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Mobile POPs --> How to make it work (27)

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Hello STMers,

I've been doing AM for the past 8 months now but most of my campaigns were always search (PPC).
Mobile has lured me in and its something I want to master in the long run, since in my opinion its the future of marketing. After attending ASW and reading endless posts on STM I came to a conclusion that Pops are the way to go to get started for somebody who is new to mobile and relatively new to AM.

Two things to achieve with this follow along.
First, my goal is to master mobile pops and make it a full time income.
Second, I want to create a very honest yet simple follow along for anybody trying to master mobile pop traffic.

I want to create a very structure follow along, where I can clearly and honestly document all of my mistakes and success. I'm open to any feedback and advice and would be happy to test and implement.
With that being said, all the newbies can follow it, minimize their mistakes and maximize their profits and chances to success.


Disclamer: I am going to make this work with all your help

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Day 1: 1/21/2017

With advise of one of my affiliate friends I decided to start with Antivirus offer for South Africa Geo.

GEO - ZA
Offer - AntiVirus Pin submit
Payout - $3.80 - $4
Traffic Source - PopAds
Landers - I ripped 3 landers from AdPlexity and cleaned them up.
Tracking - Voluum - 6 campaigns:

http://i.imgur.com/t5qY2Z2.png

Why I set it up this way?? Well, I'm not a Voluum Pro, so visually its easier to track this way.
Also, I wanted to test high bid and low bid individually.
And since each carrier will have different results for different bids, I wanted to track that separately as well.
(Feel free to tell me if there is easier way to do it)

My setup in PopAds:

http://imgur.com/g9E7qUa

Same thing as you can see I had individual campaign for each carrier and bid.

Now, I know that 0.01 and 0.05 PPV is damn high and I would probably never made it profitable but right now I just want to gather data.


Progress

I have little to no experience in setting up campaigns in Voluum, so I wanted to test the waters first.
I ran maybe $5 in traffic at my high $0.05 bid. This is what I learned:

http://imgur.com/bLW42ob

Within 2 mins of running traffic, one of the placements ate up most of my clicks. Most likely it was a bot traffic.
Besides, I wasn't sure if I had everything setup properly, so I continued to research and test the rest of the day if my tracking and lander are on point.

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Day 2: 1/22/2017

So I checked my LP and it seems to work fine. I used HMA pro to see if I'm able to go through the sales funnel and reach the offer page but apparently its not something you can do.

I decided to trust my instincts and simply just start running traffic to all 6 campaigns. This is what it looks like:

http://i.imgur.com/m3Hnk0R.png

Progress

As I started to run traffic, I kept my eye on placements first. I wanted to make sure to exclude any placements that will eat up my traffic.

First thing I noticed is that many placements would display more clicks than visits. That was a HUGE red flat to me and I blacklisted them right away.

Example:
http://i.imgur.com/JzRjZ1o.png

I went through STM to see if anybody else was having that problem and came across a few posts. It looks like there is a problem with my LPs.

Results

Bid: Outrageously high. I need to take that down
ROI: -100%
CTR is out of control because I'm tracking more clicks than visits.
I'll try to research more about this problem and have it resolved asap.

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Don't blacklist after a couple of impressions with high ctr. That can be a single bot who got caught in a back button / auto redirect loop or badly programmed click through bot. That does not say anything about the quality of the placement.

ZA carrier is one of the most competitive traffic you can hunt for. You won't find any cheap traffic. Reconsider different GEO to get started.

3 landers are a good start, but you need to test several offers as well. Min 3-5. Check what competition is running and get AM recommendations.

Otherwise good approach to getting started, you will make progress quickly.

HMA alone is not enough to see the offer page. Use chrome developer mode with mobile, opera mobile emulator, or random agent spoofer to emulate mobile. Then you should be able to see the offer page.

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If the bugget is an problem, try offers with much lower payouts, because in this case you will get statistical signifiance much sooner.
Also try to run an bot test is you see some strange placements, see here hot ot do it: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...highlight=test

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Nothing wrong with the way you've set up those camps - and great FA so far!

Just because a placement is eating up budget doesn't mean it's a bot placement - some placements are just bigger and have more traffic volume to give. IMLucka has already pointed you to caurmen's bot tutorial if bot traffic is a concern.

And yes - your bid IS outrageously high! Check PopAds' traffic estimator (bottom-most section in campaign edit) for the average bid, and bid a bit higher than that and you'll get decent quality traffic.

I'm with sebastian regarding ZA - you'd likely find success sooner by testing less expensive geos. And testing more landers/offers is a must - will greatly increase your chances of success.



Amy

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I say in 95% of the times the offer is just not good enough. But then, its the affiliate who did not tested enough offers....

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We're in the same boat. Your follow along reminds me exactly of what I'm going through right now.

It's a real emotional roller coaster. You get what seems a brilliant idea and you're pretty sure you're going to at least be close to breakeven and then you get few conversions or none at all.

The day ends, you go to sleep and then ideas hit you. This time it's gonna work! Confidence goes way up so you get to work and test more. You check your stats and get disappointed it's nowhere close to where you thought it'd be.

But we'll make it, persistence is the secret to make this work.

Hang in there man! I'll be following your progress closely and hope you'll get closer to green every time I come to your FA.

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You're doing extremely well. Learning AM is all about being willing to test stuff and make tweaks and observe the results before making more tweaks...which is exactly what you're doing.

The emotional roller-coaster is something every affiliate marketer can relate to. Based on personal experience and also on the countless conversations I've had with so many affiliates over the past couple years, I've found that the biggest cause of failure for new affiliates is not being willing to test enough, especially offers.

And being willing to test enough stuff is only a start. It has to be done in an efficient manner as well - otherwise the affiliate would run out of money before being able to make consistent profits. Testing a random offer in one geo one day and another random offer in another geo the next day is testing broad, but then each test would have to start from scratch. Your decision to stick with one good traffic source and a suitable vertical for that traffic is a good one. Very soon you'll know what types of lander angles are effective, which geos have less competition but convert well enough, etc. You can reuse the same landers for multiple geos that speak the same language. Testing all the offers you can find for a geo+vertical will maximize your chances of finding the best offer currently available on the market. And if you find success in one geo, you can run there again and again by gathering new offers after every couple of months - that way you'd be able to take advantage of the fact that you've already spent the money on cutting the worst placements.

I've also seen affiliates that attempt to use the same flawed approach again and again, but keep expecting to see improved results. I believe that's what some people's definition of insanity is.

As long as you're willing to keep firing and adjusting your aim, you WILL eventually hit the target. I don't believe there's such thing as failure - every person that has "failed", has merely given up before they could find success. As long as you keep learning and keep testing, finding success would just be a matter of time.

Stackman said something in one of his posts that really stuck with me - he said something along the lines of "you got to test so much that something has to work" (I just spent half an hour trying to find the actual quote but couldn't - hope I've conveyed the essence of his wisdom accurately). In other words, if you haven't found profits yet, it just means you have more testing to do. No need to beat yourself up by treating every unprofitable campaign as a personal failure.

Again, you're doing extremely well. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.



Amy

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Nice!

Cut placements over categories, if you have some profitable in it. Otherwise you cut too much scale.

Scaling:
Test higher bids, setup 2. & 3. campaign with same targeting but incoporate lower EPV of second impression into bid, create 2. & 3. Account, test higher bids for good placements in whitelist camp (create bid baskets depending on EPV of placement), bid into the dark to unlock new placements (all widgets that are already sending traffic into blacklist + original blacklist), retest big placements that you have blacklisted at the beginning, if you buy carrier only, try to buying in bulk and sending the redundant traffic to a monetizer tool, test different traffic types like banner on your main source if available, scale to new traffic sources (same traffic type)

GEO2 improve funnel, test more offers and landers, if that doesn't help cut placements and targeting options, but only if you have enough traffic to make it worthwhile after cutting.

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Congratulations on the green - and here's to many, many more!

This is the beauty of low-payout offers - some of them can have high conversion rates, so everything can reach statistical significance so much faster.

A good strategy: Test low payout offers first to identify the best placements. Then run high payout offers on the best placements. Much cheaper that way than testing high-payout offers on all placements.


Many offers will get paused after a short time, but LPs don't tend to burn out very quickly. I've seen the same landers used extensively for well over a year or more in certain verticals.

This is why I like to test many landers at the start. Once I have a good one, I could then use that same one to test a lot of offers in the next while.

Since you've only tested 3 landers, I would suggest that you test more before mass-testing offers. The better your lander is, the more money you'll save when mass-testing offers, and the more profitable your camp will be once you do find that best offer of the bunch.

Good "Next Steps". And your friends' advice all sounds good.


Unless a category is really doing badly, try to cut placements instead. You'd want to cut smaller chunks of traffic as opposed to bigger chunks wherever possible, to avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water.

As for scaling, testing bids would be a good start. Also try duplicating the camp, increasing the frequency and lowering the bid. You can even try setting frequency to RAW and testing lower bids to find one that give you the best results, then cut placements.

And I would suggest to scale to other major pop sources right away. The high ROI means there's a good chance the camp will be successful on some of the other sources. Try Propeller and Zeropark to start.

I would focus on the best geo right now, and THEN go back to geo 2. Can you provide more details on that camp - we'll go from there. Also, how big is Geo2 compared to the one you're scaling? Always focus on the more profitable camp(s) and/or ones that have more scaling potential (e.g. has bigger traffic volume) first. Minding the 80/20 rule is always a good idea.

Optimization in a nutsheel: Basically, if you're not making enough of the total traffic profitable, then you'll need to test more offers and/or landers. If you're making enough of the total traffic profitable, then spend money to identify the unprofitable parts and cut them. The rest is about bidding appropriately to maximize profits - stuff like sorting placements into different buckets and bidding differently, having several camps with different frequencies and bidding differently, targeting wifi and carrier traffic in different camps and bidding appropriately - all fall into this category.

Looking forward to hearing about your scaling efforts!



Amy

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Can you kindly clarify this in a simpler way if possible?

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Second impression has lower EPV (most of the time) than first impression. Paying same price is not smart, thats as well the reason why a second camp is always better than higher frequency cap where you pay the same. So bid for second camp lower.

Yes additional accounts on popads. one account never gets all available traffic.

Target broad in this case wifi + carrier and send wifi to a monetizing tool like afflow. Or build a funnel for it. Sometimes you get more carrier when you target wifi as well. They need to get rid of the wifi traffic that nobody wants, so you get sometimes rewarded for taking it (more volume or cheaper price).

Search for afflow / monetizer here on the forum.

Propeller you need to cloak if you want to run aggressive.

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Denys, very good progress, man! )
Keep a good work!

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Making sure, so instead of increasing cap on the same campaign, I am better off creating low & high budget camps to test different placements at each bid, correct?

Is there a guide about farming accounts that I can read? Also I wanted to ask a question regarding your comment on having multiple popads accounts. Is the approach here to run the exact same campaign with the same targeting option across multiple accounts at the same time to capture all traffic?

Will definitely look into monetizing traffic that I do not need "Explore Rules in Voluum".. thanks Deny & Sebastian.

Regarding cloaking.. do these traffic networks actually catch cloakers a lot? When they do, do they usually ban accounts and keep the money? Any tips on avoiding trouble?

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The green is looking good! I would suggest to nix the camps with <$5/day in profits - not even worth your time checking/managing them. Free up your time to scale or test new stuff instead.

Good work on testing higher bids! A lot of new people don't understand the importance of that. Bidding higher doesn't necessarily mean you get a lower ROI, because you may get better quality traffic which would increase your CR. Wouldn't know until you test.

Basically sebastian and I are saying the same thing. When you increase the frequency cap, you get more traffic, but the ROI will drop. If you keep the same bid, sometimes the extra traffic will result in more total profits in spite of the lower ROI - it would be like if you were selling a product and setting a lower price in hopes of selling more to result in higher profits overall. Another strategy would be to keep the original camp at 1/24 frequency, then set up another camp at a higher frequency, and bid lower to offset the decrease in ROI. Effectively what you'd be doing is pay top dollar for the high-quality first impressions in your original 1/24 camp, and then pay lower prices for 2nd/3rd/4th/etc. impressions in your other camps with higher frequencies. Point number 4 in this post explains this in more detail:

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


About 20% human traffic or bot traffic? Caurmen recommends cutting placements with >80% bot traffic.


Have you scaled the successful geo to other traffic sources yet? If not, that would be the first thing to do before testing anything else.




Amy

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I did some more looking and FINALLY managed to locate that post by stackman!

It's here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post149032

The original quote:

"The mental note behind this is you're forcing luck.. you're forcing a big campaign by testing so much that it can't NOT work. Make sense?"

That entire thread is littered with gold. If anyone hasn't read it - do it now!




Amy

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Yes instead of just increasing frequency cap, you start a second camp with slightly lower bid e.g 20-30% lower. Watch out if you run smart bid to don't bid yourself up.

Yes you run the same camp just with lower bid for the camp on the second account, see the sentence before.

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Getting some nice green!

Your plans sound good! Once you find a better offer in your testing, do remember to retest some of the stuff you've previously blacklisted (placements etc.) as some of that may be profitable then.

Adcash is pretty strict with landers. Propeller as well. Are you still running AV? When running AV, finding sources that will allow the typically aggressive landers is half the battle. Basically your options would be to either cloak or tweak landers until they get approved. The second option is not impossible (sorry for the double-negative), but of course the trick would be to find a very good offer that will convert well enough even on less-aggressive landers to result in profits - which may be more trouble than it's worth.

I guess I forgot you were running AV offers when I suggested propellerads. Popcash works well for AV - maybe give that a try instead.



Amy

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Any of the major networks will have lots: Adsimilis, Clickdealer, Mundo, Appflood.... (Disclaimer: STM does not endorse any aff networks, so please work with them at your own discretion.)


20% clickloss is normal yes.

And you're absolutely right about the costs not being accurate - you ARE referring to popads costs that are recorded in Voluum, right? You're right about the need to keep an eye on the actual cost. One way would be to put a multiplier in the campaign name - for example if you're finding that the actual cost for TH AIS is twice as much as the costs shown in Voluum, then in the campaign name say "x2" so that every time you're checking stats you'd know to mentally adjust the cost in your head. And I'm not exaggerating about the x2 - for TH carrier traffic on popads, when I'm seeing 100% ROI in voluum, it means I'm actually just breaking even in reality! I've fallen into the trap of keeping red camps running for a long time before I realized they were losing money - the green in voluum can be very deceiving. Great point!


Unfortunately as a mod I can't really discuss cloaking techniques. But here's a great thread on how to blank out the referrer:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...nt-ROI-Boost-*

Regarding voluum rules - basically try to set up as many rules as you can to restrict your traffic to what your offer will accept, and send the rest to a safe page (or a monetizer service like afflow/monetizer.com).

Quoting Forrest Gump: "And that's all I've got to say about that!"




Amy

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Hire an VA to transfer the real cost from your traffic source to Voluum each day. It will cost you $5-10 each day, but in the longrun save you lots of money. You can create a simple google doc with screenshots how to do it and then hire on upwork. Hire VA experience and attitude.

If you're still running AV test some adult networks exo, reporo, clickadu, plugrush, traffic junky....some have carrier targeting, as well some allow aggressive.

BTW 50% ROI is enough to focus on scaling. Difference between $50 and $500 is the ability and skill to scale hard and fast. Focus on that for the next days as long as your campaign is alive. Pop camps die quickly, squeeze out every $ asap.

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Hey Denys,

Your friends have to understand what you're doing, indeed if they don't, cut them off. I haven't seen any of my friends for months because I want to make AM work first. That's my focus for now and I also have a brick and mortar business I run with my girlfriend. Thankfully she helps me a lot with it so I have a few hours per day to dedicate to AM.

Hang in there, once you systemize your AM business, you'll get to enjoy more free time and will be able to hang out with anyone.

You're in profitland and that's all that matters. You won't run out of budget to keep testing and increase your profits.

Good luck with your campaigns!

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I wanna give you an advice that I gave also an other affiliate in his Poland AV threat: If you run Pinsubmits you should in the most cases target all carriers + WIFI. In nearly all GEOs you have 1-2 carriers that allow a 1 click flow on direct carrier billing. Some of them even aggressive with overlays. In his case it was Poland Plus, in your case its Vodacom it has eCPMs 11 times higher then WIFI and 3 times higher then the other carrier but you can not benefit of it because you run Pinflow instead of Direct Carrier billing. So eighter kick out the carrier that allows that aggressive billing or move to an offer that has a 1 click aggro flow... Now that you wanna try it in KE and TIM you have as aggressive carriers Safaricom and TIM...

Regarding that point you can hit me up. We are a mobile affiliate network as well. I can intro you to an AM that will walk you through the offers and gives you carrier recomandations...

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Agree 100% with you Denys - I feel the same way. All my friends know that I'm too busy to just hang out (been for the past few years now). But it doesn't mean they're not important. They know to bug me when something major happens and they do - when they're going through a crisis and need advice, consolation, or just a listening ear or shoulder to cry on.

Transitioning from having a full-time job to being a full-time marketer requires a ton of work and dedication. Your real friends will understand this and not count it against you. Those that don't - may be time to let them go like you said.


This is very valuable advice!

I've been studying energy for the past few years. Many people believe that when they're demotivated and frustrated, they should stay determined and just force themselves to push through the funk. From an energy perspective, nothing can be more counter-productive. The negative energy would just gain momentum to make everything worse, even affect other aspects of life that are seemingly unrelated.

The best thing to do would be to take a step back as you've suggested, to keep one's thoughts very general in order to slow down that negative momentum, let it come to a stop, and start directing it in the positive direction. General thoughts such as the ones below can help turn the energy around:

"I'm learning everyday and am getting better at this."

"As long as I don't give up I'll keep improving until I succeed."

"Every super affiliate was once in my shoes so if they can do it I can too."

"The more stuff I test the better my chances are of hitting something profitable."

"There's no hurry - I still have my job and money coming in."

"I'm not alone. The STM community is available to help me if I'm stuck."

"There are so many good offers and traffic out there to play with. If I test enough I'll find a way to get a slice of the pie."

"Running campaigns is fun and exciting!"

"If I test enough stuff something has to work. It can't not!"

Etc. etc.

And at times when we're too frustrated to even start thinking these general thoughts, the best thing to do would be to distract ourselves with something unrelated like you said. Go work out, play a game, watch a movie, treat yourself to good food, whatever. Then start with general thoughts, get some good positive energy flowing, then gradually work towards more specific thoughts and ideas to build positive momentum.

For those that think this is a bunch of new age hooey, I apologize for having wasted your time. If even one person will resonate with this, then my time will have been well spent. Actually - even the self-reminder as I was writing this has made it worthwhile.


Woohoo! You know that's just the beginning, right? Right!


In the beginning it shouldn't be about profits. Those camps have allowed you to learn the art of campaign optimization.

This is why when newbies are running camps that I know for sure will not make more than low xx/day, I never tell them to stop running and pick another geo etc. (On the other hand, I can't bear to see people running something that won't make more than $5/day - even for the newest of newbies this would just be wrong.)

I personally like to launch massive tests - test 40+ geos at a time, hundreds of offers. Then pick the most promising ones that I know won't require much optimization to get green, and scale hard and fast. Because I know that given the short lifespan of pop camps, that I can't afford to spend time on too much optimization.

But before a newbie can get to that stage, they'll need to understand how to analyze stats, what to look for, how to make decisions, etc. And in the process of learning all that, he WILL make many mistakes, and lose money. I'd much rather see him run in a small geo that doesn't have a lot of traffic, using offers that have low payouts, so he'd lose less money while slowly learning how to walk, than advise for him to start sprinting at full speed and trip all over himself, losing a lot of money in multiple geos because he doesn't know what the heck he should be focusing on.

So - start looking at things from a broader perspective. Those camps weren't meant to bring in profits through scaling. They were meant to be a learning opportunity. Next time you'll know what to look for. You'll have plenty of opportunities to scale.


Which networks? Send me a PM with your skype, I'll see what I can do. (Note to other members: Please understand that I can't do this for everybody, as much as I'd love to. PMs with similar requests will be ignored unless I've been helping out with your FA and see that you've done your part of the work.)


Nicely said!

If you have proven landers that you've seen work well for a few geos, feel free to test many geos at once. But even then, testing enough offers for every geo would be important.

The last thing you want, would be to have a bunch of kinda-OK offers running in many geos, all making little bits of profit. It would be much better to run in fewer geos, test more offers so that you're running some of the best ones available in those geos, get the ROI as high as you can, scale hard and fast, invest in cutting placements etc.

Those geos you listed are all good ones to target. I'd suggest to just keep running in those geos and testing more offers.


Ripping landers from tier 1s for use in tier 3s is a common tactic, and a good one.

If you'd provide more details on your Voluum+adcash issues I'll do my best to help.

Have fun with your 5 camps/day - looking forward to seeing stats real soon!



Amy

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During my 9-5 time I always worked on my own stuff before getting to my job.

Even today I get more done from 4am to 8pm than during the rest of the day.

You can try getting up early and working on camps before you go to your job. No need to give your prime time away for small $ in a 9-5 job.

You can break down mobile pop in 3 tasks that really matter at the beginning.

Ad-intelligence / Reverse Engineering
Testing Campaigns
Optimizing & Scaling Winners

If you focus 3-4 full hours a day on that, you will win big very soon.

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Day 23 - 33: 2/13/2017-2/23/2017

It's been a little over a month since I started my journey in Mobile pop traffic and while I don't have much to be proud of, I would not change it for the world.

What I've been doing in the past 10 day

- Expanded my reach to AdCash and PropellerAds as well as ClickDealer, MundoMedia and AppFlood (Thank you Amy!)
- Launched 4-5 campaigns daily (except over the weekend)
- Tested: TR, JP, TH, RU, IN, KZ, VN, SA, SK, KE and MY
- Tested 5 new LPs (Original is still a winner, so I ended up translating in 9 different languages)
- After several failed campaigns I took a step back for a few days and tried to switch and reset my focus. It does help!
- I slightly deviated from AVs and tested other 1-click offers (I'll just stick to AV)
- All the new offers that I have tested were Top Offers suggested by my AMs


Without further ado.....

Failed tests:






Only winners:

Just to make sure I understand this right. So if it says Safaricom only, than run on all carriers anyways?


I think I'm going to focus on 1-click going forward


I couldn't have put it in better words.



LOVE IT! This is a recipe to keep away from a disaster!


I have many questions about this but I'll stick to the top two:
- When you decide which offers to keep, what ROI would be satisfactory? (I've been cutting anything will less than -25% ROI on the first round of testing at 5x-8x payout)
- When you test, I imagine you use proven LPs or simply direct link to see if it will convert?


- Not so sure that my Voluum campaign link looks right because some payout amounts went missing (conversions are there but $ is missing):
http://xxxxx.voluumtrk.com/09955eae-...948c7d?source=[zone]&customer=[advertiser]&timestamp=[timestamp]&campaign=[campaign]&user_language=[lang]&creative_id=[ban]&ip=[ip]&connection=[connection_type]&type=[type]&browser=[browser]&cid=[clickid]
- How do I apply Pixel for conversion tracking and postback???



Next Step
- Keep testing more offers until I find something promising and scalable
- Testing any future advice



Thank you all!!

Denys

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Your head AND heart are in the right place - the initial learning period should be evaluated in terms of progress made, not profits, and in that sense, you've done wonderful work! The profits will come.


Nonono! Blueflag was talking about Pin Submit offers, not carrier-billing offers. If an offer only accepts traffic from one carrier, then you should only target that one carrier.


Answer to the second question is "Yes".

As for ROI - it depends on how much traffic you have access to. -25% ROI sounds OK of you can still cut some targeting and placements but usually I would only only pick offers that are profitable right off the bat. However, if there's a ton of traffic available, then I know I could cut my way aggressively to green and still have plenty left over to profit from.


Crap - I've never used adcash's postback. So you're trying to get Voluum to post conversions to adcash?

I just took a look - this should work:





Basically generate a postback url at Adcash and paste it into voluum's traffic source settings for Adcash, and don't forget to replace the CLICK_ID variable with {click.id}.

Let me know if this doesn't work and I'll try to figure it out.


One more tip about testing 1-click offers: Identify carriers that have enough traffic volume first, then focus your testing on them. Many carriers don't have traffic at all. You won't want to be making a few dollars here and there - that would tie up most of your day just maintaining a bunch of baby camps, time you could be using to scale bigger camps.

Keep on keeping on and you'll get there!


Amy

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