jmgraff Mobile Follow-Along to $xx Profit / Day (4)
What's up STM, it's been a while. I've been out of the AM game for a good 3 years now due to a (big) change in my day job. Seems like just yesterday I was slinging dating offers on Plenty of Fish! Things sure do change fast around here, I got a lot to wrap my head around. But I feel good. I got some extra money nowadays, more than I had in 2012 at least, and I wanna multiply it into my future kids' college tuitions.
I've already been poking around a couple mobile traffic sources, running $20 here, $5 there just seeing how everything works. Ran some VN AV PIN sub offers on PopAds, ran some Pokemon GO install on Go2Mobi. Nothing profitable, but some were close. Now that I've got most of the tools I need and a good idea of how the mobile game works, I'm gonna start a follow-along to keep me honest. It's how I made my first $1,000 on this forum back in 2012 after all!
Traffic sources I have available to me:
- Go2Mobi (display)
- Popads (pop)
- ZeroPark (various)
- Millennial Media / 1 Mobile (display)
Affiliate Networks I have access to:
- Adsimilis
- Ads4Dough
- F5 Media (although I don't think my account is fully set up quite yet)
- MaxBounty
- Peerfly
- Neverblue (but not really, I think my account expired and they're called something else now)
Hosting:
- Amazon CloudFront CDN with S3 backend
Tracking:
-
Spy Tool:
- Adplexity
Misc:
- Gimp (free Photoshop equivalent)
- Solid background in programming
Now for some questions regarding my setup and methods:
1) How important is it to have your own domain for
2) How important is it to have your own domain for Amazon CDN, i.e. why not just use the xxxxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net address?
3) What's a good resource for translating creatives and landing pages? I'm assuming Google translate is no bueno
4) Landers. I see lots with aggressive back button redirecting, alert boxes, sounds, all kinds of crazy shit. Should I be testing one version of each without that, essentially doubling my number of landers? I know the answer is probably going to be yes, but I was wondering if there was a general consensus that those things improve ROI all the time and should be used whenever possible.
5) CloudFront users: do you have all your landers in one bucket+distribution, or do you have a separate bucket+distribution for each? Right now I have a separate one for each, and it is a major pain in the ass creating new landers. There's got to be a better way that I'm missing here.
Tip: for those of you that haven't used PopAds before, check your targeting... IT'S NOT JUST MOBILE TRAFFIC. I accidentally blew through $20 in like, 3 seconds yesterday lol
Looking forward to hearing some feedback. I'm going to work on some landers, set up some new flows and campaigns in Voluum, and organize my CloudFront stuff in the meantime. Should have a camp up and running within a couple days, probably sooner.
Originally Posted by jmgraff
1. It is important due to some problems people experienced when the default domains were flagged by safe-browsing tool, so go for it.
2. in mobile, domains don't matter all that much. I'm using the default generated long urls with my CDN hosted landers.
3. google translate can work for very short and very simple phrases - so like "click here", "enter here", "how old are you". For advanced copy, you can use onehourtranslations which is pretty expensive or go to odesk or fiverr - if you can find native speakers there, the result can be very good for a fraction of the price at onehour.
4. aggressive works better yes, but it's also against the rules of ad networks or the offer owners so proceed with caution. You don't have to use all the scripts, but many of them will ALWAYS boost your roi. For me, sounds didnt work for example.
5. can't answer since I don't use cloudfront
Good luck with your campaigns.
Started 4 campaigns today...
Vertical: Mobile AV PIN submits
Traffic Source: PopAds
Number of LPs: 10
Number of Offers: 5 Android+iOS, 6 Android
Stats from past 5 hours:
Campaigns
Landers
Offers
What I did so far
Landers: I cut direct linking and am about to cut the landers with 0 and 1 conversions.
Offers: It looks like the top two are the best, but I have to dig into the stats tomorrow morning and figure out the statistical significance.
I haven't touched anything on the traffic source yet. I'll look for placements to cut once I get the funnel correct.
Bidding
I just rounded up to the next whole number from the average bid for my targeting options for each campaign. Is this a good call? I know some make a separate campaign for low, med and high bids but 12 campaigns seemed excessive to me. If I'm leaving money on the table here and splitting it up like that is absolutely necessary, please let me know.
Throttling
I have it set to 1 impression per second, which it ends up being more like 10 per second. I did this for testing so I don't blow through my whole budget in an hour. Once I've got some green and have settled on my cutting, I'll open it up. Vietnam has a surprisingly huge inventory.
Feedback
More to follow
Ok, sorry for the lack of updates. Long story short, I was unable to get any of these profitable even after cutting down to the least negative ROI offers/LPs and trying to cut the biggest losing placements. Not sure how related to using the default
If I'm not having any luck with that, I'm thinking of switching verticals, geo, traffic source, or all 3. This one was pretty frustrating since even the most promising offers still had me at about -50% ROI.
Questions
- Any thoughts on the domain issue? Could that affect things this much?
- Am I correct in cutting offers first, LPs second, placements third?
- Separate campaigns for high, med, low bids - worth it? I'm going to do this unless I hear some reason why it's not necessary
- I have an idea to try display with AV (using one of those generic "download" creatives with the high CTR) and pair that with a set of scary AV landers. Good idea? I mean besides it being risky.
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