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Journey to Afflow's Leaderboard (56)

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What's up STM! So after reading miss Vortex tutorials about Afflow I got inspired again and she gave me an idea to document some of the stuff I do on Afflow.
I haven't done much past few months, as you may see, my other journey has been sitting there as well.

As promised, I started on monday, but forgot to post this thread.

So here are my monday's stats:



I was playing around a bit to understand how most popular countries and carriers work. Unfortunately the first thing that I noticed was that it's not that easy to get information about good offers and countries. So I decided to make my own little program that pulls live leads from Afflow to my database so I can analyze everything (that's what I did today). Today I haven't done anything because I had a lot work to do (our PBN hosting's DNS is now globally distributed for ultra fast speeds, woo!).

So my goals for upcoming days is to finish my reporting tool so I can get real time updates from my system to see which countries and offer combinations convert well so I can optimize my campaigns a bit better and make sure I'm not wasting my time or money. The goal for this journey is to give some advice for beginners who are interested in Afflow & ZP combo and see myself in the leaderboard of Afflow.

Make sure you read this sweet series of Afflow and Zeropark domination by Vortex: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...utorial-Part-1

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Some nice stats! Thanks diplomat for starting this!

For the more promising camps, it would be worth it to test higher bids and cutting targets aggressively to get more traffic and increase conversion rates.

What about the losing camps? Let's see if we can limit the losses more efficiently!

Looking forward to seeing updates!



Amy

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Just a little update for monday's stats:



2 x $2.80 conversions came today.. so I'm in $0.05 loss only lol. I can finally start working on Afflow today. I'll update stats tomorrow.

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Nice!

One suggestion: For those "losing" camps, I'm seeing quite a few that had a lot of potential! If you'd just bid higher and cut some targets you should be doing better. I'm looking at camps #3, #5, #9, #13 (lol all odd numbers).

I know some of them are already at high visibility, but try bidding higher anyways - you will almost certainly get more traffic from better targets!



Amy

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Yes, I tried that yesterday night and here's what I got:



It was actually worse, it was like $30 loss, but few conversions came over night. So I left 2 campaigns running for the night based on my app's calculations and here's what I have today already:



So yea, they are working well.

But the fun thing is, here are stats for 20th February:



It went profit! A bunch of conversions came today as well.. so yea. I haven't started any campaigns just yet because I just got up, but I'll get started with new campaigns after my coffee.

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You're doing well diplomat!

Try to look around if you can find some kind of generic landing page, I know that this method doesn't really require LPs, but sometime it can help.

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Thank you for posting this thread and showing us what you're results are, I may try afflow also after I read all of the afflow tutorials. Also I forgot, are you using landing pages at all. Because one of the commenters made comment of you using some type of landing page so I didn't know if you where using one or not.

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No, I don't use any landing pages.. I send traffic directly to Afflow. The thing is, using landing pages only makes sense when you know what kind of offers you have. Since I'm not sending antivirus traffic really, I can't build landing pages. If you do AV, then yea, you can use your own landing pages too which may help.

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I think afflow is using their own landing pages... Thats why its working.

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You can still use landing pages, but they have to be very generic, try to be creative

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I think I know what you mean, and I definitely will do it. It's all about scaling up on the good ones isn't it.

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Alrighty, it seems that my 20th February test keeps getting new conversions, it was like $5.50 in loss, now $34+ profit:



Yesterday's stats were okay too:



For some reason things didn't convert that well yesterday.. not sure why, few great campaigns got capped or removed as well. In order to get to the leaderboard I need around ~$1100 revenue, so I have a long way to go.
I really don't know how they manage to get that large revenues. I understand most of those guys are networks which explains their high revenue, but I can see that there are few regular people too. I bet they have some kind of real nice automation and notification system. I guess I have to research it a bit better.

So far things are going fine, but I have to figure out how to detect converting campaigns.. when they start and end. I'm already pulling live leads to the database so now I need to improve my app a bit more.

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Just a friendly note for you : in some GEOs (Asia, Latam for example) it's quite common to see new conversions coming in several days later, especially with carrier billing offers. It's probably related to reporting and it's very different from one GEO to the next. After a while, you will be able to make a qualified guess on how much extra revenue you can expect.

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Yup, that's totally fine. My goal is to get real time stats to profit and everything else that comes is just bonus. I'm not 100% sure if I'll be running anything today because I'm working on the reporting tool, but fingers crossed I can run things today :P

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Alrighty, I made my little dashboard a bit nicer looking, thought I'll share it with you:



I hope it will help me find better campaigns. I'll start testing it in a moment.

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Wow diplomat is that your new automation tool? Looking GREAT!

Regarding delayed conversions: Yeah they're annoying, but I would just cut targets first and open them back up later if conversions come in afterwards.

So yes - you've seen that bidding higher definitely works at least in some cases. You'll need to continue cutting targets after each bid increase. Things need to get worse before they'll get better.

As for how some people are doing big numbers - I know I've used this example many times already, but my friend recently made close to 5 figures in the same day in ZA, targeting carrier traffic, on zeropark, using afflow. Cost was only $800. But in order to get there, he had to cut a LOT of targets over time, AND his automation tool picked up on a hot uptrend very early on. It's always impressive to throw around big numbers, until you know what kind of investment needed to go into that before it could happen.

With so much competition on all these pop sources, and most of the landers being used in plain sight (i.e. spy tools), you need to go the extra mile in order to get a slice of the pie. Whether it be to do more research before jumping into a geo+vertical, or being willing to test more offers and landers (doesn't apply in afflow obviously but I'm making a general comment), or investing into identifying good and bad placements - you either need to hustle harder or get more intel, or both.

Regarding landers: I wouldn't suggest going through the trouble of testing your own landers for afflow. Save that trouble for when you're testing individual offers from aff networks. Afflow is direct-linking to some offers and using landers for others. Any additional lander you use will likely make some offers do better while making others do worse. 80/20 rule applies here as with anything else. But of course, don't let how I feel limit your testing!

Diplomat: Your numbers are looking better! And you have a tool! Really eager to see what kind of damage you can do.



Amy

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At this point it's just reporting tool. It's collecting the best converting offers past hour and then pulls data from Afflow to match offers and verticals with carriers. I'm still trying to figure out how accurate it is and if it's accurate enough I can add automation tool to it. It's real nice because technically I'll be able to figure out good offers from beginning and if I react fast enough (without automation right now) I should be able to pull maximum amount of leads. I still need to spend few k and days to figure out how well things are going.

Yes, that's exactly what I do

As I said above, I have tons of testing to do which I'll do since things are going pretty ok. I have enough free funds to make this thing working so all I have to do is learn more, build my automation tool and bank hard :P

Yeah, I don't think I'll spend my time on lps. If my tools work well, I probably don't need to worry about lps anyway.

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Great progress diplomat!

I like the idea of your reporting tool.

Me and my buddy did a similar thing last month, we are tracking the whole Afflow for around month now, got some interesting reports in there, unfortunately I'm just too busy these days to launch stuff that shows up there.

Good luck on scaling this baby!

Erik

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Alrighty, decided to change my tool a bit and automate everything. It manages bids, campaigns and offers. Only thing I need to do is pause targets. Did a small test yesterday:



Worked pretty okay. I'll start the real test on monday. I have a good feeling about this. Loss came mostly from few bugs that I did not notice in the beginning, but they are all nicely fixed now.

It tries to pick well converting offers every 5 minutes based on the info of the last hour. There are bunch of nice rules which will keep everything stable and not too crazy. I can't wait to get started with testing!

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Wow. This exciting and confusing for me at the same time.
Excited because this is fun and making money.
Confused as I am new and still trying to understand the numbers & conversation between experts.

But I hope someone can advise me the "automation tool" that everyone is referring here.
Is it part of the code that was set in the afflow or tracker (Voluum or Funnelflux etc)?
Or it is another third-party software to analyze the data from afflow?

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Hey diplomat good job!

Quick question: Are you using top 10,000, or maybe top 1000 targets campaign? or maybe RON?

Thanks!

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I don't think there are any real and good public automation software available for this purpose and if there is, I highly wouldn't suggest buying it before researching it a bit. Everything you see in my thread are custom made by me for myself.

Thanks man. I'm using RON. It's really easy + it's real fast to get results. Yes, it may be a bit more expensive, but you know, sometimes those tiny sites from where you get 5 visitors can bring you great conversions.

Anyway, just got up, time to start testing the little thing

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Just a quick update. I haven't played with Afflow because I have some real world work to do:

I ran a test on 27th with stats like this:



I made many changes to my little tool. Now it automatically pauses targets, resumes targets and all those goodies. Everything else besides picking campaigns works perfectly. I need to figure out my campaign picking system a bit more.
I hope to find some time tomorrow to figure this thing out. What was awesome was that the biggest profit came from ID campaign so my little bot managed targets correctly

Last month went pretty ok.. ended in profit:



I still have tons of work to do and targets to pause.

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Good job man!

One Question though: if you don't mind, can you share the rules you have applied for the targets?

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They are actually really simple, but a bit strict. Pause target when it reached 100 visits or $0.30 spend :P When a conversion came, bot will go back and unpause all targets that are in profit or even. If there's a conversion, but the target it in loss, it will calculate the average payment and checks if the loss is larger than AP. If not, resume, if yes leave it paused.

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Very nice! You're not too far from breaking even with the automation tool - this is a feat considering how many camps you're running.

Just one suggestion: Again, test higher bids to get more traffic. Often, when you first increase your bid you'll dip back into red, when once you've cut a round of junk your profits will be better than before. Do this a few times for the bigger geos and you could be making much higher profits from the bigger traffic volume.



Amy

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Sounds good! Have you considered a rule to automatically increase bids for targets that the initial campaign bid for them is to low?

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Actually no, I have not thought about it because most of the time all bids are totally fine.

Yup, that's what I'm working on. I think I may be a bit too careful and worry a bit too much right now, but that's normal I guess.. As I said earlier too, I still have tons of work to do.

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I have a follow up question, what ruling do you apply for sources? when do you pause the bad ones? what do you do if they have conversions but are still losing money (what threshold you apply there)
and if you later take this (from what I asume at first is a RON campagin) to a source or target camapaign.

thank you

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I block sources manually because sources are not as important for me as targets are. Most of the times I don't even check them, but if I do and I see that a source is really deep in loss then I usually pause it (if it has only few or none conversions).
Think about it like this.. Source is a publisher and a target is a website. Not all websites are created equal. There may be websites that suck real bad from a publisher, but there may be sites that convert really well. So I really don't see the reason in blocking sources, but if you notice that a source goes too crazy.. like $10 in loss with $0.05 conversion and visitors are spread nicely over targets.. then you should pause that source.

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Amen!

Some sources perform better than others. As you've pointed out, there are good and bad targets on every source, but if you see many of the biggest targets on a source doing badly when the camp is doing well overall, then consider cutting the entire source.

I've noticed that a couple of the bigger sources have done well for me consistently across many geos. And then of course there are some sources that have performed poorly for most geos. Once you've identified those, what you can do is start every new camp on just the best sources, and only if it's profitable on these best sources, scale to other sources except the consistently poor performing ones.

You would only want to do that for the really big carriers that have lots of traffic volume. Otherwise traffic would be really slow, and with afflow where profits are transient, you don't have the luxury of waiting a long time to assess potential.

Really eager to see some stats but I'm sure you'll post them when you're ready to.



Amy

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Thank you for the response.
it makes sense.

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The columns, is it converted amount in #4, number of conversions in #5 then eCPM in #6?

Looks like the quoted post didn't show -- but the reporting tool you showed a screenshot of.

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Please be more specific which screenshot you mean. If you mean a screenshot from my tool then it's like this:

It's actually old screenshot, I have changed my tool a lot and it doesn't have a nice graphical UI anymore.
EPC is just eCPM from Afflow.

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Something funky is going on. Past 2 days I haven't received any conversions.. Well I did receive 2 ultra tiny conversions out of 36k visitors. ~$60 in loss. I checked all links and stuff and everything is working fine. I contacted Afflow's support too, still waiting for their response. Kinda strange. I can see that 99% of the visitors show up in Afflow, but nothing converts. I wonder what's going on.

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Well now that really sucks!

While you're waiting on a response from afflow - one thing to check: Click into your afflow stats > Link > Cloak Breakdown, and see what percentage of the traffic actual went to the offers. A couple of students on the AMC have run into problems due to having accidentally set there cloudflare settings to cache. Although I highly doubt that's the issue in your case, it would be something to check.

I would also recommend that you try MrPayne's approach here, just to see if you get some conversions. If not, then something MUST be wrong.

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...w-and-Zeropark

Do keep me posted on progress. I can be called on to do some troubleshooting together if we need to.




Amy

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I actually just finished watching his video and he gave me some good ideas that I'm trying out. I'm not using Cloudflare, I'm using Route53 for my DNS. So it's not the reason. Also the support told me to check cloaked too.
What's really strange is that even when I'm sending random RON global traffic.. I still don't get anything. I'm still analyzing what might be wrong, but it makes no sense. I have not changed anything and my domain is not blocked by Google.. so yeah, I have to figure this thing out.

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Very perplexing indeed!

I would try a couple more things:

1)Generate a afflow link and manually browse to it to see if I'm being redirected to offers, and also check if the views are being registered in afflow correctly.

2)Replace the afflow domain with a new domain.

I'm sure you're more tech-saavy than I am so I'll stop here. But if you need a second person to test anything, I'm game.



Amy

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Same for me. From 30 conversions per day in South Africa on several offers to 0.

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Yup.. but it dropped for me for multiple good countries too. I understand that offers change and so on, but that big drop is kinda sad.
Well, things are better today.. I'm running a global pops RON and things look nicer today:



It's pretty difficult getting traffic at $0.0001 so if I see conversions, I increase the bids for countries to get some more. I did find one campaign that was working well, but then I realized for some reason I don't have a country - carrier campaign for it. I have over 350 campaigns and not for that country, lol. So now I'm waiting for ZP to approve it, but yeah.. things are a bit slower than expected.

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Alrighty, I decided to try out wifi traffic too. I can already smell those nice bots. I'll compile a nice list of hosting companies that I'll use for the ISP block list.
Traffic is flowing nicely now.. now it's time to wait for conversions and hopefully they will come.

Here are some of the bot isps that I added, I'm still adding more and I'll add new ones here too:

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Any updates on this bro'?
I am very interested how things are going.
Thanks!

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Hey diplomat, thanks for the journey, hope you can update us soon.

I'm wondering, what coding language did you use for your automation tool?

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Whoa, totally forgot about this journey already. Just a quick update.. I haven't been doing Afflow for some time (a bit over a year lol) because we decided to build some software which took all of my time. Now everything is nice and stable again and I finally have time for CPA.

I have been playing with Mobidea offers and got raging 3 conversions so far (since yesterday evening) lol. Tried a bit of Afflow too and results were as expected:



I decided to scrap my automating tool and we will be rebuilding it from scratching using all the knowledge we have gathered.

As a response to the quote.. We are using Python and Java for our tool.

I'm not sure how often I'll be updating this journey, but I thought I'll let you know what I'm up to and how's going :P

My plans are to work a bit more with mobile offers and of course, do some Afflow.

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Hey @diplomat!

Great to hear from you again.

This sounds exciting, keep us updated on your journey!

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Great to hear from you!

Regarding Mobidea's offers - those numbers look hideous! Were you direct-linking to DCB offers? If so, that just does not work well anymore. Please do try landers.

Your automation tool sounds intriguing! Will you be offering it as a SaaS? And have you checked out some of the other automation tools like theOptimizer and Optifyme to see how yours compare?

Best of luck with your new tool!



Amy

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Hehe no, those are Afflow offers, not Mobidea. Right now I'm just running 1 offer which got approved \o/. It's stats aren't super good, but it's something (direct linking because of testing):



I have spied a bit on theOptimizer and it looks great! I never thought about making it SAAS, but it sounds like an amazing idea. The more competition there is, the better the quality of services.

Right now I'm really loving Zeropark's optimization tool, I have had great luck with it already. I'm sure I'd have more luck when they would approve my campaigns..

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Alrighty, it's time for a first test with the optimization tool.

I set up quite strict rules:

If target has 100 visits and $0.3 spend and 0 conversions - pause
If target has more than 0 conversions and ROI more than 0 - resume
If source has 1000 visits and $2 spend and 0 conversions - pause
If source has more than 0 conversions and ROI more than 0 - resume

I'll be using few larger T2 geos so I can get tons of traffic and see how the tool handles under pressure.

I'll be using Binom to track from the side.. but unfortunately it's showing completely different stats when compared to Zeropark, so I may need to switch to Voluum, not sure, we will see.

Initial budget for this test is smallest Zeropark payment - $200. I'm hoping to spend it ASAP.

Fingers crossed

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Must be so exciting to test out a script you wrote yourself!

What did you mean Binom is showing different stats when compared to ZP?



Amy

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Alrighty, traffic has gone somewhere and it's friday evening.. so it's time to pause the test.

Budget: $200
Spend: $158.11
Earnings: $59.03
ROI: sucks
Geos: US, IT, RU, ID, ZA, JO, EG



I messed up real bad with some IT and US targets and it made me lose ~$40 total. The problem was that I accidentally added target pausing rules with view counts. I should have set a spend limit.

Overall.. the tool worked perfectly and I'm very happy about it. Here's a small screenshot of the log panel:



I'll run US again tomorrow.. and only US. I got some real nice and juicy $2.20 and $2.80 conversions. I'll see if traffic comes back tomorrow. Hopefully some conversions come over the night as well, delayed ones.

I'm super surprised that ID and IT didn't convert at all.. From time to time I saw walls of IT and ID conversions but my traffic didn't convert

Anyway, this was just a test to see if the tool worked and it worked extremely well and I'm super happy.. now it's time to add some more bells and whistles

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Hey hey Amy!

Well, for example.. For now, US RON campaign has 18,064 views in Binom, but ZP has 18,803.. god knows where they disappeared. It's nothing crazy, but there might have been few conversions :P

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I’d say that is pretty common thing with click loss on big volumes. What server setup are you using for Binom?


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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I don't know man, I haven't had that kind of issue with Voluum really.. maybe I have, but it's like a lot smaller so I may have missed it.
And I have quite reasonable setup. 1Gbps NIC, Samsung enterprise SSD, E5-2690 v2 and 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM..

But it really doesn't matter, it's maybe worth like $5-6 (if there was actual click loss).

I do like Binom, you can put little X in front of your zone IDs so you can see which ones you have disabled etc :P

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Oh that's just clickloss, which is normal as imdude has pointed out. I doubt switching to Voluum would eliminate that issue.

A clickloss of only 4% is already really good. In fact, up to 20% can be considered normal.

Congratulations on your tool working perfectly! You can add so many functionalities to it in the future to make it badass. For now what it is capable of doing is no doubt already saving you time and money.

Your US camp is at around -50% ROI, which isn't hopeless! Now would be the time to drill down into the various stats - OSs, browsers, etc. - to see if you can cut any segments that have really negative ROIs. Alternatively, you can run traffic for longer to eliminate more unprofitable placements first, before cutting major traffic segments. That way, you'd cut less traffic.

Also - zeropark allows bidding differently for each placement. For the bigger placements that have made at least 1 conversion but are not profitable, it would be worth testing lower bids to see if they'd become profitable.

US is an exciting geo to tackle! Looking forward to seeing how you optimize this!



Amy

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Oh sure, right now I had all targeting in 1 campaign. Now I'm going to split it into ~3 campaigns (Verizon, T-mobile and Sprint) and then apply optimizations to those campaigns. It's unfortunate you can't set minimum and maximum values for OS and you can't add browser filter for mobile traffic (like Propellerads has for example). So yeah, I got tons of campaign based optimizations to do. Too bad I have to wait until Monday :P Now at least I know what kind of rules I have to set up so things are looking good.

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Sounds like a plan!

Targeting different carriers in separate campaigns is a good thing to do. However, try not to split the camp into too many campaigns for targeting smaller traffic segments, because many traffic networks will assign lower priority to camps that target too narrow, and give it less traffic. Try to do some testing yourself if you can. Some people would just bid low and target broad (e.g. all traffic in a given geo or even multiple geos), then set up tracker rules to segment the traffic and direct the right traffic to suitable offers. The broader you target, the more "important" some traffic networks would "think" your camp is, and the more traffic it will assign to you.



Amy

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