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Finding my way in the Mobile world (34)

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Well, I really like these follow alongs and I sincerely hope mine will last long enough to encourage more n00bs like me and of course I hope to learn a lot from this dazzling but exciting journey.

So, I already introduced myself in another post so I’ll focus on my first efforts in mobile, inspired by Amy’s 40-day tutorial.

I joined STM last week, took a Voluum account and deposited my first $100 in PropellerAds.

At this moment I’m still re-cycling through day1-5 to find my first campaign that will survive the excel test (to kill or not to kill).

My first two campaigns were low payout offers from India and Argentina. Results after approx. 12 hours, 10000 impressions and $10 per camp: 0 conversions.

Lessons learnt:
- how to set up a campaign with tracking
- That using another affiliate network with proper tracking requires more than a simple copy paste of subids 😉

My third campaign (videos in Honduras) gave me 2 conversions (of which I posted some screenshots in another post in the achievement’s section). Hey ho I had to bid high though to get traffic anyway.

Lessons learnt:
- it works
- setting up campaigns (DL) is now a piece of cake 😊
- Honduras is quite expensive (3.75 CPM)

Finally, I am running a campaign in El Salvador as we speak, which has already given me a few conversions. I will give an update on the stats and the excel outcome in the morning (past midnight in NL ATM). Actually these are two campaigns for the same offer: one on 3G traffic and one on WiFi traffic.

Cheers,
—Stuart

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Kudos for taking massive action!

If you're running wifi traffic, I would highly recommend that you do a bot test while you're at it:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...live-campaigns

And actually, even for carrier traffic, bot traffic seems to be increasing - so wouldn't be a bad idea to incorporate the bot script in either case.

Looking forward to seeing some stats! Thanks for starting the FA!



Amy

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Thanks Amy

At this moment I'm still in the Direct-linking phase, so as I understand from the article I don't need a bot test yet? Apart from that, one thing I'm realizing as we speak, is the fact that I feel I should proceed to landers as soon as I'm ready for it. With the DL offers I feel a bit like fishing in a huge lake without having any control on what's gonna happen until I catch my first big fish. On the other hand, due to my - still too busy - weekly schedule my campaign-launching frequency is not that impressive haha so I just need some patience as well I guess. So I will keep testing low pay-out (<1$, €1) Single/Double Opt-in offers until I find one that gets the verdict 'keep running' in the kill-whitelist calculator so I can practice the optimization process.

Anyway, my El Salvador campaigns (3G + WiFi) have given me the following results after approx. 10 hours of traffic ($10,- budget per campaign):


(PropellerAds)


(Voluum)

so I broke my conversion record: 9 conversions (7100 impressions) but the calculator still says 'kill' (logically).

Now, as I wanted to experiment with placements a bit and get some feeling for the effects, I checked the placement id's in PropellerAds and excluded the placements which had cost me more than 5 times payout ($1) and which gave me no conversions, so maybe the quality of my traffic would improve. Well, I did that and just let it run overnight.

Result: one placement that gave me 5 conversions during the first run, didn't even show up among the placement id's during the second run [/SIZE][/SIZE], while a new placement showed up and gave me more than 1000 impressions without any conversion. Well isn't that a funny (but negative) effect (at least for a n00b like me it is haha).

By now I have a few questions:
- Why doesn't the cost show up in Voluum while I set that in the campaign (i.e. $1.4 CPM)?
- I have read different guidelines on how much $$ to spend on testing offers for the first run: 5 times payout? 40 times payout? Last one seems more logical, as you have to set $10 as minimum in PropellerAds anyway
- Maybe this is a dumb question but still I'd like to ask it here (duh I'm still LVL1 hehe): Are there any tips to have more chance on finding solid offers (still for Direct-linking) that convert more likely than just arbitrarily choose all low-payout offers in gaming/video's in T2/3/4/ countries? Of course I've asked the MobIdea team, my AM's at PeerFly and MaxBounty, checked the top offers mails, checked the opportunities in MobIdea, but again: I feel like I don't have any control at all in this process. If it just takes 20 or 30 campaigns, then so be it, but any possible advice here is more than welcome

To conclude this post, I will summarize my most important lessons learnt:
- Be patient (actually I already knew this, but it's good to have these reminders sometimes)
- Do your homework (keep looking for offers, apply in advance (Mobidea), fill Excel with info (Day 2), etc.); this is more efficient then finding one offer and launch a campaign
- Keep in touch with your AM's (it wasn't *that* logical to me in the beginning)
- Plan my IM time; I still have a 45/50-hour working week (unfortunately) and every minute I can spend on IM is worth a million to me
- Keep reading motivating success stories

In addition to the last one: All the positive feedback I have already gotten during my first week here on STM is just overwhelming and gives me a lot of motivation and the right spirit as well. I want to thank you all for that.

Cheers,
--Stuart

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Oh I just found a really nice answer to my question on $$ per offer (thx Amy!)

“I can't tell you what the sweet spot is, but I CAN tell you that spending a little bit on testing each offer, and then testing a ton of offers, finding gems that convert very well from the start and scaling those hard and fast, would be the way to go.”

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That's the idea! Sounds good.


Total revenue is less than $2. With the spend being $10+, there's very little hope of the offer ever reaching profitability, even with a lot of cutting.


Yup! That's the key to testing direct-linked offers. You could even just run something like 5x payout's worth of traffic to each offer, cut the ones that don't convert. For the ones that do convert within the 5x payout, keep running traffic and following the process flow.


Good. Or you could even cut earlier than that. The earlier you cut the more money you save, but then the risks of cutting a potentially profitable placement would be higher. Pros and cons.


This is common. You may have gotten outbid for traffic to that good placement. And new placements do crop up. Sometimes you'll see completely junk placements that will give you a ton of traffic without converting, which is why using automated solutions to cut placements would be ideal.


Will answer these in a separate post - need to pop out for dinner and don't want to rush.


All important lessons learned!


Likewise - thanks Stuart for taking the time to start and update this follow-along for the benefit of all!



Amy

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Hi Stuart! Please find below my response to the rest of your questions:

Where did you set up the cost? Please show your steps.


You've read different "guidelines" because there are no one-size-fits-all rule.

Basically, the more money you spend on testing an offer, the more certain you can be that you won't miss any good offers. But at the same time, this accuracy will cost you. So you'll need to find your own "sweet spot".

I have suggested 5x payout in the past as well. You can still use that if you'd like. You will miss out on some potentially good offers, but then you'll be able to test a lot more offers on the same budget. And the trick to making direct-linking offers work is be efficient with your spend. Due to the high competition and not being able to optimize landers, you'd need to test a ton of offers to find one that will give you profits - so controlling costs will be of paramount importance.

Either way - I would advise to use direct-linking as a learning tool for getting experience on analyzing stats and optimizing the campaign accordingly. Try to move onto using landers as soon as you have some experience.


Asking around would be your best bet. Also, if you have access to screenshots of the offer page, look for some of the following signs of a winning offer (these are specific to 1/2-click carrier-billing offers - although some of them may also apply to other types of offers as well):

-Simple, uncluttered page. All we need is for the visitor to make 1 or 2 taps to subscribe, so we don't need a lot of preselling. No need for lengthy explanations that will make the visitor impatient and click away.

-Attractive graphics is especially key for entertainment type offers (e.g. video and gaming subscriptions).

-Important info all above the fold (that makes it very obvious what the offer is, and includes the CTA).

-Big CTA that the visitor can't miss when tapping on their mobile device.


Stuff like page load speed you can't usually check, unless you happen to have a data plan with the same carrier the offer is targeting. This is all I could think of for now. This is not a dumb question at all - an entire book can be written on this topic alone. I happen to be lazy and would rather test lots of offers by sending a bit of traffic to each, rather than spending time evaluating each offer (again, I'm only referring to 1/2-click offers).

Also - you can check spy tools to see if you can find offers that are receiving high volumes of traffic for longish periods - chances of them being good converters should be higher.



Amy

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Thank you so much Amy, everything makes more sense every time you explain something

I made a screenshot:



so you can see I edited the campaign 'Descarga Loader 3G' and put $1.4 CPM in the right field (at least, that is what I assumed) but apparently something's missing here...

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Aw thanks! Glad to hear!


Wait a second - how come the number of impressions is zero? Please select a date range where you were running traffic. Based on your settings it should track correctly. If not, you'll need to submit a support ticket to Voluum (within the Voluum interface when you're logged in).

Please let me know how you get on!



Amy

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Yes I just wanted to show the edit window. As you can see in the screenshot above I got impressions, but costs don't show up. Think tracking works just fine

Anyway, my steps for now:
- Gonna set up a bunch of direct-linking campaigns right away - BTW: not by rotating offers yet, let's take this step by step '-)
- I have removed the postback URL from the PropellerAds settings (as discussed in this post)
- Gonna put traffic on 'standard' instead of 'distribute' in PropellerAds and just keep it running for a while to see how fast it goes and to be able to pause campaigns directly when my ad spend exceeds 5-8 times the offer pay-out

To be continued

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All sounds good!

Regarding cost-tracking - please do submit a support ticket from within the voluum interface. I don't remember ever attempting to track costs that way - although based on the instructions below, you seemed to have set it up correctly:

http://feedback.Voluum.com/knowledge...aign-in-voluum

Would be interested to know what the issue is!



Amy

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Ok I got a reply from Voluum: you have to enable jmpression tracking in the traffic source setup which gives you an additional impression tracking link. One detail: your traffic source has to support that:

http://feedback.Voluum.com/knowledge...rticles/604680

I couldn’t find anything about an impression pixel in PropellerAds so I’ll leave that for now.

Meanwhile I ran two separate camps which I killed quite fast, especially the TH one that at a certain moment exploded within 10 minutes time (only impressions haha).

Now I’m rotating 3 similar offers which works quite nicely must I say. I will give an update on that camp tomorrow.

Cheers,
—Stuart

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Ah OK got it - thanks so much for reporting back!

I've always just done the cost estimates in my head. For example, if my bid is say $1, and a placement sent 2000 visits, then my approximate cost would be $2.

This is not accurate of course. But for pop traffic camps, most of which have thousands of placements or more, I wouldn't worry too much about accuracy. Efficiency is more important.

AFAIK, most pop sources don't provide the option to pass costs to the tracker. PopAds does, but they are so inaccurate in some cases - the worst I've seen was with Thailand, where the actual costs were nearly twice as much as what was reflected in Voluum! That means I need to see 100% ROI in Voluum to be breaking even in reality.

Zeropark is the only source where costs are tracked accurately through Voluum, but that's only because they're the same company (codewise) and therefore have access to the data.


Looking forward!



Amy

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Short update before I proceed with setting up a new camp with some Russian gaming offers:

I tested some similar offers (PA) by using the rotation feature in Voluum. That worked well, but somehow the traffic in Panama was quite expensive yesterday, so I decided to increase my bid to the suggested value after noticing that I didn't get much traffic with my somewhat lower bid. Anyway, not a single conversion for all three offers so I ditched this campaign as well. Counter is on 8 campaigns now (10 offers)

Action plan for the next few days:
- I am gonna choose my next offers a bit in line with Amy's suggestions, in this case by assessing the offer's LP (Big CTA button, attractive graphics)
- Closely look at the different placements from day 1 (why wait to optimize if I can already ditch some $$-absorbing placements right away)
- While the campaign runs, I'm gonna read into the landers section of the 40-day tutorial
- Reading other's follow-alongs; Other questions I had (but didn't dare to ask) have already been answered there
- Subscribe for AdPlexity (Mobile) to have a good look at the competition
- Get myself some VPS to host my future landers
- Get a decent VPN again
- Refresh my programming skills (only doing some MatLab atm haha)
- Use more cool words like 'camp' and 'ditch' (I'm Dutch you know)

We have Carnival starting next Sunday meaning I have some quiet days at the office and some days off, so I hope to be able to spend a bit more time on my IM efforts.

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Some thoughts in bold.

Have fun!



Amy

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Thanks again Amy!

Well this was actually still about direct-linking campaigns, what I meant was that I wanted to closely monitor impressions so I could cut some bad placements directly, whilst still testing:


so if you look at the PropellerAds screenshot above I meant I should have cut these placements as soon as they reached 2x payout (payout was $0.60), right? Anyway, I was too late as the number impressions increased quite fast while I was walking the dog for his late-night trip. In the end I still spent 3x$10 for the three Russian campaigns (3 separate offers) so I learned at least that things can go quite fast. Result: 0 conversions again so I really think it's time to move on with landers and spying on the competiton a bit. I think I practiced with setting up basic campaigns enough anyway.

OK will do that anyway, but as I have understood a CDN can only handle static LP's right? Which is enough for now I guess

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Ah - gotcha!


That is true! I should have included that as a disclaimer to my "it doesn't matter where you store the files" comment.

I don't think I've seen php files in ripped landers though. If I have, it couldn't have been more than a few - or else I would remember.

So I don't imagine you'll run into issues.



Amy

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Also - just realized I forgot to add the following point to the list of positive signs to look for in a carrier-billing offer: How noticeable the subscription price is.

I'm not going to comment on the ethics of the tactic, but some offer pages only state the price in fine print to make the visitor believe the offer is free. Those tend to convert better than offers that show prices in big fonts close to / on the CTA. So that would be another thing to look for.


Amy

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Thanks fo the extra info Amy

Last few days I have been investing a bit in studying ads on Adplexity. Furthermore, I set up my CDN according to Amy's tutorial. Works like a charm! So next step is to go and prepare some landers. I have been reading about agressive pre-landers (yes or no) and for me it's definitely a no go. I really liked this post from mrbraun on this topic. I also found this post about using proven landers very inspiring (tanks again Amy!), as well as this post. I cite:

Now this is so much gold for us newbies, maybe an experienced affiliate doesn't even realize that anymore. I'm now gonna use this as basis for my newbie strategy.

I am reading so much nowadays, I have 10 STM tabs open simultaneously, I am reading STM articles on my iPhone whenever I have the chance, and I just keep absorbing. Besides that, I'm testing offers as often as I can. Finally, I'm analzying the coding in pre-landers to refresh my coding skills. A day without this business is a lost day already. I hope to stay in this flow forever. (I can't even concentrate at the office anymore haha)

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Update:

1 small campaign (1 offer, DL) running --> 1 conversion so far
3 campaigns on downloads (1 offer, DL) --> 1 country, 2 carriers + WiFi separately running

If one of these offers/campaigns appears promising, I will test it with some pre-landers.

Oh and some stats:

I launched my first campaign on January 25 (This happened to be my birthday LOL, didn't even realize that)
Since then I have launched 22 campaigns
Voluum shows 83,752 visits
The amount of revenue is $5.43 up til now
I'm feeling more alive than ever (at certain moments that is, think it's about time to write my vision board )

Costs:

$170 traffic (PropellerAds)
(and of course my subscriptions for STM/Voluum/Adplexity/HMA)

And I will be honest: IMO, my biggest profit is the feeling of my first 3 weeks of real experience in Affiliate marketing.

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Glad you're staying in the flow!

Chasing the flow is THE number one secret to staying productive. I wish you would stay in it forever too - but if not, then trying to get in as often as possible and stay in for as long as possible would be good enough!

Yup mrbraun's post on running whitehat landers is pretty great! The trick though is to find especially well-converting offers - that will be profitable in spite of not using aggressive landers.

And if it doesn't sit well with you to be misleading to visitors, or to run shady offers - I would really urge you to get away from pop as soon as you have some experience with campaign set up and optimization, because more often than not, offers that convert well on pop are shady, and the most effective way to achieve CR is by being misleading. Main reason being because the audience is so broad, and the fact that pop is interruption marketing - that basically it would take using every trick in the book, including deceptive practices, to capture visitors' attention and then convert and monetize them. There are of course lots of exceptions, and I'm making a generalization. But I do feel that you'd be better-suited to running whitehat on FB by providing value to visitors.

Also - just to clarify: When I suggested using direct-linking first to find out which offers are worth testing further, I was referring to 1/2-click offers specifically. Not every type of offer can be tested using direct-linking. For example, AV and sweeps offers usually don't convert well without landers - those you would definitely want to using landers from the start in order to adequately pre-sell visitors to give the offer page a chance to convert them. 1/2-click offers are suited to direct-linking because they require little/no preselling due to the simple conversion flow - all the visitor needs to do is tap 1/2 times to subscribe.


Nice! Looking forward to seeing some stats for those new camps!

Since you're running wifi - doing a bot test to eliminate bot-infested placements would be good practice that can save you some test budget. Instructions can be found here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Live-Campaigns

Good job on taking massive action! And the coincidence of launching your first camp on your birthday is a sign that this is meant to be - I don't even believe there's such a thing as coincidence any more. Reminds me of when I had my last J.O.B. - the day after I set up my first website, I was so reluctant to pull myself away from the computer to go to work, but 10 minutes after I arrived at the office I was notified that I no longer had a job. The plant closed a month later (this was during the whole downturn of the automotive industry in North America over a decade back). That was Fate's way of telling me which way to go - I haven't looked back. I trust that whatever awaits you down the road, you're meant to come across, and that it will be an improvement from where you currently are.

Have fun!



Amy

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Well I *do* want to proceed to FB soon, but on the other hand i don't mind being a bit misleading for now if that trains me more to become a good affiliate '-) The only thing I would regret is when an affiliate network or traffic source would ban me or something. BTW, cloacking isn't an option for me.

From the campaigns I set up yesterday I only got 2 conversions (two different campaigns), so unfortunately I have nothing exciting to tell about this '-)

What I would like to do next is take my campaign on a download offer that gave me 14 conversions in total (what's in a name...) and relaunch that one with a few simple pre-landers I borrow from Adplexity, mainly to train myself to set such campaigns up. Well I checked Adplexity and what I notice is that most landers ask for a phone number. I don't get that. I would expect this required action to be taken on the lander itself, not on a pre-lander. Is this just a dummy action to engage your visitors? And something else: Sometimes the preview on the search page in Adplexity shows something different than the LP you download. Is this a result from some anti-spying script?

What I want to do is just take the attractive part of the LP without the phone number field and have one huge CTA button.

Great topic for an off-topic thread

I love this quote Amy!

I couldn't agree more!

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I've just talked about some options on running aggressive vs. not, in the following post. I was talking about AV offers specifically, but many of the same points will apply to other verticals when running pop:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post336692

If you really want to play it safe, either use whitehat landers (using tips from mrbraun) or only run offers that allow aggressive promotion. (Your AM would be able to give you a list - don't try to decide based on offer descriptions - many offers that state "no misleading advertising allowed" will actually allow it. It's something only your AM would know.)


Some of those "landers" are actually offer pages.

As for the preview showing something different than the LP downloaded, it could certainly be some anti-spying script like you said, that either redirects you elsewhere or replaces the original lander with a different one based on certain criteria (e.g. geo location, device etc.). I'm not good at coding myself, but have worked with expert coders - it amazes me how they can come up all types of cool ways to manipulate browsers, visitors, and spy tools.


You could. But I'm not really sure what it is that we're looking at here - please feel free to post screenshots of landers and offers if you'd like me to take a look and provide more-detailed feedback.

Are you still DL'ing to carrier-billing offers? If so, there really aren't that many landers you can find on Adplexity, probably because most people are either DL'ing or cloaking/hiding from spy tools. Here are some tips to get you started, but expect to go through a significant amount of testing:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...885#post332885

Have fun!



Amy

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I have read both of your posts mentioned above and I get the point Both really valuable posts IMO!

Once I have produced some creatives I will post them here. My reasoning is just that the offer page (LatAm download offer) I am referring to only consists of a black screen and a button saying ‘descargar’. Adplexity shows me a bit more attractive landers/offer pages (IMHO) with more info so why not try it? And it forces me to dive into the technical details a bit more these offer pages got a substantial amount of traffic BTW.

Oh and I figured out how to show (estimated) costs in Voluum. Instead of choosing CPM in the campaign settings, which requires an impression pixel from the traffic source, I just chose CPC, which *does* calculate the costs from the impressions as recorded by Voluum. It just looks so much better and real

Thanks!
—Stuart

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Ah! These are what we refer to as "Download Now" offers. Let me see if I can find some relevant posts....

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-from-Mr-Braun

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...wnloads-offers

Be sure to read through the entire threads - there are posts with good tips on how to promote these types of offers. Basically, because these offers often don't even tell visitors what it is they'd be downloading, you can promise the moon on your lander, and there are a million and one angles you can use. (I'm not going to comment on the ethics of these offers or the way they're being promoted - I'm just approaching the topic from an affiliate skills standpoint.)


Very nice - thanks for letting me know! I personally never track costs manually. Next time someone asks I'll know to pass on this valuable tip - thank you so much!



Amy

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OK, so let's give a short update as it's been almost two weeks now.

First of all, I have been spending some time to play around with ripping and editing LP's and set my S3 bucket up, including the FTP-connection. All works fine

I was quite eager to test my first funnel with a real landing page, so I grabbed the best-performing German Amazon lander from Adplexity, modified it a bit and set up a campaign with two identical offers, one from PeerFly and one from Mobidea. First thing I had to get used to was the fact that the offer got a lot less clicks to the offer than when you direct-link. Quite obvious, duh... but at first I thought I was doing something wrong haha, lots of impressions in Voluum but only a few clicks:

Well after spending $10 on this $1.75 offer I paused the offer, no conversions, but at least some experience with setting up such a campaign. I maybe should have downloaded more landers, but actually the ones available were all quite similar.

Last Friday I decided to try another direct-linking campaign. I chose Singapore as country and applied to all twelve $0.91 payout offers available. I put them all in one campaign after checking the screenshots of the offers (win a trip to Hong-Kong and other sweep-stakes. One lander looked like this:

So adding a wheel-of-fortune pre-lander seemed a bit weird to me. After all, on this lander they already ask to answer a few questions to see if you're qualified.
Anyway, I just started the campaign to see what would happen, but after spending around $34 (SCPM) and obtaining 22k impressions, I still didn't have one single conversion from the twelve offers so I paused the campaign. I know I haven't spent 5x12x$0.90 yet, but my intuition tells me this campaign isn't gonna work anyway (or is this really too early to judge?)


Something different: I know we shouldn't focus too much on EPC and CR data given by the Aff networks, but what about all offers which state EPC=$0.00 and CR=$0.00? For these offers we know for sure these are at least not-so-popular offers, right? Unless these are new offers I guess.

Tomorrow I will check Adplexity for some new ideas and I will focus on landers. I also messaged my manager at PropellerAds (she tried to call me a few weeks ago BTW) with some questions about popular GEO's so I hope to have some answers tomorrow. That's another funny thing I realized: During the weekend you should have enough fuel to survive these few days because of the limited availability of support haha (of course obvious again '-)

Finally: I must admit that my motivation got a little less due to constantly seeing 0 conversions last week, but after reading another follow along I got some new spirit, as it shows I'm not the only one struggling and not the only one having lots of questions. Furthermore, some other questions/doubts were also answered in that thread.

That's it for tonight, another busy day at the uni tomorrow...

All the best,
--Stuart

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This is a feat in itself! Fortunately once it's set up you won't need to touch anything for a while.


That CTR looks quite low, but may be normal for a geo like DE.

And yes you should have probably tested a few more landers. Keep an open mind - don't JUST look for landers that are pushing Amazon gift cards! Look for landers that promote other gift cards, and tweak them to promote amazon cards. You can even take landers for electronics offers (e.g. iphone) and tweak those to see amazon cards.

Testing a few landers will ensure you have at least one that will convert reasonably well. Also, spending a little bit of time to make sure they a)display correctly in all major devices, b)all the functionalities are working (e.g. backbutton redirect, alert popups, exit pops, all links functioning, any jquery interactive elements are working correctly etc.), and c)load reasonably fast (<1s if possible but definitely <2s at most), will give those landers a better chance of success.

Also - in order to get the conversions necessary to cut those landers down to a winner, you need an offer that converts reasonably well (otherwise you could lose your shirt just in this first step alone). So it would make sense to include a few different offers in the beginning, find one that converts at least semi-decent, then use JUST that offer to cut down on landers. Once you have a winning lander, you can use that to test more offers.


Yes - some offers will already have a lander built-into them. Aff networks and offer owners call them "pre-landers". "Landers" to them are offer pages. It's 2 perspectives of the same things - but when talking to your AM or the advertiser we need to use their language to avoid misunderstandings.

For offers that already come with landers, we can indeed just direct-link to them. Another thing I've done with some success is put a simple 1-page lander before that - for example the kind that lists the iphone in several colors asking the visitor to choose their favorite color. So those would be 2 things you can test.


For direct-linking, spending $34 on a $0.90 offer is way too much. I'd say ditch the offer.

I would have spent $10 on it - if I don't get at least 2 conversions, I wouldn't have bothered continuing to run and optimize.

If I was testing with landers I would definitely have spent more money on cutting down to the winning lander, and then using that to test more offers. When landers are involved, there's so much more room for optimization. But not so when direct-linking - because then we'd be depending on the offer almost 100%, so if it doesn't start performing great right off the bat, we're basically sunk.


Offers that are known to convert well, your AM is probably recommending to everyone, so be prepared for more competition.

Offers that are new or that nobody has bothered to test yet, some of those may turn out to be winners. If you test them first and find the gems, you get first-mover's advantage - but not for long, because the AMs will pick up on that and start recommending it to everyone. Once the offer makes it to their top offers list the playing field would be pretty much leveled.

This is why speed is of essence. If you've tested lots of networks and know of some that convert well and don't have a lot of competition yet, you can scale so much faster and bigger than your competition. Having a blacklist of placements for major geos on major networks will also help - that way you can reach profits much faster and make your money before everyone else starts running the same offer.

But testing new offers is a double-edged sword - they're not proven performers yet so the chances of them turning out to be duds would be greater.

So it's really up you which approach you want to take. You can run proven offers exclusively (ones recommended by your AM or that you see doing good traffic volume on Adplexity). Or run unproven offers exclusively. Or run both - run proven offers first, and then unproven ones later.

When testing landers though, avoid using unproven offers - you need conversions to cut landers!


Awesome!

Be sure to ask them for intel on what kinds of offers are running successfully in those geos! *wink*


Pop has gotten harder. Not gonna lie. Use it as a learning tool to get your foot in the door. Make some initial profits. Then try Native or FB or Adwords. That would be my 2 cents.




Amy

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Thanks for the extensive reply Amy, really appreciate it!

Sounds logical!
These were in fact 12 offers, rotating in 1 campaign, so I spent less than $3 per offer in my perception these were similar, but not identical offers.

Gonna take action tomorrow again, enough inspiration!

BTW: I haven’t got a reply from my PropellerAds rep yet.

Cheers, Stuart

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So... It's been a while. I lost the positive flow somewhere during my mobile flight. Lots of excuses of course: busy at work, busy family life but I will not complain about that '-) the only thing that worries me a bit is my health. My fatigue has kept me from taking action the way I should/wanted. Anyway, I'm still planning on fixing and uploading some decent LP's for sweepstakes. My AM at MaxBounty has really been helpful with choosing a few good offers so only for that I already feel obliged to take action again Furthermore, I didn’t start this FA just for fun

Uhm yes I did that (PropellerAds), and what they answered me is to first deposit $1000 which will move me from the self-hosted platform to a more premium platform with lots of intel. Maybe later

So, gonna work on my landers first and hopefully start a new campaign soon.

Cheers,
--Stuart

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SO nice to see that you're back! Thought we had lost you.

Everyone's entitled to breaks. If you're REALLY not feeling it, don't push yourself too hard. Relax, do some research, and try again.

Don't be afraid to test out your ideas. And don't give yourself any deadlines. Test enough things and you WILL find a direction. Pushing yourself too hard will only make you want to give up more.

Your fatigue is most likely from all the resistance and internal struggle. If you're demanding that you succeed and yet don't have enough experience to be confident in yourself, you'd be fighting with yourself and building up a lot of resistant energy. That will result in fatigue.

That plus any other stress coming from your day job and family will deter anyone from wanting to do anything.

So - DO try to relax and have more fun with this! Try to enjoy the process more and give yourself less stress. Stress will only make you unhappy and unproductive - which won't get you anywhere.


Ah OK! Sometimes I forget what a privilege it is to have a good relationship with networks. Makes me appreciate that even more.

No worries - that's not a requirement for initial success! Keep the fire burning and you'll get there soon.



Amy

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Thank you so much for your kind and inspiring words Amy, these mean a lot to me and I think you are *so* right. It has taken me some time to get into the flow again but I think I’m ready to take some action now.

What also has had some influence were my doubts about mobile pops with the extra tresholds (SSL, increasing bot traffic, Voluum issues) and my increasing interest for FB. However, I realized that mobile pops are still the way to work your way into this business and learn the basic skills so I decided to stick to mobile pops until I master it at a certain level (yeah I know this advice has been given a lot to a lot of newbies but hey, you still have to experience it yourself right? Funny detail is that I always tell my fresh students in uni that they have to start working hard from day 1 but I also tell them that I know it’s not convincing enough me saying that, and that they will have to experience it themselves. And that’s the exact reason (IMHO) that there’s no shortcut in AM: because you need the experience anyway and that takes time).

Anyway, while a lot of you guys are visiting Barcelona at this right moment, I am celebrating my holidays with my family 150 km below Barcelona. I really hope to be able to visit next AWE meeting. Meanwhile I have read tons of STM articles to get inspiration again.

I also read all comments on Voluum’s pricing policy. Too bad they don’t offer a newbie’s configuration without all the whistles, but OK, I have canceled my subscription for now and I am thinking of trying out RedTrack. They even offer a free plan that’s great for practicing AM and they offer nice upgrades. Most important is that they look newbie-friendly to me, haha.

So, while I’m still relaxing at one of L’Ametlla’s beaches, I’m planning the following actions:

- refreshing my CSS & JS knowledge
- set up Spanish LP’s for sweeps, I still have some example LP’s I ripped from Adplexity a few months ago
- find more sweeps offers for Spanish-speaking countries
- set up tracking in RedTrack and fix SSL
- set up bot script
- set up business account in PropellerAds to get rid of the taxes (EU)
- set up campaigns in PropellerAds
- press ‘start’

All the best,
—Sjoerd



Verzonden vanaf mijn iPhone met STM Forums

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Hey Sjoerd sounds like you have it all planned out! And Spanish is definitely a good language - it's so widely spoken. Although the Spanish spoken in Spain vs. Mexico vs. Latin America are all different, for a quick initial test, using the same set of landers should be fine.

Barcelona was awesome! Hoping to see you there next year! (Or even AWA this December? Bangkok is a very exciting place to visit with your family as well!)

Regarding FB: You've already launched a few pop campaigns in the past and have the basics down, so it may be good to start with FB directly. Pop isn't getting easier or less saturated.

Regarding tracker: It may be good to choose one that is more discussed around here, just in case you need help from the community. Funnelflux or Binom would make good choices. I'm planning to rewrite the 40-day tutorial around Funnelflux. Binom I've heard lots of good things about. But of course ultimately it's up to you - if you're good at tech then I'm sure you can make most trackers work for you.

Please do keep us posted on your progress!



Amy

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You don’t have to be technical savvy in order to use Binom, because we take care about all the technical support.

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Would be great! Let's consider this one of my goals for the remaining 5 months of 2018 Taking my family is a wonderful idea, the only thing is that Dutch schools are quite strict in their leave policy. But who knows!

OK this is a major one... I have thought about your suggestion the last couple of days, have read a lot about FB again, and I think that it's indeed a wise decision to start with FB as I have to get into the AM flow again anyway. Furthermore, I realized FB is not that new for me, I even have a sort of warmed-up ad account already (from back in 2014/2015). So actually it may have cooled down a bit again but nevertheless, it has some ad spend and maybe even more important: I never got a ban as a FB newbie haha At that time I promoted games and that's where I got my first $150 MaxBounty revenue. So.. Maybe the time has come to crack the FB beast once and for all. I will start a new FA for that!

Finally a short note about the tracker: As I read through @stickupkid's (also really helpful) articles/replies, a tracker for FB may not be my first need. But I will drop my questions/doubts about this in my new FA.

Amy, thank you very, very much for introducing and guiding me through the wonder world of pops. I already learned a ton and I will definitely read back some of your well-explained articles when needed

So this is it for this FA I guess. Next stop: FaceBook

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Oh I'm so glad!

Pop is a wonderful place to start, but it's almost always nicer to expand away from it into something more complicated and more promising.

Thanks for this follow along! I'll be on the lookout for your next one. I'm not an expert in FB yet, but would love to still follow along.



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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