Newbie - 3 months of struggle with direct linking Afflow offers (5)
Newbie - 3 months of struggle with direct linking Afflow offers
First - thanks to all the valuable information shared here. I went through several of those relevant to me especially by Vortex, Mr. Green and others and tried to implement the suggestions already shared, but I think I need some help :-)
I did the 6WAMC course earlier in May'17 and then started with the obvious and easy one - direct linking Afflow offers.
In the last 3 months, I've spent close to $3k and was able to recover half of it in conversions.
I used Afflow with Propeller Ads, ZeroPark, PopAds and PopCash.
I tried to follow the advice provided in the course and STM forum - selecting lesser competitive and non-english countries, running small budget campaigns and cutting losses by removing non-converting site IDs/website IDs/source/traffic. I did rinse and repeat for several countries - targeting some by city, some by offers, some by carrier etc...
However, a common behavior in all these campaigns was that after excluding the non-converting sites/websites/source/traffic - I was not getting much impressions and even increasing bid did not provide much help.
I'm about to give up on direct-linking pops and move to landers but thought of asking for opinion. Is there anything else I can improve upon? I did not setup CDN because my guess is that direct-linking does not need that (unless I'm not getting the big picture).
Is direct-linking pops still worth the time and money?
Hi! Always nice seeing AMC students here.
Pop has gotten more competitive, no doubt about that.
And with so many people running afflow and other monetizers on pop networks - members from STM, the AMC, and affiliates from outside either of these - it doesn't make it any easier.
Afflow is still one of the best monetizers, if not THE best. One way to make it work is take it to lesser-known traffic sources. This has always been a key to achieving more consistent success with these monetizers. Here's an outline on how to seek out more traffic sources:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post317559
Also - AMC didn't just cover afflow and pop. We covered using landers on pop. We also covered mobile display and FB. Feel free to expand into those traffic types as well.
What do I mean by that? For example, if you're seeing that most of your bigger/biggest placements are in loss, and not enough of them in profits, then there would be little point in continuing to cut.
Only when you can make enough of the traffic profitable, would it make sense to cut out the unprofitable portion. Otherwise, you'd have nothing left after cutting.
The earlier you can tell whether a camp either 1)has a good chance of being profitable or 2)probably will not be profitable or be left with very little traffic at the end, the more money you can save. How to be able to pause a camp early enough so as to limit losses, without risking cutting out too many camps that could turn out to be profitable if you'd continue to run it, will require experience.
Perhaps it would be good to do a post-mortem on some of your camps (or look at current stats of campaigns you still have running if you have any) to learn more from them.
Let's see how that goes first. Of course it would also be good to test landers and individual offers - that would give you an additional variable to optimize. The optimization process you learned from optimizing afflow can be applied to those camps as well. It would be good to start testing offers on the same geos you've been focusing on for afflow, because you already know what the best placements are. Test offers and landers using the best placements to save money, and if you get green with them, expand to other placements.
This post has a list of links that will help you with finding and testing landers:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post324392
Right now I'm trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all testing and optimization method for landers, so that I could write more lessons for the newbie tutorial. But there's no need to wait around for that - start testing and ask questions as they arise, or start a follow-along.
Keep us posted!
Amy
Welcome to the forum tritya! 
I think you were the first AMC cohort to get access to the new acceleration modules, have you had a look at those? If so, the caurmen's automation module might help you since you've got the process down and it's just, as you say, rinsing and repeating. Not exactly sure what's in that module, since I'm from a previous cohort (have to say, I'm pretty jealous), but there should be some transferable knowledge.
Originally Posted by tritya
I see somewhat similar behavior as you described. After cutting placements etc. that do NOT convert, the traffic volume went down (which is normal) and conversions also went down (which is weird). Whatever I do, increase bid like you mentioned, the volume and conversion is just gone.
It feels really strange to me, because even if the total volume went down, the converting placements should still bring in enough traffic to convert like it used to, right? I think this phenomenon is related to the targeting itself not your optimization. The underlying profitability has changed within short period of time, so even if you don't cut, it will turn less profitable overtime.
But I'm just a newbie. I may be wrong.
Try the following:
-Compare placement stats from before and after the drastic drop in performance - if you're no longer getting traffic from placements that were converting for you before, bid higher.
-Clone your camp - sometimes that will "reboot" it.
-Pause the camp for 1-2 days and unpause - that would sometimes reboot it as well.
Also - first thing to do would be to ask your AM to verify that the offer isn't the cause. If it is, other affiliates may have reported it. Get confirmation that the offer isn't the problem before doing anything else.
Amy
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