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Pink Cat Popping Into The Green (32)

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My goal with this follow-along is to share my early learning phase as transparently as possible. With all the amazing people here on STM I know I'll learn a lot. But I'd also like this to be quality archive material for anyone else willing to read through this in the future & maybe learn from my progress.

I have no intentions of stopping until I see green. And really, that's just the beginning!

My goal with this follow-along is not to make any set amount.

Instead my goal is to internalize & truly understand the fundamentals of affiliate marketing w/ paid traffic. Earning money is an indicator of this. However the numbers don't matter as much right now. Instead I'm starting this follow-along with the aim of building my skillset in a few areas:

1. Learning how to test properly & gauge offers
2. Figuring out what makes a good(or bad) lander
3. How to study tracking metrics and how to optimize/scale offers
4. Creating an optimal daily routine to learn affiliate marketing

Generally speaking I should be able to work on affiliate marketing every day & I will update this thread accordingly. I plan to launch at least 1 offer a day, if not more, and consistently update this follow-along multiple times per week.

I am trying to be transparent and honest about all of my progress/questions. I know this helps me but it may also help anyone else willing to read this in the future.

So that's my little spiel. But I know actions speak a lot louder than words. In my next post I'll share where I am right now with testing and where I'm going from here.

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-27% ROI from direct linking is a good start! I'd definitely start testing that offer more, yes - but also keep testing other offers too.

Good work on sharing all the details of what you're trying here. That really helps us to help you.

First thing I'd suggest on the landers: leap into your spy tool and see if you can find what other people are running with this offer! Competitive research is always job #1.

Second thing: have a good look at the direct-linked lander that the offer is using. You may need to ask your AM to forward you an image of it or give you a link. Since it's working decently, have a look and see what it's doing.

Third thing: have you done any placement cutting on this offer yet? If not, running a bot test and a round of placement cuts, cutting things that don't convert, might well be enough to put you in the green.

Looking forward to your next results!

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You can check for this before launching your campaign, PopAds has an inventory of traffic per geo + you can review an estimate of the available traffic with your options & bid.

Don't forget to search Adplexity to see what traffic source your competition is making the campaign work on.

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hi,
nice to see that you are growing up.
but the ctr is so low.you should find out the reason.it is very hard to make money with this ctr

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Hey thanks both of you for the advice sorry I didn't see it! Again it's been a looong while since my last update. Hopefully I can start closing that gap.

So it's been all of June and the entire month ran blood red across all my sweeps campaigns. The two biggest issues I've had are finding offers that convert, and keeping my domain from getting flagged. My landers with the best results were always those quiz-style landers themed like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple etc. Naturally Google finds these deceptive so after a while my whole domain gets flagged.

Towards the end of June this got so bad that my domains were being flagged in 24hrs or less. I'd prefer not to cloak so I've kinda run myself out of sweeps at the moment... currently I'm testing adult carrier offers which seem to convert very well && run little risk of being flagged by Google.

I've only started adult over the past 4-5 days and have already found some pretty decent offers. But the biggest problem is traffic volume. I never thought that adult carrier traffic would be so small but I have trouble spending $50/day in banner impressions on Exoclick. I'm running 300x100 banners along with some pops to adult offers, some direct but most with landing pages. This makes it tough to gather data because $50/day is not very useful to know which offer/lander performs best, nor if I should scale to 300x250/pops.

But here are screens from offers I'm optimizing(both in LATAM). This is from one offer with just today's data so far:



This one is just for today's data for my best performing offer. I'm only looking at today because I made a bunch of changes to cut landers and banners so this is a fresh set of data after those changes.

The data isn't super significant with only about ~$42 dollars spent. But across two landers I'm seeing CVs and my best offer+lander+banner hits around -4% which is surprising. I've cut no placements yet so this is probably the best data I've found compared to any sweeps camp I've ever run. But again, the data is small since I can only spend maybe $50/day even with crazy high bids(Smart CPMs at $3.00 and higher do nothing).

I've already selected my best offer which does convert very well, plus my "best" lander pulled from the Statistical Significance calculator. I put "best" in quotes because it's not 99% stat sig but I can't wait days to collect enough data to be 99% positive. All I know is they both convert, and one converts slightly higher than the other. I'm running all traffic to this offer+lander while testing 2 of my top banners. I may add a few others but if I can get green like this I'd like to cut placements and test more offers instead.

Here's a shot from my 2nd camp which I've been running a little longer(maybe 4-5 days). I started with maybe 7-8 offers and five landers but I ultimately whittled down to the best offer+lander. This screen is from half a day(-ish) of data for this combo:



Typically this camp hits 20-35 CVs per day but I've cut a few of the other offers. Almost every offer I tested for this campaign converted at least a couple times which made cutting even more difficult.

But once I realized I wasn't gonna get much traffic I started making liberal cuts. So far today my best lander is -29% and my best offer+lander+banner is basically breakeven.

I haven't cut placements for any of these offers so these are just small tweaks based on data. They seem to convert very well so I'm glad I started testing adult. The biggest problem is lack of traffic volume for these 3G carriers. But either way I'm glad to not be buying new domains every day just to fix flagged landers!

I'll update this a little more often(I tell myself) but if anyone has advice for 3G/carrier adult offers I'm all ears. Will still be running pops for this stuff but since banners offer better lead quality I'm getting my feet wet in there too. Shoutout to chris_climbs for his amazing progress in adult that ultimately led me here--as beginners we're all kinda stumbling around blind, deaf & dumb so it's nice to feel like I'm making progress even if it's baby steps.

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Hello pinkcat

Adult can still work pretty well with PIN submits, so you made a good choice

I don't understand the low spend thou, I'm buying 3G traffic from exo and don't face such a problem. Can you tell me what GEOs you are targeting? Just the rough size of it, don't need to know the exact GEO.

Volume can be an issue with POPs but they usually have a ton of banner impressions available - especially with the 300x250 footers, but those can be of low quality on some sites and in some GEOs - it's not a rule though, definitely test them, I've done a lot of volume there. Are you targeting premium spots only or RON too?

How much are you bidding for banner traffic? A tip regarding the bid estimator on exo for you : make sure you also pick a browser, or the numbers can be skewed quite a bit.

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Hey thanks matuloo! The traffic volume confused me too, I'm only running 300x100 banners right now but I've tested them in quite a few geos like MX, BR, PE, CL, and AR + a side test in TH. None of these geos would spend more than $4-$7 per hour even at crazy high bids.

I tested Smart CPMs set to $3.00 running for hours, I was left spending maybe $0.30 eCPM and it would not go higher.

These screens are from Exoclick's traffic estimator so you can see the size I'm working with + how much I'm getting. Note "yesterdays impressions" are lower than what I really got, but my numbers are not too much higher than these stats. Also my size is limited because I'm not just running on a geo, I'm running a geo+carrier. So for example I wouldn't run all Brazil 3G traffic but rather Brazil Claro 3G traffic. I know this lowers my total volume but the numbers still feel off, and I've seen low volumes across 4-5 LATAM geos which means either I'm doing something wrong(very possible) or these geos don't have much carrier traffic.



I know I'm getting very low % of the total volume but I've tested more than just upping the bid.

I tried high bid($2-$3 CPM) along with no frequency cap or 1/1(so 1 unique visit per hour). Neither of these made a huge difference at all. Plus I've changed from "Premium Sites" to "All Sites" and this did make a difference for some geos, but only maybe $5-$15 per day extra in banner impressions.

It seems like no matter what I try I can't seem to hit Exoclick's estimated values. Even at crazy high bids, no frequency cap, no blocked segments/placements, and full RON I can maybe hit 38% total volume on a good day. But if you say this isn't normal then it's gotta be something I'm doing wrong cause I wanna be spending more!

Although I did not know to set the browser in Exo when bidding so thanks for that tip my friend it's something I'll test going forward and hopefully I can figure out why my volumes/estimations are so low.

For the record, the two screens above are campaigns from different geos but they're each bidding $0.25 CPMs with 1/24 frequency capping. Both have eCPMs below $0.25 so I'm not even paying what I'm bidding, I assume that means I'm the highest bidder in both geos. And both are premium-only because I didn't see much from doing a RON but if you think it'd make a difference I'll try that.

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Hi thepinkcat.

I am still new in the business, but I just want to comment in your first camp (the one with Arabic landers). I would say that the landers are poorly translated (yes it's correct in terms of grammar and spelling) but for a native Arabic speaker that should look stupid

Also, every Arabic country has it's own accent and it's widely differs from country to another. so may be speaking in an Egyptian accent was one key to get a better conversion.

I know you already dropped this camp you no longer need this, but I just want to give an idea that may help you in the future.

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I would first test different banner formats to get more of the available overall inventory.

Then I would try to setup new campaigns with the same targeting, sometimes your camp has a bad reputation or gets blocked from high traffic placements.

Then I would try to setup a new account and test if you get more traffic if you run the same camp from several accounts.

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Hey thanks Sebastian, I have setup multiple new camps in many different geos and they all barely push 30% or higher. My account is also fairly new, I created my Exo account the same time I joined STM so I can't imagine why my account would be throttled.

What I noticed is that my ads get categorized as VOD/players and Exoclick says that some publishers may not run these ads. Here's a screenshot from a camp I was running all day yesterday, barely hit 25% of the estimated volume for one 3G carrier.



So is it possible that the VOD offers get blocked on lots of publisher sites? Could that be why I'm getting such small traffic volumes? I think the most I've ever seen was 36% of estimated traffic which does seem really low, not to mention I can't imagine why publishers would block the VOD offers.

But regardless I do have some interesting data and I'll post that in my following update.

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Right now I'm seeing an offer that converts surprisingly well. It not only converts the most out of my total set(I tested ~7 offers) but it also pays the highest.

This makes it tougher to gauge stat sig because the calculator only looks at total traffic & conversions. It seems tough to compare offers with totally different payouts because one conversion for an offer could 2x-4x higher than another offer, even with far more CVs. Thankfully my highest-converting offer also pays out way higher than others.

Here is traffic data of my best four offers spanning just over $100 spend across all of them.



I'm thinking it's safe to assume the 1st offer is the best. But is it? I mean, it's already green! I did zero optimization whatsoever, just ran traffic across a few generic adult landers.

Now the issue is when I started running traffic just to that offer. I figured it was worth breaking away from the other offers to see if this green ROI would hold. I know data can skew once you send more traffic to an offer so I was expecting a good dip. Overall it dropped to about -20% but the best lander did just about breakeven(-1%). I ran with two tested landers that converted well before but I haven't tested any other landers yet.

Here's the data over a $60 spend, $30 for each lander:



I plan to build a handful of landers today and start running more traffic ASAP. From there I'm hoping I can find a green lander with this offer, then cut placements for a decent ROI.

But I've got a couple questions on this:

1. How do I gauge if this is really the best offer? Some offers in my test had $0.50 or $0.75 payouts where my green offer above converted at $2.00. So looking at a stat sig tool seems disingenuous because even a higher-converting offer might be red while this one was green. Is there any good way to compare high variations of payouts in different offers?

2. Is there anything else I should try for optimizing this offer into the green? I feel lucky I stumbled onto this without much optimization but I don't feel like I really learned much so far. I know offer+lander has the biggest impact so that's obviously where I'm starting the optimization but if anyone has suggestions I'm always open.

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In this case it's really clear that the highest paying offer is the winner, it brought in the most conversions and it pays way more too ... you also sent enough conversions, so it couldn't be a coincidence. I would definitely continue with that one offer.

As you said yourself, it's quite common to see a performance drop, once you send more traffic to an offer - but this can balance itself out with more volume.

What I would do is this : send more traffic, use multiple landers and look at the placements and targeting options ... standard optimization to find a funnel that would work well with this particular offer.

Is this RON traffic or just from some premium sites?

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Right now I'm running premium sites only. Once I've got a nice funnel I plan to switch over to RON and ideally scale to a few other adult sources.

I've got a round of landers going now and 2-3 are comfortably in the green. I'm looking more at optimizing banners + landers for the moment, although Android clearly converts higher than iOS so I did cut that segment. For placements I haven't seen too many that are 2x spend with zero CVs so I've been hesitant to cut placements. Will keep an eye on those going forward.

But for targeting options anything else you recommend looking at beyond OS? This offer runs on a single carrier and it's 3G only so I'm not sure what else to look at besides maybe the device brands.

Either way today's looking awesome it's my very first green day EVER. And I'm still optimizing!



In case anyone ever bothers to read this sad little followalong: I started running traffic April 1st 2017. It's now mid-July and I just hit my very first green day. That's over 3 months of losing money before seeing anything decent, and I still don't know if I'll be able to properly scale this thing but it looks very promising.

Biggest point is don't give up. $13 profit isn't anything but it's the fact that I'm learning how this all works that's the most exciting part.

Will post further updates once I can get this optimized and (ideally) scaled.

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When you see one OS performing way differently than the other, try to target them in separate campaigns - you might find that it will work better with a different funnel ... always remember one thing, when you cut something, the volume is gone... so try to find a way to make it work, before cutting it for good

I'm glad that you see some green finally, it's not much as you mentioned yourself, but the good thing is, you have several green LPs, which leaves you with a solid base to build on - it's always better to have multiple versions of everything than having to rely on just one (be it LP, banner or whatever).

Besides OS, I've seen browser types having a big impact, try to look at that too.

Banners can be very powerful too, I've seen it times and times again in adult ... the right female on the banner can turn a heavily losing campaign into green Definitely test more banners too. That's what I would focus on right now, the LPs+offer combo seems to work, now try to get more traffic by using the right banners.

You can also start using more sources, not sure where you are running now, but there are several decent sources in adult for banner traffic.

Keep going, you're very close!

Matej.

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Big congrats on the green! It might look like a small number now, but it's a big milestone.

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Boom!

Nice to see you getting some green.

First thing i would try is to test new offers that accept the other carriers as well.

So you keep running your winning offer with the carrier it takes...and you test new offers for the other carriers.

Would as well try the funnel with pops (same funnel + targeting) on exo.

As well higher budget / bid to get more traffic.

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Also want to share a minor victory(so far) with a small camp in a fairly small geo. It's also carrier billing and even though I'm bidding a high smartCPM I'm only able to spend maybe $15-$20/day for one banner format. But without any optimization I've got a couple offers green:



These are the four that converted best and it's clear that three are working very well. Offer #3 has slightly lower spend because I added it later into the camp, but I'm debating cutting #3 & #4 to just run against the two green offers.

No optimization on this one so I've just been running with a set of banners & landers over a few days. Tough to spend a lot so gathering data took a while. That's why I think once I cut down to a single offer I'm gonna notice a steep drop in ROI(this happened on my other green camp too, it immediately went from green to red once it was receiving 100% of the traffic).

For this I'll be following similar advice for optimization. It'll just take more time to find the best creatives. Not sure I'll be able to scale this much but even if it can do $10-$20/day I'd be psyched. So I've got a few offers that are definitely converting right now & I hope by my next update I'll be able to share my 2nd official green day.

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Hello again

I'm glad to see that you are still in the game and actually seeing some progress Glad that I could help on your way!

It's about finding the right combination really, so you can try to play with both ... sometimes it helps to change the banner, sometimes it's the LP ... really hard to say what it's gonna be in your case. But, whatever you decide to do, take it one step at a time

You can use a small trick here, users don't really look at all the thumbnails, well most of them anyways ... so to quickly check whether you can reach any solid results with these changes, just swap the first line of them, or try to put one or two large ones close to the top and test various images there ... it should give you a good idea about how big effect this can have and whether it's worth the hassle.

Yup, this step is clear.

Correct again, try what I suggested above.

Once you are confident that your funnel is solid, you can be more strict than that... it's pointless to keep running on strongly negative placements when you see way better performance on the other ones.

Yup, it's a good idea to build a solid funnel first, then scale it ... this approach will give you the much needed confidence and save you a lot of trouble. Images on LPs matter a lot, adult is a visually intensive vertical, based on impulse behavior so yeah, images matter a lot ... but not as much as on the banners, that's where you fight for the attention of the user the most ... LPs come after it.

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Matuloo strikes again! Thank you my friend. I've got a few other q's about angles if you(or anyone else!) has advice.

I edited just the first few rows of thumbnails on my best lander. So far this hasn't made a difference but I've only tried two different angles(1. blonde women, 2. college orgy/gangbang). I also added a totally new lander into the mix. The offer is just under $0.50 payout and it's been converting well. So far I've done over 10x spend on all new landers and here are the results:



The new lander seems to convert the best although it hasn't reached stat sig yet. The different angles I created don't seem to make a difference.

What I'm wondering is generally how this offer looks & if the right angle would even make a difference with total ROI. This offer definitely converts and over the past week it's just below breakeven. I have not seen any of my newer banners dominating older ones although some convert better than others. It just seems like nothing is blowing this out of the water or making any drastic difference. LP08 from my screenshot has me hopeful but $1.50 profit isn't much & I know that number will drop once I send 100% traffic to just that lander.

My questions:

1. Is there any rule for testing landers/banners knowing when to cut? I've done 10x-12x for these landers before comparing stat sig but should I be running them longer? Same with banners, how long should I wait for spend data before cutting & replacing? Especially if they're all kinda lukewarm performing at a similar rate.

2. Would the right angle help a camp like this go from breakeven to +20% or +30%? Is it really just a matter of testing different angles with new photos? How do you know if an offer is a dead end vs. the offer having potential to flip green?

All the success I've had from adult carrier has been luck so far. I've never needed to mess with angles so this is new to me. But is it mostly just about testing dozens(or hundreds) of banners/landers to get a combo that consistently works?

I'm thinking of hiring someone from Upwork to do all the image cropping because it's tiring to stare at porn for hours every day. I've been brainstorming angles hoping one of them fits but I don't know if new photos are enough to get this green. How many new angles/creatives do you go through to optimize from -10% into +10% or more? After a dozen angles would it be safe to move on and try new offers?

Struggling to figure out how the optimization process works b/c it seems like the idea of "angles" in adult is simpler than angles in other verticals. With adult it seems like the "angle" is just the type of picture(closeup, from behind, amateur) and the content(black on white, red heads, BJs).

This makes sense but I'm not sure if swapping a different chick or a different style(ie. from behind, black on white, older MILFs etc) could really affect an offer like this to get it confidently green. But I'm willing to try dozens of angles if that's typically required to flip green.

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1. Cut at stat sig, if you can. At this point, don't think so much about "multiples of payout", just put the numbers into a calculator and cut at stat sig. If they're really close in performance, either run the 'best' few performers together (e.g. with your banners, its usually best to have 2-3 working at a time) or just cut down to one and carry on testing. If all the creatives are luke warm, you could try testing VASTLY different styles, or maybe you're near a kind of max CR for your offer. For images, consider amateur (local-ish looking) girls, and/or semi-taboo type stuff (not necessarily NASTY though) -- both seem to work well.

You don't need to rip all these new images yourself!! Just steal some 300x250 'play video' type banners from adplex (take a look at nearby countries to your GEO, and sort by "new" you can find lots of interesting stuff), and just pop those into your lander. That one fast way


2. In my limited experience, these offers aren't so much about "angle" anyway. You just need a funnel that lends itself to high CTR, and keep the user engaged till they click that confirm button. The images make a big difference, but there's not a ton of ways to approach these as far as I can see. I've personally seen numerous camps where the offer does DECENT but lukewarm across various funnels. I've only personally solved it by finding a new offer, or maybe some blacklisting if appropriate. There is a point of serious diminishing returns in optimizing the shit out of something that is only has the potential to make a few bucks a day (this point could be quite subjective).


very curious to hear what matuloo's thoughts are too!

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Chris gave you very good advice, especially this part here :

The thing is, with carrier billing offers, the image itself is actually the funnel in a way Adult is a visual vertical, so the image speaks louder than a few words. It also has to click with the LPs, they should work hand in hand.

It's funny and hard to believe I know, but a single image can turn a losing campaign green ... try to test things like certain type of females : don't go for "black on white, red heads, BJs" ... rather think like : Chubby amateurish looking 30+ girl with large tits ... and look at specific setups : for example images shot at home, in kitchen, doing laundry ... the girls don't even have to be fully nakes, let alone doing some hardcore "activity"

So yes, I would definitely try to spend more times on the images ... you need to find something that the people NEED to see ... it could be a girl that reminds them of their school teacher, or a neighbor ... or show them something so ridiculous that they have to click it ... think about all the retarded animations you can see online.

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So far things are lookin pretty good for October!

These stats are from yesterday w/ one offer running across two formats on Exo, opened both up to RON. Looks like about $50 profit for the day. My plan is to scale this into TrafficJunky and maybe a couple other sources(TrafficFactory, TrafficForce, JuicyAds?)

No idea how long this will last but I think it's working and I'd like to milk it. Here's my setup & plan for the next few days:

- Currently running 3 LPs all in the green so I figure it's worth keeping all 3 in rotation

- Also running 4 banners@ 300x100 with all of them green, planning to keep all 4 running in rotation

- For 300x250 banners I've got 5 in rotation and 4 are clearly green, one is closer to -10% but could flip green w/ more traffic. I may try swapping in some new 300x250 banners to see if I can improve ROI

- Have not needed to cut many placements b/c most of them are converting. But I am looking for placements hitting 1.5x spend with 0CVs and will cut those immediately

- Both Android & iOS are green so there isn't much to cut for OS'. Same with devices most of them are working well


If anyone has advice for scaling this thing I'm happy to try any suggestions. But the biggest thing(and most confusing thing) I noticed is sporadic conversions between each day... meaning that some days it'll perform way better than other days. I'm guessing this is normal for adult? Like one day I might hit 130% ROI and the next day I'd do closer to 50% ROI, exact same funnel & offer. The total # of conversions seems to vary so adult carrier offers do not seem "stable" at a certain amount per day(ie. $100/day every single day consistently seems tough with these offers).

I'll update more once I have stats for the coming days & of course once this campaign eventually dies I'll update on my total earnings. But it looks like I've got a winner and it's been a long time coming!

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For an overview here's my three-day total running this offer across both formats(added 300x250 late so it has less spend)

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Great going, the ROI is looking very good

It's quite normal to see unstable conversions, especially with lower volume and in competitive spots/sources, where your positions change across the day, based on the competing bids.

You can scale this to other sources for sure, but since this is a carrier billing offer, it will be a bit tough as not all the big sources support it ... for example trafficfactory and trafficjunky are out. Try also trafficstars, traffichaus, ero-advertising ... sources like plugrush and juicyads can work too. If the funnel is solid, also test POP traffic.

- There are also more banner formats, test them all.
- Open the cap, increase bids, un--block placements that you've cut during the optimization process.
- Sometimes the carrier targeting is off on exo, you might want to test IP ranges.

Go all in on this, who knows how long it's gonna last

Matej.

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Another update, this is what I've got for the past week:



The offer is still going green as of today and hasn't slowed too much. My overall ROI has dropped but that's from testing a few other camps with duds.

Still with this carrier camp I've seen some weird days with large fluctuations. But every day has been green @ $10-$50 profit/day.

A few things I've noticed with carrier offers:

1. Really not much traffic(at least for this geo) even running many formats on 4 different networks. I'm still struggling to spend $100+/day which means this offer likely won't ever hit xxx/day

2. Lots of fluctuations. Some days the 300x250 format will do 100% ROI while the 300x100 will be in the red, other days exact opposite. Then some days all formats are green. I'm guessing this is normal?

3. Since traffic is limited it seems like I'd need a bunch of these carrier offers going at one time just to do decent profits.

Those minor complaints being what they are, I'm beyond thrilled to have a green camp going. But I'm surprised how difficult this is to scale. The target geo is fairly small already(around 15MM population) but I can only run this on one carrier so the pool is even smaller.

I'll continue running this into the ground but I'm left wondering how to proceed. Basically is carrier adult worth continuing? It definitely works, but would it be easier and/or more profitable to switch into adult dating? What about switching to a different TS like Facebook, Bing, or Native(running non-adult offers)?

I'd like to get a few more camps green in adult first just to prove this one green camp isn't a fluke. But is it currently easier to push adult dating than carrier? Or are both areas equally difficult to flip green?

Anyone with an opinion is more than welcome to weigh in!

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I have not tried adult traffic sources yet. My initial casino offers last month had restrictions on adult traffic. I'm running a couple now and one of them allows it so maybe I can test there.

I'm also familiar that there's traffic beyond pops but it seems riskier than trying to scale on Pops. I have no blacklists for native and I don't have $10k free capital to try it. I also don't see any display banners running on AdSense sites or anywhere else promoting these casino offers so I have no creatives to spy on. Same goes for push notifications. I'm sure these traffic types can work but I have absolutely no idea how to leverage them--I'd be walking in cold and I'm almost certain I'd be eaten alive

My plan is to try sweeps + casino just on pop/redirect traffic. If other people can be doing $500/day profit on sweeps/pops then surely I could get there. Question is what I'm doing wrong and what I'd need to do differently.

What I'm wondering right now is the compatibility of each traffic source. For example, if I run 10x-20x payout on Adcash and wind up at -60% does that mean Adcash just isn't gonna work? Meaning if none of the placements are really "good" then maybe that TS just isn't gonna work for that offer? Or is it something wrong with my testing?

Here's an example of me trying to scale one of my offers last month(no longer running this). It's all Adcash data, spent around $170 to make back $70 rev. -58% ROI. OS/device/etc already optimized as best as it could be. Should I have kept running this and just blacklisting placements hoping for the best? Or was this traffic source gonna be an uphill battle to get positive ROI?




I find myself in a weird position where I can kinda get months green($500-$800 profit) but I cannot seem to scale offers and get them doing $200/day, $300/day, etc. I either wind up with results like above with just not enough conversions, or the offer does convert but all of the placements are in the red. For example, a placement that has 10 conversions but sits at -30% isn't much better than a placement at -100%. Either way it's losing money and I don't seem to understand how to flip it all green.

Could be my offer, or the sources I'm testing, or just my lack of optimization knowledge. Hopefully if I keep dropping some data in here we can figure that out and get me moving on the right track!

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Maybe you don´t make anything wrong or need to do anything different.
In the end it all comes down to lander+offer combination.
I had a casino camp running on Adcash recently in a Geo of less than 5 Million, that campaign made about $400-$450/day with more than 300% ROI without any optimization.
The problem you have on Adcash is that Adcash is a DSP and when you create a campaign by default all SSPs are selecetd.
That means in Tier2/Tier3 Geos you will receive tons of traffic and first you need to weed out the crap and that can cost lots of money.
Also Adcash doesn´t have SmartCPM and with their fixed CPM bids you also can pay way too much for crap placements.
I have my own flow to test on specific sources and when I have a good working funnel I scale to the more complicated sources like Adcash.
When you have a managed account at Adcash you can also run campaigns on CPA, that way you can control the costs pretty good and at the same time collect black- and whitelists.

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If after all the optimizations you still see 50-60% negative numbers ... but you are getting solid amount of conversions, there is some problem with the funnel. Getting conversions makes it possible to block the worst positions/placements so you can be certain the traffic is at least decent. Then it's about finding the right creatives and offers for it to work.

Bidding can also be the problem, as twinaxe suggested, especially when there are not Smart bidding options ... the right bid can definitely make the 30% difference, it's probably not gonna turn your -60% campaign into +50% but slightly losing placements could become profitable indeed.

It's also true that some combinations simply wont work no matter what you try ... some offers simply don't work with POPs, or at least not good enough for it to be worthwhile, or it's the LP that makes it impossible to profit, maybe the offer lander is not strong enough ... it's hard to give you specific advice, you got the data and you see the funnel, so try to identify the problem and tweak it.

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The way I see it: Pop traffic is good for low barrier to entry, and ease of learning how to run camps. But the downside is that scaling can be difficult because the traffic is fragmented, and many offers that are suitable for running on pop don't last very long at all (because they're shady in nature).

But if you already have experience with pop, and don't yet have the budget to tackle native or FB etc., I would recommend the following:

-Choose a hot vertical that has many good offers, and many landers to rip on Adplexity. Read this report for inspiration:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...keting-in-2018

Sweeps is doing fine, so is casino. So your choices are good.

-Find out which affiliate networks are the best for the vertical you've chosen. Google, do a search on STM, ask around, look in spy tools, etc. Join these affiliate networks.

-Talk to everyone (AMs, other affiliates, etc.) and do research using spy tools such as Adplexity, and make a list of geos that seem to have the most numbers of good offers. Exclude geos that don't have much traffic on the major pop networks - while small geos may be great for newbies, the scalability is not there for someone like yourself who already has experience.

-Use a quality traffic source such as PopAds or PropellerAds for initial testing to conserve test budget - test 5-10 landers (fixed up well and optimized for speed and display) to find winner. Use the winning lander to test best offers (AM-recommended offers, offers recommended by other affiliates, offers that have promising stats in spy tools). As long as you're not losing horrific amounts of money in this process, continue with the testing, because this is the investment stage - you're looking for a decent lander + a great offer to make enough of the traffic profitable, so you could cut the unprofitable parts later.

Optional: You can do a bot test at the very start by taking what you feel might be the best lander and offer (based on aff network stats or spy tool stats or even gut-feeling) and running some traffic to eliminate the biggest and most bot-infested placements. 60 impressions per placement is enough, so what you could do is bid real low and keep refreshing stats and blacklisting placements that have reached 60 impressions. And do this until you feel you've identified all the biggest and worst ones. After that, set up the actual campaign with multiple landers and offers. I find it a lot less complicated to do the bot test first and then run the actual offer+lander split-testing.

Also: You can choose to cut placements from the start of the lander+offer split-testing. Doing so will help you save on testing but will restrict the traffic volume you get, however the latter is of less concern if you're running in larger geos. I would highly recommend using an automation tool such as theoptimizer.io for this purpose especially if you're operating in larger geos that have a ton of placements. And set the cut-off to be aggressive - 1x payout or 0.5x payout. You can always retest the bigger blacklisted placements later on when your camp is profitable running on the best lander+offer.

-Once you feel you've done enough testing to find a promising lander+offer combination, see if you have enough profitable placements or other traffic segments (OSs browsers etc.) to be making worthwhile daily profits from the camp. If so, keep cutting towards green, and start scaling to other networks (and cutting placements aggressively from the start as well). If not, either test more offers and/or landers, or test another geo.


In short: 10x-20x payout may or may not be enough to gauge potential of that geo+vertical+TS. And whether -60% ROI is too low to keep optimizing or not will also depend on the geo+vertical+TS.

What you're looking for when trying to identify whether there's potential or not for a given geo+vertical: If I've tested many of the AM-recommended offers on at least the 3-4 aff networks known to be strong in the particular vertical, on a traffic source I know has high-quality traffic relative to other sources for that traffic-type (PopAds and PropellerAds are good examples), I would look at conversion stats for traffic segments like placements/OSs/browsers/etc. to see how much of the total traffic the best offer+lander can make green, and go from there.

If I've tested many of the best offers on good quality traffic and STILL can't get enough green, I'd know there are easier campaigns to tackle. Mind the 80/20 rule.

If I DO see enough green segments/placements, then I know that further cutting of the unprofitable stuff will likely result in a green campaign with worthwhile profits.

Your example of 10x-20x payout: If the geo is large and has a ton of big placements, 10-20x payout may not give us enough stats to observe whether you have enough green segments to justify cutting further. AND that is assuming you had already split-tested landers and offers to find a good combo!

Your example of -60% ROI: If the geo is large and has a ton of placements, and you haven't started cutting heavily, then -60% ROI REALLY isn't bad! Because even after cutting all the way to green, you may still end up with 3-4 figures a day in revenue (even 5 figures in the biggest geos) if there's enough traffic and you have a good enough offer.

Lastly: Once you have a good campaign to scale, invest in testing lots of different traffic sources! The more good sources you have access to, the faster and bigger you can scale your next profitable campaign. For a simple method please see the section "Applying to More Pop Networks" in this thread:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...liate-Networks



There are many other things that can give you an edge, like access to exclusive offers and account managers on traffic sources. But those will only be accessible once you're running volume - and my advice above may just get you there!




Amy

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Wow thanks to everyone! I think Amy's post may take the gold here--so much value in that. I'm gonna need to re-read it a few times to get it all!

But I did take Mat's advice and launch on adult. Waiting to hear back from Adnium for CC approval but I got up on Exo and already flipped it green. Here's yesterday's stats for that:




Overall I think I'll keep up with testing sources to see if I can get an offer doing xxx/day. That's not a lot but it's enough that I could save up some money to get into a budget for native.

Biggest problem with pops that I've found(aside from sources/scaling) is handling flagged LPs and aggressive angles without automation. It's really tough. Manually swapping out domains once they're flagged is super frustrating, especially if you've got 30+ camps on many different traffic sources. You've gotta keep checking every few hours to make sure you aren't running traffic to a redscreen. And it doesn't help that almost every pop vertical works best with aggressive LPs that'll always get flagged.

I've been lucky enough to get this far and really do appreciate all the help

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Oooh congrats on the green! Now try scaling that to a few other adult sources - there are MANY! I would make that my highest priority if I were you. Always focus on the activity that has the highest chances of bringing in the most profits. Don't spread yourself too thin.

(When the camp dies, yes you'll need to start testing again from $0 profits, but at least you milked the profitable camp all you could before it did. Over time, this approach will very likely net you more profits than taking time out from scaling, to set up more test camps for new offers. At the very least, throw the camp on the 5 major sources first.)

And regarding the chrome flagging, have you seen this fresh-off-the-press guide from thedudeabides?

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...hrome-flagging




Amy

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There we go Adult is overlooked by many, people tend to forget that it's still the same users that are searching in google during the day Obviously, there are usage limits to this traffic ... but it's always clever to test it. Great going!

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