No Excuses Mobile CPA (6)
Hello World.
My name is Pat, but you can call me Castle. I'm starting this follow along to keep myself accountable and hopefully get some good inputs on all the ways I am able to improve on my campaigns.
Quick backstory: I come from the SEO world, mainly ranking niche sites and promoting CPA/Amazon/E-Commerce offers. Last year I found out about 
), that's exactly what I'm going to do.
So please chime in if you see I could use a helping hand…or if you are a newbie subscribe to this thread and let's start this journey together!
Your partner in crime,
Castle
18.06.2016
After spending a week getting used to the forum and reading through a bunch of threads, I am ready to start the Mobile Appetizer, although I am the WORST cook in history. I HAVE on occasion managed to burn water. So let's see what deliciousness I can whip up here:
List of Ingredients:
Traffic Source: Go2Mobi
Offer: 2 different Antivirus Pin Submits
Network: Fuseclick by Blackfox
Payout: $0.90 and $0.71, respectively
Geo: Brazil (my home country!)
OS: Android
Celular Network: TIM, Claro, Oi, Vivo
Exchange: Smaato
I got Adplexity and ripped a few banners in Portuguese, did some minor Portuguese correction. In total I created 8 banners (4 ripped, 4 my own) for this. I set up the campaign as instructed and submitted for approval.
20.06.2016
Campaign got approved! Let it run until $20 spend but didn't get any conversions. So according to the recipe, I need to look for a new offer.
So I found a new offer, this time it's an Antivirus CPI:
Traffic Source: Go2Mobi
Offer: Antivirus CPI
Network: Blackfox
Payout: $0.16
Geo: Brazil (still my home country!)
OS: Android
Celular Network: TIM, Claro, Oi, Vivo
Exchange: Smaato
I used the same banners as before since they're still relevant. Just duplicated the campaign with this new offer. Got approved within a few hours. Spent $6.84 and then the campaign got disapproved by Smaato due to "Malware/Phishing". I'm not sure why, it's this app from the Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...r.mguard&hl=en
Well, not gonna dwell, so on the next one. Will look for another offer and will post it here.
What I learned so far:
- Just do. Don't waste too much time in analysis paralysis. Launch the campaigns, see what works. Most of the time you're going to run into some shit that you never thought of and never run into the "problems" you thought you were going to have in the first place.
- Don't let the setbacks affect you. First offer didn't convert? Second offer got banned out of nowhere? Who cares, learn what happened and why, then move on to the next one.
- Search for answers to problems when they happen, not before they happened (goes hand in hand with learning number 1)
What CB product was it?
I promoted the startpottytraining.com guide. But then found out that the product owner didn't care about the product at all. Never replied to my emails.
Subscribed!
Nice follow-along castle, I like the way you approach this 
It's a good thing you chose Brazil since you're from there. I recommend to stick to it for a while, the volume is huge, there is a lot of offers available for it and the fact that you're a native PT speaker makes it just easier for you.
Now to what happened with the smaato rejection - talk with your AM and ask if they have fallback offers turned on, I'm pretty sure they do. You probably sent some traffic that didn't match the offer requirements and it was sent to another offer that smaato didn't like. Ask them to remove the redirects if possible. The other option could be that they didn't like your landing page, which is a bit unlikely since it was approved by go2mobi.
I would recommend to setup rules in your tracking and send any hits from other countries either to some safe page or google ... these are often reviewers and they get redirected by the aff network to various offers, which can cause problems as the one you had.
Before you move further, you should look at the placements in go2mobi and get rid of any budget drainers - placements that you won enough impressions on, but didn't have any clicks or the CTR was veeery low. There will be some for sure. You need to buy cheap clicks as the offers for BR are usually low paying ones, so it simply cannot work with expensive traffic. Don't overdo this tho, you don't want to kill the volume just get rid of those placements that simply cannot work no matter what - if the click costs 20 cents for example, well that's not gonna work with a $0.16 payout offer, it's not possible.
If you want to work with appinstalls - wifi works fine for this and it's usually cheaper. It's also a good idea to target specific carriers in separate campaigns as the bids can vary.
Anyways, so much for some basic tips, now keep going, I'm looking forward to your progress.
Hi matuloo thanks so much for chiming in here, what an honor!
I got really excited with your suggestions, thank you for that. I have gone ahead and on the first campaign (Antivirus CPI), I have blacklisted all placements costing me over $0.08 CPC and all placements with reaallly low CTR. My reasoning was that this will still allow me to get some data and once I optimize it to individual carriers/banners/device combo, I could potentially have lower CPAs in overall. But feel free to chime in if I'm being an idiot ha ha
Will post more updates as they come.
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