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Anitvirus and sweeps mobile pop journey (20)

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Hey STM. Mrpayne and xxf8xx follow along brought me back. Specifically xxf8xx, dude has been through some brutal stuff but came out on top. I don't know him personally but you can check his follow along here

I was a super noob member here awhile ago. I was reading a bunch and not taking action. Information overload at its finest. I took what I knew, canceled my membership and literally locked myself in my office and became a hermit until I learned the basics.. ok maybe not a hermit but it was to the point when the sun hurt my eyes when I did venture outside.

Think I can say I'm no longer in that dreaded newbie lost stage anymore. I'm comfortable with handling my servers, tracking, setting up camps, landing pages (this was a biggie for me at first. Now I can edit landers quickly and know what I'm looking at), all that good technical stuff.

If I was to name my biggest issues now. It would be scaling, and bidding.

TLDR;
OP is not in the dreaded newbie stages anymore

Now that we got the intro knocked out that nobody reads anyways. Lets get to the money.

Setup-
Voluum
VPS digital ocean

I launch whatever VPS is closet to my targeted GEO. I have ran into situations where there is no VPS located close to my target GEO so I had to make due. I would love to run a CDN instead of a VPS but I currently can't because of some things in my setup. It could be costing me loading time and conversions but its what I have to work with. I try and edit my pages down as minimum as possible.

I'm working in LATAM, middle east, Africa (not south) and southeast Asia. I stay away from the more expensive GEO's to run. Shit ton of sharks and I don't have the capital nor the man power to compete with those guys atm.

What am I running right now?

I'm focused on this Brazil offer. Payout of $.33 cent. Making an average of $25-$30 a day on 1 traffic source. Have initially tested around 4 landers (not to many different variations out there) and the one I edited came out on top. Rotated a new one in recently and my edited still held strong.

What have I done?
Tried scaling to popads, clickadu, popcash, and plugrush. No real traction there. Advertiser didn't like the traffic I was sending from popads and clickadu anyways. Plugrush I may try again but it's seems difficult to stay in the top 5 and remain profitable.

The bids seem to high in all the other traffic sources for this offer and targeting. I can bid $1cpm and not get very much traffic. Up to about $2cpm I can start getting a good amount of traffic with conversions but the ROI takes a serious hit. I would need to convert 6 times every cpm just to break even.

I've stopped other camps and concentrated on this one as it shows good traction. I would like some advice on how I can possibly scale this offer to see xxx days.

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I'm still in the 'dreaded newb stage', so I don't have any advice on scaling, but out of curiosity what can't you do on a CDN that you can on your VPS? Are you doing something dynamic on your VPS?

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No worries you'll break through that newbie stage man. I seriously had zero knowledge about all this stuff like editing landers (JS, html, css, php), setting up tracking, servers and all that jazz. Yes I'm running some php so a CDN is a no go.

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Mid day yesterday a bunch of placements appeared out of no where sending a ton of bot traffic. I only noticed it when I was checking the traffic source to check volume for another camp I was thinking of launching. Seen that my daily spend was double the amount it usually is. Checked Voluum to see what was up. I estimate at least 15 new placements showed up that I had to blacklist. One of the placements sent about 30,000 visits within a few hours. All majority bot traffic. How these sites get on the network is beyond me.

Still looking at other sources or strategy to scale the brazil offer.

Asked a couple of my AM's for other offers and got a couple brewing that looks to be doing well. If I'm not able to scale this offer to xxx profit in the next day or two I'll just leave it to make a steady $25-$30 for as long as possible and move on.

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Thanks for starting this FA! Things are looking great!

My main suggestion here is this: Why not use this opportunity to explore more traffic sources? Most traffic sources have BR traffic (as it's a biggish geo!) You have a converting funnel on your hands, so would be able to test new sources for cheap/free.

I know you've started doing this already, but feel that you could take this a lot further. Make a list of several hundred pop sources (look for ad network review sites, google popunder/popup traffic networks etc.), and do something like this:

-Write a form message to ask questions to vet out the traffic sources - e.g. sample volumes of top 10 geos or carriers, minimal initial deposit, questions about targeting options...

-Send this form message to all sources, either by email or via the contact forms on their site.

-Narrow down your list of sources: The ones that don't respond within 7 days you can forget about - either support is bad or the network is no longer in operation. Networks that don't have enough volume to be worth your time, don't even bother with them. Networks with high initial deposits you can try to talk it down further - if you can't, then test them later (after you've made some money). Basically weed out sources you don't feel good about for one reason or other.

-For the remaining ones, make the minimum initial deposit and set up your BR camp there. You already have a working funnel, so if the traffic doesn't convert, then you'd know the traffic quality isn't there (at least for this particular geo and OS). Next time you have a good campaign to scale, you can try these "bad quality" sources again to give them another shot - I'd say to try at least 2-3 geos before deciding whether to use them again or not, because different sources can be strong in certain geos and weak in others. (If you have the cash, you could also do a test on their worldwide traffic using afflow or similar to find out which geos are strongest.)


Other tips on scaling this camp:

-Play with bids - set up staggered bid camps to see which bid is triggering traffic from which placements. Often, you'll see high-quality placements in high-bid camps. If at a certain high bid, you're seeing enough good placements and enough volume from them, it would be worth it to continue running this high-bid camp and just cut all other placements except the profitable ones.

-Also test super-low bids to take advantage of the cost-savings. They won't make you rich, but it's often an easy way to "scalp" and make a few bucks a day.

-Play with frequency. If your current camp is doing high ROI, set up new camps to test higher frequencies. Your ROI for these higher frequencies will drop, but you'll get more traffic volume, so the end result may be more profits - you wouldn't know unless/until you test.

-Have you tried banner traffic? If you have no experience with banners, a good initial test would be to use generic banners - for examples of generic banners please see this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...isplay-Traffic

Basically the aim of generic banners is to get high banner CTR, i.e. to get as many eyeballs on your landers and offers as possible. Effectively, this is a way of turning display traffic into pop traffic. Generic banners do zero pre-sell for you - so later on you could definitely test banners that are tailored to your lander and offer in order to improve performance.


Looking forward to further updates from you!



Amy

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Hi Amy,

Yes I've been scouting out some other traffic sources. Great idea with sending out a mass email to all of them. Some of these little known or unheard of traffic sources seem a little sketchy. If they respond back it show's a good sign if not the I saved myself the trouble. If I do a search on STM about a traffic source and I don't get many results about it... should that lead me to believe the source is no good or is it a hidden gem... hmmm.

- I've played with bids on this TS. Seems like I may just be competing with myself TBH.

-Testing lower bids. I have tried this on some of the sources I've tried scaling to. To low and I don't get any traffic. Bid just right I get traffic flow but the CPM doesn't match up with me eCPM with this offer. How can I make a low paying offer $0.33 cent work when traffic cost is on the higher end? So a $1.5 cpm I would need my offer to convert around 6 times to break even. If I bid lower the traffic starts to slow and conversions start to take a steep decline.

What kind of bidding strategy is best used to make lower payout offers work? Does the way you bid change if the offer payout is $.20 compared to a $2 payout?

- I was hoping to avoid banner traffic to be honest but will look more into it for sure.

**So here is the camp update for today

Traffic has be picking up for some odd reason. I haven't changed anything but I'm getting more traffic. Maybe some other affiliatges dropped off. Making an average of $50 profit these past few days now with the highest being a $75 day,

Couple of my placements have shoot up. So I have other affiliates playing around in the jungle with some of my placements. Bidding wars arent my strong point so I'm looking to see what can be done there.

My Voluum 1million impressions has been surpassed already by 600,000 visits lol. I didn't even notice until I looked at my monthly progress. So I will need to factor in those additional charges with my ROI. $0.04 cent per 1000 vist overcharge. Its june 24th so I will probably be reaching into the 2million impressions area.

I would like some input on my funnel to see if improvements can be made based on more experienced affiliates.

The offer is an AV type offer. My stats for my two camps look like this for today

Whitelist camp 80,124 visits - 2,144 clicks - 2.68% CTR - 6.86% CVR

Main Camp 45,384 visits - 1,355 clicks - 2.99% CTR - 5.68% CVR

These numbers are the usual average for this camp. Does this CTR and CVR look about averagish for this type of camp?

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You won't know. This is why it would be good to just fork out the minimal deposit and test your best camp on it.

Some of those networks WILL either be scams, or will have traffic that doesn't convert well. So that risk will need to be factored in. You're basically investing money into finding good traffic sources, and the amounts lost to scams would just be a part of that investment.

Start with networks that have small minimum deposits and work your way up to larger deposits. Even for networks that ask for large deposits, you can usually talk this down. Don't be afraid to ask for what you feel are outrageously low amounts compared to the original amounts requested. Tell them you have a large budget but you're testing hundreds of sources so want to diversify the risks, and that if they have good traffic they could expect long-term business from you and your team. It won't always work, but more often than not they will at least lower the original amount.


Bidding higher will often increase the CR as well. You can't know until you test different bids. You can also cut placements for every bid, to only leave placements that have high CR running.

Personally I use the same bidding strategies for high vs. low payout offers. Generally speaking, low payout offers will convert better. Of course you'll always have good and bad offers in every payout range, but in general offers are priced the way they are for good reasons. If the CR is similar for all offers, nobody would ever touch low-payout offers.

So - in terms of bidding strategy - try these:

1)As mentioned above, start staggered-bid camps to see which placements are sending the most traffic (i.e. the key players), cut the bad and leave the good for each camp.

2)A cheaper method: Start with a low bid, cut placements, up the bid, cut another batch of placements - repeat until profits are starting to decrease even after cutting placements, then revert to the previous bid.

Note: Don't wait days to optimize all placements. You should see in the first day or two, which placements are the key players. Judge the overall profits potential of your camp based on those key players. Don't wait days to see how the small placements perform - your time would be better-spent doing something else.


-Test lander variations or even completely different landers.
-Test more offers!
-Ask for a pay bump on your current offer.


CTR and CVR will vary widely depending on your targeting, and the particular lander and offer you're running.



Amy

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Hello there.
Have you tried to reach our support team for optimization? have you used managed or self-serve platform for gaining traffic?
I suggest you can earn more, especially if we're talking about BR traffic.

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Hi demian,

I will be in contact with clickadu's support shortly to see if there is anything that they can do. I used the self-serve platform.

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That's great, they'll be glad to help. Also, there is an opportunity to attach you to a personal manager for the continuous partnership.
And that means personal dedicated support and some cool stuff like IP targeting and suchlike.

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Update.

This offer just will not budge on scaling. I've signed up with some other sources but still nothing. Yes Brazil is a big geo but when you look at the traffic stats on the networks the targeting for iOS is super low. We are talking 1.5 million impressions compared to 40,000 for iOS. Talked with my AM and he told me there are some affiliates pushing this hard enough where the cap is almost full for this week. So when I put it into perspective it's seems to be just me and my ability to scale. It's weird because I've signed up with traffic sources but they all are reporting the same low traffic. I'm thinking the ones pushing this hard may have access to traffic I don't.

On a brighter note its still stable on the traffic source that's been working well for me. It's the only source I've seen that has a good amount of traffic for my targeting. Still have to toss out a couple bad bot placements that try and sneak in every once and while.

Looks like I will be looking to start working on some other camps.

*EDIT* So to make this interesting. I will be trying to scale this campaign to another source. Since I didn't get to post how I lead up to this campaign. I will show how it looks when I try to scale. This way you can see how I'm doing it and if I'm making mistakes along the way. Campaign is currently waiting for approval. Will update after initial results.

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This is entirely possible. They may be running lots of camps across a ton of traffic networks. Also, have you explored the possibility of running on banner traffic - mDSPs for example? If you can make that work you'd have access to a whole new set of traffic.

Also, some people may be running direct with publishers sites.

Try to get your hands on the top alexa sites for Brazil. The top 100 or 500 alexa sites for each country used to be free. Now they only show you the top 50:

http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/BR

Manually browse to each site, and see if they have ads on them put there by a traffic network, in which case you could just sign up to those networks to get access to that traffic. Also look for opportunities to advertise directly with the sites. The biggest sites will already be running with adsense or traffic or another network, but the smaller ones (relatively speaking) may have advertising spots available. (To get to the smaller ones though, you'll need to see a lot more than just top 50...)

Lastly - they may be running the offer on FB or search (adwords/bing/etc.), where they'd get access to a LOT more traffic than just pop.

If you think about it, there are only 2 general sources of online traffic - websites, and apps. And I've mentioned most of the available options above.


Good idea! Was about to suggest that.

Basically your options are:

1)Stick with pop traffic. If you want to do this, target geos+carriers+OSs+whatever that have enough volume to be worth your while. Explore more pop sources to add good ones to your arsenal, then just scale to the best of your ability within the confines of pop sources, and run lots of camps to build up revenue.

2)If pop seems too fragmented for you, expand into other traffic types, e.g. Mobile Display, Native, FB, Search.


Sounds good and looking forward!



Amy

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Here we go. Camp was ran yesterday so I was able to cut a few bad placements ahead of time.

The breakdown of how it was setup and initial results.

- Averegish low camp
Spend $10 to test
I took the average and added about 20% which came to around a $1 cpm
I already knew which OS versions have been converting the best from my other camp so I only targeted those versions.

Here are the results for this one
16 conversions
$10.12 spend
$5.28 rev


Placements




To optimize I would

Camp low bid - whitelist placements 1, 9, 11, 18, 22, 23, 26, 48. Blacklisted 2, 4, 5, 8, 15,

I was thinking to white-list placement 1 but the ROI is slim. It has the most volume though.

Camp 2
High 2.8 CPM
Spend $15 since the bid was higher
Same targeting as the other camp

Results
Conversions 23
Spend $15.19
Rev $7.59


Placements



Optimize high bid - white list 4, 8, 10, 12, 21, 24, 30, 36. Blacklist 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 17, 19, 22, 27

That's what I was thinking to optimize these two test camps. Most is wifi traffic so I need to cut fast. My rule of thumb with wifi. If I get a placement with 100 visits with no click its gone. My funnel seems to be tight so if a placement has spent offer payout ($.33) with no conversion its gone. There are some placements that had a conversion but it was still in the negative ROI.

I would launch 2 new white-list camps with the same bid as the test camps. Blacklist all the white list placements in my test camps. Take my high bid camp and set the bid higher to see if there is anything else out there.

Do you see any flaws with this? I'm curious how you more experienced affiliates would optimize this.

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Amy,

With running the camp across a ton of networks. It seems like that may be the case. I mentioned before the difference between iOS and android traffic is huge. I'm thinking they might be making a couple of bucks profit per day per traffic source. Most traffic sources have a min of $100 deposit so not sure if it would even be worth it.

I was thinking of banner traffic. I'm kind of turned off from it ATM as I'm just getting the hang of pops. Dealing with another variation is the last thing on my list to be honest.

There is a possibility I got from a traffic rep about a traffic share deal for the sites that have been doing good for me. The only problem is I have very little control of the traffic. I can choose mobile, and the geo. Everything else like OS, carrier, wifi, language I can't. So I will be getting a bunch of traffic I don't need with no idea how much of the traffic I'll get with what I do need.

I'm sticking with the mobile pops game until I get enough cash flow to move onto bigger sources. I don't have the cash flow to enter into those spaces yet. I have heard you mentioned before that pops is something to start with then move on when you can. That's exactly my plan

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For pop camps, results are, more often than not, better when you blacklist rather than whitelist.

And judging by your placements stats, I wouldn't make any decisions yet, because most of your placements haven't even reached the equivalent of 1 payout in spend. I would wait until most of the major placements have reached at LEAST 2x payout in spend. Also, most of the placements that HAVE converted, only had 1 conversion ("lottery" conversions where we have no idea when the next one will come....)

At that point, you'll be able to see whether you have enough green placements to justify running the camp further. Of course you'll need to take into account of the other major traffic segments as well - for example if the camp is getting a lot of IOS and Android traffic, but IOS is sucking balls, then you know you'd be able to cut IOS and increase the ROI of all placements. In that case you'll want to cut the underperforming segment(s) and then run more traffic and look at placement stats again.

If there aren't any major segments that are performing horribly - OR if you've already cut them - AND most of the major placements are STILL not in profit - then there would be little point in running the campaign further.

That is - unless you can improve your funnel by testing more landers and offers.

And if your original, average-bid camp does not look hopeless, you could set up staggered bid camps to get a feel for how profitable the major placements in EACH camp will be. Then you'll need to make a judgment call as to which camps to keep running and cutting placements further, and which camps to just give up on because there aren't enough profitable placements to even justify cutting further.

To recap: The central idea is that if you don't have enough profitable placements, then there would be little point in continuing to cut unprofitable placements. Of course this is assuming 1)you've optimized the funnel (lander and offer), 2)there aren't major traffic segments that are losing big money that you could cut to increase ROI for all placements, 3)you're not bidding overly low such that traffic quality is lacking.

So yeah - I would run this camp further before making decisions.

This camp though looks more promising! Most of the placements that have converted are green, and some with 2 or more conversions! Definite potential there.


Again - test blacklist vs. whitelisting, as the blacklisting approach will often work out better for pop camps. Whitelisting placements may make the traffic volume disappear.


If you're getting so much traffic that you're losing a lot of money daily, then yes, cutting at 1x payout without a conversion would be wise. Once you're green, you could always gradually re-test some of the bigger placements that got blacklisted from before (if you choose to).


Experimentation is always good! Let's see how that works out for you.


I hear you completely. But there's a bigger picture here: The more good traffic sources you have in your arsenal, the more quickly you can scale all subsequent green camps. It would be good to actually have a green camp to test these new traffic sources with - the better your funnel converts, the less money you waste in this testing. So the goal here isn't to scale your current camp - it's to use your current camp to scope out traffic sources to add more good ones to your arsenal.


The easiest way to transition to banner traffic, would be to just download a bunch of generic banners, and use those with your winning lander+offer from your original pop camp. When you're ready to try something new, just do this on go2mobi, to get a feel for the new targeting options that come with mDSPs (e.g. exchanges), and go from there.

That's just another option. If you're wanting to focus on pop for a bit longer, that'd be cool too. Just don't get complacent and stay in pop forever.


That sounds great! You have a couple of options here:

1)Start testing offers that accept wifi - until you find one that converts well.

2)Test offers that are mainly geared towards carrier traffic (carrier-billing stuff), in a geo where afflow is doing high eCPM for wifi traffic. That way you could just monetize the carrier traffic using individual offers, and redirect wifi traffic to afflow. (You can also run other rotators/smartlinks instead of afflow - whichever service converts the best for your chosen geo at the moment.)


Awesome!




Amy

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That's a nice opportunity.

As Amy already mentioned, you can create several funnels or send the redundant traffic to a monetizer.

However I would only agree to the deal if they allow you a trial of 2-3 days with the option to pivot if you can't tune things in.

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These posts are gold, Amy! Very helpful for my current pop-sweeps campaigns! I'll update my follow-along in the newb section as I implement these tactics.

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Quick update.

Damn cash flow issues. Was waiting to launch some camps and rev up volume with that traffic deal. Looks like I need to delay it some more and slow down my current traffic and make sure I have enough to cover my other expenses for this month.

Thought net 30 meant that the rev you made during that month you will be paid on the 30th of that month. Come to find out I won't be getting payment until the 30th of the following month. So really net 30 means you will not be getting paid for 2 months. My AM is working with me to see if I can get on weekly's so we will see.

That puts me in a f'ed situation right now as I may have to stop everything.

Cash is king.

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Hi gameandwatch,

I was curious about how your caps are doing? Keep us updated on your progress..

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Sorry to hear! Yes the net 30 terms are confusing indeed - I've been caught with that one when I first started online marketing over a decade ago.

Hang in there! Many newbies will run into cashflow issues in the beginning. I know it's hard to keep calm and avoid getting frustrated, but it's a necessary path to success - just a part of the shit that will make you stronger if you don't let it break you.

If you have to stop everything temporarily, then you have to. But everything can resume once you get that next payment. And you'll come back with a stronger resolve to succeed than before.

Let us know how it goes!



Amy

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