Mobile Pops - Poland - Antivirus (23)
Hello everyone! This is my first follow along campaign. I have very limited experience with AM over the past 10 years, dabbled here and there. Anyway, I decided to give mobile pops a shot. Here is my setup.
GEO: Poland (my wife is from Poland so it makes things easier with translation)
OFFERS: Android Mobile Antivirus
PAYOUT: $3-$6
TRAFFIC SOURCE: PopAds
I'm thinking my first mistake was starting out in such a competitive GEO, however I'm already in on this and I will see if I can make it work. I started running traffic a few days ago. My targeting options in PopAds look like this.
Quality: Top 60% (5+)
Frequency Cap: 1/24hrs
PrimeSpot: All Traffic
Adblock: All Traffic
Type: Popunder
Allow other methods...: Unchecked
Bid: 0.005
Device: Smartphone
Environment: Android
Connection: Cellular/Carrier
I'm getting about 6,000 visits per day which is a little slow for collecting data but I'm patient. So far this is my LP stats.
Two of the landing pages were getting a significantly lower CTR so I cut traffic to them. Was this a mistake? I thought the CTR was way too low but now I'm thinking I should have just let them keep running to see if they convert.
My offer stats are below.
I originally had just two offers but then added a three more when those didn't seem to be converting at all. Probably another newb mistake. The two conversions are the same offer on different networks. Probably too early to cut the others though?
I'm thinking I just need to wait it out here and get more data? I checked the placements and nothing is really standing out as terrible at the moment, but I'm not too sure what I'm looking for to be honest.
That's about it for now. I will update this again later tomorrow. If anyone wants to offer some insight into my first campaign, I'm all ears.
Thanks for being transparent! This really helps us provide detailed feedback. 
First of all I have a question: Have you checked offer requirements for each offer to see whether they accept carrier/wifi traffic? What about OSs?
Right now your traffic is limited because you're only targeting carrier traffic, which has a lot less volume than wifi and is significantly more expensive. You want to make sure that's what your offer accepts - otherwise it wouldn't be worth it for the price.
Next, some suggestions:
I want to commend you on including so many landers and offers, which is something most newbies are not willing to do.
However, for future reference, pick more landers to start, and fewer offers - 2-3 offers will do, and make sure they have very similar payouts.
The reason for this, is that when we compare lander stats to gradually cut the worse ones, the statistics calculator will assume all conversions are worth the same. So if the offers have very different payouts, then our cutting decisions will not be accurate.
You may ask then why would we test more than one offer - this is to increase the chances of having at least one offer that converts well enough to generate the conversions that are necessary to differentiate the best lander from the worse/worst. If you only test one offer it may end up being a dud. If you test 2-3 your chances improve.
And testing more landers in the beginning is good. However, I'm not going to complain about 5. Are you using a CDN? And have you checked loading speed to make sure they load reasonably fast? Over 2s and they won't stand a chance. 1s is OK, but the faster the better. Nobody has patience these days and will leave if the page takes too long to load.
I have a rough campaign testing approach for sweeps on pop, at the end of this post:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post293497
So you can follow that if you like.
As for cutting landers by CTR - that's a common mistake. I've seen many low-CTR landers convert well. Having said that, if the CTR is so low that it would take an impossibly-high CR for the camp to break even, then cutting based on CTR is justified. In your case, if I were you, I would have let those 2 landers run until they get cut when/if they reached statistical significance.
Speaking of which, here are methods you can use to cut landers and offers, respectively:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Banners-Part-1
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...211#post289211
Also: While you're split-testing a group of anything (landers, offers...), do NOT add in additional candidates. Every time you add in something new, you're starting a new round of split-testing. You can't compared old and new data, so once you throw in one or more new candidates you need to ignore the data collected before that point and start new. So next time, be patient!
I'm really tempted to tell you to start everything over from scratch, because basically from this point onwards, your cutting decisions will not be accurate due to the mistakes pointed out earlier. Don't feel bad though because every newbie has to make mistakes - it's called paying your dues. It's great that we get this stuff sorted out early on.
But I'm not going to ask you to start from scratch. Although cutting decisions will not be accurate, at least you won't have lost all the money you've spent so far on data. Let's run this further - I'm hoping LP 5 will get a couple more conversions which will allow you to cut the rest of the landers.
AVG does look promising! Let's see how this will go...
Thanks for starting this follow-along!
Amy
Thanks Amy for your advice! Yes I figured I should just leave things alone until I reach statistical significance, but being a newbie I got impatient. I will not make that mistake again. I wanted to show you the speed test results on my landing pages (see screenshot below). The first load time on most of my pages is huge, but then the second load time is normal. Is this typical? I am using Amazon CDN
Also one other question. My offers do allow wifi traffic. Would it be smart to duplicate the campaign and test wifi traffic only with a lower bid?
OMG those load times are unreal!
Could you please send me one of your landers via PM? Via dropbox would be the best, but any other way would be fine. I just want to verify load times from my server and CDN. Those certainly don't look right, especially judging by the not-so-low CTRs some of your landers have.
Please update this thread to let me know you've PMed me. Otherwise it may be days before I'd check.
Examples of conversion flow are email/pin submits and 1-click / 2-click. The 1/2-click flows are simpler, but are only possible with carrier/3g/4g traffic, where the mobile carrier already have all the customer's info, so all the visitor needs to do is click on a subscription button (for 1-click flow) and maybe specify one other option (for 2-click flow). Whereas for email submits visitors will need to enter their name and email, and for pin submits they need to either reply via SMS or enter a PIN they receive in order to complete conversion.
In comparison, 1/2-click offers tend to convert better than email/pin submits because it takes fewer steps to sign up to the offer. Downside is these types of offers require carrier traffic which is available in much less volume at significantly higher cost. Email/pin submits do not require carrier traffic (although they do sometimes convert better on carrier than wifi) but conversion rates are lower than for 1/2-click offers. So, pros and cons.
And then there are offers that have 2 different conversion flows - a simpler 1/2-click one when you send carrier traffic to it, and a more complicated flow (for example pin submit) when you send wifi traffic.
What I would recommend: If none of your offers have the simpler 1/2-click flow, then there'd be no need to start separate camps to target carrier traffic only. You can just set up one camp to target both carrier and wifi traffic, and only bid high enough for wifi traffic. You'll still get a bit of carrier traffic， so if you see that an offer is doing good ROI on carrier traffic, you can start a separate camp to target carrier then, and bid higher. Just no need to target carrier from the start, because if an offer fails to convert on wifi, then chances are it won't convert well on carrier either (as the conversion flow would be the same).
However, if you have offers that have 1/2-click flow for carrier traffic, then they would definitely deserve setting up camp(s) to target carrier traffic, or one camp to target each specific carrier, and bidding high enough to get a reasonable amount of carrier traffic for the testing.
Lastly - the answer to your question is YES! Setting up a wifi camp and bidding lower would be a great idea!
Amy
Wow Amy, you are an absolute wealth of information...thank you! I sent my landing pages over via PM.
As for the offers, they are all PIN submits I believe. I will look into it further to make sure all can convert on wifi. If so I will set up a wifi campaign in the morning and see how that does. I was a little confused about carrier/wifi traffic and why carrier converts better for some offers. You explained it perfectly.
I've reached statistical significance for all of the landers and offers. Using the calculator at https://win-vector.shinyapps.io/CampaignPlanner_v3/ I was able to determine an offer and a lander that had a greater than 95% chance of being the best. Lander 5 was a clear winner with 4 out of the 5 conversions so far. 4 out of the 5 conversions were also with the same offer, so that one is a clear winner as well. In fact, that lander and offer combo are in the green!
I'm not quite sure what to do next. I assume it would be wise to test some other landers and offers? Or should I be scaling this lander/offer combo to wifi traffic and other networks?
Edit: I got it now. Read through the sweepstake setup link you gave me. I will test a bunch of other offers. Then I' m going to do higher and lower bid campaigns and see what happens. I will also do a wifi campaign, maybe a low medium and high bid for that as well.
Nice going!! Seeing green is always encouraging!
I looked over your landers and tested them - the load times are fine - all have average load times of under 2s. I was using webpagetest.org.
The only suggestion would be to compress your images if you haven't already. There's one image in there that's taking half a second to load. https://kraken.io/web-interface works well.
So yup - your landers are fine.
Edit: I got it now. Read through the sweepstake setup link you gave me. I will test a bunch of other offers. Then I' m going to do higher and lower bid campaigns and see what happens. I will also do a wifi campaign, maybe a low medium and high bid for that as well.
However, since you're ALREADY in profit (although it's a bit too soon to conclude this as you only have 3 conversions after all), there's nothing to stop you from running just this lander+offer combo in your current campaign, and duplicating this camp and using that to test new offers (remember to leave your current offer in there to act as the test control!)
Looks like you have a solid idea on what to do - I'll leave you to it. Looking forward to your next update!
Amy
I wanna add something regarding Poland. They opend the Carrier Plus currently for Overlay flows on Direct carrier billing. It converts currently 15 times better then any other carrier there. This effect is not kicking in for Pinsubmit what you are currently running. I would exclude this carrier to cut costs or focus only on Plus but replacing the Pinsubmit offer with an aggressive Clickflow. I know this deeper targeting will increase costs a little but should pay off still big time for you. Especially if you go for the variation of only running Plus you can convert aggressive on all OS....
Originally Posted by blueflag
It's exactly as you said:
Yet another reminder to check afflow stats when deciding which geos, carriers and verticals to run.
Thanks a mill for this insight!
Amy
Having said what I did in the post above - a note to priest regarding your camps: Unless your offer is a carrier-billing offer for the Plus carrier, the above does not apply to you. Please stick to your current plan - it's a sensible one!
Having said THAT - it would be great to pick some PL Plus carrier-billing offers to test as your next campaign.
Amy
If you dont have own insight into global stats, you can always ask your AM. For a "normal" affiliate program its not always possible to give you infos over a certain carrier if you wanna run something specific and they dont have a smartlink, but if they have direct offers and Smartlink the AM can digg that out for you.... Hit me up if you need some infos
Antivir in Poland is a good choice. However the inventory of Popads in Poland is a bit weak. Would test that on a different traffic source that is stronger for Poland (e.g. adcash, exoclick)
Awesome advice in here. Thank you to all of you! I will put all these suggestions to work and see what I can do. I created a duplicate wifi campaign so far and it is doing well. I will update with my progress later today or tomorrow.
Conversions really dropped off on my one offer and it hasn't done well yesterday or today. I've added some 1 Click flow offers (from Glize network, thanks blueflag) for the carrier traffic and testing some other pin submits on the wifi traffic. The low volume on Popads makes it difficult to make any decisions because it takes quite a while to reach statistical significance on offers. I'm thinking to move my campaigns over to exoclick as suggested above to see if I can get a little more traffic for quicker optimization.
Originally Posted by priest
Originally Posted by blueflag
I'm not sure what happened but on Monday morning I was profitable and then it was like someone flipped a switch and the conversions just stopped. I've thrown traffic at a bunch of other similar offers and nothing works. Very frustrating but I'm trying to figure it out because I would like to learn from it. If anyone has any ideas where I might have went wrong, I'd love to hear it.
There are so many factors that come into play, and as a newbie it is tough to isolate which ones led to the failure. I stuck with the same LP and offer that were converting well, and then when that offer dried up I tested several others and couldn't even get a single conversion. I'm still getting a good CTR so I don't think it is a problem with the lander (after all it was working fine before).
I'm thinking I just need to suck it up and move on to testing a bunch of other landers and offers. I've tested lots but probably not enough, especially for landers.
Originally Posted by priest
I understand the frustration. The truth is that when it comes to paid traffic, every 10 campaigns we launch may only result in 1-2 profitable camps, if that. That's just the nature of the game. We test a ton of stuff to find a few gems and scale them. And don't think super-affiliates can do much better! I was just chatting with a well-known super-affiliate a couple days back and he told me he spent $5k on a test that didn't get result. I spent more than that on another test last month before finally cracking the code. So be patient with yourself and give it time. If you keep trying and learning every time, things WILL improve. It can't not!
If you're using the winner lander to test offers, and none of the offers shows promise, just start testing another geo like you suggested. Again, just because you're mass-testing offers for a geo, doesn't mean you're guaranteed to find gems. Cut your losses and move on. It's just a normal part of the game.
If you've tested lots of landers already, and the one you have is working for several geos, then just focus on using that to test offers in multiple geos.
It's the weekend - at least go relax for a few hours to regain your perspective on things. This game does have its frustrations but it gets easier as you gain experience. Take a break, then come back to try again. There are lots of gems out there waiting for you to discover.
Amy
Originally Posted by priest
If performance drops from one day to another and does not come back, its two variables most of the time (if you have checked that your funnel is still working technically):
change in market environment, somebody outbids you, or profitable placements dry up. Easy to spot & fix
Offer not a winner anymore (100s of reasons for that possible). Nothing you can do about, besides testing more offers.
In general, if camp performance does drop and you cannot fix it within 2-3 days: Pause the camp, move on, come back if you find new offers.
Where is this screenshot from?
Originally Posted by vortex
It's exactly as you said:
Yet another reminder to check afflow stats when deciding which geos, carriers and verticals to run.
Thanks a mill for this insight!
Amy
Originally Posted by worthderijcmo1971
I really cant find it into Monetizer can you provide the link please
Originally Posted by matuloo
Try this one:
https://app.afflow.rocks/
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