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Newbie's Follow Along to goal of $XXX profit per day (19)

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Hi Everyone,

Thought I would start a follow along as I start again in the AM journey. The goal is to get some profitable campaigns initially before scaling up.

For the start, I'm using:

• Traffic source: PopAds, Exoclick
• Affiliate network: Peerfly, M0bIdea
• Tracker: V0luum

I'm planning to initially start with DL'ing offers and then drilling down into the best converting combination.

Will be updating here with the results.

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Hey there..
I've just started as well. Using the same setup as you.

Mobidea
Propeller Ads
Voluum.

I'm certainly not in a position to give you tips but may be looking at my follow along below yours as already had some good tips and advice.

May just help you get a kick start!

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Hey Adi, check out vortex's thread on campaign optimisation. Doesn't seem like a good offer at all, which should have been cut WAAY earlier. Basically, focus more on placements/zones rather than just city and also follow vortex's rules outlined in that thread on when to cut campaigns and/or placements. You'll need to test a lot of offers, but I guess for the sake of getting a hang of optimisation, can start with just a few.

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Thanks Rolandb. Yes, this does not look like a good offer at all. And thanks for pointing to the Vortex's guide .

So going to start a number of campaigns - Basically failing fast and figuring out which ones among them is the winner among them and zeroing down on placements rather than other variables initially.

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A quick question - for the Landing pages, here's how it goes:

Traffic Source => LP => Link click => Voluum URL?

In that case, how would Voluum get all the parameters that come from the traffic Source ?

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It goes like :

traffic source => voluum campaign url => LP => voluum click url

The LP has to be edited to contain the click url.

A word about your campaign : I see a mix of GEOs, all TIER1 countries with very high competition levels. It's not a good decision to start in such competitive places, on top of that, 8 cents per conversion in such GEOs is very low.

I'm not sure what kind of offer this is (type, conversion point), what kind of traffic you bought for it (desktop, wifi, 3g?)

In order to get some more actionable help from me or anyone else, you will have to be more specific with the info and tell us more about your campaign

Thanks,
Matej.

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Hi, can you share your verticale ?

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Main thing is to test, that's where you'll get the best feedback.

But I'd recommend testing more than 1 LP, shoot for 5 if you can, using different angles.

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As usual Matuloo's and Roland's advice are spot on.

Matuloo has asked all the questions I had as well:

If it was an international offer, it would definitely require more than the bit of money you spent on it. But international offers have more potential for pockets of profit. So if you want to explore this further, we'll be here to help.


I see where you're coming from - expend the least amount of effort required to uncover the promising offers first, then put in more effort. Normally this would be a wise approach.

However, be careful about one thing: Some offers NEED landers to even convert reasonably well. Antivirus for example, which is what you're running, typically requires landers to do well. In other words, just because they don't convert without landers, doesn't mean a thing. Plus, it would really drain your budget by direct-linking to them, because the conversion rates would be so low - it would take a lot of traffic to even see conversions.

There are exceptions though: 1/2-click antivirus offers can convert by direct-linking. But even for those, you should split-test against landers - they may make the offer convert better.


Yup $2-3 per offer would be the bare minimum - that would be spending 1 payout per offer+lander combination.

Do you know how to cut offers? If not, here's the methodology:

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

Normally you would cut landers using this methodology:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Banners-Part-1

However, because right now the conversions are coming from different offers with different payouts, you can't really use that method (because the stats calculator assumes all conversions to be the same, which is not the case here). It would be better to cut offers first, and when you have a winning offer (i.e. the last offer standing), cut landers based on conversions from just that one offer.

Looking forward to your next update!



Amy

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Question: Are you running an international offer? Or just a lot of offers in a lot of geos?

And something seems wrong - your CTRs are terrible!

Could you please check the following:

1)Take a campaign url, paste it into your browser, click through the lander to make sure they all function as intended. Repeat this again and again until you've tested all the landers and make sure the clicks are being registered in Voluum.

2)Check all landers' outgoing links to make sure you've replaced them with your Voluum click url.

3)If you're targeting mobile traffic, use browserstack to view your landers from different devices and make sure they're all displayed properly. Make sure that the main elements including the CTA are above the fold!

4)Make sure all landers contain the backbutton script. That's pretty much the standard now. You could even put in more effort to increase ROI later on when you have a promising campaign. See here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Button-Funnels

5)Check the loading speed of all your landers, and tweak them until all of them are loading under 2s, preferably under 1s. See the "Why is my lander CTR so low?" section on links containing information on how to decrease your lander load speed, plus other tips on increasing CTR:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthread.php?29397-The-Big

I may have more advice for you - but let's first make sure your landers are working as intended.




Amy

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Hi Amy,

Thanks a lot for the tip! And that's what I guess was wrong!

They are all different offers in varying geos.

I checked with different campaign URLs - they are correctly going to the lander including the button link being the correct Voluum click URL.

However, they are redirecting to another offers (checking with that geo + on mobile device) and not the ones which I selected. For eg - AV one is leading to a sweeps campaign with diff affiliate links. Not sure why this is happening!

Is this something wrong with MobIdea or with my campaign setup? I'm going to try some offers from ClickDealer and see how they perform and if they are able to generate any conversions.

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Sweeps on shopping.

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Browsing directly to the offers isn't the most accurate method - often, you'd get redirected by the affiliate network, if you're not browsing from the correct OS/carrier/device/whichever other requirements the offers have. For example if an offer only accepts traffic from CarrierX, and you're surfing from desktop, or mobile via wifi, then the aff network would redirect you to another offer, so as not to "waste" this traffic.

The proper way to verify whether the traffic is ending up at the correct offers, simply check tracker stats to see how many clicks went to each offer, then look at stats in your aff network dashboard and compare the numbers. If the numbers are close (with up to around 20% to account for normal clickloss) then you're good.


Some affiliate network software doesn't allow for the first tracking token to take on dynamic values - for example something like clickid. This is why I've gotten into the habit of always using the second variable - in this case s2 - to tracke clickid. If you're not using s1, then just leave it out, or leave it in and just not set it to anything. Either would be OK. I tend to use s1 to track campaignID or trafficsourceID - feel free to do the same. This way, if the advertiser or aff network ever has a problem with your lead quality, there's potentially the option of stopping traffic from guilty campaigns of traffic sources that are responsible for dragging down the overall quality, instead of just being told "your quality is too low - you're not allowed to run this offer anymore".


Awesome!

Are you direct-linking though? If so, then we'd still need to explore your landers further!

And did you manage to fix the postback? If not, we could take a look at it together as well - feel free to include screenshots.


Use this:

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


You need to notice the fact though, that broadband is also responsible for most of the traffic.

Be careful about making that type of observation - everybody's been there as a new affiliate. It's like making the observation that most people like to include a lot of rice in their diet, until you find out most of those people happen to be Chinese.



Amy

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Congrats on getting conversions rolling in Adi!

Once you start optimising, would be nice to see your placement/zone stats. Also if you have multiple landers now, can you share those stats? Thanks.

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Hi Ronald,

Here's the zone stats:

Attachment 17092

I'm currently not using any landers and DL to the offers. It's because I this currently is a sweeps campaign on shopping.
However, yes I can try out different landers and check the improvement in RoI.

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Image didn't attach correctly. This sometimes happens, I'd recommend using Imgur and attaching using the forum bbcode if you can. (just in case you're sharing recent data) Can you share the zone stats from the start of the campaign?

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Sweeps offers don't usually convert well when direct-linked. You may actually be wasting money by not using landers from the start.


You may be onto something here! More conversions will confirm whether the trend is real.

If the android browser is confirmed to convert a lot better, you could either stop targeting chrome, or clone the camp and just target the android browser in the new camp, and of course try increasing the bid - because you'll be able to afford doing that then.


You were asking about what zones were earlier. Zones are what we usually also refer to as placements or ad placements. These are the individual websites that our pop ads will pop up for the visitors that go to those websites. The important thing to keep in mind is that some sites convert better than others.

So the idea is to delete sites/zones that don't convert, or don't convert well enough to be profitable, to increase the ROI of the camp.

Trends are your friend. You need to see if enough of your traffic is green - if so, then keep running traffic to cut the unprofitable zones. If not, then don't continue running and cutting - because that would leave you with little/no profits.

As for your specific stats (thanks for uploading those!), all the placements that HAVE made conversions so far, are green, which is a positive sign. Like Roland has advised, the top few highest-traffic zones are ready to be cut. I usually like to cut placements that are in loss by 2x payout or more.

Those top few unprofitable placements account for over half of the total traffic, which really doesn't leave you with much traffic to make money from. I don't know what time range you collected these stats from, but even assuming these were all collected in one day, the total profits from your green zones is only around $1 - and this is assuming you continue to cut ALL unprofitable zones (which will take spending money to identify). Too much money needs to be invested in exchange to such little profits. Not worth it at all.

However - all of my comments are based on your current funnel. So if you add landers, or more offers, the entire situation will change. I would strongly recommended doing this ASAP.

Making good progress!




Amy

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GREEN!!

I did cut out all the non-useful zones and the campaign is now in green. 2.00 PM is when I excluded all the red zones from my campaign.

This is pretty good improvement. However, I'm wondering of various ways in which I could increase the traffic to this and thus conversions.

What are some of the tips which I could try out?

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Congrats on the green! That's always exciting to see! Another milestone!!

Having said that - and I'm wanting to say this in a way so as not to rain on your parade (because you learned a TON to get this green!) - but it may not be worth keeping the camp running in its current state, because the profits are too small to justify spending time monitoring it every day.

It looks like you only have that 1 major green placement that's worth noting. The rest of the placements aren't really giving much traffic or yielding conversions.

If you want to improve on this particular camp, there are some things you can do:

-Test more offers and/or landers to improve your funnel, so that you can make more of the available traffic profitable.

-Test higher bids to hopefully trigger traffic from better-quality (higher-CR) placements. To save money, you can clone your current camp, keep all the currently-blacklisted placements blacklisted, set a higher bid, and see if you trigger any new and good placements. Cut unprofitable placements for that new camp, then clone THAT and set it to a higher bid etc.

(You can even test really high bids - sometimes you can get very high-quality placements that just aren't available at lower bids. Just be sure to set a minimum budget and watch it like a hawk so you can pause it if you don't get conversions.)

-Find another traffic source that has more traffic for your set of targeting (e.g. geo+carrier).


I don't remember if we've talked about the importance of having enough traffic volume, but basically the more volume you have access to from the start, the more placements etc. you can afford to cut and still make enough money after the camp is profitable. So having enough volume at the start is important - if the traffic source you're planning to launch a new camp on, doesn't have enough traffic for your desired targeting (geo, carrier, etc.), then either choose another geo etc. to target, or choose a traffic source that has more traffic for that geo etc.

So that would be the first step. Next step would be to test landers and offers until you're able to make enough of the available traffic profitable. What's "enough" and how do you check?

What I suggest is drill down to the various traffic segments in your stats (placements, carriers, OSs, browsers, devices, etc.), for your BEST offer+lander combo, to see which segment(s) have the highest daily profits, and see if the amount is high enough. What's high enough? It depends on the person, but I'd say that even for the newest newbie, anything with less than $5/day wouldn't be worth keeping running even as a novelty campaign (that you run for fun just to see the green). If you see for example, that the Android OS is green by $5+/day, then run further. Or if you see that your green placements are jointly bringing in $5+ in profits a day that would work. Confirm that the profitable parts of your traffic are fetching high-enough profit amounts, and THEN cut the unprofitable parts.

That's the jist of the importance of having enough traffic volume and how to tell whether you should keep a campaign running or not. Again, congrats on the initial green! You're learning tons along the way and deserve a big pat on the back. The learning is the main focus at this point. Profits will naturally come later.




Amy

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