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FOLLOW ALONG: I have just launched my 1st ever Campaign!!!!! (31)

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Hi All.
Just thought I would let you all in to what I have done, as I am sure it's going to go wrong somewhere and will be calling on some of you to help bail me out!
I have just launched my first ever campaign Following Vortex (Amy's) guide: Setting up your very first camp (Voluum Version)

I used Mobedia
and was recommended for pop traffice to a childrens mobile tv offer. (Ad - 14447) Payout £0.36. Argentina and carrier: Movistar AR
They advised me that the offer page was fairly free flowing so for my first campaign it should suit as I will not need to create my own pre lander.



Voluum:

• I created a custom affiliate network and called it 'MOBEDIA' left the othr options as default and saved it.
• Copied the secure postback URL under setup on Voluum
• Visited the Mobedia dashboard, setup the Global Postback (custom) and pasted the above in to the domain field.
• Modified the link as set out to incorporate {{DATA2}} & {{MONEY}} - then saved all changes
• Copied the Mobedia Offer link and then pasted this into the URL on Voluum 'New Offer' under the 'Flows' tab.
• As shown, replaced where necessarry with {campaign.id}&data2={clickid}
• Copied the offer name
• Specified the country as Argentina and the Affiliate Network as Mobedia --> clicked 'save'

• Clicked the traffic sources tab then clicked new traffic source then selcted propeller ads, loaded the template, left it all as it is and clicked save.
• Clicked the Campaign tab, then clicked 'new campaign' and named it AR Main Movistar
• Specified the traffic source as propeller ads
• Country as Argentina
• Destination (path), selected the direct linking box, selected the relevant offer in the dropdown box and saved.
• Copied the campaign URL at the top of the campaign window to insert in to Propeller ads.

PROPELLER ADS

• Click Campaign and the create campaign.
• Paste the URL from Voluum into target URL
• Left Pricing Model as 'CPM'
• Copied the Voluum Campaign Name.
• Did not checkmark 'Activate Traffic Boost'
• Set frequency capping to 1 & 24
• Selected Argentina for the country field
• put $2.33 in CPM field
• Set daily and Total campaign budget to $10
• Under Campaign Schedule select Ad delivery method as 'Distributed'
• Under Targeting, then Advanced select '3G' as connection type, OS type as 'Mobile' and exclude Blackberry OS.
• Device type, selected phone and tablet
• In mobile ISP selected Movistar (AR)
• Unchecked 'I want to get traffic from anti ad block zones'
• Checkmarked 'I declare and guarantee....'
• Clicked START CAMPAIGN!!!!

Left it for an hour and saw on my propeller ads the impressions start to rise.
I then paused the ad on propeller ads.
Viewed my mobedia dashboard and under the charts and offer tab it showed the offer and it showed that it is registering clicks.

I think this means I have done it correctly and have resumed the ad on Propeller Ads.
I will post again tomorrow to give you all an update.

I hope I have done this correctly.
Any comments or suggestions are greatly welcomed.

Thanks in advance.

Marc

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Should I be seeing any sort of results yet or do I need to be far more patient?

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3,592 visits and not a single conversion.
What do I do? Do I carry on with the campaign or drop it?

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Hey Marc!

This offer has not bad results overall in Mobidea, as you can see on the Opportunities page. What you can definitely do now is to try to shorten your costs. I believe there is one OS that has much more traffic than the rest, so I would already cut all the OS except that one.

Besides, seems like your bid is a bit too high. You could also try to decrease it a bit and check your results - the goal is to set the bid as low as possible, and still be getting a good amount of traffic.

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How is the traffic distribution among publishers?

The fact that you are not using a landing page complicates the optimization because you don't have the LP Ctr parameter which is very helpful in the fist stage of launching campaigns.

In this case I think you should start blocking publishers which spent more than $1 (impressions > than 500 with your CPM).

If the traffic distribution is such that there are no publishers with more than 100 clicks (which for me it is a good sign) it means that you just need to give it more time.

In any case you should stop once you reach $20 in spent without any conversion, and check with the network.

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Hey!!

Thanks for this.
I have had a look at your opportunities page and seen the OS you were reffering to, so I will cut the others and give this a go.
my CPM is currently $2.33 which you mentioned is too high, what (roughly) would you recommend setting this as?

Thanks for your help!
Also go to say the AM's on your website through the instant chat have been great help too!

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Ervin.

Thanks for the insight, looks like this can be helpful. [Enter the painful Newbie questions]
1. I am using Propeller Ads, how can I find out my distribution amongst publishers?
2. Once I know this, how do I block certain publishers?
3. I have no experience with coding and design. Is there an easy way to get a professional landing page to use?

Many Thanks

Marc

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Just signup for one month with a spy tool like adplexity and rip one of the landers. Easy as that There are many place that offer a lifetime discount so do check it out.

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Hello Marc,

I'm quit new to mobile cpa as well and after a lot of sweating I've a few campaigns profitable.

Probably it is not a good idea to run this offer on popups;
It is targeting children while the most visitors from your popups are not children and a large part of the other visitors are not parents either.
Me personally experienced that the broader the offer appeals to your visitors, the higher the chance of success, like the Vortex Guide: Games, Videos and Mobile content (that is broadly targeted like antivirus)
Also the screenshot looks a bit strange but I don't know how the landingpage looks on a mobile phone.

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1. you do this from Voluum. Go to your propeller camp and click on reporting, then from "Variables" menu (up right corner) select Zone ID (which is the publisher id for propeller). You will get a report with clicks you got for each zone ID. Copy the IDs that you want to block and go to step 2

2. to block publishers login to Propeller, click edit on the campaign you want to block zones and scroll down to "Targetting". There you have a text box where you can paste all the zone IDs that you want to block. Don't forget to switch to "Exclude". Check this screenshot: https://screencast.com/t/nshNW4bdCVf

3. Many times if you ask your AM from the network you got the offer they will be able to arrange you something. Otherwise the options are 2: get it done by paying a coder/designer or ask if anyone here in the forum can help
Normally affiliates find landing pages through the so called "spy tools" like Adplexity, but is a service that you need to pay, and not sure if you wanna add that expense to your budget at this point.

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Hi Guys.

I have now lowered my CPM to $2. Do you think this is still too high?
I have also changed the IOS allowance to Android only

Let's see how this goes this time round.

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Ervin,

You are a star.
Hi Guys.

I have now lowered my CPM to $2.
I have also changed the IOS allowance to Android only

I am just getting to grips with this and I will hopefully start experimenting with pre landers next week.

I had a look and decided not to block any zones as none of them had impressions > than 500

Let's see how this goes this time round.

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Going to give it a try. Lets see how long it takes before I screw this one up

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Noted.

Thanks Johnny.
Will carry on with this one just for a demo and practice, but makes sense what you said. Will also look for another offer to promote too!

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Hi marc_w, I would suggest you don't continue wasting money with direct link offers, I personally almost never managed to make offers work on pop traffic without a landing page.

You have chosen the harder way

So I would say that finding a good offer and running it with 1 or more landing pages is a must in order to continue.

It will help you understand how the optimization really works, and will also help you start building your own list of bad publishers for a given traffic source (publishers that do not send clicks to the landing page) and save money by blocking them directly on your new campaigns.
But this is not possible with your current setup, as you have no idea which publishers are the ones that will never click on your landing page.

How are you picking your offers from Mobidea? Are you talking to your AM there? Are you talking to your AM on Propeller? These are important tasks that you should put on your daily agenda, will be much harder if you try to understand everything by your self. Account managers are paid to help you, use them.

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Hey Ervin.

If you say so then I'm going to give it a go with the landing pages!
I speak with the AM's at Mobidea, but not at Propeller Ads (What should I be speaking to them about?)

Re: Landing Pages.
I have purchased a domain Via LCN.
I haven't got a sever yet. I will check my other company's website and see if the same server can be used (I think it is running through Host Gator).
I saw on Wix that they have templates for Landing pages. I have played around with Wix before and seems fairly easy as you can use drag and drop set up. Is this going to be okay to set up a Landing page?
If it is, I'll create one and then pick your brains some more on how to actually get the landing page up and live and incorporate it into my tracking etc..

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Hey Marc! Again, sorry for the late reply as I just got back from a business trip.

Several points I want to make that will help:

1)Have you read lesson 7? With direct-linking to carrier-billing offers, it's all about testing a lot of offers but only spending a bit of money on each. I suggest to cut an offer if it doesn't convert at least once per 5 times payout spent on traffic.

2)It's no secret that using landers will give you an extra variable to optimize and therefore extra room to improve your ROI. However, direct-linking is a much simpler way to get started - although profits potential is much lower, you can learn how to set up tracking and analyze stats and optimize the camp accordingly. It's not my intention to recommend that you continue to direct-link forever, but it IS the simplest way to set up your first campaign and get your first conversions, and a lot of people wouldn't have gotten started if it wasn't for the simplicity of this tutorial.

Also - for 1/2-click carrier billing offers, because most of them will convert without much/any pre-selling, it can be difficult to come up with landers for them (or find suitable ones on adplexity). Let me know which offer you're choosing next, and let's see if we could find suitable landers for it.

Alternatively, you can move away from 1/2-click offers and jump into offer types that have plenty of landers available on adplexity for your ripping pleasure - sweepstakes for example (to find other examples just browse through adplexity results). Here's a post where I've listed some resources if you want to learn about landers:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post324392

3)Regarding the bid: What a lot of people don't realize is that bidding low will get you lower-quality traffic that doesn't convert as well as more expensive traffic. Yes you can probably bid lower in certain countries and still get decent traffic quality, but because my tutorial needed to be a one-size-fits-all/most solution, I wanted everyone to bid high enough to ensure that the traffic quality is there. That way, if you're not getting conversions, you'd know it's the offer and not the traffic that's the issue.

Basically the goal here is to bid around average to make sure you're getting decent quality.

When you find a promising offer, you'll need to test lower and higher bids anyway. But for initial testing, you don't want to cut an offer thinking it's a dud when it's because you're bidding too low and getting crappy traffic.

4)Regarding cutting zones/placements/publishers (for pop you can use these terms interchangeably): I would suggest cutting zones that are in loss by the equivalent of 2 times offer payout, no matter if it has converted or not. I find this rule-of-thumb to work pretty well.


Looking forward to your next update!




Amy

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Thanks Amy.

Yes I have read it and also started to implement cutting Zones and other variables, such as carriers etc dependant on their performance.
I have tested a new offer today which has a bit of action going on although it is an extremely low payout $0.03.

I will let it run its course and post it below once done so. Would be great to get your thoughts etc.

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I don't think this offer is worth continuing with personally. All converting zones bar 1 are way above 2x payout and the 1 that isn't is $0.01 away. Optimising for OS won't remove a significant amount of non-converting traffic either looking at those figures.

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I would take a look at zone stats for JUST the android OS and see if there are promising placements.


One thing to look out for: The versions with the most conversions also happen to be the ones responsible for the most traffic volume.

What you should be looking at is CR - in this case though happen to be the same versions.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to start your next campaign with campaign targeting set to just the best-converting traffic segments as indicated in Mobidea's stats. That should save you some test budget. If the best-converting segments are profitable, you can always open up your targeting to test more segments. And if even the best-converting segments are NOT profitable, then it probably wouldn't be worth it to open up your targeting.




Amy

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Hi All.

So I am now ready to start using landing pages.
I have signed up to Adplexity.
Bought a domain through LCN.com
Got a VPS server through Liquid Wed.

I was wondering if someone can help me or if there is a step by step guide. to:
- Connect The Domain to the VPS
- How to upload the Landing Page I downloaded from Adplexity to my server.
- How I put my unique link on to the landing page.
- How I set all of this up so it all works in line with Mobidea, Voluum and Propeller ads.

Thanks

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Hi Marc,

Sign up for cloudflare to point the domain to the VPS IP. Ensure that you have apache etc. running on your VPS to serve web pages.

Download the Landers from Adplexity, modify the URLs in it to point it to your Voluum Click URL (available from the Setup page in Voluum).

Add Landers in Voluum and create Campaign as a Path - putting the lander with the offer that you want to run.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks Adi.

I now have my domain and server connected and have also applied Cloud flare.
Once I have ripped an ad from adplexity, how do I change the URLS in this?

What URL do i put in here? Is it the on that Voluum asigns me once I have set up the relevant campaign?

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Hey Marc, the following threads should help:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Ripped-Landers
http://feedback.Voluum.com/knowledge...ng-up-a-lander

But yes, it's the one provided by voluum that's the click tracking link.

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Thanks guys I got to say I am still struggling.

Are there any more basic step by step guides as to how I even open the ad/landing page I downloaded in order to edit it etc

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Not yet - I'm writing that step-by-step literally as we speak. This is why I haven't been posting much the last few days - I got to get the tutorial done soon (I'm in the process of rewriting the current newbie tutorial + add a step-by-step on how to make+use+test landers).

In the meantime - you'll just have to figure out how to do this yourself. Ask questions here when you're stuck.

You can open a landing page in any text editor, but sublime text 3 would be recommended because it was designed for editing code.

Keep those questions coming.


Amy

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Any progress with the landing pages Marc? Hope my PM could help further.

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Hey Roland.

Unfortunately been working day and night on my current job.
Hence the reason why I am looking to move away from it!

I'm still pretty confused and it looks quite daunting what you sent me, but am looking into it as we speak.

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Marc - I'm under the impression that you don't know how to code or read code?

By "code" I'm referring to HTML / CSS / PHP / JS / Jquery.

If not - then you really should take a couple of online courses. You need to at least have the basics in order to modify landers.

Here's something straight out of the FAQ we've put together for the 6WAMC course students:


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Q: Do I need to know coding to make landers?


You can survive by ripping and modding. In fact, it’s recommended that you start by using ripped landers at least to establish a benchmark, because the popular ones are tried and tested, vs. your own custom-made landers which are unproven. A very goo

You don’t need to know a lot of coding in order to fix up ripped landers (i.e. to correct the errors introduced during the ripping). Take a couple of online courses in html, css, js and jquery and get some practice fixing up a few landers and you should be good to go.

Some online coding tutorials:
https://www.codecademy.com/
https://www.w3schools.com/

If you want a custom lander created for you, here’s a service vortex has used:
http://www.bannerslanders.com (Disclaimer: STM does not endorse any products/services, so please use at your own discretion.)

Once you’re making money, you can consider outsourcing lander ripping/modding/creation.


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Let's see how far you get with this. Ask questions along the way.




Amy

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Don't hesitate to ask if you have any specific questions along the way. I'd also recommend what Amy posted, it's not as daunting as it looks, both HTML and CSS are fairly straightforward and shouldn't take you much time. PHP / JS / JQuery take more time, but a basic understanding should be enough. As you become more familiar with those languages, understanding landers will become a LOT easier.

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Hey @marc_w as far as coding goes:
1. down load a text editor (sublime text 3, notepad++, etc.), your choice here but like Amy I recommend sublime text. Its free you just have to ignore the messages that recommend you donate.
2. open ripped lander with the text editor either through the menu in the editor or by right clicking on the file and chose "open with" then chose your "editor"
3. Now is the hard part coding: this you will have to at least learn the basics by watching youtube videos, online education ( code academy is one example ), asking for help on here, or if you can afford to hire someone. I use sublime, and it has a "FIND" and a "REPLACE" options in the menu that can help you locate links:
will look similar to this:
Find: http://www.....
Replace: http://yourlink

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