John's Revcontent follow along, do or die! (33)
Hey guys!
I started a new campaign a couple of days ago and I figured I might as well make it a follow along. I'm doing this because i'd love to meet more people along the way that are running nutra offers on native (if it's on revcontent that's even better) and it's a good way to keep track of my progress and get some tips when things aren't looking too hot.
Let me start with a quick intro : I'm 24 years old and i've been doing affiliate marketing for close to 3 years now. I started by creating gaming sites, monetizing with content locking and ranking them with seo. Then a little while later I started to run fb traffic to them and I started making very good money. That lasted a good 7-8 months and the money I made them made me realize that aff marketing is something I could do for a living and have a really cool life.
After that died out, I got into app installs and started hitting big numbers after a couple months. Once again, life was good and I rode that wave until february 2016. At that point, I had made a lot of money, I could live on these savings for a couple years if I needed it and I figured I might as well try to build my own thing. I hired an android developper and made him code a utility app, like the ones I used to promote and I figured I could make decent $ if my earnings per visitors were close to the payouts I was getting from aff networks, life would be good. Orange Cache Cleaner was born :
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....orangecleaner
Of course, things didn't go as expected and after a few thousand $ spent, I realized this was going nowhere. I managed to get close to 200 000 installs on the app and the best days I had were 40-50$ per day with 10 000 DAU.
Then I brushed that off and started an arbitrage site, since it was somewhat popular. After only a couple weeks, I had figured out how to make it work and I was earning high xxx$ to low xxxx$ per day profit, life was good once again. Of course, that didn't last and I got banned by google adsense and the site never recovered. For the rest of the year 2016 I tried things on and off and nothing really worked out.
Then came 2017 and I started hitting Adcombo's COD offer. The cool thing about them is that I was able to learn the ropes of native without spending tons of money, and that's what I did from january to may 2017. In the end, the results weren't stellar and I ended up making about 20 000$ and spending 22 000$.
So here's why I started this follow along. I grew bored of the really low spending days because of low traffic in small geos and the inability to scale fast when something started working out. So I decided that with the experience I had acquired I was ready to start a USA - Skin - Revcontent campaign. I picked an affiliate network that was recommended by sebastian (Clickbooth), hit up my am and asked her for her 2 best offers in usa - skin. I spied a lot on adplexity and setup the campaign with 2 landers that I saw the most, ads + headlines I saw a lot and the 2 offers my AM recommended. Here's the breakdown so far :
Right now it's not looking too hot, with 70$ revenue on almost 500 spent. What I'm doing at the moment is gradually building a blacklist, and here are my criterias :
30 visits, 0 clicks : BL
30 visits, 40%+ CTR : BL
50$ spent no convs : BL
I'll update once the conversions start coming, which hopefully is soon!
Before I end this first post, let me just talk about my goals for the upcoming future :
- I'd like to make some profits within the next month (before affiliate world berlin). I don't have a ticket for the event nor have I booked my trip but since i've never been to europe, this would be an awesome opportunity to network and then make a cool trip. But, in order to do that, I'd like to make some profit first as this would be a HUGE personal victory.
- Talking about profits, I'll follow something i've seen on Malan Daras' blog, the $50/day method. Basically every week you focus on increasing your daily profit by $50 (week 1 : 50$ per day, week 2 : 100$ per day, week 3 : 150$ per day, etc) and by the end of the year you'd potentially be making 1/2 million dollars. The mindset behind this is great because slowly but surely you'll reach the top and since you're growing gradually, everything seems achievable!
I'll stop rambling for now, thanks a lot for reading and don't hesitate to hit me up on skype to talk about AM or anything in general!
If you have the savings, come to AWE.
Looking forward to seeing you hit the green again like our good old utilities days 
Your initial strategy (learning outside Tier 1 for cheap) was a great move.
Your current strategy is not a good one.
Skin on Revcontent is already tough, but you can do big damage with it. The vertical fits well for a big part of the inventory.
However Skin on Revcontent in US is the toughest thing you can do on the whole damn network.
When I started out with Skin, I could make it work within 2 months in AU, CA, ZA and UK.
Nevertheless it took me another 20k and forever to make Skin in US work.
The regulations are just way stricter, the competition is super tough and the amount on bullshit traffic is stunning.
You really need to be damn good to make it work in the US.
Switch to AU, CA, UK or ZA to become an expert in Skin, then give the US another retry.
That's if you want to stick to Skin.
The better strategy would be to jump on a newer vertical that hasn't been run to death yet.
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
Looking forward to seeing you hit the green again like our good old utilities days
Hope I get back there too, those were the days!
Originally Posted by sebastian_r
Will update this thread with the initial results in a couple days!
QUICK UPDATE :
Hey guys,
Here's a quick update on current situation.
I followed sebastian's recommendation since it was a very good one, and I created a Mobile - Canada - Skin campaign instead of the desktop - us one. This will allow me to keep learning, but with more volume and with a smaller T1 geo. Hopefully this will also allow me to get results at a lower cost and work towards profitability faster!
Right now i'm bidding 0.15 CPC with an avg ctr of 0.16%. Traffic is coming in somewhat slowly as it spent only 35$ in the last 24 hours. I also only have 1 category open at this time.
I sent an email to my rep and asked him for some insight on the avg bid with my targeting, i'll adjust from there.
That's it for now!
I'll update in a couple days, talk soon
Originally Posted by goldenjo
For mobile iOS I would bid in the range of $0.2-0.24 to start with as well at least 3-4 categories. You can ping me for recommendation of categories.
Update #1
Time Running : Since may 7th 2017, 5 Days
Geo : Canada
Traffic Source : Revcontent
Vertical : Skin
Targeting : Mobile iOS
Categories : 6
Campaign type : Blacklist, 14 Widgets
Overall Revenue : 216.00$
Overall Spend : 533.33$
Total Profit : 317.33$
ROI : -59.50%
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Ads :
Devices :
Landers :
Offers :
Targets :
Widgets :
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Ads : I have 10 ads in my campaign and they consist on headlines + images i've seen a lot on spytools. #50 has spent almost 150$ and still has no conversion, I think i'll cut it tomorrow morning to leave more traffic to the good ads.
Devices : Even though my campaign is Mobile iOs only, I got 80$ of worthless Desktop - Bot traffic... I sent an email to my rep about this and he says in their backend it says no desktop traffic was sent and that he couldn't do anything about it basically. I'm pretty pissed as that -80$ is over 25% of my losses and there nothing I can do about it...
Landers : I took the one I saw the most on spytools (literally everyone uses it) and I kept it as is. The CTR of 80% is ridiculous and it's because of the exit pop that's used on desktop. I tried disabling it and testing a lander without it but I was getting 1%-2% lander ctrs and paying 6$-7$ per offer click, there's just no way that would have worked.
Offers : I have Offer 1 that I am testing on both Clickbooth and C2M. Right now it sucks on Clickbooth and as soon as I get more data I'll be able to tell if it needs to be cut. Offer 2 seems alright but they didn't have it on C2M so I can't split test it there. Once I figure which offer is the best, I'll try finding it on other networks to split test it.
Targets : Right now I'm running 6 targets (thanks to some of sebastian's recommendation). My initial target is the one that sucks the most right now, with -175$. I think I'll cut this whole category if it doesn't get a lead by the end of tomorrow.
Widgets : I've got 40$ spent in unknown which has to do with the 80$ worth of desktop shit I got i'm guessing, nothing to do here. Because I'm using landers that give a stupid CTR, I can't really cut widgets based on low or high ctr, they all have high CTR. For this my plan is to cut widgets that have spent 50$+ and don't have conversions, is that a good idea?
That's it for today, hope the next few day go even better!
Originally Posted by goldenjo
You need to blacklist hundreds of placements, otherwise you buy the traffic nobody else wants.
Mapping the network yourself can take a long time and will be pretty expensive if you don't know if your funnel works.
Better get a blacklist from an account manager.
You can later retest yourself once you have a proven funnel.
You can cut creatives after 1 payout.
On the initial run they get very good traffic from many placements to establish the CTR, if they don't convert quickly they won't start later on.
Your CTR is propably so low because (i) you get lots of bad traffic, as mentioned your whitelist is not good enough (ii) you get traffic from bad creatives, targeting the wrong demographics / audience.
Yes you can cut placements after one Step 1 payout.
Before cutting the category, test new creatives. The category got most traffic from 3 creatives that you need to cut.
I'd focusing on 1 device at a time instead of all 3 to help you optimize faster.
Sebastian, on average how many creatives would you say you have running per campaign at a given time?
It is very tough,I have spent 30000 dollars and get back little.
Originally Posted by chitown
Originally Posted by newyorkheart2000
Originally Posted by chitown
Update #2
Time Running : Since may 7th 2017, 8 Days
Geo : Canada
Traffic Source : Revcontent
Vertical : Skin
Targeting : Mobile iOS
Categories : 5
Campaign type : Blacklist, 16 Widgets
Overall Revenue : 360$
Overall Spend : 1005$
Total Profit : -645$
ROI : -64.23%
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Ads :
Offers :
Targets :
Widgets :
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Ads : I cut the ads in red and I am left with 3 ads. 71,31, 52. Right now I am wondering if I should cut 71 and 31, I kept them because they had a lead but they are at -62% and -55% ROI. Ad 52 is breakeven so I will test combos of that creative + different headlines and different creatives + same headline. I also added 2 ads to the campaign that I saw running on spytools a lot.
Offers : Right now I am only running the C2M offer, as it's the best one so far. It used to be slightly profitable but this weekend it didn't do so good. Hopefully with the new cuts it does a little bit better and stays the winning offer for now.
Targets : I paused my biggest spending target because it spent 310$ with no conversions. I will keep improving my funnel and when I feel like I have a much better funnel, I will reopen that category to test it again, but it seems like a waste of money for now.
Widget : I paused 2 new widgets and I don't have enough data on the rest. I took sebastian's recommandation and on friday I sent an email to my AM asking him for a list of the most blacklisted placements for my targeting and vertical. Hopefully he gets back to me today. If not, I will send him another email tomorrow to remind him.
Also, I did a lot of spying on adplexity this weekend and I came up with a list of potential WL placements for my campaign. I checked the sites that were getting the most traffic for the big players and for long periods of time and I think it's safe to assume that if the placements bring in a lot of volume and they do so for extended periods of time it's probably a good placement. I made a WL campaign with 30ish of these widgets and we will see how it performs once it's approved.
That's it for now!
Cut all creatives but 52.
Test some more variations of this creative.
Test more new offers, the offer makes or breaks your campaign.
With a better offer you could already be profitable.
Get the Skype of your account manager, nobody reads emails anymore lol
Hit me up on Skype for a strategy to blacklist placements quicker.
Update #3
Time Running : Since may 7th 2017, 11 Days
Geo : Canada
Traffic Source : Revcontent
Vertical : Skin
Targeting : Mobile iOS
Categories : 6
Campaign type : Blacklist, 88 Widgets
Overall Revenue : 552$
Overall Spend : 1462$
Total Profit : -910$
ROI : -62%
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Ads :
Landers :
Offers :
Targets :
Widgets :
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Ads : I kept the best performing ad from last update, created some variations of it and added some new combos too. Right now the old 52 one sits at -25% ROI but i'm sure it could go green once I figure my offer + lander combo. New ads 17 and 28 are looking good, I will keep them and try variations of them soon. The other new ads need to spend more money before I can decide to keep or cut them.
Landers : My original lander is 7-2, and as you can see it spend most of the money for the campaign. I tried some variations of it to lower the CTR, since right now it's at 85% CTR which means I can't cut placements based on CTR since it's boosted. This lander has a ouibounce script (when the user's mouse exits the page there's a popup) and an exit pop script (When the user presses X, it asks him if he's sure he wants to leave). However, since I'm on mobile both of these scripts don't work and I tried playing around with them.
Lander 7-2-M : For this one I deleted the Ouibounce + the exit pop script, so no script at all. For this one the CTR was 1.12% which is really awful and I stopped running it after 40$.
Lander 7-2-2 : This one I KEPT the ouibounce script and I DELETED the exit pop script. Now even if the ouibounce doesn't do anything on mobile, the CTR climbed to 8.46%.
Right now I'm running 7-2 and 7-2-2 and I'm hoping they have a similar performance at least so I could keep only 7-2-2 and start cutting widgets based on CTR too. Something I don't understand is that in the end, these 3 pages display EXACTLY the same on mobile, yet they have CTRs of 85%, 1% and 8%. If somebody understands how the ouibounce and exit pop's script CTRs are ''calculated'' on mobile or something, i'm all ears because right now that part is a nightmare...
Offers : I added oasis ads to the rotation and it quickly became a winner. However, yesterday I had a shit day and the performance of the offer dropped by a lot. I re-added the C2M version of the offer to benchmark both. Right now I am split testing the same offer from C2M vs Oasis ads.
Targets : Nothing new since last update
Widgets : Blacklisting widgets after they've spent 1x offer payout. I also got a BL from my manager which helped me add 60+ bad widgets.
Quick Note : I thought I was on to something as tuesday I had a positive day (+75$). However, yesterday's performance (-275$) quickly brought me back to reality. Something worth mentionning is that with Oasis' offer, with the 6 leads it has on them, my manager added 8$ per conversion in retrospect because he hadn't activated the good payout in the begining. So the offer made an extra 48$ that's not shown in tracker. So on that first day I tested Oasis it murdered every other offer I had tested before but after yesterday's crappy day the performance went down and it's about the same as C2M's did. This is why I am now testing C2M vs Oasis again.
I also applied to JumbleBerry but they said I wasn't doing enough volume.
The plan for now is to run only the lander which has less CTR (8%) and start cutting widgets faster and based on CTR. Find out the best offer between oasis and C2M and run just that offer. Test variations of best ads.
And if I can manage to get breakeven or small profits with this, I will focus on scaling.
EDIT : I also started a WL category for my best placements. I was wondering, when I add new placements to the WL category, do I have to BL them in the BL campaign?
Talk soon!
hi,nice process.I wanted to try native too,however I don't think that i have enough money now.but I learned a lot from you,so thanks very much.
and for the script,it can work on mobile too,especially for android.for ios,it works sometime,so i think that is the reason for the ctr.
Update #4
Time Running : Since may 7th 2017, 15 Days
Geo : Canada
Traffic Source : Revcontent
Vertical : Skin
Targeting : Mobile iOS
Categories : 6
Campaign type : Blacklist, 90 Widgets
Overall Revenue : 1046$
Overall Spend : 2023$
Total Profit : -977$
ROI : -48.29%
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Ads :
Devices :
Landers :
Offers :
Targets :
Widgets :
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*Good News* --> during the day yesterday (may 21st), this camp made +193$, let's hope it keeps going great!
*Please Note* --> The stats reflect the period since the last follow along update, so may 18 - may 21
Ads : I re-started some old ads now that I have only 1 lander and 1 offer, figured I might have missed some winners. Turns out 71 was one of them and it started doing really really well. 71 and 17 are actually kind of the same, the headlines and images are very similar and I hadn't noticed the similarity before. FOR SURE I'll try variations of these with pictures that look like them. Let's see if we can find even better ads and if these type of images are the best for my campaign.
Devices : Same complain as the other time... I'm still getting garbage desktop + tablet traffic and without these I'd be breakeven for the past 3 days. The other day my manager told me he couldn't do anything because apparently there were no desktop visits registered in his dashboard. I have no idea how to handle this with him and how to make it stop. If anyone has ideas i'm all ears..!
Lander : Really simple, I played with my original lander and it's many scripts. I was finally able to take out the useless script and keep only the good stuff. Now the CTR is 5.5% and i'll be able to cut widgets based on CTR. Increasing the lander CTR would be a good thing too. I might try to test headline variations soon. (Not now as I want to focus on widgets)
Offer : Only kept the Oasis one and it's doing good now with the lander combo, yay! For now i'll only run this one and when I do enough volume I'll test jumbleberry's offers
Targets : I un-paused my high volume target that was -300$ and it started doing MUCH better now. It's the top one with +83$ and i'll keep it open
Widgets : I paused a couple widgets that had 1x offer payout and no conversions. In the next few days I should also be able to cut based on CTR, still need a bit more clicks to many widgets to do that. I have a couple widgets that have had 2+ sales (trial + upsell) so these would be in a future WL. For now i'll just keep running the BL while I find good placements and I BL shitty ones.
The only thing that's less cool is that Most of my sales come from widgets that only spent a couple bucks, which means right now these are no good for a WL and don't have much volume. They're just lucky conversions and I can't rely on them for daily revenues.
That's about it for now. Since I have a good lander + offer combo right now, I will focus my priority on ads + widgets. For the ads part I'll test variations of my 2 solid ones and for the widget I'll cut based on 1x spending and no sale, and CTR that's too high or too low.
Let's hope I get many sells from low volume widgets, they're awesome morale boosters!
Also, I just bought my ticket for Affiliate World Europe in Berlin, if some of you are going and want to meet / talk business there hit me up, i'd be glad to meet you!
Talk soon
Great follow along
I suppose If you would make this work, you have a very good chances to make native work for you
Cause, you choose not the easiest vertical, and not the easiest traffic source.
It would be better to create best funnel for native with another small native network, and then scale it through revcontent.
Anyway, your ROI is getting better every day and I glad for you.
About BL,WL:
You can ask your rep about it. And even more, you can ask your rep about WL for your vertical/geo. Some of them share such info.
Originally Posted by goldenjo
I think i will be on AWE so will be glad to meet you)
Originally Posted by cpamatica
And yes for the whitelist, when I'm ready to make one I'll use my widgets + recommendations from manager!
Originally Posted by badsant
I'll try to find something else to do with this traffic
Update #5
Time Running : Since may 7th 2017, 18 Days
Geo : Canada
Traffic Source : Revcontent
Vertical : Skin
Targeting : Mobile iOS
Categories : 6
Campaign type : Blacklist, 100 Widgets
Overall Revenue : 1806$
Overall Spend : 2727.85$
Total Profit : -921.85$
ROI : -33.79%
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Campaign :
Ads :
Targets :
Widgets :
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Campaign : Since my last update, my campaign has slightly improved (+55.15$). I had 3 good consecutive days with +130$ but then just today (may 24th) I didn't get a single lead and finished the day -210$ for the campaign... With a couple more leads the results would look MUCH better but hey, that's the name of the game with native. Somedays are just THAT bad.
Ads : Can't even argue with it anymore, 71 is just way better than all the other ads i'm running. I made some variations of it's image and headline but they all haven't spent enough to draw conclusions. I'll wait for them to get more data before I upload a new batch of ads.
Targets : Nothing new to say here, still have 6 targets and 4 of them are green for the past few days, it's a start!
Widgets : As you can see, most of my conversions came from widgets that got 1 click, which means they're pure luck and I can't expect them to happen everyday. The only thing I can do is run the best offer + lander + ads combo to make sure I get a few lucky conversions like that.
I have a couple of questions about how I should proceed right now. The best way to increase the traffic to my exact targeting right now is by running ads with a better CTR. This is what I am trying to do by cutting/uploading new ads every couple days but for now it's all I can do.
There are still a few things I can do to improve the campaigns volume and hopefully sales :
Scale with new Categories
Scale with other phones (Android, windows phone, etc.)
Scale with desktop
Scale with tablet
At this very moment I think the best course of action would be to open up new categories. Since I have no idea which category could work and opening them all would bring a TON of bot traffic, I'm thinking that I could hit up my manager and ask him about the demographic of the different categories. This way I could find categories that have a lot of 35ish+ years old women and add these categories for more volume. Are there any other way to find out which categories could do good for a campaign?
Then, I am wondering if you guys are running WL + BL or simply a BL then just a WL once you've figured out your placements. I don't have enough placements for a WL but I am trying to figure out if that would be useful for the future or I should just keep hustlin on the BL campaign and cut crap widgets as I go along
Also, if I decide to run other phone OS in the future, should I run them in the same campaign or a new one? Skin - iOS, Skin - Android OR just a big ol Skin - Mobile camp?
Thanks a lot guys, talk soon!
Hey 
I'm having the same problem on the converting widget these days, but on MGID. Actually, it seems that the problem comes from Facebook.
I've been investigating in this issue, and my conclusion was that some widgets were getting traffic from Facebook, but since Facebook has updated (once again 
) his guidelines, he's been banning a lot of accounts, and therefore, your converting widgets that were getting good quality traffic from Fb!
You need to constantly unlock new placements and check from where they're getting their traffic. If they're not receiving traffic from Fb, then I usually bid for those and the conversion is quite stable over the coming days. But if they're getting traffic from Fb, I usually also bid for them but keep checking them every now and then to see if they're still getting traffic from Fb, if they're not then I pause them.
I hope you understand what I mean, I tend to be awful at explanations sometimes 
Good luck!
Your widget problem does not seem like a real widget problem.
More like an offer or creatives problem.
Since you have tested several creatives, I would narrow it down to an offer problem.
When your offer is not good, no matter how hard you work you won't get the campaign to fly.
Either find better converting offers or pivot to another GEO / vertical.
To make sure that you have not an creative problem, have you tested several angles?
Eye Bags? Wrinkles? Lip Lines? Sagging Skin?
To make sure that you have not an widget problem you can send me the referrer data and I tell you if you get traffic from good placements or only the leftovers (you can blank out the converting placements if you want)
Originally Posted by foussama
I'm having the same problem on the converting widget these days, but on MGID. Actually, it seems that the problem comes from Facebook.
I've been investigating in this issue, and my conclusion was that some widgets were getting traffic from Facebook, but since Facebook has updated (once again
) his guidelines, he's been banning a lot of accounts, and therefore, your converting widgets that were getting good quality traffic from Fb!You need to constantly unlock new placements and check from where they're getting their traffic. If they're not receiving traffic from Fb, then I usually bid for those and the conversion is quite stable over the coming days. But if they're getting traffic from Fb, I usually also bid for them but keep checking them every now and then to see if they're still getting traffic from Fb, if they're not then I pause them.
I hope you understand what I mean, I tend to be awful at explanations sometimes
Good luck!
I guess you're right about the fact that we can't do anything about this really though.. I just checked and indeed the traffic from my 2 best placements is almost exclusively from facebook. That would explain why their not getting conversions lately...
Thanks for your input!
That looks great!
Gameplan is solid as well.
Scale what is working fast to all device, more channels and bigger lists.
You can ask your account manager for additional placements he recommends or you do some manual research to find some good ones.
If you want to test a big list without spending all too much, you can use interest targeting.
If you want to dominate single good placements, you can break them out into separate camps with high bids or use a CPM camp for it.
But don't interfere with the camp that is working, test outside of it. Never screw around with the momentum of a good camp.
Originally Posted by sebastian_r
Originally Posted by luker_ge
How are you doing now?
Originally Posted by bluecrayon
We'll see how this does in a couple days
Great Thread! Thank youo for sharing your story
You seem to be very focused on placements, camps, bidding....
If you have an weak offer, you cannot fix it with those variables. (only having 1-2 placements working is an indicator for a weak offer)
So I would keep split testing offers for this camp.
Then I would put my focus on the creatives.
They have a huge leverage as well.
But at this point, I would recommend you highly to focus your time and energy into new campaigns.
When it takes this long to bring a campaign to -17%, it's not a winner.
Just imagine how long it would take you to scale this camp, if you manage to make it profitable.
A winning campaign shows traction and momentum faster on native.
2-3 weeks are ok, 2-3 months are not.
Originally Posted by sebastian_r
I spied and saw a lot of casino offers being ran and absolutely no brain campaigns. I started running new campaigns now based on what I see out there and I will stop campaigns faster in the future if they don't work.
Thank you for your great help!
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