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Mobile Pop Campaign Using Amy's Blueprint - Follow Along (23)

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Hello,

First thread here. I would like to share my progress with everyone, as well as receive some feedback/guidance. This week I started testing several offers (direct linking) from Mobidea. Traffic source I am using is Propeller ads, although I did run 1 campaign on Popads. I decided I'd like to master one traffic source and become profitable before experimenting on other networks. So for now I am running on Propeller ads only.

I've tested 5 offers so far. 4 out of 5 were shut off due to either no conversions, or very few within the first $15 spend.

Currently I have been running 1 offer for about 3 days. Mobidea Offer, Propeller Ads, Voluum Tracking. Instead of using a set Bid at 2.33, I decided to bid much higher and use their SCPM option. This allows me to change bids for each placement manually once I see what's working/not working. I started this campaign on a max bid of $10 (although I didn't pay anywhere near that) so that I could outbid others and open up the best zones. This method seems to have worked quite well for this campaign, although since I'm using SCPM I'm unable to track my cost's in Voluum making it difficult to see what I'm spending per zone. Any advice for sending my data over to Voluum using the SCPM cost model?

Day 1: -100% ROI
Day 2: -59% ROI
Day 3: -8% ROI

I don't think this campaign is going to be much of a money maker. I'm currently only able to spend about $10-20/day in traffic. After cutting some placements, It's looking like I'm only going to see a few thousand impressions/day max. Also, the other problem I am running into is that this campaign does not allow for much optimization. Since I am running direct link, I'm limited on data and have nearly ran out of placements to cut. If at best, I may see a profitable campaign but the earnings will be very minimal. HOWEVER, this campaign has been a great way to learn how to analyze my data and cut placements.

My plan from here is to continue running this campaign for a few more days, simply to experiment and see how the changes I've made to my campaign affect the performance/ROI.

NEXT STEP:

I purchased Adplexity membership and got approved on another affiliate network. So from here I will be testing some copied Landers and some new offers. I am thinking of running a sweepstakes campaign in a specific GEO, targeting only one OS.

My plan:

- Swipe 2 landers from Adplexity that appear to be doing well
- Test 2 sweepstake offers
- Run campaign on Propeller Ads or Popads targeting 1 GEO, 1 OS

(My biggest obstacle will be learning to customize landing pages. Anyone that is able to help with HTML, please let me know.)

Any suggestions or advice would be GREAT!

Still not profitable, but seeing that this campaign is near a profit definitely gives me the motivation to move forward with testing better offers and running landing pages. My earnings are small for now, but it is a HUGE step forward for me. I've been struggling with CPA for over a year. I've ran various campaigns and spent thousands of dollars and I never saw 1 conversion.

I haven't given up because this has truly been a passion/dream of mine for a long time. This past year has been the most difficult time in my life. I hit rock bottom in every aspect of my life, and had to make a decision. No matter how hard life is, you have to keep pushing for what you want. I've cut out my social life, I have cut out my spending and am currently living in my parents basement with my dog (after recently losing everything I had). ANYWAYS, I will continue moving forward, and have faith that someday I will be exactly where I want to be (working from my computer in a condo on a beach in FL to be specific )

Thank you to everyone in this forum that has been of great help.

I look forward to the Future!

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Good luck buddy, let me know how it goes.

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Good luck with your campaigns!

As for SCPM, I don't think it's possible.

You would have to grab ZONE data and pair it in excel for example to get the right costs for each one.

Your Day 3 start looking good, wish you all the best!

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Good progress! At this point, learning should be the top priority - this campaign is allowing you to learn optimization which is fantastic! The lack of traffic after cutting is a very good lesson learned as well - so that next time you'll keep in mind to avoid targeting options (geo/carrier/etc.) that don't have a lot of traffic to start with. For practice though this campaign is certainly serving its purpose.

In order to track costs correctly: One option would be to export placement cost data from Propeller and revenue data from Voluum, then combine them using a spreadsheet - please see this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...pampamp-easily


Very nice!


Exactly! It's the perfect playground for you to experiment with anything you like: Targeting options, bids, bidding mode, rules of thumb for cutting stuff, whatever else.


Make sure the offers have a good track record if possible - e.g. recommended by AMs for being good performers for multiple affiliates, or has received lots of traffic according to Adplexity stats.

I would actually suggest to "borrow" a few more landers from Adplexity, but I guess 2 would be OK to start. Basically in the beginning there's a catch-22 situation where we have neither a proven offer nor a proven lander. My strategy is try to find an offer that converts at least semi-well, use that to test a bunch of landers to identify a winner, then use that winner to test more offers.

In order to find an offer that converts semi-well, I'd start with a few that have good track records, then wait until one of them makes 2 conversions without incurring major spend, then use just that one offer to cut landers. If none of the offers convert OK, can try another batch of offers until finding one that does.

Aside from finding a decent offer to cut landers, it is crucial that the landers themselves include at least some that can convert well (because we need both a good offer AND lander to have high CR) - which is why I tend to test more landers in the beginning than 2.

And because there are usually just a small'ish number of lander designs that are being used a lot, the process of identifying a winner is usually faster and easier than to identify a winning offer. This is why I choose to cut landers down to a winner first, and THEN use that winning lander to test however many offers there are that I can find, for that particular vertical+geo(+whatever other targeting).

But don't let me deter you from testing your own strategy! Everyone will come up with their own testing and optimization methodology - as long as you know what you're testing and track the results.


LOL that was my main obstacle in the beginning too! Would take me an hour of trial and error to do something trivial like move a logo more to the right.

It does get easier and easier.

It really wouldn't hurt to start/join a mastermind where you can potentially work together with someone that has better coding skills:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...15-Masterminds


I have a lot of admiration for people like yourself.

Attitude is everything. You become the person you see yourself becoming. Sacrificing your social life etc. etc. will only cut out unnecessary distractions and sharpen your focus.

I do hope you still have money coming in? May I ask what your monthly disposable budget is for running campaigns?



Amy

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Currently I have around 2500 dollars of money to play with. With my full time job I have probably an extra 1k dollars a month to save/invest.

Right now I'm learning a little bit of code and deciding what I want/need to do to borrow some landing pages. I don't know if it's necessary to have the lander recreated from scratch, or to just make changes to the current code. Not sure if I have the skills to do either at the moment.

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That's good! I mainly wanted to make sure you have continued and disposable income to invest into paid traffic until you succeed.

I would suggest for you to set a goal of spending $250/week on campaigns. Aim to spend that money as constructively as possible, and focus less on profits at this point.

That way, your focus would be on learning, and because you're not eating into your reserve, you wouldn't feel any urgency to make this work any time soon.

$250/week of course won't allow you to run continuously 24/7 (unless you're targeting a tiny geo on a small network). So either throttle your traffic, and/or daypart from the start to only run during evenings local time when offers typically convert better, or only run traffic a couple/few days of each week while spending the rest of the time on research and preparation. (You know, tasks like spying, ripping and fixing landers, chatting with AMs to find out what's hot, reading forum posts and blog posts, etc.)

And once you have some experience with pop, I would urge you to expand your learning to another traffic type - FB for example.

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post337049


Your best bet would be to rip and fix up. For 2 reasons:

1)Doing so would require a LOT less coding experience. But more importantly...

2)You need to start with landers that are tried and tested. Landers that you see being used a lot by other affiliates, have much greater chance of converting well compared to landers you've designed from scratch. And when you don't have a proven offer, the last thing you'd want would be a catch22 situation where you're running offers with landers and not getting conversions and wondering whether it's the offers or landers that suck (or both!) So, always start with ripped landers. Once you've found a good offer, you can test variations of the best ripped lander, or even test one that's completely different that you design from scratch. (However, unless you can figure out how to keep landers out of spy tools, your custom-made lander would get ripped in 2 minutes because it would stick out in a sea of landers that look pretty much the same - so a better strategy may be to make variations of the best lander so that when spy tools pick them up, they won't stick out and get ripped as much.)


Spend a couple/few days going through coding tutorials, then it would just be a matter of spending time on fixing landers to get the experience.

At first you may be fixing one thing at a time and refreshing the page to review the change, and each change may take an hour or more, but as with everything else, the more you do it the easier it gets and the faster you can do it.

I would strongly recommend getting Adplexity for ripping landers - if your budget doesn't allow it, at least subscribe for a month and rip landers in various languages for 1-2 verticals before unsubscribing.

But if you really don't have the budget for it, let me know and I'll give you some sites you can spy on - that will take a lot longer though, and you'll need to have a VPN like hidemyass, but it's doable.



Amy

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Thanks for all of the info. I actually am already subscribed to adplexity, I have a few landers downloaded already that appear to have good performance from looking at the stats.

I have been in contact with my AM and have been given a few offers to test. This weekend my goal is to get these landing pages fixed up/links replaced etc.

I am planning to test about 3-4 landing pages, and I also have 2 offers I can test for a specific GEO that were recommended to me by my AM.

Hopefully I will have my campaign running in the next few days if all goes well with hosting/editing my landing pages.

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Hey Everyone,

Little update to where I am today. I killed the previous campaign, I was not getting enough traffic in that particular GEO, and was also running direct link to a low payout offer.

I swiped a few landing pages and did some editing. I successfully learned how to host/download/run landers after an entire weekend. I fixed the broken parameters, changed a couple images, and erased any suspicious code. ( I downloaded many landing pages to find that some were nearly impossible for me to get clean, they were still redirecting or the code was just an absolute mess)

Started current campaign yesterday 2/19/20

2 Landers
2 Offers
Pop Traffic

I started the campaign late in the evening, started running traffic and noticed a few errors right away. The landing page was redirecting my traffic (I believe) and a small typo on the offer link that cost me a few dollars.

Yesterdays stats:

Cost: $29
Conversions: 4
Revenue: $9
ROI: -70%


Todays Stats (so far; currently 7pm):

Cost: $57
Conversions: 11
Revenue: $31
ROI: -45%


After looking over my data I decided to adjust some bids, cut placements that were performing poorly, tuned off 1 of the 2 offers and added an offer that AM recommended for my traffic. I am still running both landing pages, simply because 1 of the 2 I had stopped due to issues in the beginning (most of data is from 1 landing page). Both landers are up and running now, and am testing 2 offers. By tomorrow I should be able to see which landing page/offer is performing the best and make decisions from there. Will give an update tomorrow

One thing I noticed today was that I bought alot of traffic but during a certain time of the day I was receiving hardly any conversions. Since the evening my conversions have gone up significantly (also eliminated bad offer and added new)

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So far today my campaign has not been doing that great. Which doesn't make much sense to me considering I cut quite a few placements that were't performing well.

What should my rule of thumb be for cutting placements? 2x the payout, 3x the payout? I'm seeing MANY placements where I've spent around $2 with no conversions. My payout is $3.

Here are stats from propeller ads from the last 3 days.



I'm spending so much money from these placements that have cost me around $2. Am afraid to blacklist them for fear that I'll miss out on a good zone, although at this point most of them aren't looking promising. Most of my conversions have come from just a small handful of placements. Some placements I'm getting conversions on and only cost me 0.20.

Right now, both landing pages appear to be doing about the same. I've only been running 1 of the 2 offers for a day now, and it has received more conversions than the other, but I still feel it's not enough conversions to determine which one to keep.

It's odd because most of the day I will be way in the negative, and then at certain times I will all of a sudden get 2-3 conversions at once after not getting any for HOURS. Seeming like only certain hours of the day I'm getting conversions, where as a majority of the day I'm getting very little, if any. Should I only run campaign at certain hours to cut down my spending? This campaign appeared to be promising right from the start. After an hour of running traffic I received 2 conversions immediately, but that must have been by luck. I still feel that this can be a profitable campaign but I'm missing something. I'm afraid to cut too many placements too soon, but I also don't want to be wasting money if placements are going to show no sign of success. Any help would be appreciated.

Here are my stats as of today:

Spent: $48
Visits: 17k
Clicks: 9.6k
Conversions: 5
Revenue: $15

Offer 1 received 2 Conversions
Offer 2 received 3 Conversions

LP1 Received 3 Conversions
LP2 Received 2 Conversions

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Below are the stats for over the past 3 days. After speaking with my AM, and looking at my data I decided to cut out all carriers except for 2 (Vodafone and O2). I also turned off all browsers except for Google Chrome, Android Webview, Android Browser, Samsung Browser.

I also blacklisted any zones that I was spending over $3 on with no conversions. Also any zones that I received alot of visits but no Clicks






The only problem I'm having is that I'm running SCPM on Propeller, and Voluum does not account for different costs in clicks. However, I think by looking at the two (propeller and Voluum) I'm able to get a good idea if something is doing well or not. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for me. Thanks!

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First of all - it's GREAT that you've progressed so quickly. From figuring out tracking to figuring out how to rip and clean landers to optimizing a campaign - all in a short time. Fortunately, most of this stuff you only need to figure out once.

You're right in picking and choosing which landers to fix up. Before I had anyone help me with coding, I would download twice the amount of landers I needed, and would ditch the ones I wasn't confident I could get to work. The 80/20 rule is gold.

Reminder: When deciding which landers/offers to cut, be sure to only include stats for the period when they were ALL running simultaneously. For example, if 7 days ago you've started running 2 landers, then 4 days ago added another lander, then you've started a new split-test 4 days ago when you added the most-recent lander - which means when comparing stats between all 3 landers to decide which one(s) to cut, you can only look at the time period starting from 4 days ago and up to the present.

It's normal for a campaign to experience good days and bad days. In addition, it's normal for a campaign's performance to start off strong, then start to diminish, or even experience large dives. In the case where you're seeing a sudden dive in performance, I've offered some things to try in the following lesson:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...830#post333830


You can set your own rule of thumb that makes sense to you.

Basically: The longer you wait, the fewer good placements you'll cut by "mistake", but the more money you'll need to spend (and potentially waste on bad placements you end up cutting). The corollary is true too, i.e. the faster you cut, the more good placements you'll cut by mistake, but the more money you'd save on placements that end up draining your budget.

My personal rules of thumb I've suggested in the tutorial:

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

Use Aggressive or Non-Aggressive Placement Cutting Rules depending on your particular situation. I've explained this in the following lesson (read the section "3)Rules of Thumb, and the concept of Efficiency vs. Accuracy"):

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...069#post331069

If you feel that you've already identified most of the major profitable placements, gradually cut all other placements, starting with the largest. Try to cut in batches of say 10 placements. If, after a cut, your traffic to the good placements experience a noticeable drop, consider reinstating the last batch of placements you've cut. Many pop networks are weird that way - when you target too few placements (or anything else for that matter) it will consider your campaign to be "less important" somehow, and assign less traffic to he camp. This is why the blacklisting approach will often work better than the whitelisting approach.

Don't be overly concerned that you'll miss out on good zones by cutting more rigorously. That's a risk you'll have to take - it's either that or having to spend a fortune on cutting. I'm referring to the concept of Efficiency vs. Accuracy as laid out in the lesson linked to above.


Don't go by "feeling" or guessing - use a statistical calculator!

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


A campaign can certainly convert better during certain times of the day.

However, it may also be due to delays in the affiliate network posting the conversion data to the tracker. So try to go by the affiliate network's hourly stats if such stats are available.

If you see a definite trend of certain hours that are profitable or less profitable, you can try dayparting by only running the camp during the most profitable hours (or alternatively, cut out the hours that are the least profitable). See if the conversion rate improves. If not, you can always reinstate the excluded hours.


Are these the stats for today alone? Or since the start of the split-test?

Definitely need to run them further to collect more conversions in order to reach statistical significance.



Amy

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Hey Everyone,

Haven't posted in a couple of weeks but I wanted to give everyone an update.

I decided to drop the traffic source I was running on. No matter what I did or tested, I could not make my campaign profitable. I had a few days with -10%-15% but still couldn't get it in the green.

I moved my campaign to a new traffic source and all I can say is wow, I noticed a huge difference. My campaign hit hard from day 1.

The first few days I ran in the negative, but after optimizing/testing different offers I started to see a profit. I noticed that certain hours of the day I was spending money and not getting any conversions. Setting my campaign on a schedule (dayparting) has increased my ROI tremendously.

Here's what allowed me to go from red to green:

1. Tested ALOT of offers (10 to be exact)
2. Found a traffic source that does well in my vertical
3. Daypart
4. Learned how to adjust bids according to the day/hour

This is only my second day in the green but I think I can see a consistent positive ROI from here. I've cut many bad placements, found the right offer/lander combo and I feel like everything is all starting to make sense after looking at Voluum stats everyday for the past month. I've spent alot of money more so playing around to see what works, which has been a great learning experience. I know now that when I change angles/verticals and create new campaigns I'll be able to optimize them at a faster rate and will understand what changes I am making and why. Once I see a consistent positive ROI on this campaign I will be moving it to new GEOs with more traffic.

Right now I'm running on 1 specific carrier, but I am about to test a few more to see if I can squeeze more volume/profit out of this campaign.

Thursday 3/8/18 (first profitable day)

Cost: $46.01
Revenue: $56.57
Profit: $10.56
ROI: 30%

Friday 3/9/18 (will be shutting campaign off on Fridays based on historical trend/data)

Cost: $36.85
Revenue: $17.83
Profit: - $19.02
ROI: -52%

Today (not as much traffic as there is on the weekdays, but ROI is extremely high)

Cost: $12.08
Revenue: $29.56
Profit: $17.48
ROI- 145%


My goal from here is to maintain a consistent profit from this campaign daily and then scale to other GEO's. I'm also trying to scale quickly so I qualify for weekly payments from the affiliate network (1k/week in revenue)

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good man~~~ keep it going

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Yesterday's stats (3/10/18)



Today's stats (3/11/18)



I increased my bids so today the profit margin was much lower but I received more volume than yesterday. I am still finding the sweet spot.

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Looks good man, the ROI from yesterday is crazy!

Keep it up!

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What traffic source you've switched to? Popads?

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GREEN! Congratulations! And thanks for sharing your valuable learning experience!

I would recommend that instead of scaling to other geos, that you also scale to more traffic sources.

The more good traffic sources you have access to, the faster and bigger you can scale all your future campaigns. This is what makes the difference between doing xx/day and xxxx/day. I talked about scaling to other traffic networks in these lessons:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...liate-Networks

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...affic-Networks

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...9-Testing-Bids

Try setting up staggered-bid camps to get traffic from a wide range of placements.


Also: Are you still direct-linking or using landers already? If still direct-linking, I would strongly suggest moving to landers ASAP.

Awesome progress - very happy for you and looking forward to seeing you hit higher and higher profits!



Amy

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I pm'd you.

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Thank you!

I am using landers. I've already tested several and am currently running the best performing lander. However, I'd like to get someone to fix up my code so that I can get optimum performance and increase my conversion rate.

The past 2 days I've been in the red, but not by much. I created a seperate (identical) campaign targeting a new carrier. So far I've noticed that the new carrier has way more volume. I'm still cutting some placements, but I'm trying to give the campaign time so that I can get significant data. I started to change my bids based off of the data over the course of 3 days. I'm using the EPV metric to get an idea on how much to adjust my bids.

My affiliate manager actually increased the payout on the offer I'm running so that should help out.

I will consider moving this campaign to more traffic sources rather than to other GEO's. Also helps that I am now familiar with this particular GEO/schedule. I decided to stop day parting for now, I was restricting alot of volume and honestly even though traffic slows down at certain times, my offer is still converting about the same.

These results are actually showing my old payout rate, the offer payout rate was just increased minutes before writing this post

Actual Revenue generated for today is $83.70, if only that was profit lol

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That would be a good start, but the best way to test bids would just be to test several bids around the average bid, $0.50-$1+ apart. This is because when you change the bid, you wouldn't JUST be bidding differently for the SAME placements - you'd be triggering traffic from different placements as well. The really premium placements that convert well, you won't even be able to access when you're bidding low (because some of your competition have already seen how well they convert and are bidding higher to get more traffic from them, leaving you with none).


Makes sense. And yes now would be the perfect time to test lots of other traffic networks! The more good networks you have access to, the faster and bigger you can scale all future green camps - this is what makes the difference between xx/day and xxxx/day+.


All in good time.




Amy

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So basically the campaigns I was running just came to a halt. My avg bid on the network was around 0.0075 and I was receiving quite a bit of traffic, breaking even, had some profit days, and overall campaigns seemed to be going well. I was optimizing, cutting some placements (not too many) that were costing me and slowly adjusting some bids on the best performing targets.

Traffic nearly stopped and I noticed all of the "top bids" on the network had gone up double/triple what my bid was at. I created a new campaign targeting the same Source with a higher bid, and I spent a ton of money with little to no conversions.. -90% ROI. I have no idea what happend. Nothing out of the ordinary, no major changes to my campaign etc.

I'm finding it very difficult to see consistent numbers on pop, I don't even quite understand how you can create a steady campaign with positive ROI when POP seems so volatile.

I'm actually at the point where I'm not sure what direction to go. I've spent alot of money getting the campaign I had breaking even and that vanished.. I'm nowhere near recouping my investment since starting in pops. I've spent probably close to 2k dollars since the beginning testing and optimizing and I've earned about 1k in revenue.

The bids on the ad network seem insanely high, between 0.015-0.025 for traffic in Germany under a specific Source (ad network is Zeropark).

I was running my top performing landing page under a pretty popular Vertical (many other people running similar page), thought I found what seemed to be a great converting offer with a good EPC. I also had a coder fix my landing page and reduce size significantly. Page does not appear to be redirecting any traffic.

I'm thinking that I need to stop this campaign as I've already spent a ton of money on it, ran on 2 different traffic networks, testing many pages, many offers etc. But I am unsure as to what to go into next. Not sure if I like the nature of POPs and the inconsistency I'm seeing.

One thing I'd like to know is, is it better to run multiple carriers in a campaign rather than targeting one specific carrier? Will the ad network see my campaign as more important if I'm running higher volume on one campaign?

I was running a campaign targeting carrier1 only an this is the campaign that had some profitable days but all of a sudden the bids seemed to sky rocket.

I started a second campaign targeting carrier2 only, and it opened up a lot more traffic. Seemed to be performing well at first, but then just stopped and traffic slowed down.

What I am thinking about doing now is gathering the data over the past week or 2 and creating a whitelist campaign for all of those targets.

I'm just not even sure at this point what I'm doing. I feel like I've exhausted variables to test and my options are limited. Biggest issue I'm having is that the affiliate network has me on monthly, and I've earned about $900 on the network, there minimum threshold is $500. I was told payment does not get released until $500 is reached, and then I was told that the payment gets released 30 days after the threshold is reached. So I'm not looking at getting any payment for another 3 weeks. I still have money to run traffic, but I never realized I'd be almost 2 months before getting a payment. To get on weekly payments you need to run consistent 1k in revenue a week. The network has great offers and im somewhat committed at this point being that I've earned most of revenue through them.




Update:

I looked at my stats for the past couple weeks (I would assume this is considered data significance). I decided to create a separate campaign for each carrier. I created white list campaigns with the top targets that generated a profit over the past few weeks for each individual carrier. Each campaign has around 30-40 targets each. I went ahead and adjusted bids on the few that I know are generating the most volume/conversions.

We will see how this turns out. These 2 campaigns, in theory should be profitable? I also added a few targets that generated some conversions, but may have been close to breaking even for me so I'm not limiting my traffic as much.

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Okay so campaign is still not profitable. Performance has gone downhill.

Originally I was generating quite a bit of conversions targeting 1 carrier only, and avg campaign bid was 0.008. All of a sudden it seemed that my traffic slowed down and most placements which were profitable became extremely expensive. Like 2-3x my original bid (0.008). I raised my bids and traffic was plentiful but I was burning through my budget. I don't know how I could even be profitable with bid prices that high? Why all of a sudden was I receiving a good bit of traffic/conversions and then the prices on placements went up big time?

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Pop camps ARE volatile, as are some of the other types of traffic. And pop is especially volatile out of most/all traffic types. I believe it's because of the high (and increasing) levels of competition - having to compete with so many other advertisers, with everybody tweaking their campaigns at the same time, is making pop harder to profit from.

Here are some of the things you can try when a campaign's performance goes downhill:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...formance-Dives

Spending just 2k and making 1k back is a feat. You've spent 1k and learned a ton. No reason to feel defeated. You've done very well.

DE is an extremely competitive geo to play in. And Zeropark is where everyone is running. Of course bids and volatility will be high.

To get a leg up over the competition, there are a few things you can do:

-Be willing to test more landers and offers than the next person (sounds like you already have). If you can get exclusive offers that convert well, all the better.

-Use automation tools like theoptimizer or optifyme to help you optimize your camps faster, more efficiently, and with minimal effort from you - so that you can juggle more campaigns simultaneously.

-Test a TON of traffic sources so you can find more good ones. That way, you can make multiple times the profit from every good offer+lander. Competition on the lesser-known / smaller sources can be significantly lower, and therefore campaign performance can be a lot less volatile. The smaller sources may have less volume, but camps can stay profitable for longer (due to there being less competition and volatility).


And then of course, you can try other traffic types. Native is similar to pop and has better profits potential AFAIK, but be prepared to spend big bucks to optimize campaigns (e.g. if running in the US you may need to spend 1k/day just on cutting placements). You can also consider FB or search (adwords/bing/etc.) Those are the most promising types of paid traffic I know of at the present.

We're planning on coming out with more tutorials/guides for the other traffic types, in addition to the 40-day tutorial by myself. In the meantime, don't wait - there are ample follow-alongs and other content that can provide guidance on how to succeed. You already have some experience running paid traffic campaigns, that between forum content, your experience and common sense, and actual testing, you should be able to figure things out.


The trend I've observed is that the more traffic segments you're targeting (geos, carriers, OSs, whatever else), the cheaper your traffic and the more traffic volume you'll get.

However, targeting multiple carriers or geos in the same campaign can result in overbidding of some geos/carriers and underbidding of other geos/carriers.

But - if you know that the average bids of 2 or more carriers are similar, for example, you could try to target them in one campaign to gain the advantages mentioned.

So there are pros and cons to each approach.


Perhaps take this opportunity to do some freelance work to build up your cashflow?

That's a common issue for many newbies in the beginning. If you arrange for additional income to come in, you'll be less stressed. This post may put some things into perspective for you:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post335357


Remember we were talking above, about how the more traffic segments you target, the more traffic volume may be assigned to your campaign because the traffic source tends to view it as being more "important"?

Well - the opposite of that phenomenon is that when you're targeting just a few placements, i.e. have a whitelist, the traffic source may assign less traffic to your campaign. Many people (including myself) have experienced similar: Start a whitelist with placements that were getting a lot of traffic an making lots of conversions in the original campaign, just to see traffic dwindle to a drip in the new whitelist campaign.

This doesn't ALWAYS happen, but just to give you a heads up. It may be better to cut fewer placements, by including those that aren't in major loss, and a ton of the smaller/smallest placements that aren't costing major money.


Competition may have gone up to drive up prices because everyone wants a piece of the traffic. It could be anything. If you're not wanting to play the bidding war game, just pause that campaign for now and test something else.

Reactivate this campaign at a later date to see if things go back to normal.


Don't despair - like I said, you've done very well. This is not an easy game to play. I'm not insisting that you stick with pop - feel free to expand into less-volatile traffic types. But if cash flow is an issue that's stressing you out, then your priority should be to arrange for more money to come in - that's what I would do if I were you.



Amy

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