Follow Along - Road to $100+ a day as a Newbie. (7)
Hi STM community! I have just recently joined and i'm amazed as to how great this Community is. I've been reading lots of Follow-Along's and i've decided to create one of my owns since I've seen how much help a person can receive by all of you awesome individuals. I am currently stuck in a situation right now. I've been testing this offer/lander for about 2 weeks and I've ended up making the Campaign profitable on some days on one traffic source , PopAds. I've analyzed the data from my tracker (
Here is what I'm doing.
US Offer, $2.50 Payout. (Spent about $120 for data)
Top 60% of websites.
Only targeting Tablets because Mobile hasn't been converting as well.
I am at 0.0015 for my bidding which puts me in position 62, giving me about 1000 impressions a day.
Here are photos of data.
My question is, where do I go from here? What is the next step for me? Any feedback is appreciated! Thank you so much
Hey, btaastm!
I'm glad you've decided to share your media buying adventure!
It’s good that you made your RON campaign profitable. Now what? You move forward like a pro, that's what!
Specialization is a part of a media buyer's daily work. It means you've gotta spend some time creating white lists and targeted campaigns because that's the way to go.
In order to increase your margin, you should look for the so-called “gold mines” inside your campaign. They can appear to you as OS, websites, devices, browsers, etc.
How do you find them? You must check every component of you campaign and look for the ones with the highest ROI and simultaneously with relevant profit generated (I would say more than 4 or 5 conversions, in your case).
Once you identify these parameter(s) (for example, a device) that comply with all these requirements, you must think about the creation of a separate campaign with just that well-performing device. Don’t forget that - when you do this separation - you must cut that device from your RON, in order to make sure you're not competing against yourself for it.
When doing this change, don’t forget to calculate the eCPM (revenue per 1000 visits/impressions) to know the maximum you can pay for that parameter.
What should you do to the RON after these changes? It can remain positive and you can optimize it afterwards and search for more gold mines. It may be the case that it won’t be profitable anymore. Why? Because you’re now maximizing all its profitable parameters and that means you should pause it.
This is the way to expand and maximize your profit from the data you gathered from those 2 weeks!
I'm wondering about your optimization strategy/decision process. Tell me: how did you choose what to optimize on your campaign?
Why am I asking? Because I see a lot of conversions on Mobile Phone which seem optimizable. This means it can be a good idea for you to take a look at that data 
Cheers!
Hey,
I followed your advice and created a new Campaign, seperating my whitelist and RON.
On my RON Campaign, I blacklisted everything from my whitelist. I decided to put on mobile again after reading your comment because I drilled down the data further and realized that I was only down -27.14% ROI for mobile.
I looked at my data and noticed that Android vs IOS. Android was converting at a much higher pace so I got rid of my IOS.
On my PopAds Campaign, this will be my test 3. What I did on my new Campaign, I increased the bid to 0.0024, which gives me these numbers:
Tell me: how did you choose what to optimize on your campaign? - The reason why I decided to optimize to tablets at this moment because on my testing phase #2, I did tablets vs mobile and I received these numbers:
Also, I was wondering can you further explain how to calculate eCPM (revenue per 1000 visits/impressions).
Thank you once again!
Hey, btaastm!
I’m glad you followed my tips!
You did well to blacklist and whitelist from one campaign to the other. The bid you choose to put is another important metric to analyze.
As I've mentioned in the last comment, the eCPM gives you the bid value you can afford considering the results you've achieved. The way to calculate it depends on what you pay for: if you pay per 1000 impressions, then it's eCPM= (revenue/impressions)/1000 ; if you pay per 100 visits eCPM= (revenue/visits)/100. Even though you should take the eCPM into account, it can be surpassed.
For example, on whitelists, you might want to have a higher bid in order to be more aggressive and try to get more data from those good parameters. With the opposite approach, if you want to play it safe, you should stick to the eCPM value so that you don't lose control of your costs.
It’s very important that you check all your data very thoroughly before deciding to optimize with such a big impact as cutting Mobile from your campaign.
For example, inside Mobile, you have different devices and browsers with different performances. Let's say that OS - Android is not having a great performance/ROI. Then you go check deep, analyzing browsers, and notice that Android Legacy has no conversions and high costs.
What to do?
In case the rest of the campaign has average performances and only this browser stands out, you should optimize it by cutting this browser.
This can be the difference between profitability and losing ground!
Hope I've been able to help!
Cheers!
Hey
Thanks for another solid tip!
I started bidding more aggressive and I have definitely seen more conversions!
On my RON campaign, I have seen that mobile is converting more than before. Thank you for telling me to look back at the data for mobile.
After optimization, should I be increasing my budgets every now and then to change my positions?
Originally Posted by 
There are targeting options with a very large impact and then there are those with lower impact. You can look at this as a tree structure, the options with the highest impact are sitting at the top, then as you go lower there are those that cause smaller changes.
As we are talking about mobile device optimization here, there are 2 TOPS of the tree - Phone and Tablet. If you cut any of them, you have just killed the whole tree. Never do this until you tried to optimize on the lower levels, always take it from the bottom, slowly climbing to the top. As
Keep in mind that one bad target on the lower level, for example an OS version, will also affect the performance of the upper level factors including LPs or banners. That's why it's important to wait some time after you cut something, to get fresh data that will show you the effect of that change on the whole funnel, before you move on with the optimization.
Raising the bid can help you get more volume and in many cases it will also bring better quality traffic. Definitely try to bid higher once you have optimized the campaign to a decent level. It's also a good idea to do a staggered bid test, so launching multiple campaigns with the same settings but a different bid, and analyze what bid level gave you the best results.
Good luck
Thanks for the great tips matuloo! That has definitely opened my eyes to what is out there with Phone and Tablets! Here is an update of how I've been doing the past 3 days.
It seems that my campaign has slowed down and now I'm seeing negatives. Just wondering if this might be the weekend or have I optimized my campaign too fast?
What I can do now is to bid higher! I will also launch a staggered bid test to see how my campaigns do against each other.
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