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My journey to $xxx/day and beyond - Mobile Pops (42)

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Hey everyone,

I recently quit my job and I'm really needing to make this work... I can't think of going back to that 8-5 life again!

I haven't been as proactive as I would have liked lately so my number of camps run is still quite low.

My current setup is FunnelFlux, Linode, Amazon cloud.

The most recent campaign I've run is an iPhone sweep in Indo through Mundo on Popads.

I ripped a number of landers and tested out a few offers relating to iphone and other phone prizes. Started with 5 landers and had cut it down to 3 landers on day 3.

Day 1: spend +-$10, cpm 0,58, click loss 20%, landers ctr 10.2%, conversion/landerviews 0.93% = 13 conversions ($1,56)

Day 2: Spend +-$10, cpm 2,10, click loss 23%, lander ctr 13.8%(Dropped 1 of the landers), conversion/landerviews 2.25% = 12 conversions (Despite cpm being much higher the roi was near identical to day 1)

Day 3: Spend +- $13, cpm 2.09, click loss 18%, lander ctr 10.6% (dropped 2 of the original landers), conversion/landerviews 0.5% = 3 conversions (This should have been my best as I had dropped 2 of the poorer performing landers and had done some placement cuttings where my spend was over 5 times payout with a conversion or 4 times without conversion.) No idea how it bombed so badly... FunnelFLux also didn't report 2 conversions which is strange...

I don't think there is much potential carrying on with this camp?

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Doesn't look too good, but then again, you didn't do much testing either. 5 LPs only, sometimes it takes dozens to find a good one.

You were running just one offer if I'm not wrong, you need to test quite a few ... based on my experience, the most important thing now is to have a good offer and LEGIT traffic.

The offer you picked is a lead gen or carrier billing offer?

There is a ton of bots on popads, or any other source, you need to make sure to stay away from the worst placements - a bot test is mandatory. 3G traffic is better when it comes to this, but you didn't mention what you were running.

You also don't need to wait to 5x the payout when running initial tests, 2x should be enough.

Can you give us more details about your campaing, it would be easier to give you specific advice.

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@craig88.. you are not going to make it work by babysitting 1 campaing.
You need to crank up the production. Pick really low paying offers. and just keep launching 10-20 campaigns per day.
Launch, analyze, recycle, relaunch..

Go with some smartlink/hybrid/mumbojumbo or whatever they call it service and dump traffic on that, test carriers, countries, verticals, and only when you pinpoint a working segment try to push a direct offer to it. Otherwise the approval, setup pingpong with aff network is going to be too slow for you to make any money.

Now specific for this ID campaing, this is a wifi one or has wifi fallback? Try buying popcash for that..they dont have carrier segmentation option, but I don think you need that for your offer.

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Thanks for the advice.

It was 5 LP's and 3 offers (leads) $0,12 payout which I set all to carrier traffic on popads. Ok I will cut from 2X PA going forward.

The camp was just the usual iphone sweeps aimed at Wap and one offer was web as well for all phone types . I've been trying to focus more on low pay out offers to keep testing costs down whilst still learning a lot.

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That's my plan now is just to mass test camps, but it always takes longer than I plan... So you are saying try smartlink camps as opposed to testing say camps such as 5 iphone sweep offers with 5 landers in Indo and other geo's?

This one I just targeted carrier traffic as some of the offers were WAP/WEB and others were just WAP.

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@craig88

Yes do smartlinks first...
You cut on the offer approval time.
And you can spend that time on testing more geos / verticals.

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Any specific ones you would recommend such as Afflow? I see mundo has a number of different smartlink rev share type offers and I know Mobidea also has them.

So the theory would be to run traffic to smartlink, analyse which internal offers are actually converting in which geo's and then start new camps adding in LP's for those ones which appear to have potential? I didn't know you could see which internal offers are working from smartlinks but then again I've never run them before.

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It's actually a pretty good advice to test smartlinks, but make sure you're not wasting time on BOTs - focus on 3G traffic to make it easier for yourself.

As for smartlink networks to test : you mentioned afflow and Mobidea, more to try are kimia, glize/brokerbabe, mobusi, bitterstrawberry, firstmobilecash ... all are considered solid companies to work with.

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Thanks Matuloo I will start a few smartlink camps targeting 3g and see how they go.

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I did a smartlink offer from Mundo and ran a worldwide camp at a cpm of $,25 which limited my countries to lower tier 3's, I think.

The only country to convert was Indo which I got 9 conversions = $,92 after $5 spend. The actual spend on just Indo was $1,04.

My conversion postback doesn't seem to work so I end up manually inserting my conversions into the excel spreadsheet I download from Popads. Busy trying to sort that out with Funnelflux support team.

I created a second camp just to target indo which I have only included android, as it was the only one to convert.

I tried to see which carriers were give me those most conversions but there seems to be slight differences from the report on funnel flux per ISP and the options on Popads for cellular carriers. Some names are similar but others that I wanted to whitelist I cannot find on the options list. Will run this camp during day hours tomorrow and re-assess it.

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Do not run much traffic until you get the tracking working properly, you need to make sure you are looking at correct data.

Carrier names is quite a big mess unfortunately, many networks use different DBs to identify them... you'll need to find a way to handle this. Many carriers have been acquired by larger ones, but they still identify as the old ones ... wikipedia has pretty good lists of carriers, take a look at it. The best option is to use IP targeting with sources that support it, there are some sites where you can find more or less accurate IP DBs to work with.

BTW: Mundo isn't exactly a mobile focused network, I had better results with those that I listed for you, make sure to at least test them.

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Thanks Matuloo, I am busy getting support from Funnelflux so should hopefully be resolved soon.

I thought carriers were going to be a tricky problem... I'll check wikipedia and see if I can tie some of them back.

I thought mundo was quite popular for mobile? I did run another smartlink with Mobidea at the same time but my limited conversions seemed higher on mundo so wanted to try optimise that camp a bit more.

Will register for some of the others as well and test them out too.

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Mundo is definitely a popular network and as far as I can tell it's also a reliable one ... but they are multi-focused, having all kinds of offers, while some of the ones I listed for you are dealing ONLY with mobile subscription offers, so they are better optimized and offer better deals and higher payouts in many cases. If you are getting better results with Mundo, by all means focus on those offers, but don't forget to keep your mind open and be ready to test more networks. Any network, even the best one, is just a business that can go south and you need to be able to switch

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Makes perfect sense. I signed up with Kimia today and I'm busy going through the various geo's epc to see which ones I should target for the smartlinks.

I tried optimising the Mundo smartlink camp that I ran yesterday as it seemed as if profitability would be possible. Not as such. My spend yesterday for the Indo geo as mentioned above was $1,04 and revenue was $,92 so it was close to breaking even and I assumed some optimisation would get it in the green.

I dropped all phones other than android as they were the only ones which converted. There was quite a bit of traffic from iphone so I thought this would make a cost saving.

I then looked at which carriers brought conversions yesterday and only included them in today's camp. I had to play around with the AS numbers and do lookups for those on google but it seemed to work.

The issue was that traffic had slowed down a lot and I struggled to get to $3,66 spend.

I had 11 conversions which summed to $1,19 and thus a -ROI of 68%. So much worse than my previous un-optimised run...

Impressions per pop ads were 14.8k, 11.4k per tracker and 9.7k per Mundo... Seems like I'm losing a lot of traffic along the way with all the redirects.

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I remember that the clickloss on mundo was way higher than on kimia for example, I guess they are counting hits in a different way ... makes the EPCs look better

A note on the volume, $1- $3 is nothing to base any decision on, it's simply not enough. If there isn't more volume available, I wouldn't even mess with that. On one hand, it looks like cheap ground for learning, but without proper volume, you can't really test anything. It's also the reason for the erratic results, one day almost green, the next one at -70% ... that's what usually happens with low volume.

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Yeah I agree I think I played with the optimisation a little too much and killed the traffic.

I ran $10 to Kimia smart link today and most of the traffic ended up in ID, IN and TH, due to my lower bid.

Once again my click loss from traffic to tracker to offer is pretty dismal. Pop ads 20k, tracker(linode server in singapore) 14.5k, Kimia 9.3k.



ID seems to be the only one with potential granted mexico and brazil had no traffic due to my bid?



It seems that with some optimisation of OS's it might be possible to get some green. I've noticed that Pop ads doesn't seem to allow you to filter for OS 6.0.x only 6.0. which would then include all variations of 6.0.x. Not sure how to solve that as in this case I would want to exclude 6.0.1 and keep 6.0.

I've also noticed the carriers only one seems to be profitable for ID, before taking into account the OS's above. I think it might not be a good idea to black list them all but Excelcomindo as that would probably kill my traffic?



Also in terms of placements, i'm not sure if any are worth blacklisting yet. Perhaps the first one but the multiple is still quite low, although no conversions at all.

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Ok, the good thing is that the performance is better than with Mundo, right?

There are some green targets, but the limits of the sources won't allow you to cut all the bad ones - the OSs for example. Try to dig deeper, maybe you'll find a way to limit it at least partially - for example, you might find out that some of the non performing carriers have higher % of OS 6.0.1 so you might kill 2 flies with one hit

You are right that you need to be careful when pausing a large targeting group, such as a carrier, it takes away a large part of the traffic. Sometimes it's needed though, especially with carrier billing offers - when there are no good offers for a specific carrier, it's pointless to target it.

Your click loss is pretty high though - please try to see if it's a problem of some GEO or it's the same for all of them. Some GEOs like TH have a high loss usually, in some GEOs it's usually better.

I wouldn't cut placements yet, even the worst one is just 35 cents negative so far.

BTW: are you still running this through LPs or it's directlinked now? In case you do, did you run some loading speed tests on them?

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Haha yes it so far has a better ROI than Mundo's 49%



I'm running direct so not sure if it's a combination of my server page funnel loading time together with the offer page...

So to conclude it I should whitelist all of the green OS's even though some of them will bring their bad performing x variations along and just run Excelcomindo to see if I get enough traffic. If not maybe include the other carriers that did convert as well even though they initially had negative roi's?

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It might be worth it to talk to funnel flux support and see if they can give you a recommended setup to match it with what you have now, or maybe ask the server support whether they would recommend an upgrade to increase the performance. I still think the clickloss is a bit too high.

Thought it's complicated to use LPs with smartlinks, as the offers change a lot, there are also some generic LPs that might improve your performance, try to test some.

Instead of whitelisting anything, let's just try to maybe run some more and look for stuff to blacklist, that's my preferred way of doing things - looks for the worst targets with the lowest impact on volume and cut those first. Remember that you've only run $10 worth of traffic, that's really not enough to make such big conclusions as cutting carriers for example. Give it some more time

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I chatted with them and they think it's a problem between the geo locations of the aff network's servers causing the slow redirects. I think I might try run it direct to see how that compares and see what percentage click loss I end up with from traffic source impressions to offer views per network stats.

I ran an extra $10 today and ended up on a negative -17% ROI. I also upped by Bid to try to get more traffic and placements.



This was after whitelisting the OS's that were green yesterday.

Once again certain OS versions were green and their x variations were red.



PT Excelimondo seemed to be the only carrier with profitability again but if I drop the others then traffic slows down which I found out today.



There are a few placements that I could maybe cut but once again this will probably kill traffic.



Now I'm not sure how much potential this camp has for continuing with the limited traffic after the cutting? Any worth in increasing my bid even higher?

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You're still keeping the volume very low. With -17% I'd open the floodgates and run with unlimited daily budget... with high volume, things tend to look quite different. As you have seen yourself now, the performance was different from yesterday, it can very well be connected with the lower volume. Why are you only spending $10 per campaign? Is there no more volume at the source or you're just being too cautious?

Honestly, I would throw more volume at this, and instead of cutting carriers, I'd try to star by cutting the worst placements - it's possible that some placements are sending you more of the "bad carriers", so by cutting those, you might reach way better numbers.

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Thanks Matuloo, I think I'm just being overly conservative. I got burnt a bit in the beginning with $70 days and no conversions so trying to be more precise with spend. So far I have been running day parting between the hours of 1pm to 12am. Should I run it the whole day? Seems I could get around $300 spend based on the traffic estimate.



The other issue is that I was chatting with my AM and she mentioned that the one offer which was converting really well for me has reached it's cap.

I see the volume estimate for just Excelmindo carrier is around 135k so about $100 spend, in theory. Would it not be a good idea to try get near that spend on just the one carrier? Or create a separate camp that just focuses on Excelcomindo?

My AM was also saying that there are good offers for Indostat which the smartlink doesn't seem to be redirecting too so I could maybe try them direct as opposed to smartlink?

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My theory is, that to really see FULL performance, you need to take as much of the available traffic as possible ... so full day or several days of traffic, with as few limitations as possible. This way, you will see what the traffic is capable of and it will also provide you with more stable results. So, yup, get as much of the traffic as your budget allows. One tip though, do not reach high spend with high bids Try to stay as low as possible. In another follow along where I'm helping right now, the OP had even better results with low bid.That might be worth a test in your case too.

As for the capped offer ... well that's part of the game, try to find some more that are converting.

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Thanks that makes sense. I think I'm trying to cut and optimise too early for budget sake which will hurt me in the long run.

I chatted to my AM and she broke down the various offers that my smart link had converted on and I started a new camp for the one with the best EPC which also had a number of conversions. This offer was specific to one carrier only.



The issue was that it seems the advertiser stopped it as my AM says even their IMB team has got no conversions lately after a lot of traffic. So that is a lesson to be learned.

I created two different camps here to try see how much of an effect my tracker has on re-directs.

Camp 1 goes straight from traffic source to affiliate offer url: Traffic source says 5164 impressions, kimia says 2715 visits so nearly 50% loss.

Camp 2 goes through tracker: 5.2k impressions per traffic source, tracker has 4122 (so about 20% CL which is normal) and Kimia has 2217 so only 42% ended up seeing the offer.

I'm not sure if these percentages are normal and taken into account for the bids...

The two direct camps above aren't really worth going over as I cannot rely on the data due to issues with the offer.

I ran the smart link again yesterday but barely managed $10 spend, and this was after doubling my bid... Ended up with a ROI of -21% which was similar to the previous day of -19%.

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When working with direct offers you need to monitor campaigns often, many of these offers have smaller budgets so they can get paused any time. I've seen that happening dozens of times.

The loss seems to high to me, could be that part of it are bots, try to analyzed the data on a per placement basis, do you see some placements showing way higher loss than others - compare data from the source with what the tracker records.

Since you're sitting at similar ROI, it's time to explore the other optimization options.

Just to make sure I understand it correctly : you are not able to spend more than $10 on this campaign? Even with 24 hours rotation? Or are you still dayparting?

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I can try have a look at the placements like you said but there should only be a 20% loss from traffic to tracker in theory? It's that additional 30% afterwards that I'm not sure about.

I noticed the $10 spend yesterday took quite a few hours to happen and it was probably between the prime traffic hours too. I could have spent more but don't think I would have got close to $50.

The one camp seems to be getting more traffic so I'm assuming that carrier is the bigger one but it is still small.



I've run through $8 in last 3 hours on the one camp and less than $2 on the other carrier camp. Not sure how it's possible to target these individual carrier offers and come out with decent revenue? Unless the plan is to have a number of them running concurrently?

Also is pop ads known for having high volumes in Indo? Should I maybe be testing with other TS's concurrently? My bid jumps around from top 10 to top 20 so it I don't think I'm losing out on much potential traffic.

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Why don't you run for 24 full hours to see what happens? You need to get an idea about the performance during the whole day. Dayparting should come as a second part, once you see that some hours are killing your campaign ... do not start with it.

The loss is very high, I would try to run a bot test, thought there is usually lower amount of bots in carrier traffic. But it's true that I have seen such a large loss on some GEOs, not sure why, but it's way bigger in some geos.

You can try other sources, the funnel you have is decent, so you shouldn't hit heavy loses on other sources either. Indo is a large GEO, so there should be enough volume everywhere.

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Thanks Matuloo, the placements seem to be ok in general and only a few worth possibly cutting.

This first camp is slightly in the green but doesn't seem to be much to optimise. Other than maybe cutting the bids down, which would affect my already low traffic.



This one has a few possible placements to cut, but once again there goes my traffic.



This is my stats for the day, obviously, the cost is higher due to click loss so probably just around break even or low negative ROI. But I can't seem to optimise it much more and/or get more traffic.



The traffic estimator seems to be jumping around a lot for the two camps:

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I finally managed by first >$100 with one network so at least I'll see that money again

The problem is the camps are basically breaking even, or making low ROI's, which would be fine if I could scale to $xx,xxx revenue pm and come out with low $x,xxx profit but the volume is too small.

I managed to get more traffic by dropping the 1/24 views down to 1/12 and then to 1/6 hours but this also plays with the ROI.





Is the trick with pin submits to just go for volume and find as many offers for various carriers to make low $x/xx profit per day so that 10 good offers at $10 a day profit comes to $100 profit a day? Or is there a better way.

So far I'm not using landers. Is it worthwhile to play with them? My AM seems to think it will just lower the ROI as more clicks are required, but I know testing is always good.

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Getting solid volume can be a problem at times, that's for sure... we're playing a competitive game.

There are still tricks to increase it though :

- there are many more sources to use
- if you made in one GEO, you can do it in another one
- try to duplicate/clone campaigns, sometimes it helps
- increase budgets or don't use them at all, load more funds into your account - sources love high spenders
- open the targeting options some more, if it makes sense ...

You can try a lot of things.


It can work both ways, managing many small campaigns is very time consuming, but it's a bit safer to run that way ... 100 campaigns can't die at the same time. Managing one huge campaign is very easy, it's also more predictable ... but it's often hard to find such campaigns.

Poor lander will do just that, lower your ROI... good lander on the other hand, will increase it. The problem is, with some offers or smartlinks, it's quite hard to find a lander that "suits them all"... I would definitely test that. My biggest campaigns in carrier billing were smartlinks with LPs ...

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Please be aware that US web hosting clicks will cost around $25/click at adwords, so you have to set up everything perfect to make money with that.

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Thanks Mat, appreciate the advice.

Yeah I see exactly what you mean. Can't promote hosting off pops lol. Would need to aim it at someone wanting to create a website, which I tried running on FB to a price comparison type article. Made one bluehost sale but that was ages ago.

Would you recommend starting out in dating(wifi traffic) as opposed to the adult mobile content offers? I've read your posts and it seems that they go in phases, with one working better for sometime then the other takes over. Is kimia known for good dating offers or more so mobile ones? I read you recommended CD and a few other in another post but left out kimia, which you usually recommended so wasn't sure.

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Kimia is more about carrier billing, it's a typical mobile network, while in dating, you need to cover both the "desktop" and mobile devices and wifi traffic along with 3G. You're right about one thing, dating and mobile billing offers fight for the prime spot for quite some time already... so hard to say who is the winner now, both still work

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Ok great thanks, confirmed my thoughts. So CD would a fair choice to find some dating/wifi/desktop type of offers?

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Yup, clickdealer is a solid network, but there is no shortage of networks now, and pretty much all have some dating. You will need a few and split test them, the differences in payouts and CVR can be quite big.

You can always try to go direct : topoffers, vipoffers, dateprofits, datinggold, xcash ... there is a solid amount of adult dating advertisers with in-house aff programs.

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Awesome thanks, my CD AM recommended an offer in FR for casual dating so have just been spying and saving banners and LP's. The lp's look like they could be pretty complicated to rip properly. They are all quite intricate and well designed with lots of scripts embedded in them. Not sure if it was the best way of doing it but I just viewed source in Safari and then downloaded it as a webarchive file which now seems like a hassle to actually open.

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Hire a coder to do this for you, if you don't have coding experience yourself. Fiveer or upwork are your friends .. guys from asia will do this for cheap. Just prepare multiple ones, so they can rip it for you all at once. Then you will just modify them on your own, small changes are easy to make, but it's quite complicated to rip the more advanced LPs.

While we are here, ask your AM for more than one offer and also ask for the best performing urls, in case there are more. There is a bunch of low paying SOI offers in FR and also some higher paying DOIs, I'd recommend to split test those

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Thanks Mat, I ended up going back and using sitesucker to get them. Most of the JS,css and image files were not local so had to download them and update the code. I noticed that most of the banners went to a few different landers on about 3 different domains which seemed strange that only 3 domains would be getting most of the traffic.

It was a bit frustrating as the offer I tried first with about 5 different landers, 4 different LP's and 3 different offer pages actually broke even last friday night/sat morning. Hit about $125 revenue with that as the cost. Had an issue loading more funds into the account over the wknd and ran it again on Monday night but the ROI was completely different. $26 rev with $75 spend. Could the ripped banners have been burnt out over the wknd from the others using them?

I'm also struggling to analyse the stats correctly as the cost is obviously incorrect for the various spots and banners, but correct overall.

Is it wise to create my own banners by making a psd template of Image and text and then just trying different images and texts? I notice most of the banners have a similar format of image/giffy taking up left half of banner and text the right half.

I think I should create a new follow along in adult...

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It was more likely a standard fluctuation and/or different kind of traffic ... adult is quite volatile so it can go up or down a lot every day. And it's very important to get the right traffic - bidding position, cap ... then there are BOTs ... there might have been some offer related issue too. Banner do burn out fast, but usually it's longer than a weekend. Try to re-launch it again after a day or two, and it's very likely to perform on a different level again.

You can download cvs reports and compare it on a per banner or placement level ... but I personally simply look at how big the differences are and keep it in mind when comparing costs and revenue. It's not 100% accurate, but that's not needed either.

Yup, this works well. You can have plenty of layouts in templates and simply produce lot's of banners this way.

Yup, that would probably be the best. Link me to it, once you start it.

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Ok awesome thanks Mat. I read your one article regarding separate camps for placements/spots which allows more accurate cost breakdowns. Obviously I could break it down even further into sites but then I would have too many camps.

I created a new FA: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...s-Adult-Dating

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There are certain "points" where you have to break it up more, but I agree, no need to overdo it as well. Gonna check your other follow along now

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Hi craig88, thank you for reading our interview! We hope that you've enjoyed it and it was worth your time.

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