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10 Years Out of the Game -- POPping Back In (32)

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Hey guys and gals,

My name is Chris, and I am eternally grateful that I found this forum! I'm excited to continue learning and growing as a performance marketer, especially with the resources I've been discovering in my last month as a member of STM Forum.

My background: (I promise this is going somewhere)
I'm 24 years old, and I've been playing with computers nearly my whole life. It all started with learning DOS commands to play old video-games, and eventually I made it here. As a kid, I spent many years of my life CONVINCED that I could make some money on the internet, and at one point I did.

Around the age of 11 or 12, I eventually discovered the whole "free iPods" a little bit before its peak. I worked through a few incent funnels, and realized that there really were free iPods at the end of the tunnel, but that didn't seem to be the end goal to me. I figured, if I could earn a free iPod, what's stopping me from being on the other side of this transaction -- that's where the real margin was, right? So I started chatting with incent, "point/prize site" owners and learning about what they were doing.

Fast-forward a little bit, I had a severe ankle injury and ended up in a full-leg cast, in a wheelchair, for most of the summer and fall leading into my first year of high school. The card's were dealt, and my young-self suddenly had ALL sorts of time on his hands, mostly spent in front of a computer.

I bought a niche domain off an AIM friend of mine, and started working. Within about 4 months, I'd taught myself enough PHP, and learned (just) enough about the industry to piece together a custom "point-site" incentive-based script and design. I was ready.

I hit up every contact, and every forum that I knew, and told them about my new site. I joined just about every "get-paid-to" and "stay-at-home-mom" forum I could find, and sprayed about my site, and it seemed to work. To cut the story short, I did pretty well with my site for about 6-8 months, pulling about $4,000/month profit at one point. BUT, nothing lasts forever, and I was just a kid. I healed up from my injury, and started being, well, a kid! I began hanging out with new friends, and let the site dwindle into obscurity with the hundreds, if not thousands, of others that popped up and fell-out around this time.

Let's face it: advertisers eventually learned better, and realized that the traffic coming from these sources was, quite-frankly, shit. But geez, for a while, you could get paid $30-$40 a lead for a Video Professor or BlockBuster Online subscription -- and the lead would usually stick even with a cancellation before the trial's end.

I eventually went off to a good university, discovered a love for rock-climbing and travel, and ended up with a B.S. in Geology. The last few years since, I've worked odd-jobs ALL across the board; I've seen many countries and had experiences I wouldn't trade for the world. But, I also began to learn that I needed to seek a new balance in my life. I spent most of the last year teaching myself web-development, before thinking: "wait, web dev. is cool -- but why can't I use these computer and math skills FOR EVIL TO SPREAD POP-UPS ACROSS THE WORLD (just joking :P)", so I bought a membership here and decided that I'm going all-in this time around.

MY GOAL:
LONG term: I aim to control my destiny, be my own boss, and have the flexibility to work from anywhere in the world. The world is a big-big place, and I certainly intend to see as much if it as possible before I die. Maybe I'll have to explore the places with wifi for a little bit ;P I'm trying to learn LEGIT techniques now, not poor-traffic-quality incent techniques. I want to build relationships, and eventually, build a more stable business, something with value -- beyond the volatility of pure arbitrage.

SHORT term: I aim to improve my process, continue learning, and find some profits. Anything!! Break even for tooling costs would be a first step. (Thats about $15/day 30 day avg.) I work as a substitute teacher for the moment (pay's not great...but it's fun and VERY flexible). I could replace my wages with another $40/day (30-day avg) on top of tooling expenses.

WHAT I'VE DONE NOW:

In the last month, I've spent the first 1.5 weeks reading A LOT, signed up to a few networks, and got into almost all of them (except ClickDealer and MaxBounty, dangit!...that's okay now that's its been a month, I'm going to start bugging them again :P). I've got Voluum, Adplexity, Pingdom, HideMyAss, and a membership at a grip of traffic sources -- money flowing through two.

I've launched 8 campaigns (on PropellerAds and PopCash), and tested maybe 40-50 offers across them. I've gotten conversions on 3 of them, but nothing has hit more than -75% ROI or so, overall. I've spent about $350 on traffic in the last couple weeks, and my overall account is sitting at a cool, cool -90% ROI (wait...maybe that's not cool? lol). I have an initial budget of $5k set aside, though I have $10k total I'm willing to spend/lose in the learning process, for lets say, the next 6 months or so.

I've primarily been focusing on carrier billing offers (yeah I know, why deposit money into PopCash then?! :P ), and I've ran a bunch of mobile-content -- generic downloads/vid/game subs, a few AV PIN submits, and I just launched my first sweeps campaign. I'm thinking about stepping away from the mobile content (EXCEPT games) for a sec, since I just cannot get these offers to convert with the angles I've been running, or direct-linking either... My best success was with some AV PINs (truth be told, I dont love the 'shadiness' of it, and I don't want to cloak, but I dont feel bad if I'm still willing to run 'em on sources that don't care, will offers that the advertiser/publishers dont care either), though I am excited to see how these sweeps camps will perform.

I look forward to building relationships with other internet marketers on the forum, and think I'll start going to some local meetups to get face-to-face time with people who know this game!

OPEN INVITE: If anyone is around San Diego anytime soon, and wants to try their hand at rock-climbing, I'm a certified guide and first-responder. I'll take ya out climbing for some good conversation and company -- I won't even ask you about the camps you're running right now!! (hahaha...maybe )

SO: I know that was an essay, but thanks for reading; that's a bit about myself, and I look forward to following along with you guys!!

(I'll post stats of my current campaign with some focused questions in post number 2!!)

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You can run pin submits on popcash. Send the support and email and ask them if they can enable carrier only for a specific campaign.

AV without cloaking and in compliance with T&Cs is tough, but still can fly. Traffic sources you can run are popads, popcash, exoclick and some more.

Sweeps in Asia is a good choice, you can look into LATAM as well.

Focus more on the offer than the lander. The offer has an higher leverage and can improve your campaign by big margins. The lander "only" needs to be good enough.

That said, search for more offer and split test them. Improving from -70% to green by cutting only would be a long long way.

Then buy some more data and go into the targeting options ISP/Carrier, OS, Connection type and see if something is killing you or shows already potential.

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Thanks Sebastian! That's good to know -- I'll keep that in mind when running camps from my remaining balance in PopCash. It seems like soon I should consider testing a new traffic source, as I've been having a hard time finding conversions on Propeller. Of course, the offers probably sucked too :P

Unfortunately, these are the only three PH sweeps offers I can find across EVERY affiliate network that I'm currently with. Maybe that's a good lesson for me to only run camps in a particular GEO/vertical that I have access to more offers for. Either way, I'll run a little more to this camp, to at least see if I can pull a winning sweeps lander from it, so my next few sweeps camps I can focus first on the offer. I've been approved for a whole bunch of sweeps offers in BR, so that's the camp I'm putting together now. I have access to a lot more offers in this GEO as well, though I understand BR is a bit competitive.

I'm waiting to see if I'll be approved with MUNDO, and hopefully if I'm persistent, ClickDealer or MaxBounty will let me in soon -- they seem to have a large selection of offers.

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Welcome Chris, best Intro, ever.
You are on good hands here, follow your process, it look good and improve it at every test

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Awesome Chris! Looking forward to following your progress. FWIW, I'm with MaxBounty, and it seems as though their Mobile selection is pretty weak. TBH I don't think
that you are missing much not being with them. ClickDealer might be another story.

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Haha, thanks ackbar. I was hoping someone would like it

Thanks alex!! That's good info to know. I won't stress about MB for the moment then, and I'll apply to Kimia (from what I've heard, they seem to focus on such offers, kind of like Glize and Mobidea I guess).

I'm trying to be careful that I don't spread myself too thin across lots of networks, so I don't end up with a lot of "unrealized" revenues below min. payout thresholds of each network. At the same time, I want some good options available to split test lots of offers across networks.

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Great intro!

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Post-weekend update:

I launched a new camp this weekend, and (with a low payout offer) it's converting "more" than any other I've launched. The ROI is not positive, but it reached approx -30% for its best segment at one point. I'd love to get some perspective on the process I approached it with; I feel like I may be not looking at it with the right eyes, and I'm not sure if it's time to call it quits with this offer, or at least on this traffic source?

GEO: EG
Vertical: Mobile content (games)
Bid: $1.96 cpm (for the majority of traffic sent) [near first 'bend' on estimator]
Source: PropellerAds


So I found about 10/12 offers, across two carriers in this GEO, and set up a split test direct-linking these offers. 7 Offers for Orange, 3 offers for Etisalat. I set a 'rule-of-thumb' budget (payout*# offers*3-5) for each, and ran some traffic overnight. I dropped in a mainstream Afflow smart-link in with each too, to see if my offers were performing better than the algorithmically-selected offers. (What do you guys think about this strategy?)

NOTHING converted for the Orange camp, and there were two offers that seemed to be doing well for Etisalat, so I bumped the budget up a little bit, and focused on it.

Stats after first bit of traffic across both carriers:


I was able to cut one offer fairly quickly (and the smart link), and i sent a little more traffic to the two best performing offers to see if one would stand out.


Offer 1 and 2 kept going back and forth, so I started up my VPN and checked the landers. They were the same advertiser, same lander, with different BG images for two different games. So I chose offer 1 for my next split test.

I could not find ANYONE running the offer on adplexity, direct linking or with landers. So I found some good creatives for the game in question from the creators website and a few other sources, and I made 5 quick landers -- they were full-screen image backgrounds that were one big link. I took the best looking images (to me...) and added "Serious Gamers Only!" and "Play Now!" 'buttons' on them in GIMP. I used a couple with english, and a couple in arabic. I should have probably used arabic for all of them, and made them more dramatically different in retrospect perhaps.

Here are the stats after a few hours of traffic. Toward the beginning of this, in the meanwhile, I blacklisted a few placements that were eating a up some budget with no conversions. I used Amy's placement calculator for this. I think this helped ROI a little bit.



GA002 and GA003 were pretty easy cuts first based on the peakconversion calculator (before this screenshot even). I then ended up gutting GA001, and had a little more traffic run to DL/005/004. They were all so close, that based on something I read here, I could just choose one and move on with the next split test. I stuck with Direct Linking, and decided to do two things. This could have been a mistake here.

After dropping all the placements into the "Kill/Whitelist/Keep Running" calculator, there were a few more targets to blacklist, so I did so at this point. There were two in particular that it suggested could be whitelisted, so I pulled these out (BLACKLISTING them on my 'main' camp in addition to the other BLed targets). one of them is responsible for so many of the conversions with relatively small volume, so this was odd to me. The following screenshot is of those placements up to this point in time when I cut the landers down:

The two in the green were the ones that I whitelisted, based on the calculator: (in doing so, I upped the a bit above what propeller said I would get all of the impressions here for...only 300 a day...lol)


Ok, so, I set that up, and decided to test bids on the semi-"RON" camp, and let the whitelist go thru the night. This could have been a mistake, because now without those whitelisted placements, the other camps are all performing at a significantly lower ROI. CTR and CR are skewed, in general, across these stats due to direct linking making up a lot of the visits. CV should be accurate though.



(this is ^ data from last night at 9PST till right now, not the camp lifespan of course )

BUT something weird happened to effect the main camp. It kept pausing itself!! Like no jokes, I set an alarm to check my stats once in the night (lol ...), and it was paused, while the two higher bid camps were running. So 'pressed play' and when I woke up again it had done the same!! Maybe three times this happened -- paused by itself shortly after (note: not 'in moderation' or 'rejected' or something like that -- all compliant just direct linking a game). SO THIS LAST SCREEN SHOT is skewed because of that. All those impressions look close together, but truthfully. I didn't like the looks of the high bid camp, so I paused em when I woke up. I DUPLICATED the original camp on propeller exactly, same link, etc, and it was approved shortly thereafter, and suddenly sending traffic again no problem. So those stats for the "main camp" are from the hour or two since I woke up and paused the high bid camps.

I'm a bit at a loss here, can anyone give me some input on my process? Is it time to drop this bad boy? maybe worth trying the same offer at another source?? I've sent quite a few conversions, but since the payout is small, I don't know if I should be thinking about asking my AM about quality. that being said, my AM hasn't responded to me at this network for two weeks (I had a really responsive AM, then they assigned me a new one ... never even accepted my skype request yet).

Thoughts? Concerns?

(I would always love someone to tell me "hey Chris, WTF are you thinking?! time to reconsider 'a/b/c'" whatever, I'm not afraid of recognizing my mistakes Thanks guys!)

[this all being said, this is my first little pocket of green! even if it's a buck on the tiniest whitelist camp! dont worry, I didn't go out a buy a ferrari to celebrate haha]

UPDATE:
I forgot to mention, that I did cut out iOS early on (fairly low volume, and quite bad ROI compared to android). I've looked at browsers, devices, etc, and nothing stands out too much. Windows Phone is sitting at 130% with 5 conversions and only 136 visits. But thats a total of 136 visits out of like 13k... Android browser though has a few thousand impressions, and is sitting at -25%...maybe worth focusing in on? Or is that volume too low?? (chrome is doing fine ROI wise on that lil whitelist camp though...)

Here are the stats for browser and OS for the LIFETIME of the 'main' camp now (including the hours since the best converting placements were pulled out into the WL camp):

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1 hour later thoughts (before I head to work for the next 6 hours :P )

As my GEO is now creeping up on it's sleeping hours anyway, I'm going to pause the main camp for the PST daytime here, while I reflect upon everything I wrote above, and while I patiently hope someone has some useful considerations for me I guess my original thought was that I could let it keep running and hopefully find more 'good' placements and weed out some more 'bad' ones, but without those couple targets in there...it's settled back to almost -90% ROI (again, for the most recent time frame of 9pm last night till now pst) which is "not dank" in technical terms, haha. I'll let the white list camp keep chuggin, because why not I guess?

I will keep trying to learn from this data this evening, while I also begin to put the pieces together to launch a similar camp in IQ tonight or tomorrow. I just got approved to a grip of new offers, that my spying senses show me that other people are running at least. (this is opposed to the current offer which I found no traces of).

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Hey Chris welcome! (Or should I say welcome back?) What an intro!

I don't know how I managed to miss your follow-along. I'm going to partially blame it on the 6-week AMC course where I'm spending many hours chatting with students on the chat platform. Plus your follow-along got a high post-count from day 1, which may have led me to believe that you were already getting a lot of help from various members.

I've had a long day and need to get some sleep now, but will provide more detailed feedback first thing in the morning. Just want to leave a reply to subscribe to this thread.

Regarding wanting to get into Clickdealer - if you still haven't gotten accepted, shoot me a PM and I'll see what I can do. I can't speak for them of course, but based on my dealings with Clickdealer reps, you're exactly the type of affiliate they would welcome. You're a big action-taker and are ready to spend money to make money. Do update this thread to let me know to check for your PM - otherwise it may be days before I get around to it.

Regarding AV offers - I wouldn't recommend that vertical unless you're ready to cloak. Exoclick only relaxed their requirements for a brief period of time before changing them back to the original, strict rules. You'd be restricted to popads, zeropark and popcash (and ZP doesn't accept all AV landers - for example the google lander will get rejected). Unless you're prepared to stick to high volume geos on these sources, and/or explore smaller sources with lax requirements, and/or start cloaking, I'd suggest to pick another vertical.

Will try to be more helpful tomorrow...



Amy

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Hey Chris,

Read everything through Very detailed so far, keep it going! I think we can help you out as well when it comes to offers in Asia. We have local account managers in Thailand for example so we were able to get some pretty nice deals.

Add me on skype if you are interested, we can get some campaigns going straight away

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Very cool! Great post! I love love love rock climbing. Feel free to hit me up as well if u wanna rockclimb around la. My fav spot is malibu creek state park

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I imagine the 6-week AMC is keeping you quite busy; hope it's going well! I almost signed up, if I hadn't had a week-long trip planned (from many months back) during the first week of the course. I'll keep on chuggin, and see what things are looking like by the time the next one rolls around.

RE: Clickdealer: I didn't get in touch with them again yet, so I'll try once more on my own coming up soon here, then certainly take you up on that gracious offer I did apply to affiliaXe this week, and got accepted -- which is rad; they have lots of offers. Of course, not too many though in the couple GEOs I've been spying on the past few days, lol.

yeah, I'm not too excited about running more AV at this moment, and this helps reaffirm my thoughts I've been having. Looking forward to your next post!

Fantastic! Thanks for the shout, and I'll keep your network in mind as I continue launching camps -- esp if I have any more that I'm piecing together in Asia. I'm hesitant to have myself spread across TOO many networks lately, in the interest of being able to develop better relationships with my AMs at my current networks, and to make sure I can cash out some of these (minor :P) account balances I'm bubbling up. You'll go straight towards the top of my list!

Woohoo! Thanks, John. Malibu Creek is one of the places I really cut my teeth with sport climbing, when I was going to school in LA. What a beautiful crag, even with all the crowds, haha. I look forward to the next time I have chance to clip some bolts and pull on some pockets -- I'll be sure to hit you up next time I'm up that way!! we will crush! (or fall a lot ... I dunno ? one in the same??? :P ) Right now I'm getting ready to climb another big-wall in the Valley this spring; kind of stressed about it, but I know it can't be as terrifying and mind-melting as the last one the other fall. I'm bringing more water this time!!!



What I did Today:
I'm still watching my little baby whitelist EG camp convert (it's at about 150% ROI with 30 conversions...but I know it's just a bit of a 'novelty'). Still digging around the data from this EG 'main' camp and trying to learn. I did a bunch of offer research (for Iraq) and began propagating a new excel spreadsheet to compare offers. I'm starting to second guess if I have appropriately priced volume available for all these offers I bugged my AMs to approve for me in IQ this morning...haha. I want to have something else launched with data flowing in the next day or two here.

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Awesome work Chris. Really stoked to see you get your first touch of green on your camps.
Looks as though you are headed in the right direction!

If I'm following correctly, it looks as though your BEST Roi's in gaming are coming from direct linking?

Interesting... what about ripping some gaming landers from Adplexity and testing those offers (if they
are in any of your networks)

Your main question seems pretty valid though. When exactly is the time to just cry 'Uncle' on a campaign, and
move on to something else?

On one hand, you don't want to give up too early, on the other, you can't just keep beating a dead horse...

Either way, the fact you are moving through all the motions (testing, failing etc)on these smaller payout
offers will definitely pay dividends for you on subsequent campaigns.

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Thanks for the motivating words

Yes, that's been my best ROI so far, on this most recent carrier-billing gaming subscription offer, direct linked. Still not great for the whole camp, maybe around -30% at best? I've run some other "generic download" & "video player" mobile content offers, but couldnt get them to convert too hot.

Anyway, I could not even find these particular game offers being run anywhere on adplexity (searching for the offer's URL, that I found by viewing my link through HideMyAss). Furthermore, I could not find the game that the subscription 'highlighted' or whatever, being run anywhere on adplexity by searching for keywords related to its name.

So, since I could not find any relevant landers, and being that the game is a decent sized franchise, I went to their website, plus dug around Deviant Art for cool art related to the game. I cropped my favorite ones down to mobile-screen sized images, and added a couple 'boxes' on top of them in GIMP that looked like buttons. I translated "Serious players only!" and "Play now!" into arabic on google translate for the buttons, and made landers that were literally full-sized background images that linked to my click-url. I added autoplay 'alert ding' sounds, vibration, and a back script that redirected to the offer page.

Kind of basic, I know, but I figured they'd be okay for a test. These were the five landers I split against direct linking in my above post. They all got ~50% CTR which, though partially attributed to the back script, I figured was kind of decent for my 'ghetto efforts'? haha. The best one seemed to do 'just-as-well' as direct linking, but seemingly no better statistically from the data I collected.

maybe I should have converted a few into 'proper' landers? Or just done another round of split testing landers? I get this feeling that if I could have improved interest in the offer MORE from my landers, that perhaps I could have got my funnel good enough to convert this offer across more of the traffic I was sending, as opposed to these few "juicy" placements I whitelisted. (which was still primarily driven by ONE placement). That being said, I may have saturated this small placement now. It's CV is dropping, and today the ROI is slightly red in the whitelist camp. I'm going to pause it.

I'm going to go look for more content sub. gaming offers with low payouts to try again with this similar approach. Split test 10-15 offers for one or two carriers in one GEO, direct-linking. Then try to find landers that are being run for the best performing, or make some again in a similar fashion. Please poke holes in my approach if you see fit; tear me to shreds & make me cry!! hahaha :P

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Finally setting aside some time to read through your FA in detail to provide some feedback.

Were you just direct-linking? Or using landers? Let's see if we can't learn something from that $350 you spent!

For PopCash, you can ask support to turn off wifi traffic, although you can't limit traffic to any specific carrier. (Tip: If you want to get a feel for the percentage makeup of different carriers for each geo, and also get an idea on how much carrier traffic volume they have, you can set up a worldwide camp and ask support to turn off wifi traffic. That way you'd know which geos and carriers to focus on.)


It's odd how you named your offers. Are they the same offer that have 3 offer pages?

You've cut those 2 landers correctly - they've reached stat sig.

As for additional sweeps offers for PH - I don't know exactly which type of sweeps you're looking for, but I quickly checked a couple of networks and found a few at Clickdealer, Mobidea, Gotzha, and Mundo. (Disclaimer: STM does not endorse any aff networks - please join at your discretion.) I have no idea how recent those offers are and how well they convert, but if you ever want to put that winner lander to use, maybe give those a try.


I don't tend to set campaign budgets, because every situation is different.

Basically my criteria for keeping a camp running is simple: I'd drill down to Offer > Lander > [major traffic segments], where a major traffic segment is a particular subset of traffic that you can target at the traffic source, that has enough traffic to justify your efforts in running it. It could be a major OS (android/ios, or even windows phones for a big geo), a major browser (e.g. chrome), wifi or a major carrier - anything that has enough profits potential to justify targeting it alone.

If none of the major traffic segments are looking like they have a chance of getting green, for any offer+lander combo, I would stop the camp. Exception: If I was still testing landers, and planning to mass-test offers later on with the winning lander, then I would run at a loss just to find that winner, as long as the losses are too severe.

When making the assessment above, it's important to look out for any low-ROI segments you can potentially cut to increase the overall ROI of the camp. Most of the segments are connected, so cutting one will affect the others. For example if you see that 1/3 of the traffic is from IOS, but it's performing a lot worse than Android, you can cut IOS to increase the ROI for browsers and carriers etc. You'd also want to check your placements stats to see if there are bigger ones that are converting badly, that you can cut to increase the overall camp ROI.


You would use stats collected since T=0.

You can compare the performance of all/any candidates for any time period in which they were being run simultaneously. This means that if multiple landers have been running together since T=0, then you can compare stats gathered since T=0, regardless of whether or not you've cut other landers in the meantime.

Another thing to point out is that in spite of using stats tools, you can never determine a winner with 100% confidence. A large part of this is due to the volatility in traffic performance. There are simply too many factors that can affect camp performance and they're all varying. You could pick out a winning lander based on 100% probability of being best, but if you continue running it against the other "loser candidates" the tide may turn later on. Or if you retest all landers at another traffic source you'd end up with a different lander. But using stats tools is still miles better than not using them, and I would suggest to never cut landers or offers at below 90% probability, preferably at 95-100% because offers/landers can make/break a camp.


Sweeps offers can be annoying for exactly that reason. You need to divide the offers by "prizes" and customize landers for each.

One way to speed up this process, would be to take your winning lander that resulted from another campaign where you've tested offers for another "prize", and just customize that for all other "prizes". It's not the most accurate method, but it's a lot more efficient.

Whenever I think about testing and optimization, I'm always having to choose a sweet spot between being accurate vs. being efficient. You can be more accurate but less efficient (i.e. spending more time/money), or you can be more efficient but less accurate.

If you want to be more accurate than that, you could customize all landers for another prize, see if you notice 1-2 landers that have converted well for both prizes, and customize those for the rest of the prizes.


It is true that carrier traffic is expensive, but it's only expensive because it converts so much better than wifi. The prices are only that high because people are still making money at those prices.

I can see your argument that with such high CPMs and low'ish payouts, the camp looked bleak from the start. However, it wouldn't be fair to make this assumption for future cases, without finding out through testing what the CR is. Carrier traffic can convert so well that in spite of high traffic costs and low payouts, you can run offers profitably. Never know until you test.

Your observation about the low traffic volume is important. Next time you'd know to confirm there's enough volume before starting a camp, or even before looking for offers. Some of the major traffic sources have traffic estimators (e.g. propeller, popads, exoclick) you can check for traffic voumes for specific targeting options. Then there are sources you'd need to actually run traffic in order to assess traffic volumes (e.g. ZP) - in these cases setting up a small camp and bidding reasonably high, and running a few minute's worth of traffic to see how many impressions you get, and extrapolating to 24 hours can give you a very rough idea on how much traffic is available for your targeting.

But yes - it's important to know how much traffic is available at least on the major sources for your targeting, before you spend time on prepping landers and choosing offers etc.

Depends. How much traffic is the popads estimator telling you is available?

Testing different bids can yield huge differences in CR. People would naturally bid higher for the best-converting placements, so lower bids will result in low-quality traffic.


Did you mention you've started an FA thread here? Again, if you have trouble getting in, send me a PM and I'll see what I can do.


A word of warning: Cheaper traffic doesn't necessarily mean better cost-savings. Again, the unknown variable here is the conversion rate. Sometimes, cheap traffic is cheap for good reasons - some traffic is just harder to convert, which is why it's cheaper. Good examples are CN and IN - there's plenty of cheap traffic, but it's difficult to find offers that convert well for these geos - at least according to personal experience.

The opposite is true as well: Sometimes, certain traffic is only expensive because there's one or more offers on the market that's converting very well. This is also part of the reason why testing extensively is recommended, but if you're good at spying, you can narrow down your test area.


I don't think comparing with afflow results can hurt!


Did you check offer stats on the split-test calculator at win-vector?

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...211#post289211


Love your approach on making very simple landers! But have you tested them on browserstack to make sure they'd display correctly on all major mobile devices?

That placement calculator is pretty nifty! But I must say that for pop placements, of which there may be thousands, using that spreadsheet may be more trouble than it's worth. I'd just cut placements using rules of thumb, for example when a placement is in loss by 2x payout. There are so many of these, that cutting less accurately will not have much impact on the overall camp. But thanks for your patronage certainly!


This is strange indeed. Can't say I've observed the same.

Running a WL camp is only worth it if you're making significant profits, which is clearly not the case here. There's more EG Etisalat traffic on propeller and exoclick, so maybe try there. Adult traffic can convert well for mobile gaming offers (Disclaimer STM does not endorse any traffic networks - please buy traffic at your own discrretion.) There's simply not enough traffic on popads to be taking all this trouble, but it was a very valuable learning experience nonetheless! AND green is always nice to see for a beginner (which you're not really, but still a beginner when it comes to pop traffic).


Send an email to the network's main email to request for a new AM. Again, point them to this thread.


Overall traffic volumes isn't enough to justify targeting by traffic segments, but drilling down into stats is still a great exercise. I've also found windows phones to convert well in many geos - too bad there isn't more of that traffic. For the bigger geos you can target just windows phones to make profits - not substantial but would still be worth your while.


I understand that thinking - this is a trap that has lured many people into over-running a hopeless camp.

Without bidding higher, it's unlikely for the camp to all of a sudden start triggering traffic from better placements.

You've already been running this camp for a few days, which means all the high-volume placements have either been whitelisted or blacklisted. Spending money to test smaller placements would give you diminishing returns on investment.


Normally you won't want to do that, because 1)it takes time to keep an eye on running camps, and small profits are just not worth your time, and 2)a low-ROI/low-profit camp can easily dip into red given the volatility of pop traffic, to eat into profits it's acquired up to that point.

However, if seeing green is still a novelty, then keeping it running may provide the motivation you need to do more testing. I'll overlook it just this once.

Which reminds me: Are you basing your assessment on cost data that's been posted back to Voluum via the [BID] token? If so, beware of inaccuracies in costs. Go to popads to generate a report to see what you're actually spending - the actual costs will almost always be higher than what's reflected in Voluum. I've been caught by this many times - in a geo like TH for example, the actual cost can be TWICE as high as what's in voluum, meaning I'd need to see 100%+ ROI in voluum to actually be breaking even!

Another thing you can do with this offer, is take it to mDSPs such as go2mobi, and run using generic banners. Traffic volumes aren't bad really:




Your "ghetto efforts" are an efficient way of doings lots of testing in a limited amount of time. I'm an advocate of doing JUST enough work to give offers a chance in the beginning, and would only put in more effort if I see something deserving additional effort and investment.


Why not do both and compare results?


A sound approach! And if you test a couple hundred offers at a time, you'll really find some gems! But only when you're ready to.

(I really need to cut down on the length of some of my posts!)



Amy

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First, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to give such insightful, detailed feedback. This really means a lot, and I look forward to the day that I've learned enough that I can pay such gestures forward!!

For the far majority, I have been testing with landers. Sometimes I've tested direct linking against landers though, but again many of these camps didn't convert. For mobile content subscriptions across verticles (videos/games/'generic downloads'), a lot of my landers have surrounded the "Exclusive content" angle.

These were the exact offer names for the three PH sweeps offers on Mobidea. I know, it seemed odd to me too, but I suppose they were from the same advertiser with different landers? I've been staying in the habit of naming things in Voluum exactly what they are on my Aff. Networks, spelling errors in all, because it helps provide me a better reference when comparing stats between my tracker and the network. I will keep these networks in mind; maybe I'll have to just suck it up and apply to another -- I'm technically already in 7 networks, but for the verts/geos I'm running, 3 of those are a bit useless to me at the moment.

Though I suppose I know this intuitively, it really helps to see it written out. Remembering this will help a lot when considering if a spend was appropriate, and when looking to learn from my test camps!

Awesome! I'd been thinking about this still, since that camp, and my glad my intuition has been affirmed. For the second part, I've been good about cutting only with 90% or higher, except for the couple cases now where two things were really going head to head, back and forth. I will continue to try to buy more data to let things reach even higher confidence in the future!

This first thing is exactly what I did when converting my landers from the PH iPhone prizes, to the BR "money" prizes. I changed all references to iphones to stuff about 'winning cash' (with the exact amounts differing per lander made for each offer). Then I went into the "user testimonials" and changed the pictures, plus changing the copy and pictures everywhere else.

The point about accuracy vs. efficiency is extremely useful to consider. I'll be always searching for my sweet spot!

Thanks, I will keep that in mind! If I learned one thing from this most recent camp when looking at the little pockets of green, is that things can convert at such a level that EPV can huge!! Now it makes sense that people are out there paying $20/$30+ CPM...if their EPV is 0.050 or something, they could still be at 100%+ ROI on their targeting!

I've been doing this during my offer research lately, across propeller and popads at least. Plus I've been bugging the PopCash support most days to ask for a current Mobile CPM volume/bid inventory.

As I'm not on ZeroPark, I didn't know this second part, but that is a great technique to learn! I will be bugging them again now that I have some traffic-spend proof for them, but I'm not rushing into it, because I still want to get a little more familiar with the traffic sources I have been working with already.

There was plenty of volume available for Smart on PopAds, iirc (maybe 10k ish or a little more, targeting only the top 50% of sites). It must have been my bid, so I will watch out for that next time if traffic seems very slow.

Thanks for your generosity in helping new aff marketers such as myself get into networks I'll give it another shot soon, and see if the FA might convince them to change their mind. Otherwise, I may be in touch soon regarding getting a reference for ClickDealer and/or Mundo!!

Maybe I will get this tattooed in mirror image on my forehead, so I can remind myself every morning when I brush my teeth!! haha :P

Great, I will continue to do so. It's like a freebie offer for every GEO i run in! And yes, I've used this calculator, but mostly the peak-conversion one since mostly the offers I have been comparing have had the same payouts.

I didn't check them on browserstack , but I will be sure to do this for all landers in the future! Bookmarked

I will start using the rule of thumb for most placement cutting, while keeping my (excuse me, YOUR) calculators handy. lol. I will also take from this, that I can be more agressive cutting placements early on with these rules of thumb. It may have helped my last camp, which had QUITE a few that had gone 2x payout in red. "But its only 30 cents loss...no biggie" --> yes those add up, and can make a big dent in ROI!!

By a freak coincidence perhaps, they finally accepted my request and got in touch this morning! Though a little frustrating, I will certainly give them a chance and keep this thought for if I have any more troubles with AMs.

Thanks for pointing out this trap to me; It's a good one to start looking out for and avoiding!!

I think I can find my motivation no problem without that little green. Fortunately, I'm a pretty optimistic guy and not afraid to keep testing, even if things have been bleak.

For the camp in question, it was being run on Propeller so there was no inaccuracy in cost. I updated the cost every hour or so, or whenever I needed the most current data, via "update cost" on Voluum. So the differences in pricing from traffic source, to the "real cost" after click-loss etc should be reflected already in any of the stats I posted.

I will continue to be extra vigilant in comparing costs across the tracker and T.S. for any of those that pass bid/cost tokens along to my tracker.

Wow, that is a bunch of volume!! It sounds like I should sign up to go2mobi, at the very least to help me in my research for offer volume.

Furthermore, maybe I can test some of these "generic content" offers better with 'download' and 'play button' style generic banners better than I can test them with pop ups, and hoping the the placements are triggering the pop when someone presses 'play' on their video or clicks to download a torrent or something.

My ghetto efforts affirmed!!! haha. Glad that I was on the right track with my thinking there. And as for the second thing, I think I will have to constantly remind myself that this is the answer to many of my questions!!

I will get there

And Amy, I will also never complain about the length of your posts!! I'm so grateful that you've given me such a detailed response...I don't know how you find the hours, Amy -- you are a machine! (in the nicest way )

This all has given me a lot to think about, and an even bigger boost of excitement to keep launching and keep following-along.



Today's Plan
I'm quite busy with my other job the next three days, but I will get plenty of hours in still before and after. I've gotten approved for a whole bunch of gaming content sub offers in Peru, so I'm going to prepare a similar camp to this most recent EG camp, and use some of these new-learned methods to hopefully optimize even better this time! I will be posting along here with the progress on that, so stay tuned!!

- Chris

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welcome back look forward to your progress!

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thanks @freddyfortunes!

Thursday Morning Update:

Still busy with my "other work" and some offline commitments, but I think I'm balancing things okay I got another camp launched, and did some thinking/research about my next camps (more on that later). I'm also trying to always remind myself that I need make sure I'm not just "in motion", but consistently taking action. (Thanks @cmdeal !)

I set up a new camp last night with PopAds for game offers in PE: put all the pieces together, set it up on the traffic source, and went to sleep waiting for the approval. When I woke up, it had been approved -- woohoo, let's get some data!

Vertical: Mobile content (game subs.)
GEO: PE
TS: PopAds
Offers: 11 offers, 1 'rotator'
Landers: None (direct-linking for this initial test)
PopAds Targeting Options: Top 60% of websites (5+), 1/24 frequency, Cellular & Cellular/Carrier connection for Claro ISP
Bid: 1.5x average for my options

I awoke to one conversion, thinking "okay, let's hope a few more come in a little faster than this!". And "at least this one conversion didn't cost me much YET". I know, of course, that 1 conversion doesn't mean anything

I remember thinking when setting up the camp. on PopAds last night, that the avg. bid seemed pretty damn low for the carrier targeting I'd set up! (~$0.60 CPM)
SPOILER ALERT: I had made a mistake with my targeting and had yet to notice...

I started doing some research on my next camp, while occasionally checking my stats.

Now I must thank the affiliate spirits for directing my distraction into some follow along threads, because conveniently I came across this post in xxf8xx's follow-along:

"Hmm....." I quickly dug into my stats, then on my PopAds camp settings, and realized I had made this exact same mistake. And a solid 2/3 of my traffic this morning was coming from Windows desktops...

​

My experiences launching camps on Propeller had gotten me too comfortable, as when you select "3G" on Propeller, they automatically target mobile devices. Fortunately, this is only my second camp on PopAds., the first of which I'd only spent $3 on...and I'd only spent $5 of my $22 budget on this camp so far this morning. So I learned an important $8 lesson today, and I can live with that mistake. I'll certainly never make that mistake again!

SO, I went back to PopAds, updated the "device targeting" to smartphones and tablets, checked the estimated average bid, and of course, I was under avg. for my targeting now. So I also bumped up my bid to ~1.5x the new average, and went into Voluum and have selected to only view traffic since my realization.

Fortunately, there are still about 13k daily impressions available with this new targeting (I could get more if I bump the 'quality' option down, no doubt), so I figure I should have some data to work by later this evening perhaps (if anything converts, that is )

TL;DR: Check your PopAds targetting options carefully, ladies and gentlemen! I hope someone else can learn from this mistake, just as I learned from xxf8xx.

I'll be back this evening to give an update on this camp, and to share some of my questions/reflections on my next campaign I'm researching this afternoon.

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Evening Update

So the PE camp is looking a little bleak, but that being said, there really isn't much data. Only about $5/6 (4k impressions) more worth of traffic has run through the camp, since 11 hours ago this morning when I fixed the targeting.

To avoid mixing in the bad desktop traffic, this is the drilldown for mobile traffic. The spend should be pretty accurate: to update with more accurate pricing, I "restored cost" in Voluum (it was obviously lower than actual due to 'automatic' BID token passing and minor clickloss factor), then UPDATED cost in Voluum with the accurate costs. The CPV shown is actually lower than my bid of ~0.0016 due to the extra traffic I bought at a cheaper price mixed in with desktop. I think I did all this right to reflect accurate-ish cost stats.



Now between the slow traffic and the amount of offers being compared, each offer-segment has barely just cost right around the average payout of the offers ($0.64). I also notice that, I guess due to inherent inaccuracies with the traffic estimator (?), that although this morning when I changed the targeting it said 13,000 approx. daily impressions were available, it now is showing that 7000 approx. daily are available.

This is quite a big difference, and makes it seem like that's barely enough to make it worth testing this carrier/GEO combo on PopAds. I think I need to run at least about 3x more traffic to the camp. to have collected a statistically significant amount of data.



I notice if I up the play with the bid for the estimator's sake, I would only get about 9000 imp/day in bidding queue position 1.

If I keep the same bid and change quality to "all websites", it tells me 12000 imp/day are available. (as expected, quite a bit more!!). What do you guys think about PopAds' quality settings??

Would it be worth doing anything else with this camp while I let the data creep in? Since I'm direct linking, I guess I could have been running a bot test already or something?

I also don't want to mess up this split test. My gut is telling me I just need to just let it run longer and collect more data, then decide if anything is to be done, or if I should be moving on from these offers.


In the meanwhile, thoughts on my next camp:

I got a list the other day from one of my AMs, of "top performing" one click flows on their network. Since my last couple camps have been game subs., I focused in on the few games offers on the list, and noticed a few of the 'highest-performing' were from some "small" (compared to most of the GEOs I've been running this last month) Caribbean island nations and tiny north african countries. Most of these GEOs hadn't even crossed my mind -- they're not available to spy on in Adplexity (though neither is Kenya and it seems to be 'poppin' for PIN submits lately), and I cannot find many offers available for them (at least in the networks I'm in).

When I say "can't find many", I mean that for 3 or 4 of them, I can find exactly ONE offer...the one on the list from that network, and the most I found for any similar GEOs as I began digging was 3 for one country. I did a bit of digging and found between PopAds & Propeller (and popcash but no knowledge of specific carrier targeting here) there is some traffic that I could buy. A couple had from 5-15k daily impressions available, so enough to work with.

I just wonder what might be the best strategy to test offers like this -- where I have 1 offer for 1 carrier in 1 small country (that supposedly converts according to the network!) -- and where I have no idea on the competition's strategy. This latter point is intriguing to me, because it means that many others have the same 'issue' and the competition may be small.

A couple thoughts I had:

1. Launch every similar vertical offer I can find across all these little countries, with many 'micro camps' -- 1/2 offers per country, super small budgets, direct-linking and see what converts, and if so, what has the best ROI. Then optimize a funnel for that one, testing lots of angles.
2. Choose one or two select offers (maybe the ones from the list, and not from my own digging into similar offers in similar GEOs), then try to come up with a handful of unique landing pages & angles, using adplexity from elsewhere for inspiration?

I'm a little hesitant with #2, because I feel like launching unproven landers with my level of experience could be a waste of time/money, though perhaps a good learning experience.
On the other hand, it feels almost a little silly just direct linking a single offer in a camp of its own and 'hoping for the best', without any sort of funnel split test for it.

Any thoughts?? (on this, or on my above camp )

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Geezus Chris - we should start a group called "Talk-Too-Much Anonymous", and have meetings 3 times a week, 6-hour sessions.

Please don't feel like you need to respond to every point I made - unless you need further clarification. I'll try to do the same. Otherwise we'll have a novel ready to be published by the end of this month.

I find that the best way to test mobile content subscription offers, is just to direct-link and mass-test.

I would either set up a smartlink or load up a bunch of offers, and test all major carriers to find the gems and scale them.

The trick is to not spend too much time/effort/money on testing each offer - just spend for example 5x payout on each and cherry-pick the best. This approach is radically different from when testing of landers is involved, where you need to invest time and sometimes money on translations to prep landers, such that you'd want to test somewhat thoroughly so as not to waste that investment. Also, there are only so many offers you can test using a set of landers in a particular language and vertical, so if you use the same 5x-payout approach you'd quickly run out of offers to test.

Not every type of offer are suitable for direct-linking though. Make sure your offers are easy to subscribe to (e.g. 1-click vs. credit-card submit) and don't require any/much pre-selling. Stuff like mobile gaming subscription and video subscriptions come to mind.

Also, once you find some gems, you may want to test landers to potentially make them convert better. Normally simple landers will do - because if the offer is converting well just from direct-linking, then it obviously doesn't require much pre-selling. So probably no 4-survey-question type landers. Try something like a nice attractive graphic with a short and sweet headline and MAYBE a couple bullet points if that, plus a CTA.


Next time if you encounter the head-to-head situation again, just randomly pick a winner and start the next split-test so you don't have multiple "old" test candidates slowing down the next test. If in the end you can't find better candidates than the 2 or more head-to-head contenders, you can just keep all of them running to delay saturation and spread out risks (of one offer going down or other issues at the aff network).

We've had quite the discussion on these in another thread:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...wnloads-offers


Likewise - thank you for starting this follow-along and be so detailed in your explanations! You're working 2 jobs as well (AM plus your other one), so we're in the same boat.



Amy

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Haha, yeah... I've been treating this follow along as a bit of a journal, and my rambling thoughts are making it into my posts without enough discretion perhaps.

I will work on being more terse and precise with my posts in the future

Thanks, Amy; this is great info on strategy for running these types of offers, and I will use this technique to launch another few camps.

I've got a couple camps running now, and will update with some stats later on!

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Nice going catching that mistake so early on!

A steal of a lesson for $8 I'd say! Some of my past mistakes (not trying to brag :P) have cost me anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousands. We're only human and sometimes we're careless. I just said "ouch" and told myself I'd make that back 10x over and moved on.


The quality settings you have are fine. You're paying more for better traffic, which is justified when you're wanting to give your offers a chance to prove themselves.

For carrier traffic, there's not really a need to run a bot test, unlike for wifi. It's stupid easy to create bot traffic for wifi - I could load up a software right now and run it on proxies and send a few million views to any target website that's converting well for me, to make it convert badly for my competition and make them blacklist it to get all the traffic for myself. But it's not that easy to emulate carrier traffic, if even possible.

Again, since you're just direct-linking, you don't even need to compare offers and cut when they reach statistical significance. Just run them to 5-10x payout and cut them if you don't see promise right away. They take almost zero effort to test and there're plenty more offers to test, so there would be no need to test any one offer thoroughly. The superstars will shine from the start, and those are the ones you want to find.


As I've mentioned above, if you know that a type of offer has a good chance of converting when direct-linked, then you can test more efficiently by direct-linking and setting a small budget for each offer.

So it's important what type of offer you're looking at. Some may convert when direct-linked, others may not (e.g. sweeps).

I'm not against running in small geos - I once had a camp where I was targeting one mobile carrier in a geo that had 1.3 million population total, and it was making around $40/day without any optimization - not even cutting of placements. Profits weren't great, but it was completely hands off due to the total lack of competition as you've pointed out.

However, I would never have targeted it if I had to prepare landers for it. Wouldn't have been worth my time, even back then when I was a newbie. So that would be another consideration.

Another point I want to make is that unless you can find a way to keep your landers out of spy tools, it would hardly be worth the effort to innovate on landers, as they would get ripped within the hour. It may be more effective to just rip and mod, find the best lander theme, then test variations of ad text. Your variations will make their way into spy tools, but at least because they look like the other landers, they'll fly under the radar, unless you run high traffic volumes.

I've just pointed out some of the considerations - in the end you'll need to make the decision on how you want to approach these small geos. Feel free to do your own testing. If you're aiming to maximize learning and not profits just yet, then spending time in small geos could be a great exercise! The lack of competition can be sweet, and because there isn't a ton of traffic, you don't risk losing your shirt.

So basically do whatever the heck you want. Just report back and we'll look at the results.



Amy

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Thanks, Amy!! Good to know about the bot traffic relating to carrier traffic, and this will be the strategy I apply for my next mobile content camps -- direct linking to 5-10x payout.

Your anecdote is some good motivation for me to keep testing these offer types in these small geos .

Monday Morning Update

I had some hiccups with PopAds at the end of last week, and it put a stop to the main camp I was running. Long story short, I tried to up my PE camp's deposit so I could finish running the 12-offer split test to stat sig., and I, unthinkingly, tried to do so from my VPN connection while I was at work at school.

This flagged my account, and blocked deposits. I learned something new, and totally understand why this would be a security concern. I've emailed PopAds an honest explanation on Friday, but have yet to hear anything back from them..... Turns out all the offers were all paused this morning anyway, so that camp really washed out due to a few mistakes on my part, and what was to be an inevitable pause from the advertiser anyway -- didn't even finish its first split test.

Then, I last minute was reminded that I was committed to helping a friend with his advanced-level guiding certification exam in Joshua Tree this weekend, so I had to duck out from the internet Saturday and Sunday. I had a great weekend away from the internet, and really refreshed my perspective and reminded myself why I'm doing all this in the first place

-------------------------------

I started a new campaign Friday afternoon:

GEO: somewhere in the de islands, mon
TS: Propeller
Vertical: Mobile Content [games & generic]
Offers: 4 + Afflow Smartlink

It ran for Fri. afternoon and Sat. morning. This was long enough to run 4 of the offers to ~7x payout with no conversions, so I cut them fairly early. The higher payout offer was converting though, and after sending all the traffic to it, it reached -11% direct-linking.



I paused it since Sat morning due to circumstance, and it seemed the next logical thing would be to test landers. The bidding landscape hasn't changed much apparently, so today I set up a split test for 5 landers + Direct Link (control), to see if I can optimize the funnel more toward green. All landers focus on different takes of the "exclusive content" angle.

This data will be coming in a little slow, due to available volume on Propeller and GEO size, but hopefully I will have something to work with tonight.

In the meanwhile:
I am researching offers to get ready and launch a "big camp" (series of a bunch of little 'micro-camps' for GEO/carrier combinations I can find with these offer types in small GEOs). I want to get a bunch of different offers together to launch around the same time; direct link to 5x-10x payout and see what seems ready for more optimization.)

I'll update more as the stats roll in

(this is my attempt to be more terse....uh oh, lol)

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Crap - sorry to hear that! Some traffic sources are really paranoid about logging in from different IPs, and unfortunately popads is one of them. I trust that popads support will sort you out. Support tickets may take a few days to get a reply - sometimes it seems to me like they're a one-man show.

How could all the offers get paused at the same time? Were they from the same advertiser? Then it was a good thing that popads flagged you - saved you money that would have been wasted.

You can re-use your landers for any geo that speaks Latin-Spanish, and there are lots of them! Or were you just direct-linking?


Looking promising! What's "de islands, mon"? (Wait - don't reveal it if it's a small geo.) How much traffic does it have?

If it doesn't have much traffic, then it wouldn't be worth it to test landers!

Also - if it's a small geo, then popads wouldn't be a great source to run it on - try propeller/zeropark.

If there's traffic volume for lander-testing to be worth the effort, then by all means do that first. You should also test bids. After all that, if you're green or close enough, then cut anything that have a negative ROI - cut any placement that's in loss by >2x payout; also drill down to OS, Carrier, Browser and see if there's anything you can cut.


LOL looks like I wrote that too fast - you've answered my questions above.

So yeah - if there isn't a lot of traffic available, I wouldn't worry about testing landers. See if you can cut your way to 30% ROI. If not don't sweat it - you could be dedicating your effort and time and money on testing other offers.

You can scale that camp to zeropark and test bids. If you're targeting wifi, scale to popcash as well, and test bids there. Basically scale to all major pop networks and test bids at each, and cut unprofitable placements.

Another thing to do would be to scale this camp to mDSPs. Start with go2mobi using custom banners. You can also start testing custom banners on Mopub/Google - they're where the big traffic is at, but they don't accept generic banners.


Sounds good and looking forward!

You're doing a great job at being more terse - I'm trying hard to do the same lol! I've really met my match this time.




Amy

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Yes, I'm almost certain they were the same advertiser due to similar payouts, verticals & prelanders. This is a great way to think about it! Still waiting on PopAds support...5 days now...


Great scaling tips for these offer types!! I had started my split test before your response, so ended up wasting some money on this camp. I drove traffic to it across a day with the landers in rotation, and it did nothing! (I did 'sit on it' for the two days of the weekend...) So I jacked the bid and ran some more traffic, and it was still way weak so I cut it off.



This message, and given the context of running some small GEOs, I "re-emailed" the ZeroPark rep that rejected me at the end of Jan, with some screenshots of my last 6 weeks spend, to see if they'll let me in now! Is this how I should approach having my account approved, or should I just apply again from scratch?

This next post will be seem long, but it's mostly pictures!! lol

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Wednesday Morning Update:

As I planned, I launched a handful of 'little' camps (all relative, I guess) direct-linking to mobile content offers (games/videos) across a few GEO/carrier combinations. I tossed in a smart link in all but one of them. My offers must have been bad, because the smart-link outperformed in many of the camps, though most were still losers. Let's start with the loser camps first:

GEO #1 -- 1 Offer, 1 Afflow Smart Link
The smartlink was responsible for the 3 conversions, while the other offer (0.25 payout) ran to ~10x spend. Probably could've dropped this one earlier.



GEO #2 -- 3 Offers, 1 Afflow Smart Link
One offer was a dud, and got dropped early on. The other two and performed almost exactly the same (despite different payouts), sitting each at about -75% -> -80%ROI . I paused the camp when each offer was around 8x spend.



GEO #3 -- saved till end

GEO #4 -- 8 Offers, 1 Afflow Smart Link
This seemed like a big waste. All three conversions were from the smart link, and none of the other 8 converted. I ran them to about 4.5x payout each, then paused this camp.



GEO #5 -- 4 Offers , no smart link
This one was launched late in the series, not till yesterday afternoon, so it's still collecting data. The one conversion came in as I wrote this, but with payouts of about 1.10-1.20 here, I'll have to run at least $20 to it to reach 5x spend on each. Will update more later on this one.



---------------------------

GEO #3 - 2 Offers, 1 Afflow Smartlink
This camp quickly showed that the smart link was outperforming (I used the 'different payouts' split test calculator with avg SL payout vs. offers), so I went with it. After a few hours of the camp running, at 9am I cut both offers, changed to targeting Android ONLY. A couple hours later I launched it on PopCash with the specific carrier targeted (the volume is REALLY low here). Then around 3pm I went to afflow, and set up the link to target the three best converting offers (most the traffic was going to them already anyway; and I know they'll still send clicks around anyway...), AND I also started a test to split bids.

My first bid was already nearly high enough to get MOST traffic. Due to bid-graph estimator with a big discrepancy between 'levels', I just started this one high. So the orig. camp is "high bid", then I added MB and LB camps.

All camps, total camp-life:


Main camp (Propeller - GEO#3 - Games 003), total camp-life:


Camps, since bid split at 3pm:



What's next for this camp? I think that it is time to start targeting the best converting segments, but with such low volume I'm apprehensive to cut major segments out. I also think it could be worthwhile to start looking at placements? Here are my last couple picture of stats for this camps, with my thoughts to follow:

"MAIN CAMP", Afflow smart-link drill down, OS-OSV


"MAIN CAMP", Afflow smart-link drill down, Browsers


"MAIN CAMP", Afflow smart-link drill down, Placements by Visit


"MAIN CAMP", Afflow smart-link drill down, Placements by Conv



TO CONCLUDE:
Firstly, I checked again this morning (and will continue to, based on the afflow arbitrage guide) that traffic is still going to the 'best' offers. They've been at the top for this geo for a few weeks now.

It seems to me that I might target only Android Browser and Chrome Mobile, but the others arent considerable volume anyway. (EDIT: a few conversions came in for "Chrome" and Opera Mini, so its not quite as 'confident' of a cut anymore)

Should now be the time I drop the lower bid camps and focus on the 'original, high bid, camp??

Now, Propeller only lets one target major OS releases, so I'm not so sure if any version of Android here (with volume, that is) is really outperforming the next. If I could target 'decimal' releases, maybe, but I cant see it now.

Also, I think I need some more data, but I would like to see how ROI is affected across the day. When I went to bed, these stats did not look nearly as hopeful, but the smartlink converted like crazy overnight (maybe the afflow offer targeting helped?). I need more data for this, but I suppose I could base some decisions in this line of thought on Afflow's aggregate data.

might it be worth doing some white or blacklisting? And generally, could I use placement data from my other bid camps combined in here to help my considerations?

Besides all this, the only other main thought I have would be to consider scaling it across more traffic sources soon, before afflow's funnel changes at least. I launched it on PopCash but no volume. I cant launch anything on PopAds, because my account is still flagged. AdCash has some more carrier volume for this camp, but it was rejected after submission. I emailed them to ask if they support Afflow links, but I'm not too hopeful since there's no way to "show them" the LP. Zeropark probably would, but I've been rejected there and now 24 hrs out from 're-emailing' to see about getting approved based on recent spend. As this is a smart-link, I'm not even sure what the offer is, so maybe mDSP would not be a good choice for this? Maybe I'll sign up to a few more sources and see if they have volume for this GEO.

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I'm doing well thank you!

I understand the lack of motivation - pop has gotten quite competitive. I've put down some of my thoughts regarding that in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post321311

Regarding ecommerce being super-competitive for English sites - you may want to ask the experts over in the ecommerce subforum. But AFAIK, that statement is false. Ecommerce is FAR from being saturated even for English-speaking geos. It depends on the niche you pick and how well you target your audience, and of course how good you are at running FB camps (or otherwise get traffic). Also don't forget that there are other countries that speak English aside from the typically competitive ones like US/CA/UK/AU. Furthermore, you could always get text translated for cheap by hiring on Upwork or using Fiverr. So - don't get discouraged before you even get started! I'm thinking of giving this a try myself (probably after finding someone to do the actual execution - otherwise I'd never find the time).

Keep the dream alive! AM has a ton of profits potential. It's just a matter of testing different things. Best of luck!




Amy

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Thank you for the kind words and inspiration. Good to hear ecommerce is still far from saturation even in english geos Best of luck to you as well if you do find the opportunity to dabble in ecommerce.

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It’s been a while since I updated this thread — almost a year now. It’s been an interesting year, and I want to give an update on here and open new discussion on scaling my current operations.


Last August, the PINs I was running saw their last real burst of productivity. I spent a little time the next month or so trying to get those working well, but increased regulation and decreased motivation lead to a lack of productivity on my part. Then I moved to Chiang Mai, TH in November stayed there for 6 months, before 2 months in Bali. I’m now back in SoCal and happy to be here!


I went to AWA last December, which was a blast — it was great to meet the two of you, Amy and Matej, among so many other great people. I do wish I had been arriving there at a more productive time for myself, affiliate-wise, though.


With the beginning of the year, I decided I would make a go at tackling native, some solo and some with a few friends I’d made at AWA. I did that for about 3 months, and though I had a couple camps around -30% on a reasonable spend, I had a hard time finding any consistency there within my budget, especially coming off not really having any camps going. After losing a few k there over Q1, in April, I decided to switch back to adult traffic — but with dating, instead of PINs.


I finally started putting some actual work in, and dating starting going much better for me off the bat. I broke even on about $5k ad-spend April, then about $500 profit May, $700 June, just over $1k July but will probably only do about the same for August, maybe a little better. I’ve had numerous days of low XXX, only up to about $150, but not consistently as you can see the average is much lower.


It’s great to be profitable again, and even a little consistency, but almost 5 months with the vertical now, I need to pull some big levers to reach my goals — say relatively stable profit about 3-5x where it’s at now, in the next couple months. Then beyond from there.


So here we are: a year and a half since I started with paid traffic, and I’m definitely not a big-baller yet, haha. I found some momentum at the start, got real lazy for a bit, then have found green in other verticals now, just not quite where I need to get to. That being said, the past year was a blast, spending a good chunk of time exploring, meeting new people, etc. was something I certainly needed. I’m lucky enough to have some savings in the bank and some other income, that I don’t have to start getting more thoughtful about personal bills and stuff for at least the rest of the year.


In my time as an affiliate, at the least I’ve improved my workflow quite a bit (always room for improvement though), become a lot more proficient at making banners, and most importantly, I’ve stopped thinking in terms of daily ad-spend profits, ever since I started doing my books proper. It takes time to figure out, but daily profit doesn’t mean much if you have excessive overhead (tools, memberships, etc) or massive float (be that spread across aff networks, or unused traffic source pre-pays).


I want to get this down proper — where I can pay myself an appropriate market-based salary, while keeping the business itself profitable. Then with the option to pay myself bonuses, if performance is particularly good.


I’ve still got a long way to go to super-affiliate status, but I’m here to work for now, and hope to get more involved on STM again for accelerated learning and networking.


I’ll be starting another follow along, specific to dating shortly, with more details and some stats, and see if I can’t get some real volume going soon!


- Chris -

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Hey Chris!! It was amazing finally meeting you in person at AWA last year! And wow - does time fly!

Thanks for the detailed update! Paid traffic campaigns can certainly be inconsistent in terms of performance. A strong heart is required to survive all the ups and downs.

Looking forward to your follow along - and welcome back! So great to see you!



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Whats up Chris!

Still early in the journey my man, but its good that you've realised where you can go wrong... super important in this industry that when something is working you put all your effort into scaling it, campaigns don't last at all and when the profit is there you really need to take it to whether out any future storms or low periods that may come.

Great outlook here, self motivation in this business is a difficult part, no one really overlooking what you do and the solo time have to stay hungry!

It's a good sign that you've managed to find profit overall and I think you're hounding at the gates to go to the next level now.

Really the different from $150/days to $1500/days is just that mindset leap, accepting that you must run more traffic in order to make more. If you have a campaign working in one geo for a particular niche, only your own laziness will effect you here, this is where you test test test pick more offers similar stuff in other geos/other traffic sources and scale it our rapid fire, reinvest those profits into those campaigns and then soon enough you hit the $500 days and of course well beyond.

Hit it while its HOT, keep the process flowing in the down-time days campaigns will come just trust that process.

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