Home > > Newbie Follow-Alongs

---

Very excited - 1st EVER campaign! (23)

---

Finally launched my first ever affiliate campaign after first learning about the industry from Charles Ngo's blog in summer 2016. Have been preparing for the past year and saving some money, and finally launched a mobile pop campaign following Vortex's guide.

I have organized 7 different camps in Voluum, and have launched 1 of them so far on PropellerAds. It was a campaign with 12 game offers getting shown to mobile users who are on the Orange carrier network, in Egypt.

Total cost for this camp was $8.60, and I received 1 conversion for $0.28, giving me a -97% ROI... LOL. Honestly, it was more exciting than discouraging because obviously it's rare to start out hot and this marks my first online revenue which is super cool.

I am going to launch another campaign or 2 today and try to optimize the first one I suppose. This aspect is very interesting to me, I love the combination of creativity, IT, and skill involved.

Unfortunately my tracker isn't functioning properly which I made another thread about and will be trying to fix today.

I will post more updates later tonight or tomorrow! Any tips or thoughts are appreciated

---

If you show some data and maybe ads/landers people are very helpful here! The very excited part is important and congrats on the first conversion!

---

Hello nrthnlight!

Congrats on taking action, it's a more important step than many would believe. And congrats on your first conversion too

I't hard to give you any advice so far, there is obviously something wrong with your campaign ... bad offer, bot traffic, bad or no landing page ... or a mix or all of them

The most important step now is to get the tracking working properly, I would suggest to hold back and not spend much without it, as it equals to shooting blindfolded.

Once you get the tracking working, we can take a closer look at your progress and give you more meaningful feedback.

Matej.

---

Thanks for the response! Unfortunately I am still having issues with tracking... I spoke to my affiliate network and the have told me that I have everything setup properly on their end so I really am not sure what the issue is.

I contacted Voluum by email this morning but they have not responded yet.

Is there anything you can think of that might be causing my conversions to not register in Voluum?

---

Can you point me to the thread where you posted details about the tracking issue?

In case you didn't post it yet, can you please tell me more about the setup here?

---

Yes here is the initial thread:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...o-Voluum-stats

I saw that Amy posted back on the newbie guide in the tracking section that they changed the postback process since she wrote it and she is testing out the new process.

---

Just noticed her reply too, let's wait if the test brings an answer for you, if not, I will try to assist you too. Send me PM if it wont start to work by tomorrow.

---

Good news, it appears that the tracking is working now!

---

Excellent! Anything else I can help you with?

---

UPDATE:

Created 3 more campaigns yesterday and budgeted $10 worth of traffic to both of them. However, one campaign still hasn't received any traffic from PropellerAds, despite being live for a while now.

Traffic Info:

- Network = PropellerAds
- Pricing Model = CPM
- Bid = $2.33
- Frequency Capping = 1/24
- Schedule = Distributed
- Budget = $10


Checked stats this morning and 0 conversions on them. They were Direct Link gaming offers, and were running in Egypt and Brazil on mobile.

Both are from Mobidea and I will link to them below:

https://affiliates.Mobidea.com/apps/overview/15157

https://affiliates.mobidea.com/apps/overview/14816

Here are some of the stats for the zone ID's:

https://i.imgur.com/tUGyIJU.png

https://i.imgur.com/xe6sib7.png

After reading Vortex's newbie guide I have a few questions regarding optimization. First off, there was a download for an excel template to help you know whether to cut a placement or not. The minimum ROI that was mentioned was -50% and if it was anything lower than this, you should not spend any more time or money. Well so far the best ROI I have gotten is -97%... so how do I get to the point where optimizing the campaign will have any kind of effect on ROI? For these types of offers is it a matter of just picking as many as possible until you find one that works?

Another question I have is regarding traffic. It says that my estimated impressions for these campaigns are in the high 5 figure range, and obviously this is just an estimate but my budget is almost capped for both these campaigns and the impressions aren't even over 4000 for either of them.

I will continue reading posts here today and looking for more offers in order to get a successful campaign going sometime soon.

Thanks again!

---

There's no need to use that spreadsheet to decide which placements to cut for pop camps - using rules-of-thumb would be enough. That spreadsheet is a bit of an overkill for pop, because it requires quite a bit of data before it will give you a "VERDICT". Pop camps don't usually stay profitable for too long, so no need to be very accurate when making cutting decisions.

As for the newbie guide - are you referring to my new process flow here?

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...675#post329675

If so, all I'm using the spreadsheet for, is to determine whether or not we should keep running the current offer, NOT to decide which placements to cut.

Sorry for any confusion! I've just added a sentence in there to emphasize this point. Thank you!


Are you sure you have Ad Delivery settings set to Standard and not Distributed?

And are you sure you've assigned enough daily and total budget to enable traffic to continue?




Amy

---

Hi Amy,

Thanks for the response. And yes I was referring to the kill-whitelist calculator in that exact post.

What was really referring to was regarding cutting campaigns rather than placements. I guess I just mixed the terms up. So to rephrase my question, as far as these types of offer-traffic combos, is it normal to see these at -100% ROI and having to just keep rolling the dice with them to find a good one?

I'm wondering if I could just stop the traffic after a couple thousand impressions because they don't really turn around for me when I let the budget run out.

With regard to my ad delivery settings, they are set to "distributed" because I thought I remember reading that in the first or second post of the guide. Would you recommend standard? As for budgets, I have the daily and total both set to $10.

---

November 13, 2017: Update #2:

Spoke to one of the team members at Mobidea and hopped on some new offers that are supposed to be converting well.


Offer 1: Iraq - Mobile Content - 3G

Traffic Info:

Pricing Model: CPM
Frequency Capping: 1/24
GEO/Bid: Iraq ($2.33)
Delivery: Distributed
Budget: Daily = $10 Total = $10
Targeting: 3G (multiple carriers)

Here are the Voluum stats so far for the Zone ID's

Offer 2: Panama - Videos - 3G

Traffic Info:

Pricing Model: CPM
Frequency Capping: 1/24
GEO/Bid: Panama ($2.45)
Delivery: Distributed
Budget: Daily = $10 Total = $10
Targeting: 3G (multiple carriers)

Voluum stats for this offer:


I will continue updates as more data comes in.

---

November 13, 2017: Update 3

Offer 1: Iraq - Mobile Content - 3G

Traffic Info:

Pricing Model: CPM
Frequency Capping: 1/24
GEO/Bid: Iraq ($2.33)
Delivery: Distributed
Budget: Daily = $10 Total = $10
Targeting: 3G (multiple carriers)

Total Cost: $1.94
Impressions: 834

So this offer has yet to get a conversion but it's supposed to be converting well and I haven't gotten many impressions yet so I'll let this one run a while longer.


Offer 2: Panama - Videos - CW

Traffic Info:

Pricing Model: CPM
Frequency Capping: 1/24
GEO/Bid: Panama ($2.45)
Delivery: Distributed
Budget: Daily = $10 Total = $10
Targeting: 3G (multiple carriers)

Total Cost: $0.58
Impressions: 238

This offer is in the green for me so far. 1 conversion for $1.28 for an ROI of 117.24%

So now I'm wondering whether I should cut some of these less profitable placements? I'm going to increase the budget for this one to let it run longer.

In the mean time I will be reading more about optimization.

---

Hi!

Happy to see a green campaign! It's good that there are conversions already, but still too early to cut zones, you can't really make decision on one conversion. I'd run these two offers for a little bit more.

Looking forward to see the updated from today

---

Thanks for the heads up!


November 14: Update #3


Offer 1: Iraq - Mobile Content - 3G

I stopped the first offer I mentioned in my previous posts. 4000 impressions and no conversions. By now it seems that after about 1-2k impressions with no conversions, the offer is useless (at least as far as direct linking is concerned).

Offer 2: Panama - Videos - CW

11AM: first time checking the stats today and an additional conversion on this offer bringing the total up to 2 conversions with less than 1000 impressions. For some reason this was not tracked in Voluum, so the profit and ROI numbers are a bit off but I manually calculated it and I'm still in the green.

1PM: Wasn't getting much volume at with this offer. I'm running it though PropellerAds. Went and edited the campaign by increasing my bid from $2.33 up to $2.5. Based on their traffic estimator, this was only a marginal bump in traffic but I decided it couldn't hurt to try.

2PM: Checking stats again and 3 more conversions! That brings the total to 5 since starting the campaign yesterday. I updated the costs and the current data from Voluum is posted below:



So these seemed like the most interesting sets of variables to look at, please let me know if there's anything else I should post etc.

Next Steps:

I plan to further increase my bid to get more traffic, but it seems that the only substantial increase in traffic comes from bids around the $7 mark. I'm not sure if bidding this high would lead to to a loss, so I will be going in increments of $0.50 to start. My bid starting at the beginning of the next hour will be $3.00

Is there anything else I could do to continue tweaking this campaign?

Thanks everyone!!

---

Hey nrthnlight,

Can you share the lifetime data rather than daily snapshots? At this early stage, looking at daily stats can make zones/placements look better/worse than they actually are.

Thanks and glad to see your camps up and running!

---

Yup - with these offers it's a matter of mass-testing them to find the gems, without spending too much testing each.

You can decide on a cut-off yourself. As is usually the case, it's about finding a sweet spot between 100% accuracy and 100% efficiency. Spend less budget testing each offer, and you'll cut out more good offers by mistake, but at the same time you'll get to test more offers on the same total budget. Spend more budget testing each offer, and risks of cutting out good offers would be less, but then you won't get to test as many offers using the same total budget. It's your choice. My suggestion of using that calculator spreadsheet is just one way.


You can do this either way, depending on what it is you're trying to achieve.

If you're not wanting to spend too much money per day on testing (e.g. you have a monthly budget that you can afford to spend on campaigns), then you may as well choose "distributed" to collect data throughout the day to get a better representation of performance, as well as minimize the effects of volatility on your stats.

If you're wanting to get your testing done as quickly as possible, and wouldn't mind spending the money in the same day, then choosing "standard" would be appropriate.

I only asked because you were concerned about the traffic volume you were getting - and that it was nowhere near what the estimator was showing. (BTW - that estimator can sometimes be WAY off. When in doubt, ask your rep if you have one, or put in a support ticket to confirm available traffic volume.)


What's the payout on the offer? If it's <$2 then I agree, you've probably run enough traffic to it to call it quits. If in doubt please refer to the optimization process flow chart in my tutorial (or just use your own rule-of-thumb or judgement as discussed above).


This camp is looking promising indeed!

I would suggest to clone the campaign and increase the bid on the new campaign, instead of increasing the bid on the current campaign.

Different bids will trigger traffic from different placements. It looks like at your current bid you're getting good ROI from some placements. If you increase the bid, some of those placements may end up in loss.

Consider running the current camp a bit longer to cut more placements. After that, clone the camp (with the same blacklisted placements also blacklisted in the new camp), increase the bid, run a bit and cut placements. Then clone that camp again and increase the bid and cut more placements....so that in the end, you'll have multiple camps targeting different profitable placements.

Try to do increments of $1-2. Otherwise you'll see a lot of overlap of placements from one camp to the other.

As for other optimizations: Try drilling down into devices, OSs, browsers etc., to see if there are segments that are responsible for significant amounts of traffic, that are in negative ROI. Consider cutting those to increase overall campaign ROI. Try not to cut segments that are only accounting for small percentages of traffic.

Other than cutting placements and testing bids and scaling to other traffic networks, there really isn't much optimizing you can do to a direct-linked campaign.

If you're looking for more sources to scale to, these posts will help:

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

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

There's no need to wait - start scaling to other traffic networks now.




Amy

---

Hi Amy, thanks for the response.


I have started scaling to other traffic sources, but they are all taking forever to approve my campaign which is annoying. PropellerAds has a huge advantage imo simply because they approve campaigns within minutes.


Anyway, I cloned the initial campaign on PropellerAds and will post the updates below


November 15, 2017: Update #3


So for this campaign, I enabled traffic boost and set it to standard delivery. I just wanted to test traffic boost out, and from what I can tell it was useless. The network person didn’t describe it very well and I’m still not entirely sure how it works. From what I understand though, it gives you additional traffic although it is low quality. This camp is in the red so it seems to have had no positive impact for this campaign at least.

Next campaign was a clone of the initial with a zone restriction on it. I simply excluded the least profitable zone.




Next was the same campaign with browsers excluded and again I just took the 2 least profitable browsers.





I have 2 others campaigns on other traffic sources but they are taking a long time to get approved so I have no data yet.


The major problem with this campaign has been the fact that there just doesn’t seem to be any volume with the restrictions the offer has. I am only allowed to send traffic to one carrier and its handicapping the impressions I can get. I’m bidding like $5 CPM and getting 800 impressions…

The initial campaign is still profitable and has been bringing in conversions.

Would love to get some more traffic as it appears to convert well as I’ve made $25 in revenue in the last 2 days even with limited traffic. Next I will be trying to find something that converts in a geo with more volume. So overall this is probably not worth the effort. Would love to hear some thoughts on this.


Thanks guys.



I made sure to include the life of the campaign in the stats.

---

November 17, 2017: Update #4


Hello everyone, just checked over the stats for my campaigns and have put together an update of whats been happening


So like I mentioned yesterday, in an effort to optimize my initial campaign from Monday that had been converting well, I created 3 clones in order to test different variables. Unfortunately all 3 of these were unprofitable.

I also cloned the initial campaign and set it up on PopAds and PopCash in order to try and scale it, but for whatever reason these two have combined for less than $0.50 worth of traffic in the last 24 hours so they haven’t really had any impact. My settings for both of these were to just keep it simple since haven’t used these networks before, so the settings were all just general. My bids were in the $3.5-$4 range which had me in second position for the bidding queue.


The initial camp from a few days ago is still doing fine but the conversions have slowed down a bit. Stats below.


I’m going to be creating new campaigns to test today as this offer doesn’t seem to be worth the hassle at this point. I will post updates once I get another successful offer up and running.

---

Yes - next time, confirming sufficient traffic volume before even looking for offers for the targeting options (geo, carrier....) would be great.

However, some of the small geos and carriers can convert very well with the right offer, precisely because there's a lack of competition (people don't want to bother). It's one of those things where when it works out, it works out really well. But it may take a lot of testing to find these gem geo+carrier+offer combinations - so whether or not it's worth it to even test for them, is hard to say, and the decision is yours to make.

Scaling to other traffic sources is the logical thing to do. It is a pain how some traffic networks take a long time to approve campaigns. But don't just wait around holding your breath - launch more campaigns, or seek out more traffic sources to scale the profitable campaign to.


That's OK - main thing is you thought of additional ways to optimize a campaign. Test results could have gone the other way - we wouldn't have known if we hadn't tried!


Sounds sensible!




Amy

---

Campaign Journal: November 22, 2017


Started 4 more campaigns yesterday from offers that were given to me by the team at Mobidea.


Offer 1: Nepal - Mobile Content

• So this offer is paying out less than $0.10 so I figured it would be good to test due to the ease of getting data.
• I bid $1.17 which was just over the max bid so that I could get as much traffic as possible and test it quickly.
• The offer has been converting very well, but unfortunately it’s not converting enough to cover the traffic cost. It has been hovering in between -50% to -16% ROI, and I have been trying to get it green for practice. Haven’t been able to get it there yet, despite cutting a few bad zones.
• Not sure whether I should abandon this camp or keep trying to get it green
• This morning I cut a few more zones and started the camp again so I’ll update again later with how it does
• I started this campaign around 1pm EST yesterday and ran it overnight so I'm starting it over again this morning since it reached the $10 budget

Here are the stats for it:








Offer 2,3,4:

• I won’t bother posting much about these as they were not converting well enough to continue
• I ran about $10 worth of traffic to them and only got a few conversions and they were all below -50% ROI so I paused the traffic

Would love to hear some thoughts


Thanks!

---

Indeed, a very good way to practice optimizing a camp! (If your aim is to make profits, though, then there really isn't enough traffic volume.)

Could you please show some placement stats? What about OS and browser stats?

To make the camp green, look for major traffic segments that are doing the most negative ROI and start cutting and see if that would be enough, if not, cut more.

Or, cut some of the bigger placements that have spent >1-2x payout but not yet in profit.

Let us know how you get on!



Amy

---

Home > > Newbie Follow-Alongs