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POPS vs Display vs Native mobile. What to focus as a beginner? (17)

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I have already run a campaign with display (go2mobi) with no conversions following the appetizer method.

After reading around, especially the follow along journals, i have noticed a trend were people suggesting pops+sweepstakes as a way easier route for beginners. Is that the case?

Can you guys give some thoughts on the best type of mobile traffic to use as a newbie and with what vertical combination?

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I'd recommend pops and sweeps or PIN submits for beginners right now. Display isn't in a great place at this point.

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Display - tough
Native - expensive (needs high budgets)
Pops - this bad boy you try

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Why is display not a great place/tough? Is it just tough for newbies? I have heard this said around the forum a few times recently and keep wondering why.

I am getting back into mobile after 2 years of doing other stuff and I'm very curious to find this out because I used to really like mobile display. I felt like banners were just one more place you could have an advantage because of CTR.

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I'm still looking into precisely what's going on with display right now, but there's definitely a commonality of experience amongst affiliates I've spoken to - not just newbies - that display is tough to get profitable at present. A lot of it seems to be that the offers are just better suited to pops right now.

It's not impossible to get profitable - vortex got a display campaign going recently, for example - but it's definitely tougher right now.

Some of that is just that pops are in a good place right now.

If you want to leverage your banner skills, fb and e-commerce is another good option at present. Fb are keen on getting white hat performance marketers back right now and there's a lot of potential for profit.

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sweepstakes + pinsubmits and pops definitely for a begginer is the best way

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I had to cut large part of my mobile display (DSPs) campaigns too, the exchanges started to behave weirdly. It looks like they are filtering some of the good placements and selling just the crap through DSPs. Conversions went to shit, you need to bid way higher to get good CTRs now ... not sure what they did, but there were some changes indeed and this format is largely unusable for now.

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Another vote for pop traffic! I wouldn't recommend sticking with pop for long-term because it's gotten very competitive with the massive influx of newbies, and also because of the increasing amounts of junk traffic, and the fact that most pop camps don't stay profitable for very long. However, it's the perfect traffic type to learn the ropes with because it's so easy to get going - basically just get a subscription to Adplexity, rip a bunch of landers, fix them up, and you're good to go.

So my suggestion would be to use pop to learn basics such as how to test offers and landers, analyze stats, cut offers and landers and placements, and other optimization tasks. Then once you know enough to consistently make profits, to expand into other traffic types such as Native/FB.

Unless you either have people working for you or are an automation whiz, or know some black magic (i.e. blackhat tactics) that will give you a big advantage over the competition, it would be hard to make high profits with pop on a consistent basis. Chances are you'd be juggling a ton of camps and getting burnt out by constantly having to find new profits to replace those from dying camps.

As for mobile display: I'm 100% sure there are still people that are still making it work, but as @caurmen has mentioned, many people we've spoken to, some of which used to run a lot of mobile display traffic, are now having trouble making the traffic work for some reason. But this can be a good thing for the more adventurous souls: There's less competition there now.

You'd need to be prepared to test a LOT of stuff though if you're wanting to give mobile display a shot. I'm making it work. It's still a traffic type that has great potential.

Best of luck to the OP! And if you're wanting to give sweeps+pop a shot (if you haven't already), I've provided a rough strategy at the end of this post:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post293497



Amy

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Just not native. Native is for more advanced people.

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@johnaff - agreed. For anyone wondering why - one of the simplest reasons is that native tends to work better with higher payout offers. That's not an absolute rule but it's a strong trend. That means that testing is a lot more expensive.

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Are you guys talking about native mobile or desktop native?

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Both. The targeting can be mobile or desktop. The type of advertising you can buy at sources such as Taboola, Outbrain, Revcontent, and MGID. Ads that look like these:



Hope that helps!



Amy

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Would skip the pop and display part and go straight to fb if you have a decent enough budget. If budget is a matter, stick to Pops. Display is almost dead.

Native is too expensive to learn the basics. I mean really expensive. To make it work in Tier1, you need those $40+ payouts. A decent blacklist has 500-1500 placements in it. You can do the math.

You can try it outside Tier1 where lower payouts can fly, but then there is not all too much good traffic available, so you end up with tiny camps in absolute profit numbers. And the amount of suitable offers is rather low as well. Its tough to make a $10-50 sale in India lol

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Same question here. Is it really worth investing time and money into pop right now? How bright is the future? I mean i can see fb not dying in distant future but what about other sources?

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Well, ever since the birth of POPup advertising format, I've seen people posting on various forums how it's about to die and there is no future for it Google tries to push hard on the interstitial pop format now, let's how that works out ... but I'm pretty sure POPs are here to stay. It's a very competitive place right now, but that can and will change at some point. POPs are still the best traffic type for learning the fundamentals IMO.

Facebook and other social networks OR adwords and other search sources ... this has solid future for sure, but it's harder to make it work and the traffic can get pretty expensive.

Any source can work I would say, it just depends on your skills and expectations.

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My point was more on competitiveness of pops. I mean almost every one is pushing same offer+ same lander on same traffic source so its hard to see new guys being successful there.

Im gonna give it a try though. Will start FA tomorrow. Wanna thank you because it was your FA which inspired me to take action.

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You are right, pops are very competitive right now, STM played a role in this too, as it's currently the easiest traffic type to learn AM with, so we're recommending it a lot to newbies. But this will change in the future, it's always like this, the competitiveness goes up and down with every traffic type or vertical. Affiliates tend to move from one hot thing to the next all the time

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