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How I Reached $300/day Profit with Utility Apps and Mobile Pops in 2016 (45)

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For a while now, I have wanted to contribute back to STM as a "thank you" to those who have continually contributed to my follow along (Amy and matuloo) and each of you who have shared so much through your threads, case studies, tutorials and otherwise. I very much appreciate the time and effort put in by each of you to nurture so many up and coming STM members. This case study is credited to you.

And what would be more fitting than to share details on how I was able to hit my first $300/day profit in August using mobile pops and a utility app. Some of the information I share may not be compliant for all offers, including the ones I promoted, but I encourage you to look deeper and understand the approach more so than the actual angles used.

Sometimes it's so frustrating and it feels liking your constantly pushing a boulder up a hill that never ends... but if there's one thing I've learn, nothing good comes easy.




How I Started...

Initially I was stuck trying just a handful of GEO's mostly within the sweepstakes vertical. I didn't have much luck other than one little campaign that did an inconsistent $10-15/day profit for a short period of time. I was focused on making sweepstakes work but wasn't testing broad enough or fast enough to really get anywhere. Looking back I can see so many mistakes I made and much of it was due to my lack of experience and confidence.

One day while having a chat with my AM from Adsimilis (#AprilRocks) she recommended an Android app install that she said was doing well. I had known about the app because I saw it being promoted all over AdPlexity along with several similar apps. At that point, I was still trying to stay focused on one vertical in an effort to make it work. But I decided to give it a try and start expanding my tests to include a couple other verticals. Sometimes you just have to shake things up.

Offer Details

Offer Type: Android Utility App
Accepted GEOs: International, most all GEO's allowed
Payout: .15 to .20 depending on the network and my final pay bump

Target Settings
OS: Android
Connection: WIFI and Carrier in one campaign

I really had no idea how to promote an app install with mobile pops. All I knew for sure was that I needed my landers to load as fast as possible, needed an angle that would fit a broad audience, find the best converting offers and highest performing landing page... that being said, this was still unchartered territory. Initially, I took the offer from Adsimilis and also found it on ClickDealer, ripped a bunch of landers and spent the afternoon cleaning them up. After I had fully prepared the ripped landers, I setup a domain name and researched the best CDN to use for hosting my landers.

I use a website called Cedexis > Reports and look up the Cloud Storage Response Time for the GEO I'm running in and in this case I used Amazon S3/CloudFront as I do most of the time but on occassion I use Rackspace. In this case, I decided to do my initial test in Brazil because I had been focusing primarily on the LATAM markets when testing sweepstakes and felt comfortable with it. Plus, I already had a spanish/portuguese translator I had been using so my execution time would be fast if I started doing more translations or testing different angles.

Example of Some of the Landers I Ripped and Tested




After setting everything up in Voluum, submitting my campaign to the Traffic Source and setting the campaign live.. I waited with anticipation.

Initial Test Results

It includes 2 offers and 8 landers in 1 GEO.




Typically I Follow This Rule for Testing Budgets

(Average offer payout) X (Number of Offers) x (Number of Landers) x (3-5x)

So in this scenario it should've been...

.15 x 2 x 8 x 5 = $12

What I actually spent on the first test was $66, so quiet a bit more than what that formula suggests - goes to show that you can't always stick to that formula. I wanted to thoroughly test things out and because Brazil is a high volume GEO I knew that I'd initially get alot of traffic from a handful of high volumed placements, so I needed to spend more to get a better gauge. In general, I could've spent $30-40 and been ok for this initial test.

The overall campaign test results came back at -87% ROI but my best offer/lander combo was -67% ROI right off the bat. One of my better initial test campaigns.

At this point, I really wasn't sure of my approach and my process was not very efficient. I decided to run more traffic to the best two landers to identify which one actually was the best and continued running traffic to both offers.




It was clear that Lander 7 was the winner and both offers performed similar but even after all this testing I still way far from making profit. So I found out that Mpire had this offer and decided to test it with my best lander.

So I setup another test with Lander 7, the original 2 offers and the MPire offer.

Here are the results...



From previous tests, I knew that the original 2 networks were getting me an ROI of around -60% with Lander 7... but once I started to notice the MPire offer converting better, I continued running more traffic to see how the dust would actually settle. I was enthusiatic to see that it achieved a -40% ROI, that's a huge improvement and validates the importance of testing multiple networks for the same offer.

Frustration Sets In.. But Sunshine is Around the Corner

Up to this point, I had not been very flexible and typically stuck to the GEO's that I was most comfortable with or just trying to master the LATAM markets but I like trying new things and after reading a few case studies on STM had decided to take my best lander and have it translated into 5 new languages so I could test 5 new GEO's, I also ripped a bunch of new landers to test along with my best performing lander in Brazil.

I decided to launch a test in one new GEO at a time. And for whatever reason, I didn't start with the best offer that I previous found to be MPire. Instead, I started to test the original two offers... don't ask me why, maybe it was because of the lack of sleep I had been getting or who knows.

Here are the initial results from launching a test campaign in Indonesia:



The best combo coming in at -57% right off the bat and I had only tested a few landers and thats when I realized that I wasn't testing my previous best offer.

At this point, I decided to go hard or go home and prepared more landers, signed up to several new networks and found the offer on several of them. Some of my data has been mixed up because I was staying awake 16+ hours a day just so that I could run 3-4 rounds of tests in 1 day in an effort to test and optimize quickly. Because of that, it would take too much work to find the actual days/times that I did each round of testing. At first I was documenting everything with a notepad on my desk but after things started taking off, I tracked less and less of the specifics and I focused on growing profit.

After testing several other networks with my best performing offer, I narrowed it down to two networks running the same offer.. MPire and AppFlood. I had also introduced several new landing pages that I had ripped. The next round of testing was an exciting day for me!



Yes, you see that correctly! 39% ROI for my best offer/lander combo. Some of these stats have improved as I've noticed many app installs will have delayed conversions for up to a week but the bulk of them will be accounted for with a 6 hour delay or so.

What had me very excited about these results, was at this point I had not blacklisted or cut any targeting. I had only tested offers and landers, removed the bad, kept the good. So the fact that I had achieved 30%+ ROI before pausing bot placements and blacklisting poor performing placements.. again, it was a good day.

I started to pause placements that had received 30-50 visits and had 0 clicks. And I also noticed that most of my profitable placements had a CTR above a certain percentage. So I paused all of the non profitable placements that had a CTR below 5%. Later I increased that to 20% and paused the non profitable placements.

Before I started scaling, I wanted to do another round of testing to try and improve my ROI even further. In hindsight, I should've just started scaling and optimizing my placements right then. But due to my lack of experience and trying to figure everything out, I decided to do more granular testing. And here is a screenshot of some of my granular tests...




What I validated from this round of testing was that granular tests do not have a big impact in most cases and it requires a longer testing period with more budget spent to really identify a winner. Thus, focus on testing unique landing pages and not small tweaks on landing pages to get the best improvements.

These are what the mobile carrier and placement stats were looking like at this point for my best offer/lander combo, incase they are helpful to you...

Mobile Carrier Stats




Placement Stats




While I was going through this process, I also decided to test several other GEOs that I had planned to previously so that I can start to scale on the same traffic source. So I had my best lander translated into those 4 languages, setup a new campaign that targeted all of those countries together. This is not the best approach but I was just trying things at the time based on various feedback and threads I had gleaned insights from. My idea was to quickly test these new GEO's and see which one had the best results based on my current best offer/lander. After my initial test on this campaign, almost all of the GEO's were profitable. I had to make some adjustments to bids and pause some placements but within a day or two I had increased my profits already.. but my primary focus was still scaling and growing the Indonesia campaign.


At this point, the Indonesia campaign was profitable and all of my testing was done and I was about to setup a whitelist campaign to continue focusing on growing profits.

This is how much I had spent testing Indonesia before I was able to get it profitable, keep in mind that I had also spent a couple hundred dollars on my original testing in Brazil.


Total Spent to Get Indonesia Profitable



Total Profit from Indonesia Whitelist Campaign



Total Profit from My Global Campaign



Along this journey I started to test my whitelist campaign against my RON campaign, trying to determine which performed better. I was also running into cashflow issues so I couldn't scale faster. I also duplicated some of my best placements into a new campaign but at a lower bid in an effort to grab more of the visits for those placements and profit, even if at a lower volume.

By doing all of these methods and then some, I was able to achieve my first $300/day profit on August 28. It was a great feeling. Unfortunately, this offer and most utility offers had gotten paused at that point so I didn't get to reap the rewards for very long but I did get a few days of $200-300 profit.

Despite that, I learned a ton going through this process and testing so many different things.. making all of the mistakes that I did. It really helped me understand how I need to think and how to approach campaign testing more efficiently.


My First $300 Profit Day




If you take anything away from this case study, is that you should have no limits to what you will test. But you should prioritize your testing in this order...


Offers
Lander's
GEO's


Check out the other tutorial that I just posted today on my method for testing and finding profitable campaigns:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...able-Campaigns


Here is a list of threads that I found very helpful and I reread them several times, you may find them helpful as well:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Considerations

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-of-my-methods

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...day-case-study

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...gle-Day-s-Work

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...it-on-Facebook

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...azy-New-Angles

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ery-Saver-Apps


In my follow along, I walk through alot of this case study in real time but I don't reveal as much informaiton. You will find an more accurate recap of the profit/loss by visiting this post in my thread:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post286536


My hope is that you find value in what I've shared and that in some way it can help you achieve your first $300/day of profit.

Since this campaign, I have been able to build another campaign to $300+/day profit and several smaller campaigns.

What I'm working on now is learning how to build consistent daily profits and how to build campaigns that are fully compliant as I do not want to run with the added risk of being non-compliant and losing my payouts.


I will caution you, that using these angles and some of these tactics on utility apps would bring a certain level of risk of not being paid out. Make responsible choices and understand what you are doing before you try anything non-compliant. In fact, I encourage you to stay compliant always but to each their own and I'm not responsible for your actions.

I'm happy to answer questions and share more, feel free to leave comments below.



Cheers!

Andrew

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Hi Andrew,

Congratz for your successes.
Your follow-along was very interesting and, now these posts... I really like how you're giving back to the community

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Very nice case study, thanks for taking the time to write it Andrew!

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Great thread and journey mrpayne.

Bummer seeing the offers off once you started killing with them.
Next time press harder on the greens and be sure to have money floating from somewhere.

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Congrats MrPayne on your campaign/follow along! Sick write up!

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This is an amazing post!

Congratulations on your success!!!

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A second golden post in one day thank you very much for your post, it will be very helpful, I hope tnat I can achieve at least 100 dollars perday with this methode I already bookmarked your three topics.... Thank you

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Thanks Andrew,

I read your first Follow along a few days ago when I joined and it was pretty clear that you were going to work hard and do whatever was needed to succeed.

Hoping to emulate it !

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Andrew delivers for the past few days! This is what I call "giving back to the community"!

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Thanks mrpayme for the write up, i have read your follow along a dozen of time and pretty much ready to start my pop journey again.

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This is awesome. Thanks for sharing Andrew.

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Wow. This is extremely well thought out and amazing information. Thank you very much for the share. Im up next!

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Oh i have a question mrpayne.

How do you usually deal with the offers/ landers approval process? That is the parts that consume my time the most, it usually takes days or even week to get my offers/ landers approved. Do you have any tips on this?

And sometime i have no idea why a particular landers can get disapproved even though it is already driven traffic to by other affiliates to the same network/offers.

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This is where it helps to have a process in place.. I typically use an excel worksheet, organize the tabs by geo/vertical and go through my networks one by one, hit up my AM's, gather all the offers both recommended and non recommended, organize them, use a column to put pending/approved and copy the affiliate link into the excel doc.

If you have a process and go through and request a bunch at one time and do this almost daily, you will have plenty of offers to test each day. But don't hit up your AM's all the time and then never run any traffic to those offers, that's not fair to put them through that much effort if you aren't putting effort into actually testing them. Plus, some networks like Adsimilis and AppFlood have tons of offers that don't require initial approval. Sometimes while I'm waiting for offers to be approved and creatives to be approved, I will test random things that don't require approval.

As for lander approvals, thats hard to answer as every source is different and has varying rules. I typically have a general 'safe lander' for the vertical that I am in and will set that up for approval and use Voluum rules. Whether my main landers are aggressive or not, I prefer to keep my landers protected as much as I can. It's important to review each traffic sources requirements and guidelines so you know what to expect and this is also why its better to focus on one traffic source in the beginning, atleast for a while, until you get a solid grasp of it.

Be mindful of the requirements for each traffic source, some don't like the bait/switch cloaking and you can get banned.

At the end of the day, there is no easy or fast way to get these tasks done. This part of the campaign launch process sucks.. but the only way to get it done.. is to just sit down, focus and do it. No magic pill and to be blunt while providing constructive feedback... you need to change your mindset from a "How do I get this done" and "How do you get this done".. to more of a "I'll get 10 offers approved and setup today" and you will have to learn this part on your own, so just launch, test, send emails to the support team, figure it out.. get it done... launch.. profit.. repeat.


Andrew

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Nice breakup of your way to profitable campaign, Andrew!

This is how it work most of the time. One who put in enough time and test a lot of offers and combinations will eventually at some point find success.

Good luck with your following campaigns!

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Amen to that.

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Very nice and useful case study. Wish there were more like this one!

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Why don't you just show them the Google lander you used?

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I never use the Google lander nor did I for this campaign. While I do try aggressive tactics on some of my campaigns, one hard line that I don't cross is using trademarked logos with my landers - everyone in my mastermind knows this about me.

If I do choose to test a Google themed lander, I remove the logo completely. But from my experience, you don't even need to use the Google landers to make an AV or Utility App profitable... although I'm sure it works well for those who do use it.




Andrew

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....

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This is an awesome guide. Thank you for sharing and congrats on the success!

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Great job on sticking to this and not giving up. It always pays off!

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congrats! on booth the campaign and the HQ case study.

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Hey,Andrew
Thanks for your golden sharing, I learned a lot from you.
Just one question,as recentlly CPI rentention has been a big question for me, sometimes it is 30%,and sometimes it is even 60%-70% required.
So how do you deal with this problem?
Thanks very much.

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Right now running CPI is very challenging on pops, atleast if you use the non-compliant angles for the utility type offers but I've noticed other offer types getting more strict with their KPI's as well.

Me personally, I do not run any CPI offer if they require more than 30% retention rate past Day 1, maybe Day 2 depending on the offer. I've not experienced any issues at this point with rentention rates but I know that some of my campaigns have been in the 35-40% mark after Day 1.

From my research, the average app will lose 75% or more of its daily active users (DAU) and most people decide within the first 3-7 days which apps they want to keep or not.

See this quotes and references:

Reference 1

"Based on Quettra’s data, we can see that the average app loses 77% of its DAUs within the first 3 days after the install. Within 30 days, it’s lost 90% of DAUs. Within 90 days, it’s over 95%. Stunning. The other way to say this is that the average app mostly loses its entire userbase within a few months, which is why of the >1.5 million apps in the Google Play store, only a few thousand sustain meaningful traffic. (*Tabular data in the footnotes if you’re interested)

Ankit Jain, who collaborated with me on this essay, commented on this trend:

Users try out a lot of apps but decide which ones they want to ‘stop using’ within the first 3-7 days. For ‘decent’ apps, the majority of users retained for 7 days stick around much longer. The key to success is to get the users hooked during that critical first 3-7 day period."

http://andrewchen.co/new-data-shows-...o-much-better/


Reference 2

"Less than 25% of new app users return the day after first use."

https://www.appboy.com/blog/app-cust...g-2016-report/


Reference 3

"The Average App Loses More Than 75% Of Its Users After One Day"

https://arc.applause.com/2016/05/20/...on-rates-2016/


Keep in mind that these stats are not specific to a user deleting the app but rather they do not return and open the app.

With that type of information in mind, I prefer not to promote apps that require more than a 30% retention after Day 1 or 2. In my opinion, it shifts way too much of the risk over to me even if you're 100% clean, white hat and hyper targeted campaign angles. So the offers that require 70%+ retention rates are in my opinion loopholes for the advertisers to cut you out at anytime they choose.

That being said, I'm still very new to the overall CPI market and these thoughts just reflect my present opinion. Would love to hear more experienced thoughts on this topic.




Andrew

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Congrats Andrew, definitely enjoyed reading through - Keep up the good work

Kind regards

Mikkel

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Wow awesome results! Great to see your thought process at each step. I guess sometimes pulling 16hr days can pay off.

Out of curiosity how much did you pay(average) to get your LP translated? Seems like you translated into about 5-6 different languages, do you think that was worth the cost?

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It only costs about $10 per translation and it was definitely worth the cost.


Andrew

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What website did you use?

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I use two solutions...

www.onehourtranslation.com when I'm running in a geo that has language I don't use very often.

www.upwork.com I have a few freelance translators that I use all the time for the more popular languages, like Spanish, Arabic, etc




Andrew

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Awesome thread MrPayne, and VERY helpful for me as I'm new and I'm running mobile pops too. I loved how you managed to optimize the campaign. Thank you very much for the information you provided here.

I have two questions:
1-) What verticals do you recommend for a newbie?
2-) Can you suggest some good aff networks so I can split test the same offer in various nets? Now I'm inside MaxBounty and Peerfly, couldn't make it on YeahMobi and ClickDealer AM never answers me. Can you recommend some networks to sign up?

Thank you again! Hope you profit every day again

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Glad you find the information helpful.

1. Start with low payout offers that are less than $1 but preferably less than .50 - things like sweepstake SOI, app installs and 1-click pins from tier 3 geos.
2. There are alot of good ones but you should definitely figure out how to make ClickDealer work, Mundo, Mpire, Adsimilis, and others.

I hope we both can profit every day haha! That's a nice wish



Andrew

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Hey Andrew, nice thread. As a newbie, I think I'll join your challenge tomorrow.

Was wondering, what banners did you use in combination with this type of offers? Would you mind sharing a generic one?

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You should join the challenge for sure! Just notify that thread with your follow along link.

And for this campaign I didn't use banners, it was straight mobile pop traffic so I just had landing pages. Same ones you can find all over AdPlexity.



Andrew

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And THAT'S why I'm a newbie

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Another question Andrew. For these utility apps, did you get better results with carrier than wifi or the other way?

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It works on both.




Andrew

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Thanks Andrew for taking the time to share so many details of optimizing a campaign and hitting that great payday. I'll be sure to read over this a few times, cheers !

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thanks MrPayne For the case study .
really inspiring for me .

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Are utility apps still reviving good traffic in 2017 and is in app installs a good choice to begin with for a newbie?

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Utility apps are quite a bit smaller than they were in 2016, and I'd say they are not a good choice for a beginner. They are all capped so getting any budget for them is not so easy if you are just starting out.

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Great write up Mr Payne. Have the offers been 'un-paused' so you can continue to run them, or were they just terminated?
Cheers

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I would say that utility apps are not necessary being revived at the moment, its competitive and as manu_adefy stated, getting a decent cap for the offers can be difficult for newbies. That being said, if you approach utility apps as merely a good starting point to learn without the goal of necessarily being profitable, but rather just to learn the fundamentals, I think this is a great way to kick off your first few campaigns because you can collect data easily - and that's what you need in order to learn. After a small amount of time spent on it, move on to other offer types.

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The offers were paused at that time and I was able to locate other offers that worked well for me in place of the originals. Eventually, the original offers returned to the networks and but most didn't have the same level of performance. It seems that utility apps have a cycle of showing up for a few months, then disappearing for a few months.. then repeating over the last year or so.

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Awesome post, it's really helped me. Thankyou

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