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Trying to make PopAds - Afflow work | Newbie's First Campaigns (8)

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Hi All,

After watching Zeno's AMC Free Mini Course Video #1: The 4 Simple Stages to Mastering Paid Traffic and reading Vortex's Amazing Afflow tutorials, I finally decided to start my AM journey with this Arbitrage.

1. I started by researching Geo+Carrier+Vertical Combo as Vortex's Part 3-4 Tutorial. These combos have High eCPM even right now (at the time of posting this thread)



2. Day before Yesterday, I launched a Campaign on PopAds for $10/day targeting the GEO-Carrier combo and made a link on Afflow targeting APPSDL vertical only and exit/bounce pop targeting all verticals.



Stats:
More than 1 conversion:

More than 100 impressions:



Spent: $15
Revenue: $4.65
Profit: -$10.35

Optimization:
1. eCPM in the Afflow Planner of KR's main offer has decreased to 0.35 where as in AU, the eCPM is still high at 25, so I paused KR traffic.
2. OS data in AU is still less, so did nothing there.
3. Actual eCPM of AU is 1.28 and CPM I am paying is $2.7. Don't know what to do.


Questions:
1. Using the 'Traffic estimator' in PopAds a good way to decide the bid, As I use it to maximize impressions in the estimator? If not, then what
2. In General, If traffic is going to High eCPM offers, then at what ROI% should I stop testing a particular GEO+ Carrier combo. ( I have read Vortex tutorial multiple times, still not able to answer this)
3. What things should I focus on, so that even if Afflow campaigns fail, I learn something useful?

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Hey!

South Korea is not an easy GEO to work in. Since the performance is unstable (in some days you receive conversions, some others - not), probably there is not that much traffic and your eCPM varies at random.
Regarding Australia, the first campaign doesn't look bad, and seems that you could make something good out of it. All you need to do here, is - as you are saying - get all the relevant data and blacklist the worst parameters. Try to work with high bid to get the most relevant stats possible, but if you prefer to save, you can decrease the bid from 2.7 to 2, for example.

Don't stop the campaign based on impressions, the main thing would be cost and profit, so if you, for instance, spent 3xpayout (in some cases 2xpayout), you can stop the campaign.

Generally speaking, if you have choice of working with CPI Smartlink or with single offers, it is much more effective to work with the offers separately. You can set your campaign really for the specific offer so that it's easier to optimize.

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Great start!

"at what ROI% should I stop testing a particular GEO+ Carrier combo" <--- it's impossible to provide a cut-off, because every situation is different.

In the beginning, you'll often need to invest into cutting placements. It will depend on which traffic source you're running at - average traffic quality and traffic volume.

What do I mean by that?

Example 1 - Zeropark: Lots of traffic volume, but traffic quality is mixed because they're brokering from many sources. So a better strategy would be to bid high and cut a lot of junk placements. This means you have more leeway in terms of ROI at the beginning - you could start with a lower ROI, cut your way to green, and have lots of traffic left over when you're done.

Example 2 - PopAds: Low to medium traffic volume for most geo+carriers, but quality is relatively high. So it would be better not to cut too many placements, or you'd have little traffic left over. This also means you'd need a higher ROI in the beginning to even justify optimizing the camp.

This is what I meant when I said above that it's not possible to provide a cut-off for ROI.

As for deciding on the bid: You could either 1)start at around average bid and see how the camp does first, and test bids if initial ROI looks promising; or 2)start bidding the eCPM shown in afflow stats directly and start cutting placements from the start. A third option would be to 3)just start staggered bid camps in the very beginning, and either pick the best-performing bid to keep running, or keep multiple camps running and cut placements for each. I wouldn't recommend this for unproven offers, but afflow comes with eCPM stats so you can be fairly confident that certain segments are good performers.

The most valuable thing you can do using afflow, is to identify good and bad placements. I used to focus a lot less on cutting placements, but pop has recently become more and more competitive - to the point where it's almost always necessary to bid higher just to get at placements that have decent quality, and then cut placements more aggressively to get rid of the junk. Once you've cut most of the junk for a traffic segment (geo+carrier+whatever else), any future camps you run on that segment - afflow or individual offers - will start from a better place than from scratch. Once you've done the same for a few big traffic segments, you should keep finding more offers to run on them to reap the rewards, because you'll have already invested into cutting placements.

Hope that answers your questions! If not please ask further.


So your ROI is at around -50%. Main question now is: How much traffic is available? How much do I need to cut to get green? And would that be worth it?

Based on what I remember, I don't think there's much traffic for this AU carrier on popads. And trying to cut from -50% will limit your traffic further still. So consider running at another source - one that has a lot more traffic for this carrier.

For future reference: The other thing to look at, are placement stats. Mainly: traffic distribution over placements, and ROI of individual placements that have made conversions. For example, if a couple of the biggest placements are performing very badly, i.e. wasted lots of money without having made a conversion, AND placements that HAVE made conversions are all showing high ROI, then that's a good sign - because once you've cut those couple big bad placements, you can expect to increase the overall campaign ROI by a large percentage. Similar reasoning also applies to other traffic segments such as OS/browser/etc. - if you can find a major segment that's responsible for large chunks of traffic, and is not converting or well, then you can count on a big increase in ROI once you cut it.

Again, this is why I find it very difficult to suggest a cutoff for ROI. It all depends on:

1)How much traffic volume you have (and therefore how much you can afford to cut and still have enough left over)

2)How many things you can optimize (e.g. if you're only targeting one browser and one OS for one carrier in one geo, then there isn't much room for optimization)

3)Whether you have large traffic segments you can either target solely (i.e. good-performers) or cut (i.e. bad-performers), to dramatically increase the overall ROI of the campaign.


Hope this all makes sense! If not please ask for further clarification/elaboration.




Amy

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Hi Mobidea
Thanks for giving a heads up. Appreciate it

On PopAds , no placement spent more than 1x or 2xpayout, so I think cutting doesn't make sense.

I will be jumping on offers too, after giving afflow a proper shot. I do feel that in afflow, the offers and traffic distribution is not in my control so it might be difficult to make it profitable but yes, I will get an better idea about the traffic source and its optimization. Also, I read in Amy's replies that people were doing 3-4 figures a day. So that is keeping me hopeful!


Hi Amy,

Thanks for such elaborate answer. Specially:
1. Difference between Zeropark and PopAds,
2. Factors to see before stopping campaigns based on ROI

You are right, PopAds doesn't have a big inventory for AU+optus, PopAds automatically charged my at the rate $15CPM just to spent the budget.
Thanks, I will make a note of the placements with sufficient data.

Yesterday's Stats

Spent: $20
Revenue: $0
Profit: -$20


Now,
1. I will look for new Geo+Carrier as PopAds Doesn't have AU+Optus traffic and KR is difficult, also had a lower ROI. But it felt good to come near -50% ROI
2. Please let me know if I should be aware of anything.

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Researched and found 3 consistent GEO + Carrier + Vertical combo using 30 days, 7 days and Today data in Afflow.

Research Results:


Today's Stats:
Spent: $10.05
Revenue: $0
Profit: -$10.05

CPM prices, PopAds report.

Funny thing: I found that in PopAds's whatever we put in Daily budget, it doesn't effect the 'traffic estimate' only CPM does (Atleast for small traffic pocket)

1. Traffic was split in multiple offers. Maybe that is why didn't got any conversions. Stats below.

2. As eCPM in research of PT and IT was low, should have I not sent traffic to those combos?
3. Am I spending less? Should I increase my budget or increase the duration of my campaigns, as $10 lasted for only 2 hours?
4. I am finding it difficult to do a daily research in Afflow to launch campaigns, more over 0 conversion is not motivational. Maybe I am doing something wrong. I feel like I should jump to single mobile offer + Pops, I don't know.

Please let me know what should I change ? or should I try single offer + PopAds?

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Spending just $11 across 3 carriers is way too little spend to even judge potential I'm afraid. These are geos where offer payouts are (often significantly) bigger than for tier 3/4 geos - you'll need to spend at least 5x payout (of the best offer, or average payout of the best offers for that carrier+vertical) just to get a very rough idea as to how easy/likely it would be for the camp to end up in profits.

You'll need to be willing to test more carrier+verticals, and to spend more money on testing each, if you wish to give this method a proper try.

And yeah - IT TIM and PT VODAFONE have eCPMs that look a bit too low. I also noticed that a lot of the PT traffic is WIFI and not vodafone - are you targeting wifi by accident? Trying to target carrier traffic on popads can be tricky sometimes.

A cheaper and easier way to start though, would be MrPayne's method:

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

Or you could try individual offers like you said. Pop has become so competitive, that any way you do it, there's no way around testing extensively. If you do more spying (in the wild and/or using spy tools) you can narrow down the amount of stuff you need to test, but you'd still need to test lots of stuff to find something that has potential of being profitable.

Either way - let us know how you get on!



Amy

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akshat and vortex, what do you suggest for popads + afflow? Popunders or popups?

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Popunders usually have most of the volume, so what I do is use that for testing, and once (if) the campaign reaches green, I'd launch the other formats.



Amy

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