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Solutions to raise offer EPC (14)

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Hi all,

I would like to start a discussion on a problem that I haven't seen posted about before- unnaturally low EPC. We are an advertiser running a skin offer and are trying to break into internal traffic. One of the benefits of this is we get to see the stats that our pubs are making work.

Over the last month we have taken leaps and bounds in the world of native but we keep returning to the same problem: low EPC.

For our offer (negative option WITH TERMS [we're not getting sued]), our pubs are converting at around 4%, with our worst performer at 3.5%.

Our MTD CR is an incredible 0.4%, and we can't seem to figure out why our CR is so much lower than everyone else's.

For our baseline offer (through oasis ads, to compare vs our internal offer) we have an EPC of $1.90 while average for the offer is over $4.

My only thought is bots, but we have found our high performing domain IDs (content.ad) so the bot traffic should be well filtered out by now.

Does anyone else have experience with an unnaturally low CR/EPC? Please post any suggestions here

Thank you!

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I don't have a great answer, but I can at least try to give you some of the possibilities.

First obvious one is bot traffic. If you are just starting to run traffic, experienced affiliates already have blacklists and tools to cut out bots and even are more familiar with the best traffic.

Next, it could be some because of duplicate visits. Affiliates may well be sending unique visitors as much as possible. That usually helps, because the same visitor in the same next few minutes is extremely unlikely to convert, so it lowers EPC and CVR.

It could also be certain scripts used... Just a small example, back button scripts that redirect to the offer ruin EPC and CVR.

Last, but not least, do you know exactly what creatives the affiliates are using? They could be using much more effective ads, thus getting better CVR.

Cheers,
Manu.

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This gets my vote too, it's quite possible your affiliates are cloaking and using different LPs than you see - did you consider this option?

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Agreed with conclusion above. No affiliate wants the advertiser with an internal team to see their shit for obvious reasons... especially when running volume

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Your affs are probably running Creatives/Landers that are gonna get you sued. That's why their EPC is higher than yours

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Don't wanna be the ugly fox in the room but getting sued will only happen ( 99% of times ) if you're promoting US offers to US users. In the
rest of the world if you're light on your feet ( ie: small payout offers, lots of volume ) noone will care enough ( too many cons that outweigh the pros )

Thoughts on this from the black belts in the room?

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Your pubs running native for sure? Or fb? World of difference in EPC.
As well, most damage on oasis is not done with native. Can't take those EPCs and compare to yours from native.
In terms of high EPC on native, if you don't optimize on widget level, you're not doing it right. And I don't mean black / whitelisting with that.

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This was my original thought.. our pubs are running FB which I'm guessing produces higher quality traffic than native. What do you mean by optimizing on the widget level but NOT black/whitelisting?

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Were you able to boost your EPC?

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I guess it means to optimise (create new one) ads for big pubs, or for categories

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Yes we were! It is still not as high as we would like it to be, but we are nearly in the green. I never realized when getting started just how much time and $ is required to properly blacklist/whitelist widgets or domains. We have a lot of blacklisting to do, but by simply increasing bids on a few converting domains we were able to significantly raise our EPC. It appears that facebook is quite a bit faster because you are able to target potential customers so well and with native you have to cast a pretty wide net. We are still in the red but we are finding more and more converting domains and as we optimize we are continuously getting a better EPC. The lesson learned here is as an affiliate, all that matters is if your clicks convert. If your clicks aren't converting, it doesn't matter how many you send because 0*anything is still 0.

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Oh yes smillar, blacklisting poor placements is an extremely important part of the optimization process and one that never really ends since new placements are added to the networks on a regular basis.

You are right with that "wider net" remark, that's why broad appeal offers performs the best on networks with limited targeting options.

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So final update to this thread....

Turns out that we weren't tracking upsells in Voluum. After upsells we're sitting at +60% ROI on the week. Our EPC is much higher than all of our pubs. One of the reason the EPC appeared low is it was registering bot clicks that content.ad didn't make us pay for. I'll make a full post going through our process over the last month and a half and all of the mistakes we made (we made a LOT of mistakes) sometime in the next few days.

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Glad to hear you figured it out and very much looking forward to the post

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