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Understanding Erratic/Unstable Conversions, why does it happen all the time? (20)

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We all know this situation : campaign starts, all looks fine and bang it dies. Or you're running a campaign, results are poor, then all of a sudden you get a burst of conversions and 30 minutes later it's over. Or my favorite – well oiled campaign runs for weeks and then all of a sudden it tanks and starts loosing money. On top of that, even when nothing strange happens, the conversion rate changes across the day all the time.

Ups and downs are part of the game and so are the mysterious conversion bursts, or sudden drops of performance that simply don't look right. If you are like me, you need to understand why some things happen so let me explain a few possible situations that lead to erratic/unstable conversions that drive all of us mad.

Let's start with performance DROPS.

1. SCRUBBING – month is coming to an end, advertisers crunch their numbers and they realize the profit isn't exactly what they would like it to be. The easy solution? Scrub some leads from the poor affiliates and buy one more Ferrari This is NOT something that EVERY advertisers would do, but some sure love to run the shaving machine from time to time.

Solution? There is none, except for switching offers and promoting more honest guys.

2. TECH PROBLEMS – one of the most frequent reasons for sudden performance drops. Tech problems can happen anywhere, servers can go down, DBs can lock up, scripts can crash … connectivity problems don't help it either.

Solution? The first thing you should do in case of a sudden performance drop, is to actually check if all works fine. In case you detect tech problems, pause the campaign and reach out to your AM or the advertiser you work with.

3. OFFER IS PAUSED or GONE – conversions stopped all of a sudden? Check if the offer wasn't pulled or capped. You wouldn't believe how often some offers get pulled without prior notice, especially when running the more risky verticals. Daily CAPs can also get VERY annoying and it's quite normal to see Network Wide caps in the mobile space, especially with app installs or PIN submits. Advertisers wants 1000 leads per day from a network, they fill the cap while you are sleeping … your morning won't be the best I'm afraid

Solution : Networks usually have fallback offers in place to minimize the loss in cases like this so make sure you are using them. Good AMs help a lot here, timely notice about a paused offer is crucial. You might want to stop capped offers for the night or agree on private cap with the network. Advanced coders could utilize API access to receive alerts in case sudden drops and switch offers. Work with reputable networks, those usually have larger caps and more stable offers.

4. COMPETITION – don't we all just love competition? Especially since all it takes is for someone to steal your funnel, target the same placement, bid a bid higher and bang… your performance goes to shit - thank you spytools Being outbid is one of the most frequent reason for a sudden drop in performance.

Solution : My personal experience tells me that it's the best to be no. 2 or 3 in the bidding chain. Going up to 1 increases the traffic price too much usually, while dropping to 4 or lower means a noticeable drop in traffic quality. Anytime I see a sudden drop in performance and there are no technical problems anywhere in the funnel, I try to modify the bids a bit. In case the traffic goes down too, I try to increase and in case the traffic remains or goes up, I try to lower the bid. Sometimes I have to pause and wait for the competitor to go away or to decrease bids again so I can get my spot again.

5. BANNER/FUNNEL BURNOUT – every campaign has it's life cycle and once it comes to an end, it's over. The truth is, burnout usually causes a slower and consistent decrease, but in some cases it can start suddenly too – especially in impulse verticals as Adult Dating for example.

Solution : instantly replace some part of the funnel, usually the banner dies first. It's good to do a 2 way test, make a new banner with different imagery/graphics and another with different angle. Sometimes a simple change like this can resurrect the campaign, but pretty often when the death by burnout starts, it's time to start working on a new funnel.

6. EVENT – I had a dating campaign in Germany once, I couldn't wrap my brain around one thing – it would randomly die at some days in the evening, for about 2-3 hours and then come back again. Took me 3 weeks to figure this out, wanna know what was causing it? BundesLiga (german soccer league) was coming to an end and the results were very close so a large % of the male demo was watching it

Solution : Educate yourself about the markets you are running in, big national holiday, church related events, sports events … all of this can cause a sudden drop in conversions.

7. BAD DAY – conversions dropped, but everything is working fine, offer is still alive, there are no tech problems, no big events going on … Sometimes it's just a bad day, could be caused by “the weather” or a combination of the already mentioned factors.

Solution : When this happens, there is pretty much nothing that you could do. Pause the campaign if the loss is too high, or keep running and collecting data if it's no. In case it really was just a bad day, the performance should return pretty soon.

8. NEW OFFER LANDER - advertisers love to optimize their stuff for maximum conversions, however, what work's with their funnels might not work with yours. So in case they make a change that's not really compatible with the way you are promoting them, the conversions will go to shit obviously. Sometimes they also decide to pull a lander and replace it with another one, without letting anyone know.

Solution : check the offer lander to see if it has changed from what it used to be - I know it can be hard to remember all offer landers that you are using, but it's a good idea to check at least those that you send most volume to and maybe make screenshots for future reference. Try to ask your AM if there were some landers pulled or replaced. You should also test the other landers available for your offers - in many cases they will work better than the default ones.

Sudden INCREASE of Performance – Yes, this happens too

1. COMPETITION – just as it can kill your campaign, competition can also be responsible for a sudden increase in performance. How? When it disappears Imagine that there is someone you are competing with, that guy has a well optimized campaign, targeting some of the same spots/placements as you do and since this guy has better payouts he can afford to bid more than you. And while he is chasing chicks on Ibiza, his account spends all the balance and the campaigns stop for a few hours. As a result, you will get access to traffic that you didn't have access to before and bang, conversions start flowing in. Once the guy realizes what happened, he reloads his account and claims his spots again. At this point, your sudden conversions increase is gone and you are left scratching your head about what just happened.

What to do : make a deep analysis of your data and drill down to placements. Do you see any placements that suddenly started to send you more traffic and conversions for a while and then stopped? Or, do you see some new spots in the list that were not there before? Make a whitelist campaign with just these spots and try to play with the bids to see if you can get the traffic flowing again.

2. NEW PLACEMENT/SPOT – Site/App owners change AD networks sometimes, they might not be satisfied with the income they are making with AD network A so they test network B. After a short test, they realize network A was still better, so they return to it. In case this happens, it will look similar to what I described in previous example – placement analysis will discover a limited amount of placements that were not there before and that stopped sending traffic after a while.

What to do : this happens a lot in ADULT for example and all you have to do is load the site and see who they sell the spots to now and register at that network. With mainstream sources it's difficult because these networks usually hide the ref info.

3. EVENT – this is another example of a factor that can either kill or boost your campaign. Imagine you are pushing a security app and a major security breach happens in one of the GEOs you target. Obviously this can boost your conversions in case your angle is related to that particular event.

What to do : it's always good to look out for events that are BIG enough to hit primetime news and use them to your advantage. So you don't need to wait for sudden spikes in CVR and analyze whether an event was responsible for this, you can make it part of your research and look for major evens proactively.

I could go on and list more factors, but I'm pretty sure everyone who made it to the end of this post, already has a good idea about the various factors that can cause unstable campaign performance. This list is by no mean a complete one, my intention was to make you look at the bigger picture and look for the less obvious reasons when you see a campaign behave like a roller-coaster.

Thanks for reading,
Matej.

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Great post!

One more cause of conversion drop I'd mention: new offer lander. The offer owner decides to "change it up", rotates out their old high-conversion lander for something untested, and... boom. CVR through the floor.

Also, on the tech problems point - pretty much the first thing I do if I see a sudden conversion drop is to run a speed test on the offer page. If it's loading in 28 sec - yup, there's your culprit.

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Great call, let me add the "new lander" option to the text - if you don't mind

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Thank for an other great post matuloo !

A thing that also drive me crazy about unstable campaigns, is when I have a good working funnel in a campaign at +30% ROI and I move that funnel to a separate campaign with the same targeting and bid and it just don't work at all (like -40% ROI).

Do you experience this too ? If not, how many conversions (in adult dating) do you wait on a single funnel (banner / lp / offer) before you're pretty sure that it's a winner and you can move it to it's own campaign to optimize it ?

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Separating a specific funnel and whitelisting it, is pretty tricky in adult. The reason is, the impulse nature of the market translates into many random leads, that are not a result of a well optimized funnel but rather happen just like that, randomly or based on blood pressure The only cure is to wait for more data. Hard to say how many conversions you should wait, I rarely try to do anything sooner than I have 10+ conversions. And when isolating specific combos, I want them to REALLY stand out.

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On all tests I've made, that where combos with at least 10+ conversions, an as you said it just feels that too many external factors where in play during those conversions and the same combo on it's own campaign won't do the same result at all.

But if I remember right, on one of your posts about optimizing a campaign, you explained that when you have a bad segment, you're drill down into it to see if there is a sub segment (like iOS + Carrier vs iOS + Wifi / * Carriers) that is performing well, and if so you are moving it to it's own campaign.

How is that a different situation ? Or maybe you where refering to a sub segment with a damn good ROI only, not one at +20% ?

Are you going to be there in AWA Bangkok ?

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The situation is the same, the problem is that adult is such an impulse market - once too much blood flows down to certain part of the body, brain is not really working the same as before ... this complicates things at times So in order for this to work in adult, you need to find combos with high ROI and the combos have to be WAY better than the rest. If you take a 20%+ combo that made 10 leads when the rest is at -20% with 8 leads ... this is not WAY better, but just a bit ... know what I mean? In mainstream I'm doing this with +20% without problems, in adult you need stronger ROI.

Not sure about AWA just yet, it's 50/50 for now December is a bit complicated for me since I have 3 kids and Christmas vacation starts early for them and they have tests in school prior to that, which I help them to prepare for. But we will see if I can make it.

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Hey bud, Great Post, Some things i knew, but a few very IMPORTANT ones i didn't even contemplate - appreciate the time you took to write this ;-)

#KeepRockin

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You're welcome Very often there are things in AM that are so simple and obvious, but we still keep on overlooking them. I wrote this post to show you guys how to look for them.

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Yes pretty nice thanks !

Considering the offer, if shave or something else, would you recommend to always run two offers intead of just one ? In particular when you are off for several hours (at night for example), to avoid too much loss in case there is an issue during that time ?

Also something i came by once, not sure if this is frequent, but for those that use pops a lot, you can notice that on mobile this generate a lot of traffic and if you use the back button trick, and direct it to the offer it can lead very massive traffic to the offer. And the result I got once, was a protection on landing page, that was checking if the site was not under ddos, result, offer was showing 4 or 5 seconds after loading with a cloudflare message showing before.
Don't think it happens often though.

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Just wake up to morning where one of my main campaigns flopped, so I'm going through your checklist now.

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Regardless of an offer being scrubbed or not, I always try to run at least 2 of everything at the same time : offers, landers, banners ... the more I am able to run the better, campaigns last longer this way too. It can be hard with offers thou, many times it's virtually impossible to find 2 offers with the same targeting that would be working equally well. If that's the case, I just risk it and check as soon in the morning as possible. Having a biz partner helps too, 4 eyes see more than 2.

This was probably due to bad setup and you were sending people around in circles which inflated the amount of impressions multiple times - they were not able to get out of the redirect chain. It could have resulted in too much load on the server and it ran out of resources or it triggered some DDOS protection since there were numerous requests from the same IPs... not sure how exactly this works since I'm not really good at server stuff, but I'm pretty sure the redirect chain caused it.

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Great post! Thanks.

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I'm glad you liked it

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matuloo's posts are definitely not to be missed.

Excellent!

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always learn a lot from your posts! good stuff!

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I'm really glad you do!

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Hi Guys,

if you can help shed some light it would help, been running this VSL offer, evergreen stuff, just runs well, and up until now people are killing it, I'm using the same traffic source, same cpc, I have not changed a thing I notice it slowed down a bit before the election but though ok this is normal, anyway, I kept sending it traffic, but now it just no longer converts, although I know some AM are still running this offer successfully, I asked my AM if anything changed in the funnly, can any of you more experience Gurus shed some light on this, thanks

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I suggest you go through the first post!

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Could be this exactly, everything comes to an end at some point and maybe that time is here for this campaign. Maybe it's time to change something in the funnel. Could be burnout too ... or any from the reasons I named in the opening post.

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