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First month result (49)

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This is my first month's report. I'll be honest with you, the pain of losing money starts kicking in...

But, I see how this can turn out to be a real business for me. (why is the image so small, how do you enlarge it here in the post? )

After several campaigns, I realized that I probably didn't cut lander/offers before they have a chance to get statistical significance. But I'm not 100% sure.


Please take a look at the screenshot above, that pretty much concludes what I have been looking at the past week. Maybe at this stage, I should focus on finding a good lander? Then use the good lander to find good offers?

Any advice will be highly appreciated!

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Hey man!

Beginnings are always hard and they hurt, I can totally relate to your pain - and I bet most of the guys and girls around here.

I recently tapped into new niche and traffic source = beginning again and got similar results.

After weeks of testing and losing money it's slowly starting to turn around to greens.

Key is to not give up and focus.

Your ROIs look pretty low.

Could you post more information, what niche/sources/geo/payout range you were running?

It might be that the offers is not good enough or it's not a good fit for your source, or you need to do more optimisation.

The more information you can give us, the better we can understand and help you out.

Stay strong.

Launch. Test. Repeat.

P.S. If you want to post full size images, just upload them to imgur.com and copy the BBCODE share link.

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-ROI is part of the process!

erikgyepes covered it pretty well, but there's a few things you should look further into:
1. Is your offer good, is it proven, are other people running it at a profit? - I would always recommend using a good, proven offer when starting. Ask your AM for some starting tips!
2. Then look into the other key factors: ads, lander, and what type of traffic you're running

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Hey guys,

I will not give up , this little pain won't stop me, and I'll make it work sooner or later.


If you take a look at the second image, the first one is a UK/iPhone X(Mobidea+AdworkMedia)/PopAds/average $0.70 campaign.

I think I screwed up because I was testing 5 landers + 3 offers at the same time, but didn't cut properly.

Mistakes,
1)Cutting too early; didn't wait till data is usable to take action
2)Compare landers using conversions from mixed offers


I was trying to find a working lander to proceed to further tests, but because of the above reasons, I didn't make the right decisions. After a while, I felt like a mess, so I stopped the campaign. (I might be back to it later)

The second and third campaigns on that second image are the ones I'm running right now.

The second one is a TW/IamNaughty (ClickDealer+Mobidea)/PopAds/$1.20 campaign. I am still trying to find the best lander out of 5, I have cut them down to 2, will keep on running until I have a winner. I didn't make the same mistake as the UK campaign so far, but I might make other mistakes soon lol

The third one is a SG/iPhone 8(AdworkMedia)/PopAds/$1.20 Campaign. I am trying to find the best lander out of 5, I have cut them down to 2 also.

The fourth one is a KE/Antivirus(Mobidea+AdworkMedia)/PopCash/$0.65 campaign, I was still trying to figure out what vertical adult dating/sweep/antivirus to run. I think I'll leave antivirus until later and focus on the other two for now.

In spite of the fact and the pain of losing money, I am not worried and I know this will bring me good return in the future. I only need that one green campaign and it will bring me back every cent I am losing now!

And, please advise.

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With ROI like -80-90% for a whole week, this morning I just woke up to this

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People are so nice here! I received congratulations for this little achievement, this is the right place to be in as affiliate marketing newbies!

But I do want to clarify that my campaign is far from being profitable... it is just the ROI is increased dramatically, there are still more tests to do. But I am confident that it should be able to get green eventually!

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Congrats on the nice ROI!!

Did you do anything on the campaign to get the positive ROI or did it just happen without touching anything?

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The magic happens after I try a different angle on the LP. I guess this part is essential in a campaign. Didn't know it is so important. Lesson learned!

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congrats on your success!

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Congrats on the green numbers

We use our own tracking software, but i'm interested since i've seen the one you use in quite alot of screenshots now. What software is that?

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It is Voluum

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I was going to wait until tomorrow to critique on your post (like I said in your other thread) but thought I'd take one look - and decided to reply.

The numbers look pretty hopeless for the 3rd and 4th, but has a bit of hope for the 2nd camp - but of course this is when referring to your current landers and offers.

If I were you, I would run several offers from the start with those landers, see which offer is converting (without waiting for stat sig), then run just that one offer to cut landers. That way you won't need to spend as much money on cutting landers.

Also - even though stats may look hopeless now, it may be because the offer you're running is no good. Once you're down to a good lander, and use that to mass-test offers, you may find a gem - or a few.

Spend most of your budget on finding a good lander and offer, and THEN cut all the unprofitable stuff. Most newbies make the mistake of taking a random offer and lander and try to get green by cutting placements etc. That will just make optimization very expensive, and leave very little traffic at the end to profit from. I'm glad you're not making that mistake!

And of course - congratulations on the first GREEN! Testing more landers and offers are tasks that will increase your ROI by leaps and bounds (again - as opposed to cutting placements). Now that you've seen the light, you'll never look back.

Looking forward to your next update!




Amy

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Congrats on getting green duiyao!! Awesome to see that you've reached this stage. Hoping for further success!

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Solid advice, as usual, Amy! As a matter of fact, I did get a couple of days green with the TW/Adult Dating campaign, but very little, only a few dollars. And it would go red again. I have tried to cut some placements, but cutting anymore will only reduce my traffic. I am kind of confused about what to do next now. Should I ditch the offer, or should I come up with more different landers to test the same offer? I am worried that this is the best the offer can do.

Please help!

BTW, I used back button redirect to sweepstakes offers and get ROI increased by about 10%.

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Good stuff with the backbutton redirect! Testing backbutton funnels is something a lot of people overlook, that can give you quite a big boost in ROI if you do it right.

Regarding the TW camp - it's simple really. If you're not making enough profits, your choices would be either to 1)ditch the camp or 2)improve your funnel to make more of the available traffic profitable (by testing more landers and offers).

I would definitely test more landers AND more offers - with focus on testing offers if I'm confident that my lander is already quite decent. And of course you can always test variations of your best lander - doing so has the potential to increase ROI by quite a lot as well.

And of course you can take your currently-best offer+lander to a couple of other pop sources just to see if they'd do any better, and to also see if you could get more traffic volume (although, you can get a good idea from the traffic network's traffic estimator if they have one, or by asking a rep at the traffic source).




Amy

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Hello duiyao,

This TW-offer looks familiar to me => I think there is a cap on this offer, please check that => if so => there is no way to get your campaign improved.

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Thanks for the post! I'm new as well but only really early stages of learning so I am just trying to digest this stuff.

Looks like your fairly new so I enjoyed reading this as its what I will experience in the future

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What is the traffic distribution among the publishers that are generating conversions? Is most of the traffic coming from a few publishers? In case it is, adding a new lander/offer in your camp might help you increase ROI as the user won't land on the same lander/offer over and over again.

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After throwing over 10 different landers at this campaign and it still refuses to take off. I think it is time to let go. I have asked for my account manager to get a list of top adult dating offers in different GEOs. I think I'll try them.

Do you think I should try different verticals, or stick to just this one? I think even though this TW campaign didn't take off, I did make it profitable to some extent. Maybe it is good to stick with the vertical since I have already accumulated some experience. I didn't have same degree of success with any other verticals (sweep/antivirus)

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What is your current ROI? Have you tried scaling it?

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ROI is fluctuating from -10%-10%. I tried over 5 different traffic sources but without any real improvement.

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Suggestion: Last ditch effort, by cutting all of the bigger placements that are still unprofitable at this point.

That may reduce your traffic to almost nothing though - if that's the case, then yes, I'd say pull the plug - but only on the current offers.

Have you tried using your best lander to mass-test offers yet? That's when the magic usually happens - when you'll find some gems.

Sweeps is a big vertical, my two cents would be to stick with it for a while longer. You DO accumulate experience. And sometimes you'll see some landers perform consistently well across multiple geos - in which case you could just use those 1-2 landers to test all other geos as a shortcut.



Amy

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Will do! Whatever Amy suggests, I'll just go for it.



There isn't many offers available, only 3. I just found a new one, waiting for some confirmation from the account manager. I'll certainly test new offers.

This campaign is not Sweeps, but adult dating. I'll still test when there is new landers or offers available. I'm going to start a UK campaign in adult dating soon. This time there are over 30 offers to choose from, I'll have to ask AM for top converting ones as a starter.

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That's true though - not too many offers for this geo.


Ah! Please consider starting a new follow-along and put "adult dating" somewhere in the title - matuloo is the expert on adult dating, and I bet he could give you some great guidance!



Amy

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Hey duiyao, that is actually a pretty good ROI...some more split tests and you can get it to positive. Have you tried testing other angles or improving on your current angle?

There are also many variables that you can test like page speed, different hosting and CDN, your headlines and body copy etc. You can also check out this good article by Charles Ngo on optimization https://charlesngo.com/optimize-inte...ing-campaigns/ and this one https://charlesngo.com/affiliate-mar...ation-process/

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I got a new offer to test, I use 4 landers that converted the best so far on it. Let's see how it goes.

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Here is another article from Charles Ngo that can help you:

7 Strategies to Take Your Campaign to the Next Level
https://charlesngo.com/7-high-level-...he-next-level/

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Well, now I don't think I'll ever ditch this campaign, I'll always test new things, be it a new angle for a lander or a new offer.

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Good luck, just keep pushing

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After a few more readings, I decided to drop the US campaign, and UK campaign, or any Tier 1 GEO at the moment. I’ll get back to get that TW campaign profitable. Yeah! Bullet dodged. (I read that $1K/day is the minimum budget to even get a chance to win in GEO like that for adult dating)

For any fellow newbies wondering what changed my mind, here is the post https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...13452-The-Most

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So I heard that banners will work better for adult dating offers than pops. I think I'll try that. I'll start from Traffic Junky and Exoclick.

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Getting back to the campaign turned out to be a right decision, my first xx/day campaign, a huge milestone for me.

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Nice work, keep on poppin'!

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Congrats! Wish someday soon i will also reach that milestone.

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CONGRATULATIONS!!

Just to confirm what you've already found out for yourself, banners DO work better than pops in general when it comes to adult dating. It's such a competitive vertical, and having the extra element you can optimize will get you a lot further.

Something worth trying for pop though: There are adult dating offers that come with their own pre-landers (or what we affiliate simply refer to as landers). Those can be direct-linked to on pop with very minimal effort. One of the teachers on the 6WAMC course did some experimenting and had very good results with that a few months back. So that's another thing you can try when you can find the time.

Again - congrats and I look forward to seeing you hit xxx/day soon! (And it probably won't be as hard as getting from 0-x/day, or from x-xx/day, either.)



Amy

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Hi Duiyao,

Any updates on the campaign?

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Hey man, thanks for asking!

The campaign is still unstable, it could make a few dollars a day, and red again the next. So I am going to test banners. Also will do more research on improving landers.

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Thanks, Amy! I am still studying and practicing to

1) improve the lander CVR
2) learn to use banners, I tried it once on Exoclick, the beast consumed $50 of my budget in 30 mins with 1 conversion. I'll stay away from Exoclick until I know better!!!!

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Sounds like a plan!

Are you referring to Exoclick RON? If so then yeah, you can stand to lose 4-5 figures a day in a high-traffic geo if you don't know what you're doing. I've had first-hand experience with this:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post200678

So that's one way to go. TL;DR version: Target a premium site to test creatives and offers until you have very good banners + lander + offer, then scale them to RON.



Amy

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I kept thinking about all the campaigns I have run. At first, I was pretty frustrated to see -80% ROI, but then I learned that it is all too common for a campaign to start this way for anybody, newbie or pro (unless they have killer landers, of course). So, not so much room to blame myself on that. But, now I think the TW campaign and perhaps every other promising campaign failed to bring in constant good ROI days would be my fault mostly. What I haven't done/realized enough is that I started cutting placements too early before testing enough to find good lander/offer combo. As much as I read all the material here about such matter, I still wasn't doing tests properly. I never really implemented the 10X payout rule in testing each combination. I would keep something running only because I see conversions, resulting in overspending for useless data. I threw in new landers here and there, but will cut them ad hoc, very few of them can get statistical significance. I can say at least 30-50% of the budget spent is wasted in terms of campaign developing. Funny thing is, when I just started out and read a lot of tutorials here, I thought to myself 'Hmm, this is quite simple and obvious, why would somebody make such mistake?'. Well, the thing is, it is easier said than done. It is not rocket science, everybody gets the theory, but, it is a whole different story when things are moving together and you have to make decisions and execute dynamically.

Next, I'll focus on honing the skill of finding/building good lander/offer combos.

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These 2 are very common newbie mistakes. But learning from mistakes IS the learning process! So - well done! I've seen some people lose money for YEARS on the same mistake before I called them out on it. You have every reason to be proud that you reached these realizations early on.


Spending 10x payout on each combination may be too much or too little. As long as you cut stuff as it reaches stat sig, you won't need to care much how many payouts you've spent on each combo.

The only exception is when all your test candidates in a split-test convert very badly. For example, you need to use an offer that converts reasonably decent in order to cut landers down to a winner. So what I would do is throw a few offers in at the beginning with all the landers, run until one of the offers reaches 2 conversions, then pause the other offers and just use that one to continue cutting landers. However, as soon as it's apparent that none of the offers are converting well enough for me to be able to cut landers without spending a ton of money, I would swap out the whole batch of offers for a new batch. (Either that, or just run something else.)


Same thing with people that are playing the stock market, or gambling (such as playing poker).

It's difficult to stay cool when it's your hard-earned cash on the table.

To combat those emotions, I suggest to focus on reaching a certain daily/weekly spend, instead of going after the next revenue or profits milestone.

So for example, set your goal to be "I will aim to spend at least $300/week on collecting data", then try to spend that money as efficiently as you know how. Doing that as opposed to aiming to be making for example xx/day by the end of the next month, will take the stress off, because it's a LOT easier to reach a certain spend, vs. reaching a certain revenue or profit level.

Plus, when your aim is to reach a certain spend, you'll be much less likely to freeze up and procrastinate due to the stress to succeed. Try it. This change in mentality has helped me immensely. I hope it will help you as well.


Sounds like a plan!




Amy

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As a matter of fact, I just re-started with the plan of $30 loss/day to collect data. This just confirms that I am on the right path.

Thanks, Amy!

BTW, I just hit another XX profit/day yesterday that marks my most profitable day by far :P

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I never even tested any other traffic source than facebook/adwords. It always staggered me how much traffic you can get for very low amount of money for these cheap traffic sources. I have had many people ask, how to start with marketing. This is probably best, as you can run huge tests for gathering data without spending loads of money. Congratz on xx days. Don't be scared to waste money on building quality presells, it can pay off big time.

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Wow wow! Eager to see you starting hitting xxx profit days real soon! Based on your follow-along, that's where you're headed.



FB/Adwords traffic is more expensive for sure, but the quality is typically higher than pop - often by a LOT.

Pop traffic IS cheap alright - but the quality is shite. In the end, profits potential will drive the market, and we'll get what we pay for.

Agree with you that knowing how to pre-sell is key.



Amy

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Thanks, Amy! I can't emphasize enough how much your tutorial and your comments helped me. The screenshot is today, the 3rd day I hit xx profit in a row. I think my journey of 'First month result' is concluded. I'll start new follow-alongs in the future. It is amazing how I got -80% to profit. AM really is what I thought it was.

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Congrats mate on your success!

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Great progress man!

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Congrats duiyao, glad to see you progressing this far! Looking forward to your new follow-alongs!

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Your gratitude is appreciated! But know that you alone are responsible for this initial success - well done!

I'll be creating some new subforums for members to post their earnings milestones in a couple days - then you can post that awesome screenshot to there!

We're all proud of what you've achieved, and look forward to seeing xxx, xxxx, and xxxxx days in your future. Thanks so much for having taken the time to maintain this follow-along. These things take up time and are immensely valuable to other new members. Much appreciated, all the best, and do keep us posted on your progress!



Amy

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