Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns

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Project: Escape Middle Earth! (49)

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DISCLAIMER: I actually haven't read/seen enough Lord of the Rings to actually make jokes about it so don't expect any more of those :P DO expect lots of ultimate newbie questions. Gone full noob. No turning back.

Sup Fam! Hope you're all getting over the AWE hangover - been sneaky facebook stalking the photos and it looked meeaaannn! My goal at the moment is to make it to AWA in December, so hope to see you all there!

After finally raising enough for initial testing, I've been on STM for a few weeks now slowly researching myself into a small worried hole. I finally decided to stop wasting time and money and just start, which I did and now I'm more like a large confused volcano.

That said, here are my baby steps:

Decided to follow the Mobile Cookbook Appetizer Guide, but on recommendation went with Avazu as my traffic source (thinking it'd be pretty much the same set up as Go2Mobi...I don't think it is...) gave it a grand as initial testing budget (and got their free $100 bonus! aw ye!). Applied for a few networks, got accepted into ClickDealer and Adsimillis. I'll eventually test offers with both of them, but atm going to run with the network with the GC of an AM (churr clickdealer!)

BRAINDUMP ON MY CAMP SO FAR:
OFFER: Chance to Win an Apple or Samsung
Payout: $0.16
Geo: Thailand
TS: Avazu
Total Budget: $100 (as per Avazu's restrictions)
Daily Budget: $30 (As per the appetizer)
Frequency Capping: Cap set up per device 1 impression per day
Bid: Went 1.5x payout so $0.24 (I feel like that's super high??)
TRAFFIC: I went through Avazu's sources and picked the ones that had Thailand in their top 10 countries and an average bid close to mine, ended up with 5 and just went 'select all inventories'

ANGLES: I picked 3 angles - because I'm a little bit technologically challenged/may actually be blind, I didn't figure out how to rip banners/landers from adplexity until i'd already made my own, so I just used my own because they look fairly unique and I thought i'd get the practise in. Will probably end up cycling in some ripped ones that definitely work. (I'm using one ripped banner rn)

Went with 3 angles to test: a Pokemon Go themed one = "Catch a new Phone!" (I fucking hate pokemon go)



lander:


a gameshow themed one (I watched Killer Karaoke like once and thought it'd be a great idea but i'm not sure on this one)
"What would you do for a new phone?"



lander:


and a more generic facebook message sort of one:



lander:


I'm rolling with the "Simple and Ugly works!" ideology, which is why my banners and landers look like a 5y/os 1st attempt at coding (defs not because I suck at HTML and photoshop...)

I know this isn't a heap of information, but I also have some newbie questions that I was hoping to find some help with! (Like, wayy newbie. Like, i should be able to figure this out by myself but for whatever reason I can't plz help!)

1. I can't figure out how to set up conversion tracking in Avazu - not even trying to connect to to Voluum yet, just plain ol linking the network to Avazu so the conversions register. either I'm looking on the wrong places of the tracking URL on avazu is super different to the Go2Mobi one, which is confusing me because the Appetizer guide is talking about G2M.

2. Weirdly can't get my landers up on Avazu, although I'm sure with a little more hunting and hair pulling I'll suss that one!

I know there's zero data to go on, but any help while the camps still being approved r.e. the set up (esp bidding! I don't think Avazu has autobid and I'm really just guessing here and would rather not lose all my money by bidding too high!) and setting up tracking would be amazing!

Thanks team! Y'all are fab

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Awesome man. Looking forwards to seeing your data.

Since your a newb you should go full transparency with your camp. Youll learn a lot faster and get in the money a lot quicker. There are million of big camps out there.

For the best feedback on followalongs, you should include:
data by ad
Data by lander
Data by targeting method
" " geo
" " device
" " browser
" " browser version
" " os

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thanks man!

I am trying to be completely transparent, just yeah, obvs forgot a few things!! thanks for pointing them out

I think i included most of that in my OP but

Offer: Chance to Win Apple or Samsung SOI /TH
Traffic: Avazu - Banners
Payout: $0.16
(is there any more info you need on the ad? sorry, I'm not quite sure what you mean. #noob)
I'm not targeting too specifically yet, I figure I'll start with a wide net and then optimize. The only thing I've cut down on is Geo, which is Thailand, and device - I'm only targeting mobiles, as it's a mobile offer (and all my landers look shit on browsers lol) otherwise, I'm including all browsers & OS at the moment.

Is that what you were asking?

Thanks for your feedback!

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ah jk realized you meant Voluum data - haven't actually started the camp yet (except for like 10 minutes when i hadn't got it on Voluum or anything set up properly yet) so I don't have any of that data. I was more looking for advice on my bid, and my dumb conversion tracking n00b questions. But I got some fab help with that, so I'm about to press go and will hopefully be back with more solid data in a few hours!

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You said you bid 1.5x payout, is this CPM basis?

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yup - using Avazu's Flat CPM

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Aiite gang, here's an update: !!UPDATED with mad pro imgur links

I didn't realize that the camp would run while it was still getting approved by TS/asap after it was approved which took wayy less time than I thought so long story short I paid $15 to learn that wee lesson...bunch of clicks and some conversions showed up in Clickdealer but honestly I have no idea what was pointing at what at that point but at least something like 18,000 people got to see my madd photoshop skillzz


So (with some help) (*lots of help) I figured out that its actually easier to do all the tracking through Voluum. (This is groundbreaking shit, guys. Who'd have thought that someone made a tool to make stuff easier! ohmogod.) So I spent all morning figuring that out! Because my banners and landers are supposed to correlate, I set the banners as equal weighting and then made a rule in Voluum that (hopefully!) sends people from the right banners to the right landers. (and I'm only testing one offer, so they all go to that)

I thought I had everything set up right so I pressed Go! Super exciting to see some clicks come through but had warning to leave it a couple hours, so I went for a run (wellington had a nice day for once!) and when I got back 3 hours later it had smashed through the entire daily budget with no conversions. By that point I had to race of to the day job so I just paused it.

Anyway, have some fab screenshots of my voluum data! The one conversion you'll see was a conversion test I did through Avazu so it doesn't count :P

Voluum:
http://imgur.com/05tfAzY

Camp report Avazu:
http://imgur.com/bw9BBAn

data by lander: http://imgur.com/a/lbFLr

i'm only running in Thailand, but there's definitely some difference so far in regions. I know with Avazu you can drill down into local/hyperlocal targeting, would it be worth doing that further down the track?

Data by device:
http://imgur.com/jantwIR
obvs mobiles are smashing it, but the CTR's are interesting across the brands with Generic phones having the highest at 46.67%. Unsure if thats because generic phones have harder to find back buttons lol, but will be interesting to see conversion rates when i get some...

data by OS:
http://imgur.com/jOgRII5

data by browser (only included main browsers because my screenshot skills are still pretty noob):
http://imgur.com/2bVhp2W

again, can drill down into browser versions (and will) - there's obviously two or three with out standing CTR's, but probably not worth it without any conversions.

Question: It did take me until like half an hour ago to figure out how to track costs in voluum, is that why cost for all the browers etc isn't showing up? Can/should I fix this?


The goal of this campaign, as it's my first, is definitely just to learn the basics. Like, the absolute basics. I'm terrible at researching myself into a hole and also just freezing when I'm not 100% on something, so i'm okay with spending some money to learn how to use the software and to go about the processes because that's super confusing to me (if you didn't pick that!) I'm actually just proud that I have my landers and banners up and that my postback seems to be working, everythings spending money and tracking and doing the things!

I'm now emotionally invested in this camp so I'm gonna stick to it (jk. But its as good a camp as any to start with IMO) but plans for the next few days are:
- lower my bid: will probably go down to $0.12 just for kicks (and because thats what someone suggested)
- Control Lander: I spent my whole shift reading this thread >> http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...d-Pops-Journey (I work in a very quiet bar) and although I'm nowhere near that level, it was super useful, especially wherever he says that thing about there being like 3 or 4 variations on landers that convert and I realized that mine look like none of them so I'm going to make some changes so they do, and also add in a proven one or two. Same with banners
- Add another offer! I was finally contacted by my Adsimillis AM and he sent me through a bunch of offers that I might be able to use so I'll have a look through those.

(I'm keeping this camp paused overnight as I really super need some sleep and I really don't think that without some of the above changes it'll make any statistical difference.)

I'm still getting my head around many many things, so any help/feedback/constructive criticism/mild abuse is welcome. I hope the data in this update is more useful than my OP lol (i was kinda just proud of my landers tbh. they took me like 2 weeks)

Churr Stakkers! Y'all are fab!

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Your attachments dont work for me, upload them somewhere and just link them

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done!

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Brief update: I'm running the camp again with the reduced bid, but widened the sources/inventory to everything on Avazu, just to get some really wide data (figuring i'll blacklist later)

I've applied to run a couple more similar offers across Clickdealer and Adsimillis in a couple different geos so that I can test a few offers at a time, and what I'm going to do while I'm waiting is tweak my landers. I'm still going to use my angles (i don't really have a reason not to!) but I'm going to experiment with different banner CTA's and making the landers look more like proven ones. For example, instead of my pokemon "click on your choice of prize" I'll do a 'how much do you know about pokemon?" quiz style. And I'm tweaking/translating a couple of proven landers to test with as well, such as the spinning wheel and facebook style.

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Oh wow! You're really creative when it comes to angles - and boy it must be hard to have to "dumb down" your banners and landers when you have good coding and photoshop skills - RESPEKT! And learning about tracking and setting up the infrastructure correctly is no walk in the park. So you have every reason to be proud!

Bidding low is another great decision - you can test for cheap and get green first, then increase your bid to get more traffic. (Somehow banner traffic is not like pop traffic. For pop when you bid low you get all the crappy traffic. Not so with display.)


Next - some suggestions for improvement:


1)There are too many variables in your camp. I love your banners and landers, but the fact is they are original and don't yet have a track record. You also don't know whether your offer is a good one. So basically when you don't get conversions you're left wondering whether it's your creatives or the offer that's the problem - it may even be both.

So your decision to test a couple of proven landers would be wise. As for banners, throwing in that "generic" fb one to establish a benchmark is a nice move as well - that way your landers are guaranteed to get some views (as generic banners are designed to attract clicks, although they'll do zero preselling for you).


2)To maximize your chances of having at least one decent offer, try to include multiple offers from the start. 2-3 offers recommended by AMs, preferably from more than one networks, would be better than testing just one (in case it turns out to be a dud).

Also - I've tested quite a few TH sweeps offers a couple of months back, and noticed this big difference in payouts amongst offers. There were ones in the <$0.10-0.20 range, and also ones that were >$1. Now I'm NOT saying high-payout offers are always better (in fact I'm always encouraging everyone to test low payout offers because some of them can convert very well to more than make up for the low payout). But based on my experience with TH sweeps I couldn't get any of the low payout offers to work, and had way more luck with the <$1 offers, so definitely try to throw a couple of those into the mix.


We need to get some conversions first - otherwise there would be nothing to look for when it comes to analyzing stats. Cause you can't really base anything on CTR.

Looking forward to seeing some conversions! Thailand is a fantastic geo. Of course feel free to experiment with other geos, but if you want to save money, it may be better to focus on learning all you can from this first camp before moving to other geos which will probably be more expensive to test. Would be entirely up to you of course.



Amy

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Hi Amy! Thanks for replying! That's so nice of you - I'm glad you liked my angles, that's the part of AM I most enjoy so far! I was super lucky I have a crazy intelligent friend who is probably the most patient person in the world to explain tracking to me, otherwise i'd still be tearing my hair out over parameters or something :P


haha about that...So I had the camp paused for a couple of days (after spending like $80 with no conversions and no useful data) and realized that I probably went about it in the wrong way. I was super excited to do the things I enjoy (angles and LPs!) but not so much the things I don't (reading data and stats..) and also I didn't really have a plan other than "make funny angles > put on internet >> Profit!???" :P

So i know that everything I've read says not to jump the gun and abandon camps too soon, buut thats exactly what I'm going to do! (not sure if that really counts as a camp tbh...more a bunch of random landers thrown at probably some really bewildered thai people)

I've spent the last few days researching and ripping landers and asking really dumb questions, and I'm about to put up a camp that's actually thought out (as thoroughly as my super noob and very unlogical brain can...I also have a friend who's doing a PhD in science **something ** and he sat me down and explain variables etc to me the other day, and it was super helpful to apply to this!)

I'll update with more details once i get some useable data lol, but the gist is I (did pretty much everything you said not too...) switched geo's to VN (so still in SEA) but everything else is fairly similar. Still display, still phone sweeps. 2x Iphone and 1x samsung to split test. All on the same network at the moment, (I've only been accepted into 2, and Adsimillis doesn't seem to have what I want to test in this camp. I'll chase up my other network apps, and hopefully be able to test over multiple networks soon!)

I've ripped 3 landers and I've spent the last few days tweaking and translating them and am just waiting on approval! I've still got my other ones (so proud...:P ) and will probably cycle those in at some point, but for the moment, gonna go with proven ones! (I'm using a quiz, the spinwheel and a really basic FB one that I ripped off adplexity)

I've got a little more hope for this camp! But I'm actually enjoying the more 'treat it like a science experiment' thing...it takes all the worry about money out of it, and I can focus on getting results!

Again, thank you so much for your help, Amy! I love how you're always enthusiastic about everyone's follow alongs - it's so encouraging Sorry I'm not exactly following your advice! I'll be able to apply it to this camp though

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Haha no problem! Nobody is under any obligation to follow the advice they get when they post a follow-along. Your gut-feeling is often just as important. VN is another very good geo! And this is a good time to focus on this geo too. (A little while ago the laws there got really strict, so aff networks and advertisers were careful about people running aggressive - that situation has gotten better since.)

Looking forward to seeing how you do with this new geo!


Amy

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Wooo so I finally started in my new geo!

Currently working from a hotel room in Napier (more like Yay-pier amirite!) and the (free!) WiFi really isn't handling the jandal so we'll see how this goes!

SO NEW CAMP:

TS: Avazu
Total budget: $100
Daily budget: $30
BID: started on 1x payout ($0.48) which it ate through in like 3 hours.

Offer 1:

Win Iphone 6S
Geo: VN
Clickdealer
payout: $0.48

Offer 2:
Win Apple 6S
Geo: VN
Clickdealer
Payout: $0.48

Offer 3:
Win Samsung S7
Geo: VN
Clickdealer
Payout: $0.48

So for this camp, I ripped and modded a bunch of landers (I've stopped putting my screenshots through MS paint so lets hope they work this time!):


and made some sweet-ass banners that are based on some I saw on adplexity >>



I didn't really look too hard into angles this time, although that is on the list when optimizing.

Anyway, set the bid to 1x payout (luckily, all my offers payout are the same!) and hit go!

Aaaand here are the stats! 3 conversions, aw yea!

Data by offer:

by lander:

by Region (obvs only targeted VN and i guess its not surprising that the major regions have most of the clicks/conversions)
device brand (only targeted mobile, had a few stray views on tablet but not CT):

and by OS:

I'm not sure if anything is at stat sig for cutting yet, I've halved the bid and am going to let the camp run overnight and see how it goes!

My goals for the next couple of days is to optimize landers and banners (I have a feeling some of my landers are pretty slow and messy haha) get some more conversions so I can start cutting placements. I'm also currently applying to some more networks so I can find some more offers to split test. I want to try and get a second camp up for testing ASAP as well, but i'm not sure if that's too ambitious, considering how long this one took me!

As for testing, I'm currently working on a Javascript file for all my landers to 1) have all the text on one place so that translating is easier and 2) so I can cycle through and test different titles/questions for the quiz/CTA's etc. I've got a decent idea on how to do this, anyone have any pointers on how best to run and track this, and also if it will slow down loading time considerably?

thanks again, gang!

UPDATE: stats once I figured out how to update the costs on Voluum. Good one.

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Great work! This has been a big learning experience I'm sure - the whole exercise of making banners and landers and setting up the tracking and creating the camps...

Having said that - the conversion rate is way too low - $36+ in spend with $1+ in conversions - to make this work you'll need to somehow figure out how to multiply your conversion rates by 25x - which would be a bit ambitious...but let's see what we can do!


1)Offers: Your offers are converting, but you may very well find better offers. Consider asking your AMs for a couple more (preferably from different networks just to get more of a variety?)


2)Banners: If my calculations are correct, your average banner CTR is around 2.80% - is that right? That's some sweet CTR!

How I arrived at that figure:

$36 ad spend / $0.48 CPM = 75k banner impressions

2159 banner clicks / 75k banner impressions = 2.88% banner CTR

Certainly can't fault your banners if they're getting this sort of CTR!

With only 3 conversion though - unless all 3 were made by the same banner, I doubt any banner has reached statistical significance for cutting.


3)Bid: Try something for me: Change your bid to something crazy low like 0.02CPM for an hour, see how much traffic you get. If not enough increase it gradually until you're getting decent traffic levels.

Right now your budget is churned through in 3 hours, which means there's an abundance of traffic available. Display traffic isn't like pop traffic where if you bid low, you get really crappy traffic that doesn't convert (bot traffic etc.) I mean yes, even for display traffic there are good and bad placements, and the good placements are going to cost more due to there being more competition and people bidding higher for traffic from them, but by bidding low you probably won't stop getting conversions - at least not so based on my experience.

Right now there's a huge gap between your revenue and cost - so we'll need to try to close that gap - and drastically reducing the cost would be a necessary step.


4)Landers: I've never run sweeps on display myself, so have little idea what lander CTRs should look like. However, I do have limited experience running sweeps on pop. Here are some sample CTRs for your reference:



As you can see - these CTRs are a lot higher than the ones you're getting. So a good idea would be to test more landers.

One big thing to note here, of course, is that I'm not being exactly fair in comparing your landers against my stats, because my landers are likely a bit more aggressive/misleading than yours since you're running display whereas I was running pop. Still though, it's obvious that the lander CTR could be better.


Looking forward to further progress!


Amy

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Thanks Amy!

The first thing I did was lower the bid, like you suggested - mainly because I still wanted to keep the camp going (and not chewing through my budget) while I took my own sweet time finding new offers and making landers (because I'm super slow!)

I put the bid down to $0.03 (because that's the lowest Avazu would let me go..) and pretty much nothing! So I doubled it to 0.06 and got a little better, but not much. I let it run for a full 24 hour cycle (since I made the changes at what would have been like 5am VN time) and these are the stats I got for the day>>



In the meantime, I had some problems with Adplexity so am currently doing a terrible job spying manually trying to find some new landers I'm going to go through some of STM's free samples and try and get as many variations up as possible.
I'm currently reading Ca$hvertising, and have set myself a challenge for when it's quiet in the bar, or on th bus or whatever, to think of a few different headlines/CTA's etc for each of my landers following some of the principles in that. I think I've figured out (with some help!) how to rotate them using javascript and Voluum, so I can test those without having to have a million different subdomains (because I'm super uncreative with domain names lolol)(by the way, how do people deal with that? I assume that most people are more organized than me, and have a few flashy domain names, and actually keep track of what LP is where...as opposed to making new subdomains for everything that are really obviously named..."deiphonesweeps1.mobileoffers.com...deipho nesweeps2.mobil....""

I have a new Adsimillis AM, and she's been hooking me up with some new offers, which is mean! I have a whole list of untested ones to try, so I want to start smashing through those ASAP, as I keep adding landers and banners to my collection.

I think that's all for now! As always, super appreciate everyones help! <3

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This is a really good approach. Small chunks of dead time where you can't do anything else are perfect for brief intense thinking-oriented tasks like this. You can also use that time to go through lessons you've learned mentally - the technique of spaced repitition is proven to help you put down long-term memories.

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Seems that the bid needs to be raised further. But I guess if you're looking for more landers and offers to test, then you wouldn't want to increase the traffic until those are in place.

What kinds of problems are you experiencing with adplexity? There's a ton and a half of iphone 6s landers for VN. Here are a few I've used in the past if you want to give them a try:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/isi0bbjmyw...nders.rar?dl=0

Disclaimer: I was running these on pop traffic so there may be some aggressive elements/text that may be against Avazu's TOS (or those of the mobile exchanges) or the offer's requirements. Also, I didn't spend a lot of time going through the code to look for sneaky traffic-stealing scripts.

Other than that - all you need to do is insert your Voluum link wherever it says "your-voluum-click-url-here".


I don't know how other people do it. I just use subdirectories. For example I'll have a subdirectory named "vn-sweeps" and then inside I'd have folders "iphone6s", "sgs7" etc., and inside each of those I'd have "LP1", "LP2" etc. Simple.


It's nice to be testing wide, but remember to avoid adding landers and banners to a camp sporadically. When split-testing a group of candidates, you'll want to evaluate data that was collected in the same time period, meaning for example you can't run 3 landers yesterday and then add a couple more today, and then evaluate and cut landers based on data across the 2 days. There are day-to-day fluctuations that will skew your data.

Also - when you're SO new to running campaigns, it may be best not to set up too many campaign at the same time, because you're bound to make "mistakes" and the more camps you have, the more number of times you'll be repeating some of the same mistakes. It may be better to just focus on 1-2 campaigns, give it/them your all, and try to learn everything you can from it/them. Then once you know what you're doing, you can launch more camps all at the same time to improve your chances of hitting on something profitable.

Nice progress! Looking forward to seeing more!



Amy

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Hey guys, thanks for all your replies and thanks Amy for those landers! They're awesome! The problems I was experiencing with Adplexity was that i'm sharing an account with a master mind group and no one paid up in time so our subscription got cancelled lol. All is good now! Although I'm not sure if I'm using it to the best of its capabilities.

Yeah, so I just left the camp as it was, in the hopes of getting enough data to have some clues on cutting placements when I get to that point.
Probably ultimate noob question, but in setting up my camps (on Avazu) I don't do anything in the inventory control to start with, just literally going with everything (-the china specific sources, as i'm not in china) Figuring that I can start cutting that as I collect more data. Is there a better way to go about this? With my first attempt in Thailand, I searched through and found all the sources that had Thailand in their top 10 geos, but I had 0 clue what I was doing (still don't, apparently!)
Anyway, as I was still bidding super low, nothing much happened and I had no good enough reasons to cut anything, because I was only up to like 5 conversions. I added all of Amy's landers, and a bunch of new really generic but proven banners in and will obviously compare data from 'before new creatives' and 'after new creatives'.

My Adsimillis AM set me up with a brand new offer to try. All my other offers are from ClickDealer, so it will be good to get some data across networks. It's another Iphone 6s sweeps, in Vietnam, but it's as yet untested. The Payout is $0.4 as the advertiser wants some data before raising it. I currently have a (not active) campaign in Voluum set up to run it on its own, with my banners + some new ones, and my landers + Amy's ones (thank you!!) but I'm wondering - should I just add it to my current camp? should I also add it to my current camp? or leave it separate? I figure that i'll be able to see all the stats in Voluum next to each other anyway, but i guess if its in a camp on its own it'll get different traffic? Also, setting up this camp on Avazu, I changed the cost model from their flat CPM to CPC. I'm still pretty shakey on cost models/bidding etc, so any advice on this would be fab. (again, not running the camp yet so I can change anything!)

I definitely want to focus on this new offer at least - getting some good data. I'm looking forward to it! Probably ultimate newb moment, but it's nice having an AM suss out an offer just for me, especially when I hadn't run anything with that network before!

Once again, thanks for all your help! and thanks Caurmen for the advice/encouragement. Weirdly, my boss doesn't agree...

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Try not to worry too much about placements for now (unless you see some that are just draining your budget and not converting). You're current priority is to find a good offer + good lander + good banners.


Not sure I understand you here? When you target traffic from a specific geo, you'll get traffic from that geo, no matter which app/site you'll be getting traffic from. Many sites/apps get traffic from multiple geos.


When split-testing, it would be good to run all candidates at the same time, instead of running some yesterday and some today and comparing that way. This is because there will be day-to-day performance fluctuations (conversion rates could be very different, for example; plus you could be getting traffic from different placements each day).


It's GREAT that you're testing another offer!

When split-testing offers, definitely put them in the same camp. As you said, if they're in different camps, each offer will be getting traffic that's a bit different. Whereas by rotating them evenly in the same camp, they'll be getting the same traffic from the same placements, and basically be subject to the same set of conditions (which is conducive to an accurate split-test).

However - when you add new candidates to the current test, you should probably ignore the stats collected for your current offer before you added the 2nd offer (for the same reason explained above - day-to-day fluctuations).

I've only used CPC for adwords but not for display or pop - for those I've always used CPM. You are definitely encouraged to test and find out which ones works best, but for now I'd suggested sticking with CPM - again, your current priority is to test offers, landers and banners. Keep everything else simple for now.


It's good to be grateful, but really, recommending offers is what AMs do. They can only make money when you do, so it would be in their best interest to keep suggesting offers for you to run.

I've run offers that were recommended by AMs, and offers that I just grabbed off a network without it having been recommended by anybody. I've found good and bad offers for both cases. So don't think that you can make all offers from AMs work.


LOL!

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I meant as I'm creating/managing my camp through Avazu, their inventory control tab. I've just been running on all sources from all inventories instead of narrowing it down to just using, say, Smaato or something. I know, of course, that it will still only get traffic from that geo (although I had a few clicks from canada in my VN camp..i assume theres always some slip through)

Cool, clears that up! For some odd reason I was like "But since its the advertiser that wants results, maybe I should get data just for this offer!" yeah not quite sure where that logic came from!

To simplify things, I cut my Samsung offer for the moment (as all my conversions came from Iphone offers anyway) so right now I'm running 16 banners, 10 landers and 3 offers. none of them have odd rules when certain banners can only lead to certain LPs or something, so I hopefully won't have any issues with an offer not ever being displayed because I messed up a rule in Voluum or something. I've upped the bid to $0.12 CPM, so hopefully will have some good results by the end of the day.

Right? "Why are you day dreaming?" "Actually, it's called spaced repetition..." "If you weren't the only one who can lift our kegs i'd fire you."
I feel so needed.

Thanks team!

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Ah! Exchanges!

You can always target all exchanges at the start, see which ones gives you the highest ROI (and enough traffic volume at the same time), pause the others and only use that exchange to continue testing your stuff at the lowest cost possible.

And regarding getting some impressions from outside your targeting (geo etc.) - yup there will almost always be some of that. If you're getting a lot of traffic you're not targeting, speak with the traffic source, and/or just set up a redirect in your tracker to send that traffic to a monetizing service like afflow/monetizer.co.


Sounds good! If you drill down into your tracker stats you'll see whether all landers and offers are getting impressions and clicks.

If you're still not getting a lot of traffic, increase the bid further still - would still be a bargain!


It's called multi-tasking and being efficient. So you have brains AND muscles, stop bragging! (I'm just jealous...)



Amy

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Yes! That! haha i'm not quite down with the lingo yet. But that makes sense! The untargeted impressions aren't too bad at the moment, but I might look into those suggestions in the future, because they're still noticeable.

Yup! My landers (okay, your landers!) are getting really great CTR's! I'm gonna let it run for a day and then post stats

So with this current bid, I think I'm bidding enough that it'll just run through my $30 daily budget in a day. After 9 hours, these are my stats



Do you think I should up the bid and see if that helps with conversions? or should I wait and drill down further into landers and offers after letting it run for a day or two?

Also, another newb question - I'm trying to test conversions, just to make sure there's nothing wrong there. My conversion flow for offer 1 is MO Flow (1click2sms), offer 2 doesn't say and offer 3 says Pin Submit. Does this mean that the conversion is triggered when the user texts the pin? Because I can't trigger a conversion by putting in a fakey conversion. Any clues on how to do this?

Exactly! lolol AM for the brain gainz, keg lifting for the other gainz! And keg drinking. For the fun gainz. :P

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The lack of conversions may not be very encouraging, but you ARE testing 3 offers plus a good number of landers here, so let's wait to collect more data and see.


Yeah - conversion will be completed when the sms is replied to, or when the PIN is submitted. I've never tried to manually trigger a conversion to be honest - I test so many offers it would take forever for me to confirm every single one. I'd just trust that every aff link will work and just cut offers based on lack of conversions (or rather, when an offer is inferior to other offers I happen to be testing, in a statistically significant way).

But if you want to trigger a test conversion, your AM may be able to do it for you - ask them and see.

OK it sounds like you're getting enough traffic there to test your stuff. Let's wait before increasing the bid. Your offers ARE getting eyeballs - let's see how they fare first.

It's great to see your lander CTR has gone up! And "my" landers are now "your" landers. Actually I ripped them so they were never really mine anyways...



Amy

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Aiiite gents (& ladies) here's an actual update!

Camp Stats:


Offer stats:


Lander Stats:


Still no conversions although, since this camp has gone through a few incarnations, I lost track of the budget and it ran out about half way through yesterday, hence the low spend. (which obviously, with no conversions, if I was a little more experienced I'd probably take that as a cue to cut the camp, but I don't think I've done it 'right' yet and don't think that's a reason to cut it...) So I upped the budget, and I did up the bid because before, when I was running a $0.24 bid, I got a couple of conversions. Idk. Possibly wrong.

I think I'm at the point where some landers are really obviously underperforming, so I'm fairly confident in cutting the crap ones - I think the lack of CTR is because they take bloody ages to load, because they're the ones I ripped, and I didn't really optimize them for speed (in fact, I probably did the opposite!). There's some really similar ones up there anyway, I don't think the good people of Vietnam will be missing out on a spinwheel or something :P

I might run my banners and maybe placements through the calculators (shout out Vortex and my man MassivBiz!) and see how they fare - I know I shouldn't cut things on CTR, but i don't have a CR and I'm wasting money on things that aren't taking people to the offers = not the goods!

I don't want to be discouraged at this point, but I feel like maybe its the offers? I'll do some more research, and maybe see if I can find some different offers. Any ideas? Do people out there still want to win Iphones? Or do they just like weird quizzes? (because thats the lander with the mad CTR...) I guess I'll keep running for a bit - it is the weekend in VN, and it is the olympics...maybe I should try promoting supps! :P

Thanks Amy for your help! I was more worried about my tracking, but the conversions should still register in the network, right? And I had super awesome help setting up my tracking, so I don't know where that logic came from...

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You don't have enough stats yet to tell whether your banners, landers and offers are working. I thought you said you were spending $30/day? The screenshots are only showing a spend of less than $10?

I've seen MANY landers with low CTR do higher CR than landers with high CTR.

Having said that - if your original landers are loading really really slow - then that may be a valid reason to cut them.

There are many factors that contribute to a lower CTR - and some of those factors can actually have good impact on CR.

So generally speaking, don't cut based on CTR unless it's so low that the math would never work out to be profitable.


10 landers x 3 offers = 30 combinations.

All you need to have a profitable camp is for one of these combinations to result in profits.

And you've only spent less than $10.

You need to collect more data before deciding whether the current camp has any promise.


As long as you've entered your affiliate link into your tracker correctly, and as long as you've chosen the correct offer when setting up your camp in your tracker, the conversions should register at the aff network yes.

And if you've set up your postback url correctly at the aff network, and you've appended the right tokens behind your aff link when entering the offer into your tracker, then the conversions should get posted back by the aff network to your tracker properly. We could verify your postback url if you like! All I'd need to see are 2 things:

1)The offer url in your tracker when you created that offer.

2)The postback url you pasted into the aff network.

You can obfuscate the first parts of the url for security reasons. All I need to see are the tokens that come after the urls.



Amy

---

?

yup, sorry - those were yesterdays screenshots, where the total campaign budget ran out less than halfway through the day. not good for stats haha, which is why I raised it, because I'm ignoring data from before I put in enough landers/banners to get good data - a waste of like $100, but that's my bad for making all the newb mistakes :P

whoops, yeah - i realized that all my new landers have backbutton redirects, which the old ones didn't - explaining the high CTR lolol.

on that note - when I visit my landers and try to get to the offer, I get the error 400 message and can't get through to the offer (even on VPN). However, my offers seem to be getting clicks/views on Voluum, so I assume it's me overlooking some redirect thing like a noob...

That'd be fab! I'm still worried lol

1) Offer URL: http://clmbtrk.com/?a=41335&c=110478&s1={campaign.id}&s2={clickid}
2) Postback URL: http://adf1c.voluumtrk2.com/postback...payout=#price#

So after fixing the budget and everything, someone suggested that maybe running on all exchanges with such a small budget wasn't the best idea. So I thought I'd narrow things down a bit in the hopes that it'll take less time to find a winning combo. I can always scale to other exchanges, right? I've pretty much duplicated the camps in Avazu and Voluum, the only difference is that one is only running on Smaato, and the other is only running on MobFox, because from what I've read here both of those are good exchanges.

Hopefully this gives me *some** conversions!

---

oh hey, last question - So 2 of my offers allow traffic from all carriers, and one has restrictions. So far i've just been running all carriers (this may or may not be because I didn't read it the thing...)

I created a rule on Voluum after the default path (that says send all traffic from all banners to all landers and offers) that says if its not from the specified carriers, send it to the offers that don't specify carriers. Does that mean that the other two offers won't receive traffic from the specified carriers? Logic is not my strong point and I have entirely confused myself. :/

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Cool, so here's some stats after running both of those for what was supposed to be a day :/



It worked really well at first! Smaato was giving me heaps of traffic, and i got 2 conversions from 1 placement in the first couple hours, after like $4 spend. I was like - "Mean! Maybe I'm finally getting the idea!" Mob Fox didn't go so well, so I upped the bid from $0.12 to $0.2, which caused it to chew through the budget in 6 hours with 1,500 clicks and no conversions. I might cut that camp.

When I went to bed, Smaato had spent just under $8, still on 2 conversions and a 2.18% banner CTR. I woke up 10 hours later (I get one sleep in a week, don't hate!) anndddd it was exactly the same. No more spend, no nothing. So right now I'm in full panic mode, trying to figure out what went wrong. I've contacted my Avazu rep, I've upped the bid in case it was that but I have 0 ideas. Any help?

Other than that, I had a brain fart and only targeted the 4 carriers that were allowed for my restricted camp in the traffic source, so the rule i made in Voluum was redundant anyway (following my logic, it would have mostly sent traffic to the restricted carrier offer? But it clearly didn't, because as you can see here, they're all pretty even: . And i've totally just managed to confuse myself more, because the 2 conversions were not to that offer. ) So i've cut the restriction on the traffic source, and am just doing through Voluum now. Is that right?

Other than that, everything seems to be registering everywhere else properly (a little clickloss between traffic source and voluum, but from what i can tell thats normal?)

Thanks fam!

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jokes I figured out my problem - my Voluum tracking url got blocked from Smaato because I was cheap and didn't buy a custom domain for tracking. Lesson learnt!

Funny story though - So I thought maybe I just got outrageously outbid, so upped the bid to something stupid like $0.5, before getting the message from my Avasu AM that my URL had been blocked. At this point, I was out and couldn't do anything about it anyway so i figured if it was blocked, it wasn't going to spend money ..... loljks, weirdly gets unblocked at about 5pm, spends the entire budget (gets 3 conversions!) and obviously stops. all while I was at work.

So I lowered the bid and upped the daily budget for the day, hoping I'm onto a good thing but i have a feeling I might be blocked again - going to set up my URL tomorrow because I'd rather not lose any money on mistakes made while my brain is crying for sleep. I figure if it gets blocked, it's not going to waste money!

Das all. Just wanted to let everyone who was reading this saga from the edge of their seats that they could relax now, i sorted it, everything is going to be okay. I don't not suck at affiliate marketing yet, but I did have cookies for dinner. I'm writing this one up as a good day :P

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Never mind, that wasn't the issue...or was maybe only part of the issue? or something. Either way, I changed my tracking/camp URL to some thing totally gangsta and not voluumtrck or whatever....and it didn't work. I hit up my avazu rep, and she suggested that I change my top level domain (I was using seaman2u.com, because I was told just to use something generic?) so changed it to avg.com (again, a generic one someone suggested to me) nothing still! It's been switching between 'Approved' for the exchanges, and "Approved (limited)" (limited, and has a list of exchanges that aren't smaato?) so that's confusing.
Spent hours playing around with the bid to the point of raising it ludicrously high and taking away all budget restrictions - nothing (thank fuck lol)

yeah, this is what todays stats (as of 11.45pm when it's been running non stop all day) look like....

Does anyone have any ideas? /suggestions of where to make a separate post about this haha? I've been messaging my Avazu Account manager, but she's on china time and only seems to be around while I'm at work, and its super hard to hold up a convo and implement all her changes in between waiting tables :P

In other news, I've started up my MobFox camp again, it's going a little better! (by which i mean, i don't think its been blocked by anything yet...)



it got something like 50,000 impressions, but only spent like $10 so i'm going to up the bid. those are still pretty shit CTR's though.

Currently looking for new offers to start a new camp to pass the time because damn, I just finished at one of my jobs and there's a dark abyss of hours that need to be filled with shit opening up in front of me! The smaato camp was actually going really well, the times I got it to work. I checked the dayparting, and it seemed that it was as soon as it started getting conversions that it bailed on me.

Sweet as, gang! thanks for reading my huge ass brain dump

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Did you navigate to the lander url directly and clicked on the CTA? Doing that will not take you to the offer, because it's a Voluum click URL and not your affiliate link.

To test the link properly, you'd need to browse to your voluum campaign url, and THEN when you click on the CTA you'll be redirected to the offer page by voluum.


Looks good! You must have already gotten conversions posted back by now.


One strategy would be to test all exchanges first to find one that gives you the best ROI, and then just use that to test your banners and offers. Mobfox is one of my favorite exchanges in terms of performance. Ketads and Inneractive have given me really high ROI as well.



Amy

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EDIT: I made a mistake about the order in which Voluum evaluates rules. I've set up testing to confirm that Voluum will actually evaluate the TOP rule FIRST, and work its way down to the last rule. Any traffic that doesn't match any of the rules will go to the default path. Apologies about the mistake!

The way voluum rules work, is that the bottom-most rule will be checked first, and if the visit doesn't meet that rule then the second-last rule will be checked, and so on. And if the visit doesn't meet any of the rules then the default path is implemented.

So let's say we have this scenario:

Offer1 - accepts CarrierX and CarrierY

Offer2 - accepts CarrierX only

Offer3 - accepts all carriers



I would set up voluum paths in this order:

Default path - Offer3

Rule - if carrier=CarrierX, send to Offer1 and Offer2 and Offer3

Rule - if carrier=CarrierY, send to Offer1 and Offer3

[PATH ABOVE EDITED - ADDITIONS IN BOLD]


At the traffic source, you should target all carriers that are accepted by all the offers you're rotating in that campaign.

To use the same example I gave above: I should be targeting CarrierX, CarrierY, as well as any other carrier accepted by Offer3.


Yes clickloss is normal - especially if there's just "a little".


That clickdealer offer with 2 conversions is looking promising!



Amy

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Nice find! It's basically standard practice to use custom domains instead of the default Voluum domains - that's like blocked everywhere long before now.


It's great that you're eager and hustling hard, but please do get more sleep. Without health, nothing else will matter. And when you're sleep-deprived, you'd be more prone to making bad decisions. It's a relief that you found the problem to the lack of traffic though!


That's really weird! You DID get your traffic back though at one point right? Did you change anything after that that could have caused the traffic to stop again?

I have a feeling that you either didn't set up the voluum domain correctly, OR you forgot to replace the campaign urls at Avazu with the new campaign links from Voluum (the ones containing the new domain name). I suspect it's the latter. Let me know!




Amy

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True! I'm an idiot :P

sure have! thanks again

Cool! Smaato and MobFox have both given me a few conversions, but Smaato keeps blocking me (more on that below) and I didn't quite hit the sweet spot with budget for MobFox yesterday - I'm not quite sure what happened there, it may have been because I was screwing around with the bid so much, but as you can see the impressions (and therefore everything else) took a nosedive after about an hour......but still only spent just under half of my $30 daily budget? I'll raise the bid for today and see how that goes.

Sweet, that makes sense! I think I read a post saying it was the other way around...But I've fixed that up now

Haha yeah, I was told to stick with the voluum domain by someone who I think was trying to keep it easy for me (and who doesn't use voluum anymore - good one me!) I've changed that now and it's all good (the domain, at least. Its tracking properly!)


haha thanks - I've got the sleep thing down! I know I can't function on no sleep, so I don't even try! I work late shifts at a bar, and just wanted to make an update after work in the hope that someone would answer my questions in my sleep :P

It was really weird! Still is! I have no clue whats going on right now. So I set up the voluum domain fine - I know this, because I'm getting constant traffic with MobFox, and its registering at voluum and all is sunny. And i triple checked that I replaced all the URLs. It turns out that my campaign ID was blocked at Smaato for "misleading ads". I'm not sure why this would be - all my creatives have been approved, I'm not cloaking (except for a double meta refresh, because the advertiser took forever to approve things so my AM told me to just go and DMR - should I take that off? I'm not even sure if that counts as cloaking.)

So on my Avazu AM's recommendation, I made a new (identical) camp, ran it on smaato. Again, it went well for a lil while, and then all traffic just gapped it the fuck outta there, so I assume I got blocked. Not really sure, my AM is onto it.

What I'm trying right now is making a brand new camp in voluum so that the campaign URL is different, and a brand new camp in Avazu, so that everything else is different. Fingers crossed! Has anyone else had problems with exchanges like this? How did you deal with it? (shout out to my amazing avazu rep who is doing a fab job of sorting out my problems and just generally being great at her job!)

the great thing is, when the camps are running properly, they're *finally!** getting some conversions and good data and if they stopped just doing their own thing i'd be able to start optimizing! The day will come....

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When you say "Avazu AM" you mean your rep from Avazu mDSP right? And not your affiliate manager from Avazu the aff network?

Nice to see you're getting conversions on Mobfox! But yeah it would be to your advantage to try to continue working with your rep on Avazu mDSP to figure out the issues with Smaato, because that's where most of the traffic is at.

Hope your issues will get resolved soon so we can get around to actually analyzing data and optimizing the camp! Fingers crossed...



Amy

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haha yes - I'm not that silly. She introduced herself to me as my Account Manager so you can see the logic there :P

making a completely new camp (in Voluum and avazu) seemed to work, but the stats are disappointing.

here's all my stats from the past week, which is roughly when I started these camps (i think).



as you can see, a frustrating jumble of camps and data. Also I think I've been blocked on Smaato again.
I've spent like $200 on this camp and I'm not sure if there's anything useful in there. I don't know if looking over the data for the past week is useful in any way, since I've been changing things up the whole way. I mean, those are the offers >> but I can't even tell if it's time to cut the adsim one, because it's spent like a 3rd of what the other two have because of the carrier restrictions (and me slightly fucking up the Voluum rules).

(Current rule, if you don't mind checking

Offer 1: accepts only carriers x,y,z

Offers 2 & 3: accepts all

Default Path: all traffic to all offers

Path 1: Traffic from carriers x, y, z to offer 1

yes?)

but yeah, i feel like trying to look at all the data from the entire length of this mishmash of a camp is too long, but I don't really have anything that even looks like statistical significance from the past day or so. or at all ever.

So i think my options are:

- Keep running as is and see if I reach stat sig - at t his point, thats looking fairly unlikely
- try starting up new camps on different exchanges (and stop pouring cash into exchanges that keep blocking me) - might work
- try splitting things up some more - different landers/banners on each exchange so that I can spend more on each of them - don't know how accurate this will be as sending different traffic to different lps/banners...
- try starting up an entirely new camp (I've got a bunch of whatsapp offers suggested by my AM's, and a few landers to go along with them) - I kinda want to figure this all out on one camp, but it's getting super frustrating and expensive
- curl up in a small ball and cry - may have already tried. -100% ROI. will retest.

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Yikes!! The numbers are not looking good, but let's see if there's any hope left. First of all I'd suggest you keep all camps on pause and not spend further until we've looked at stats.

I know that with so few conversions a lot of things have not reached statistical significance yet, but we need to see whether there are any promising combinations.

Could you please do the following drill-downs into Voluum stats and show screenshots (for EACH of the 3 camps that have gotten conversions):

-Offer > Lander and show me stats of the combination that has done the highest CV
-Creative ID and show stats of the best-performing banner
-Offer > Lander > OS and show stats of combo with highest CV
-Offer > OS, show stats of combo with highest CV
-OS, show stats of best-converting OS
-Offer > Lander > Creative ID, show stats of combo with highest CV

I would also like to see placement stats. Please go to Avazu mDSP, click on the "Reporting" tab, choose "Dimensional Report" and generate a report over the entire time period you were running these camps, and generate the following for EACH of the 3 camps:

-Publisher Name, sorted by conversions in decreasing order (just showing the top 10 placements would be fine)
-Publisher Name, sorted by spend in decreasing order (again, top 10 would be fine)

That's a ton of screenshots I know. The best way to attach them would be to upload them to imgur.com, put your cursor on each image, click on the downwards arrow, click on "get share links", then copy the "BBCode" url and just paste that directly into the post. Don't try to import them into the post as attachments - you'll go through hell trying to make them all display correctly (been there done that not doing it that way again).

Let's see if there's any hope of any combination reaching green. If I think there's a chance, we can do one last test (i.e. last ditch effort) on the seemingly best-performing offer + lander + banner + OS + placements (I said "seemingly" because they're not actually best until statistical tools say they are). If a combination of the best everything doesn't get you green - then perhaps we should ditch the camp.

No need to feel bad - this was a great first attempt! And do know that a majority of camps we launch WILL be unprofitable - it's the ones we CAN get profitable that will make up for the losses (hopefully!) It's just the nature of the game.




Also - I realized I made a mistake in the paths I set up in the example in my previous post - I've edited it with corrections:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post284544

Many apologies about that! A case of my brain not keeping up with my fingers. So to apply that same logic to your case, it should be this:

Default Path: all traffic to all offers

Path 1: Traffic from carriers x, y, z to offers 1 & 2 & 3




Actually you CAN do that, and offers and landers WILL reach stat sig, but if even your best-performing offer+lander combo is far from breaking even, then there wouldn't be much point in spending the money to run to stat sig.

The exception would be if you believe you can come up with new angles and make banners and landers that will convert a lot better than your current ones, AND/OR if you're planning on mass-testing every VN sweeps offer you can find in order to identify the best offer in existence. If that's the case, then you may decide to run at a loss just to cut down to a winning banner+offer+lander combo - and THEN start a new round of split-testing using new creatives and offers.


Let's look over the stats first. Wouldn't be a bad idea to just test your currently-best banner+offer+lander on all exchanges.


Nah - I don't take to that idea. When you're split-testing creatives, you need to subject them to the same set of conditions and rotate them evenly. When you run them on different exchanges or in separate camps, they'd be subject to traffic from different placements etc. so it wouldn't be fair to compare them. That's some original thinking though!


Testing different things is always good!


Haha cute! That'll always be a comforting last resort, but I think you're doing real well for a noob. You've had to figure out a ton of stuff to get to where you are. Sure enough you're losing money at the moment, but consider that as tuition you're paying to learn the trade. I mean many people are willing to pay upwards of 100k to get a college degree. In comparison learning AM is usually cheaper.



Amy

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holy moly! alright, i think i've got this! I'll try get them in some kind of order, but i did manage to thoroughly confuse myself in the process, so we'll see how this goes...

the three camps are All Exchanges, which is the first camp I ran without looking at exchanges at all, MobFox, which is the camp running specifically on MobFox (betcha didn't guess that one) and Smaato, which is actually the two camps that I ran on Smaato, (the first got blocked, I just made a new camp on avazu and link the same Voluum URL) but not the one where i made a completely new camp on both Voluum and avazu because that one didn't get any conversions and still got blocked after three hours.
Hopefully all this makes sense, and I didn't get anything mixed up!

-Offer > Lander and show me stats of the combination that has done the highest CV
all exchanges
mobfox
smaato


-Creative ID and show stats of the best-performing banner
All exchanges
MobFox
Smaato

-Offer > Lander > OS and show stats of combo with highest CV
all exchanges
mobfox
smaato

-Offer > OS, show stats of combo with highest CV
allexchanges
mobfox
smaato

-OS, show stats of best-converting OS
all exchanges
mobfox
smaato

-Offer > Lander > Creative ID, show stats of combo with highest CV
all exchanges
mobfox
smaato


-Publisher Name, sorted by conversions in decreasing order (just showing the top 10 placements would be fine)
all exchanges
mobfox
smaato

-Publisher Name, sorted by spend in decreasing order (again, top 10 would be fine)
all exchanges
mobfox
smaato

that is a butt load of screenshots!

as you can see, there are some combos in there reaching green, so I'm hopeful! if not, this has been a great learning experience, and hopefully the next few tests will cost less (money and time!) and start to earn more!

haha aw thanks so much! I always knew that i was going to have to lose money on this, and possibly more (per camp) than other people, because I'm a bit of a slow learner and get distracted easily - but you're right, much less than a degree! And according to clickdealer, I've made something like $14, which is still more than my music degree has made me so far :P

Thanks so so much for your help, Amy! i can't believe anyone would offer to go through stats that they didn't absolutely have to, holy shit :P

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First of all - THANK YOU for taking the time to get me those screenshots!!

As you've observed, there ARE some green combos - so yes there's hope! (I would be more certain if some of those green banners had at least 2 conversions...but at least now we know the camp deserves to be tested further.)

I would suggest that you use a SINGLE exchange to conduct your offer+lander+banner testing. Because conversion rates between exchanges can vary by a LOT, we should avoid cutting offers/landers etc. based on data combined across multiple exchanges. Based on your data, I would suggest choosing either Smaato or Inneractive to set up your new camp, as they are the ones you've gotten the best results with (you only got 1 conversion on Inneractive, but I've had good results from this exchange in the past so...)

(If you choose to run on Smaato, I would suggest blacklisting the "Microsoft_Windows" placements tempoarily. The ROI seems to be really low and we want to avoid having one placement hog all the traffic - ideally we want the risk spread out over lots of placements so that if we don't get conversions we know it's not because the placements are bad. You can always retest these placements when you have a green offer+lander+banners combo.)

As for what to run for this new camp - you have 2 choices: 1)Re-test all offers, landers and banners, and cut as things reach stat sig, or 2)pick stuff that seems to be performing the best ("seems to be" because most of it hasn't reached stat sig yet so we'd be guessing) and run a "last ditch effort" test.

Option 1 is self-explanatory. If you choose Option 2, I would recommend running these:

Offer: I forgot to ask you for offer or carrier stats - these elements are really crucial so let's re-test all 3 offers and all accepted carriers. (When you set up Voluum rules this time please note the changes to the path - remember I made a mistake and corrected it?)

Landers: "iphone 6s spinwheel", "iphone 6s Facebook", and "Lp7" seem to be the better performers.

Banners: Creative ID 747594 (from campaign "All Exchanges"), 750360 (from campaign "Mobfox"), and 750342 & 750343 (from campaign "Smaato"). (Some of these may be the same banner, I wouldn't know - because when you use the same banner across different camps they get assigned different Creative IDs.)

OS: All OSs accepted by your offers. I'm not seeing a trend as to which OS has converted better than the others.

I would suggest running $20-30's worth of traffic to this new camp - then we'll look at stats and see what we should do next.

You have a degree in music? That's so neat! Are you still planning to develop in that direction in terms of career-path?

Haha you're welcome - now I'm going off to spend some time going through my own mountain of stats lol!



Amy

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Heyy!

No, Thank YOU for going through all my stats! Thats so helpful, and its so helpful to get an idea of what I SHOULD be looking at in future camps!

I just sprained my ankle, so I now have lots of down time to implement all your suggestions! (Yay but also not-yay...) super helpful again, and thanks for spelling it out for me!!

I'm thinking i'll go for option 2 in your post, just in the hopes of simplifying data and saving money. As its my first camp, I'm not super fussed about making money from it, more about learning the method etc. I'll set that up and post some stats sooooon

I have like 90% of a degree in Classical Tuba Performance - for various reasons I couldn't finish it, but the hope is that by investing a couple years into AM, i'll get to the financial point where i can finish my degree (preferably somewhere cool, with a good teacher!) and be able to support myself while doing the audition rounds with the aim of getting a sweet ass job honking out phat Mahler bass in a symphony somewhere!

haha good luck! have fun :P

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alright crew, not entirely sure if you WANT to see stats for this latest attempt, but i'll give you a run down just in case...

so i fixed up the Voluum rule, and threw up a new camp using the banners and landers Amy suggested above, trying all three offers (my adsimillis AM requested that I continue testing their offer, and i figured that with getting the rules wrong, I probably hadn't given it enough of a chance with reduced traffic and all that) I put it up on smaato, hoping that I'd managed to cut whatever was causing the problems...

after about $20 spend, i got 1 conversion, but that turned out to be from one of those Microsoft_windows_ROW placements that I'd forgotten to cut. that was also where 99% of the budget had gone to. So i cut all of those, and let it run another $20 ~

Smaato blocked me after about three hours again, with $39 spend and no further conversions (so i probably would have cut it there anyway)

as a last-ditch out-of-the-box (sort of) attempt, I put it up on Inneractive, with $20 budget and hopefully a low enough bid that will last out the whole day and still give me some dece data.

fingers crossed!

Question - doesn avazu mdsp have a trickle -down effect for banners? because I've noticed that, espcially in this latest attempt, each banner will get pretty much half the click of the one above it. (Voluum stats, if that makes sense) It could be because each of my banners is exactly half as shit as the one before though...

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Eek! Hope you're feeling better!



Keep your eye on that goal and I'm sure you'll get there sooner than you believe.



HEY! You stole my line!



Sorry to hear - but I think you've given the camp a more-than-fair chance to perform. If that Inneractive camp doesn't show promise - then time to test those whatsapp offers you mentioned!



LMAO!! Thanks for the good chuckle! You're really really funny.

If you check your banner stats on Avazu you should see approximately the same numbers of impressions for each banner - unless you're targeting multiple exchanges in one camp, and different banners got accepted/rejected by certain exchanges.



Hope your ankle is all better!


Amy

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thanks so much for all your support! haha my ankle is all good - i'm taking it as a sign that I needed to spend less time running/doing stupid shit and more time stacking!

The Inneractive camp didn't go too well - I had the bid at $0.5 and was still getting way less traffic than the other two. I gave it a couple of days (because it wasn't even making is halfway through the budget lol) but nothing, so I abandoned ship and am keen to start up this new camp!

I have three whatsapp Pin Submit offers over three networks, and I think I can dig out some more but i'm thinking thats good to start testing! (Avazu APX has two versions of the same offer - one in Malay and one in english, so i'll also split test that)

Right now i'm hunting for landers - not having a whole heap of muck on adplexity, but from scouring through the follow alongs etc I have an idea of what people are using/making work, so I feel fairly confident in making some of my own and throwing in some slightly more aggressive scripts (and less weird images than the last ones i made...)

But keen to start up this new camp! I've made it an aim to start up camps more often, and not spend too much time dwelling on the one camp. Of course, i understand the importance of waiting for stat sig and giving everything a good chance, but I want to get more and more used to the process of setting up camps (and hopefully making less mistakes each time!) and testing as much as possible. At the moment, it takes me over a week to set up a camp, just because I always feel like I need to research myself into a hole and from there its a hard bash digging myself out! and not spending hundreds on each camp would be nice (for my wallet) :P

Stop it, you're too kind! :P

yeah, the impressions on Avazu were normal (I was only running on one exchange each camp) so I guess it was just my banners, and a weird coincidence!

Thanks again for all your help and support, I've learnt so much this last month! currently sitting with my foot in a bucket of ice feeling totally okay with having a legit excuse to not walk for a couple of days :P

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You may be encouraged to hear that one of the most successful affiliates I know made one of his biggest breakthroughs whilst in almost exactly the same situation.

He was laid up injured and couldn't do anything but work 18 hours a day on the computer. So he ground like crazy and broke through in a new vertical that subsequently made him hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars

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Thanks for the encouragement! I'm lucky it's just a sprain, so I can still get out and limp around (I couldn't sit for 18 hours a day hey, i'd go insane!). But i'm trying to use this time (because I know that I *should* be resting) to lengthen the amount of time I can spend sitting and focusing, because currently it's an embarrassingly short amount of time, and I feel like it's not really conducive to max productivity :P

Hearing success stories from similar (ish) situations is awesome though! #Goals (not the getting injured part, the working like crazy without getting hung up on being injured part!) Thanks man

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@miss_marple - have you heard of the Pomodoro technique? If you're having trouble sitting and focusing you may find it very useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

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Yes! I've been using pomodoro for a while - I used to use it for music practise current goal is to be able to string more than 2 or 3 pomodoros together...

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ALERT: I made a mistake regarding how Voluum evaluates rules - please see the "EDIT" in the beginning of this post:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post284544

All the logic is still correct - except the ORDER of the rules should be REVERSED. I've set up an actual test to confirm this.

I think I've been lucky that I never had rules set up where the order mattered (i.e. when rules criteria are mutually exclusive / don't overlap). Well now I know!

Many apologies for the wrong information!



Amy

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