather statistical evidence?

3) Do they mean 3 completely different campaigns?
The term campaign itself seems like a bit broad. In my head campaign would mean, promote a specific product(s)/offers(s). So GEO's, TR's, landers, I could change all that and still be the same campaign. (am I correct?)

4) When they say test different offers in your campaign, do they mean the exact same offer but different vendor lander?
E.g. if you look at iPhone in your CPA network, there is like 3 sweepstakes for the same country, and if you go to another CPA network, you will find even more. Do they mean A/B test all those?
Or they mean, put iPhone combined with Galaxy S7 in the same lander? I guess in this case depends on what lander you're using as some only allow one offer...

5) When I spy my competition, I see they're mostly targeting Android. Should I always try both in same campaign, or should I split into 2 different campaigns? Or focus on only one OS?


Basically I have skill enough to launch 3 campaigns a day if that's what you guys recommend, I just don't wanna launch more than I should and then loose focus on analyzing the data.

Cheers!

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Good hob bro can you please drop me you skype that we Can discuss and exchange idea ?

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Hello STMers

So my last update was 12 days ago,

Since then I was trying to find someone to work with as alone can be pretty boring and found a partner, a good friend of mine that was actually the one introducing me to AM world, he wanted to do this for long time but he played around but never got into it 100%. He is also living in Thailand and we work on schedule basis 9am to 6pm, or more in the last few days..

We were working hard on launching a campaign in Australia on PopAds, we just launched yesterday night.

After running my first campaign on Pop Ads, I realised the next campaign would have to be better planned in terms of budget, bids, gathering statistic significant data, work hard on the landers, add intro and exit pops, verify landing pages speed properly, etc etc.

With this is mind, here is what we did:

1) Campaign Planning

- First I went to Pop Ads and saw how much Visits per day we can have for different type of bids.
- I then created an excel file to calculate Min CTR%, Min CR% for a certain Bid
- After analysing this table, I assign different colors, with green being the CTR and CR that I believe we can achieve.
- So with that in mind I created the final table targeting 2 different bids.
- After that we saw for each day what could be the spending, (BTW the visits are now incorrect, because I selected English(Australia) only at that time and also only carrier connection, so it was way less traffic, anyways that does not affect CTR and CR min metrics formulas)




2) Offers

When I first started I made the commitment of making sweepstakes work, and I'm not changing until I make at least one or more successful campaigns.

- We have 4 different offers.

2 offers of type A
1 offer of type B
1 offer of type C

Offers of type A are older, we know they supposed to convert.
Offer B and C are completely fresh, we have no data yet about conversion rate.

We will apply soon for more similar offers.

I subscribed to Mundo Media, but the approval process is being slow as they wanna verify with my other AMs my traffic quality.
Do you guys think it's ok to give a shout to my AMs to see if they can reply to Mundo Media reference email? I just don't like to ask this kind of things as in the end I'm asking to help me get in the competition..


3) Landers

- I have access to spy tools, so I grabbed 10 different landers running not only in Australia but other english speaking countries.

- Me and my friend then worked on all 10 landers for the past couple of days, hardworking,
- add intro pops
- exit pops to all
- added countdowns
- back button redirect
- improve the code (remove unused stuff, include css and js in index).
- changed text and removed non compliant. A lot of the landers had words like FREE, you WON, etc. We went fully compliant.
- tested on android phones, my iphone is broken :/ need to solve this problem soon.
- Tested load times with pingdom on both EC2 located in Australia and CloudFront (disabled intro pops for the test in case you wondering), guess who won

Screenshot (I only show 2 tests but we did for all landers, and in all EC2 average was better)




4) Bot Traffic

- We tried to follow Carmen advice of 60 visits per each website before blacklisting, we spent around $26 in total, and we got like 10 websites that we decided to cut.
In the meanwhile we saw Mr Green thread about website IDs in PopAds to cut, but actually I started to wonder, is that list multi geo? Is that an average of different countries? Because I did saw IDs that were congruent with my testing and Ids that were not. I also ran traffic bot in Germany before, and one of the IDs was not fine in Germany but fine in Australia. So I decided to use the list we got from our test, and perhaps try to AB test in the future Mr Green list.

Here is our final blacklist for bots:




References:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Your-Campaigns
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ut-Bot-Traffic


5) Campaign launching

We launched the campaign yesterday around 10pm BKK time, so it was already midnight+ depending on which city you live in AU.

Some of our landers had really bad CTR, one of other landers had super high CTR, basically the users has almost no option then follow the flow to the offer :P
There is still room for improvement in wording for sure, images, colors.

We decided a rule, we only cut or change landers when hitting 3-5 time the payout. We still deciding whether 3 or 5. I guess for extreme cases of 0% CTR we could cut after 3, for cases where we are not 100% sure we can do with 5. Your input is highly appreciated

Another lesson I learned from my previous campaign it to not optimize other campaign settings until at least break even, so we will just focus on getting the right landers/offers combination, and only after that improve the other campaign setttings, otherwise we can't escalate it.

Our Stats so far:

Campaigns




Landers




Offers




And that's it for now! Please as always feel free to comment we really appreciate any STMers input

Cheers!

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nice progress mate , you are having a nice CTR for lander Australia #6 but the CRV is a bit off.

Does Voluum reports your Popads cost accurately? i am using Funnelflux and only 75% of the real costs are recorded due to clickloss.

If this also happen to Voluum then you probably should take those unrecorded cost into account as well.

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Thanks, well it does not, there is a little bit of discrepancy between popads and voluum, I definitively should take that into account, which I'm not at the moment.

Well the high CTR on that lander is basically due to the fact that the user is kind of forced to play the game and then redirected to offer automatically in terms of conversions though we ended up going for lander #4.

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Hello everyone!

I will update the results of the campaign once I completely stop it.

In the meanwhile, I'm back solo again, my partner is more tied in terms of budgeting and although we didn't spent our monthly budget he feels Australia traffic is expensive and we need to spend more to collect data whereas in countries like Brazil we would have more conversions and we could spend less to find out what's working. He also wanna move away from sweepstakes and go for anti-virus, and considering doing pops on desktop instead of mobile because he thinks less variables to handle.

So we basically decided to work on some campaigns together but each launch on his own.

My motivation had a little bit of a drawn back, as I am really much more of a team player than solo player and last week I didn't really do much apart from researching offers for a new campaign in Brazil and India and having a great chat with my AM about compliance stuff, my paypal account also got blocked which made me stop my current campaign, need to verify bank account basically.

Anyways, this weekend I was thinking I need to be more serious in terms of planning, I was using my work force derived purely from motivation, meaning, I didn't set a strict schedule, I was just coming to office when I wake up and work until I'm tired. So what was actually happening is that some days I would arrive at 11am, and work till 8pm, some days earlier but not consistent schedule.
In a way is good, but not sustainable for the long run as I was putting work above everything else, but I do wanna have nice hobbies, do activities, etc. I mean I was working on a 9 to 6 job, all I thought was when I have my own business I can have so much more free time, have time to do this, that, bla bla, and in the end I end up working the same amount of hours or more and just stopping when I have no energy to do anything else. I do know I'm starting and not making money yet but given until I make real money can take long time, and given I saved enough to not be stressed out on making money super fast, better be balanced and consistent and enjoying daily life as well.

With this in mind I spent the day of today thinking and planning my work strategy and also gym :P

Basically I will set weekly goals either on Sunday or Monday morning.
Weekly goals should not vary, and I should complete at least 75% of them, I can't commit 100% because things change, priorities change sometimes as well and unexpected situations also happen
(e.g:
We have a deposit stuck on PopAds for about 3 weeks now given it was made from my partners paypal on my pop ads account, still solving with support,
ZeroPark did not approved my winning lander once I replicated the campaign for Carrier Traffic, so basically had to stop it in ZP after spending and gathering a considerable amount of data)
Good thing is it's actually all this things I can take a lesson from it, once I'm profitable this would be a bigger headache

Daily Tasks/Goals

A goal in the end is a set of tasks, so for daily goals could be something like Have Landers Ready for campaign A, which could mean in terms of tasks, gather 10 different landers and modify whatever is needed, plus host them in the server and talk with AM for approval.

I will estimate the hours of each tasks and make sure it covers the day.

And I will try to keep this thread daily updated.

So my routine is gonna be:

6:30 Wake up
7:30 Gym
8:30/9:00 Work
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Work
16:30 Enjoy while it's still day time!

I think 6 hours of focused work should be enough but let's see how the experiment goes, of course when I have a campaign running If I need to dedicate more attention I will, priority could quickly change if I need to milk a campaign
But for the all planned weekly work this will be the hours.

That's all for now, I'll be back tomorrow morning!

Cheers!
Andre

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Hey guys, so as I wrote before, here are my weekly and daily goals.


Weekly Goals

- Prepare Brazilian Campaign and make it ready for launch on Monday.
- Run 10 different AB Tests on Australia Campaign.
- Prepare agressive campaign, pretty similar to my AU campaign, but the offers and landers can be more aggressive.
- Prepare backbutton redirect campaign for both Australia and Brazil rather than sending to the offer, most likely anti-virus campaign.
- Look for either a partner or perhaps look into hiring someone to help me with collecting landers, replace links, spy competition and upload to server.
- Read Cashvertising

BackLog Tasks

- Set up Brazilian Campaign in Voluum and Traffic Source (1h)
- Set up Agressive Campaign in Voluum and Traffic Souce (1h)
- Set up Back Button Redirect Campaign in Voluum (30m)
- Test Landers speed with pingdom for all new landers (2h)
- Go to bank to request extract and get paypal deposits in order to confirm in website (1h)
- Work on the 10 different A/B tests (3h)
- Spy competition on Brazil and collect 10 different landers (2h)
- Learn more about anti-virus offers in general, landers, strategies to promote, check CPA networks available offers, etc. (3h)
- Go to sites like upwork, freelancer.com, look at filipino websites, or possibly find a thai person. (This is not easy to estimate, I guess I need to keep looking so I'll allocate time for this one on daily tasks)
- ... Will add more once I completed some of them.

Daily Tasks for today

- Go to bank to request extract and get paypal deposits amount in order to confirm in paypal website (1h)
- Work on the 10 different A/B tests (I already know the tests I wanna do, just need to work on them) (3h)
- Spy competition on Brazil and collect 10 different landers (2h)


Cheers,
Andre

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Wow Andre! I just got caught up reading your follow-along. Very impressed with the level of detail.

That excel chart you did where you charted popads' bids etc. - I can't tell which values were gotten from the traffic estimator and which ones were calculated, and what your assumptions were. One thing I want to point out though, is that the conversion rate CAN and WILL in most cases vary greatly with bid levels. Because advertisers will bid higher for placements that convert well, and blacklist placements that don't convert, if you bid low you'll get all the junk traffic from bad placements that nobody else wants. Only when you bid higher will you have access to better placements.

Generally Speaking: Basically you have two graphs of conversion rate vs. bid, which have opposite effects on ROI (i.e. higher CR = higher revenue, higher bid = higher cost). When you bid higher you get higher ROI up to a certain optimal point, after which further increase in CR will no longer keep up with the increase in costs so the ROI will start dropping. There's no way to accurately predict where that optimal point is (i.e. which bid will result in the highest ROI), and this point will be constantly shifting with changing levels of competition.

So what I would suggest, is to set up several camps with staggered bids, run the same amount of money to each (10-20x payout should be enough), and see which bid gives you the best ROI. If you perform this test as part of your initial testing, you can choose the camp with the best bid (pausing the camps with the other bids) and use that camp to test your offers and landers, in order to save on test budget. If you perform this after you've already found a good offer and lander, you can further increase your ROI.

And of course, due to the ever-changing bidding landscape, you may need to repeat this test from time to time. But hopefully by then you'll already have cut all the bad placements and performed other optimizations to allow cutting into your margins to stay profitable if you have to bid higher.

I know it sounds weird to ask your AM from one network to help "sell" you to another network, but this is customary in this business. Another thing you can do is give your new network a link to this follow-along to show how much effort you're putting into your camps. If you need me to vouch for you, send me a PM.


Like you, I'm leaning towards relying on actual test data as well, instead of using the blacklist. My reasoning is that some of the most-blacklisted placements may not be the worst ones, but they made it to the list merely because they're some of the biggest placements so are higher-profile. What I mean is, a placement can only convert as well as the lander and offer being run there, so for any particular placement there must be people making profits from it and people that aren't. Therefore the bigger a placement is, the more often it would get blacklisted by people that aren't able to make it work. Hope you can make sense of this confusing explanation.


Very nice testing and documentation!

Regarding bots: Based on initial testing, I've found that some of the best-converting placements were the ones that contained as much as 40-60% bot traffic! Of course it doesn't mean that bot traffic converts better - it's probably due to the human traffic from those placements converting SO WELL that the placement can perform well overall IN SPITE OF the bot traffic. The network I used for the bot test wasn't popads though. But once your camp is profitable it may be a good idea to go back and test these placements again, especially seeing as they are some of the biggest ones for your geo.


First of all, it would really help to know how to cut landers properly:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Banners-Part-1

To compare offers that have different payouts, this is my new best friend as recommended by a fellow STM member:

https://win-vector.shinyapps.io/CampaignPlanner_v3/

To see instructions on how to use it please see:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ou-pick-offers

Note that when cutting stuff we don't consider CTR at all.


However - the CTR on some of your landers is appalling. I'm starting to think this is the norm for AU sweeps, because I've personally tested the landers from some of the other follow-alongs and ended up with the same appalling CTR. But anything below 1% CTR would still be unusual. (e.g. Your lander #8 had $10+ ad spend and only got a single click - ouch!) The first couple landers have pretty nice CTRs though! Anyways no matter - just cut landers based on impressions and conversions.

I see that one of the offers seems to be doing the best, but I'm guessing you weren't running all these offers during the same time period because they didn't get the same amount of impressions. To split-test anything, be sure to run them simultaneously, otherwise the results will be skewed by fluctuations. For example if you ran OfferA yesterday and OfferB today, and yesterday was a particularly high-converting day of the week for your vertical, then it wouldn't be fair to OfferB if you were to compare the results.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that you take that offer that's made 5 conversions so far and use that to test more landers. See if you can get that CR up. After that, test more offers.

Testing more offers is your best bet to increasing ROI by leaps. The lander doesn't have to be the greatest but it has to be at least decent. I always like to say that good offers will convert with an OK-lander, but not even the best lander will convert a shitty offer.


Have you checked out our masterminds section yet?


Completely agree with you on this! I think you'll enjoy caurmen's post here (in case you haven't come across it already):

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...rly-CHEATSHEET


Looking forward to seeing you progress at this game Andre! And thanks for starting such a stellar follow-along!



Amy

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Hi Amy,

Thanks a lot for stopping by with valuable information

Thanks also for your offer of vouching for me! That would be great!

Regarding Optimal ROI vs Bidding, I totally get what you mean now because ROI might change exponentially between placements, and some placements you only get access if you bid high, I learned this recently as I finally got my first stable green I even got into bidding fights, spend more time on that than anything else.. It's not easy at all to track this optimal ROI vs bidding with Voluum I need new tools, and already taking care of that..
Anyways, I will put more details once the campaign completely dies, for now just focus on working.

Andre

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Hey guys,

So, now that things slowed down a bit more I found the time to write a proper post.

I'm glad to announce that I reached the barrier of $100/day with sweepstakes, but... just for 3 days, for now..

Basically since my post almost a month ago, where I did all that planning, I ended up not strictly following it, then I decided to put some pictures of my goals in my room.
Printed down schedules, motivation pictures, goals and a countdown until I go on holiday to Portugal. I wanted to put some pressure on myself, wake up every morning and focus on what I have to do.

All this planning happened on 15 Jun.
I decided to launch 2 campaigns a day, 1 stm post a day, gym, food, hobbies and activities and have a successfull campaign until August 3 (day of my flight).

Well as you can see I didn't write any post, neither I launched 2 campaigns a day, neither I went to gym or eat properly. I'm good at making this plans just to not follow them.
On the other hand though, this set me into way more motion, I started working hard and be focusing on work, I reviewed my campaign launching strategy, and tried to launch 2 a day. I realised that I didn't launch a new campaign for such a long time that it took me a lot just to have one ready.

I really tried hard to launch 2 a day, I got a big spresheet with a lot of good offers, I seperated them into campaigns.
I did an improved version of my bidding strategy, and I studied the statistics again, applied in excel and saw what's the minimum views I need for each offer before I decide to cut.

Now I understand why they say 3 - 5 times payout. I was doing with a 95% confidence level and I got the double in average, I guess if I did with 99% I would get the 3-5 times.

There are so many variables, ROI%, CPM, Payout, Min CR, Min CTR, Min CVR
What I learned from doing this spreadsheet is that indeed only the payout value matter to define how much test budget you need. All the other variables influence everything except min test budget.




After having all this down, I planned for each offer this calculations. I wanted to spend only the necessary for each combination of lander/offer.

This took me almost 2 days to do the proper strategy, and after that I started working on the first campaign applying it.

I decided to launch the first campaign after all this planning in 1 country and I started by running bot traffic, I saw some conversions when doing it but not enough traffic, so in the meanwhile I started working on a second campaign also on PopAds for another GEO.

I launched the second campaign, and I started thinking how is possible people are launching 1 campaign a day and managing all this running campaigns and getting the most out of the data they get specially when they are newbies. It's just too much data to analyse in my opinion with the experience that I have.

I guess some people don't try to dig the hole, they just walk on the field and try to find a hole.
Anyways, even though I decided that it made sense that second strategy I could not let go the fact that I needed more data before I take a decision to move out.
I also saw conversions coming in when doing the bot traffic, so I started to test out landers for my first campaign.

I tested quite a few, and I was around breakeven, during some hours of day positive, and then negative, and then not enough traffic.. Then tried Plugrush, the same almost no traffic.

So I decided to try on ZeroPark, again same kind of performance, not stable, but I had much more traffic and also doing better than PopAds.

On Tuesday I was like, ok Andre, I guess it's time to try something new, Anti virus they say it converts really good, I read cashvertising and fear is one main factor that makes people buy, I thought, AV landers are pretty scary, I should really give a try. I'm overwhelmed for like 1 hour thinking what I should do to make this shit works, then I look at my computer and BAAM, I have 20 conversions from one placement at Zero Park within a hour.

From those 20 conversions, I could immediately see what type of settings was converting and applied to my main campaign and BUM I was suddenly green.

Basically lesson learned, I was not bidding high because in ZeroPark there was quite a bit of traffic, so I would spend money fast if I would bid high. So what happened was that this placement where I got 20 conversions from, I was in lower position in the queue, when someone must stopped bidding I suddenly started to receive traffic from it then I got the conversions. By having in a shor time period this conversions the settings of the user were similar and I could apply to the main camp.

Those 20 conversions, happened, so I created a green camp, put all good placements there, constantly change my bidding and make sure I'm the first, checking my ROI for each placement, I was able to reach almost $308 that day. I was so fucking excited that I could not even eat, I was in the office until like 11pm went straight home and continue monitoring.
The thing with Zero Park is that if you don't control the bidding per placement you can be wasting money as you would pay the average bidding even if top bid is below that.
So I was monitoring every 30m or less.

Tuesday screenshot:

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The 3 days after I was able to milk in total $917 profit.
I was also trying to expand to other traffic sources, but not able to make it work, and also ZeroPark was consuming too much time. I working, sleeping a few hours, could not even sleep properly since this started..


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The campaign died on Friday within a hour unfortunately. (I had a couple of offers and was not due to landers).

Initially I thought it was tech issue with tracker or cake not passing conversions, but now I see that is just the good placements I had, even though I'm the first bidder I don't get traffic.
Apparently this happens all the time when they see the traffic is doing good, monetize in other ways..


http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...5-Smells-Fishy


Anyways, in a way was good because it gave me time to build my systems, sign up to other Traffic Sources, CPA networks, be ready in the future to scale more, and I got my roommate to join me. The Green coming in can convince anyone hehe


From all this the biggest lesson I learned is, persistence was the key.
Persistence in the sense of keep trying to make it work, whatever you do, because I don't think I found the formula yet.
What I did found was that this shit works! I just have to be ready when it works again.
Because when it's working, you need a whole different set of skills compared to launching campaigns. Managing campaigns and scaling is a whole different game.

I'm still not giving up on this campaign, trying in different TRs.


PS: I reached overall profitability

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Before the green camp




After




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That's it for now, have a good weekend!
Andre

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Hey Guys,

So my campaign finally died kind of everywhere, I guess the offers are done, not sure.

Basically we were trying to scale the campaign to Exoclick, Propeller, AdCash, Go2Mobi, DNTX, Leabolt.

We ran in all this traffic sources, came up with new systems to launch campaigns, collect stats from Voluum using their Rest API, generate reports, see how much can bid for each placement to save money, etc, etc.
We were able to break even but only on ZP I made money.

It was very good experience though, we worked like crazy and when I get a new gem in my hands I will be able to handle and scale much better.



So now it's the time to find a new Campaign.

I have some questions if someone would be willing to answer would be great

1) When your campaign dies aka the offers your running died, do you just replace offers and try them with the same targetting? Or you just start all over again running broad? (Assuming offers would be same vertical but slightly different)

2) So far I've launched in total 5 campaigns since i started in 29 March.
I test several offers within a campaign, up to 10 offers or more per campaign given mobile sweepstakes are all the same... it's either win iphone or samsung...

So I still get a bit confused on how can people launch several campaigns per week in this vertical.
Are they considering launching the same offers in different Traffic Source a new Camp?
Are they considering each batch of 3 offers a new Camp?
Are they considering a new GEO a new Camp?
For me I've been considering a new Camp when I move to another GEO. If I'm working on the same GEO and I'm promoting Mobile Sweepstakes in different traffic sources, then I consider to be one Camp.


3) I think it's time also to start trying new verticals, I accomplished my goal which was to stick with sweepstakes until hitting $100/day.
Which verticals would you recommend me to get on?
I must say, I like pre landed offers, if I can focus only on traffic optimization and data analysis great because I feel that's what I'm good at. (if you know any vertical or CPA network that has lot's of these please recommend me )

Cheers,
Andre

---

keep up the good work man. learning a lot here. looking forward to more posts on your progress!

---

Hey, Andre tnx for ur jouney ) i read a lot) im just starting my own way at AM and reading persons like u inspire me.
And also tnx to Amy ) u always help to every one)

---

Hi Andre, nice follow along.

I'm no expert, and others might disagree, but personally, I've had the most success just running whatever seems to be working at the time (according to spy tools).

Seeing as you're ripping landers etc. it doesn't really seem to matter so much which vertical you choose, at least that's been my experience anyway.

More important is the optimisation and data analysis process, and as you said, scaling to other traffic sources can be tough (still trying to master that myself).

---

Hi Andre,
I really learned a lot from your follow along. I joined STM a month ago and trying to learn as much as possible and then use all that knowledge. Action is key they say haha. But keep up the good work and I'll follow you.
Ralph

---

Hi everybody,

So I was out of STM for 2 or 3 months, and subscribed again as AWA is coming and I wanna network a lot.

Since my last post 4 months ago, I feel we grow so much, specially on systems side.

From the moment I get a list of offers from my AM until the campaign is set in 5 different traffic sources + Voluum, I'm now able to do this in literally 3 minutes.
I'm now able to monitor properly my campaigns, get alerts on my phone when stop converting, get alerts on something starts converting, real time stats with ROI charts over time, visits, conversions, etc.

I have my own landing page system with rotation, obfuscated code automatically, backbutton, redirection, etc.

It has been a lot of constant work, lately I've been waking up around 6am-7am, I immediately open my laptop and start working until 8/9, then go to the office, work, lunch, work, dinner, work and go to bed completely exhausted. I've been working week and weekends.

On the top of the systems we've been launching campaigns.

You guys must be wondering now after what I wrote above how am I doing on the core business of affiliates. So I won't make you wait and I will put a screenshot right now of Voluum for the last 6 months of data due to voluum limitation.

---



---

As you can see, I'm still not Banking, but I'm on the breakeven, pretty much constantly, I don't think I have been more than 1.5k negative so far.
Just this month of November we spent 2k and made 2k back, and now that I'm focusing 100% on campaigns I only see this going up.

I'm honestly happy with my results because I think there is so much to improve on the marketing side.

Starting by the fact that 95% of my campaigns are direct linking (even though I did the LP system... )

If you look at my CTR% at the screenshot and my CR%, you will see they don't make sense, that's because I do direct link, and just some clicks when I sometimes remember to test LPs.


I feel I'm very strong technically speaking and on creating systems BUT I'm a total newbie in the marketing side, I don't know angles, I don't understand why something converts better than other, I don't understand the basic marketing concepts or why someone would subscribe to offers that I promote. The only thing I do is mass TEST and look at data.


I do wanna study the marketing side, but honestly we keep being dragged to improve our systems, to test new traffic sources, to find more traffic for certain campaigns, to find new offers on different networks, to test something that came out, etc, etc.. I'm all over the place and doing all sorts of tasks, would be great to have a team so that I could focus more, and we did hired some part-time people to help us, but still is not enough.

I'm also wondering to be honest how important is angles on POPs? Cause everything in I see it's pretty much the same, AV landers, Sweeps, you have this themed landers, with intro pops, exits, countdowns, etc, wondering what else I could change to make the user convert.


I think I have reached the time where it would be good to speak with an experienced Affiliate, and understand what's my bottle neck to do the jump to profitability, hopefully I will be able to learn something in this AWA to do the turn.

Another thing I've been thinking lately would be to team up with someone which is very strong at Marketing side / Networking, he can do high ROI campaigns but his weak side is scaling, coding and is at a stage where he needs help in order to scale.

If the right person appears I might consider this seriously, although on another hand I do wanna know everything and really learn marketing properly. Achieving by myself would make me a little bit more proud

Anyways, this is my update, I hope to see some of the guys in here at AWA!

See you next week

Adios!
Andre

---

Hi Andre welcome back! Thanks for the update! You've been working hard.

BTW your screenshots aren't showing up properly. It would be easier to upload them to an image host like imgur.com, then pasting the BBCode link in the post.

Regarding your bottle-neck - would be difficult to provide specific advice without knowing, well, the specifics. But I'll jot down what comes to mind and hope that some of these will apply to your situation:

-Learn to let go of camps that are doing low profits/ROI. Not only will these camps tie up your valuable time (that you could be using to find better offers, or scale on camps that have higher profits potential), but low-ROI camps can easily dip into the red.

-Since you're already direct-linking with success on pop (I'm assuming you've been running pop?), you can most probably make the same offers convert on display traffic by using "generic" banners:

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

-If you're running pop, but don't have a way of keeping your landers out of spy tools, then spending a lot of time on coming up with your own landers may not be worth the time, as it would be noticed and ripped the same day you run traffic to it. Start testing ripped landers to help achieve higher ROI.

-Focus more effort on testing, and only pick the very best offers to optimize and scale. This way your average ROI and profits will be higher, and camps will last longer, and it will take less money to cut placements etc.

-Drill down into stats more to identify only the best traffic segments to target - again, letting go of traffic segments that are not very profitable.



This is all I could think of for now. See you at AWA - feel free to stop by the STM booth to say hi!



Amy

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Hi Amy!

Thanks for stopping by, screenshot issue solved

Indeed I'm doing strictly pops, and your post about Display came in right on time as I was thinking I need to expand to Display in order to scale.
The generic banners with high CTR% sounds like a solid advice for my case, given I have currently an offer with very high CR% on direct linking but not enough traffic, I don't see why it wouldn't work if the traffic came from display, so in this case maximizing the CTR% would be enough to test it out.

Yes, I also got aware a lot of people are indeed hiding their landers from Spy Tools, but given I was doing mostly direct linking I wasn't super concerned about it, but that's something I will take care soonish.

Sounds good, I will stop to say hi then

Cheers,
Andre

---

Hi Everyone!

Today I came here to bitch a little bit and hopefully get some advice to make me less concerned

So basically I have been playing with Display and found what I guess you guys call a pocket of profit. I found the right placement and the right offer, and I'm having very high CR% doing direct link to the offer.
The placement is pretty stable and I'm doing xxx/day for the past almost 2 weeks.

I'm all happy cause it's good that this is my most stable campaign I had so far, so I go to request the payment to my network and they say, oh we need to check traffic quality before paying you.
So at this stage I already have generated almost xxxx in revenue, maybe my mistake for not asking earlier to check my traffic quality.

Then they say, oh your CR% is too high, can you make it lower, I'm afraid the advertiser is gonna make problems when they see it.
Like start asking questions, screenshots proofs and etc. So I tried to lower down CR% but honestly was being difficult tasks unless I just loose money on purpose, which is preferable then being stopped I guess. On the other hand I'm quite worried and I'm not sure the advertiser wouldn't check report per day so wouldn't matter to lower CR% at this stage...

So I had to stop sending them traffic and now it can take at least 3 days for them to check quality...

I know my traffic quality is good, cause the placement is pretty legit and kind of related to the vertical.
I'm also doing direct linking, so if the user is converting, is due to their landing page, whatever complaints they have it shouldn't be more than what they already have..

So here is what is concerning me:

1) If they (advertiser) do see there is high CR%, and wanna know more details, what should I share?
My AM said if they suspect my traffic is misleading they will ask for my ad networks and placement I'm running...
I mean, in the end they can say whatever they want cause I don't have a way to prove anything on their side..

2) What kind of responsibility the CPA networks has in this case?
What I know is, I invest money in this campaigns, I do everything right and compliant, and in the end I still get my ass at risk and the CPA network does not assume for anything?

PS: I am diversified by the way, I've been trying to find similar offers from other networks, but the one I'm talking was performing better and therefore made more money there.

Would be great to hear some advise from you guys!

Cheers
Andre

---

To lower cr you need to buy cheap traffic and send it to your tracker. Thats all.

---

This is a pretty weird situation, but it happens from time to time. Networks/advertisers become suspicious when they see a too high CR as it could indicate sending incentive traffic for example. I don't know anything about the promo methods you used, but in case all was legit, you should have nothing to worry about as the quality should be just fine.

On top of that, in case no fraud was involved, the network should pay you without questions asked - quality checks should be used in order to open cap and not to delay payments.

You can definitely use the method Atilla suggested in order to lower CR, just buy some cheap traffic and send it their way - pops for example

---

I'm super confident about my traffic, I know it's related to the vertical, and I'm doing direct link, so, if they would have complaints it would be their own lander inducing user to mistake.

The only reason I'm worried is because my AM is like basically saying that they might ask questions given my CR% is too high and I would need to provide proofs on pretty much everything..
Lowering the CR% with pops is a good option for future, but it's too late to do at this moment.

The thing is, if I'm doing everything right, do they actually have the right to ask me any kind of proofs solely on the fact that I have high CR%?
I mean, KPI should be user complaints, not high CR...

---

Oh no! Sorry to hear about this! However, this is a very good lesson-learned. In the future, always ask for a quality check for the first batch of leads before sending further traffic. We'll just have to keep our fingers crossed that the aff network will pay you and allow further traffic.

In terms of lowering CR: Attila and Matuloo have suggested the most convenient way - basically just bid the lowest amount for pop traffic to balance things out (you can play with the bid - you could potentially lower the CR and make profits with the pop camps at the same time). Alternatively, if you're good at coding, you can whip up a very simple script to load the offer url more than once for every visitor. But the first way is the safest.

I would suggest to just be transparent at least this one time, as you won't want to put your xxxx revenue at risk. Next time though, you'll know to ask for a lead quality check before sending volume, and to also ask whether the CR is sufficiently low (which is ironic but sometimes necessary as we've seen).

As for responsibilities - every aff network has its own TOS. And even if the aff network is legally obligated to pay you but decide not to, you're probably not going to take them to court over xxxx.

In the ideal situation, your AM should have asked the advertiser for lead quality check before you racked up all those leads, but the reality is that most AMs are too busy to stay on top of stuff like this. So the more measures we take to protect ourselves, the better.

Protective measures include: Proactively asking for lead quality verification before scaling, and keeping a record of all correspondence between us and our AMs in case we need to refer to it in case of dispute.

But you're right - at the end of the day, you don't have access to stats on lead quality, so you'll just have to go on what the advertiser/aff network tells you. Let's see what they say first.

Keeping my fingers crossed for you...


Amy

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You can refer to the network's TOS. But AFAIK, if the network has reason to suspect you're running in a misleading way (which I know you're not), then they have the right to ask for specifics on how you're running and where you're getting your traffic from.

And in this case they do have a valid concern: An overly-high CR CAN indicate that you're either being misleading or are running incentive traffic. Whether or not they have any ulterior motive is irrelevant - they do have grounds to ask you to provide details.

I've run into this problem many times myself, and my best advice would be to work with your AM on this so that the advertiser will pay the network. This way everybody will be happy. It would be a lot more difficult to get your aff network to pay you out of their own pocket - even if you're 100% in the right.



Amy

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Hey Amy, thanks for the advices, it has been a year and I did not renew my subscription, in the end they didn't pay some small revenue which was fine, they didn't bother also to explain much or give/ask any proof and I kind of stopped care about it.

Note: I will post shortly an update of everything I achieved in the past 1 year! Stay connected

---

So it has been almost 1 year since I made my last post and today I decided to come back to STM to tell what i've been doing, hopefully find some advice, connect with more people and possibly JV with a person good marketing but lacking tech knowledge or even open up my tool to some people.

So much happened since then, I could post some screenshots of my most successful months but success is so relative, someday you might feel you're successful and other day you might feel you failed. I guess there is no such thing as success cause in this industry if you don't keep trying new things, the successful thing you have will eventually die.

I know you guys love screenshots so here goes

Here are some screenshots of numbers I did in the past few months

April


May


Jun


July


August


September



In total since April, on traffic, we did

Revenue: $95,145.04
Costs: $74,629.98
Profit: $20,515.07

How I made this money in mostly 4 months period?

Traffic: Mobile Pops
Vertical: Mobile Subscription
Funnel: Direct Link, no Iframe, no autosub!! (Surprise!! Yes it works!!)

Well I found publishers that worked good with direct link, I could buy their traffic through several different traffic sources but eventually I found the one that worked directly with them which allowed me to have lower bids and much higher volume, had huge volume for like 4 geos, and they all pretty much worked, what I needed was to find offers.
Bear in mind, bids in here were like up to $16 for some carriers, no wonder why it's so hard to find placements like this, cause bidding low you would almost get 0 visits. Traffic Reps in general also have no idea of what bidding are per carrier&placement and also no idea about the volumes neither. You just gotta test basically.

Mobile carrier billing is hard, there is so much shady behavior and I have no idea why. You can have a winning offer for like 4h and after that goodbye at least for the GEOs/Carriers I was running.
If lasts 2-5 days, you can consider yourself lucky.

Even good offers then can have 4% CR at some hours, and 0.5% at other hours. I suspect the Advertiser themselves might be the one doing shady things on their side. It's the only logical explanation I can find.

I was testing something like 50 offers a day in total for 4 different carriers, and every 5-10 minutes rotating offers based on stats. I would keep the golden offers in a path, and possible good offers in another path, so I constantly sending traffic to all the offers but allocating more to the ones that have better EPV.
I was essentially doing what a smartlink does, but manually.
It was crazy I couldn't sleep properly, each time I stopped working we would stop making proper money and start wasting.

So me and my business partner started to build our own system, aka rotator or smartlink.

We now rotate offers, track costs automatically, auto-pause campaigns if nothing is working, test exact budget per offer based on payout. Pull offers from all the networks we work with through API, attach to Voluum campaigns through our backoffice, any alert you could imagine to help you with campaigns monitoring we did it and receive on our phones. So Jun and July were less work cause I didn't need to refresh stats anymore, I just needed to focus on bidding and finding more offers. Campaigns could now run 24/7.


Why did the campaign die?

Well on August I was feeling pretty burned out, and went for Holiday for almost 1 month, the performance in general for my best 2 carriers dropped significantly because they supposedly put captchas on their pay page, eventually I stopped buying the traffic cause I was on holiday, and guess what I came back, the publisher disappeared, my traffic reps were not able to find the exact same source again, they said they changed feeds and spreaded their traffic through subids or whatever, and basically I have no idea how to get it back neither one single traffic rep is able to get it back. Amazing.

I'm so annoyed with pop traffic, cause building an asset when you don't even know where the traffic is coming from is literally gambling.. I really tried hard during these 4 months to find out everything I could about the traffic I was buying but the info is just not there.


Where do I stand now?

Well I'm back to launching campaigns on direct link trying to find more traffic on several geos. Testing 3+ new carriers a day with at least 3 offers each.
I have some deals where I resell some traffic
I have my own software to manage/scale campaigns, pull offers, any daily operation you need it's there.

Future plans? What I'm doing to do now?

Well this is a tough question. My best day was $800+ profit and I had several days doing $500+

After doing this numbers and being back to negative everyday is just so frustrating.
Specially cause I feel I didn't learn shit on the marketing side. I have no idea why people convert or why offer A does better then B or why placement A does better then B.
My motivation is quite down at the moment and I guess that's why I made this post. Surprisingly I was more motivated even it took me almost 1 year of pure fight to have a proper profitable campaign vs now.
Hearing other opinions, outside comments would probably help me in terms of direction.

Negative things:

Not diversified in terms of traffic.
Didn't learn marketing side.

Positive things:

Good relationships with Traffic Reps
Good relationships with Several Networks
System made for Reporting, Monitoring and Managing
Hired our first full time employee
Set up Company
Cashflow problem solved


So I'm thinking I need to change things, I wanna diversify, I wanna get to understand the visitor, I wanna build assets.

Here is a few ideas I have:

* Native - I read and I believe that Native can be pretty good. I will learn user psychology, angles, copywriting. I should know where I'm buying the traffic from, so I guess less focus on the traffic and more focus on the offer / angle. I don't have to target per carrier which means more volume. ROIs% are supposedly bigger once you make it work, and you can always improve your angle. So your creativity matters.

* Facebook would be an option for Gaming, other than that I don't wanna deal with accounts for now unless someone would be willing to JV and provide the accounts.

* Pops with Mobile subscription - Keep trying to find more placements, but I have the feeling that is being very hard at the moment, even I look at network reports I see way less revenue vs before.

* JV with someone that needs help running camps - We have our software and if you someone is rotating offers manually, copy/pasting URLs from networks to Voluum, can't sleep at night cause you afraid offer is gonna go down, etc, etc. Our software solves the majority of bottlenecks in daily operations.

* Make our software SaaS.

* Start finally trying landers for adult offers such as dating or nutra in adult pops/display where I know the exact website that I'm buying traffic from.

* Do some IT projects on Upwork possibly related to affiliate. After all we have knowledge in most APIs from traffic sources, CPA networks, Trackers.


As you can see many ideas, and uncertain what I should pursue. Would be great to hear some opinions, advices from you guys.

Cheers!

---

WOW~~~

Thanks so much for checking in! And with such great news no less! It's always encouraging to see a member find success!

Plus - you dropped so many knowledge bombs! I'm just going to highlight some of them below.

I'll definitely point this out to some of the newbies that have tested under 10 offers and getting discouraged that "it doesn't work". Direct-linking still works - it has just become more difficult and will require more testing.


This is a very good model: Find out which placements are converting well, then cut out the middle man (i.e. the traffic source) by buying the traffic directly from site owners.

With how competitive pop traffic has gotten, it's almost a necessity to try to establish some sort of edge in order to make profits - and this is definitely a powerful one.


GOLD!

It requires a strong heart to bid that high in order to see whether you'll trigger traffic from such "gem placements".

A more wallet-friendly way would be to clone a lower-bid camp where the bad placements have already been cut, then set a high bid and cut placement very rigorously. Many people don't realize the importance of testing bids, especially high bids - it's great to see examples of how well that has paid off for you.


This will serve as a good example to some of the newbie members that have only tested 3 offers and are wondering "why am I not making profits? This doesn't work!"

And spreading out the traffic over multiple offers is an ingenious way of counteracting the volatility that's so typical of pop traffic!


Pop traffic still works - but you'll burn out eventually from all the volatility - having to constantly monitor and tweak to stay in the green, and having to constantly test new stuff to find new profits to replace lost profits due to dying camps/offers.

To make substantial profits from pop, you'll need either automation to do more in less time, or have a team of people working for you, or both.

There are easier traffic types that have greater long-term profits potential - FB for example.


With your 1)perseverance (it's not like you'd settle for a 9-5 now or ever again), 2)experience in maximizing profits from campaigns, 3)the automation you have in place, and 4)the profits you've made from pop up to now, you can jump into any other paid traffic types, start testing, and expect a lot more success than what you've gotten from pop.

And I completely hear you that running pop isn't a real business - it's not sustainable, and things can only get worse from here would be my opinion.

Pop is a good starting place because the barrier to entry is so low. But really, I would strongly recommend that you consider moving away from it, at least partially. I've put some of my thoughts about pop traffic in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post321311


If you go this route, I would recommend starting by ripping good camps from Adplexity Native, for tier 3 geos. I heard that this model is the easiest way to make initial profits.


Gaming is definitely not the only niche that can work on FB!

Ecommerce for example is another. And lead generation of all types would be yet another.

B2B lead generation (and B2C as well - basically many types of lead generation can work well) can be very lucrative when done correctly. And if you stay compliant in the way you promote offers, there's little risk of getting your account banned.

(Even if you do, it's not difficult to get new accounts these days, but we're not allowed to talk about buying/selling of accounts so I'll stop here.)

You can find CPA offers that pay per lead (e.g. maxbounty, shareasale, linkshare....) and promote those. Or you can cut out the middle man and approach businesses directly to negotiate a price per lead that you generate for them. Or, you could start by promoting CPA offers, then once you've locked down well-converting demographics and creatives etc., approach businesses in the same niche to work directly with them.


Again, if you asked me, I would suggest to move away from pop.


This is always a good choice! I know many people are looking for automation solutions.

If you do go this route, you can write a post to intro your product in the Products/Offers or Buy/Sell section. You can also put a link to your product in your signature, and start posting to answer other members' questions or otherwise helping them out - which would be easy given your knowledge.

And you don't need to roll out all the features at the start. Even something as simple as a script that can add offers to voluum automatically (or even just more quickly), people would gladly pay for. And this is not speculation.


I did some testing with male enhancement COD products - can convert well, especially for tier 3 geos.

Adult is evergreen, although competition has increased. Matuloo's the expert on adult. If you start a follow-along I bet he could give you some valuable advice.


It's important to do what you love - that way work won't feel like a chore, and it will make it easy to get out of bed in the mornings.

However, from a profits perspective, I wouldn't recommend that you resort to doing this. People that are strong in tech are everywhere, and you can hire them from developing countries for as low as 3 figures/month full-time.

If you do choose to go this route though, I would suggest that you hire people to do the actual coding, to free yourself up for the high-level tasks, such as promoting your business, negotiating contracts, and designing the algo.


All are good ideas but yes, difficult to choose from.

Perhaps give yourself a month's time to research and dabble in a few of them to see which one(s) you want to pursue further.

Again - thanks so much for coming back to update us on things. Congratulations on your success and I have no doubt that you'll achieve so much more!

Please do continue to keep us posted on your journey. And consider making a post in the "Success Story" section - which your screenshots definitely deserve one:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...uccess-Stories




Amy

---

Hi asknopt,

I hope you making more money that you're showing in those screenshots since it is simply not enough if you're skilled and working your ass off.

If you're convinced your management-software works and delivers decent quality in results I definitely would skip all the marketing-stress (since you're seeming to hit a burnout) and just concentrate on this piece of gold. Make a saas-version and use all your relations (including STM) to get people interested. There are always people buying, especially when it is a good quality product.

---

That's not a fair statement IMO.

He accomplished these numbers just by 1)direct-linking, 2)running 100% whitehat, 3)on pop.

That's a feat by my standards!

If you're doing any better using the same approach, then kudos to you, but even then, it wouldn't be fair to say that he wasn't making enough.



Amy

---

Hi Asknopt,

Thanks for sharing such great value info. I do have some questions. Hope you can answer me.

1. Once you have identify the converting placement. Are you whitelist that placement in a new camp according to their bid price?

2. As mentioned, keep the golden offers in a path, and possible good offers in another path. What approach you take to test the " possible offer" 5x payout ?

3. How about the "good placement "targeting? Eg. OS. Do you narrow it or targeting everything

4. Do you cap the view frequency? 1 in 24 hours? or no caps

I do facing some issue to whitelist placement. While I identify some good placement. I whitelist it at new camp and try to bid same price or slightly higher with same targeting. But that camp seem not getting view , izzit i still out bid ? Secondly, i believe a lot new camp having this situation. Once you launch new camp, there are few placement able generate 1 conversion out of 10 view (maybe less). But it's will not increase view afterwards. Becoz it's only one conversion generated, so may need at least 2 conversion to consider whitelist. How to do approach for these kind of placement ?

Hope you can advice and share me some tips. Many Thanks

Cheers,
Leong

---

Hey Asknopt, really great follow along and awesome that you came back to give such a detailed breakdown!

I'm currently in a similar situation to you, except minus a few zeros... I also find it strange how some offers get super high epc's for a few hours then bomb out afterwards, then come back again. It's just so volatile and I spend too much time looking at the dashboard trying to see what is doing well at the current hour, which is also difficult due to delayed conversions.

I've also been direct linking and playing with smartlinks between a few carriers and then concentrating on ones with high EPC's, but struggling to find real volume. Granted I've mainly been sticking to Popads.

Do you have requirements for offers such as the need to be over a certain payout to make it worthwhile for the lower volume that comes with specific carriers?

---

Hello,

- $20,515.07 in 6 months = $3420/month
- working full time
- He/she accomplished these numbers just by 1)direct-linking, 2)running 100% whitehat, 3)on pop. -> Exactly, that is what I mean, Asknopt seems to be a skilled marketeer!
- paying for staff, bookkeeping, servers, domains, trackers, tools, all kinds of fees and ... and ... and so on, there is not much left of that $3420

Asknopt deserves better!!!

Anyway, the question was for opinions/advice;

In mho he/she can earn a lot more with his/her AM-management-software,
and, more important, he/she can avoid a lot of stress.

---

Agree with all that!

Very sorry I misunderstood your intent! I agree - the OP could be doing a LOT more damage with their skills if applied to something else.



Amy

---

Thanks for the amazing feedback @Amy!

I followed your advice and made my tool post and updated my signature

Indeed I need some time to think what I will pursue in terms of traffic/verticals.
In the meanwhile will also connect with people wanting to use my tool, let's see how this goes.

---

1) I use several different strategies depending on the traffic source as well. But in general I have a broad campaign and then multi campaigns with different bidding. I move placements around accordingly to their performance.
If a placement does particularly well then I move to a seperate campaign where I do crazy high bids just to see what's the top volume of that placement per minute.

2) I usually test offers in placements I already they know they convert. So my formula is pretty much 2x offer payout. If the offer payout is really small like $0.15 I would do like 5x payout or more.
I also try to test the offers throughout the day cause like I said, CR% vary drastically you wanna catch a bit of data on every hour for at least 24h (the longer the better).

3) I do broad targeting, the more you restrict your campaign the less priority you will have in terms of traffic. Most traffic will always be android at least in the countries I buy.

4) Honestly never played much with Frequency CAP, I always use 1 visits per 24h. I'm not sure how accurate they are cause I still get visits from same IPs. Although given I rotate so many offers actually I should play more with this.

5) I'm not sure I understand your question, but if you have a placement with 1 conversion and only let's say 10 visits. I would put it in a seperate campaign and increase the bid exponentially to see if that placement has volume. I did experiments with placements going as up as $200 CPM just to make sure I was the top bidder (I was getting paranoid with this placement). This is a bit crazy approach bidding this high, you have to know very well the traffic source to make sure it won't spend all your balance and that you can restrict the campaign safely. Cause some traffic sources are not able to control traffic spikes.

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Thanks for the advice!

Indeed the money I did is far from my goal.

I just did my post about the tool, will try to pursue that on the side!

Cheers

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Apart from focusing on the software, is there any particular traffic/vertical combo you would recommend me to try out?

By the way I'm a He

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Hey Craig, seems like you're doing exactly same as me.

To overpass the volatility (if you know your traffic works) you just need to have several offers rotating.
When I was doing things manually, I would look at last X visits (I was recording the visits into a DB) for each offer and choose best based on EPV, Send 90% of the traffic to best offer and 10% to all the "golden ones" which might not be working at the current hour but you know they work.

I would literally test everything I get my hands on. One camp I was doing was AIS and some networks had over 100+ offers, and almost like 20 new offers a day just for 1 network. I'm connected to several.

Payout is really irrelevant when you know your traffic works. What matters is EPV. So I would test everything.

Obviously this strategy is if you already have things working.

If you're starting a broad camp then I would use different approach.

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HI Asknopt,

Thanks again for your great info. I will try to build my automated offer rotation. Hopefully it's works for me. Btw, I based at Malaysia and will go AWA this year, hope can catch with you next time.

Cheers,
Leong

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Just itchy to comment on your successful campaign but I think it can be more profitable:
- add Landing page, most of the time using landing page with "good" angle will increase your CR
- maximize "second chance conversion" with adding back button redirect (the one that never ends), popunder, vibrate, sound
- even with direct linking you can still use back button redirect script. Just create blank html landing page that auto redirect to offer using FORM submit/JS redirect
- if you are profitable then do not afraid to be the top bidder in that geo, or add more frequency, it will sacrifice your ROI but that traffic flood gates will be opened up for you
- conversion maybe dying out slowly, perhaps because traffic are tired of seeing same angle same offers. So test out different offers by sending small percentage of your traffic from the profitable/quality placement

I'm sorry just giving my 2 cents, maybe you already all the above or maybe you decide to move away from pop so I don't know.

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You're welcome! Sure let's catch up, send me your Skype in PM and I'll add you!

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Hey Pavel,

I paused the campaigns for now to focus on the tool.

But just to comment

1) LPs is definitely something we should do which we never tried properly.
2) need lp for that
3) I'm not sure I get it. How would having a Blank Page help if the user hits backbutton? Wouldnt that be a extra step to go to the offer? Unless I would open another pop from the LP, something I thought about it to duplicate traffic although most traffic sources are not ok with that!
4) Indeed need to try that in the future
5) Yep was doing that all the time.

Cheers for the advices!

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This is a handy trick, I think I posted it somewhere here on STM already, but don't remember where, so let me do it again :

What you need to do is to create a LP that is nothing but a blank page with an autoredirect in it, so it redirects users to the offer straight away, just like a directlink would. This LP's source code would also contain the backbutton redirect script, which is basically just a manipulation with the browsers history, so it replaces the browsers "last page" with an url of your choice, all backbutton redirects work this way. So any user who goes through this LP, will get the backbutton url set and then redirected to the offer. You will lose a few ms here, but that shouldn't really matter.

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Ahhh!! Makes total sense, unless the offer that I'm sending the traffic to, also replaces the backbutton, which would invalidate my attemp right?

Cheers!

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True, the can only have one "previous" stored.

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