Mobile Affiliate! I'm such a noob! (7)
Hey guys, I used to work as an affiliate in 2009 - 2012 or so. I ran a lot of adult dating, bizopp and debt / edu lead gen back then. I had some moderate success, but I think my most profitable month was around 6 or 7k USD, so nothing that impressive. I only ran a handful of mobile offers for dating stuff, most of my work was on desktop.
Now I'm getting back into AM and trying to learn mobile ads (starting with pops since that seems to be what everyone recommends). I'm following the newbie tutorial by vortex, so I just got 3 campaigns up and running on Propeller Ads. Not much too look at, so just posting a screenshot of my
Running Nigeria, India and South Africa. No clicks yet. I doubled the CPM for the SA offer since it's technically a tier 2 geo and more competitive (I think?)
Not expecting much from these test offers. Just trying to learn the workflow for building campaigns and getting my feet wet again. I've signed up for a few different networks and traffic sources, so will try to branch out a bit once I feel more comfortable.
Good to be here and looking forward to sharing my progress.
Btw,
Good luck with your comeback, yes ZA is still competitive, one of the biggest advertiser there recently got serious problems and they are giving fines like crazy for iframing. That makes it less competitive then a few weeks ago. If I would start today, I would pick some offers in Middle east.
Since I posted that last screenshot, I setup a few more campaigns (KZ and another IN offer). I hit my $10 limits on all campaigns in Propeller Ads and got a total of 4 conversions combined for the different offers I set up. I cut all the offers that didn't convert and then went in and cut some zone placements that were deep in the red (I cut the top 3 here):
Will keep running the campaigns that converted and continue to cut placements. I'm going to go read some more of the resources on mobile pop on STM to find how everyone typically optimizes their campaigns, but I think I'll probably have to build some landers to pre-sell more. I've setup Amazon S3 and CloudFront for static hosting.
I also noticed that it's difficult to preview some of the offers in remote geos (they redirect to my current geo, for example), so I bought an overlpay membership so I can start to preview the offer flow for these.
My tasks for today will be to: build 3 - 5 more campaigns in different tier-3 geos and check the results, continue to cut zone placements that are far in the red, read more about mobile pop campaign optimization on STM.
After building 8 different campaigns using PropellerAds as my main traffic source and various mobile 1 or 2-click flow offers, I found a single offer that was converting quite well from direct linking alone, so I eliminated all the zones with poor profits (and still watching).
I also cloned three different landers and currently have them swapped into my campaign. Once I got the landers running, I also built two similar campaigns on both PopAds and ClickAdu to test different traffic sources and see if I can find a good traffic/offer/lander combo for this campaign.
Here are my results for PropellerAds:
And here are my results from PopAds campaign which I just setup an hour ago:
Note: I already did a bit of optimization on PropellerAds, so that should explain the better numbers on PopAds, but I think Propeller is slightly too expensive for me to get in the green on this specific offer. Any thoughts on that?
I'm still not profitable yet, but it seems like the offer is quite hot. What are the next things I should do to further optimize this campaign? Should I just wait a while and collect more data or should I be doing other stuff to bring it closer to profitability?
Also, what kinds of budgets do other people here usually use for their testing phase of mobile pop? I spent ~$100 on PropellerAds testing those 8 different offers and found a single offer in that batch worth focusing on. Was my budget too high for testing phase?
I think I spread myself a little wide on the offers I tested this round. I'm coming back into AM after a long break, so I just wanted to see what's available these days and get familiar with the campaign building process.
Going forward I think I'm just going to pick a single vertical (ex. AV) and then a single group of geos (ex. tier 3 countries in LatAm) and then 3 - 5 landing pages, and 3 traffic sources in my initial test phase. Then, from there I'll start cutting all of the big variables (geos, LPs, traffic source).
Open to any advice or critique of my process. Let me know how I can improve it!
Looks like the offer is performing pretty well, so that's good news 
1. Check if your traffic matches the desired targeting - proper carrier, device and GEO ... sometimes you need to alter the settings at traffic sources.
2. Look for any super bad performing targets : OS, device type ...
3. LPs and more LPs ... make sure to test more than 3 clones
4. more sources ... you're already doing so, that's good
5. bid levels and frequency capping - you can play with this too
Keep going, looking good so far
Originally Posted by matuloo
Should I start cutting all the devices with conversions that are in the red? Or is there some math I should employ here? Let me know.
Originally Posted by matuloo
Thanks again, all great advice.
When cutting large target groups like manufacturer, device type etc ... make sure you have good reasons for doing so, because it means you will sacrifice a large part of your volumes. Based on the screen you posted, I wouldn't cut any device, since even those that are read, are only slightly negative. Thats something you should be able to solve with better LPs. If the samsung devices showed 0 conversions, that would be a signal to cut.
Bid levels and capping : you can test different capping in the same campaign, just let it run long enough for the change to show its full effect. As for bids, you can also alter the bid and let the campaign run, but if you are about to compare several bid levels head to head, you need multiple campaigns for it.
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