Mobile cookbook - 0 conversions - 200$ spent (8)
Hey hey 
Props for taking action and starting your follow along!
The first screenshot of banners are looking good at first sight , I'm personally not running display currently so better for someone with recent knowledge to chime in.
The main reason why there has been no conversion would be the landers, I'd recommend to sign up to a spy tool like Adplexity Mobile and have a look at all the top landing pages for sweepstakes there, for example by using the search term "iPhone" and "running longest" ... then take some of these top landers and try them, just to verify your setup is otherwise correct and you're getting conversions.
Looking forward to your next test results
Very nice follow-along indeed! You're being very transparent in revealing your banners and landers and stats - this will really help us in giving you useful and specific feedback and suggestions. Way to go!
Like kepe has suggested, a subscription to adplexity will help greatly.
You're very creative and very diligent and it really shows in your banners and landers. However, right now you have no idea why you're not getting conversions, because there are simply too many uncertainties. You're running an unproven offer using unproven banners and unproven landers. So now we have no idea which one to optimize, because we don't know which one(s) are the cause of the lack of conversions.
What I would suggest is do the following:
1)Run pop traffic first to find a good offer+lander. Get a subscription to Adplexity:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...e-STM-Discount
Rip as many different-looking landers as you can find that are getting lots of traffic (selecting "running longest" as kepe suggested, or try "received most traffic" - setting the time period to something recent like 7 days or a month). There are tons of iphone 7 landers so you'll have no trouble finding them.
Ask your AMs from different networks to suggest the best iphone 7 offers for your chosen geo, and pick 2-3 to test the landers. All you need is at least one offer that converts well enough to help you test landers to cut down to the best one. You can then take that lander and test all the iphone 7 offers for your geo to find the best one. You can find a rough testing approach at the end of this post:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post293497
While you're at it, I would actually suggest to try non-english-speaking geos if you could. That way you avoid the heaviest competition, because lots of affiliate marketers know English which makes targeting English-speaking geos so convenient. Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, basically tier 3/4 geos, are worth testing. Traffic is cheaper, conversion rates are higher which means you get more data faster which will allow you to optimize faster. And don't be deceived by the lower payouts - the higher conversion rates will often make up for that.
2)Once you've found a good offer+lander, you can then scale them to mobile display and test banners. That way, you narrow down the uncertainties as you already have a proven offer and lander.
This would be the best method I know. If you absolutely don't want to touch pop, you can still just keep testing on mobile display until you make it work, but it would mean having to test banners at the same time you're testing landers and offers, which would mean an extra layer of uncertainty. It would still be doable of course - so - whichever way you choose to go would be OK.
Either way though, there's no way around testing more offers and landers (starting with popular landers from Adplexity).
Looking forward to your next update! Fantastic work so far!
Amy
Making display work is tough. Way tougher than pops. With pops you can remove one moving component (the creatives). Creating / finding good creatives is one of the toughest parts in AM. I wouldn't bother as beginner.
3 landers is a good start, 1 offer needs some improvement. The offer if the most important part in your funnel (after you have choosen the GEO and traffic source). Just because the offer works for somebody else, doesn't mean it will work for you. So you need to test a solid ammount of offers to find one that works with your GEO/Source/Creative combination.
Focus on testing as many offers as your budget allows you.
Go with AM recommendations, offers you see other guys running for a couple of days on adplexity, and offers you see others running in early position while live spying. If you have a bigger budget, you can plug in all offers of your vertical / GEO that you find on your go to aff networks.
Thank you all for trying to help me.
I took your advice and switched to pops.
1. I signed up for Adplexity as you guys suggested and I was able to see what the competition was doing. (My eyes started to sparkle when I discovered how the big guys are actually doing it...)
2. Signed up for an account at Propellerads, made a deposit and started to test!
In order to rapidly test, here's what I did:
- Ripped a proven landing page on Adplexity.
=> Bingo, someone's running the exact same offer I wanted to test. So I rip his landing page for the UK, clean it up, and set up my pops campaign.
I don't plan on making profit using someone else's work, I actually want to get inspiration from competitors and create my own landers based off what I learned in my research, but in order to test fast, I just used the ripped lander (cleaned) as is.
- I set up the campaign and let it go live.
=> I'm surprised I only get 1 conversion out of 1,400 people who clicked all the way through the offer. My landing page CTR was 39.89%.
So it's a sweepstakes offer (iPhone 7), really popular from what I've seen on Adplexi and one of the top offers according to my AM.
The landing page I ripped and tested is in the form of a customer survey offering to win a prize in exchange of their opinion.
So... 1 conversion out of 1,400 clicks with a proven offer and lander, I really don't know what I'm doing wrong...
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post293497
I'll go and try a few more landers to see what works
Today, to try and regain some motivation, I tested the same offer in other countries (NL and BE) with translated landers and still no conversion. Even worse, my landing page CTR got awful: 0.38% ... and once again, the lander used here is a ripped lander for the NL offer (probably the same affiliate who's killing it on the UK market).
I'm lost and motivation took a hit.
What did I do wrong?
Replicating entire camps from Adplexity - from traffic source to landing page to offer - can be a good approach. But even in this case you'd need to test wide by replicating a few more camps, and not expect every test to turn out a winner. Not to mention that the lander you ripped may not be the actual lander the competitor is running - they may be cloaking for all we know.
Lander CTR can vary widely from geo to geo. There are so many things that can cause a lander to be clicked on and convert....or not. This is exactly why it would be a good idea to test a lot of landers when you're new to a vertical and have no idea what will convert. Same goes for offers.
I know it can be demotivating to see something that's apparently doing very well for a competitor, to completely flop when you run it. That's unfortunately a reality we affiliate marketers need to get used to: That maybe 1 out of 10+ camps we launch will turn out profitable. As you gain more experience the odds will improve for sure, but when you're new, it's better to make peace with those odds than place all your hope into each and every camp you launch. Test wide, zero in on the promising, optimize and scale.
Amy
It's a numbers game as vortext said. Test 30-100 find 1 winner. Over time you will become better at weeding out bad campaigns to not even test them. Focus on becoming really good at researching / reverse engineering what the successful guys are doing. Here's the big BUT: you need to learn to identify who is successful. No need or value in copying a newbie or bad camp.
The stats are looking promising!
I would suggest that you use this method to cut landers:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Banners-Part-1
Keep running until you're down to a winner - I'm rooting for the google lander too.
I know what you mean when you say you wished there was a more legit way than using logos - but they DO work very well. If you want to run completely compliant then pop may not be the most suitable traffic type for you. I'm not saying it's impossible to run clean on pop, but it would be more difficult.
Once you're down to a winner lander, you can test more offers with it, keeping targeting broad still. Then you can see which offer does well for which traffic segments and go from there.
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Originally Posted by vortex
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