Can't Get A Single Offer To Convert Once (32)
I've gone through a majority of charles ngo's articles and went through all of his online course and in 1 article he mentions how mobile content offers are a good starting point for beginners. I've promoted those for 2 weeks straight using antivirus pin submit offers mainly on tier 3 countries while creating landers and also modifying and reusing top-performing ones on adplexity with very little sucesss. After spending almost 1 grand, I emailed him and he recommended soi email submit offers. So I tried those using offers from Peerfly that had a high cr and epc and were mostly US only. I still couldn't get them to convert except waay past 5x the payout and even then it was just a few conversions after 100's in ad spend. Now after signing up for STM I noticed that pop ads were the right place to be in but maybe not pin submit offers like I was doing earlier. So I left that and thought maybe the high converting email submits on peerfly were too competitive because they were tier 1 and the high cr rates were a sign of high competition. I tried getting this clarified with my am but it's been a week and she still hasn't responded. So I decided to run 1 click flows in tier 3/4 geos and adjusting bids according to the newbie guide on propeller ads and testing batches of offers. But after testing around 15 of them across many geos I had no success. I'm thinking it has something to do with the 0 epc and cr rate that they all had. Also, I've tested around 30 different offers across multiple affiliate networks, traffic sources, geos, and verticals but can't seem to get one to convert before the 5x payout. I've even let some go beyond that and tried optimizing by blacklisting zones that are 2x the payout or more but after blacklisting nearly 100 website ids on popads with 1 offer I decided to just stop that campaign. Can someone tell me where to go from here? Should I change the kind of offers I'm promoting? Should I increase my bid to the max so I'm number 1 in the bidding queue? Are there offers that actually convert before 5x the payout without landers or optimization??
Yes, it seems really hard to find a potential good offer.
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
How much have you spent and how many clicks have you gotten?
i had the same problem with pop ads, spent more than a grand, optimized a lot, but still couldn't make it profitable.
I've gotten conversions before but only a handful and after 100s in ad spend and never before 5x the payout
Right now I'm limiting my budget to 5x the payout and then shutting down the campaign on 1 click flow offers. They're direct link so no clicks on landers.
Rafael, so what did you do?
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
Sure there are, but remember, that if something only converts once in 5x payout, its still at only -80% ROI. Plenty of offers can convert more than this "without optimization", but it really depends on so many factors (i.e. the traffic source and/or quality, the funnels you are testing, the GEO, the bid, plus so many more things), that it's not exactly predictable.
It can be frustrating running initial tests, especially in new verticals. Believe me, I know -- I'm working on dipping my toes into two new traffic types & verticals now, and it can be a bit overwhelming, to say the least.
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
I'm not sure if anyone is going to have an exact answer for you, but here is what I recommend:
#1. Slow down and FOCUS, while working on creating a consistent process.
#2. reflect on what have you have LEARNED from the money you've spent and campaigns you've launched. If you've spent over a grand, there should be something you can take away from that initial 'tuition'. (Really $1k isn't soooo much money, by any means, to spend in this game, but I know it seems like a lot when getting started, especially if ROI is low) If you don't have good reflection here, refer back to #1.
#3. Test more offers, more landers, and more traffic sources.
#4. Talk to all your AMs, and learn to ask good questions to get the info you need. You will find some AMs are easier to work with, and some may seem to have 'better' info. for you, but you need to ask the right kind of questions first. E.g. "Can you tell me the top 25 mainstream mobile content offers, by revenue, from the past 3 to 5 days on the network" , "Any new segments for mobile sweeps that have risen in your charts the past few days? Can you tell me about a few that have multiple, well-performing offers?", etc. (I'm just spitballing here...) Lists like these are a good place to start, and should give you some direction in your spying attempts as well.
Mobile pops are not easy, and one can't expect to just throw something at the wall and hope it sticks. Sometimes you will get lucky like this, but its really a numbers game. Say 30 low payout mobile content offers direct linked --> that's really not so much, and you will likely need to test even more to find one that really sticks. If you take your time to stay organized and learn more system-level stuff, you will start to develop skills that can translate across verticals & traffic types.
For whatever its worth as I'm still a bit of a beginner, some anecdotal perspective: lately, I've been focused on adult carrier billing offers on pops and display, and the last two or three times I found a real successful camp , it took me say ~$2k in testing to flip my entire "search" from red to green (considering all the losers, and "little winners"), and that's with proven landers testing many, many offer/GEO/carrier combinations in just one vertical! I lost a lot of good camps in the last month or so, and this time around in my new "search", I'm still only around break even (-5%) on about $4k, still looking for that next "hot" camp
Hi Chris, thanks for your comment. Do you have any profitable campaigns that you can reference for your approach? And basically what I take from you is just keep trying right? Not change anything?
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
I'm not necessarily saying "don't change anything". In order to do anything, you need to find a converting offer. That's your number 1 goal. For direct linking mobile content offers, that process (running each offer to ~5x payout, then cutting) is sound. But don't overthink & overdo optimization at the beginning, especially not while you are trying to run a discrete "round" of split testing some variable.
Ultimately, you need to decide on a reasonable budget for the campaign, then set it and let it run, without tweaking (unless you have some huge, obvious screw-up/bad placement/etc). If you spend your budget, and nothing performs, then you can do a few things - test more offers, or call it a loss and move on. You should try to test a lot of offers, not necessarily at once, but in batches of 5-10 (could do more if huge volume available), but there is a point where a GEO/traffic source/vertical combination needs to be written off as a dud.
You could also test a new traffic source (could be done in initially, as well), because different sources have better and worse inventories for different GEOs (in quality and/or volume).
You can't do anything else in terms of optimization, if you don't have conversion data to work with. Try to avoid over-optimizing in general, but especially at the beginning. If you cut too many placements, you will limit the traffic available to yourself thus possibly create such "small" camps, they're not worth your time. Unless something just totally kicks ass on a small subset, look for offers that convert across a lot of placements, so you can spend as much as possible when scaling
I wrote an article for cases like yours, please read it to see if there is any value in it for you : https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-Read-This-Now
Hi Matuloo, thanks so much! I've read a few of your articles on your site before. Thanks for the help, I just set up a bot detection lander and waiting for my am to get back with me on the top offers by revenue. Gonna try to run a bunch of those with the bot detection and see what happens. What kind of offers do you recommend I stick with? Email submits or 1 click flows for mobile content? Or is there something better than these two?
And I've been direct linking both email submits and 1 click flows. Should I start using landers instead?
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
you should be doing what the big guys in the industry are doing. if they are using landers, you'd have to be insane not too.
One of the big guys in the industry (Charles Ngo) recommended direct linking in some scenarios. I believe it's also been recommended here for direct billing in one of the guides.
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
The most-probable causes for the lack of success I think, would be the following:
1)There's an issue with your tracking setup. However, you HAVE been getting a few conversions, so your setup can't be completely wrong - but perhaps it's just slow? If redirection speed from traffic source to offer/lander is too slow, you could be losing visitors.
a)Are you using a cloud-based tracker like
b)Have you checked the speed of your DNS for the domain you're using for your tracker? If speed is slow, there are optimizations you can make.
c)Another good test: Set up 2 campaigns simultaneously, one using the tracker, the other one bypassing the tracker (i.e. just put the aff link directly into the traffic source as the destination url), and compare how many conversions each campaign gets. The camp that bypasses the tracker SHOULD get more conversions because there would be less clickloss, but if the difference in conversions is night-and-day, then something is probably wrong with your tracker setup.
For this test, it would be best to choose a 1-click offer with a really low-payout in the $0.03-$0.10 range, targeting a major carrier in a tier 3/4 geo, on a traffic source that has plenty of traffic for that carrier. This way you can collect a lot of conversions without breaking the bank.
(The conversions generated by the camp that IS using the tracker, will be posted back to the tracker. But the conversions generated by the camp that is NOT using the tracker, won't be posted back anywhere - you'll need to check the aff network stats the see the total number of conversions made by the offer, and subtract the conversions you see on the tracker.)
d)Another thing to check: For your direct-linking camps, check the number of impressions your camp received, and compare that to the total views received by the offer (find this in the aff network's stats). If the numbers are very different - i.e. more than 20-30% - then there may be a problem there that you'll need to dig deeper to uncover and hopefully fix.
2)You may have spent way too much money testing way too few offers. Not saying for sure that you've made this mistake - just pointing it out as a possibility, because it's a classic newbie "mistake". I put that in quotation marks because it's something almost every newbie has to learn the hard way. Consider it as tuition you needed to pay for learning the trade.
It's not easy to know when to give up on an offer. If you're targeting carrier traffic and direct-linking, then pausing at 5x payout without conversions - like you've pointed out - would be a good rule-of-thumb. However, if you're using landers, and/or targeting wifi traffic, then you'll need to spend a bigger budget before giving up - simply because there is more room for optimization to increase your ROI (testing landers and cutting bot traffic, for example).
3)You may have been direct-linking to offers that normally wouldn't convert well without a lander. A lot of 1/2-click carrier-billing offers can be direct-linked because they have attractive offer pages with nice graphics, and because they don't require much action from the user (e.g. tapping the subscription button once - thus the name "1-click"). But sweeps and antivirus offers for example typically won't do well when direct-linked, unless they already have landers built-into them (aff networks and advertisers call them "pre-landers").
________________
Next, I want to briefly talk about campaign approaches. There are 2 approaches in general - direct-linking, and using landers.
1)Direct-linking.
As was mentioned earlier: Your decision to test offers to 5x payout, then ditch if there are no conversions, is a good one, ASSUMING you're talking about direct-linking to 1/2-click carrier-billing offers! (If you're targeting wifi traffic, and/or using landers, then you'll need to spend more.)
Offers that can convert well when direct-linked: 1/2-click carrier-billing offers that have attractive offers pages with great graphics (basically offers that look like they can sell themselves, without requiring pre-selling); offers that have pre-landers (or what we affiliates call landers) built-into the offer; and certain apps can convert well when direct-linked as well (although in most cases direct-linking to apps is against the advertiser's rules).
The trick to succeeding with direct-linked offers is to test a TON of them, but only spend a small budget on testing each. Identify gems that convert well from the very beginning, to optimize and scale. Don't treat these offers like you would your family - don't spend and spend until you're 100% sure they are duds before saying goodbye. There are a million and a half of these offers on various networks. Keep ditching and don't look back.
And of course, before you mass-test, make sure you only pick offers that has a chance of converting well without landers! Can't stress that enough.
2)Using Landers.
Below is a brief description of 2 approaches I like to use when testing offers and landers - I'm copying and pasting straight from an FAQ we've compiled for the 6WAMC course.
1)Ask AMs for offer recommendations (for a specific geo and offer type). Pick 2-3 that have similar payouts - the more similar the better. Rip all the most popular landers from Adplexity (ones that have received the most traffic, that are in the target language, for that offer type, ones that look really different - don't pick landers that look similar). Have at least 5 landers, 10 would be better. Throw them all into a campaign. Cut offers and landers down to winners (using stats calculators). Then test another batch of offers.
2)Compile a big list of all offers that exist for your chosen geo and offer type. Again rip landers as above. Run all offers and landers together until one of the offers has made 2 conversions, then pause all offers except that one. Run that offer and all landers, and cut landers until the last (winner). Then use that winning lander to test more offers as above.
Further explanation:
-In the 1st approach, the offers need to have very similar payouts, because when we compare lander stats using the recommended stats calculator, this calculator will assume all conversions to be worth the same. So if the payouts are too different then the results will be inaccurate.
-In both approaches, the central idea is to test all the popular landers in use to find a winner first, and then use this winner to mass-test offers. Once you find a decent lander, you can use it for at least a few months, because landers don't "burn out" half as quickly as banners do. Offers will also come and go, but you could keep using that same lander to test new offers for quite a while.
-Basically, to test landers and cut down to a winner, you need at least one good offer that will give you the required conversions without breaking the bank. In the 1st approach I suggest to use AM-recommended offers because they're more likely to give conversions (usually the reason why they're recommended by the AM is because they've converted for other affiliates). In the 2nd approach, I suggest to pick the offer that reaches 2 conversions first, because it's an indication that it's converting at a decent rate.
-This whole approach in a nutshell: Use one or more converting offers to nail down a winning lander, then use that to mass-test offers. Once you have a good lander+offer that will hopefully make enough of the traffic profitable, cut the unprofitable parts to result in profits.
Lastly - 2 more suggestions before I let you go:
I would HIGHLY recommend that you write a detailed post (just update this thread) to describe what you have been doing. You've spent all that money already, so let's see what we can learn from them - do a post-mortem on them if you will. Doing this can greatly increase your chances of success in future campaigns.
After that, you can also start a follow-along to describe new campaigns you run, to get feedback and guidance. That way, I could give you a LOT more specific directions than all the general advice I've been giving in this post.
Last piece of advice: I know your confidence could use a boost at this point. Remember my suggestion above on running a 1-click offer with a really low-payout in the $0.03-$0.10 range, targeting a major carrier in a tier 3/4 geo, on a traffic source that has plenty of traffic for that carrier? That would actually be a good way to start. Seeing a lot of conversions can do wonders for your mind and soul. Plus, they'll help you to learn how to optimize your camp for a LOT cheaper than if you were running higher-payout offers in tier 1 geos with expensive traffic, because you'd generate a lot more conversions with the same test budget. Run a few of those, start a follow-along, and we'll go from there. How does that sound?
Amy
Hi Vortex, thanks so much for your feedback!
1) Now that you mention it, I went ahead and checked the speed for one of my campaigns on gtmetrix and google's mobile site speed tool and while the performance was good on gtmetrix google ranked it as slow and estimated a 29% visitor loss. I've never had this before. I used to always speed check my campaigns and they always came out with perfect performance and loaded in less than 2 seconds so I stopped checking them. Later on I changed my tracker to a custom domain and forgot about speed checking. I think the issue is with my tracking domain.
a) I'm using
b) How do I check the speed of the DNS for my domain? How can I optimize it?
c) Thanks for this tip, I'll keep it in mind for future tracker setup testing. Without testing, I think the speed of my domain is definitely the issue, just need to figure out how to optimize it now.
d) I got a 25% difference between impressions recorded on Volume and Unique clicks on peerfly so no issue there I think.
2) I did do that at first and spent a lot of money on just 5 offers but realized that was a mistake and tested around 20 more offers for direct billing and followed the 5x payout rule but still didn't have any luck. However, I think what you pointed out to me today concerning the speed of my DNS and what Matuloo mentioned about bot traffic could be the reasons for the poor performance in all my campaigns up to this point.
3) I understand some offers are hard to convert without a lander in direct billing that's why I only used coupons/vouchers, antivirus, and gaming. I think I read that in one of the guides here. I haven't done very well with about 20 of them so far but I think we found the reason for that and I'll get right to fixing them as soon as I figure out how to take care of the speed issue. I already implemented the bot detector lander so hopefully that problem's taken care of.
Thanks for sharing those two approaches to direct linking and landers! I'll definitely keep them in mind. And thanks again for your response, hopefully this will bring me one step closer to my first profitable campaign.
If someone know how to optimize the DNS of your tracking domain please let me know. I really want to get my campaigns back up and running asap
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ll=1#post32628
a) I'm using
b) How do I check the speed of the DNS for my domain? How can I optimize it?
c) Thanks for this tip, I'll keep it in mind for future tracker setup testing. Without testing, I think the speed of my domain is definitely the issue, just need to figure out how to optimize it now.
d) I got a 25% difference between impressions recorded on Volume and Unique clicks on peerfly so no issue there I think.
2) I did do that at first and spent a lot of money on just 5 offers but realized that was a mistake and tested around 20 more offers for direct billing and followed the 5x payout rule but still didn't have any luck. However, I think what you pointed out to me today concerning the speed of my DNS and what Matuloo mentioned about bot traffic could be the reasons for the poor performance in all my campaigns up to this point.
3) I understand some offers are hard to convert without a lander in direct billing that's why I only used coupons/vouchers, antivirus, and gaming. I think I read that in one of the guides here. I haven't done very well with about 20 of them so far but I think we found the reason for that and I'll get right to fixing them as soon as I figure out how to take care of the speed issue. I already implemented the bot detector lander so hopefully that problem's taken care of.
Thanks for sharing those two approaches to direct linking and landers! I'll definitely keep them in mind. And thanks again for your response, hopefully this will bring me one step closer to my first profitable campaign.
The rest of what you said sounds good! It sounds like you were just paying your dues to learn the normal lessons every new affiliate marketer needs to learn. But yes, the speed issue would DEFINITELY be worth looking into.
It may be better to start a new thread to ask about DNS optimization, just to get more eyeballs of people that have experience in that area - which definitely is NOT me. If you don't get a reply, bump the thread and I'll see if I could get someone to help.
Best of luck and do let us know how you get on!
Amy
Can you post a waterfall graph of the loading speed tests you did (or otherwise more details on what the reports said)? That will help us diagnose and fix your speed issues.
You might also find Manu's post on Route53 DNS setup useful: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...hlight=route53
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
Regarding the DNS problem you were discussing with the other guys here ... I'm using dnsmadeeasy.com and it works pretty well too.
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
Hi Matuloo, so should I be direct linking direct billing gaming offers or not?
Caurmen has done a test in the past, and observed that when visitors have to wait more than 2 seconds for something to load, they started leaving in droves.
You shouldn't need to choose between whether to speed up the offer page or the DNS - you should aim to speed up both if you can!
Amy
Ok I did the route 53 setup and the campaign load speed went down from 4.3 s to 2.5 s according to gtmetrix. For some reason the google speed test never went through. The only thing I didn't do in the setup was step 4 with cloud front because I'm not using landers at the moment. Is that ok? Also, is that speed ok? If not, how can I optimize the offers while direct linking?
There's very little you can do about offer loading speed if you're direct linking.
Just treat it as an element of the offer that you can't change - if the offer ain't converting, it doesn't matter if that's because the copy's terrible or the site's slow, you can't fix that. All you can do is move on to another offer - which you'll need to do quite a bit anyway to find one that's good.
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
2.5s, however, is still too slow. I would suggest that you repeat the test for different offers - most of them should be a LOT faster. If they're all slow, then there's a possibility that your DNS is still too slow.
And nope you don't need cloudfront if you're not using landers yet. I proposed an idea in your other thread on using a simple loading lander to prefetch the offer page using caurmen's method. Please feel free to give that a try!
Amy
Hi Vortex, thanks for your advice. I went ahead and tested a list of 8 different offers and most of them came between 3 and 4 seconds, while 2 were 6 and 8 seconds. I even tested the offers with a speed test in the geo that they're in and got similar results. Should I forget this whole batch and keeping looking for offers that are under 2 seconds?
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
Originally Posted by rashidannahas
More questions/suggestions:
1)Are these offers all from a single aff network? Or multiple networks? If all from one network, please test some from other networks and compare results.
2)When testing offers, were you testing from the same geo the offer accepts traffic from? If your geo is in Asia and you're using a test location from North America, then the speed would be inflated. Also, if the test location is different from what the offer will accept, you'd probably be redirected by the aff network to an offer that WILL accept traffic from the test location.
3)Are these offers carrier-billing offers that only accept carrier traffic? If so, then they would be really tricky to test. I don't know of a carrier-traffic emulator (typically you'd need to be browsing from a device that contains a SIM card from the specific carrier), and usually if the aff network detects that you're not using the specific carrier, they would redirect you to another offer. If you've been getting redirected, then that would explain the long loading times (at least in part).
4)As matuloo has suggested, try another test tool and compare results.
Amy
1) Yes they are.
2) Yes I tested from the same geo and got those results.
3) They also accept wifi traffic but I don't plan on running wifi so I can stick to the 5x rule and not have to worry about bots right now.
4) I tried with 4 diff speed test tools and got the same results
Have you tested offers from another aff network? That would be my last suggestion.
In addition to an idea I have - which I've posted to your other thread:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post321966
Amy
Home > The Newbie Zone > Questions and Answers