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Newbie on Mobile Pops - Let's Get Profitable! (18)

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My Panama offer is doing significantly better than the others. It's still got a -85%ROI, but there are a handful of placements that are getting most of the conversions. So, I've made a second campaign of JUST those placements to try and capitalize on it.

I'm looking on Mobidea for other offers in Panama on the same carrier to see if this is a good niche to target or if it's just this offer.

I've also made an account on PopAds to try a second traffic source.

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Hey Aff_mountain, how many conversions are you working with? It isn't a good idea to make a "Whitelist" of placements that only have 1 or 2 conversions, from experience they will end up losing more money.
Also I believe you should make strict budgets, and work with a plan, I see your India campaign has spend $130 with only 2 conversions (<$1 revenue). You could of saved a lot of money by working with a better budget here, If an offer doesn't convert with after 10x spend than it's very bad IMO.


Do you have an AM in Mobidea?
I usually don't follow the statistics shown by the network, the reason being these statistics may be skewed or favoring a affiliate that has already gone through the optimization process.
Therefore it is always good to keep Split-testing different offers, have a talk to your AM and ask for their top offer on your traffic type (pop) & your GEO..

With pop traffic is always good to try more than one source, maybe you find a much better ROI right of the start with popads..

This is because of competition, this means that there are more people who are buying/ bidding higher on these placements.

Hope this helps,

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I'm whitelisting based on 2 or more conversions. I know it's not a lot, but as of this morning my whitelist campaign has gotten 2 conversions for $1.14 in adspend. That's a 10%ROI, albeit a very small profit.


Yeah, I see that now. Until I started testing offers outside of India, that campaign was the only one that I'd gotten any conversions on at all. Combined with the good stats Mobidea shows for it, I figured I could spend some $$$, cut placements and possibly get closer to being profitable. But once I started testing other Geo's and carriers, I saw that it's actually pretty apparent from the start which campaigns have potential and which don't. Lesson learned. From here on out I'm going to stick to a hard budget of $20 for testing each offer. And maybe that's even too much, maybe i'll cut that down to the $10 Vortex recommends in the tutorial.[/QUOTE]


I do and she has been helpful. She has recommended some SMS Billing Pin Opt-In offers (I think these are called pin-submits?) for me to try. The payout is low so I assume they also do well without a lander.

Awesome, thanks for the tips optifyme. My account on PopAds appears to be live so I'll get to testing that ASAP.

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Great, this should give you much more opportunities to test. $10 is usually enough for low payout offers to see if they work or not. I'm Sure that Vortex (Amy) will give you advice on here soon!

Nice, I assume these placements are very low traffic? could work but they might not give you enough traffic to make a lot of profit.


Yes these are pin submit offers, or mobile content offers. They used to run great about 1-2 years ago, not sure how these offers are doing now but i'm sure there are some good ones out there. A lander always helps if your aggressive enough.

One of my first profitable campaigns was using PopAds, hopefully it works out well for you!

Also, I see you are not using a lander for your current offers, any reason why not?

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They are low traffic, and I notice that they also seem to be competitive. I had set a bid at $7.50 and was getting traffic, but then the traffic died off and I saw that in order to continue receiving traffic I needed to bid closer to $9. And checking again jsut now, to get the most traffic I need to bid $10.

The main reason is I was following The 40 day tutorial. These are very low payout offers, and it seems like maybe the extra step of clicking through a lander would kill my conversion rate. But, I don't know that, so I should test it. I have Adplexity and have dug in a little bit. I saw a few of the offers I tested running on PropellerAds, all direct-linked. I tested them but had no luck so I cut them off. Maybe I should see if I can find which exact placements they were on.

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Thanks for giving the tutorial your effort and attention!

Eek!

The trick to running these offers via direct-linking is to spend a little bit of money on testing each to find gems. There are a million other offers and not that many will convert well enough to stand a chance at being profitable after you do optimization. I'd MUCH rather see you spend less than more - assuming the payout was less than $1, $130 would have allowed you to test 13-26 offers, not 1. I talked about this at length in the posts linked to in the following post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post336436


The idea isn't to get the most amount of traffic possible - it's to get traffic of ACCEPTABLE quality, in order to give those offers a chance to convert.

Amounts lower than $2.33 are OK as long as you're not the lowest bidder - although there's typically not a whole lot of bot traffic in carrier mobile traffic, the amount is increasing. So it would be good to avoid being the lowest bidder and getting stuck with the crappy bot traffic.


I really wouldn't waste my time or money optimizing ANY of these offers.

Assuming they're all low-payout offers with payouts <$2, they've spent way too much money with way too few conversions. Please don't over-run tests next time. When direct-linking there's isn't a lot of room for optimization, i.e. basically you'd be counting on cutting stuff (placements, and traffic segments such as OSs, browsers, devices, etc.) to get from negative to positive ROI, and it takes money to identify stuff you can cut. So instead of wasting money on optimizing an offer from extremely negative ROI to green, you should use that money to test more offers instead, until you find an offer that converts well from the beginning (at least -50% ROI) BEFORE optimizing by cutting from negative ROI to green.

If you have your heart set on playing around with some of your current offers, at least pick the ONE that seems to be converting the best and try to optimize it. You won't likely be seeing profits - after all the cutting you'll probably not be left with much traffic - but it WILL provide you with the opportunity to learn. But PLEASE don't over-run ANY non-converting offer to the extent you have - $90+ without a single conversion should make anyone wince. I wouldn't spend over 10x payout on an offer without seeing conversions.


This is a very frequently-asked question from new people, i.e. "my AM told me the offer is converting VERY well for other affiliates - so if I'd just spend more money on testing it I should get more conversions!"

This is the biggest misconception. Evening assuming your AM or affiliate network isn't lying to you and that their stats are accurate (no offense to any affiliate network), you won't know WHERE or HOW the other affiliates are running the offer. More importantly, you don't know how much they're paying for the traffic. They may be running on Facebook paying a pretty penny for the traffic, when you're running pop which is the lowest-quality traffic in the hierarchy of paid traffic types, in which case you can't possibly expect to get remotely the same EPCs as those affiliates.

Without changing any campaign parameters, such as targeting or bid, it would be highly unlikely for a non-converting campaign to suddenly start converting well. So, don't fall in love with camps or offers. If an offer you're direct-linking to doesn't start off with a bang, ditch it without a backwards glance.


Usually yes, this should be the case. This is why it's important to test bids once you find a promising offer - because each bid will trigger traffic from different placements.


It's not that I don't recommend doing distributed delivery. It's just that I'm personally impatient and like my tests to finish as quickly as possible.

If you have limited funds and want to stretch them out to see a better representation of campaign performance over time like you said. If you're planning on doing dayparting eventually, then that would be a good way to collect data.

If you're concerned about running during times when the conversion rate is lowest, try to avoid sleeping hours in the target country - which normally would be between midnight and maybe 7 or 9am.

Panama is a good geo that can convert well for the right offer, and competition is not huge. However - it doesn't have a whole lot of traffic.

But for a newbie looking to learn how to set up and optimize camps, it may be the perfect geo.

For such a small geo, popads isn't the best traffic source. Zeropark would be a better choice. But feel free to test both sources.

Making a campaign with a list of selective placements is called "whitelisting". This approach usually doesn't work too well on pop sources - in most cases, you'll find that once you set up the whitelist camp, you'll get a lot less traffic volume than what you were getting before in the original campaign from the same placements.

But don't let me discourage you from doing your own testing! In the worst case scenario you'll see this phenomenon in action. In best case scenario it may be fruitful for you.

Another tactic I sometimes used: I would blacklist (i.e. pause) all the biggest placements that are NOT the ones I'm wanting to whitelist. That way I'd be blacklisting in reality, but essentially I'd be whitelisting - by targeting mainly the good placements, but at the same time a bunch of smaller placements that may or may not be good. Sometimes this will give better results than whitelisting. So feel free to try this for yourself sometime.


Glad to hear!

It's OK to splurge on campaigns when you're a newbie - everyone needs to start somewhere! If anything, I'd much rather you're psychologically ready to spend money on campaigns, than watching your budget like a hawk and expecting every campaign to be profitable and holding your breath all the time, overdoing the thrift.

Having said that - we need to learn to spend the money wisely as well - since the end goal would be to make some sort of profit. Of every 10 camps you launch, you'll get maybe 1-2 profitable, so keeping testing budget low while maximizing profits for the winning camps will be necessary if consistent profits are what you want.


Because most 1/2-click offers require little or no pre-selling to convert, people don't usually use landers.

If would recommend to just test more offers using direct-linking, find a couple good offers to use to learn the optimization process, and then move onto using landers for other types of offers (e.g. sweepstakes). For 1/2-click offers, not a lot of suitable landers can be found in spy tools. You'd have better luck testing your own designs, which will require more experience and knowledge on what lander elements are effective in getting visitors to convert. But if you'd like to try your hand at it, I've provided some tips in this post:

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


Thanks for starting this follow-along! I look forward to seeing further progress.



Amy

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Thanks for all the feedback Amy, it is much appreciated.

My Panama offer got rejected from PropellerAds this afternoon for "malware". Annoying, but I'm ready to try some different traffic sources anyway.

My AM recommended 3 pin submit offers, 2 direct opt-ins and 4 sweepstakes, so I'm getting them added to my offers spreadsheet and into Voluum. I'll test this round on PopAds and Zeropark, spending no more than $15 testing each offer.

I've ripped 4 sweeps landers from Adplexity to try. These sweeps offers are lower payout ($1.20 or less) so should I test them direct linked too?

I've got a bunch to do and 2 new traffic sources to figure out!

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How exciting!!

And yes - for direct-linking, keeping the test budget low is KEY. $15 is OK. Personally I wouldn't spend more than 5-10x payout.

For sweeps - I wouldn't try direct-linking them because it would be HIGHLY unlikely to get profitable without using landers (unless the sweeps offer already comes with a lander built-in - like present the visitor with a survey with multiple questions before showing them the opt-in form).

Do feel free to test multiple traffic sources, but personally I don't see much point in testing the same offers and landers on more than one traffic source. I would rather spend the money once and test on a single source, then scale anything promising to the other one. (I would suggest using PopAds for testing and Zeropark for scaling.)

Looking forward to seeing how you get on!



Amy

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That's such a cute comment!

These posts may help:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-for-beginners

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...re-Experienced




Amy

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Nice! Those carrier campaigns look like a case of so-far-so-good!

The wifi ones - not so much. For future reference: For carrier-billing offers that also accept wifi traffic, you'd want to test carrier traffic first, and only test wifi IF the carrier camp(s) looks like a winner. This is because in most/all cases, carrier traffic will get a simpler conversion flow - e.g. 1/2-click - whereas wifi traffic will get a more cumbersome conversion flow such as PIN submit. So if the simpler flow doesn't convert well, then chances are the more complicated flow will not either. No need to waste money twice!

So you can pause the wifi camps if you haven't already.

For smaller geos try Zeropark. For carrier traffic you usually won't want to run in tiny geos, precisely for the reason of lack of available traffic. So in the future, try to avoid carriers that have too little traffic. For now though, I would suggest continuing to optimize the current carrier camps, just for the practice. Once you've optimized at least a couple of camps, I would suggest to move onto sweeps+landers. Direct-linking to carrier-billing offers has become quite difficult to make consistent profits from - so treat this model as a learning tool only.


Assuming we're talking about low-payout offer in the <$2 range, $10 sounds about right. $50 is too much.

I wouldn't spend more than 5-10x payout's worth of traffic on testing a single carrier-billing offer when direct-linked. The trick is to test a TON of these offers on low budget, identify the gems, and scale. If an offer doesn't look like a winner from the very beginning, ditch it - there's a million and a half of these offers, and not a lot of gems around nowadays so spending too much on individual offers will zap your test budget unnecessarily.


This is a common problem. Mobile companies go through changes all the time - they merge, un-merge, change hands, etc. etc. Just google like you suggested and look up the history of the mobile carrier to find other names they've operated under. Wikipedia is where I usually go for this information.


PopAds is sometimes screwy in the way they classify carrier vs. wifi traffic. I've written about this in great detail in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...esting!-Part-1


Don't. AMs always aim to be helpful, but in the end your stats are the reality. Just analyze stats and optimize accordingly.


Can't hurt at all!

If you want to try your hand at adult, I would strongly suggest that you start a separate follow-along thread and specify the word "adult" somewhere in the title to alert Matuloo. He's the expert in the adult vertical, so if he provides feedback to your FA you'll have the best chances of success.


Boarding a flight now - will answer during transfer.



Amy

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Hi aff_mountain,

I have read your follow along with great interest and I will keep following it. I recognize a lot of the same issues I run into. Amy’s answers are of great value as well and form - at some points - a nice complementary shell for my own follow along (for which I am gonna give an update tonight again) because I get answers on questions I haven’t asked myself yet. Please feel free to read my follow along too, along with all of Amy’s tips and guidelines. We will crack this beast, I’m sure of that

All the best,
—Stuart

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AFAIK popads doesn't provide conversion postback. However, I don't have a habit of posting conversions to traffic networks, so maybe you know something I don't?

How did you manage to get that set up?



Amy

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What does that mean? PopAds "conversion tracking" page says the postback URL is good for all your campaigns.

Looking at it again, though, I do notice it says it requires the "conversionValue" token, which I didn't include in my link, so that could be the issue.

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Now that I'm looking at it again, yes the conversion postback url should be fine for all campaigns. Been dealing with quite a lot of traffic sources lately, my bad
Anyway, i you'd like to pass the conversion value to popads then your configuration should look like this http://prntscr.com/iki4o2

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Oh man, I'm hitting a wall lately.

I've been downloading and trying to fix up landers from Adplexity, but none of them function correctly when I upload them! I've run into this with 4 landers so far. Buttons don't work or the "spinner" doesnt spin when I tap it or in one case I can't get the "Welcome ___ user" model to go away. I'm going to download some more and if I can't get any of them to work correctly I'll just buy some custom landers.

One thing I'm curious about, I see several of these landers using "Base64" to encrypt image url's in the source code. But it's weird stuff, like the FB thumbs up icon... Is this a way of concealing things that you don't want google to see? Or is there another reason to encode simple images like this?

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You likely just need to go through a tutorial on jquery. If you still can't make it work, consider starting a new thread where you share the lander files to get advice from expert coders. It really would be to your advantage to learn basic coding.

Custom landers is not a good idea with you're first starting out and have no idea what works and what doesn't. Tried and tested landers being used by many people would be what you'd want to start with. Once you find a good offer you can test custom landers. Otherwise, you'd be testing unproven landers with unproven offers - a catch-22 situation (where if you don't get good results, you won't know whether it's the lander or offer that is responsible - or it may be both).

Converting images into Base64 has the benefit of reducing loading speed. However, I HAVE seen people hide sneaky redirect code in there.



Amy

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Nice work Mountain,

Sounds like you're learning a lot and trying heaps of different things, just a matter of time till you see some decent green i reckon

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Awesome work Mountain

Gotta admit ripping landers is one of the things i hate the most.
I'm actually going through the process of hiring someone to do it for me (as well as other coding things)!

And I know what you mean about Popads.
Great traffic but the volume is lowish.

But I think it is an awesome place to test things quick with decent quality traffic.

The way I see it, once you know what has potential you have to try everything you can think of to increase the $/visitor value so
* You afford the more expensive traffic on popads
* You can get decent roi on other networks.

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