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Newbie Follow Along - Amy's 40-Day Tutorial (9)

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Following along from the questions posted under this thread: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ON-amp-READING

Matuloo, I'm direct linking right now, and Caurmen's code for direct linking requires iFrame, which is mostly not compliant and is actually making it look extra complicated to me. Bot testing looks clearer with pre-landers though, where you can just put your script on the lander.

Should I jump over to lander mass testing (from Day 19-20)?

- Ovi

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There is no need for an iframe, its just a simple javascript redirect, try to re-read it.

You will actually still use a pre-lander, but it will just redirect the user away without showing any "real" LP to the users.

You can start mass testing landers, but if the traffic you are buying is bots ... you know the answer

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Alright I get it.

It's recommended to upload it on the same domain as your Voluum tracker. But I only configured this tracking domain on namecheap for Voluum setup, so to host a lander on it, what steps would I need to take?

- Ovi

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Ok but you have the domain hosted somewhere, right? Or some other domain, doesn't have to be the same one. Did you get some VPS from some hosting company? Or how do you plan to host landers?

The recommendation to host it on the same domain is just to decrease possible loading time increase, but with a solid fast loading host, it doesn't matter much if it's on some other domain.

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I have VPS on vultr. Maybe just upload there, even if it's not same domain? This lag in time is not going to be drastic?

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Before uploading your landing page to your Vultr server, make sure to make the required domain configurations needed for the server to answer requests for your landing page.

I wouldn't worry too much on speed here if the lander is not being served from the same domain your voluum is. Instead, I believe it would be better to use separate domains for your tracker and landers. This way in case anything goes wrong with one of the domains you can quickly replace that one - ie. a domain can get flagged from google. That being said, you might not want to have your tracking domain flagged.

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Glad to hear! And likewise, thanks for giving the tutorial a chance!

TH is one of my favorite geos. Lots of relatively cheap traffic and relatively high conversion rates (with the right offers of course).


1)I can't see anything wrong with your setup. The only thing I can't verify right now is whether you've set up the conversion postback correctly - which we won't know until you've made your first conversion.

2)Depends on your approach. With direct-linking, the key is to spend a low amount on testing any individual offer, so you can test lots of offers. Stopping "prematurely" would be one approach.

3)You could. But TH is a promising geo as well - maybe ask your AM for more-promising offers. I would also recommend signing up for more aff networks - Kimia is a good one. I've made quite a bit of money with them. They specialize in carrier-billing offers.

4)Several options I can think of:

-Asking your AMs for geos/carriers/offers that are hot. Or going through the top offers lists of various affiliate networks to look for trends/overlap.

-Asking fellow affiliates you're friends with.

-Browsing spy tools like Adplexity to see what (offers/geos/landers or DL/etc.)people are running with high volumes, and how.

-Run world-wide traffic (basically target lots of geos) to smartlinks to see which carriers/geos show promise, then test offers for those carriers/geos.

5)I'm assuming you're referring to the affiliate-network-wide stats across all affiliate accounts. I would take that with a grain of salt because a)different affiliates run different-quality traffic (different sources, different targeting, optimized vs. pre-optimized traffic, etc.) so just because someone else is getting high EPCs, won't necessarily mean you will too (especially with pop traffic, with tends to be of low-quality compared to say display banner traffic or FB); b)aff networks will often artificially inflate these types of stats, or would sometimes only show the stats from the best-performing affiliate.

Having said all that - it's generally a good idea to stay away from offers that display low EPC. And offers that display high EPC may still be worth a try - just be prepared to face a ton of competition from fellow affiliates that have chosen to run the same offer for the same reason.

6)That would depend on way too many factors to list. A better question to ask would be "when should I cease traffic if not getting conversions?" And this question was answered in the direct-linking process flow.

7)Test more offers, preferably low-payout ones. Right now you need to start making conversions ASAP to turn your expectations around, and lower-payout offers has the potential to convert better. Sign up to more affiliate networks (1-2 more) and ask for well-converting offers with low-payouts. I usually suggest for people to stick with geos/carriers that have lots of traffic, but if you're needing to make your first conversion feel free to pick a smaller geo with limited traffic, if only to get that first conversion.

The first conversion is the hardest, especially if you got off to a rocky start. Expectations are everything. In the beginning, because you haven't gotten your first conversion, it makes it difficult to expect - so you're trying to break through that catch 22.

Alternative solution: Take a smartlink (Mobidea, Kimia, any other aff network that has smartlinks and lots of carrier-billing offers), set a manageable campaign budget like $10-20, the lowest bid the traffic source allows for you to set, and target mobile carrier traffic in tier 3/4 geos that have lots of low-payout offers on the particular aff network - geos such as BD, ID, TH, PH, VN, EG, IN, PK should normally fit that bill. You should be able to get at least a few conversions (added bonus: if you run more traffic until you see which geo+carriers are performing well, you could then choose to test individual offers for that geo+carrier).

(I know I almost always advise to bid average or above to ensure traffic quality, and that's important when you want to be fair to the offer. But here we're just wanting to get the first conversion, and also to compare performance of different geos and carriers - so the comparison is relative and not absolute. Therefore we don't need the best-quality traffic. Also, if you set the bid really low, the cost-savings can offset the decrease in traffic quality - especially if you run a bot test at the same time.)

Once you start getting conversions, your expectations will advance to another level. That would be the time to test individual offers - whether direct-linked or with landers. I've just finished the entire tutorial including lessons on how to test landers, so please feel free to give that a try.


It's our job to answer questions! So keep 'em coming.



Amy

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Thank you matuloo, platinum, and Amy!

Amy, I did get one conversion from this camp, so setup is working fine I believe.

I am going to test out this approach. I have applied to Kimia today. And I'm also affiliate with Aragon, Clickdealer, and Affiliaxe.

Now, I want to know, afflow is also a smartlink technology. And I have coded their live leads collection that caurmen showed in his acceleration module. How can I take advantage of it with this approach? I'm actually also following along with your afflow tutorial every day. Yesterday, based on the trend I saw from live leads, I launched a targeted camp in IR at $1.3 CPM (above average) with the hot PINs vertical and converting offers, I got 5 conversions ($0.16 each), but the ROI was ridiculous (-97%) - propeller actually burned $23 in a few hours with $10 total budget set. I just halted there. So, this was a blind approach actually: see the live leads stats, and launching a camp on the hot segment. After this camp, I got on afflow to see the actual eCPM for this GEO and vertical (which I remembered from your tut), and found out that it was well below the CPM I was paying for on propeller.

So:
1. I need advice on refining my afflow approach as well based on this whole story.
2. This is what I'm thinking, correct me where I'm wrong: All approaches for afflow (zeno's, MrPayne's, Yours) require you to run a test camp to uncovering hot promising segments. So, this live lead stats can bypass that explore camp, and give you promising hot segments to run with (geo+vertical+offers, it doesn't pull carrier though). Will these stats be different from what you will get, let's say, from your approach I've quoted above or MrPayne's $100 global test to uncover promising segments?
3. Finally, if or how can I employ this tool in launching new camps as per your 40-day tutorial? Or just go for the multi-geo smartlinks camp you suggested?

And yes, should I start a different thread for afflow follow along?

Thank you!

- Ovi

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Sorry to hear about your experience with Propeller - I'm getting quite annoyed with that issue as well as a number of other members have reported it in other threads. I'm seriously considering rewriting the tutorial by replacing them with another traffic network. You should put in a support ticket and demand a reimbursement. When you set a budget limit, it should be adhered to.


Regarding afflow - the whole idea of looking at live leads is because they are real-time stats, i.e. they are conversions that are happening at the present moment and being posted immediately. The aggregated stats on the rest of afflow are behind by 2 hours. It's not a blind approach, but not every camp will be successful of course - and it DOES take experience to be able to tell whether a segment will have a chance just by analyzing live leads. The sooner you start traffic the less competition you'll have (because the more of the people running afflow aren't yet aware of the opportunity) but then you'd have less data to go on to base your predictions on. So it will take experience to find that sweet spot where you're jumping in early enough to beat most other people to it, and yet not so early that you don't have enough data to make a good decision.

I don't have much experience with analyzing live leads at all - I was only running camps based on aggregated data that are behind by 2 hours. So can't really provide much help there.

However, regarding the 5 conversions at -97% ROI - I would recommend stopping the camp when you see that there's not much chance of the camp doing at least -50% ROI before major optimizations (e.g. cutting placements).


Regarding running a test camp: The different approaches may give different results, and you are encourage to use all of them to see which one(s) suit you better. There's:

-Analyzing afflow's aggregated data to find consistent good performers. You won't have first-mover's advantage, but if you can optimize campaigns better (e.g. by cutting placements) or if you can find traffic sources that have less competition, this would be a good approach.

-Analyzing afflow's live leads. You'll get first-mover's advantage, but will have less data to go on when making a decision on whether to test that segment or not.

-Launching a test camp to target many geos/segments to identify winners. This is basically synonymous to throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Not a bad approach really. Disadvantage would be that it can get expensive. You'd usually want to stick to tier 3/4 geos that have low payouts and relatively cheap traffic, and maybe bid really low. If you want to test tier 1/2 geos, this type of testing could get prohibitively expensive.


As for using your automation tool (I'm assuming you're referring to the afflow live leads tool?) - that actually won't work very well, because afflow's offers are being swapped in and out all the time, so trying to identify the best segment and then testing individual offers for it may not be the best approach.


As for starting a new follow-along: Yes please feel free to do so if you like! And if you do, please link to that in this thread and I'll go take a look.



Amy

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