Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns

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Shooting from the Hip -- Mobile Pops Follow-Along (59)

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Hey everyone!

As you can probably tell by my join date I've been "on" these forums for a while, but not so much. I joined with a flash in the pants desire to chase money three years ago, stayed on for a month and never came back. I'm back to treat AM like a business, and have digested a ton of information and would like to say thanks to all of you that provided it. The $100 first month back is repaid in time saved by far.

I feel like I'm all over the place at this point in time, but as long as I'm moving forward to getting my first campaign started, that is a small win in my book. Shooting from the hip.

Summary of what I'll be running:

Traffic Source: Mobile Pops (PopAds to start)
Vertical: AV Pin Submits
Tracking: Voluum
Budget: Nothing formally set by I'm comfortable losing $1k-$2k with no questions asked and can easily top up bi-weekly/monthly
Short-term goals: $3000/month stable ($100/day) / OWN the process and skill of affiliate marketing to ultimately have a money-making skill in my back pocket, and eventually use it to promote my own business/products and make this a full time thing making the long term goal $x,xxx days Question: is this feasible on 2-5 hours a day depending on how much side time i have?

Progress so Far

This doesn't seem like a lot, but it took me forever to even get to this point...small wins

• Joined traffic source for mobile pops (Popads)
• Joined several networks (F5, Adsimilis, Affiliaxe, waiting for approval on A4D and MundoMedia)
• Got approved to run two different offers in the same GEO being VN as my first
• Created three landers (essentially ripped) to test
• Sent landers in for creative approval on one of the offers

IMMEDIATE NEXT STEPS

A lot of this will be learning by just doing (shooting from the hip) - but I majorly need to learn the basics so I can increase my speed of execution. You'll see just how basic I mean below.

• Make deposit to traffic source - just was holding off until everything was in place
• Figuring out how to set up a domain to actually host my landers
• Hosting my landers - I plan to use the AWS/CDN writeup from @Caurmen
• Set up traffic source/landers/offers in Voluum Tracker CORRECTLY - this is the most "daunting" for me coming up... any tutorials for popads/voluum would be much appreciated...this includes linking stuff, what tokens go where, which are necessary, etc...
• Launch campaign 1

SHORT-TERM PLAN FOR CAMPAIGN 1

This is my short-term plan on how I plan to run Campaign 1. (Only half a joke)

• Test 3 landers on Offer 1 in 1 GEO my first offer is $0.50 payout, is this ok?
• Figure out what to do next... in terms of how long to let these run, how to bid, what to bid, what to look for, etc. (lol)

Look forward to continuing to keep this posted and you guys following. Feedback is always appreciated. Always open to networking as well! I live in the greater NYC area - please feel free to PM to meet up/phone/skype chat.

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Hi tpm,

First of all what's your name? I'd like to address you by your name rather than tpm

Like you mentioned here, the more you do delve into internet marketing the more you'll develop processes to increase your efficiency in creating campaigns.

Since you're starting in AV Pin Submits, work in countries in which traffic is much cheaper.

*Hint: From what I see, start with LATAM or Asia countries. Vietnam, Thailand, Brazil, etc.....

1) Ask your AM for top 2-3 offers in those countries. MundoMedia and Clickdealer have a lot of good AV offers.
2) Pick a payout less than $1. The thing with those geos I mentioned above you're getting traffic much cheaper and you're able to gather more conversions/data at a lower cost.
3) In terms of landers, rip 5-10 landers and then test them out. The more landers you test at once, the more confidence you have in your data itself. You have to find a winning lander/offer combo. With offers, let's say MundoMedia gives you their top 3 AV offers, then after testing you find one that performs the best. You could then take that top performing offer and then go to other networks to find the same exact offer OR ask the AM at other networks for their #1 AV offer and test against that.

1) In terms of how long you should let it run, you should set a budget that you're comfortable with. So since you're working with AV and payouts are usually low(>$1), I would put $15 for testing. That may be a lot more than needed, it really depends on your preference.
2) Since you're promoting with PopAds, I suggest first starting with a average bid + 50% to 60%. Stick to that bid until you get a winning lander/offer and then you could test a staggered bid approach, see below.


Starting Bid:


Staggered bid approach: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post276910

3) Start your PopAds campaign with open targeting don't narrow your options.



4) When you're done with your initial testing, feel free to post a screenshot of your landers, os, mobile carrier, and offers so that we could provide insight on it.

There's plenty of affiliates in or surrounding the New York area.

The week before the NYC affiliate summit last year there was a meetup that Ed Hong and his group scheduled. It was kinda my intro to affiliate marketing. Shout out definitely to Mohamed that helped me with understanding and creating campaigns.

Definitely check it out here: http://www.meetup.com/New-York-City-...keting-Meetup/

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Simon - thank you! I appreciate the extended post on my campaign, it was much more help than I even expected. Again, the $100 spent on this forum has already been repaid in time saved multiple times over.

I am just about to hit launch on my first campaign, I made the traffic source deposit and now just need to get started. I will report back as you said with relevant screenshots. I'll also joined that NYC group.

One question for you on your post - when you say: "I would put $15 for testing" - Do you mean $15/lander, $15/offer, or $15/campaign?

Thanks again!

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When I mention $15 dollars in testing it's for the whole duration of the campaign including landers/offers.

If you have like 2 landers and testing it between 5-10 landers, I'd allocate $15 to test. The amount is dependent on your offer payout, but since you're doing AV, the offer payouts are relatively low but with higher volume. So $15 gives you more concrete analysis of your campaign.

Another scenario you could put it is if you have a offer payout of $50. If you allocated $15 dollars to test it wouldn't make sense because if you spent $15 and only have one conversion. You're up $35, but then again 1 conversion doesn't really tell you much.

Hope this clears things up!

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For more information on when to stop testing, and roughly how much you'll need to spend, see

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...gn-Or-An-Offer

and

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...nificance-quot

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Wow! What a great start of a follow-along! And Simon - thanks for all the detailed insights and advice. tpm767 you're in good hands!

And of course I'll help out whenever possible. For instance, regarding tracking - if you would just do your best to set that up first, and post screenshots, we can verify them for you.

Keep them updates comin'!


Amy

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Hi all - thanks for the responses again!

Continuing to learn daily, and already feel like I know so much more than I did just 2 days ago.

I believe I'm all set up in Voluum, but have a few questions if anyone has some time to answer before I hit go on the traffic source to make sure everything is in line! My questions are in bold, but some other background info is in the text.

1) I set up everything in the system: network, offers, landers, traffic source

2) I set up 3 landers on 1 offer to get a campaign going (I have not yet pushed start on the traffic source yet, maybe I should add a couple of more)?

3) I also need to test the tracking, I tried clicking the campaign url myself and the clicks went through, i purposely did not convert because I wasn't sure if that was "okay" with the nework. What is the best way to test both the tracking and the conversion tracking?

4) When I created a new campaign, I set up three different paths (each with a diff lander, but each with the same offer) each set to 100% so I believe that will send 1/3 of the traffic to each one. My major question is - is this the right way to do it? Or should I be setting up three separate campaigns, one for each lander/offer?

5) If I were to set up two campaigns using the same landers in Voluum , but linked to a different offer, can I see the performance of the landers separately WITHIN those campaigns?

6) Did I setup too many tracking parameters for PopAds in Voluum? Is there any downside to this? Screenshot here:

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4) Given this is a pop campaign and so you don't have to worry about the banner -> lander flow, you're doing it right.
5) Yes, you should be able to see lander performance on a per-campaign basis.
6) No, there's no real downside. More information is better.

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Thank you Caurmen! Appreciate the quick answer here.

I had other question as I was vetting my tracking:

1) It seems Voluum is tracking my visits but not my clicks. I set up my campaign in Voluum and for testing purposes used the campaign url in my own browser and clicked through to see if it would log the visit and the click. It logged the first visit and the first click through one of my landers, but when I kept doing it to see if each and every lander worked, it would only log the visits and not the clicks. I've tried repasting the "LP click" link from Voluum into my landers html and reuploading them to my servers but that didn't seem to register a click still. I've also tried clearing my cookies, and still only registering vists... Am I doing something wrong or is this normal since I'm doing this from one browser? EDIT: I've now duplicated the campaign, and tried using that campaign ID in my browser, and now its not registering visits either...

2) When I set up my offer URL - I put this at the back end of the string in Voluum: "&s1={campaign.id}&s2={clickid}&s3={device}&s4={ca rrier}&s5={brand}". I'm a bit confused on how this works completely and want to have a decent understanding. Are all of these variables being passed through to my affiliate network and then back to my tracker? Or are these variables being passed from my tracking source, to my tracker, to my affiliate network and pack? Still have a bit of a disconnect in my mind on how the different trackers are communicating. On the affiliate network side, all I've posted there is my postback like this: "voluumtrk2.com/postback?cid=#s2#". I feel like I'm missing something since my offer URL has many more variables, but the affiliate network postback has nothing, and my traffic source is setup like the screenshot in my previous post.
-Are my links set up correctly?
-Am I missing something else here?
- Do I need to add the variables to my lander URLs?

Thanks so much, know these are newbie newbie questions!

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1) Can you ask a friend to try it? Most likely it's rejecting subsequent clicks as they're from a duplicate IP. Or try it on your phone using your mobile network, not your wifi.

2) Have you read http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-Read-This-Now ? If not I'd recommend having a read - it'll explain what's going on there.

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So - after much newbie fumbling with hosting of landing pages, getting tracking and postbacks setup, I've decided to push go on my traffic source and let it rip for $15 total budget, and just left the daily budget at $15. The only thing different from what Simon told me to use in my first campaign above is target the GEO of my offer only (and obviously use a different bid). The bid I put in the "Max bid" form in the "Budgets" category in the "create campaign" module. Besides this, all targeting options were left wide open.

For the sake of getting one campaign going quickly I'm testing:
-3 landers (way different looks, similar angles)
-1 offer (from one network)
-Set to rotate in one campaign in volume at 1/3 of the traffic each (each set up in a different path)
-Voluum is logging visits and clicks correctly now, one thing I did NOT do is test conversion through my network (I'm not completely sure how yet with an international mobile pin submit) since I think my AM is offline and wanted to get this started, and wanted to get the feel for starting a campaign. I know this is not the best decision, but I feel I setup correctly, and we'll see what happens...

My traffic source campaign is now under approval! How long does that usually take?

Next Step: Weed out placements, according to what I've read on the forum. Is it possible to do this in Voluum with Popads as the traffic source?

This is what I have at the end of my campaign ID that I've used in Popads:



Look forward to reviewing incoming data on my first campaign!

Tom

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Good stuff! Yes, running a test campaign is definitely the way to go.

Traffic source approval will usually take under a day, but it can vary.

Hmm - that campaign ID looks like it might be malformed, but I'm not sure. It's the WebsiteID part that I'm concerned about. Can you paste the full campaign link, obfuscating your domain?

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Thanks Caurmen!

It seems to have tracked in my first campaign run (but that's really just a guess, I'll be posting an update soon!), but here is the full campaign link:

"http://track.mydomain.com/xxxxxxxxxxxx?websiteid=[WEBSITEID]&quality=[QUALITY]&categoryid=[CATEGORYID]&country=[COUNTRY]&formfactorname=[FORMFACTORNAME]&campaignid=[CAMPAIGNID]&campaignname=[CAMPAIGNNAME]&screenresolution=[SCREENRESOLUTION]&impressionid=[IMPRESSIONID]&bid=[BID]"

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I started my first campaign yesterday and ran at a budget of $15, extremely broad, and the spend went through in about 2 hours (lol). I made an extremely newbie mistake of targeting all devices, so the data was pretty crappy.

I changed targeting to mobile/smartphone only to get better data. After I changed that, I thought I would run higher budget to grab more data, this still only ran ~6 hours - I think I was making the mistake of changing things mid campaign, and changing bids, etc. I ran at a budget of $50 with an initial test of 3 landers on 1 offer on a payout of $0.50. Not sure if this is too much? It still only ran for several hours. I was cutting obvious bad placements throughout the campaign, and hope I have a clean slate.

That being said here is the data for my three landers and my total campaign (today) when I was targeting mobile only. I pulled in a decent number of conversions I felt for my first campaign, but the ROI was really negative:



Now that I have awful placements cut, I think I'm going to duplicate my current campaign so its on a clean slate, and run these three landers and a couple of new ones on the refined placement traffic source, from there I will start adding new landers and stopping ads at stat significance.

My confusion currently stands around bidding, I kept changing my bid around which probably wasn't the best thing. I was trying to make the campaign run longer as I really wanted to try and run for 24 hours. I'm not sure how to deal with this when I start running this newly duplicated campaign tomorrow.

I also noted that one lander is the clear winner in conversions, but another is the clear winner in CTR%. I'm going to try and adopt the best qualities from both and create a new lander. These really are the same angle with slightly different wording/headlines, but very different looking layouts.

I'm going to hold off on starting the duplicated, "cut placement" campaign while I ask some questions and hope for some feedback on my first campaign here . My main questions are:

1) Did I spend too much on this initial test? How much should I spend on the duplicated campaign test?
2) Is duplicating a campaign after cutting placements like this ok - to have fresh data?
3) How do I bid "better" given what I wrote above - to keep the campaign running longer - I feel like I need more time data.
4) How to deal with landers where one wins on conversions but another has a much higher CTR?
5) How much "rushing" should an affiliate do after running one campaign? I feel myself getting anxious to act on these results, but I feel the need to digest the data, etc.

First campaign, and really initial test comes to a close.

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Running the campaign with 3 new landers added. I cut 2 landers as they reached stat significance, and let the other 4 run. I checked the campaign at ~$35 spend, and saw that one OS was just a money dump, ~$10 spend, 0 conversions.

I'm going to keep the 4 "performing" landers running on the "good" OS, and see what ROI looks like. I don't know if I'm spending too much money testing...

Need to figure out ways to optimize besides just cutting things that aren't working. I also don't have much of a bidding strategy yet, which I wonder if I should be split testing. At what point do I stop blacklisting placements/OS and things like that, and start split testing bids, etc.?

Hopefully on this next run I pull closer to green.

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So - I cut the "bad" OS, and am only running on the good "OS" at a bad of $1.5 CPM. Again, I'm only testing ONE offer at the moment at a $0.48 payout.

Am I running too much test budget through these landers? Where do I go next, having analysis paralysis...

It's easy to see which is doing well. And some have much more traffic then the others because I've started new landers mid campaign when I had new ideas/wanted to test a variation.

Attachment 11989

These landers are all variations of the same angles with slighly diff characteristics some have headline 1, headline 2, headline 3, but all mismatched layout 1, layout 2, layout 3, etc. Is this too many variables to be changing?

I'm having a bit of analysis paralysis on where to go next from here. Test all of these landers on another offer? Continue to run these and cut bad landers while testing new ones?

I know I need to start cutting, and think i've found a lander with promise, but there's too much I've been told to test.

Should I take the top 3-5 landers and test bidding, or test them on new offers?

Clearly, I'm a bit all over the place...

EDIT: I got a bit more data. I'm going to take the best performing layout by far, and test three different headlines on three diff bid strategies. So I'll have 3 campaigns, one for each bid strategy, and within each campaign have three diff headlines. Not sure if this is the right way to do it, but need to keep moving

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Hey man, check this out it should help guide you: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ight=propeller

I think what you need to do is try and clamp down on one variable at a time. Test landers on 1-3 offers. Find your best converting lander then test multiple offers on the lander. Always separate OS types into different campaigns from what I understand. Best of luck my brother

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After testing low, average, and high bids on my three top performing landers (same layout, different headlines), I've got closer to green.

So to be clear - I have the same 3 landers, all on the same offer, in each of these diff bid strategy campaigns.

The low bid generated zero traffic, so I won't post that here.

The average bid started around $1.2CPM and I tweaked it to $1.6CPM to pull in more traffic.

The high bid stayed at $1.8CPM.

edit: also noticed, interestingly, that the best lander on the high bid campaign was the worst lander on the avg bid campaign, and Vica versa.. Not sure how to proceed from there.

Again, I've only tested one offer, maybe at this point I need to start cutting more targeting parameters/placements and testing more landers/offers?

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First camp! How exciting!!

Some suggestions:

-I would suggest testing 2-3 offers from more than one aff network, and sticking to AM-recommended offers so you have a better chance of including at least one offer that will convert well enough for you to cut landers.
-5-10 landers "borrowed" from adplexity for example.
-Choose 3 bids - low/avg/high - and set up 3 camps at those bids to run simultaneously. Run 10-20x payout to each. See if you're getting conversions and decide whether or not to continue (will depend on the situation, but in general if you drill down to offer > lander and see green combinations I'd say keep going; failing that, drill down to os > offer > lander to look for green combinations for a major OS; can do the same for any major traffic segment such as a major device - anything that have lots of traffic volume).
-If decide to continue, pick the camp doing the highest ROI and pause the other 2. Continue running to cut offers and landers.
-Once down to winners, test another batch of offers.

Spending $50 on just 1 offer and 3 landers and for such a low payout, wouldn't be necessary. Since traffic volume isn't a problem, absolutely feel free to cut placements aggressively - even go as far as cutting at 1x payout if it doesn't convert. Just remember to retest all these placements later when you have a good offer+lander combination. Because remember, a placement can only be as good as the offer+lander you're running.




No need to duplicate your camp to start from a clean slate! You don't want to waste the data you've collected for no good reason!

When deciding which lander is the winner, use the split-test calculator! Don't look at CTR - it means very little. I could make you a lander that will get you close to 100% CTR by automatically redirecting the visitor after 2 seconds. However, like you've pointed out, finding out WHY a lander is doing high CTR and incorporating some of the elements into your next lander, is an excellent idea. Provided the high CTR isn't due to an automatic redirect or other tricks that aren't a result of interest on the part of the visitor.



Looks like I've already answered most of these above. Let's not write this campaign off JUST yet!

Could you do some drilling down like I suggested above? Offer > lander. Then OS > offer > lander. See if you find any green.

Also - have you evaluated lander stats to see whether you have a winner? If so, you can choose to use just that lander to test another batch of offers!

Alternatively, if you want to test something else completely new you have my blessing (not that you need it). May be better to pick tier 3+ geos. Which geo is this that you were running for this camp?



Amy

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Very nice! Now - once you have a winning lander from this batch, TEST MORE OFFERS!

Don't even bother testing lander variations at this point. Have you tested all the different landers you see on adplexity? Start by testing completely different landers, see which one does best, and then test variations. But test offers first because that's the one factor that has the MOST impact on the success of your campaign.

Generally speaking, testing offers will bring you larger increases in ROI than tweaking landers (unless you're talking about a major overhaul or using a completely new angle).



Amy

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Since both bids are doing around the same ROI, I would suggest to just pause the lower bid and run at the higher bid to get more traffic volume.

Now use your best lander to test more offers! Can't stress that enough!

This camp is looking really promising!



Amy

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Amy thank you for all of your responses!

Would the following data change your decision on staying on the higher bid? The green lander I believe is winner by far, but not doing as well on the higher bid campaign... Note: lander 1 in avg bid campaign is the same as lander 1 in high bid campaign


Average Bid Campaign

Lander 1 - 7542 imp / 7 conversions / -57% ROI
Lander 2 - 7398 imp / 9 conversions / -44% ROI
Lander 3 - 7531 imp / 14 conversions / -15% ROI


High Bid Campaign

Lander 1- 16050 imp / 28 conversions / -28.35% ROI
Lander 2 - 15721 imp / 23 conversions / -40% ROI
Lander 3 - 16127 imp / 24 conversions / -40% ROI


I'm not sure why Lander 3 would do so much better in terms of ROI on the avg bid campaign. Any further thoughts would be so much appreciated!! I want to do further testing today but not sure which is the best use of my funds! Test the green lander on the average bid & high bid across more offers, or more lander variations on just one bid?

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Seems like the logical thing to do would be run the average bid campaign with Lander 3 longer or at least until you have about 16,000 impressions. Who knows it might average out over time.

If one less or one more conversion changes the ROI drastically then you need more data. I think it's likely that Lander 3 could just have gotten lucky.

In terms of what to do next...

I think you are doing a great job asking good questions based on your data, but I would suggest doing some data drilling to try to find the answer because at this point I can only speculate as to why Lander 3 is doing better.

Drill down your data and see specifically what placements, os, devices are doing well with Lander 3. See if there is anything wildly different from Lander 3 on the high bid campaign.

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I ran the average spend campaign a bit longer, and I think you're right that Lander 3 was just lucky here. I realize I made a newbie mistake of not having ISP/ISPID tokens in my traffic source in Voluum (and volume ISP are too broad), so I need to reset my traffic source in Voluum, repaste the campaign ID into my traffic source and wait for reapproval.

I'm going to cut awful placements as Amy suggesting, and continue testing on higher bid with more tracking tokens and grab more offers to test tomorrow while continuing to run once this campaign is reapproved on my traffic source.

Some questions I do have:

1) Hard to find VN offers in my vertical, any suggestions? I can find the same offer on diff networks, but not new offers.
2) When I test these high performing landers on new offers on my "high bid" campaign, I should keep all targeting parameters the same, so we are testing on the same thing, yes?
3) How long do I continue to test this offer, until I have enough data to continuing cutting?

Thanks so much this advice is invaluable!

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Hi Amy, when you say test more offers with the winning lander do you mean the same offers on different networks or different offers using the same lander approach and switching the lander to match the different offers?

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Run your winning lander with multiple offers that are similar. For example, say i'm testing an iPhone 6s sweeps offer in the Philippines. I would test my winning lander with as many offers as I can.

Campaign:
Winning Lander:


Offers
6s Offer Clickdealer
6s Offer Mundo Media
6s Offer F5 Media

Cheers!

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Awesome thanks for the tip! Are you rotating new landers in or running just the one?

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When different landers are winning for different bids:

-Like mobile ad monitor suggested, you could drill into your stats to see which OSs/browsers etc. the lander is performing particularly well for. So say Lander X does exceptionally well for Browser Y, if there's more Browser Y traffic at the high bid, that would explain why Lander X performs better at that high bid.

-However, I usually wouldn't even bother doing that. I would just look at the overall picture - the high bid camp is doing the same ROI as the average camp but is giving you more traffic, which is what you need right now to test more offers. Since the 3 landers aren't ready to be cut, it means they're performing around the same, so then just start testing offers using all 3 landers. Usually I'd recommend finishing the lander testing first, so that you'd be using your best lander to mass-test offers and minimize loss this way. But in your case because all 3 landers are converting similarly, you won't save money by eliminating 2 of them before testing more offers.

-It's important to realize that NOTHING is ever 100% accurate, and that you shouldn't strive for too much accuracy or your efficiency will suffer. Remember the 80/20 rule. You can save a LOT of money by sacrificing SOME accuracy. At the same time, it's also important to be accurate enough so that you're not blindly cutting stuff. This is why statistical calculators are so great - they provide an objective way of making cutting decisions for you, and are a good balance between accuracy and efficiency.

-Once you find the best offer (IF), and if the profits are worth your efforts, you can always test more landers, or lander variations. I wouldn't put in that effort before a camp reaches green.

1)By all means test different versions of the same offer if you find it on different networks! CR can differ by a LOT. You may be pleasantly surprised. Also, join more networks. How many are you with now? If you list them I could suggest more.

2)You can keep targeting the same, or you could open them up again just to test the new offers. For example if you took out IOS from your targeting because your previous offers converted badly for IOS, you may want to open that up briefly to see how your new offers will do - they may end up converting well on IOS. You never know! However, that would require more spend. So your choice.

3)Cutting what? If the landers continue to go head-to-head like that in the high bid camp, I'd say just randomly pick one and start another round of lander testing (after testing more offers). Or are you talking about placements?



Thanks @rafa161 for your question and @inigomontoya for your answer! Great example!

To test another type of offer you'll most probably need to start testing landers from scratch. Although, if you're finding that a particular lander is working well for PH iphone 6s offers, it would probably not do too badly for PH Samsung S7 offers either. But then, that would be based on speculation.



It'd be best not to test new landers when you're mass-testing new offers - would take more test budget that way. Better to find a lander that works first, and THEN test all the offers you can find using that one lander. That way you're not looking at a ton of offer+lander combinations.



Amy

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FIRSTLY - Amy thank you! All of the advice is extremely valuable, and what really has hit home is to look at the overall picture and test MORE OFFERS. You'll see how I tried to do that and will continue doing that below.

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I retested the landers on two offers (added 1 extra lander). Both of the offers had very close performance, but two landers were the outperformers (the new lander, and one of the old lander).

In the process, I drilled down and found an OS that was eating a bunch of spend and not converting as well as a bunch of website placements.

I'm cutting the two "loser" landers, getting rid of the bad placements mentioned above, and continuing to run on these two offers with the hope to grab more and continue testing. I'm hoping to cut one of the initial offers after some more testing and go from there.

I'm also going to crank the bid up a bit and monitor ROI.



Question: I'm going to daypart this portion of the campaign for tomorrow given what I've seen in my data. Does anyone know the optimal times to run in Vietnam for dayparting and not wasting budget?

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Amy - thank you for responding to my questions specifically!

1) I'm a member of the following and open to suggestions!!

-Adsimilis
-Avazu
-Mundomedia
-Clickdealer
-F5 Media

Question: My mindset has been to try and stick SOLELY to AV Mobile Pin submits - do you think this is a good strategy or should I also launch camps in Sweeps, Mobile AV App Installs... etc. I feel that AV and Sweeps could be similar. I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

2) I may open up targeting to some new offers under the same landers, but then I will need to start a new campaign in my traffic source

3) To continue cutting landers, placements, etc so that this offer can keep running with winning landers...

Does that make sense?

let me know, thanks!

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Since last update, I cut the two underperforming landers, and continued to run the winning landers across two offers.

Next data check, I came across the following stats:



Given that the first offer in the picture if $0.60 payout, and then second is $0.48 - I used the campaign calculator I learned of from Amy (https://win-vector.shinyapps.io/CampaignPlanner_v3/) to cut the second offer.

Digging into the landers on the "winning offer", here is the data thus far.



Although there is green here on the second lander, I don't think there is enough data here to completely call one of the landers a winner.

Next steps that I've taken: added more daily budget to the campaign to continue testing these landers on the offer to declare a winner. I have kept bid constant here. I've also added a new (similar, but different) offer in the same geo at a <$0.40 payout, so we will see how that does. I want to continue testing more offers here, but have had trouble finding a ton of VN AV offers for iOS.

Questions on this campaign

-Digging into the data, there are new clear blacklists to pull in terms of ISP Name (yet), there are some winners, but I don't think its time to white list. What else can I do to optimize here?
-I've thought about after gathering more data on landers to continue testing offers, but then retest bid structures, one at current bid, one at lower, and one at higher.
-I'm afraid on my current traffic source I"m not getting enough volume to make this worthwhile, but my daily budget was also only set at $30 - new traffic sources, higher bids, and more frequency caps should help that?

New Campaigns: With my winning landers, I think I'm going to launch a new campaign in same geo, but on a different OS.

General questions on AM/Tracking

-Voluum only pulled in ~55% of the cost from Popads, so my ROI is likely positively skewed, is there a way to fix this?
-What other networks hold lots of AV offers, are there any that specialize?
-Is it too early to explore other verticals outside of AV Pin submits?

This is a lot in one post, but I feel like I'm making progress and learning the process much more thanks to all of your help!

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So, I kept running and added one more offer to the winning offer above.

Here's the (bad) results:



I'm not sure if it was unlucky or something bad traffic, but ROI for both offers was awful, and the winning offer from last time along with my landers that were doing great didn't do very well at all.

Digging into the data, there aren't too many huge culprits of the bad performance. I blacklisted one more awful website placement (excluding 25 websites now...) I'm not really sure where to go from here, but I'm going pull loser offer to test the winning offer and same 2 landers at $20 each campaign at 3 different bids for now... any other suggestions?

The one thing I did see is that iOS9 ate up a lot of money and didn't perform very well. I don't think I can blacklist it since I'm only targeting iOS in this specific campaign... please see this screenshot here. This is just the converting offer here.



Any guidance would be very much appreciated here - don't want to continue wasting money, but I think I can make it green. Would like to try and run again this evening (day VN time).

In the meantime: I plan to start up another, different offer-based, campaign with these landers, potentially 3 more landers with 3-4 offers, opening up all placements and going from there.

One question on that - is this how you should be testing multiple landers with multiple offers in Voluum?

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Here are more networks that I've heard are friendly to newbies: Affiliaxe, Appflood, OasisAds. But it looks like you've joined some great networks already! (Disclaimer: STM does not endorse any traffic or affiliate networks. Please sign up at your own discretion.)

Regarding sticking to one vertical: It really boils down to personal choice and preference. I'd say the AV is as good a vertical to focus on as any other. It's an evergreen type of offer, plus if you use scare tactics they will most probably work across multiple geos. (Just be careful that you don't go against any TOS - at the traffic source or the affiliate network / advertiser.)

Asking your AMs for lists of AV offers you can run aggressive would be a good start. You can't push AV successfully on pop traffic without going aggressive.

You can open up targeting to new offers using your existing camp - why would you need to start a separate camp? Also, by "targeting" are you referring to stuff like OS/Carrier? Or placements?

Ah OK I think I understand what you're trying to do. Are you wanting to have the current campaign run on the current-best offer+lander and just keep cutting placements? Is this why you're wanting to set up a separate camp to test the new offers? I've never done it this way but I guess you could - I can't think of anything wrong with this approach.



Amy

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Always great to see green!

VN used to be a great geo with lots of offers, but recent changes in local laws have caused advertisers to be very strict in their rules on how you can run the offers. VN offers that allow aggressive promotion are hard to find now.

If you want testing to go fast and not want to stifle your traffic volume, only cut the very worst placements for now, leaving the rest to collect data for you, even if at a slight loss.

Don't you have an original camp where you're running your best lander and offer? If so now would be a good time to clone that twice or thrice and test bids.

Aren't you running VN on popads? Traffic volumes shouldn't be a problem even at 1/24 frequency. Perhaps try setting a higher daily budget. Bidding higher will help for sure - guess after you have a chance to test a few bids you'll have a much better idea on what to bid to get good ROI.

And yes - scaling to other traffic sources will always be an option. No need to worry about traffic volume for now. Do your best at monetizing the volumes you have available, then move onto another geo. For VN, popads, popcash, zeropark all have healthy volumes. (Disclaimer: STM does not endorse any traffic or affiliate networks. Please work with them at your discretion.)


Sounds good!


Ah yes. PopAds costs will never be accurate (I'm assuming your're using the [BID] token), and some geos are worse than others. The only way to "fix" this would be to update costs in Voluum manually.

Can't say I know of any one network that specializes in AV offers. Basically any general network will have at least some. Off the top of my head: Adsimilis, F5 Media, Appflood, Clickdealer, OasisAds, Affiliaxe all have them. I think Maxbounty/Peerfly may have some big brand AV offers as well.

If you find other verticals more interesting by all means give them a try. Nowadays with spy tools like adplexity, testing a new verical/offer can be as easy as ripping 5-10 landers and asking your AMs to recommend 2-3 solid offers in the same geo. Having said that, there are definitely advantages to getting to know a single vertical very well. AV for example - after you've tested all of the landers you're seeing in spy tools, you'll know what works and what doesn't. After testing a few geos, you may find that a particular type of lander performs consistently well for most/all geos, so what you can do is take that one lander and test all different geos.



Amy

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Sorry to hear! Pop traffic is volatile - sometimes camps will take a nose-dive for no apparent reason. Testing bids would be good at this point. I wouldn't worry about blacklisting something minor like an OS version at this point. It's probably not going to make or break your campaign.

So let's wait and see how the bid-testing goes!

Also - what's your targeting like? So you're just targeting IOS? All ISPs or specific ISPs/Carriers? I'm just trying to figure out what's restricting your traffic. Those 25 placements you blacklisted - were they big placements?

There are other things you can cut to get green, such as popads' quality levels, and dayparting. But let's see how much traffic you have first.

And starting another test would be a good thing to do as well! Last thing you want is focus on a camp that's not doing too good at the moment, holding your breath for it to improve.

Regarding your Voluum camp setup: Yup! That's the way to do it.



Amy

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Amy - thanks for the rapid fire responses on ALL of my questions!

Firstly - I am dayparting between 12pm-12am local time after reviewing some data.

For this one offer - I'm targeting only IOS but on all ISPs.

On the website placements I cut, I did not check the size at the time, but using the token details tool in PopAds, it looks like some were up to 36k raw traffic (not sure if that is big relatively), but it looks like many campaigns are excluding some of them... not sure if its worth opening up placements or not this far down the line.

I'm looking forward to starting the other test, but have some questions on carrier placement which I posted in the mobile general forum. .

Hoping this bid testing goes well. So far in my minimal AM career I've spent ~$400 with -50-60% ROI its mostly been learning how to get up and running and testing this campaign. My efficiency in getting things running is much higher - my holdups are finding offers, I may need to delve into other verticals we will see how the next few days go.

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I ran the winning offer on three bid structures. This got much better ROI then my previous run, albeit still negative. The low bid got no traffic, and the two higher bids got more. That being said I’m going to run at a higher bid structure from now on.



In the high bid campaign, again, both landers performed pretty identically, so nothing to do here.

Nothing to do on ISP Name or Connection Type – pretty evenly distributed traffic, and some green but those sources were too small.

On website ID’s I cut two more placements (the worst) which I’ve read is the best to do (27 total cut now)



In reviewing website ID data I came across some interesting placements that were pulling in a lot of green.



So I filtered by Quality Score -> Website ID, to see where most of these were falling. A decent amount were within one quality score. What I want to test now, to see if its worth it is these quality scores, while blacklisting those two final website ID’s. If I don’t see enough traffic, I’ll open up the quality scores and keep testing at a higher bid.

What I did was pause both the original high bid campaign, and avg bid campaign, turned the low bid campaign into a high bid/”high quality” score campaign, and will watch performance here. I also raised bid more here to get more traffic

Continuing to narrow placements here, if/when I get green will be interesting to see if there is even enough volume to continue! Suggestions welcome!

I believe I need to continue starting new campaigns now, time to explore new geos/offer payouts/etc, preferably within the AV vertical.

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On the latest test where I cut some quality scores and websites, the ROI still hovered in the ~-30% range, so actually a decrease in improvement before getting rid of the bad quality scores. I'm not sure if this is because of the higher bid that I put on this campaign.

Screenshot:



The landers also continued to perform at the same level of ROI.



I've been drilling down to find any pockets of green and there hasn't really been much. Remember, this is my one "winning" offer with my two "winning" landers, after several rounds of cutting, at a high quality traffic/high bid traffic. I'm considering testing this campaign at the same level of quality but at three bid levels.

I'm going to try one thing now, that I'm not sure if I should - and there's probably not a ton of volume in this. I'm going to save my blacklisted placements in a notepad somewhere, CUT the quality score categorization and target only the placements that were doing extremely well. I'm going to keep the bid the same - UP the frequency cap, run for several hours and see what happens (this is just a test, but given the data, I would expect it to perform well).

In the meantime, if this doesn't do well is this campaign dead? Is it worth testing the "high quality" campaign on different bids as opposed to the very high one? I could potentially explore other traffic sources.

"After that, if a campaign is at -30% ROI or more after you've completed a couple of rounds of split-testing, and you've genuinely tested a wide variety of ads and landing pages, kill it unless you're very sure that you can make it work. " from Caurmens "When to cut campaigns thread" - says so.

Its the weekend right now so not the easiest to get more offers for a newbie.

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This is exactly why testing bids early on is recommended. Many people (my old self included) can't wrap their head around why a higher bid can make more money than a lower bid. This is because they're not taking the change in traffic quality (CR) into consideration. Nicely done!

However, be aware that not every geo or every traffic segment will perform the best at high bids. In some geos if you scrape the bottom of the barrel by bidding really low to snap up dirt cheap traffic, you can still make money. So always be testing different bids for every new geo you're testing on every traffic source.


Nicely done my friend! It sounds like you've got this - you know what you're doing and have your own approach and style. All sounds good - no further suggestions from me for now.

If you've already tested most of the available offers and still not doing really good ROI, an acceptable course of action would be what you're doing - just cut your way to green and be content with however much traffic will be left. Or just ditch the camp if the profits are not enough to justify the time you spend on monitoring/managing the camp.

If you've tested enough landers, a quick way to test offers would be to use a shortcut: Rip the same style lander in multiple languages (or get translations) and just focus on mass-testing offers. For something like AV, a good lander will often work well in many geos.

Or if you want to go the more-accurate route: Re-test all landers for several geos, see if you can find a lander that does well consistently across those geos, and just use that to mass-test offers.

So - start compiling lists of offers in different geos! Just please mind your spending - when testing so broad you can't afford to waste too much money on any one geo or offer. And don't forget to test bids! Exciting times ahead!



Amy

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Ah! I don't know how I missed that! No you shouldn't change 2 parameters at the same time like that. The green quality scores you saw was for that particular bid level ONLY. So I would start with that bid and see whether the ROI holds steady before doing anything else.


Was just about to suggest that.


Great idea! And yes - keep that blacklist somewhere safe and add to it as you discover new bad placements. Having a whitelist and blacklist for different geos on different traffic sources is one of the best assets you can have that anyone can take advantage of. You've already paid for this data, so why not use it again and again in future camps.

Again - try not to change 2 things at the same time. Hold off on changing the frequency until you see a steady ROI.


Very wise words from caurmen. This camp is more like a testing ground for you to do a lot of experimentation to develop your own optimization strategy. To that end it has served it's purpose. From a profits standpoint it's obviously not going to make you rich. You've done your reasonable best.

Scaling is always an option, but if you're having to cut so many placements to get green, chances are it would be harder to make this camp work on other networks without a lot of cutting as well.


You can always compile your lists of offers over the weekend, then approach your AMs to inquire about them and get approval on Monday.

Fun times! You've made a lot of progress and have gained a lot of insight into optimization. From this point onwards it will just be a matter of testing a lot, and picking the most promising to optimize and scale. You know more than enough to make profits now.



Amy

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Amy - thank you for the three relies. As always, the knowledge/mentoring guidance is extremely helpful and helps me to realize obvious mistakes I was making. The one mistake I made on this round was cutting down to the successful quality score while also raising bid - my bad.

My next steps for this week starting Monday -

1) One final test on this offer dual lander combo - three bids being the original I found green on, a higher bid and a lower bid. If after this there is no significant promise I'm ditching this campaign for good.
2) I was originally only targeting iOS here because Android wasn't converting at my bids. With some extra cash I had on my traffic source before refilling - I tested a really high bid Android targeted campaign with similar parameters. I was getting conversions at bad ROI - this tells me a few things about OS in this get/traffic source combo. It makes me consider testing an Android campaign but may not.
3) going to compile offers from the networks I'm apart of that are similar - preferably in one geo for now as to not spend too much - but we'll see. I'll probably stick to AV if I can , if not, try sweeps. Is a good strategy here to just grab as many AV offers in that one geo as I can and as many landers as I can - cut awful placements - and then cut to the winning offer lander combo and scale? Is there a downside to doing it this way and not testing multiple geos?
4) once I do another round of mass testing once I get to profit, test and scale to another traffic source as I haven't gotten to do that yet.

One off questions I have is if you have a bunch of offers that only accept 3-4 carriers In a geo but your TS only gives the option to target 1-2 of them specifically, are those offers not viable on that source? Lastly, if a network has a $1000 Rev threshold for payment that can give some cash flow issues - are there any ways around this threshold you've seen besides credit cards? I'm not up against a wall or anything. But would like to stick within my budgeted cash.

Amy - again thanks for your guidance.

I had a hint in discouragement on this once since it was $500 testing which really isn't much and lost about $300 (not including tracker, spy tool, STM) but in reality I learned a ton. I came from not knowing how to track or host a lander to this point in about a week. Improvement is exponential and I'm still in the "flat" stage. I always come up with one off questions as I move forward but realize I need to just keep moving and stop analyzing at points.

Look forward to this week.

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Yes by all means try that approach if that's what you prefer!

It would be synonymous to dropping one line in real deep, as opposed to dropping in several lines shallow.

However, if you're testing so many offers all at once, you can't really test staggered bids at the start - especially if the offer payouts are different by a lot. (Imagine that in each of your different-bid camps, you have different offers converting - the bid that gets the highest ROI may have just gotten lucky and made a conversion for the highest-payout offer.)

In that case, try to bid a bit above the average bid, to make sure you're getting good-enough quality to make conversions.



Why not just do your initial testing on a traffic source that will allow you to target all accepted carriers to gauge potential of all of them? Performance can (and usually will) vary widely between carriers.

There are networks that have lower rev thresholds. Those will typically be smaller/newer networks.

Also, if you have a good relationship with your AM, and have been with the network for a while, you can try explaining your predicament and basically beg them to make an exception and lower the weekly threshold for you. You may have a shot if you're scaling on an offer and can convince them that the only thing standing between you and 1k/week is cashflow.



That's the spirit! Consider the "lost" money an investment in your AM education. Nothing wrong with analyzing and asking questions - in fact doing so is necessary especially in the beginning. You need to know why you're doing things a certain way, or else you won't be able to refine your approach over time. Sounds like you're doing great, so no need to be hard on yourself!



Amy

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So - I hit green on my "final" test as I referred to it in my last post albeit probably close to break-even given click loss from traffic source. I tested three bid levels, and when I woke up once was the clear frontrunner so I paused the others and let this one run.

One lander was a clear winner at this bid level. I also targeted a certain time of day.



I dug into the data on the green lander and saw an ISP that wasn't performing, cutting that. I saw a couple more websites that were eating money, cutting those. Per my previous lesson, I'm keeping the bid the same, and going to run at the same time tomorrow with these couple of more things cut. I'm going to run $40-$50 tomorrow and see if it is worth it to keep this camp running.

Lessons learned: Continually test bids at different testing "checkpoints", don't give up on a camp too quickly.

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Campaign 1 (Original)

I ran all day and finished at -1% - that's ok. I found more placements that were doing shit, so cut those. I fixed up my day parting. I'm hoping this one is in the clear. I have a few lander variations I'll try out after this run tomorrow.

Given that at this point traffic will be relatively slow, are my options to test higher bids and to up the frequency cap? I know I can also test out other traffic sources.

NEW: Campaign 2

I ran a new campaign all day today on two landers that I know work across four offers. Overall test campaign's ROI was -67%, but there was a fairly clear offer/lander winner that I'm going to run with. I did placement cutting, and tweaked some other targeting parameters to try and get this one quickly to green. After running tomorrow if in green, will test bids, and some more lander variations and continue to cut to increase ROI.

Plans:

1. Try and get Campaign 1 consistent green on this traffic source, get a pay raise, test more lander variations to increase ROI, figure out ways to attract more traffic and then move to a new traffic source.
2. Get Campaign 2 to green on this traffic source
3. Launch new campaign with 5+ landers across 2-3 offers

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Campaign 1

Green has been hit! Screen below. I've identified several more completely negative targeting parameters to cut off to increase ROI. The ROI in the screen is a bit lower due to pop click loss. Cutting the parameters I've identified in a excel spreadsheet brings me to ~40% ROI.



QUESTION FOR POPS USERS - Can I increase traffic speed on this source? Would increasing frequency cap likely bring me out of green? I'm looking to scale now. Before was dayparting to a certain period, going to expand that period now and see how the camp performs throughout the day - obviously more time, more traffic.

In the meantime, while looking pointers on that - looking to scale to a new traffic source. This new Pops source has less tokens, and has a new cost tracking mechanism so should be interesting. That being said, I said up three campaigns on the new source at three different bids with $20 in each. We'll see how this plays out and optimize from there (if viable).

Campaign 2

Stopped this one, promise was gone and had some other opportunities that looked better.

NEW Campaign 3

Launching similar vertical, fairly higher payout, way diff geos. In the process of getting things translated, compiling landers and offers and want to go from there.

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congratulations man!

keep up the good work, ill be following along.

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I guess you could call today my first $XX day (at least for the campaign I've been working on). I ran for a longer period of time over 25% green on the first campaign. I'm continuing to chisel crappy targeting. Have a couple of offers to test on this camp potentially, and some more lander variations.

Does anyone have experience with upping frequency caps to 1 view / 8 hours over 1 view / 24 hours for something like Popads?

I also began testing on another traffic source, I tested three bids, obviously unprofitable on all, but I'll tell you that source BURNED through money quick. I'm going to start chiseling away bad placements and try and get that one to consistent green as well.

For anyone's benefit - this is how I'm cutting placements on the first run of my new traffic source. I exported an excel file of each campaign and looked up cost/conversions for each campaign against the website ID. I set up totals for each over on the right, and set up a formula that told me whether to cut or keep based on conversions/cost. Sure this is fairly elementary but it saves time and helps you to look across multiple camps. I know this is not COMPLETELY correct since diff bids will have different conversion rates on different placements, but I thought at the threshold of cost I'm using, its fairly reasonable.



Gearing up to launch new geos on new offers.

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Congrats to the XX/day! Here's to hitting XXX/day very soon!

You're doing all the right things - not much more I have to suggest except a few things:


1)Regarding opening up frequency cap: The general effect is that this will lower your overall conversion rate but get you more traffic volume. These 2 are opposing trends, so the overall effect may be an increase or decrease in total profits, so you'll need to test and see.

I know that some people would set up a separate camp at a higher frequency, and bid lower to off-set the lower conversion rate that comes with a higher frequency. So this is something you can experiment with. If you're getting a lot of traffic, you could even have several camps all at different frequencies and bids to take advantage of conversions from repeat visitors.


2)To combine placement revenues from tracker stats with placement costs from traffic source stats, this spreadsheet can help you match up the two sets of data:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...kly-amp-Easily

Just in case your spreadsheet isn't already doing this automatically.


3)For that new traffic source that's burning through your budget: Some traffic sources will have more bad placements to "chisel through" than others. As long as you're not too far away from breakeven, and you'll still be left with a good chunk of traffic after the cutting, then the cost and effort of cutting your way to green is justified.





Amy

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Thanks Amy!

For one day, I'll open the frequency cap and monitor for the first half of the day and see what's going on. Lower bid higher frequency is interesting, and something I will def be experimenting with.

Regarding the new traffic source, I think I can chisel away but we'll see what happens!

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Traffic Source 1 remains profitable between 10-30% ROI - I'd like to increase that. The setback on this traffic source is traffic volume but that's ok. I'f I can keep this stable profitable without any work, I'm ok with that while I scale to other sources. I think I can increase ROI here when/if I get a pay bump and start testing new lander variations.

Traffic Source 2 remains unprofitable. I ripped out the past 3 days of data that I paid for and was playing around with some optimizing strategies in excel. I'm going to run this as a whitelist campaign. If my analysis is correct and performance remains relatively constant, I'll have a 40+% ROI traffic source.

CONCERNS: I want to scale to other traffic sources and test more campaigns, but I need to get paid by my networks first. They have a $1000 monthly threshold and I haven't reached a pay cycle yet to be 100% comfortable that 1) I'll get paid 2) I get paid on time. The network I'm working with is known as reputable on STM for the most part and my AM has told me the traffic/landers I'm running are all good - so I probably shouldn't worry. I don't have infinite funds and don't want to go above XYZ on credit cards for financial safety reasons. I did get a business credit card that allows me to pay in 60 day increments for the purpose of my affiliate marketing career. Assuming all goes well with the pay cycles, I should be good on cash flow.

If I had more cash I'd be cranking out more campaigns and traffic sources 16 hour a day until xxxx a day. That's not yet the case .

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A lesson learned - when monitoring your campaigns and continually cutting crappy targeting parameters, be careful once its been running for a while.

I was about to blacklist a placement that had spent over the offer payout without a conversion today, and then I drilled into that placement and looked at its data from the past three days, and its past three day data was 100%+ ROI.

UPDATE - I'm no longer on my first campaign, but have another profitable one going. I'm opting to spend my money optimizing and scaling rather then testing new offers/verticals. My goal is a $XXX day by month end.

My "scaling strategy" so far has been the following, and any experienced affiliates please weigh in if you have suggestions. I'm keeping the lander/offer combos that I've made profitable on other traffic sources, starting up/making a deposit in a new traffic source and testing three bids. Whichever of those camps has the highest ROI I move forward with to optimize. Fairly simple at the surface level, but this is the type of stuff that burns up time.

For a campaign on PopAds - once I get a camp to green, I'm going to leave that popunder campaign going, but then duplicate it keeping EVERYTHING else constant but change the format to a popup. If I leave both of these running at the same time, will this ideally reduce my overall ROI on this source since I'm technically and manually upping the frequency cap?

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Great stuff - following along! Sent you a PM, I'm from NYC too

You might find this useful, I know I sure do. It's Mr Green's global blacklist for PopAds. He got it by asking them for the most blacklisted placements. This list is now about 1.5 years old - I emailed PopAds asking for an updated one and will post it in the following thread when they get back to me.

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ight=blacklist

To more experienced people - would you recommend implementing this list from the start?

EDIT: PopAds said they can't help. Maybe they don't give that info out anymore or maybe only to someone spending a significant amount.

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It's easier to scale working camps to other camps, and/or optimizing a promising camp, than to test new offers from scratch. All the best in reach your profit goals!


That's the approach I use too.


Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think popups and popunders will be from different placements, no? I've never thought to compare placements between popunder/up tabunder/up camps to see whether there are overlaps. Either way - popunders is probably the ad format usually responsible for the most traffic volume, so if you optimize popunders first, and then test bids for the other ad formats, I don't think you can go far wrong.



Amy

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Thank you Amy! In scaling something that you know works on other POP traffic sources, if after 1-2 rounds of cutting placements on a new traffic source in the same profitable segment, you aren't hitting consistent green is it best practice to drop that source?

I have one TS on a camp that is consistently profitable at low levels, and then a couple of others that started out profitable or close to profitable but are inconsistent. They don't have the targeting options of the "good" traffic source and I've tested different bids.

What do you typically do in this situation? Any suggestions on Asian POP traffic?

EDIT: two of my sources went red after 2 days, one stayed profitable but ROI went down and its only making ~$5 a day.

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So I've been running my only campaign on three traffic sources. I got way too newbie overexcited at two of the traffic sources being $xx+ green for two days, and thought if I kept going to new traffic sources, I could hit $xxx. The third source hasn't hit green. One of my traffic sources is green every single day but its only $x. I feel that I will stop this campaign once I hit the network threshold and explore new geos - Popcash and Propeller are my unprofitable sources for the same traffic segment using the same landers as my profitable source. My goal is still a $xxx day just doubt this is the campaign for it.

In my few weeks of doing AM (outside of tracking / spy costs ) - I've spent $1375 on pop traffic, and generated $1050 in revenue for a -23% overall ROI. I think if I knew what I was doing a bit more in the beginning I would have slightly profited overall. My profitable campaign has generated $45 in profit since I've started, but on the whole its a bit too slow and I realize I need to work on a campaign with more volume.

As I was slightly discouraged at this point, I looked back and realized a 23% loss for all of the learning I gained is really not bad compared to what I've seen especially since its only ~$300 (excluding tracking).

I do still need to get paid out in early August for my revenue mostly one two networks, and if that's the case I'm pretty much back to square one funds wise. Gotta keep grinding and refining my approach.

Anyone that wants to get on a mobile pops mastermind that has run (slightly) profitable campaigns and at least $1000 in traffic, please feel free to PM me.

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Hi Tom, good progress so far! I haven't really read all of your follow along but looked at these two posts specifically. Honestly, I think if you're transferring a campaign that's generating low $xx on your main traffic source, you may want to reconsider improving your funnel to get it to high $xx - $xxx and then port that campaign over to other traffic sources.

Instead of cutting out certain targeting options, create a rule in Voluum under your campaign creation details and then the targeting options you'd like to eliminate, think about rerouting the eliminating target options to a remnant network like YTZ or Monetizer.co.

With bids, try figuring out at which bids do you find most of your converting website ids and then you'll find a optimal bid for your campaign. You may notice that if you bid at $5 CPM you may get a very high converting website ID(ex.111111) and if you lower your bid to $2 CPM you may find it disappear. However, if you increase your bid to the above average bid of (111111) then you'll regain that website ID again. So, it's about testing a bid price point to get the sweet spot placements.

You just gotta keep going. Don't be discouraged, I've been working on this for almost a year now and still haven't hit anything solid. Just keep finding tips and tricks to help propel your campaign. Good Luck!

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Just finished a few hours of prep for a new campaign. Ripping landers, recoding everything as well as taking successful landers from other GEOs and translating to this geo.

Major learnings from my first campaign that will be incorporated here:
-Be methodical, unemotional, trust the data and the process
-Don't cut so aggressively, you lose massive volume even on large traffic sources. Cut only the ultimate worst placements/handsets and then optimize the funnel from there
-Definitely don't cut huge traffic bringing targeting parameters unless they are AWFUL
-Make sure you have the correct tokens lined up for your traffic source... (newb)
-Continually join more Aff Networks and grab more offers that can fit the campaign and rotate them in as needed
-Don't try and scale until your first traffic source is extremely stable
-Add your own spice to creatives once you're close to profit and/or profitable
-Many more that come to mind, but seem to come up as I'm starting the campaign.

Campaign 3

-2nd/3rd Tier GEO
-2 offers
-11 landers
-Payout ~$4.00


Question: The budget for the first test run is going to be ~$4.00 x 2 x 20 = ~$160. Is this enough for statistical significance on one campaign with this many landers on 2 offers with a $4.00 payout? This averages out to ~7.2x each offer/lander combo. I'm planning to only test one bid to start here at ~1.5x the average for my targeting as its a higher bid.

Something I haven't done is try and optimize load speed of any of my landers, or optimize technicalities along those lines line DNS, etc. Right now I'm running basic Voluum on the Amazon CDN setup.

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When scaling, you already have a "best" lander + offer, and know what targeting works, so the 2 main things left to do would be 1)test bids and 2)cut placements.

I would test bids first - at least 3 bids (more would be better). If none of the bids are remotely close to breaking even then I wouldn't even bother cutting placements.

It would also depend on traffic/quality distribution amongst placements. If in a certain geo on a certain traffic source, there are some big "junk" placements you can cull to massively increase your ROI but still leave you with enough traffic to worth your while, then obviously you'll take that into account when deciding whether or not to continue running the camp on that traffic source. On the other hand, if traffic volume is pretty much equally distributed amongst a ton of smaller placements, then you know you may need to cut a lot of placements to take that camp to green which may not be worth the effort, considering how short-lived pop camps typically are.

As for inconsistent campaign performance - unfortunately this is typical of pop camps. Some of the causes are beyond your control so I won't even mention them. Here are a couple of things I do to combat this:

1)Set up several camps at staggered bids, and keep all profitable camps running. Doing so can create a "hedge" against changes in the bidding landscape caused by changes in competition etc.

2)Set the ROI bar higher so that even in spite of these inconsistencies you'd still be making profits. To maintain a higher ROI, you can either a)improve your funnel by testing more offers/landers, or b)cut more relentlessly (example: cut anything that isn't making 50% ROI), or c)do both. This is yet another reason why it would be wise to achieve a high ROI first by testing more offers, instead of relying on cutting placements to make a campaign green. Ideally, the ROI increase achieved by cutting placements should be used to offset the decline in ROI over time, to make your campaign live longer.

As for lack of traffic after cutting stuff - ways to avoid this situation:

1)Pick bigger geos or offers that accept wider targeting ranges (more OS/carriers/etc.)

2)Pick less competitive geos / traffic sources

In Asia there are definitely geos that fit both of these criteria. In addition, there are geos that fit only one of these criteria which will be enough. There are big geos that are competitive, that will require you to test more offers and landers to make them work. And then there are small geos that have virtually zero competition that you can quietly dominate for months if you can find good offers for these geos.



Amy

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AFAIK it's not possible to determine the sample size needed for statistical significance to be reached, without knowing what the conversion rate is.

If you're testing at one bid then yes, an above-average bid would be a good choice - you need to be sure you're doing the offers justice by ensuring level of traffic quality.

You may not even need to spend the whole $160, depending on whether you even see promise in those offers. I would suggest to spend 10x payout on each offer (i.e. $80 in total) and see how many conversions you get. Assuming the landers you're using are popular landers you've ripped, if you don't see conversions then you can probably conclude it's the offers that are the problem.

It's good to look at offer+lander combos - to see how many are green, and obviously the more green you see the better. But it's also useful to look at overall trends as well. If you're using popular landers to test an offer, and it doesn't convert at all after 10x payout, then it wouldn't be a good sign. Of course there's always a chance for one of the offer+lander combos to end up being profitable if you ran more budget to it, and this is where your personal testing approach comes in. I would much rather devote less money to testing each offer but test MORE offers, and only spend time on an offer that is truly a superstar.

Another good thing to do when assessing whether an offer has promise or not, is to drill down to major traffic segments to see if there's green, e.g. a major OS. All you need to make a campaign green is to have a profitable offer+lander combo for a major traffic segment.



Amy

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