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Newbie's Journey From Zero to $XXX/day (33)

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Hey everyone!

So, here we go. Yesterday, I have decided to join the STM. After skimming through the forums, I already know that this was the best investment I could have ever made - one that will finally help me achieve my life goals, which are (in no particular order):

1) Freedom
2) Financial security
3) Happiness

My life situation at the moment is nothing special. Like almost every newbie on the forum, I work in a 9-5 office job, with a monthly salary of around $1,600 (roughly $9.50 an hour) and a $1,500 worth of savings. I don't pay any rents (have my own apartment). Only major expenses are food, fuel, bills and a small loan of $300 every month. I share all expenses with my wife, so as you can see I don't really need much money every month to allocate as living expenses.

I first heard about affiliate marketing 5 years ago through the warrior forum. Like most people starting out, I did the usual mistakes, like giving up on campaigns after the first test, being scared of spending money, etc. Luckily I didn't lose a lot of money, as in the process I did make some conversions. Of course I gave up after a month and never thought about AM.

A lot has changed since then. After stumbling by accident on Charles Ngo's blog, I got intrigued by affiliate marketing again. I read everything I could from his blog and quickly realized that I was doing everything wrong. I had the wrong mentality, approach and most importantly, I never took REAL action. I never started something and actually finished it.

I had another aha moment - I realized that if I wanted to make money, I need to spend money. Nothing's for free in life and if you want to make it, you have to EARN it, whether being spending money to learn or sacrificing free time to execute your plans.

It's the attitude that counts. I could moan about lot's of things, like little free time to work on AM, fatigue, little resources, etc, but you will see none of that in this thread. It will be a rough journey, full of obstacles, but I am here to win this battle.

As a start, I will be following Amy's (Vortex) lessons from start to finish and read everything I can in the newbie's section. For now, learning is obviously my number one priority.

Free time is a major issue for me, so I will be setting daily goals which will need to be executed on the following day. As the saying goes, taking action is everything! These are the first things I will be doing tomorrow morning:

- Sign up for an account at Mobidea

- Get Voluum tracker

- Sign up for account at PropellerAds

That is all for now, thanks for reading and for all the future advice I will get in this thread .
Cheers!

Steve

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Hi Steve, Good luck with your journey. I hope you achieve what you aim for! Your hard work will take you there for sure!

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Welcome to the forum Steve!

Congrats on your decision to actually take action now and work your way from start to the finish line

Amys tutorials are golden, follow them and you will quickly learn the basics of AM - and please, anytime something isn't clear to you, just ask and we will gladly help you.

Welcome again,
Matej.

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So, as of today I have successfully:

- Signed up to Mobidea
- Have Voluum Tracker
- Opened account on Propeller Ads and funded with $100

Waiting to get an offer approved so that I can create my first campaign and get the hang of things again. Building a process which I can follow each time I create a campaign is very important in my opinion. It's all about having 'a system' in place, so no rushing on this step!

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If you need a landing page depends on your vertical. Gams and adult can work without. Sweep, antivir and generic downloads work better with lander.

When you start out on a traffic source, you often times get lots of bad traffic that nobody else wants. So your initial instinct to give your offer a little bit more traffic is the right one.

I would recommend you to test always several offers per campaign, this will allow you as well to buy more traffic and cut down on the bad placements.

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Hi Sebastian_r,

Thanks for the suggestion. I have spent the last 2 days learning everything I can about landing pages and optimization. Also, have developed and written down my own system for testing and validating offers.

For now decided to pause the games campaign in India, for two reasons.

1) I Don't want to get lazy and direct link gaming offers, even though they may still work well after optimization.
2) Want to focus on a vertical which works better with landing pages. From what I've been learning the past 2 days, it's really difficult to convert and scale campaigns without landing pages. I might be wrong, but landing pages are something that I need to learn - and the faster I do, the better my chances to succeed.

With that in mind, yesterday I decided that I will be focusing on a vertical that works well with landing pages. From what I've seen, the antivirus installs verticals is a good option to start. So, applied for 11 offers across 3 different geos. Once they get approved, I will be starting 3 campaigns (one for every geo + carrier - to simplify things, I chose offers that have same carrier for each geo).

Have already found some good landing pages which I'll be rotating with the offers. Spent quite a good time learning about basic codes and what to adjust when ripping landing pages, but it was worth it. I am already more confident with them now. I remember how I used to dread the idea of implementing landing pages in the past; not anymore.

Obviously had to set up hosting as well. Decided to open up an Amazon CDN with Cloudfront. I chose this over VPS, 1) because probably the first bit I'll be using Amazon S3 will be all free for me (they have a free tier for the first 12 months) so I'll be keeping my costs down. 2) From what I've read in general CDN's perform better than VPSs for international campaigns.

That's all for now, going to work and hopefully I'll set up campaigns tonight once I have offers approved.

Stay tuned!

Steve

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So far so good!

I know people that are still making good profits direct-linking on pop, but yes, generally speaking it would be a good idea to know how to rip and test landers!

Is your S3+Cloudfront setup going smoothly? Here's a fantastic guide on the process by the great caurmen:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-Cost-Way-Ever!

Looking forward to your next progress update!



Amy

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Hi Amy,

Did that exactly by following the tutorial

Regarding ripping landers, I just purchased a month of a spying tool to get an idea of what is working at the moment. However I've decide to learn as much as I can and start building landers on my own, for two reasons: 1) ripping landers and just adjusting the tracking links will make me a lazy affiliate and will hinder creativity. 2) most of the most popular landers I found are either using some kind of cloaking or are black hat! I'm sure that if I run them as they are I would be banned from traffic source / given a warning.

Having taken everything into consideration, will spend more hours learning how to code basic landers and expand my knowledge as the days go by. Also the $$$ spent every month on a spying tool would be better spent on traffic for a newbie like me in my opinion.

I'm sure that this is the right way to go for me, so will be working hard this week to create 2-3 landers from scratch and test accordingly. I believe that with the right angles, even white hat landers will yield great results (correct me if I'm wrong).

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Some food for thought regarding the subject of using ripped landers vs. custom-made landers:

1)Unless you know of a way to keep your custom landers out of the spy tools, your painstakingly-coded lander will get found and ripped the same day you send traffic to it. The more your lander is different from the rest, the more it will stand out in spy tools, and the more likely it will be ripped.

If you don't have a way to prevent the spy tools from finding your lander, then testing variations of ripped landers to increase performance may be a better way to go. Variations will blend into the rest of the landers a lot better than a completely different-looking, custom-made lander.

So - definitely consider whether the additional time spent on making custom landers, would be worth your effort.

2)Landers on Adplexity that are popular, are tried and tested. You'll find that to be an advantage especially when you're testing offers that you have no idea what the performance is. Using an unproven lander to prove an unproven offer can be frustrating - when things don't work out you won't know which one to blame.

So - even if you have a way of keeping landers out of spy tools, you'd want to at least START with ripped landers until you find a good offer, and THEN throw lander variations or custom landers at it - that way, a)if you don't get conversions you'd know it's the lander that's shit, and b)you'd already have a decent ripped lander to act as a control, that you can split-test variation/custom landers with.

3)It's a lot more difficult to get conversions with "whitehat" landers. Aggressive/misleading landers will make use of emotions such as greed or fear to get conversions. This approach will almost always sell better than trying to sell the benefits of the product - for pop (i.e. broad-intent traffic), many of the offers are shady in themselves, which would make it hard to promote benefits in the first place, as often there ARE none.



Amy

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Thanks for your input Amy!

That's exactly my thoughts, however I have a BIG question: How can I get my landers approved on traffic source if all I've found so far are clearly against their policies? Should I cloak landers then? Or is it just a matter of finding a traffic source which doesn't care about blackhat / misleading landers at all? I am really stuck on this...

Other than that I have learned so much these two days creating 3 landers from scratch. I can already see why it's such a huge plus to learn at least basic coding! It is a bit time consuming, however a good exercise nonetheless!

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Just want to say as a fellow newbie I really love the action you are taking and feeling like I am currently living vicariously through you.

Keep up the great work, I know you'll achieve your dreams soon

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That's a major dilemma, yes.

Basically you're faced with the following options:

-Only run compliant landers - but try to push the boundaries and see what you can get approved. (This will make you less competitive than counterparts that are running aggressively and cloaking. So you won't be able to afford higher bids for example.)

-Cloak your landers. (This will introduce the risk of getting caught either by the traffic source or the advertiser.)

-Stick with traffic sources that have more lenient policies. (This will limit the amount of traffic you have access to.)

-Choose to run offer types that can be run without aggressive landers - e.g. stay away from antivirus offers.

-Direct-link to offers without using landers. (You'll need to test a LOT of offers.)

I wished I could tell you what you should do, but this is a personal decision. I can present the options, but in the end you'll need to choose on your own.


Do NOT make lander-cutting decisions based on CTR!

I've seen way too many cases where the winning lander had lower CTR than losing landers.

High CR is what you're looking for, and high CTR does not always result in high CR.

Always use a stats calculator to cut landers based on impressions and conversions - not CTR.

(Exception: If the CTR of a lander is SO extremely low such that it would require impossibly-high CR in order to net a profit, then just cut it.)


So you were getting traffic from the same set of placements, but got 11% CTR before but 100%+ after? And you added the backbutton script in between?

Yup - a backbutton will do that to the CTR. This is yet another reason why I advised not to make decisions based on CTR - because CTR can be artificially inflated.

Some of those CTRs still looked quite high. Were you getting such high CTRs across many placements? What was the average CTR?

Right now you can't conclude anything - because you haven't made a single conversion. Has that changed since you last posted?




Amy

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Hi Steve,

I had a very similar case on one of my campaigns. There's some problem in the scripts you're using in your lander that make each visit be redirected to the offer page 1 or multiple times. My advice would be to test the same lander with different scripts with very little budget and see which script is causing the crazy high CTR. If not it will be impossible to optimize anything since you don't know if users are really clicking or they are just automatically being redirected.

Cheers

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Yikes! Yeah that looks bad!

Blacklisting Zone IDs would be one way. But could you also check ISP stats and Mobile Carrier stats? See if the high CTRs are associated with a particular ISP/carrier.


I feel your pain - when you're running unproven landers with unproven offers, and not getting conversions, you really can't know where the problem lies.

This is why I would run at least 5-10+ landers in the beginning, and use offers that are recommended by AMs, that have been converting reasonably well for multiple other affiliates. Either that, or I would rotate a bunch of offers with the bunch of landers, and just wait until one of the offers has made 2 conversions, then I'd pause all other offers and just use that one offer to test and cut landers. Then I'd use the winning lander to retest all offers plus new ones.

The idea is that the more landers and offers you include in the test, the higher your chances are of having at least one decent offer and lander in the mix. In the beginning you only need a semi-decent offer to help test and cut landers, and if you have enough landers, the last winning lander would likely be at least decent. Then you could use this winning lander to mass-test offers.



Amy

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I guess I will take the grey hat approach for now. Ripping landers and making them less aggressive. For example, changing wording from 'you have a virus' to 'you might have a virus' makes a huge difference. However, as I'm learning more and more I'm realizing that this game of AM is so difficult when there are guys promoting offers so aggressively. Not saying I should start cloaking, however some verticals are probably not worth pursuing unless I do that, which is quite discouraging for a beginner.

With that in mind, I'm taking a different approach from now on. Will be focusing on sweepstakes, as I think they are easier to convert without having to rely on aggressive landers. I've set up a process for myself, inspired by a post from Mr.Payne about launching and optimizing campaigns, which basically relies on testing lots of offers from lots of geos and see what works first. Obviously using landing pages, I'll see what gets permitted and what not on my traffic source - we'll see. Also, since I have a limited budget, I will be looking to smaller payout offers so that I can test more data and learn more at the same time. I always remind myself that at the moment, what counts is not profits, but learning the right processes and build solid foundations!

Campaign A:

Vertical - Sweepstakes
Offers - Applied for 2 low payout offers of $0.94 from this particular GEO - waiting for them to get approved. (From the affiliate network's stats I know that these are converting, that's why I chose them only for now)
Landers - Ripped 2, will let them run out as they are for now (want something that works)
Testing budget - $15 (based on this formula: offers x avg. payout x landers x 4)

And then we'll go from there. If no offer has converted, I will simply move to another GEO with more lower payout offers and repeat the process until we have some conversions. Then we'll optimize (but that's for another post).

I realized I was taking the wrong approach and this is much more systematic. You have to test out more than one phase, testing one thing at a time! (Thanks Mr.Payne). Once I have everything up and running will post some stats!

Steve

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Steve and other newbies - Hi!

I am a newbie (sounds 12 step-ish doesn't it?)

I am a corporate attorney and have been for too long. I work in the oil industry - that's right - drilling wells. I lost count of the # of oil/gas wells I have done legal work on.

I own some condos outside the US (on beaches) and I decided to walk away and start something new while living outside the US. I bounced around on the internet until i found AM. Next, I found AWOL and signed up - $99. After being up sold I started looking again and I found Dr. Ngo. Soon, I was hooked.

I have started a lot of adventures and ventures and this one is at the top of the list as far as overwhelm. I am not deterred. I hired a very good 1 on 1 coach. Things are improving weekly.

I have big goals and I intend to meet them. I like STM so far but I am still learning the buzz words, etc. I have scratched my head so often I have developed a pain.

That being said, I am confident that one day soon I will have an ah-ha moment and dots will connect. My first campaigns should launch within 10 days. I am really zonked about that!

I plan to stick around so I will see you in the forum.

Ron

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Hi Ron,

Good to have like minded people on the forum

We just have to work harder than we ever did and hopefully success should follow. Good luck on your journey!


With regards to campaign A, the offers I applied for were rejected by Mobidea! I have no idea why, but there email reads something like this:

'Offer rejected! Thanks for being interested in the offer. Unfortunately, it was rejected due to advertiser's restrictions.'

I have no idea why and what it means. Other similar offers for same GEO have higher payouts of about $4, however that's too high for my testing budgets at the moment. So I'll be looking at offers from another GEO and leave this country on the side for now.


Plan for campaign A now looks like this:

Offers
Applied for 5 offers from another GEO, hope these get approved this time!
Average payout is $0.80 (this time I have no prove that some of these are converting)

Landers
Ripped another lander and adjusted some minor details. Will start with it as I didn't find many for this GEO, however I know that this one works great. Will add direct linking in the mix as well as offers' landing pages seem good to try on their own too.

Initial Test Budget
Based on: (5 offers x $0.80 avg. payout x 1 lander x 5x payout) = $20

We'll wait and see. Patience is a virtue they say

Steve

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Testing broad in the beginning is a great idea!

Looking forward to seeing stats when you have some.

Have you received an answer from Mobidea regarding the reason for rejections?



Amy

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Hi Steve!

When applying for an offer on Mobidea make sure you check all the restrictions and provide one of the traffic sources that you want to test the offer with. Basically, it can happen that affiliates are not checking the restrictions, and set "Popads" as a traffic source for an offer that forbids pop traffic, etc.

Plus, even if your request for the offers has been rejected, you can always contact Mobidea support for further information! Just talk to them, and ask to approve your offers If there is nothing in your plan that goes against the rules, your offers will be approved on the same moment.

Good luck!

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Hi Mobidea, thanks for the heads up! To be honest I didn't mention traffic source when applying for offers, so as you said that could be the reason. Will give it another go next week for sure!

@ vortex - Yesterday I got accepted for 5 offers from the update on campaign A and so started running it finally. After spending $10 (half the initial testing budget) I am excited to announce that we have 3 conversions!!

$2.40 revenue over $10 spent is about -75% ROI, so definately a good start from what I've been reading on these forums! Also, the lander I'm using seems to be working quite well. Basically this is what I'll be doing after spending $20:

1) Remove offers that have not converted after 5x payout spend.
2) See if there are any placements that have already consumed 2x offer payout and cut them off.
3) Run another testing round

I will post another update with data and screenshots later as I am at work at the moment.

Steve

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So far so good!

Please note that my suggestion to cut after 5x payout without a conversion, only applies when you're 1)targeting mobile carrier traffic, and 2)direct-linking, i.e. NOT using landers. This is because in this case you won't have a lot of room for optimization because there won't be a lot of bot placements to cut and you can't increase ROI using better landers.

When you're using landers you still could cut at 5x payout - just know that you'll be cutting offers that could turn out to be profitable with more lander-testing. Not saying it's a bad approach - the cost-savings may very well justify cutting a few good offers by mistake. Just want to point this out FYI.

But if you're targeting wifi, then the 5x payout rule may be too stringent, because the lack of conversions may be due to bot placements that you can cut.

Also - how many landers have you tested already?


1st question - If you've already tested a good number of landers and are already running your best, AND you're targeting carrier traffic, then yes - ditching offers that have 0 conversions after 5x payout in spend would be a good idea.

2nd - This is natural and is referred to as clickloss. Around 20-30% clickloss is normal for pop. Here are some tips on how to minimize clickloss, by matuloo: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post313897

3rd - Basically you're wanting to see how much of your traffic you can make profitable (placements, OSs, browsers, whatever have you). If you CAN make enough of the traffic profitable to justify your efforts in keeping the camp alive, then it would just be a matter of cutting the unprofitable parts. If you CAN'T make enough of the traffic profitable, then it would mean having to improve your funnel - by testing more offers and/or landers.

And don't forget that the bid will make a difference in the CR as well - so that would be another thing to test.

Just don't fall into the trap of keeping a campaign running and cutting placements hoping it would turn green by some miracle, when you don't even have enough profitable traffic segments (placements, OSs.......etc. etc.) This is a classic newbie mistake. Always run until you can say either 1)there are enough profitable traffic segments - just need to cut the unprofitable, or 2)there aren't enough profitable traffic segments - either ditch the camp or test more offers/landers. Then act accordingly.

Doing good Steve! Will leave you to your camps now - do post an update when you're ready!



Amy

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Thanks Amy!

Landers:

So far I am using only one lander. It's a very popular lander, so probably it is good and now I've tested it myself as well, so I know it works well enough for the offers I'm running. I am considering adding another two landers in the mix, certainly not as good as the one I'm using, but I'll never know if I don't try! I think that's a big mistake to assume something without testing..


Question 1: I am targeting carrier traffic + I think current lander is the best (from what I've spied).. however as pointed out earlier, I'll never know for sure without testing. So before cutting offers that reach 5x spend without conversions, I will add 2 more landers in the mix and go from there.


Question 2: Didn't know about clickloss, thanks for the link!


Question 3: So, to summarize, cutting placements that are in more than 2x payout loss (general guideline) as the first optimization is not the way to go. If I understood correctly, there are more important things to consider first, such as traffic carrier, OS, browser, etc. Is there a general guideline for these (i.e after how much spend to cut a type of carrier for example) or I just need them to reach statistical significance first?

Thanks as always!

Steve

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That's right - don't assume. It's a lot of risk to be running just one lander.

Think of it this way: You'll be using this lander to test a lot of offers. So if the lander isn't as good as it can be, then you'll have lost the battle before you start.

If however, you've tested at least 5-10+ landers and have cut down to a good one, then chances are you have a pretty decent winner. Of course there's always room for improvement, but at least you'll have tested most of the popular ones. So that when you're testing offers, when an offer doesn't convert you can say with confidence that the offer is probably a dud.


Ideally, you should apply the 2x-loss rule only when you're running your best lander+offer.

However, even while you're still testing landers/offers, you can still cut placements. That will minimize your losses quickly, but the flip-side is you may cut out some potentially-profitable placements.

To guard against that, you can choose to retest some of the placements after you've cut down to your best offer+lander combo, and after cutting some of the worst-converting segments like OSs, browsers, etc., because some of those placements may be profitable then.

Trick is focus on the bigger placements and other traffic segments. Don't micro-optimize into the smaller placements/segments - you'll venture into diminishing returns. Would be more productive to spend your time elsewhere - setting up new tests and scaling for example.




Amy

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Update Time

So, after about $41.90 spent and 4 days running, we have made $4.00 in revenue (5 conversions). I have already cut out bad placements, added more landing pages to the mix (with no conversions) and removed non performing OSs, browsers, etc.

I am trying to rip some more landers and inventing my own as well, however I can't seem to find another winner. There is only 1 lander that is still doing well in terms of CTR, however conversions have died off completely in the last 2 days. Is this a sign that campaign is dying off?

Also today I started duplicating the campaign to test lower / higher bids. So far I haven't got any conversions neither. Any suggestions how to go from here? I guess testing other GEOs is the answer..

Thanks!

Steve

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Please read the first part of this post where I talk about making sure there are enough profitable segments before investing into mass-cutting:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post321116

Of course, that only applies if you're NOT improving on your funnel (i.e. testing offers and landers). If you ARE, then you'd need to find the best lander+offer first, then see if you're getting enough profitable segments.


How many landers have you tested? 5-10+ should be the norm.

Once you've locked down a good lander, you can then mass-test offers using it.

The 5x spend rule of thumb ONLY applies in the case of direct-linking to carrier-billing offers. This is because when you're direct-linking, you can't optimize by testing landers; and when you're targeting carrier traffic, there are no bot placements to cut. So, with so little room for optimization, assuming you're bidding average and thus getting good-quality traffic, cutting at 5-10x payout without a single conversion would make sense.

However, if you're using landers, and/or targeting wifi traffic, then cutting an offer at 5x payout would not be fair to the offer. Basically you'll need an offer that converts, in order to get the conversions you need to cut landers down to a winner. After that you can mass-test offers, and cut offers that reach statistical significance (i.e. inferior to the best offer).


Please don't guess - there's no need to! Here's the method and tool to use:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...211#post289211


I would actually cut placements that are at 2x payout in loss, but that's just a rule of thumb. 3x would be fine as well.

And yes - if you find an offer and/or lander that converts better, you can always retest some of the placements you've cut before.


You're learning fast - so far so good!


Pop camps will die their natural deaths sooner or later - often after a mere few days - a few weeks if you're lucky, and a few months only if you're REALLY lucky (and if there's little competition).

Try putting the camp on pause and test other stuff for now. After a couple of days, turn the old camp back on again to see if you get conversions.

Another thing you can do is increase your bid - sometimes the lack of conversions is due to your getting outbid.

And just to rule out the possibility of the offer being the problem, throw in a couple more offers. If you haven't tested landers extensively before this point, I would highly suggest that you rip 5-10+ landers and test until you find a winner, and then mass-test offers with it.




Amy

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A vacation! Very nice! And yeah it would spoil things to have your laptop with you.

When I say profitable segments, I mean any subset of traffic you're getting - placements, OSs, carriers, browsers, etc. If you have enough profitable segments to justify your effort in running the camp, then keep cutting the unprofitable stuff. If not, then don't keep cutting stuff hoping to get green - instead, improve your funnel by testing more landers and/or offers, and/or test bids. Or just ditch the camp.

If you've tested enough landers such that you don't feel testing additional ones will give you much improvement, then mass-test offers. Doing so has the best chances of increasing your ROI by leaps and bounds, and testing offers is cheaper than spending money on cutting placements (and you'll be left with more profits in the end of the cutting if you have a better offer).

From your stats it looks like you don't yet have enough stats to see whether the camp is likely to reach green eventually, or not. So just keep running for now. And yes, you can cut placements.

But I would definitely recommend to test lots of offers before doing any aggressive cutting.




Amy

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Thanks Amy, just restarted campaign and have some more conversions already. I am cutting the most unprofitable placements and have some of them which are in profit. So I guess I have to just keep running the camp for now as you suggested. I've been trying to come up with some new landers, but none are converting as well as the one I ripped.

In the meantime I have started another campaign for antivirus apps. So far so good, looking promising as I already have 3 conversions. Spent a bit on 2 placements, as there were bots in both of them which I didn't catch at the start. So that took like $4 away from my budget. Offer payout is a bit on the low side ($0.42) but I think there's potential.

Also I have made 3 landers from scratch and seem to be working quite well. I know it's a bit more work, but to run antivirus offers with white hat landers that's what I have to do! Tried spying a bit, but all seem very aggressive and will surely get me banned.

Will do an update later.

EDIT: Not much to update, however I have started to do some day parting. I have noticed that most of my conversions were made during a particular time frame. So I think it's a good idea to test that. Will report results tomorrow.

Steve

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Sounds good!

The profitable placements - how much are they making in profits per day on average? If you like, you can share your placement stats and we'll take a look. (Post 2 versions: one sorted by conversions in descending order, and the other sorted by impressions in descending order.)

Antivirus apps - nice! $0.42 isn't low necessarily - depends on the geo you're running and how well it's converting. I've seen much, much lower.

Making your own whitehat landers - now that's what I call innovation! Have you seen mrbraun's recent post on the topic?

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...on-POP-traffic

And dayparting sounds great too!

Making lots of progress - looking good!



Amy

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Enjoying the learning process - that's the best attitude you can possibly have!

Those placement stats - I'm going to assume a single lander was used - please let me know if that's not the case and present stats only for the best lander. Here are my observations:

-I'm assuming the stats collected were over the course of at least a day? You can tell that even if you were to cut all the unprofitable placements, the profitable ones won't net you more than $1/day.

-A vast majority of the bigger placements are in loss - only one is in profit out of the top 20 or so placements.

These are indications that the camp isn't worth running, period. It's not worth cutting placements further, because no matter how many placements you cut, it would be in vain if you don't have enough promising placements in the first place.


However, if you haven't tested a lot of landers (at least 5-10+) or offers, then definitely do that - because that can potentially increase your ROI by big amounts. My observations above are only applicable to your current funnel.

Of course if you test bids that can change things as well, but if you're already bidding a decent amount such that you're not getting crap traffic (e.g. bidding average) then I seriously doubt changing the bid would take something with such negative ROI to anywhere close to positive. It wouldn't be impossible, but chances are so slim that it wouldn't be worth a test.

Therefore, I would suggest for you to either test more landers and offers, or to target another geo/carrier.

Next time, you'll know what to look for when looking at placement stats - if you don't have enough promising-looking placements (ones that look like they could end up being profitable), AND there aren't other shitty segments you can cut (OSs/Browsers/Devices/Carriers...), AND you've already locked down a good lander and offer - then it would be time to fold.




Amy

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That's exactly what I was thinking as well Amy, but wasn't 100% sure.

Those stats are from the the first day of the campaign run. Also, I had tested other landers, about four in total but could easily tell which the best lander was as I said in previous posts.

So my instincts tell me this: even if I somehow manage to breakeven, it won't be worth pursuing due to not having enough profitable segments. Also, the ones I have in profit are not worth following, so ditching the campaign is the way to go.

With the same reasoning as above, I can also stop my other campaign. It has already spent around $30, had a mix of 5 landers and only about 5 conversions ($2.10 revenue). Not enough profitable segments as well.

Takeaway's from my first two campaigns:

1) Spending on traffic is buying data. If you don't spend you cannot make any calculated decisions.
2) Learned how to build landers, scripts, etc from scratch. I could have just ripped them from spy tools, but wouldn't have learned anything by just changing tracking links.
3) Affiliate marketing is hard work and dedication.
4) After about 3 weeks I have a thorough idea of how to start and finish a campaign and what to look for when optimizing.


My way forward is to look for alternative traffic sources, mainly I will be applying to popads and start another campaign there. Also, I'll be building / ripping new landers as well. Mainly I'll keep focusing on the AV and sweepstakes verticals for now.

It's a long way ahead, but the desire to make this happen is really big. I won't stop until I'll succeed!

Steve

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I definitely like your attitude! Having a positive outlook is the first and foremost, most crucial requirement for success. If you have that, everything else will gradually fall into place. If you don't, any action you take will be in vain - that is why so many people feel like they're stuck in one place running in circles.

Regarding building landers from scratch - that may or may not be worth your time. Main consideration is whether you can keep your babies out of the spy tools or not. If you can't keep them out of spy tools, then the more your lander looks different from the others in spy tools, the faster they'll get ripped by your competitors.

If you can find out how to keep your landers out of spy tools, then you'd have a BIG edge - assuming you have the skill required to build well-converting landers.

If you can't figure out how to keep your landers out of spy tools, then it may be better to focus your time on testing lander variations (i.e. make subtle changes to your best ripped lander) - landers that don't stand out significantly from the others in spy tools won't get ripped as quickly by as many people. It may also be better to dedicate the time you'd normally spend on creating custom landers, on testing more extensively (landers and offers - especially offers!) instead.

(*whispering* I will give you a hint: I've heard of at least one cloaker that can allegedly keep landers out of spy tools. I cannot openly recommend cloaking so am not at liberty to say any more. You'll just need to do your own research to find out.)

Best of luck Steve - I very much look forward to seeing you succeed!



Amy

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Hmmm.. Interesting to know! I might look into that option in the future. But I think that as you suggested, for now it's better that I spend my time learning optimization processes, as that's where I need to improve.

I have started another campaign today, waiting for it to be approved on PopAds (finally opened an account there). So far so good, I like the platform.

Ripped off 14 landers in total and made subtle changes to them. Also, since most of them are very aggressive, I had to change some wording as well just to be on the safe side. IN the beginning I will only rotate 5 landers, until I find the best offer/s (I'm testing 3 from the GEO I chose). Once I find the good converting offer, I will add more to the mix or test other GEOs accordingly.

Steve

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Nice progress!

Please forget about cutting at 5x payout when you're either 1)targeting wifi traffic, or 2)using landers and not just direct-linking, or 3)both!

That rule of thumb would only work when running 1/2-click offers via direct-linking, because there's no bot traffic in carrier traffic, AND because no landers are used, there's not as much room for massive increase in CR. Thus the 5x payout rule would work somewhat well.

When you're testing offers with landers, you should aim to 1)test lots of landers and lock down the best one out of all the ripped ones, then 2)use that lander to mass-test offers. (And of course you could always take the best ripped lander and test variations of it.) The overall aim would be to compare landers to each other to find the best by cutting the inferior ones, and to compare offers with each other to find the best by cutting the inferior ones.

Here's the method to use for cutting landers:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Banners-Part-1

You can also compare your direct-link stats with your lander stats using the method above - basically just count direct-linking as another lander, if that makes sense.

And here's the method to use for cutting offers:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...211#post289211

Regarding setting up tracking for Zinc and Adcombo - this thread should help:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...by-Step-Voluum

And if you get stuck - you know what to do!



Amy

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