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Finally started on my first campaign with a goal of earning $XXX per day ! (4)

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Hey everyone !

I've finally launched my first ever campaign after spending quite a long time trying to think of which offer is the best and which one should I start since there were so many, then I thought to myself it seems like I'm in the situation of paralysis by analysis. Subsequently I decided that I'll just pick one and go.

Here are the few things that I've done:

1) Purchase a tracker ( Voluum ) ,
2) Signed up with PropellerAds with a minimum deposit ,
3) Signed up with Mobidea and got offers approved ,
4) Signed up with PeerFly and got approved ( Not sure if this will help me in the Mobile world of Affiliate Marketing )
5) Done everything that was in Vortex guide : Lesson 1: Setting Up Your Very 1st Camp (Voluum Version),

After launching my first ever campaign at PropellerAds, it got rejected for some reason. So I went to check with PropellerAds and Mobidea live chat support and managed to solved the problem.

Took 2 offers from Mobidea and started running them.

First offer pay out: $0.39 from Egypt
Second offer pay out: $0.52 from India

I followed the x5 pay out spending rule, but went slightly over for the offer from India. Subsequently I stopped both campaign.



I'm planning to test a few more offers with direct-linking meanwhile learning on how to add LP to my offers. Not very sure on where to start, this forum is HUGE and full of good stuffs I'll figure it out though.

From what I've read thus far, Direct linking traffic is not very targeted hence lesser conversions. I'm thinking of switching over if direct linking still doesn't work out well for me.

If anyone here is in the same situation as me etc feel free to PM me and add me on skype we can do this together!

Any advise and guidance from anyone that replies to this post is extremely appreciated !!

P.S Sorry for the long written follow-along post !

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A VERY wise decision!

There are never any guarantees that the next offer you launch will be profitable. And right now, profits shouldn't even be your aim - your currently priority should be to learn through doing. Without stats you can't learn how to optimize, and without running traffic you can't generate stats.


Direct-linking still works, but you'll need to test a LOT more than just 2 offers.

But yes, moving to landing pages ASAP is definitely recommended. Direct-linking should just be a stepping stone in your learning process.

I'm actively writing up a tutorial on how to test landers - looking to finish the end of this month. But don't wait on me! The links in this post should help:

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

And of course, now that you have a follow-along, feel free to ask lots of questions here as well!


LOL have you seen how long some of the other ones are?

Some people have gone over the forum post character limit, and I have done the same.

The more details you include, the easier it would be for us to provide specific and applicable advice.

So yeah - please don't worry about length.



Amy

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Hey Amy thanks for replying,

just some quick update on what I've done, I ran another campaign 3 offers in it few days back and here are the results as expected. Still no conversions.


I guess I'll be testing a few offers with direct-linking everyday meanwhile waiting for your tutorial on how to test landers




I do have a few question in mind that it would be grateful if you can answer them, (sorry for the painful newbie questions) :

1) As you can see from the image I uploaded above, everything else is 0 except the visits. I've read in Lesson 7 where you mentioned about manually updating the cost by setting the timezone to UTC-05:00 , which I've tried but failed. Lets say I'm living in Singapore currently, and I ran the campaign in the afternoon 3 pm SGT. when updating the cost do I have to convert Singapore time to the UTC -5 time? If so, how do I do it? Also is there a way where Voluum can update the cost automatically?

2) If I were to start running offers with LP where do you recommend for me to get a few LP to begin with testing? apart from ripping them off through Adplexity due to the limited budget of mine.

3) Also I've recently got accepted into Peerfly, do you recommend I start testing mobile offers from Peerfly or stick with Mobidea?

4) Since there are so many traffic source out there, just how exactly do I choose a good traffic source?

5) I've also noticed that I've been hitting the x5 payout spending rule pretty fast, I ran the campaign with 3 offers with traffic equally distributed to all 3, and all of them hit the x5 payout rule in like an hour or so hence leading me to cut the offer. Just to clarify if what I'm doing is right? Because I do feel that time frame of the campaign running is pretty short, only an hour plus therefore results might not be as accurate?

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I have started posting the revised newbie guide:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...-s-First-Steps

I'll try to post at least one lesson every 1-2 days. The lander portion of the tutorials starts on "Days 13-14" - so should start coming out in a week or two! I will try to get them out ASAP knowing that you and some of the other members are waiting on them.


Never be sorry about asking newbie questions! That's what I'm here to answer.


Tell me the exact step where you're running into problems - if you can show screenshots that would be best!

There's no way for Voluum to update the cost automatically, because most traffic sources don't have the option of sending costs to trackers. PopAds does, but the costs that show up in the tracker can be very inaccurate - can be off by up to 100% (e.g. actual costs are twice as high as what's shown in the tracker).

The only exception is Zeropark, where exact costs are tracked by Voluum. But that's only because Zeropark and Voluum are the same company (Codewise) so Voluum has access to the cost stats.

So yes - you'll need to learn to manually update costs.


You can do manual spying. But really, Adplexity can save you SO MUCH TIME, as I've just told another member here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post328432

To do manual spying, go through the process of setting up a TARGET campaign on Zeropark. In the very last step, it will show you a list of target websites. Copy and paste this list somewhere and save it, then set your VPN to the country you're wanting to target, and browse to those sites, and click around to trigger popup/popunder ads. Save any suitable landers you see.

But doing this manually will take a very long time. You've been warned.


Of course you can do either, or both.

Just make sure you can tell which offers stand a chance of converting when direct-linked, and which ones will require testing landers for.


Most traffic sources don't completely suck. Yes, every pop source will have various percentages of bot traffic, but there are very few sources out there that have absolutely bad traffic that doesn't convert.

Having said that, popads and propellerads are both pretty good in terms of traffic quality, especially popads. The downside of popads is that it lacks traffic volume in many geos. But if you're patient in waiting for test results, popads can be a good choice to use for testing stuff, as you can save budget in the process. Then, once you've found a good offer+lander+targeting, scale to other sources.

And once you've tried all the most popular pop sources, try to seek out the less-popular, lower-competition, and less-saturated sources. I've talked about this at the start of this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post317559

Some of the more common pop sources that have been recommended by members can be found in the links here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post327140


There's a concept that I keep referring to whenever I talk about testing and optimization, and that is the concept of accuracy vs. efficiency. Often, you'll find the following to be the case:

If you want more accurate results, you'll need to spend more time/money/both.

If you want to save time/money/both, you'll have to settle for less accuracy.

So - yes, you WILL get more accurate results by running a full day, or even a full week or month, but that would also cost you big, both in terms of money AND time.

Or, you can choose to spread out your budget over the whole day, by throttling/distributing your traffic (some traffic sources allow you to do that), but that will take more time. If you want both accuracy and efficiency though, this would be the better way to go.

Either way, try not to invest too much money on testing any single offer, because there are just so many offers out there, that you don't need to be overly careful about throwing away potential winners by accident. Exception is when you have reliable insider's info about an offer - for example if a friend tells you they're banking hard on the offer, or you know the offer is very hot by spying on the competition.

When testing offers using landers, I would recommend to cut inferior offers when they reach statistical significance when compared to the best offer in the batch of offers you're testing:

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

However, when testing offers by direct-linking, I wouldn't even recommend cutting that way. It's not as easy to make profits via direct-linking, because there is one fewer thing to optimize (i.e. landers). Therefore, you normally need to test a ton of offers via direct-linking, to find one that is profitable. Therefore, if you spend too much testing every offer, you'll end up spending more on testing than what you can make back from the profitable offers.

Another reason for spending only 5x payout on direct-linked offers, is that because there is one fewer thing to optimize (i.e. landers), if the offer doesn't show a lot of promise, then there's not much you can tweak to get it to be profitable.

Therefore, if an offer doesn't show promise right away, nix it. There are a ton more offers you can test and throw away until you find that gem. Efficiency is the way to go here (at the expense of accuracy).



Amy

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