My way to quit 9-5 - To hit my 1st $50/day (10)

Hi mates,

I’ve launched few campaigns but with only 1 or 2 conversions or no conversion. I decided to write my follow along and the main objective is to learn from all STM mates. Learning and failed is the process to being success. Please don’t hesitate to leave your comment and I would happy to read all of them.

What I have:
Affiliate network: clickdealer, F5 & peerfly (going to register few more)
Traffic sources: go2mobi and popads
Spy tools: Adplexity (unsubscribe since for this month due to tight budget.)

Offers:
Offer 1: Namshi app (online shopping app)
Vertical: IOS app install
Affiliate network: clickdealer
Traffic source: go2mobi (Smmato)
Geo: SA
Payout: $1.10
CPM: $0.70

Offer 2: Namshi app (online shopping app)
Vertical: Android app install
Affiliate network: clickdealer
Traffic source: go2mobi (Smmato)
Geo: SA
Payout: $0.80
CPM: $0.65

Action taken and game plan:
1. Get top offer list from affiliate manager which suitable newbie to run.
2. Ripped banner from Adplexity which run for 14 days and look promising for me. Created 4 angles with 20 banners. Selected 3 banners for each angle therefore total of 12 banners used to run the campaign.
Banners: static + animated



3. Originally targeted on UAE only but when send banners for affiliate manager’s approval, she suggested that SA is well converting for IOS install. Therefore I decided to test 2 geo (SA & UAE) with 2 offers (IOS and Android). To collect data and determine which offer converting well at which geo.
4. After creative approved by AM, I created 4 as below and set a daily budget $50 for each campaign in go2mobi:
Campaign 1: UAE/IOS
Campaign 2: USE/Android
Campaign 3: SA/IOS
Campaign 4: SA/Android

Go2mobi screen shoot

5. Campaign 1 being rejected by go2mobi due to offer link redirected to adult offer which shouldn’t be. I informed my AM and get she fix it and request her to redirect to an international offer for traffic out of the targeted geo. Pending go2mobi to approve the campaign again. It takes quite long to get all my campaign to be approved.
6. I decided to run the campaign 3 & 4 (same geo) first while waiting campaign 1 to be approved.
7. There is no conversion after spend the daily budget and i decided to paused the campaign to get advice from you guys whether to continue or stop.

Stats:
Day1 (5/5/6)



Question:
1. No conversion for both offers, should I continue or stop the campaign? How to know this offer is converting? Is the data enough to made decision?
2. How to track cost in Voluum if CPM selected?
3. Is the CPM set correctly? Is it too high? I set slightly higher than winning bid avg (UAE $0.65/ SA $0.63).

D2 (6/5/16)

Checking through all my setup included Voluum, go2mobi & clickdealer. Found that offer link in Voluum set incorrectly. i accidentally send the unique info to S1 paramater, thus i faster go and correct it to S1= campaign ID and S2= click ID.

is it possible this is one of the reason i got zero conversion ?

Hi guys,
It was an extremely tired week for me as I have to work average 12 hrs for my 9-5 included Sat & Sun due to project tight deadline. I’m only managing to spend about 2-3 hrs each day to learn AM therefore my progress would be very slow if compared to others. But I’m very determined and won’t give up. Let’s see some of my updates here. Hope this follow along can help to speed up my learning curve.

Update
6/5/16 - 12/5/16

After checked the entire campaign from tracker and realized that I pass wrong parameters when add offer in Voluum. As a result I got click lost and also might be one of the reasons that cause no conversion. I fixed it and want to restart this campaign with the same offer.

Actions:
1) Use 2 angles to test this offer. 4 banners (2 banners-320x50 & 2 banners-300x250) and 2 lander for each angle.
2) Will target SA only..
3) Created 2 campaigns (SA/IOS and SA/Android)
4) Daily budget for each campaign is $20.
5) Set low CPM $0.20. (avg max winning bid is $0.65 and it drained my budget very fast for the previous campaign.)
6) Translated all banners and create another 4 banner 300x250.
7) Created 2 LP and get them translated.
8) Created campaign in Voluum using flow. (direct link vs LP)



13/5/16 (Day 1)
Finally everything gets approved and launches the campaign again.

Overall stat
go2mobi


Voluum





Exchange for IOS and Android





Actions:
1) Cut bad placements (hit 5k impression without conversion) and let the campaign run for 1 more day.
2) Blacklist desktop traffic using voluum rule.

Question:
1) There are 50% clicks discrepancies between volumm vs affiliate network. Anyone know why this happened? What can I do to track it?
2) Run for all exchange and found that Smaato drained 75% of my daily budget. Should I straight away stop Smaato or just need to cut the bad placement?
3) I have 2 conversion came after pause campaign. Both campaigns get zero conversion when I paused the campaign that hit my daily budget. All clicks remain the same.
4) Is the CPM and daily budget set correctly? Because budget hit after campaign run for 6 hours.

1. Gotta plug this here since it fits :P http://adefy.com/2016/05/09/your-tracker-is-lying/ - Basically, click loss. Happens to everyone, very limited info on it, just account for it and don't try to fix what you cannot control.
2. Multi-exchange is relatively new. The pricing between exchanges is quite different so maybe you should run each exchange separately until you get to know the pricing for each, then see if you can combine them. Given the current results, not to be too discouraging, but either your angle, the traffic or the offer are not good. I'd try more angles, and try to get some info if anyone else is running at least the offer type you have on display.
3. Delayed conversions are normal.
4. Yes, but you should ask Go2Mobi support about it to be sure. Generally Go2Mobi splits the daily budget per hour and tries to split it somewhat evenly through the day. When the budget is on the small side, maybe they cannot do that so well.

3 extra things:
1. Use frequency cap 1 to start off.
2. Session depth is certainly something to experiment with on Go2Mobi and I would say NEVER leave it like that. You don't want to be the 100th ad the user sees. I usually have it set to 1 and 10. I didn't test it too much because it just worked very well when the offer and angles were strong.
3. Regardless of the traffic source you are using, try to get info from your account manager. They know their platform the best and can explain things us here on the forum can't. They are up to date with everything. Especially when it comes to Go2Mobi, I think you won't have any issues getting all those answers from them.

@manu_adefy, thanks and appreciated for taking your valuable time to give me advise and tips to move forward.

Update
14/5/16
Overall stat
Go2mobi


Voluum






Action:
1) Will stop IOS campaign temporary and stick to android campaign only.
2) Choose only one exchange to run the offer.
3) Adding banner and angle to test again.
4) Focusing on direct linking and stop landing page temporary as my main objective is to test angle.


Question:
1) 50% clicks loss is consider quite a lots to me , I was thinking normal case is roughly 10-15% clicks loss, Correct me if I’m wrong.
2) Using Voluum rule to blacklist non- targeted device and country. But I’m still received traffic from them. How can I block them?

50% is high and it could be nothing to do with your tracker but just the redirects for the affiliate network. Do you have the offer from another network to try it out?

Hello wtchern88,

just found your PM asking me to comment in your follow along so here I am

You made a few newbie mistakes, which is absolutely fine - we've all been there. Thats what STM is here for, we will point them out and help you avoid it again in the future Manu already mentioned some of the things I will mention too, but I will keep them in anyways, so its all in one post. Thanks for helping out Manu!

1. You picked wrong offer, it will not work. This is a shopping app that needs pretty accurate targeting, you can't just throw up an ad on a general/mixed traffic source like go2mobi, target all their inventory and expect it to work. These offers require precise targeting - related sites, specific demographics like women 35+ ... maybe if you could get a list of sites or apps and target similar ones, it might have a chance but not like this. To even stand a chance with broad targeting and app-installs, you need an app with broad appeal, so like a battery saver, speed booster ... but the currently available related apps are so old and so saturated that you'd have to use super aggressive LPs and cloak like mad to make them profitable. In my opinion, app-installs are absolutely not suitable for new people. Ask your AM for some sweeps, SOI lead gen or PIN submit offers

2. The way you started to work with the go2mobi platform is not the best either. First of all, you bid too high, check your winrate in the first bunch of screens - over 60% winrate - you don't want this when you are just learning the ropes and running some blind tests. Start with low bid and increase it when the traffic doesn't start flowing. You also mixed all the exchanges together, thats not a good idea - they are not equal in quality and they are also not equal in price, the best practice is to target each of them individually. The daily CAP should be at 1 when starting out and not 3 as you used. Since you are probably on a lower budget, I would suggest you pick just 1 exchange and work with that for a while. This way you will be able to spread the data across the day better and get a better picture of the traffic quality.

3. Click loss - there will always be some. We had a similar discussion few days ago - the situation was that there were multiple clicks coming from single IPs and the affiliate platform was redirecting them away - it was an aff network running on cake. Isn't it the same problem in your case? It is usually like this : traffic source sends traffic, the tracker records more than the source sent and then aff network redirects a good part of them away. Its artificial/bot/questionable traffic - just ignore it.

I would suggest to do this at this point :

1. stop the campaign
2. get different offers as I suggested in point 1, get multiple creatives for it
3. narrow your targeting to a level that allows you to run throughout the day at decent volume - 1 exchange, 1 OS, 1 device ... depending on your budget
4. set a low bid for the start, run for some time, then look at the placements and cut those with horrible CTR - do this fast in order to not get your budget drained by a large source with shitty quality
5. once you are sure there is no source that can drain your budget without giving you enough traffic, let it run until the next day or until budget is spent

Then come back here and we will look at the results and suggest what to do next

Good luck!

Originally Posted by manu_adefy

50% is high and it could be nothing to do with your tracker but just the redirects for the affiliate network. Do you have the offer from another network to try it out?

Originally Posted by matuloo

Hello wtchern88,

just found your PM asking me to comment in your follow along so here I am

You made a few newbie mistakes, which is absolutely fine - we've all been there. Thats what STM is here for, we will point them out and help you avoid it again in the future Manu already mentioned some of the things I will mention too, but I will keep them in anyways, so its all in one post. Thanks for helping out Manu!

1. You picked wrong offer, it will not work. This is a shopping app that needs pretty accurate targeting, you can't just throw up an ad on a general/mixed traffic source like go2mobi, target all their inventory and expect it to work. These offers require precise targeting - related sites, specific demographics like women 35+ ... maybe if you could get a list of sites or apps and target similar ones, it might have a chance but not like this. To even stand a chance with broad targeting and app-installs, you need an app with broad appeal, so like a battery saver, speed booster ... but the currently available related apps are so old and so saturated that you'd have to use super aggressive LPs and cloak like mad to make them profitable. In my opinion, app-installs are absolutely not suitable for new people. Ask your AM for some sweeps, SOI lead gen or PIN submit offers

2. The way you started to work with the go2mobi platform is not the best either. First of all, you bid too high, check your winrate in the first bunch of screens - over 60% winrate - you don't want this when you are just learning the ropes and running some blind tests. Start with low bid and increase it when the traffic doesn't start flowing. You also mixed all the exchanges together, thats not a good idea - they are not equal in quality and they are also not equal in price, the best practice is to target each of them individually. The daily CAP should be at 1 when starting out and not 3 as you used. Since you are probably on a lower budget, I would suggest you pick just 1 exchange and work with that for a while. This way you will be able to spread the data across the day better and get a better picture of the traffic quality.

3. Click loss - there will always be some. We had a similar discussion few days ago - the situation was that there were multiple clicks coming from single IPs and the affiliate platform was redirecting them away - it was an aff network running on cake. Isn't it the same problem in your case? It is usually like this : traffic source sends traffic, the tracker records more than the source sent and then aff network redirects a good part of them away. Its artificial/bot/questionable traffic - just ignore it.

I would suggest to do this at this point :

1. stop the campaign
2. get different offers as I suggested in point 1, get multiple creatives for it
3. narrow your targeting to a level that allows you to run throughout the day at decent volume - 1 exchange, 1 OS, 1 device ... depending on your budget
4. set a low bid for the start, run for some time, then look at the placements and cut those with horrible CTR - do this fast in order to not get your budget drained by a large source with shitty quality
5. once you are sure there is no source that can drain your budget without giving you enough traffic, let it run until the next day or until budget is spent

Then come back here and we will look at the results and suggest what to do next

Good luck!

Originally Posted by wtchern88

Wow, Such an EPIC long reply .First thing first, thanks for taking your valuable time to comment and guide me along.

Thanks for pointing out all the mistakes that i made, really happy to know what i did wrong rather than just blindly work. Affiliate marketing is a long journey to go... Must keep on GRIND ! GRIND and GRIND ! To me learn from mistake is the fastest way to improve myself, Always talking to myself " learn walk first before run" and "earn x/ day first before xx/day" and eventually xxx/day will come. Thus , must continue to test until i find my first profitable campaign (Hopefully, it will come very fast ). So many lesson learnt in one campaign, really worth to loss the money to test

i will stop my campaign first , try to get some good offer ( sweep/lead gen or app install) list from my AM and do split test the offer. Any ad network to recommend for display and pop as well ?