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My Afflow Journey (7)

03-17-2017 05:17 AM #1 erikgyepes (Moderator)

Ouch that hurts (but maybe there will be more conversions coming in durin the upcoming hours/days).

However it's not so easy as it was illustrated in that guide, so I would take it with a grain of salt.

He might got quite lucky that he launched the test when there were more good offers at the moment, or simply get into those short windows when a good offer appears.

These days I find it's not easy even when you have a good data of what's working (my buddy is building a DB + custom reports on top of Afflow, but even with those data in place it's not easy to find offer that work)

The thing with Afflow is that offers have caps, day parting play and in this case low bids are picking just the bottom traffic that's nobody is bidding for.

I find myself much more luck just by reselling traffic to Afflow from my existing funnels and then sometimes if something is picking up I launch it directly.

It has much better success, but it's the opposite way (= you must have something that works already)

Anyway, let's see what your next test brings, make sure do some blacklisting of the zones that spend too much with 0 or very few conversions.

03-21-2017 01:19 PM #2 ph03nix (AMC Alumnus)

Hi brandonsharpe, I'm running similar campaign just like yours and the number conversion after $20 spent is not that good.
However, My Payne instructed us to pause GEOs with $5 spent and ROI worse than -75%.
I can see the cost for India and Indonesia is around $20 and the ROI is no where near that -75% threshold. Although there is a lot of conversions, should you pause those GEOs? India and Indonesia in my campaign are performing in a very similar manner by the way. lol
Looking forward to your stats after $100 spent. Thanks.

03-21-2017 02:54 PM #3 Mr Payne (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by ph03nix View Post
Hi brandonsharpe, I'm running similar campaign just like yours and the number conversion after $20 spent is not that good.
However, My Payne instructed us to pause GEOs with $5 spent and ROI worse than -75%.
I can see the cost for India and Indonesia is around $20 and the ROI is no where near that -75% threshold. Although there is a lot of conversions, should you pause those GEOs? India and Indonesia in my campaign are performing in a very similar manner by the way. lol
Looking forward to your stats after $100 spent. Thanks.


Yes, pause India and Indonesia after the first few dollars. They will consume your budget and usually don't produce much results.. but on occassion it does.



Andrew

03-22-2017 06:43 PM #4 Mr Payne (Member)

Good to see you're making some progress.

As another tip you can try for the geos that are converting and that you haven't paused, is check the time for those geo's and when it is somewhere between 12pm to 12am, manually increase the bid to .0002 to see if you get more traffic and if more conversions come in. You may have to increase it to .0003 but you get the picture.

BUT - don't make decisions too fast. If you change the bid, give it some time for the conversions and traffic to pick up, like 1 hour or so. Then consider your next move.

It's also a good idea to keep a log of what changes you are making and doing to which geos/campaigns/sources and write down the time you made those changes.

So you can revert back or atleast learn from your tests and decisions.



Andrew

03-22-2017 07:29 PM #5 priest (Member)

This method is good but it throws a lot of shit at the wall hoping for something to stick. I would start with a few high traffic GEOs that show some decent eCPMs. Look at your traffic source's inventory and compare the CPMs there to the potential earnings on Afflow. This will give you an idea of where there is some potential. Say the average bid in Country X is $0.80 and you are seeing eCPM for a certain carrier in Country X at $4.50, there might be some room to make money there. Obviously the bid for the carrier traffic will be higher, but when a good offer hits and that eCPM shoots up to $10+ for a specific vertical/offer, that's when you can make some profits.

The problem with Afflow is that you can only see stats from a few hours ago. However, you can get real time stats by picking a few good placements in your GEO and running that traffic to your Afflow link constantly. Most days you will lose a few bucks or break even on this campaign but when a good offer hits you will see it right away, and then you can open up your traffic and milk that bitch to death before the masses latch on.

To summarize, I would modify Mr Payne's method to only throw shit at the wall when there is some potential of it sticking. The potential is when there is a decent eCPM for that GEO in Afflow, a reasonably low cost for the traffic, and a decent volume of that GEOs traffic available at your traffic source.

03-23-2017 02:28 AM #6 brandonsharpe (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by priest View Post
This method is good but it throws a lot of shit at the wall hoping for something to stick. I would start with a few high traffic GEOs that show some decent eCPMs. Look at your traffic source's inventory and compare the CPMs there to the potential earnings on Afflow. This will give you an idea of where there is some potential. Say the average bid in Country X is $0.80 and you are seeing eCPM for a certain carrier in Country X at $4.50, there might be some room to make money there. Obviously the bid for the carrier traffic will be higher, but when a good offer hits and that eCPM shoots up to $10+ for a specific vertical/offer, that's when you can make some profits.

The problem with Afflow is that you can only see stats from a few hours ago. However, you can get real time stats by picking a few good placements in your GEO and running that traffic to your Afflow link constantly. Most days you will lose a few bucks or break even on this campaign but when a good offer hits you will see it right away, and then you can open up your traffic and milk that bitch to death before the masses latch on.

To summarize, I would modify Mr Payne's method to only throw shit at the wall when there is some potential of it sticking. The potential is when there is a decent eCPM for that GEO in Afflow, a reasonably low cost for the traffic, and a decent volume of that GEOs traffic available at your traffic source.
Thats pretty much the gist of Vortex's strategy right? I definitely will try that once I've reached my budget

07-05-2017 01:57 AM #7 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Wow Brandon....I'm so impressed I'm speechless!

You've been hustling hard. Very hard. That commands RESPEKT! Well done my friend!

Your lessons-learned are priceless - and will no doubt help other members.

Now I'm going to get over my awe - read your results in detail and comment on them. I'll TRY to refrain from pointing out stuff I agree with, or else we'd never get through this post. But I have a feeling I'll still want to praise parts that especially made an impression.


I created a mindmap of Vortex’s Afflow method to memorize it every step of the way. Each bubble is clickable with more notes
Wowsers!! Dedication!!


This is when I started to really get neck deep into marketing. I stopped going to clubs, dumped my girl, and stopped drinking with my friends to get as much free time to work as possible. I wanted to be successful so bad I didn’t even have an interest in any of it anymore. Before and after my day job I did nothing but look at spreadsheets. I was 21 living like I was 31.
Again - if this isn't dedication, I don't know what is. Sometimes in order to achieve something big, one needs to make sacrifices...

But I do hope your girl wasn't someone you could have spent the rest of your life with? There are sacrifices you can afford to make, and there are ones you can't - try not to do anything you'd regret later on.


In April I took this quote to heart and began testing everywhere. Literally everywhere, even the countries that I didn’t know existed or you can’t even see until you zoom in the map.
Again - really impressed by your dedication.


To keep myself from going insane I turned Afflow into a game.
Gamification! Very nice! I'll be implementing gamification to this forum very soon - so stay tuned!


I also began using my map to laser target campaigns. I found a website called http://sensorly.com/ which is basically a carrier coverage map. You could choose which carrier you wanted and then it would display data on the connection speed for whichever area you are looking at. So I would pin cities on the map by which carrier was highest performing there and then check the city/carrier data eCPM to verify. It was dead on nearly every time. So then I would create campaigns targeting only these cities with their best carriers.
Very, good, thinking!

Once you've verified that the city/carrier eCPM on afflow correlate with the actual results you were getting, then you won't need to check sensorly.com anymore. Is my thinking correct?


Scale. The biggest mistakes I’ve made were not scaling when I found profits. I should’ve scaled to more sources, tried adult traffic, and raised my bids when I found profits instead of trying to test so wide and waste time on countries that weren’t working or had irrelevant traffic.
If you have at least 1 profitable camp right now, try to use it to test other traffic sources, so that you can scale all future green camps to them.

I've talked about this extensively in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post317559


I believe it may have something to do with Zeropark’s new traffic type. Now splitting it between basic and premium. Ever since this switch my Zeropark campaigns have not been doing well.
It's always a good idea to have more traffic networks in your arsenal. And now would be as good a time as ever.


It is also difficult to manage so many campaigns without at least some basic automation. So I paused many campaigns and began studying code to help speed the process.
Wise words. It has become very difficult to make profits on pop traffic without having to juggle lots of campaigns. Without either automation or having a team working for you or both, you'll get burnt out quickly.


This month I am looking to expand. I’ve joined many more affiliate networks and traffic sources to create campaigns with traditional offers that will have higher payouts. I am now going through Adplexity, Afflow, and then my own data to laser target my campaigns. Also work is still in progress with automation tools. But I’d rather not talk openly about exactly what it is that we are planning to do.
While reading through everything you've written up to this point, this was exactly my advice for you: Start running individual offers using landers.

You've no doubt cut tons of placements in many geos. And you'll have the automation tool to speed things up. Now would be a good time to recap your investment - by increasing your ROI with individual offers.

(Also give the Kimia smartlink a try - it's the best I've come across so far in terms of offer rotators.)

It sounds like you know exactly what you're doing at this point. I'm very, very pleased and proud to see how far you've come in such a relatively short amount of time. You were completely new to paid traffic a few months ago. I would come across your old posts from time to time and wonder "where has Brandon gone to?" - and here you are and posting all these golden tips. Congrats, thank you, and I look forward to seeing how fast you'll meet and exceed your own goals and expectations.



Amy

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