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Better Late than Never!!! Journey with Adult content for Pops Follow Along (43)

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Well this has been a long time coming, but finally ready to start a follow along!

Before explaining why I am doing this follow along let me tell everyone a little bit about myself.

I currently work a full time job as systems engineer and also am currently doing my masters in business analytics and information systems. On the side, I am involved in a stainless steel e-commerce business and am currently working on website development for niche sites. So everyone may be wondering how I got into Affiliate Marketing?

Well to be honest I have always been interested in marketing. I have been marketing different organizations like my fraternity, school clubs and products since my undergrad. Only recently have I found out about the prospect of promoting others products in order to gain a commision. I am also heavily involved in numbers (as you can tell by my master), to truly analyze a business.

I understand that I have a lot on my plate now with my full time job, masters, 2 business and now taking on affiliate marketing. However, I have planned this out accordingly. As for my two businesses - I have hired multiple assistants to manage the workload. I have spaced out my masters to only 1-2 classes a semester. And my full time job comes in peaks and valleys, where now we are in a valley and it has been very calm. With that being said I truly want to be a top Affiliate marketer in the game!!!

But I am not new to this. I have been launching campaigns for the past 3-4 months with only one small profitable campaign (getting me 4 dollars profit). Therefore, I understand there is a process. The reason a follow along was not started earlier was because I wanted to truly grasp as much as I could on my own and try to figure everything out solo. But this was not a good idea, because there were many times i ran into a roadblock and did not know the answer...

Now enough babbling, it's time to get started! Originally I was involved in anti-v, but found out you have to cloak to be succesful in that vertical. Due to everything on my plate I want to avoid this for the time being, mainly because I do not have the time to deal with accounts being shut down. Next I was involved in sweeps, however I realized that a lot of the landers I was ripping was not aggresive enough, and I was ripping a lot of 'landers' that actually turned to be cloaked offers.

Therefore, I will be focusing on Adult Content (maybe games ) and will be Direct linking. Also, will be working with Exoclick as my primary traffic source. As for affiliate networks I am working with clickdealer, wewe media, bitterstrawberry, brokerbabe. My plan is to run a high volume operation. I have a virtual assistant that collects 18 offers a day for tier 2/3 geos with a 30 million plus population.

Since my initial stages will be direct linking, I am not really trying to make xx,xxx profits from the get go. My goal is to make a solid xxx-xxxx profit every MONTH. Not day, but month. I don't mind if it's a whole lot of small camps that can accumulate to that amount, or i find a huge winner. But the overall goal is to slowly find a general system that I should operate in order to collect offers, eliminate offers, opitimize campaign and scale.

I hope everyone will be alongside with me during my journey and look forward to the challenge!!

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Thailand hasn't been showing too much luck unfortunately. I will keep the campaign active and try new offers. But now I am also launching a campaign for Mexico and India, both adult content vertical.

For both methods I am going to be direct linking. Mexico currently has 13 offers. The payouts are all a little different, some are at 3 dollars and some are at 0.77 cents. Now to be honest I know I have read these two variations in payout should not be mixed. But I am trying to get some quick data. I will be home for the next few days (due to the hurricane) so will make sure to eliminate any offers once they are 5 times the payout. Therefore, don't think the mix and match in payouts will be a huge issue. Correct me if I am wrong.

Now as the campaigns are being approved, there are a few questions/concerns that I have. I have been routinely testing for quite some time now and I am struggling to find a well converting winning offer. My concern is that I may have given up on campaigns too soon in the past that could have shown potential by switching up some variables. Could anyone who has had winning offers in the past elaborate on when we know that our offer is a winner? The reason I ask this is because I noticed the highest bidder always gets the first impression, which results in a higher conversion rate. What if you are the 4th or 5th bidder in the queue, and you hypothetically have a 'winner' will it still convert and show it's a winner?

Basically, I have been working on an iraq campaign for some time. I had a respectable bid that was giving me solid traffic, but not a great conversion rate. However, before killing the campaign today, I bumped the bid up to an insane price just to see how it would work out. And automatically 4 conversion came in out of nowhere. My assumption was that after jacking up the bid, I was the first impression, resulting in higher conversions. Needless to say... the budget drained rather quickly.

Would it be recommended that for my first 2 days of initial testing I bid very high to make sure I am the first impression? Or is it the case , where IF I have a winning offer, it would still convert rapidly despite being later in the queue?


Anyways, thanks for reading and I will post more updates , thank you.

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Sounds like a plan!

I agree 100% - have a solid, replicable system is the key to scaling. The rest is just managing people to do the execution.

Are you running pop or banner traffic? I'm assuming you're running pop.

For direct-linking on adult, also ask your AMs for offers that have pre-landers built into them - those make great candidates for direct-linking.

Also - since you already have experience in launching camps, I would suggest that you move away from direct-linking as soon as you're ready. Adplexity Adult would be the tool to use:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ccess-Giveaway!


If you're targeting carrier traffic and direct-linking, that really doesn't give you a lot of room to optimize your camp because 1)there are no bot-infested placements to cut, and 2)you can't optimize the camp via testing landers.

Therefore, I'd say that if an offer isn't converting at least once every 5x payout (in traffic cost), it won't have a big chance of resulting in profits after further optimization.

Thailand is a goldmine if you find the right offer that converts well - there's so much traffic volume and bid prices are relatively cheap.

And when you're direct-linking, testing a TON of offers using a low budget for each would be the way to go.


Yes you could do that. Take the offer that got 2 conversions (or whichever offer is the seemingly best-converting so far) and test bids to find the one giving you the highest ROI, then test all other offers at that bid. May save you some money.

Or, you could just continue testing new offers at the current bid, find the most-promising offer, then test bids.


Are you referring to this?

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

It can help you cut placements - direct-linked or not.

However, it's overkill for pop camps - due to volatility etc., pop camps don't stay profitable for very long. Therefore speed is of essence. That spreadsheet can help you to cut placements with high accuracy - with the downside that you'll need to throw more money testing each placement before you'll get a "verdict" on whether to cut it or not.

For pop camps, it would be better to use rules of thumb for cutting placements instead of using the spreadsheet. For example, I like to cut placements that are in loss by 2x payout or more.


Please stay safe! Just took a minute to send you some good energy for protection.

Difference in payouts won't be an issue. You could even vary the rotation weight of the offers in your tracker's campaign settings, such that higher-payout offers get more traffic. Then you can calculate total spending for all offers (sum of all payouts x 5) and set your campaign budget at your traffic source to that amount. That way you won't need to watch your stats like a hawk.


This is why it's good to bid at least average when testing unproven offers.

If you bid too low, you'd never know whether the lack of performance is due to the offer being a dud, or the traffic being crap.

I wouldn't over-analyze this to the point of figuring out where I am in the bidding queue - because at any one specific bid, you'd be in different spots in the queue for different placements.

For direct-linking on carrier traffic at average bid or above, the 5x payout criterion should work quite well at eliminating loser offers. If you find multiple offers that are promising, you can use this method to compare them to identify the best one:

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

Once you have an offer that looks promising - i.e. able to make enough of the traffic profitable (e.g. can make some of the big placements profitable, or a major OS profitable, or a major carrier...), you can clone the camp into staggered bids, cut bids that have hopeless ROIs, and cut the unprofitable traffic from each remaining camp (unprofitable placements, OSs, browsers, devices, whatever).

That's just one way to optimize. Everyone does it differently. But it would be a good approach to start with.


Bidding higher will often get traffic from better-converting placements. The trade-off of course is the higher price.

Finding that sweet spot resulting from these 2 opposing trends (cost vs. quality) would be the goal. This is why we test bids.

Also - because different bids will trigger traffic from a different set of placements, it may be good to have more than one staggered-bid camps running - as I've mentioned above. So for example you'd have a low-bid camp, a mid-bid camp and a high-bid camp, each targeting different placements (with overlap of some of the same placements across multiple camps) after cutting unprofitable placements from each camp.

Very nice follow-along! Please feel free to continue our discussion.



Amy

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Hey Amy, thanks for joining the follow along! Great to have you on board. I tried to do the little blue response messages that you were doing, but for some reason am unable to do it.

Thank you for the tips. First of, yes I am currently doing pops. I will be trying to mix in banners as well. Mainly have been testing thru Exoclick (and I hear they have great banner traffic as well). Also,I have adult adplexity, so I will heed your and Chris_Climbs advice and start incorporating landers into the mix. Have a CDN all set up and ready to go.

QUESTION: Are there anything we are looking for in these landers? I recall when I was doing sweeps, we had to really sell them on the offer by saying 'you have won!'... However, with adult I was hoping to do any landers with the highest traffic in adplexity adult. And for the most part those landers are adult cartoon gifs/pictures of naked girls(no text to presale). Would the highest traffic landers be good starting point? Wanted to grab 3 top landers and test to find the best offers.

QUESTION: Basically, I understand you need a lander for most offers (many trustworthy sources have done the split test in adult to show that landers work better than direct link). But wondering the reasoning behind landers for adult? Because we are for the most part showing a general lander that does not relate to the offer (like a bunch of pictures with a play buttons on them for example). Just curious!

Thank you for the 2x payout rule to cutting placements! That makes it very clear.

Also noticed you mentioned, bid at the average bid or above. I will continue to do that. Yesterday I was foolish and bid super high thinking that someone wouldn't dare go that close. Unfortunately I got called out on my bluff and paid a hefty price. That mistake will not be occuring again!
QUESTION: I noticed sometimes on exoclick, if I go higher than the average bid, I still don't recieive traffic. I think the average bid that is shown on exoclick may be a tad bit off. Would it be best to bypass the bid calculator and ask a network rep the correct amount to bid for in a certain country?

Great tip on the direct linking offers being dropped on 5x payout.
QUESTION: Does the same rule apply if we are using landers?

Thanks for all the tips!

Other than that, I am trying to balance the camps and this hurricane Irma that is coming. It is projected to hit Tampa this Sunday, so am getting some preparations done. I will try my best to update the follow along until then, but highly doubt it. Wish us Floridians luck! And thank you to everyone who has been reading

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That's easy!



Either click on the little bubble icon, or enclose the text in quote tags.


Fantastic!


That would REALLY depend on what kinds of offer you're promoting. Could you provide a screenshot of one of the offers? It doesn't have to be your best offer, just the same TYPE of offer. Then I'll do my best to suggest some suitable landers.


Again - it would depend on what kind of offers we're talking about.

It all comes down to how much pre-selling you can do with the lander. A lander can be a double-edged sword - on the one hand it requires another click from the visitor, which will decrease (in some case drastically) the number of visitors that will see the offer. On the other hand, a good lander will make the visitors that DO click through to the offer, convert better. The idea is for the lander to increase CR sufficiently to more than offset the damage it does in reducing the number of visitors to the offer.

So, the more pre-selling necessary to convert the offer, the more good having a lander can potentially do, and the more persuasion tactics you can utilize. e.g. Sweeps and Antivirus.

For 1/2-click offers that don't require a lot of pre-selling, it would be more difficult to come up with a lander that can do more good than harm, but if you do find one (or make one that works well), that can give you a big edge over the masses of affiliates that are just direct-linking. And I have seen landers that work well. Simple would be the way to go - an attractive graphic and a strong and short CTR (and maybe a short and sweet headline, and perhaps a couple of short bullet points).


I wouldn't call that a mistake at all!

It's one of those things that you can't dismiss just because it didn't work that one time. There are gem placements that can convert very well, that you won't even see unless bidding high. So, setting a small budget on a high-bid camp, with bad placements blacklisted from the start (that you've identified in lower-bid camps from before), wouldn't be a bad idea.


You can do that - or just keep adjusting your bid until you DO get traffic. That would be the faster method.


That's a very important question!

Answer: The 5x payout rule-of-thumb is only appropriate when you're direct-linking and running carrier traffic. (I should also add: And only for the smaller carriers and not big ones like ZA MTN/Vodacom.)

Wifi traffic comes with lots of bot placements - which you can cut to increase your ROI by quite a bit. So just because an offer doesn't convert right away, may not be because it's a dud.

And when you're using landers, then you'd have way more room to optimize your camp. Say you're testing 10 landers, 5x payout would only give you half a payout's spend per lander - hardly enough.

When using landers it's difficult to establish rules of thumb. I'm still trying to do this so I could continue writing my newbie tutorial (to extend to the part about using landers). It's so much simpler to judge on a case-by-case basis.


My heard goes out to all being affected by the forces of nature. Us Canadians are lucky to not be affected (so far). I just took a moment to send you some protective energy. Stay safe! All will be well.



Amy

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Thank you for all of your responses Amy! Learning a lot so far. Looks like using landers will require a higher budget, but can pay off higher dividends. I will send a screenshot soon as I am home today! Have been collecting the top/new offers, from the high populated tier 2/3 GEOs so far. I will try to get some reverse engineering with adult adplexity, and see which landers are recieving a lot of traffic tonight as well.

Now a quick update! Well the hurricane has finally passed. And thankfully it looks like Tampa dodged a bullet. Irma lowered to a category 1 by the time we got hit therefore not too much damage. However, we are without electricity and internet (will be writing the follow along in the library or lunch break at work). Prayers go out to all the countries that were significantly effected by Irma and wish them a speedy recovery..

This whole event went to show, that it is very hard to predict the future. I realized I will not be procrastinating on anything that can be taken care of immediately. You never know when an apocalyptic hurricane can come and set you back 10 years.

These past 4-5 months since joining STM have been a massive learning experience. But at this point I am focused on making cash in this industry.

'Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity and Cash is Reality'

This is my main goal right now. Affiliate Marketing has an insane learning curve. But these past few months of executing has taught me tons of new information that I couldn't have imagined knowing, when I was first reading STM. Despite losing a lot of money in testing so far, I am not bothered. I view it as paying for experience that will shape my understanding of this game. All this failure has led to knowledge, and I am hoping this knowledge will eventually lead me to success!

I will check back in later today. Thanks everyone for reading!

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Sounds good!


That's a priceless quote! And so true.

And I wouldn't focus on the possibility of apocalyptic events potentially happening to set us back. It's a good thing that the hurricane has provided such a bout of motivation to succeed though.

In the end, chasing after what we want is millions of times more powerful than running from what we don't want. They may sound like the same thing, but energy-wise they are completely different, and feelings-wise as well. One is being driven by fear, the other by excitement. Totally different and will yield different results. Just focus on the cash and give no attention to disasters (natural or any other kind) would be my recommendation.

Your sort of determination will stand you in good stead when the going gets tough. I see success in your near future - just that it may or may not be with pop.


Isn't this just the weirdest offer! It's clearly an adult offer, but no adult traffic is allowed...

Any idea what kind of stuff is offered with the subscription? Vids? Pics? Adult game?


There's also kimia (they have smartlinks and individual offers) and brokerbabe (smartlink and I THINK they also have individual offers). Mobusi and afflow I think only have smartlinks. There are quite a few networks that have adult carrier billing offers - these are just off the top of my head.



Next - some thoughts regarding your gameplan:

Good question. I would definitely recommend to test the most popular 5-10+ landers you can find on Adplexity first. If we're talking about really simple, generic adult video subscription landers (for example) for 1/2-click offers, they shouldn't take much work to fix up. And try to segregate offer types and identify suitable landers for each type - adult vid subscriptions being one example.

And then, it would definitely be good to include direct-linking as one of the candidates in your lander-testing, to see how it fares compared to your landers.

That's where I would start.

(Not trying to complicate things here with another option, but something else to keep in mind to test in the future: 1-click mainstream gaming offers can convert well on adult traffic as well, not just adult offers. Of course it would depend on the offer, but look for offers that are legit and will provide a bunch of games for people subscribing and not just one game - those convert better in general. It's just that most of them explicitly forbid adult traffic. But if you can find one that allows it that converts well, you're golden.)


Trying to cut landers based on conversions from different offers can be tricky, as offers usually have different payouts, and when you compare lander stats using the peakconversion stats calculator, the calculator assumes all conversions to be worth the same.

A better plan may be to throw all landers and offers into a camp, run until you see an offer converts a couple of times, then pause the rest, and continue running that one offer to cut landers until you're down to one - THEN use that winning lander to test all the offers.

So basically you need to identify an offer that converts first, use it to lock down a good lander, then use that to mass-test offers.

It sounds to me that your method is similar, except you want to test in batches. That approach is good in that it will take less time for each batch of testing to be done. If you throw all the offers into rotation at once, it will likely take longer than if you were to test in batches, but OVERALL it may actually take LESS time and budget because the more test candidates you include in a split-test, the wider range of performance you have, and the faster you can cut stuff.

(To explain that in another way: When you have a group of say 10 offers, you'll have a winner and a loser and the others performing somewhere in-between. If you test them all at the same time, you'll include the winner in the mix, which will hopefully make some conversions quickly to allow you to cut a lot of the other offers early on. Whereas, if you were to test them in 2 batches, your first batch may not include the winner - you may end up with several offers that perform similarly which will take more time for them to reach statistical significance.)

So - pros and cons. Please feel free to continue with your original plan and we'll see what happens!


Cutting offers based on statistical significance would be better. That's the approach where you keep eliminating the inferior offers until you end up with a winner:

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

Ditching offers that have spent 5x-7x payout without conversions - that will work if you're direct-linking 1-click offers for not-too-big carriers, but if you're using landers then you'll have more room for optimization.

5-7x payout isn't a very bad plan if you're only testing 3 landers (works out to spending 2x payout per lander). I just want to make sure to point out that the cut-off needs to change with the number of landers being tested.


Some offers convert worse on weekends, others convert better on weekends.

With pop traffic, there are many factors that can contribute to volatility in performance. To smooth out volatility in performance over different days-of-week and hours-of-day, you could throttle traffic to drag out your testing to span a week or more. But I don't feel that it's worth it to do so for pop camps as they typically don't last very long. Personally I feel that speed should trump accuracy in this case (i.e. just get the testing done as quickly as possible regardless of whether it's a weekday or the weekend). But if it would make you feel better, by all means conduct your testing on weekdays only.


As mentioned before, feel free to continue with your original plan - although I've suggested potential tweaks, I can't find major faults with your approach. Looking forward to seeing some stats when you have them!




Amy

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Hi achowdh3, happy to hear the storm has left Tampa "safe" ... its been "amazing" (not in the positive way) watching how it has evolved on TV. We send positive energy to all those cities who werent so lucky.

Amy, as always, has you on the right path... in detail too ... So, she was kind enough to mention us, I wanted to say indeed we have over 10 years experience in adult, quoting here "I will be focusing on Adult Content (maybe games ) and will be Direct linking" ... then we are your network.

Feel free to signup, no strings attached, and let me know, I will make sure you are assigned an AM asap.

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Thank you for your response Marina. I actually have signed up for a Kimia account and am all set! Just had a question. Do you often see affiliates running the smartlink to become profitable?

I ask this because I noticed you guys are the few affiliate networks, that allow the affiliate to see the offers/ creatives that converted well in the smartlink. Wouldn't this make it seem like smartlinks to be the first option to go to? Or would you recommend getting started with the single offers route when we are first getting started in Kimia? Thank you Marina.

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Stop stop stop. Scale this the fuck back man, you are blowing through your budgets and I don't think the current approach will teach you much

1 - Smart links are garbage. Stop running these right now. It's just a lazy approach.
a) you don't build a real relationship with a network or offer
b) can't negotiate cap (your daily quota) and payouts directly
c) don't get valuable data like landing page ctr, so it's hard to optimise, spot bad traffic etc
d) no control over the offer, so overnight they might switch to something shit
e) typically offers on poor terms, like Pay Per Sale instead of on lead
f) they take a huge commission, like an extra 20%.

2 - you've got to start using your own landers. Stop everything until you have landers. Direct linking in 99% of cases does NOT work.
- you can see which zones/placements have poor ctr and cut them fast
- can improve on them, giving you an edge over the competition
- experiment with different angles
- never run these types of campaigns without a lander!!!!! Pause that shit now until you have at least one in rotation.

3) sign up for some decent networks, big established ones that you can grow with. No more smart links! Run to offers that your affiliate manager recommends, not random garbage. Ask them to send you a top offers list. Actually give your affiliate manager a call on Skype in introduce yourselves when admitted.
a) adsimilis
b) clickdealer
c) mundomedia
d) convert2media

4) Testing. Reduce the number of variables! Keep it simple and scientific while your starting out. As a beginner you likely won't find a winner by brute forcing it with traffic and cash.

First test ($50) focusing on landers
- test one quality placement on exo
- with... 5+ landers that look very different
- with... two offers that your affiliate manager suggested

Look at the stats, focusing on EPV (earnings per view, what you make per pop up) for each lander. You can also look at EPC (per click)
- identify the lander that had the most click throughs (important as it's a small budget test)
- identify the landing page that made you the most money
- identify the offer that made you the most money

Did you break even? Small loss?

- check the winner lander, what can you improve on it? Think it's the layout? Text? Images? Questions?

If it's looking like it has potential

- try to find more landers that look similar and test those
- add more exoclick placements (other sites)
- test more offers from other networks

5) reduce your costs

- Voluum is amazing but it will get really expensive FAST with pop traffic. I'd suggest getting a trial of funnel flux or thrive and recycling the trials until you make enough to pay for it. Host on vultr using server pilot

- group buy on tools. Highly frowned upon but as a newbie you should have no shame.

https://mpiretools.com/club/signup

- learn to rip landers yourself, good skill to have. Even if it does save you $5 for hours of work, prob worth learning the hard way now. Learn to spot sneaky JavaScript

5) Other
- Voluum is amazing but it will get really expensive FAST with pop traffic. I'd suggest getting a trial of funnel flux or thrive and recycling the trials until you make enough to pay for it. Host on vultr using server pilot

- understand that in pop you are competing with big media buying crews and their algorithms. To make it work, you'll need to outwork them in terms of
a) lander optimisation,
b) offer selection and payouts
c) willingness to pop weird ass 3rd their geos where $100 a day profit isn't worth their time

- check out chaturbate.com as a traffic source when you're ready to move on to banners (asap...)

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Remember, right now the lander is the most important thing to test. Reduce all other variables that you can until you figure out one that gets good ctr and epv.

One geo, one (quality) placement, even one decide...

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Good luck!

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Hello Nick! Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for letting that be known. Haven't tested smartlinks much, other than as a link in my backbutton script for landers.

Are you saying build them from scratch? Because, I just got 10, highest traffic landers, from adult adplexity.
Can I test 3 of the offers that have been converting well from the direct linking tests (stats from past post), and add landers to those ones? Those were the offers recommended from my AM's last week.

Will do. I currently am in clickdealer, wewe media, bitterstrawberry, kimia and Mobidea.

Question about one of the listed tips.. I noticed you wrote, test one quality placement on exo. How would we typically be able to know which placement has potential when we are originally planning on launching our initial tests? My understanding was that we blacklist/whitelist once we have some data in.


Appreciate the info! Cheers

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Placements
- it's about reducing the amount of variables so you can get the most actionable data for your budget (while learning). Right now you need to test landers and offers and you can't afford to have all your budget blown by some shitty zones. Feel free to test more obviously.

What porn site do you frequent? See if that has exo placements. Xnxx from traffic factory is a good traffic source to consider also.

Landers
- rip for sure

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In that case, would it be wise to choose 'Premium' on exoclick rather than 'RON'?

I have seen many adult placements that have converted for me in the past. So I am sure I would have a starting point of one placement to use.

However, one part that I am trying to understand conceptually is .... what if I choose a placement for my initial test that has worked well in the past for a GEO, but not working for the new initial test? Wouldn't it be better to have more placement data to work with in the initial test, so we can blacklist appropriately?

Defintely starting to understand how the variables can take an impact. I think that is why I was blowing thru such a high budget. I just wanted to understand the placement concept so I can apply it appropriately down the future.

Thanks! I have some great quality landers in my opinion and will get the test started sometime tonight or tomorrow evening.

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Update

I will be pausing my smartlink campaign for the time being. I would like to now focus on my Mexico campaign. I direct-linked 20+ offers last week in the tests. Overall, there were a few that converted. Plan is to launch a test with the offers that have converted last week. But this time I will split test with 7-10 landers.

Also, I have my virtual assistant talking to my affiliate managers while I am at work to collect some more high revenue/converting offers that are doing well now. I believe he has a few good offers for India.

QUESTION: Anyone have experience with running adult content in india?

Also, I wanted to start looking into offers in smaller countries as well. I have read a blog post in Matuloo's website where he has a case study on running camps in smaller geos. Overall, seems like less competition, and in some cases longer lasting. Even though, I don't expect to see xxx-x,xxx days with smaller geos from the get go... I am mainly looking to have a profitable camp. The amount of money I am getting is not THAT important in the initial stages.

I simply want a basic strategy, and line of testing that will be easy to structure for my future testing. It's been a few months now, and I have spent a lot of time learning, doing testing, reading stm blog posts, networking with other affiliates. However, I believe I am in the stage where the campaigns should start having some positive returns.

MUCH appreciation to everyone that has been chipping in! You all have been helping me fine tune a lot of incorrect steps that I was getting wrong when doing everything on my own. Once everything clicks, I am sure I will have great results to show for everyone helping me in this journey.

Will provide more updates soon as I get out of work, and take a look at the latest offers that my VA has collected.

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Hello,

this follow along somehow slipped through un-noticed, but I found it now ... better late than never as the title suggest too

So first of all, pause all the campaigns and forget about the POP traffic from exoclick ... not sure why, but it's been performing absolutely the worst for me for carrier billing offers. Banners banners banners ... that's where the money is at exo. They have the highest volume of adult carrier banner traffic that you can find, even RON can work pretty good.

I usually agree with pretty much everything that nickpeplow posts, but this time I don't share his view on smartlinks. I personally made a lot of $$$ by using smartlinks from networks like kimia or Mobidea, and I still think it's an option to consider. Please keep in mind that I'm talking about carrier billing offers - this is such a cluttered space, with limited budgets, offers coming and going ... sometimes it's actually less hassle than hunting for fresh offers. OBVIOUSLY, if you can find a solid offer, with high budget ... it's always possible to optimize it better than any smartlink, since you can fire up a few LPs tailored to just that one offer.

Carrier billing offers are also the only adult vertical that can convert without a LP, but to be fair, I made more money with LPs than when direct-linking these offers.

As for the GEOs, Mexico and Brazil are quite tough to make them work ... India used to work like a charm, not so much anymore, but there is still some potential in it. So out of these 3 I would pick India... Indonesia also showed some promise, Thailand used to be a very good GEO for these offers, not sure how many good offers are available now though.

If you want to go on with this, definitely switch to banners or change traffic sources ... make sure to buy carrier traffic only ... experiment with LPs that look GENERIC and give smartlinks one more go OR prepare offer specific LPs and promote solo offers ...

Whatever you do, don't continue with pops on exo

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Hello Matuloo thanks stopping by.

Interesting method. Just want to make sure that I have understood correctly. Basically you are saying run banner traffic on exoclick. And to add a generic landing pages along with the smartlink.
QUESTION:
1) From my understanding... don't smartlinks come with the most optimal lander already plus an offer already? Unless I am mistaken. So would we need to add a landing page when working with smartlinks
2) With your strategy.. do you pick out the offers that worked well within the smartlink? Or do you just let the general smartlink run and just optimize the traffic from there..

Because as of right now, I have ran a smartlink test, which seemed to convert well. I dealt with 3 different affiliate networks. However, it was pop traffic, not banner on exoclick. Is it possible to work with that data, or would it be wise to retest, with banner traffic.

QUESTION: Any budget calculations when it comes to dealing with smartlinks? I have so far been dayparting my initial tests from 6pm-12am, so have been looking for a budget to last me during that duration.

Luckily I currently have the budget to implement both your and Nick's method. I have one camp up already dealing with mexico which can deal with landing pages + solo offers, and I had a smartlink campaign on pause now. At this stage, I am open to trying new methods to gain a deeper understanding.

Thanks for the advice! Great content on the blog as well.

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First of all -apologies for the lack of replies - I've been without access to a computer. Finally working out of an internet cafe in Shenzhen now to catch up on posts.

Nice! Matuloo is back! He's the expert on adult - achowdh3 you're in good hands. Nick has provided you with great tips as well. I'll retreat to the backseat a bit from now on, but still monitor this thread for progress and of course chime in whenever I have additional suggestions.

Regarding smartlinks: I've made a lot of money from smartlinks as well - so I wouldn't dismiss them altogether!

It's no secret that using landers will work better than direct-linking, and that using banners will work better than using just landers with pop. Basically, the more variables that are available for optimizing, the more room you have to improve to beat your competition.

However, many people find the learning curve scary, which is why I introduce newbies to direct-linking as the lowest-barrier to running paid traffic.

The many offers you ran on that $200 budget I see at least a couple of offers that have potential. I would suggest to run those 2 if you get a chance, and to see if you can recap some of that test budget.

Looking forward to seeing you progress!




Amy

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Yup, doesn't have to be just exoclick either, just do not use pops from exo. Plugrush, clickadu ... those are usable sources for such traffic in adult. Exo has the highest carrier volume in banners, so if you want to stay there, that's the way to go.

Nope, not the ones used by pretty much all mobile networks. These smartlinks simply rotate offers that they have available. Some might have landers, but majority doesn't. I've seen smartlinks like you've been describing for dating for example, but not for carrier billing offers.

Yes. That's part of the strategy. If I see a very good offer being rotated by the smartlink and if it's available for direct promotion, I would try that. I had good success by running the smartlink only too ... depends on the current situation in a market.

You can use the data to some extent - offers/smartlink and also some LPs that worked with pops, should also show some traction with banners. But you will need to collect new data in order to be able to optimize placements and of course also for the banners.

Budget will depend on the GEO of your choice, I personally try to run 24/7 and only resort to dayparting when the data really tells me to do so. The best thing to do is to chose a budget that will allow you to cover the whole day and get a steady solid amount of clicks every hour. Use some targeting options to limit the available volume, but definitely try to get even volumes - target just some carrier or OS for example.[/QUOTE]

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No problem Amy! Glad to have you back

Are you referring to the smartlinks camp or the Mexico camp?

I have invested a lot of money into data for Mexico. One offer seems to be doing okay direct linked. It is a 3 dollar payout offer. I didn't know whether to roll out this offer to a banner+landingpage+ offer format .. Or to start focusing on a less competitive geo like india or indonesia altogether. Any Thoughts?


I have not done work with banner traffic yet. But I feel like I have the tools to work with this, considering i have adult adplexity to spy on the latest banners. So I believe now is the best time to switch up from pops and experiement with banners, considering I use exoclick as my primary 'initial testing' traffic source.

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Thank you for clearing that up. I have plenty of generic landing pages that I will add onto the smartlink.

I have noticed that smartlinks often have very low payouts on some offers. When you see a smartlink converting well. Are you mainly just focusing on optimizing the traffic at that point to make the smartlink profitable. Then followed by scaling?
I ask this because, everytime I have launched a smartlink campaign, I can get 20 plus conversions but only get like $1.60 cents of revenue. After that I look to optimize, the device/os/carrier, but most major segments seem unprofitable due to the traffic cost + low payout mix. Which leads me to try to blacklist. Is this the correct method of thinking when dealing with smartlink camps?

Great thanks. I will do that. Do you run the test for 2 days and study the data from there?

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Well, the smartlink either has solid offers in place or it doesn't. If it's wildly negative, there is nothing to do about it. It's not like there are good performing offers available for all GEOs all the time. Sometimes it simply won't work. If I see what you are describing, I give it one more shot with a few LP variations, if it's still that shitty, I try to look whether some particular offers in the mix could do it. If it's not the case, I give up and move on.

I also do the basic checks - like whether there are bots, whether there are some placements eating up large part of the budget etc ... I make sure that I'm getting traffic that even has chance to convert ... if it doesn't help, well time to move on.



I prefer to invest more and get lot's of volume straight away, so I can watch the story unfold live as the traffic starts flowing The time needed depends on the volume, sometimes you can identify the patterns quickly.

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So I spoke with one of the affiliate managers that I have been running a smartlink for. And they have verified that they rotate landers and offers into their smartlinks. It is a general 'Adult' link. So they may be rotating in adult dating offers as you mentioned. Or it may be just that particular affiliate network. Let me verify with the other 2 before I launch a campaign for smartlinks. Thanks for the tips Matuloo! Seems as though I need to test some hotter geos.

Makes sense, more data the better right

I too would like to do that strategy. However, one thing that I have noticed. Everytime I set a campaign for all day , targeted for a carrier. I notice my budget runs out from 12am-11am ish.. I am unable to monitor a camp all day due to being at work from 9-6pm on the weekdays. Guess I should stop putting a daily cap. Need to find a way to have a steady budget to get traffic all day, but not overspend like Nick pointed out.. Finding that tough :/

I want to target more, but most of the offers I run are for all devices/operating systems. So I typically do a wide cast net test, in the initial stages. Will look into a workaround for this

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Update

So I will keep this post short. I currently have 2 campaigns that I set yesterday.

Mexico-Telcel-Adult Content-Exoclick
Path 1 (value 75%)
4 Banners
3 landers
5 offers
Path 2 (value 25%)
-Direct link same 5 offers.


India-Idea-Adult Content-Exoclick
Path 1 (value 75%)
4 banners
3 landers
5 offers
Path 2 (value 25%)
Direct link same 5 offers.

I set the campaign last night before going to sleep. I will check on the stats soon as I am home today.

This is my first time testing banners on exoclick!! I felt some satisfaction ripping some of the latest banners in the market. Was testing pops and direct linking so much that it seems smart to start adding in some new practices.


Anyone with banner experience, feel free to give any feedback with the initial setup!! If you want to chat skype name is: arman.n.chowdhury

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You simply have to limit the volume with the targeting, even if they accept all devices, simply pick just one or two. Or pick one carrier ... you shouldn't target several carriers in the same campaign at the source anyways, because the bids are different for different carriers. And you are right, adult carrier traffic certainly has it's prime-time hours with the highest levels, usually it starts around 8pm in the particular GEO.

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These are quite complicated funnels, I mean there is a lot of various variations to test ... but let's let it run for a while to see how much traffic you'll be able to get and how fast.

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When I'm optimizing adult campaigns I do not use any significance calculators, I simply wait until something either stands out clearly or falls behind clearly ... I'm doing this, because adult is naturally very volatile due to it's impulsive nature, and a few random conversions can screw it all up. In your case, LP4 and 5 are winning over and over again with offer 1, so it's safe to assume they are the winners.

With the 2nd offers, it's not that clear, one LP is performing a bit better, but it's not that clear... you need to come up with different banners or more LPs here. Or pause this one for now and focus on offer 1, to see if you can make it profitable. Then you can return to this 2nd offer or test a few different ones.

Before cutting the banners, make sure they also converted well with the LPs you're gonna keep running. One is a clear leader, but it's not good to run with one banner, you need some variety... definitely come up with more banners here.

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Noted! Is there a time when we can make some rational decisions? My main problem is I tend to analyze the data too early. For a safety net, is it best to make decisions when we atleast spent 4-5 times the payout? or doesn't matter..


I will take action on this Matuloo. I have paused offer 2 for the time being and have verified that the banner is doing well with my winning landing page.

QUESTION: At this stage should i try testing more offers, or can I just go ahead and go all in with offer 1?

Thanks for verifying lander 4 and 5 were the winners.

Question regarding this... I was planning on using multiple banners, but the same theme as the winning banner. Like the same position the girl was in, but with a new girl.. Are you saying to have different themes in the mix?

Appreciate your assistance!

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Depends on how much variables you are testing, for example : 4-5x payout is enough to spot if a single offer sucks, right? But it's not enough to test 10 banners, since you didn't give each of them at least a chance to convert. However, it will be enough to spot those with awful CTRs... it's always about how fast the trends start to unfold. If something starts to fall behind immediately, you don't have to go on with it just to reach significance. To give you some ballpark figure, 5x payout is enough to spot a completely failed offer/lp/banner or whatever, but it's not enough to make solid decisions. If the campaign at least somewhat converts, give it 10xor 15x payout before considering any optimizations. Except for the obvious losers, you can cut those earlier.

You can test more offers and use offer 2 as a benchmark, as you know it's at least a stable performer. So anything that works worse, has to go.

It's up to you actually, you know that the one you have is decent, so try to make variations from it. But it's still possible a different style would do even better. Same advice as with the offer - use the banner as a benchmark now and try to beat it.

Good luck

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Got it Matuloo. Thanks for clearing that part up!

Update:
Had some personal issues come up this past weekend. So had to go to Miami right after work on friday. Unfortunately did not get to pause the offer 2 as I expected. But there is a positive side to the story. I noticed that offer 2 basically caught up to offer 1 , when I came back to tampa today to check the data. So now I am considering keeping it for stage 2 of testing. Let me share the results.



offers1 lander


offers2 lander


banners stats


I am glad that I kept the camp on play, because now I have a deeper understanding about the creatives. The numbers tell a different story than it did a few days ago. Planning on getting keeping both offer 1 and 2 since based on the stats, one outperforms the other. Lander 4 will make it to the next stage because it seems clear that it's the strongest for both offers. And banner 1 and 2 will make it to the next stage.

Next Steps: Now I will continue to test offer 1 and 2. I made 3 variations to lander 4, so have in my camp. And I have gotten 2 new banners variations, that I will test with my previous 2..

QUESTION: Did anyone else have a problem where exoclick does not take 1000kB landers? Assume its a common problem... but i was able to compress the images.. and it looks blurry... Wondering if it looks blurry bc I am viewing it on a desktop.. maybe will look better when ppl view it on mobile/tablet?

Also I plan to start an indian camp today as well.

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Some network have limits on banner date size, not sure about exo, don't remember to have that problem with them ... but I rarely use creatives that data heavy, you should be able to optimize it down. Just to make sure, are we talking about BANNER here, right? Cause you typed Landers and exo shouldn't really care about the size of your landers.

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Yes Matuloo, sorry meant Banner not lander. I was able to compress it below 1000kb. And it looked like poor resolution, but overall it was my highest performing banner. Think it looks good in the mobile phones and tablets.


UPDATE: Been very busy lately. However there are a few updates that I would like to go over. In the mean time I have been trying to use the Chile as a learning opportunity to learn some basic testing principles. But it doesn't look like it's going anywhere unfortunately. So volatile that I don't know if it's normal or if i made some poor adjustments. So let me recap what's happened this week.

I began stage 2 testing, after narrowing to 2 offers, 4 landers and 3 banners.
Stage 2 Testing: 10/9-10-11
Traffic Source: Exoclick
Revenue: $50.40
Cost: $94.78
Profit: -$44.38

Offer Breakdown



Each offer were neck and neck. But the Offer 1 always seemed to outperform around end of the day.

Offer 1 Landers Stats



Offers 2 Landers


Banner Stats



So overall I had enought stats at this point in my opinion. My campaign budget for the variables were 3bannersx4landersx1.4x2offersx3= $100.8. I spent roughly around 94 dollars.

I used this stat calc: https://www.peakconversion.com/2012/...al-calculator/

And removed offer 2, and decided to work with Offer1. I removed all landers but Lander 11, and made 3 variations of that.. And finally, I got rid of my lowest click thru banner and made a variation of my best banners...

Thinking now I am def getting to green!

Unfortunately not..

Today was my first day testing after I made my changes.. And the results are no bueno...For this round of testing I have 1offer x 4 landers x 3 banners x 1.4 x 3 = $50.4 dollars.

Results for testing so far:
date : 10/12
Revenue: $15.40
Cost: $32.67
Profit: $-18.07
Offers Breakdown


Landers Breakdown


Banners Breakdown


Next Steps: TBH.. not sure what I should do with this camp. Thinking to eliminate lander 11 and 13, and let landers 14 and 15 duke it out...I used the AB split test calc and I see thats what the calculator is telling me.. I wanted to use this as the first camp that I can turn green, no matter what the profit margin was. So I would be able to take away the key concepts for future. But wondering if I am trying to fill a bottomless bucket at this point. Thoughts ? I have an India Camp started that I dedicated 100 dollars for testing. I just got the data in.. I will post it after dinner.

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Here are some stats regarding the India Camp. 6 offers x 3 banners x 4 landers x $0.41 (avg payout) x 3 = $95.40 budget.

Testing Date: 10/11-10/12
Traffic Source: Exoclick
Carrier: IDEA
Revenue: $19.06
Cost: $101.10
Profit: -$82.04

Offers Breakdown


Note: So many of y'all will be wondering why my smartllink got soo much traffic. Basically I talked to exo, and they said that the traffic is being routed from Proxies at this point. However, all the traffic is IDEA. Problem is that even if the traffic from the proxy is IDEA, Voluum rule is directing this traffic to the smartlinks. 12 % of all idea traffic have gotten to the smartlink, and you can tell it's chewing up ALOT of the budget. Any way to stop this from happening?


Anyways, offer 1 and 2 seem to be promising.. The rest look like duds. Since I have so many variables, I gave them 10x payout to show something but not much promise..


My plan is to keep offer 1 and 2 for next round of testing. Here are the lander stats

Offer 1 Lander


Offer 2 Lander


Banner Stats


Next steps: Next plan was to get offer 1 and 2, and split test it with brand new banners and landers (since neither ones were in the green).

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Remember how I always say that adult campaigns need variety? Now you've seen why. Adult is a very impulse-behavior field. Part of the users would click/convert on any banner/LP/offer, not because the funnel is so awesome, but because they are in a "specific" state of mind ... if you know what I mean This is why pretty much anytime you isolate a very specific funnel, it doesn't keep it's high performance ... isolating very specific funnels in adult is very hard because of this, you need a lot of data to see the clear patterns.

ALWAYS try to run more than 1 offer or LP, if one of them fails on a day, the other one can make up for it. Instead of hunting for the VERY best funnel, focus on identifying the obvious losers and get rid of those. This approach has always worked better for me.

Performance of your 2 offers was very close, especially when looking at just the better LPs. If I was doing the optimization, I would keep both offers but I'd cut LPs 12 and 14 for offer 2 and the same LPs for offer 1, these two were the worst in both cases. It's also not needed to always come up with more LP variations straight away, first give the isolated funnel a chance to prove itself, then add new LP variations.

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Got it Matuloo. Yes I should have kept the second offer in there. Lesson learned... And yes India camp has been dropped.


UPDATE: So this past weekend I unfortunately got into a car accident. I am fine, and the car is repair-able which is great news. But I am not sure how much I will be expected to cover. Prefer not to get insurance involved in this one. Until I get a quote, I am pausing all of my campaigns, because not sure how high the cost of the damages can go up to.. Mean while I will be reading thru STM, going over the tips that many of you have been giving me on my thread, and will be trying to improve my knowledge during this hiatus.

Will find out the full quote this weekend. Then I will be back in action! Cheers

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Ouch, that's not good, but I'm glad to hear you are ok! Why don't you want to get insurance involved? Let them pay fuckers Or did you do something that is interfering with the insurance contract?

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Well my family is all under the same plan, and a few of our family members have gotten tickets lately. That ended up spiking up the monthly insurance plan. I got the overall quote today and it is something that i can handle. Meanwhile I will try to launch atleast one camp-2 a week and try to learn as much as I can. Thanks Matuloo!

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Now that I look into it.. It seems like one offer is a clear winner.. But I do not want to make the mistake that Matuloo pointed out last time where I went down to only one offer.. and the camp became a bust.. But here is a overview of the offers from 10/20-10/22...

Attachment 17312

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In this case it looks like one is really a winner, but if you are afraid to stay with one offer, at least cut the one with the lowest performance. I'm pretty sure it should improve your numbers!

Congrats on the green days, it's just a beginning, but it's an important milestone!

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Thank you Matuloo! Yes, even though it's not too much, felt good to hit green regardless. Couldn't have done it without your help! Will remember this milestone.

And got it. I will cut offer 3, since it's the worst.. Since one is such a clear winner would it be fine in this scenario to leave just one offer? I don't mind doing it.


Also.. Is it too late in this camp lifecycle to add in another Chile offer? My AM recommended it so wanted to give it a test. Or would it be better to hold off on that offer for now.. and have all traffic going to the top converting one/s?

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The difference is really big, so I would probably vote to keep just that one offer. I'm all for variety in campaigns, but it's also nonsense to keep running two offers, when one performs twice as good. And adding a new one for testing at the same time, might be a good idea ... you will quickly see if it's stands a chance against the current winner. It's never too late to add new offers into the mix, you should be doing it on an ongoing basis, just keep two things in mind : add offers that are compatible with the same funnel, and make sure you don't test too many as it would eat up all your profits. Some people prefer to dedicate certain part of traffic to testing only.

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Okay Matuloo. I am narrowing down to only my top converting offer, and have added one more offer for testing purposes. The offer checks out on both of the points that you mentioned above. I will keep this one running for the rest of the day and see how it plays out..

Meanwhile my Mexico /Movistar campaign is up and running now. So just collecting some stats.


I will post more updates as I have them. Cheers

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Looking forward to it, especially the campaign with the 1 best offer ... don't be surprised if the performance of the offer goes down now, it's almost always the case when running with just 1 offer ... but the whole campaign should perform better now.

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Ok, when I look on the screens, your volume seems to be going up and down from one day to the next. I think what you are experiencing is competition pushing you up and down in the bidding chain, which messes with your traffic quality. The new offer is quite unstable too. I would check with the AM if it's hitting the network cap maybe ?

But overall, the numbers look pretty good, I would definitely try to scale this and try to optimize on larger volume.

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