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Profits By The End Of The Month (30)

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Hey Guys,

I'm new to affiliate marketing but I've been in the digital marketing space for a few years now doing digital marketing and consulting. A few months ago, I decided that I needed a change. So I sold my small company, flew out to Thailand for a month and went to Affiliate World Asia. I met many great guys and learned a lot. Plus the motivation of being surrounded by over 2000 affiliates is self-explanatory.

Anyways, over the next month, I have the goal of cracking atleast $500/day. I'm hungry and all I want is to make this work. I was doing digital marketing and consulting for clients and I've realized that that wasn't the life I wanted and affiliate marketing is my exit strategy to freedom and the lifestyle I want to have.

So this month, I've been able to achieve the following. I'm focused on AV offers in mainly three geos. I've started 2/3 campaigns so far and they're just finishing up their second day. And I plan to launch one more campaign today.

My results so far overall this month is below.



So I'm starting this post because I basically need help and guidance along the way. Plus, I hope that this thread can eventually provide guidance and motivation to others. Currently, I'm focused on 3 geos for AV Pins. I've already started running 2 campaigns and their stats are below. I've requested tons of offers in multiple geos and I've annoyed one of my affiliate managers. lol. So I've decided to slow down a little and focus on as many offers as possible across 3 geos.



Campaign 1 - AntiVirus
Started with:
Offers: 11
Landers: 2



Result for Today:
Offers: 1 (Thinking I may have cut trigger happy when it came to cutting offers 8 & 3)
Landers 3 (I cut one lander yesterday and added 2 more to test)

Campaign 2 - AntiVirus
Started with:
Offers: 8
Landers: 2



Today:
Offers: 1 (offer 8 was the winner)
Landers 3 (I cut one lander yesterday and added 2 more to test)

For both campaigns, the only green pockets I'm seeing right now are from various traffic sources. What I'll do is duplicate and create a whitelist campaign and continue the RON campaign to see if I can crack overall green.

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AWA was an amazing experience for sure!

Regarding your campaigns, I can see some promising numbers there on one of the offers that gave you -14% ROI. I would take it and do some more tests on it. Also if it shows -14% on 1 traffic source, maybe it could be +xx% on another source, so once you isolate the winners you can give it a test somewhere else.

Don't forget its all about the offer, so good step with taking and testing as much offers as you could! (+if you have the budget for it)

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Campaign 1
Take offer 2/8/3 and test them with more landers. Check Adplexity for the 5 lander doing most damage. As well, if you're in an smaller GEO, you can take the lander doing most damage in a competitive TIER1 and translate for your GEO.

Campaign 2
Offer 8 looks very good, you're close to making it work. Send 60% of the traffic to offer 8 and test new landers as well. 40% of the traffic to the other offers till you have significant data there.

For both, check if you have an targeting option (device, os, carrier, browser) which is already green, if so break it out into a separate campaign and scale it.

As erikgyepes mentioned, offers have a high leverage. Rotate new ones in till you find a clear winner. Check if you're competition is running an offer you haven't tested yet.

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Thanks for the tips erikgyepes & sebastian_r.

I went and found about 8 other offers for campaign 2. I added them in alongside. As for yesterday (day 3), I tried creating and running a whitelist campaign for both campaigns. I cut it off since they were red. My tentative plan is to cut everything down to 1 lander/1 offer, then create the whitelist campaign again.

As for campaign 1, I cut/paused it for now. It's a large, but VERY competitive geo. I did notice that the higher my bid, the more conversions I got. When I had slightly above average, or around average, I'd slip into -100% ROI. And my whitelist campaign never got much traffic and ended the day red. Then today, I found myself in a bidding war. Literally, 5 minutes after I upped my bid, I found the average bid surpassed mine. And bids are around $6-$12/CPM and tbh, I'm kinda nervous to be spending that amount of money for data especially with a bidding war. But I'll spend some time looking through the data again and try to find some good spots where I might be able to breakout the campaign.

Btw, What do you recommend in terms of setting your bids?

Also, today, I launched 6 more campaigns across 5 geos. Depending on how tomorrow goes, I'll get some translations done quickly on one hour translator and push out as many geos I can for the offers I'm already approved for. I'll try my best to not request anymore offers for the rest of the week. lol. So in total I have 7 campaigns running (6 of which are under review).

So right now, I have the following:

Campaign 1
Paused the campaign.

Campaign 2
Landers: Still at 3 Landers
Offers: 7 (6 New Ones)

Campaign 3 - New
Landers: 5
Offers: 1

Campaign 4 - New
Landers: 5
Offers: 1

Campaign 5 - New
Landers: 5
Offers: 4

Campaign 6 - New
Landers: 4
Offers: 1

Campaign 7 - New
Landers: 5
Offers: 2

Campaign 8 - New
Landers: 4
Offers: 1

Last thing I've also done was day-parted all my campaigns to run only between 7am - 10pm local time. That way I can shorten my tests by about 9 hours and hopefully not waste money while the locals are sleeping.


PS. I forgot to label this post as a "Follow-Along" and I can't edit it now. Perhaps one of the mods can change that?

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Done! You're now correctly labeled as a Follow-Along.

BTW, I'd recommend not day-parting like that on most campaigns (unless you know from the data you've gathered that it's a good idea). Late-night conversions can be pretty valuable - people are tired or drunk and their inhibitions are lowered.

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Thanks Caurmen. And good point. I'll open them up. Also, a quick update this morning.

Campaign 2
Landers: Still at 3 Landers
Offers: 7 Total
ROI: -86%
1 conversion so far.

Campaign 3
Landers: 5
Offers: 1
ROI: -45%

Campaign 4
Landers: 5
Offers: 1
ROI: -62%

Campaign 5
Landers: 5
Offers: 4
ROI: +64%
Down to 1 offer and 1 lander now.
Very small geo though and not scalable. I'll keep it running for practice though.

Campaign 6 - CUT
Landers: 4
Offers: 1
ROI: -100%

Campaign 7
Landers: 5
Offers: 2
ROI: -36%

Campaign 8 - CUT
Landers: 4
Offers: 1
ROI: -100%

Currently, I'm day 5 into my Voluum billing cycle and I've already used up 1/3 of my monthly usage because of pops but I have a friend who I met at AWA and also focuses on mobile banners so I'm considering using his help to get started with mobile banners.

I'll continue to run camps 3,4,5&7 tomorrow. Camp 8 & 6 are cut. Camp 2 is tentative.
And for the campaigns, I used the test budget of
(# of Offers) * (# of Landers) * ($Payout) * 3.

Also, for the current 24 hour period, I made a decision NOT to keep playing with my bids. I think Campaign 2 may be -100% right now because I've been outbid. But trying not to waste time getting carried away in bid wars and instead set the bid 1.25 * (average bid), leave it with a test budget, then come back when the test budget is burned.

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That's today's update.
''

I ended up dropping camps 1,2. I'd spent about $500 between the two of them and was kinda hesitant to continue with that type of risk. Now, I'm left with 4 pop campaigns currently.

I was able to get campaign 7 green because I quickly cut out the losing categories that were costing me alot. Plus, most of the losing categories also happened to be adult traffic which my network wouldn't want anyways. I'll continue testing landers between the campaigns and get you updated. I should hopefully be able to get camp 4 green by tomorrow.

I think I'll also start creating duplicated whitelist campaigns on the side for all of them to see what happens.

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Great progress so far!

I wouldn't recommend setting up whitelists before you're already not getting a ton of traffic, and whitelisting will only restrict your traffic further. Instead, it would be a better idea to use the current traffic to test more stuff. Once you're down to your best lander, DO test more offers using it. That's one of the best things you can do to potentially increase your ROI by leaps.

Remember: You're not trying to maximize ROI, but rather daily profits. If you can't make enough of the traffic profitable, then you'll need to change your approach. Don't fall into the trap of getting a camp to green just to do $1/day in profits, or even $5/day. Even for newbies, these numbers won't be worth your time in maintaining the camps, plus pop camp performance is so volatile, that with so little profit, your camps can quickly plunge back into red to eliminate previous profits before you catch and stop them.

So to summarize: Avoid cutting your way to green. If you're not making enough of the traffic profitable, then either test other geos/verticals or test more offers and landers to make more of the traffic profitable.

Looking forward to your next update!



Amy

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Thanks Amy. Very good point. I'll keep you posted!

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So I have two campaigns in green. I've signed up for a few other affiliate networks to try and find more offers. However, beyond finding the best offer/lander combo, what else do you recommend to be the biggest "needle mover" for affiliate campaigns? I've cut OS,Categories,& Carriers that have consistently performed badly since the beginning of the campaign but kinda wondering if there are any other suggestions to push the campaign to give me 2x,3x the return.

I'm going to duplicate my camps on PopCash with identical bids to see how it goes. I'd like to try AdCash and PropellerAds but I've had tons of issues getting approved by their networks with my aggressive landers. And I'm not cloaking at all. I'll update you on this when I get some results back.

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First thread I've subbed to, awesome read man. I love greens poppin up already.

In a very similar boat to you, not at all new to internet marketing but this media buying and affiliate is a new world, any chance I could catch you on Skype sometime? I'd love to have someone to share experience/threads with. If so, you can catch me @ inv.olution. Either way, best of luck man!

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Progress is always good! And green is such a nice color!

Are these camps on popads? If so, some of the tips in these posts may be useful:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-for-Beginners

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...re-Experienced

First thing I would do is test bids. Test different bids and don't be afraid to test high bids (just remember to set a reasonably low budget just in case). And again, do remember that it's daily profits you're wanting to maximize, not ROI, so pick the optimal bid accordingly.

Another thing you can do is play with frequency. I covered this in the links above.

Also, you'd want to go through all your campaign settings, to see if there's anything you've restricted that you can open up for a test. For example if you were dayparting before, then test all hours. If you were only targeting Android but the offers also accept other OSs, then test those as well. Etc.

And when you do mass-test offers, remember to open up the targeting at that time anyways. Just because your current offers convert badly for IOS, say, doesn't mean the new offers will also suck for IOS.

The thing to keep in mind when optimizing pop camps is that efficiency is very important, as they typically don't stay profitable for very long. Only do tasks that have the potential to increase daily profits significantly. Don't spend a lot of time on squeezing a few more nickels/pennies out of any camp - your time could be much better spent on testing other stuff.


Yes - definitely try PopCash and Zeropark. AV also does great on adult traffic. Exoclick should come to mind immediately, but they're strict as well so I wouldn't recommend running there unless you know how to cloak, and well. However, try other adult pop sources and see what you can get approved - it's been quite a while since I last ran AV - longer than my memory retention period of 3 seconds - so either do your own testing or start a separate thread to ask AV experts for traffic source recommendations.




Amy

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GEO>Offer>Traffic Source

If you have GEO and offer sorted, finding the right traffic source has the biggest bang for buck.

I would not spend too much time optimising the campaign on your main source. The available traffic is already too low. You can test things you did cut already that might be a traffic killer. You can as well try a higher bid, second and third campaign and second and third account.

If that doesn't help, its time to test all the other available traffic sources. Some good ones here: Propeller, Popads, Adcash, Zeropark, Exoclick, Plugrush, Reporo, Traffic Junky, DNTX, Clickadu, EroAdvertising, Wiget, Mediahub, Selfadvertiser.

Running aggressive and not cloaking is not a good combination on pops. You're limiting your potential for campaigns that can make decent absolute figures to a minimum. There are just not enough traffic sources out there allowing aggressive. Either run aggressive and cloak, or run whitehat.

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I haven't posted in this thread for a while. I've been busy launching campaigns. I found a bunch of landers (basically everything I can find on adplexity) and translated them into a few other languages. Currently, I have 5 active & green campaigns at the moment. And when I get my other translations, I'll be launching in other geo's also.

I also stopped running my higher payout offers to mitigate my risk. Much easier but better for learning to run cheap, cheap offers (less than $0.30). Once I get much more comfortable with my process, then I'll gradually, and incrementally start attacking higher payout offers.

Because.... well...



Anways, my process for optimizing my campaigns are:

1. Checking for winning offer/lander combos and creating separate paths or...
2. Cutting Losing Offers gradually until I find the winner
3. Cutting Losing Landers gradually until I find the winner
4. Cutting Losing Brands/OS which are deep in the red.
5. Cutting Losing Websites which are deep in red
6. Going through the nitty grittys to see what else I can make green.

At the moment, my MAIN issue is scaling. And the main reasons for this I believe are:

1. Not enough traffic in my geos
2. CPC's to high
3. Offer Payout too low

But anyways, here's my progress so far from January 1st.

January 1st - January 7th


January 8th - January 14th


January 15th - January 18th


January 19th


What I'm Doing
So I'm running offers with very low payouts to speed up my learning curve, because conversions are what really make your data valuable. In fact, in the example below, I was able to determine a clear winner within a matter of hours.


Statistical Significance
So below is a practical example of my noticing the importance of statistical significance. At first glance, if I was looking at ROI, I would think lander 5 is a clear winner. But when you take in the amount of conversions... it's also worth noting that 1 extra/less conversions can completely change the ROI by almost 15%. So in this case, I'd wait a few more hours before making an assumption. Or, instead of completely cutting a lander/offer, I would gradually drop traffic percentage to that lander/offer/path.


What Now?
I've looked at my campaigns and although they were great practice optimizing, I don't see much potential to obtain a decent ROI from PopAds. Although I'm currently green, my ROI is too low for the amount of money I'm making. Also worth noting that my ROI & profits are actually slightly less because tracking isn't perfect. So lets basically call this breaking even...

My campaigns are fairly green and I tried as much as possible not to cut major traffic sources to optimize the widest range of traffic as possible. And when I raise my bids, my ROI goes down. So I'm looking for other networks like ZeroPark, PropellerAds, AdCash, ExoClick and a few of the other networks mentioned. I also talked to my affiliate network and they bumped up my payout a little bit and because of the volume I've done this week, my account manager said management should be able to grant my weekly payments as of next week to help with cash-flow. So we'll see what happens. Hoping I get approved.

My New Goal
So I think I can say I hit my vague goal of just hitting profits as titled in this post since it was too easy... So I think it's appropriate to set a new and much more difficult & specific goal of $500/day by January 31st.
More to come.

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Very helpful links. Thanks for posted. I hadn't really realized how much I was overpaying in some geos.

I tried PopCash got some results so far but nothing significant. I noticed it does require a different & rigorous optimization process. I noticed plenty of top sources giving me -100% ROI in some geos. In my case, I was getting much lower quality than PopAds. And still waiting for my account to be verified at ZeroPark. I'll also check out Exoclick. Thanks for the suggestions.

Very good point. Had some issues with my cloaking setup and link loss before but will definitely try it again with FraudBuster.

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Congratulations on the green!

I agree with everything you said in your post, especially the following:

-Running low payout offers to collect more data for cheap when you're learning.

-Your optimization process.

-The importance of statistical significance. This is especially crucial when it comes to cutting offers and landers, because they are what can make or break a camp.

Regarding problems with scaling: Unfortunately, that can be a problem when running pop in smaller geos (or when only targeting certain segments such as certain mobile carriers). To make significant profits, you'd either have to target some of the bigger geos, or have a ton of camps running at the same time, or both.

Testing in many geos can be expensive. Try to spend limited amounts of money on testing multiple geos, then narrow down to a couple and test hard. Test offers, landers, cut placements. When you operate in the same geo again and again, you have the advantage of knowing what the best placements are, because you've already cut the bad ones. This is especially key if you decide to run wifi traffic in a biggish geo - chances are you'd need to throw a lot of money at the camp to cut junk placements before you can make profits. So it would be wise to test new offers in the same geo to take advantage of the initial investment you put into cutting placements.

Fantastic! Rooting for you on hitting that real soon!



Amy

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Scaling begins before you start your campaign with selecting the right GEO. If you're in a small GEO and hunting for pop carrier traffic you won't make any big waves no matter how good you are.

You know how to make camps work. Now select the right GEOs and you will do big damage.

40+ mio for carrier camps with at least $2-3+ payout. For huge GEOs you can go with less.
Smaller GEOs only with high payouts $10+
Or find pins that work well with wifi. Then you can run smaller GEOs as well.

Spend the next couple weeks mastering scaling. The difference between a $100/day and $1,000/day camp is often only your knowledge and correct execution of scaling. You can often squeeze out 2-3 times the traffic you currently get on your original traffic source (double camps, double accounts, breaking out profitable targeting functions with higher CMP, Bid baskets for placements). After that, you need to go to new traffic sources. Test 20. Find 3-5 winners.

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So quick update.

I was testing one geo that worked best on PopAds but just didn't cut it when I jumped to Zeropark. I was -90% ROI with ZP and had no green in the drilldowns. I actually accidentally spent $140+. ZP can burn your budget within seconds.


But the plan now is to is...
1. Set a budget of $10-15/camp for 7 campaigns. Formula -> (10 Landers) x (2 Offers) x ( 3 ) x ($0.20) = $12
2. Cut all campaigns with no green in the offer/lander drilldowns. AKA, hopeless campaigns.
3. Optimize landers/offer combos.

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Zeropark has more traffic than popads, but because the traffic quality is mixed, you'll need to be prepared to throw money at weeding out placements.

It would make a lot of sense to keep running in the same geos when you're operating on sources like that, just to recoup your initial investment in cutting placements.

Bidding higher on such sources is especially crucial, because more traffic volume means there's more junk at the bottom, so you definitely won't want to be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

More accurately it should be Offer > Lander > Major Traffic Segments. All you need to have a profitable campaign is at least one big traffic segment to be profitable for one offer+lander combo.

Looking forward to seeing how your new camps will fare!



Amy

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So another update... My AM caught my agressive landers. Although the description didn't say anything about aggressive landers, it did say creatives (landers and banners) need to be approved.

Luckily, I wasn't caught by the advertiser. My AM said if they advertiser caught it and not them, I could risk not getting paid... So, I think right now, I'll be looking for safer offers suggested by my AM like Pin Submits. They cost more to test... But I can't afford the risks of simply not being paid.

So for anyone who doesn't know... be VERY CAREFUL running App Installs. However, I did get a quality check this weekend and the advertiser did appear to be happy overall.

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You'll find this to be the norm: Many affiliate networks / affiliate managers will turn a blind eye to affiliates running against the rules set by the advertiser, as long as we don't get caught by the advertiser. But of course there's always the risk of not getting paid when we violate the rules. Some affiliates will factor those risks into their plans. Others will avoid those risks. You'll just have to find a balance between risk and profits.

And you can never go wrong with asking for a quality check! Even some advertisers will turn a blind eye to how you run their offers as long as the leads back out for them. Again, the disclaimer here is, again, that there'll always be the risk of having commissions withheld when running against the rules.



Amy

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Don't breach the terms if you cannot afford losing the revenue. If you do, you should have enough budget to test and float new camps.

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Yea, you're right. It's also very painful looking at the test data from the first round of testing. I know this would've been a very profitable campaign after optimizing landers, carriers, os, brands, browers, targets,etc. But oh well.

Live and learn.

Landers


Targets


Pretty much anything in the AV niche (pin submits too) is gonna need aggressive landers and many advertisers are pretty strict. Not to mention Adplexity being a serious enemy against media buyers. So I'm looking for something that's completely compliant. Looking into potentially running some adult/sweep offers.

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Quick Update.

I got 10 adult offers running on PropellerAds now with a few landers I ripped. I found offers forvarious carriers in my region so I set rules up in Voluum to redirect traffic based on their carrier and bought traffic from all the carriers in one shot. In this first round of testing, it looks like I have a winning carrier. One carrier converted better than everyone else and looks like it has potential. The other offers for the other carriers were deep in red. They got more impressions and converted way less.

So in summary...
Startup
10 Offers (mixture of carriers)
8 Landers
Spend: $52.98
Revenue: $4.54
Payouts: $0.25 - $0.60
Conversions: 9 (6 of which are from my best carrier. 2 from second best. 1 from the third best. No love for the other carriers)

So now, for my second phase of testing, I'm on to creating another campaign for that specific carrier. Next phase will be to find the best offer using statistical significance.

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Why don't you ask your AMs for offers in the same vertical+geo that allow aggressive? You already have proven landers, and know which placements are good. It would be nice to be able to take advantage of this if possible!


Did you type the name wrong? Propeller does not allow adult.


Good observation. Normally what you'd want to do is find the best offer for each carrier. Only in this case, you're seeing just one carrier that has potential.


What's the ROI of your best-performing offer+lander combination so far for that best carrier? Just want to see how far you are from breaking even, because the overall spend vs. revenue is quite high.

Other than that - good plan.



Amy

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Thanks for the response Amy. The geo I was in doesn't have many Pin submit offers. It's a big geo, but very hard to find much AV offers that aren't CPI. Still trying to sign up with a few other aff networks but still tricky atm.

So... My second test went through. Got about 5000 impressions then they shut down my campaign. I was on propeller ads. I guess the first time they approved it, they didn't see my more "revealing" landers which were in the
rotation.

There was a significant waste of spend for the other carriers/offers. The ones with the arrows are the carrier offers. The cost column is slightly inaccurate since I used their SmartCPA feature but it didn't optimize well. But in the end, the costs were $0.40 CPM. So for 4000 impressions, about $1.60 in costs. The bottom offer was definitely the winner in this case, but I still wanted to run those three again in the second test to get more conversions alongside with the 8 landers I had.



My account manager at one of my aff networks recommended wwwpromoter. I ran it there too. I just got approved and ran this morning and $50 later, 0 conversions.

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You were running carrier traffic I hope? I never had much luck running wifi traffic there.



Amy

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I would look into other GEOs with higher payouts. It#s super tough to do damage with $.4 payouts on carrier, even in big GEOs.

Don't have too much hope for wwwpromoter, the worst results I ever had of all pop sources I tested, besides maybe gungoo...

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Yes, I was running carrier traffic. Also did a test today with a campaign at -99% ROI after spending $55. Perhaps the worst results I've gotten on any traffic network.



Summary for January


Alright, so last night, I decided to slow down, take some time and look over my biggest winners & losers to see what I could have done better and to really just spend some time looking at the data overall.

Going into the next month, I plan to shift to Native/Disp. That's where I wanted to end up in the long run, but I used Pops to help me with the learning curve of looking at data and drilling down campaigns. And with over 4+ Million actions and 7000+ conversions last month, there's tons of data to look at. Although I lost over $1k, I gain a lot of knowledge and experience. So still an overall win.

Key Takeaways

1. Test TONS of offers
2. Test as many landers as possible
3. Statistical signifiance is KEY
4. Don't spend too much time trying to make a pop campaign work.
5. Low payouts help you get statistical significance easily and quickly.
6. Don't run aggressively long term unless you plan to cloak. And also beware of the risk of getting caught and not being paid.

Why Am I Not Green??
During the 3rd week, I had a campaign which I know would've pushed me into the green. However, my AM caught me running aggressively for a CPI offer and told me to stop in fear that the advertiser would catch me. That was a pretty big bummer... But I'll be going whitehat with my favorite traffic source (native ads). Blackhat is very profitable especially with networks like PropellerAds with SmartCPA. I didn't cloak and it set me back from running on networks where other cloakers are running like PropellerAds and Adcash.

What now?
When I first started doing media buying, I was mainly working doing content arb on native. Ever since, I grown to prefer Native as my favorite traffic source. So January was just a break from native overall to practice the fundamentals of affiliate on pops. But I still managed to create 10 profitable camps and more comfortable with the optimization process.

Now, I'm connected with a native mastermind group and gonna be focused mainly on affiliate and some content arb using native ads.

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Thanks for that summary! Also thank you for this entire follow-along. And best of luck continuing with native!

Looking forward to seeing you share your knowledge about native with the community!



Amy

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