Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns

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Second Attempt to Mobile CPA: Looking for Green + $XX/Day (20)

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Hi fellow marketers!

Here's a brief intro of me!

P.S: English isn't my native language. I am still learning it! So, please excuse me, if my posts contain grammar and spelling errors.

I am Chamal from Sri Lanka. I signed up for STM after reading articles on Charles Ngo's, Matej's and Andrew's blog in June. I started my online marketing journey in 2012 with no money in hand. After making a few dollars through blogging using my blogspot blog, I migrated my blog from BlogSpot to WordPress and now it makes me around $500 per month. However, I am fed up with Google's policies and it's not easy these days to rank a good in-depth article on top of SERPs for relevant keywords unless you're a branded or an authority website of Google's eye.

That's why I thought to give performance marketing a try! When I first tried it in September 2016, I failed. I believe it's because of lack of proper knowledge, experience and enough commitment.

This time, I jumped one step ahead earlier and signed up for STM, read entire newbies section and a few threads. And subscribed to a few paid services such as Adplexity. Also, set up hosting on Amazon S3 + Cloudfront CDN.

I have basic skills in web page design and with that I grabbed a few landers from Adplexity and fixed them for faster loading, deleted unnecessary scripts and redesigned with new content for testing.

Here's my first mobile campaign details:

Vertical: Antivirus
GEO: India
Traffic Source: PopAds

My Game plan

1. Grab carrier billing offers from my affiliate network(s) and set up a flow on Voluum.
2. Rip a few landers from Adplexity and set them up for running.
3. Do a bot test according to the details in caurmen's thread. $30 for bot test with $1.005/CPM (which is 1.5 times of average CPM for my current settings). Remove any placement with 20% or less CTR. (80% or more bots)
4. Up and running my campaigns with an initial test budget: My rule for initial test budget:==> avg. payout * # of landers * # of offers * (3-5). So, I will be spending: $0.7 * 7 * 4 * (3-5) = $58.8-$98
5. Spend initial budget and then cut landers using PeakConversion A/B testing tool to find a "promising" lander according to my statistics.
6. Cut Offers: cutting offers would be tricky. Because some offers supports for several operators. Then, I will have to dill down reports on Voluum and cut offers according to statistics. If there isn't any difference, I wouldn't cut them.
7. If ROI >-30%, I would be follow one of these steps:
   
   1.) Drill down reports in Voluum and find a winning traffic segment that is possible to scale. ex: Android > Chrome > Offer. And isolate the particular combination in a separate campaign.
   2.) Cut placements. (x3 or more ad spend without profits)
   
   If ROI <-30%, I will move to 8th step.
8. After finding one or two winning landers in the first round, add more 7 landers. Now rotate total 8-9 landers with another budget. Expected budget: $126
9. Cut landers and offers as above mentioned.
10. If I still can't find a winning combination, run another round for with new landers.
11. If I failed in the third round, will move to another vertical or GEO!

My moments:

• Designed 7 landers (with a few CR boosting scripts such as entry alert) and added to S3 > Voluum.
• Created a flow with right conditions and created a campaign.
• Created a campaign in Popads and still waiting for approval.

My Questions:

1. Is my campaign strategy right in your perspective? I couldn't find a lot of antivirus carrier billing offers. I applied for 11-14 offers in Avazu. Still waiting for approval from advertisers. I don't know how much time it would take. If I am approved, then I will add them to my flow and split traffic equally for each offer.

I will update soon after generating data in my Voluum tracker.

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Hi chamal,

welcome on board and good luck with you plan.

I have a couple of suggestions tho.

1. Lock down the winning lander first:

Given that you have already picked up your geo (IN in this case) I would say that the next step would be to pick the winning lander from your testing set (i.e combination of higher CTR and CVR, I personally would look more at CTR).
So I would suggest to first do a test with one single offer (to pick the right offer get some info from your AM, ask them about the one that have showed higher EPC network wide) and all your landers.

Spend like $10-$20 and hopefully end up with a clear winner.

Once you have the best lander you can go back and work on offers with this lander.
Testing a big flow of 4-5 different landers with 3-4 different offers from the start ( total 12-20 combinations) will not generate enough stats and very probably you will not be able to do the right choice (or your choice will not be based on significant statistics)

2. Get offers that accept all kind of traffic not carrier only:

Try to get as much generic offers as you can. Starting with offers that only accepts some carries will make it more difficult as carrier traffic is much more expensive.

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English isn't my first language here - don't worry, we'll understand each other just fine!


I don't believe there's such thing as failure. What people call "failure" is choosing to quit before they succeed.

Everything will happen in due time. 2016 wasn't the right time for you maybe - thanks for giving AM another shot.


Sounds like a plan! Suggestions:

-If you're targeting carrier traffic, then a bot test would not be necessary.

-When cutting offers: You can compare offers for EACH carrier and cut only based on offer stats for that carrier. To do that, you could either start a new camp to target promising-looking carriers (or rather, carriers that still have promising-looking offers), or set up Voluum rules. It's actually good practice to start new camps by targeting one carrier each, although there's nothing wrong with setting up a quick initial test to target multiple carriers either.

-If can't find a winning offer+lander combination, why not test a round of offers as well? Testing offers is one of the best ways to increase ROI. (And of course testing landers like you've listed would be great as well.)


Here are some more aff networks that have antivirus offers (actually, most of the big networks do):

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...i-Virus-offers


Looking forward to your next update!




Amy

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Thanks ervin for your valuable input!

One suggestion though regarding lander CTR: I've seen WAY too many landers that have lower CTR make more money than landers that have higher CTR, so CTR really isn't a good criterion for judging landers. In the end, it's CR that makes money, not CTR.

As for budget - it would depend on what the offer payouts are, and how quickly the landers reach statistical significance to allow for them to be cut - down to a winner.

And yes, carrier traffic IS more expensive, but it's more expensive because people can make more money from it, which allows them to bid higher for the traffic to drive up the price in the first place. For newbies, targeting just carrier traffic may be a good way to avoid having to spend a lot of time and money on cutting junk placements for wifi. Of course, in order to run volume, targeting wifi would be ideal.

Your suggestion to lock down a good lander first and then test more offers, is solid. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!



Amy

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Hi Ervin,

Thank you very much for sharing your suggestions about my campaigns. Here're a few difficulties I am facing and reasons why I chose above steps.

I like to implement your method. Finding a winning lander is one of my ultimate goals because it allows me to move to another GEOs and traffic sources without testing. However, as I've chosen around $60-100 for initial budget, my total 28 combinations would get around 2.1K-3.5K unique prime spot only traffic. I hope this amount of traffic would be sufficient for finding a good promising combination. I guess that if I go with one offer and multi-lander scenario, it would take more efforts and testing and sometimes a good offer+lander would be missed somehow.

I have also heard that a good combination usually performs better no matter what's the situation. So, in this test, I hope I could find a good one. But, another case is I didn't implement some scripts on certain landers. Because I thought it would harm for the conversion flow. But, let's see if I am wrong statistically!

I would take your suggestion into work if I find a good offer that have a good CR under my traffic method.



If I am right, I think you're suggesting to going for a direct link campaign with bunch of offers. Am I wrong? I will discuss it with my AM. But, I'd like to go with lander+offer.

Thanks again Ervin for your ideas. I got a few things from it. Will definitely implement in future!

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Thanks Amy! I agree with you; quitting before succeed is the real failure.

I've already run the bot testing landing under the main camp. I will share results for further analyzing.

One reason behind running a few landers and a few offer is actually finding a good traffic segment with a promising offer+lander combo. Then optimize and scale under a new campaign.

Yes, in this case, I set up Voluum rules. As number of offers increases, it becomes a complex flow; some offers only accept traffic in certain OS, device, plus region! As I did not yet receive a positive response from Avazu, I stopped those 14 offers and currently running with 4 offers from Advidi.

I applied for ClickDealer and Appflood. Let's see what happens!

Thanks very much Amy for your support.

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UPDATE!

I sent 100% targeted traffic to my bots testing landing page to see how much traffic passes the JavaScript.

According to statistics in Voluum, 51% are gone through the CTA link (Voluum click URL).



I made 4 conversions because, I sent the traffic to global aggressive smart link. I am in a hope because seeing conversions, especially little green numbers among red ones...



My campaign at PopAds have spent ~$30 already. But, voluum have tracked only ~$11 worth of traffic? I believe it's due to clickloss. Or any other reason?

From my experience running campaign in SelfAdvertiser, I run a non-tracked-placement identification using Google SpreadSheets. Here's the result.



394 placement data hasn't been tracked on Voluum. I don't know the reason behind this. May be the delay in tracking. If anyone know, please share with us. I had the same problem in SelfAdvertiser where I had to block 90%+ placements out of total daily placements because of bots and not-tracked in Voluum.

To decide whether i want to blacklist these website IDs, I generated a traffic report.



So, I decide NOT to blacklist these placements.

And I thought to check the Quality Scores as well to make sure my bidding doesn't get significant amount out of total traffic from low quality websites.



So, it looks good to me.

But, my only concern at the moment is the "clickloss". It accounts more than 10K thousands or 50% clickloss in other words.

What Did I do After bots testing?

As I spent $30 for bots testing, I moved to step 4 in my game plan. So, I,

1. Increased total campaign budget upto $60. Will adjust up to $100 when campaign's running.
2. Increased daily budget upto $40.
3. Didn't change other settings.

Questions:

1. What are your experiences about the data complications in traffic source and tracking software? In my case, I lose around 10K traffic. I use Amazon Route 53 for DNS management.
2. I have set the campaign settings to receive only Pop under traffic in prime spot times. Should I release those settings and let more traffic to come?
3. India is a BIG GEO. I bid for carrier traffic. Should my bid be raised?


More updates to come...

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So were you able to cut any bot-infested placements based on test results?


Are you manually updating costs in Voluum? Or passing costs back from PopAds automatically using the [BID] token?

If you're using the [BID] token, then the costs displayed in Voluum won't be accurate. However, the worst I've seen was only a 100% difference, i.e. actual spend was twice the amount of what was shown in Voluum. Your difference seems excessive. Are you certain you're looking at the same time range? There may be a difference in time zones between your popads report and voluum - please make sure the popads report you generate is using the same timezone you've specified in voluum. Another option would be to just look at the lifetime spend on both popads and voluum and compare those - e.g. say you've been running the camp for a few days, you could set the date ranges to 30 days to "catch" all stats ever generated by the camp.

Ultimately though, don't depend on PopAds costs you see in Voluum - they'll rarely be accurate. Either manually adjust the costs in Voluum, or figure out the percentage difference and adjust in your head. For example, if for a specific set of targeting, you see that the actual spend is twice as much as voluum costs, then when you're looking at voluum stats just multiply the costs in your head by 2.


How did you run the non-tracked placement identification? I don't have experience doing this so can't comment. Would be interested in learning more though!

The main question to ask is: Can you block these placements if they're not tracked?

And are the non-tracked placements able to generate conversions? If so, would the conversions appear in tracker stats, and under what website ID? Unknown? Another website's ID?


Is this traffic report ONLY for the non-tracked placements? Your point is that they account for only a very small part of the traffic, correct?

Just want to make sure that's not ALL the daily traffic you're getting for the camp - if that's the case then it's not even worth running. Would never get anywhere with that kind of volume.


Actually, the idea is NOT to AVOID getting traffic from websites classified as low quality.

Generally speaking (not always true), lower-quality websites have lower conversion rates but cheaper traffic due to there being less competition. Higher-quality websites have higher conversion rates but more expensive traffic due to there being more competition.

So you have these 2 opposing trends (conversion rate and traffic cost), and you won't know whether a placement will be profitable unless you test it.

When you're testing landers and offers though, it would be better to either bid at least average or target higher-quality websites to ensure your traffic quality is good. Using traffic you're not sure of the quality, to test unproven landers/offers, would be the equivalent of a crap-shoot in the dark - if you don't get good results, you'd have no idea whether you have bad landers or dud offers or shitty traffic.


We've talked about the cost discrepancy. What's the discrepancy in impressions between popads and voluum?




Again, better-quality placements tend to be more expensive, and in the end, you won't know if a placement will be profitable until you test it. In the beginning if you're needing to ENSURE a high level of traffic quality because you're testing lander and offers, you could just target prime spot, or higher "quality" levels in popads, or just target all placements but set an average or above-average bid. I would suggest the last option - target all placements but set the bid slightly above-average. If you put too many restrictions on the targeting you'll limit your traffic volume - and when you're running carrier traffic, you won't want to limit your already limited volumes.


What's the average bid suggested by PopAds' traffic estimator? Bid that or slightly higher than that and you should be fine.

By the way - if you're running carrier traffic, there would be no need to run a bot test - because carrier traffic does not have bot traffic (or at least very small amounts).


How much money have you spend on your current camp? How many offers? Please show some stats - placements (sorted by descending conversion, and also by descending impressions), OSs, devices, browsers, and any other stats you feel would be appropriate. Let's take a look.




Amy

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Unfortunately not. I didn't find placements with enough data. I was thinking to block placements with 20% CTR after at least 60 impressions. Check screenshot below for more info.



No, I used the [BID] token to pass the costs data.

The timezone in my Voluum is UTC (-5:00) US & Canada standard time. And I generated a report on PopAds especially for "India Antivirus" Campaign.



The first screenshot relates to this. According to PopAds, I have received traffic from 2562 websites with a spending around $30 for bots testing campaign. However, according to Voluum, it has only tracked (or received) ~$11 worth of traffic from 663 placements! That's a clear discrepancy! Isn't it?

In fact, I would have to multiply it by 100/60 or 5/3 again to calculate the actual cost for real human traffic as 40% of carrier traffic are bots according to my test. I don't concern too much about bots at this time. As you see, I don't understand how this amount of clickloss could happen.

I exported website IDs tracked in Voluum and PopAds in the same timezone and timeframe (in above case, UTC -5:00 and past 7 days). Then ran an app in Google Sheets to find out unique values that are in PopAds. Also in general, I found that there's a clear discrepancy in two reports. i.e 2562 vs 663



No, they are NOT tracked in Voluum so, no conversions in Voluum statistics. I checked my affiliate network. But, didn't find more conversions.

Yes, it was the traffic report for the non-tracked placements in Voluum.

My idea was as India is a big GEO, there could have more traffic in my targeted settings (Prime-spot Popunder traffic). Actually, it is right. However, my landers performed differently (more info in the next update) and I didn't get conversion apart from one conversion from backbutton traffic in Afflow.

So, today, I might change the settings and target ALL placements. In fact, I was bidding 1.5 times of the average CPV in PopAds summary. Average was $0.00067/CPV

Discrepancy in impressions between Popads and voluum is 15K-20K impressions. Check above top two screenshots for identification.

I don't know about it. But, according to my test and statistics, 40% of total prime-spot carrier traffic are bots. This number could have increased or decreased as Voluum didn't track ALL placements data.

I spent $30 for bots testing and more $60 for the actual campaign with 7 landers 8 offers. (I started with 4 offers, but after Avazu AM approved me for another 4 offers, I added them to the flow)

The 4 conversions my campaign has made from a smart link. So, I don't think it would be enough to show the stats for them.

I have run $60 worth of traffic for the campaign. Info about it will be shared soon.

Questions:

1. Have you experienced a situation like me or have you seen others have? I meant, a BIG discrepancy in Popads and Voluum. If so, what were your solutions? Is it because I am using PopAds? What If I am using ZeroPark? As ZeroPark and Voluum are integrated via API, there might not have discrepancies. Am I right?

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Update!

Hello guys,

Yesterday, I ran my campaign with landers at the first time after the bots testing. Here's the result:



LP4 and LP6 performed better as far as CTR concerned. And LP4 made one conversion.



We can't talk about anything after just one conversion made. However, Android OS performed well.



Now I took a few lessons from the first batch testing.

The first one is Page size matters very much. The sizes for LP4 and LP6 are respectively 14KB and 27.5KB. On other hand, LP5 had a GIF which is 202KB in size. So, LP5 ended as the landing page with lowest CTR.

The second one is actually surprising. I didn't notice it until I have run the campaign. I have added a lander with Google Play logo. Surprisingly, it got the highest CTR in iOS. So, I think I should test every possible thing to find out one that's working well.

As you see, CTRs are not good in both selected landers. I've heard that industry standard CTR is 30% in one post in STM.

Therefore, I ripped, fixed, optimized and redesigned a few landers for the second batch testing.

When fixing landers, my basic coding skills was very helpful. For instance, I was able to do an action with JavaScript very easily without using JQuery which ultimately increases the file size that's not good for a GEO like I am running the campaign.

So, that's all for yesterday. And I still have the previous issue. HUGE Clickloss. If anyone know how this happens and your experiences on it, please share it with us.

According to my spending on Popads I have spent around $60. But, in Voluum I only see $17.46 worth of traffic (check above screenshots). So, I will do some changes to the current campaign to see if this issue is fixed. (see below next steps)

Only a few visits are gone to my offers. So, I can't come to a decision without a significant amount of traffic. So, I DID NOT cut off offers. After the second batch testing, maybe I cut low converting offers or find a traffic segment as in the 6 and 7 steps in my game plan.

That's all for yesterday...

Now my...

Next Steps

1. I added 11 landers to the campaign and run them in all departments in my flow. So, they will be mixed in every possible segment. i.g: Idea Offer X etc.
2. Add $100 to campaign and increase daily spending to $80/day.
3. Change campaign settings in Popads: Remove prime spot and popunder only conditions.
4. Keep looking campaign performance to take decisions!

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Update!

After first lander batch testing, I added more 11 landers. So, with total 13 landers and 8 offers, I added $80 to my campaign in Popads to receive traffic.



So, I supposed to receive 80K traffic for my "India Antivirus" carrier billing campaign. However, still the issue continued.



According to two reports, I have lost about 42K traffic!

I don't know the reason. I will send a message regarding this issue PopAds support team for assistance.

As I didn't receive any conversion from this campaign, I paused this campaign and moved to another GEO and/or vertical.

However, in this campaign I learned a few valuable lessons. Hope these lessons will also be helpful for other new affiliates as well.

1. You may have to test a LOT to find a good lander. You can't guess which lander will perform better. Only statistics can tell.
2. Test different lander styles.
3. Don't lose too much money for a campaign that run with bugs! (In my case, excessive clickloss)
4. Have a good converting offer. Offer is the #1 key for a successful campaign. Even though I have a high CTR lander, if offer does not converting, I will not make money.


*****

Now as my first campaign failed, I will create another campaign. I might tap into another vertical and/or GEO. Update you all once I started everything!

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This is NOT clickloss - it's the inaccuracy in PopAds passing costs back to Voluum.

Automatic cost-tracking is just not accurate - so either manually update your costs in Voluum, or figure the percentage discrepancy and do the math in your head.

Clickloss is when the number of visits/impressions logged by the tracker is lower than that recorded by the traffic source. We're not talking about visits - we're talking about costs.


Ah! I understand now thanks for the explanation!

This is strange, but it doesn't just happen to PopAds - I've seen it happen elsewhere as well, although I don't remember having seen as big of a discrepancy as you're seeing.

You can try asking PopAds' support to see what they say, but unless they modify things on their end, I doubt it's something we can fix, as we can only depend on the [WEBSITEID] token to pass the website IDs to Voluum in whichever way PopAds has set this up. If I remember correctly, when you drill into WEBSITE ID in voluum, you'll see an entry called "Unknown" which I'm assuming accounts for the traffic from the "missing" placements. My experience is that in a vast majority of cases, the "missing" placements are small and not really significant enough to matter one way or the other.


This is a HUGE difference - there's no way this can be attributed to clickloss!

Actually - I took another look at your first 2 screenshots - and I believe I've found the reason for all the discrepancies: Your voluum is set to UTC -5 (I'll take your word for it) but your popads report is set to UTC. That's a 5-hour difference. You should have set your popads report settings to this in order to sync it with your voluum stats:



Please generate a new popads report with the Toronto timezone as shown, and see the the discrepancies will go down - hopefully they will (and drastically!)


That's news to me certainly! I was mainly using afflow to test for bots - perhaps if I had used another method, I would have gotten different results.

I will try to find the time to look into this and get back to you.


Looking forward to seeing the stats!

One potential concern: When you added the Avazu offers, were you only down to 1 winner in the original split-test involving the first 4 offers? Avoid adding offers in the middle of a split-test - doing so will render your results inaccurate. Because a campaign's performance will vary from hour to hour and day to day, you can only compare offers to each other if they are run during the same time.


I'm not really concerned about the "discrepancy" in costs - passing costs back is inaccurate - that's a given. But yes, the discrepancy in clicks is alarming, but like I've pointed out, it's probably due to comparing stats generated under different timezones.


Is this the same camp you've spent $60 on, the one with 7 landers + 8 offers?

Looks a bit bleak, but since so many landers and offers are involved, I would suggest to run $10 more to see if you get more conversions (I'm assuming your payouts to be in the same range - around $0.40 - so if the other offers' payouts are significantly higher, then it would be good to spend a bit more to give the landers and offers a chance).

If things don't look up, I would suggest to take the offer that has made the one conversion and JUST run that, pausing the other offers temporarily. See if you can cut landers that way, without spending a lot. If not, then you may need to test a new batch of offers, or a new batch of landers. But yes - I would suggest to run more traffic to see how things will look first.


Good observation! Yes - the page size has a big impact on loading speed, which will have a big impact on CTR. The smaller the page, the faster it loads, and the fewer visitors will click away due to impatience.

Industry standard CTR is 30%? I don't know where you heard that from, but it's bullocks. Every lander is different, and even the same lander will get different CTR when you're targeting differently (different geos for example).

CTR is really not a good judge of lander performance in general. I've seen way too many winning landers have lower CTRs than the losing ones. In the end, CR and ROI makes us money, not CTR. Some landers will get the visitors to click through quickly without pre-selling them properly first, so that when they get to the offer page they won't subscribe. And then there are landers that will automatically redirect the visitor after x seconds or after an event. Some of these landers will have higher CTR but low CR. I'm making generalization all over the place, but hopefully you'll see that it's unwise to focus on optimizing lander CTR.

However, CTR is not unimportant. If CTR is so low that it would take an impossibly-high CR in order to result in profits, then you just know you can throw the lander out - without needing to wait for statistical significance. (Also, the low CTR may indicate that it's not working correctly in the first place - would be worth it to do some troubleshooting.)


I think we should look at Offers > Landers stats first, to figure out a next step.



Amy

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Apparently you made a post as I was writing my previous post above.

I find it strange that with 18 landers and 8 offers and so much spend, that you would get only 1 conversion! I don't think I've ever seen a worse-converting campaign - looks like you've hit the jackpot!

Joking aside - I would suggest doing the following:

1)Using a VPN set to India, browse to your Voluum campaign url repeatedly, and click through every lander to make sure you arrive at an offer page. Basically, make sure your landers are functioning as intended.

2)Check your aff networks' stats to make sure the total number of clicks in Voluum are at least close to the total traffic to the offers, and make sure the traffic ended up at the CORRECT offers.

3)Check your lander load times to see how fast/slow they load, and report back.

It would also help if you could post at least a couple of the landers. If you upload it to dropbox and post a link here, I'll check them to see if I spot any issues.

I want us to do a full post-mortem on this campaign - you've spend all that time fixing up landers, and spend all that money. I want to make sure you've set everything up correctly so that you don't repeat potential mistakes for your next camps.

In addition to my suggestion in the previous post about specifying the correct timezone, could you please do one more check? Find out the total amount of traffic received by this camp since the very beginning, as shown in popads' stats and voluum stats. Set the largest time range you can to make sure you catch all traffic. See if there's still a big discrepancy.


Thanks for the great lessons!


You have a very good attitude. There's no failure - as long as you don't quit before you succeed. Hang in there!



Amy

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I prolonged the timeframe to catch all the data. And you'll see that only 2 visits are counted under the "unknown" website IDs. I'm pretty sure that there should be more if non-tracked placements are regarded as "unknown" placements by Voluum.




I am sorry about this mistake. I should have double checked everything before posting here. Yes, you're right. My two reports has 5 hour difference. My Voluum's default timezone. (I will change it to a comfortable one from next campaign.)



I was using the JavaScript redirect script in caurmen's bots testing thread. Thanks Amy for reminding me that I can also send the traffic to Afflow to see the percentage of bots. But, how do you get websiteids after bot testing with afflow? I guess you're using afflow to just count the total percentage of bots. Am I right?

I spent $60 for the campaign with 7 landers and 4 offers. (0.7 * 7* 4 * 3 = $58.8 testing budget)

I cut off landers amy as you saw in the next post. I selected LP4 and LP6 only for the second lander testing.

In fact, the lander with one conversion is in profit. But, I wonder if I could come to a decision with just one conversion made. It's a 2-click offer so I guess the user who converted had not converted unintentionally. Therefore the stats could be all right so far. But, as you see I am experiencing here discrepancies with my traffic source and tracker status.



I've heard it on a post here in STM. But, it's not from a reliable source. So, I get it. My statement above is wrong.

Yes, you're right. we can't judge a campaign solely upon CTR. As a blogger I have experienced it as well. CTA with highest CTR haven't bought higher profits. I think it's about the message and preselling on the lander.

Yes, I have used user redirection JS scripts on some landers. This might be the reason for a higher CTR. Unfortunately, I didn't regard each lander as same. I meant I haven't implemented each JS scripts in each lander. So, there might have discrepancies within my lander testing as well. However, another lesson learned!



This segment is in profit without optimization. However, I am not sure this statistics are correct considering I've lost around 110K traffic to this campaign alone! (more details in below post)

Chamal.

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Haha... Looks like I am on the right path. I've never seen a man who got succeeded at anything himself in a comfortable path with no issues involved. I need to find a solution for this.

I am using HMA VPN service. It's one of most popular VPN service with hundreds of servers in global. guess what? I couldn't find a server in India! I will contact them today for a possible solution.

Another strange story. Voluum has reported that one of Advidi offers have made one conversion. But, Advidi hasn't reported it!



Advidi:



Also check the CTA clicks for McSecure Antivirus offer in Advidi. I think it's due to the connection and load time issues in offer page. Or could be there any other reason? 2107 clicks vs 1259 clicks



And clicks reported between Avazu and Voluum are slightly similar.

Here's the loading times for the LP6 in Mumbai for Android Browser in Google Nexus 4.



3.2 seconds! I think the loading times are very high concerning I am using pop traffic. I've optimize landing with every possible thing except JS, CSS and HTML minify for some landers. And I guess that there's something to do with server. I am using Amazon S3 + Cloudfront.

I have PMed you my lander URLs. Please check your inbox.

I started this campaign on 16th of August.

First the total spendings and costs in PopAds.



Total costs and traffic to each landers in Voluum.



Voluum has PopAds tracking template in ready. So, I just loaded and set up the tracking link and pasted it in the campaign url in PopAds. So, there shouldn't be any problem with tracking. I have sent the campaign URL along with landing pages. Please check it and see if you could detect any issue with my tracking.

Thank you Amy. I will do my best to make this campaign up and running. No turning back as you said!

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Weird!

But when you're opened up the timeframe to catch all the data, did you compare the total amount of traffic as recorded by Voluum vs. popads? And did you compare again the number of placements between the 2?

I was hoping that the big discrepancy was caused by the different timezones.

If, when you've opened up the time frame to catch all data on BOTH voluum AND popads, and the discrepancies are STILL huge, then you really should contact PopAds. I don't remember having encountered such big discrepancies.


The good news is no. You can actually pass zeropark tokens to afflow, so that afflow will show bot % for every zeropark target. I showed how to do that in this post, step-by-step:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...utorial-Part-2


I agree with you - it would be near impossible to make any campaign decisions when the discrepancies are so big.

Since you're running in India, your landers are in English, correct? Perhaps it would be wise to set up a new camp using the same landers, but targeting a different English-speaking country (e.g. the Philippines), just to see if you experience the same big discrepancy. If you do again, that means it's probably not the traffic source - there's probably an issue with the way you've set up the campaign.


I like your drive! So many people expect making money online to be easy, and become disappointed when they can start making thousands a day from the beginning. You have the kind of attitude that will stand you in good stead when things aren't going smoothly. I see great achievements in your future.


I've been using HMA for years, and when I read what you said above the first thought that came to mind was "that's impossible! I've set that to India many times before", but when I went to check, indeed India was gone from the list of available countries.

Then I did a search online and found this:

https://support.hidemyass.com/hc/en-...ction-to-India

So yeah - HMA support kept promising India would be available again "in a couple of weeks" since June, with no definite ETA.

If you would give me your campaign URL, I could verify whether your landers are working or not. You can PM that to me if you like, and update this thread to let me know (otherwise I won't check PMs - there are just too many of them).


I'm pretty sure that's not possible - because conversions that show up in Voluum, need to come from Advidi.

Try to specify a large but custom date range (instead of "last 30 days" or whatever). I've been caught by that before too. If you still don't see that conversion, ask your AM - they should be able to help you.


Again, I'm hoping that the stats in Advidi are somehow not showing the actual totals due to the date range issue.

Try to figure out how to make that missing conversion appear, then compare the clicks again. If 2107 vs. 1259 are the actual numbers, this type of clickloss is terribly excessive.


Meaning that the clickloss is just as excessive? If so, then something must be wrong with your setup. I wished I knew what it could be. Big discrepancies seem to be a theme here.


Yes - 3.2 seconds is way too slow. Caurmen has demonstrated in one of his case studies that if you make visitors wait more than 2s, you'll experience high levels of visitor loss. Ideally load times should be kept under 1 second for best results.

S3 + Cloudfront should be fine. That's what caurmen recommends and is what I'm using as well.

You could check your lander domain's DNS redirection speed, and also your voluum domain's redirection speed. The latter won't affect lander speed but would be worth looking into as well.

For tips on how to reduce lander loading speed, search for the "Try decreasing your page load speed!" section in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-AM-FAQ-Thread!


Very strange. So the discrepancy is real. What could be the cause....


Let's see what happens. The losses are excessive, and I'm not wanting to encourage you to run additional traffic to this specific campaign until we can figure out what's causing all the big discrepancies.

Please disregard what I said earlier in the post about opening up the timeframe to compare total stats in PopAds vs. Voluum - you've done this. Also disregard my request for your campaign URL - you've provided it. Thank you!

I'm going to take a good look at the landers and get back to you - will either edit this post or make a new one below. Hopefully by then I'll also have additional ideas on how to troubleshoot your setup.




Amy

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OK - I've checked your campaign url and landers, and I think I'm onto something.

Your landers are fine - really nice landers by the way! I think some of them will convert very well with the right offer. Just one suggestion: People don't like to bother scrolling down, so try to make everything fit above the fold (i.e. make everything show on screen without scrolling). You may need to delete some of the text and/or make images smaller to make everything fit.

So all is well with the landers. It's your campaign url that I had trouble browsing to. This is what I got when I tried to access it from my phone:



Could you check something? Go into Voluum, click on the little gear icon at the top (to go into Voluum settings), click on "Domains", for your main custom domain, click on "Verify DNS Settings" and see if you get a "Domain setup is OK" message. If not, then it means you haven't set up your domain nameserver properly for the tracking subdomain. Fix that and hopefully the big discrepancies will be gone!



I'm keeping my fingers crossed...



Amy

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First of all, thanks Amy for your every effort and sharing your experience on my follow along.

Small mistakes do tremendous damage. When setting up custom domain for Voluum tracking with Amazon DNS, I've added "http://" to the Value of Canonical Name (or CNAME). When I saved it, Voluum had shown me an error with a few IP address. Somehow, I thought that I should add IP address. It was a BIG mistake.

Now tracking is working fine. I suppose the discrepancies had happened due to incorrect DNS settings.

So, I pull up the 'India Antivirus' campaign (8 offers + 13 landers) and increased bid to $1.312/CPM. If I am correct, I was under 10 in the list of traffic queue. Here's the recent Bidding chart from PopAds.



I added $50 for the campaign budget and eventually spent $33 for traffic (reasons are below). However, according to PopAds and Voluum CPM was $1.00.



Traffic data discrepancy has decreased. That's a good news!



However as you see, my campaign made only one conversion.



Even Though it's in profit in some segment, I can't take a decision by only one conversion. Or can I?

So, I talked with my AM. And he also said that Antivirus don't perform well as it used to be.

Bad News: Couldn't find a good converting offer.
Good News: Found a few landers with over 50% CTR. In fact, according to my statistics, one lander has 61.25% CTR without using any javascript script for redirecting visitor for offer. So, learnt a few lessons to increase higher CTR in this campaign.

I had an idea to run more traffic to this campaign to see if any promise. However, I've learnt that to actually get conversions, offer should be a good converting one.

My Next steps:

1. I've fixed the data discrepancy issue. traffic quality of PopAds is actually good concerning other traffic sources I've worked before. So, I will stick to it a bit further for my future campaigns. However, as I've funded other traffic sources as well, I will use them time by time when it's necessary.
2. As Amy suggested, I will use Afflow for counting bot percentages on placements. Thanks Amy, I've read the entire Voluum+ZeroPark+Afflow guide. However, I forgot that I could use Afflow for bots testing.
3. I will test more landers and try more designs, coding techniques for better landers.
4. Will stick to campaign plan, but this time come with good offers.
5. Run the campaign more efficiently and professionally. I added offers when campaign is running. Increased bid without records. They were mistakes.

More updates coming soon!...

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As a temporary workaround for a vpn try https://www.tunnelbear.com

they give you 500 MB of traffic monthly for free and if you tweet about the service they add 1GB to that.

There's an india exit node (i've just checked).

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Chamal I can't tell you how relieved I am that we managed to figure out the problem together!

I KNEW something was far wrong but didn't know what - that wasn't a good feeling.

All's well that ends well! I'm so glad!

The discrepancy is so small now - that it can be attributed to normal clickloss (I'd say anything under 30%).


When you're testing so many landers and offers, it will take considerably more test budget to even get a rough idea of whether there's profits potential or not.

I would suggest to run to your original budget of $50, then see if you make any more conversions.

Basically, right now, you need an offer that can convert well enough to help you identify the best lander, and do so without excessive spend.

If after a while you're seeing one offer convert SEEMINGLY better than the others, you can temporarily pause all other offers, and just run that offer to cut landers.

If however, after spending too much money (this will be subjective...), you're still not getting conversions - then you may need to get a new set of offers. Try to ask AMs for offers that they know for sure have converted semi-well or better, for at least a few other affiliates. And use them to help you cut landers down to a winner.


Your plan sounds good. Let's wait and see what happens.



Amy

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