Content.ad Follow Along + Mastermind (12)
I have been gathering some data for my first campaign on content.ad.
I'm selling a skin product and I'm also coding my own LP. I have run the campaign 3 times now. Up till now I have 0 conversions, but the overall it's getting better and better. Here's why:
On day 1 I launched on 5 tier-1 GEOs and on all 3 devices. And I also launched with a too high CPC on all of them. If that was not enough, even though I set the max budget for each device-campaign at the minimum of $50 I spent over 200 or over 250 instead of 150, because my day bridged 2 days for the ad network. That first day drained almost twice of the intended amount of money, with worst LP and all these bad variables.... but got some data
Launch 2 for the campaign was 1 week later. That was when I first started to code my own landing page. (previously I used one that just existed for the offer). Only went for tablet and a bit mobile... still no conversions...
Launch 3 was a few days later again and I improved the design of the LP and the copy. This time I went for all 3 devices again on Canada only, with lower CPCs and a much better LP.
Before I show the data I will tell you what ad images did do well. I aimed for 2 angles: smooth looking faces and ugly wrinkled skin. And the 2nd always did so much better - twice or 4 times higher CTR from ad to lander.
Here (at the bottom) is the
First thing I do is looking at the IPs. If there is one with high visits and clicks I block it. If I subtract these from my CTR visits and clicks all my CTRs drop. I'm still trying to find out how to get rid of these. I don't know if these are humans spying on my lander or the same traffic bots spamming it. I think It's the first.
Looking at the ISP/carrier data we have our winner. If I understand it correctly then one dude is using a private server or something and from there spying on me. I'm talking about the "OVH SAS". I don't know what the SAS means though.
How to get rid of some traffic coming from that server?
The problem is that I see what's bad in the data, but I'm do not know how to solve it all yet.
Another thing is the mobile browser version data: I will need to find out if my LP is somehow not responsive on Mobile Safari (But my HTML code is very basic, however I need to see it for myself).
Then I'm also thinking:
many visits no clicks means: honest response from people so my lander is bad, BUT almost no clicks is weird. So there must be more to it.
Also, many visits and the visit amount equals the click amount means: spy or bot traffic OR I'm actually doing fine... because of all the bot traffic and the uncertainty whats wrong with safari I'm not sure how to interpret is yet.
Something else that I was wondering is if ads images with ugly skin pics is maybe just feeding trolls (high CTR but low quality visitors) and not real mid aged women... So next time I will directly aim for problem zones around the face.
I would also like to blacklist the widget IDs that correspond with bad traffic only, but the bot or spy traffic (if that is even a term) seems to appear on the same website where I get actual visitors.
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I also can bring good news who don't know about the future of content.ad
Insider information tells me that the will get a new office which is about 8 times bigger, and with that more options will come too for us.
With that in mind I want to start a mastermind for that ad network, with 4(+1) people who are willing to share the landing page and ads and headlines used with each other, aswell as other strategies concerning data analysis, so that we all boost ourselves very quickly into profitable campaigns.
My min goal is $500 daily profit with one or multiple offer in the same niche, but for now only on content.ad - for now and for this mastermind.
Even better if you run nutraceutical offers, too. The current level of the mastermind would be: dedicated newbs! I'm available everyday, since I want it to make the profitable campaigns my only and main income source.
Hit me up on Skype if that#s where you wanna go, too: jayvogler@gmx.de
Jakob, awesome stuff. That tablet traffic looks pretty bad, but the desktop CTRs are amazing.
What offers are you running?
Our top skin offers are collagenix, leEscens, and abella in the tier 1 geos. Message me if you need anything
I'm running LifeCell only, and currently I'm in the green with my first conversion, running on Desktop only - for now. I want to set a stable foundation and spread that one offer before jumping to the next one. After that it should be easy to set up new offers fast.
Edit: Currently we are 4 guys in the MM, we only take one more and then keep the group that small.
Sent you a PM over Skype -
Update:
I got many clicks. They all come from the same city. I have attached 5 pics that show:
1. how to set up the extra variables in
2. campaign > report > grouping 1 = domain-id > grouping 2 = city
3. as you can see, I got all my unwanted visits + clicks from one city. For people who think blocking IPs is always the solution -> check out 4.
4. same guy uses many different IPs
5. this one shows the whole impact I got from this
my solution:
I redirect all traffic from that city. For that I go to campaign > edit > add rule: I choose the city and redirect all traffic to somewhere else.
I also changed my URL, subdomain and deleted the lander on that previous url path so I have a kinda new start. Also improved my lander a bit.
My last 2 campaigns ran for $50 each with 1 conversion each. Not enough yet.
A couple of pieces of feedback from your initial post (didn't make it through all the comments). Great job getting a campaign going and taking action. It's definitely great to test geos, but I would rather allocate that entire budget to one tier-1 geo rather than 5. Especially when it comes to something like a high cpa offer on native you are going to spend quite a bit of money just weeding out the bad widgets. I can't imagine that the budget across 5 run-of-network tier-1 geos would allow you to make any actionable decisions on a few hours of data and a few hundred bucks. If I were you I would pick 1 geo and dial in your funnel. Run 3 or 4 landers and I'd come up with several more angles (having run a ton of native skin myself). It's easier to scale out horizontally to other geos when profits are flowing and you have the budgets built to scale quicker than trying to make 5 campaigns work at once. Best of luck!
I decided to go back to my initial offer. It would be a bad idea to stop in the middle of optimization. Now that I know it's the landing page or the angles I did not pay attention to, I will go at it with more strategy.
I will launch with a very low cpc bid in the US for my first offer.
I can get away with the low cpc because I aim not for fast and high volume at this stage, also because the traffic is multiple times higher than it was for CA only.
That way I will get more data for a lower budget.
I am currently planning to use my best ad with
4 angles -> 4 campaigns all in the US
each campaign with 2 ad headlines but the same lander headline that fits the angle and goes with both ad headlines.
Hopefully something outshines well enough for me to see where to go from there...
The reason I did not approach with different angles: I was pretty confident that any angle works at least a bit, so I would go with a random angle, and from there I would start going with strategy.
hi Jacob as far as i know US is both competitive and expensive traffic. any specific reason to not target other tier 1 countries first?
For US I can bid pretty low and still get high traffic, at least compared to CA. So it is cheaper if you just look at the bids, and I get more data out of the same amount of total daily budget.
If I compare my lander with other skin landers that I took as a reference, mine should do pretty well. If their lander really works, mine should even more - that's what I think.
Running in other GEOs might not work with the offer. If the offer is not compatible with other GEOs, and I don't even know about that, then that's money that I would lose by trying it out. Maybe I'm at the point where the campaign could be consistently profitable.
It would be a waste to change settings that have worked for 3 conversion.
Hey Jakob,
A couple of things (this is to help you avoid the painstaking & expensive process I went through learning native):
1. I've bought a lot of US and CA traffic (20k+ daily/display&native), and currently buying tons of both. In my experience US tends to be quite a bit cheaper than CA. I'm curious what you tested or how you tested it that you've gotten info that says otherwise (not that it isn't the case, but I would assume the skin vertical on any major Native Network that wouldn't be the case).
2. "If I compare my lander with other skin landers that I took as a reference, mine should do pretty well. If their lander really works, mine should even more - that's what I think." - LOSE THIS MINDSET. Opinions don't matter until you've thrown money at tests and gotten statistical proof. By "looking" at a lander you don't know how fast it is, how tight targeting is, if they run separate landers for each device, whether they are just breaking-even on that traffic and retargeting for the profit...blah, blah, blah. The main point is what they are doing, how they are doing it, may not be plug and play with the goals you are trying to accomplish.
THE DUMBEST THINGS IN AFFILIATE MARKETING MAKE HUGE DIFFERENCES. - Don't Assume Till You Test (to statistical significance).
3. For the US bid in order to get "high traffic", I'm assuming that's traffic that caps daily budget with a low bid you would need to have a great ad CTR to get you the eCPM to bid alongside more targeted ads. I'd make sure that the traffic you are getting is "good" traffic and you aren't being fed the leftovers by the traffic source incumbents that aren't even spending their time to mess those site ids/widgets.
4. Lastly, I would advice always split testing a few offers on low traffic. Especially in Nutra. You have zero control over processing, what happens with an advertisers mids, if you get a bad batch of rebills, etc. Put your position not to be screwed if something happens with the offer. Who knows, maybe your next few will perform even better.
Best of luck!
Yeah dude - I don't know. It seems like a lot of people have offered great advice, and I respect your hustle, but I would follow those that have tested and spent lots of money at least in regards to some offers.
One thing you can do is reach out to your AM at the traffic source and get a "blacklist" of site ids/widgets, they may have a historical list of underperforming domains. I don't know your payout, but cutting domains after 10 clicks is simply crazy. If you are at a $.50 CPC that's $5.00 you are cutting potentially good domains on a CPA offer that I'm assuming is in the range of $70 to $80?
This is why I mentioned using low payout offers before, but either way...test at lest to $25/$30 and if the CTR on that domain is 0 or MUCH lower than the average CTR on your campaign I would go ahead and cut it. 10 clicks, especially if you are funning mobile could be a few people finger fudging and just exited out really quick.
I'm running on desktop with the minimum CPC of 30 cents. Also I have never understood what difference a lower payout offer makes, really would love to understand that point. I mean, if I get a lower payout offer, and it is just another skin offer, and I use a very similar lander setup because not much changes, and the people visiting it don't know the offer, they also don't know if I get I lower or higher payout, nothing changes basically.
I test every time with up to $50+ as you see. I also got a blacklist that I instantly used. I'm now extending it with my data analysis.
I'm still testing, changing my landers again with every launch. All I want to see are 2 conversion with my testing budget of $50. And that on a consistent basis. Only then I know that my lander is okay. Then I still don't know how good that offer is, cuz I have zero reference. I should get information on that point.
Btw, the payouts range from $40 - $50 +/- a few dollars.
About running on low traffic. Is it low traffic on a tier 1 GEO or low traffic that I automatically get from running on tier 2 GEOs? content.ad really has not much to offer in that regard. What difference is there between running on low traffic and high traffic, if the campaign gets the same amount of data when my budget is at zero? Only difference is the distribution of data throughout the day.
I noticed that I still don't get point 3, you posted:
"3. For the US bid in order to get "high traffic", I'm assuming that's traffic that caps daily budget with a low bid you would need to have a great ad CTR to get you the eCPM to bid alongside more targeted ads. I'd make sure that the traffic you are getting is "good" traffic and you aren't being fed the leftovers by the traffic source incumbents that aren't even spending their time to mess those site ids/widgets."
Does capping budget mean that I cannot spend the budget I want because the traffic is low? Actually it is the opposite. I run with the minimum CPC bid and get my budget burned out in 2h. The CTR is good.
What is considered good domain IDs? Since I get barely a conversion I can only judge from the CTR of my lander, if I got quality visitors. I know a good domain ID would be one that brings me many visitors AND a good CTR on my lander. I did not get that one yet. My visits are distributed over many websites and many different domain IDs (placements).
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