PopAds Tips for the More Experienced (16)
As promised, here's a follow-up post to the "PopAds Tips for Beginners" post earlier, which I hope was useful to you:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-for-Beginners
If you already have a bit of experience with PopAds, some of these tips will help you to squeeze more money out of the available traffic.
Without further ado - let's get started!
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1) Pay Attention When Targeting By Carrier
If you're wanting to target carrier/3g/4g traffic on popads, it may not be as straight-forward as you think. I've written a very detailed thread on the topic here:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...u-Can-t-Target!
PopAds has recently implemented IP Targeting, which can be a more efficient way to target mobile carriers - I'll talk more on this below.
2) Target by IP List
If you're wanting to target a specific mobile carrier, and have a list of IPs for that carrier, targeting by IP can result in more profits than targeting by ISPs as described above.
Your IP list may perform better or worse than targeting by ISP - it depends on how good your list is. You're encouraged to test both to see which one performs better.
I'll probably write a detailed post on how to harvest and optimize IP lists at a later point. For now, the tips below should be enough to get you started. There are several ways to harvest IPs for a specific carrier:
-You can ask your affiliate managers for them. Advertisers will sometimes release lists of IPs that have converted the best for their offers, and affiliate managers are usually happy to pass those onto us. Also, affiliate networks can see from their stats, the IPs associated with all conversions. But they won't release this info readily unless you're running volume and/or have a very good relationship with them. At any rate, if you don't ask you won't receive!
-You can compile a list of IPs from IP reports websites such as http://ipinfo.io. Simply navigate to http://ipinfo.io/countries/[2-letter country code for your target geo] (e.g. for argentina, navigate to http://ipinfo.io/countries/ar), open in a new browser tab the ASN link corresponding to every instance of your target mobile carrier, then for each ASN page scroll down to "IP Address Blocks" and copy all the data to an excel sheet. The IP ranges in the "Netblocks" are what you'll want to be targeting at PopAds.
Not all the IPs will convert. I prefer to just throw traffic at them to see which ones will, and just stop targeting the ones that won't.
-You can target by carrier name first - on PopAds and/or other sources - then drill into IP stats on your tracker to get a list of converting IPs and target by those.
And of course, you can cut non-converting IP ranges, just like you would non-converting placements.
3) Request for VIP Status Once You Think You Qualify
When you've spent enough money with PopAds, you'll be upgraded to VIP status. I'm not sure exactly what the required amount is, but based on personal experience and that of people I've talked to, it's around USD$12k.
Once you've reached this spend, do hit up PopAds support to politely ask whether they can upgrade you to VIP. When you do, please don't quote the USD$12k mentioned above - after all, the decision is up to the owner. 
As VIP you'll enjoy 2 advantages when running on PopAds:
1)Your camps will be automatically and immediately approved. You can set up a camp and literally start getting traffic in minutes. This makes it an excellent source to do quick testing with.
2)You may get a line of credit called "Postpay", which I believe starts at $3k and can increase later on. This can really help to circumvent cashflow issues. (For exact details please contact Popads support.)
4) Bid Lower for Higher Frequencies
General speaking, the higher you set the frequency to, the more traffic you'll get, but the lower the ROI will be. The amount of profits may increase or decrease as a result so you'll need to test to find out.
As mentioned in the first PopAds Tips post, I prefer to start a camp at 1/24 (one view every 24 hours), and would only test higher frequencies when a camp is green.
Another thing you can test: Start a separate camp, set frequency to "Raw" (which effectively removes the frequency limit), set a low bid. Run a bot test first to weed out the worst placements, then cut placements further based on losses. After cutting the bigger bad placements, tweak the bid to maximize profits.
This new "Raw" camp may not end up being profitable even after cutting placements, so you'll need to have the experience to know whether it will have a good chance of becoming profitable, and end the camp if chances are slim.
Extending this approach, you can set up additional camps with frequencies between 1/24 and Raw, and bid lower than what you're bidding in the 1/24 camp.
Important: You're aiming to maximize total profits across all these camps! I would suggest to optimize your bid for the 1/24 camp first, and THEN set up and optimize additional camps for other frequencies one at a time, to make sure that the new camp can increase your total profits before setting up more camps.
I would also suggest to not go crazy by setting up a lot of camps with different frequencies. Camps require time to maintain. Unless a new camp looks like it's likely to result in significant profits, I'd suggest not to bother.
5) Bid Low for Unattractive Traffic
Extending the idea of bidding lower for higher-frequencies, you can do the same for other lower-quality traffic, such as non-prime traffic, or adblock traffic (more explanation to come), or placements that don't convert the best.
The key is to bid low and cut placements rigorously.
I would suggest to play with this only after you've identified your best offer, lander, and traffic segments. Using traffic of dubious quality to test offers/landers would just be a bad idea.
6) Know When to Use Smart Bidding vs. Legacy Bidding
You can find a detailed explanation on the difference between Smart and Legacy Bidding in PopAd's knowledge base under "Bidding methods".
The gist of it is that by choosing Smart Bidding, PopAds will automatically bid higher for you on certain placements, so that you'll get more traffic volume and higher-quality traffic (because when you bid higher, your ad will get shown to the visitor earlier, and likely convert better). The downside though is that costs will be higher.
I would suggest using Smart Bidding at least while you're testing offers and landers, because the higher volume and quality will be an advantage when you're testing.
After you've identified the best offer+lander+targeting, you can either continue using Smart Bid and tweak the bid until profits are maximized, or switch to Legacy Bid and sort placements into different camps with different bids. The second approach may allow you to squeeze more money from your camps as it will give you more control over what you're bidding per placement, but then it's a lot more trouble. Your choice.
7) Test Adblock Traffic
(This section updated 14-Nov-2018.)
Here's PopAds' explanation on what AdBlock traffic is, and how to test your landers and tracker urls to see whether they are blocked:
I set up 2 campaigns, one targeting global desktop and the other targeting global mobile traffic. Ran $10 to each, then drilled down to the adblock variable in
FOR MOBILE TRAFFIC:
Here are the stats for mobile:
adblock = 0 means no adblock, and adblock = 1 means adblock is used.
As you can see, adblock traffic comprises around 3% of Mobile Wifi traffic, and around 8% of Mobile Carrier traffic.
When I drilled down to various geos, I found that the ratios across geos are pretty much consistent with the numbers above.
Adblockers have certainly become more widespread compared to when I first made this post 2 years ago - back then only 1% of all mobile traffic was adblock traffic.
If you're wanting to take advantage of adblock traffic, then follow PopAds' advice to check both your tracker url and lander url (and perhaps offer url as well), to see whether those urls have been blocked by adblockers. If not, then adblock traffic should convert for you.
Here's an idea though: Try setting up a global camp to target JUST adblock traffic at a really low bid (since this traffic is cheaper), and sending it to either an international offer or a monetizing service such as Monetizer. I haven't tested this yet, but you can if you like! (You should still test your tracker url and any lander and offer urls if you have them, to make sure they're NOT blocked by adblockers. If you're running Monetizer, also check your Monetizer url to make sure your Monetizer domain isn't blocked.)
FOR DESKTOP TRAFFIC:
My global campaign shows that around 14% of desktop traffic is adblock traffic:
When I drilled down to various geos, I found that the percentage of adblock traffic varies greatly from geo to geo. Don't quote me here, but based on my limited sampling, it would seem that tier 1 geos have particularly-high percentages of adblock traffic - it can be as high as 50%-70% in certain geos.
So, if you're running desktop traffic, DO heed PopAds' advice, by finding out whether your links are blocked or not - and if not, by all means take advantage of the cheaper adblock traffic to see what ROI you get!
8) Read PopAds' Knowledge Base for Advertisers
Lastly - there is some good information in PopAd's Knowledge Base for Advertisers, that can give you more insight into how PopAds works. If you haven't read it yet, you definitely should!
You can find it here:
https://www.popads.net/kb/advertiser
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And that's it for now! Thanks for reading. Also, I know that some of you are experts on PopAds - it would be awesome if you could share more tips with us below!
Amy
Excellent tips, especially #4.
Good stuff as always!
Andrew
Awesome post Amy! I appreciate it!
Good post Amy.
As for Adblock my results have been similar. Sometimes Adblock performs better than non-Adblock BTW, but the percentage of adblock for mobile users is very low.
I guess it's different with desktop traffic as there users tend to install it a lot more and many of them really hate ads and popups.
But the moral of the story as always: split test and decide based on data.
Originally Posted by servandosilva
In fact will do that right now and report back...
Thanks for pointing that out!
Amy
Perfect tips Amy!
I've done a small test on desktop adblock traffic, and have updated the "Adblock" section in the original post with my findings.
Thanks very much servandosilva for pointing that out! And apologies for my oversight - my perspective is a bit limited as I almost never run desktop campaigns. Glad to have learned something new today! 
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Thanks very much servandosilva for pointing that out! And apologies for my oversight - my perspective is a bit limited as I almost never run desktop campaigns. Glad to have learned something new today!
Amy
Great work!
Amy's series on pops are absolutely paramount! 
I'm reading them all. Thank you!
These posts were a great 1-2 punch for popads, thanks Amy!
Great tips Amy!
Regarding the frequency capping:
Is frequency capping based on IP? x views per 24 hours per IP?
If that is the case and we are targeting carriers/carrier IP blocks, wouldn't it make sense to have higher/unlimited frequency capping because carrier IP-s are in rotation and we can get different users from the same IP - so I don't really see a reason to cap it high. Someone please correct me if im wrong.
Thanks for these tips Amy! I have a question that I am hoping you or anyone else can answer. Is there any way to block website IDs before even starting a campaign? The only way I can see to block website IDs is starting the campaign and then going to "Quick Report by Website ID" and excluding the website IDs from there. Thanks.
Originally Posted by splitpersonality
Indeed one of my mastermind buddies suggested this early on. I played with different frequencies but still found the same drop in ROI when I increased the frequency.
So no matter how IPs are allocated in reality, testing different frequencies would be wise - basically just look for the frequency that will maximize daily profits for you.
Amy
Originally Posted by thien425
Go to your popads' camp settings, Website Targeting > Excluded, paste a list of site IDs in there, save changes, and you're all set.
Amy
Awesome post, thanks!
Updated the section on adblock.
Amy
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