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Success In AM In 2018 - A Newbie Follow Along Adventure (44)

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Hey everyone,

This is my Follow Along for Amy's 40 Day Newbie Tutorial. I'm not really what you'd call a newbie however, i had a really committed attempt at AM a few years ago but could never crack quite figure it out, and now after a bit of a break want to bring it back to basics and just focus on relearning the skills and mindsets required to create a system where i can create profitable campaigns.

My goal out of doing this is to be able to create and optimize some initially unprofitable campaigns into profitable campaigns, no matter how small they may be so that i can boost my confidence + experience and be able to move onto bigger, better and more profitable and stable campaigns in other areas!

The purpose of this follow along is to...
- Help keep me accountable
- Give me somewhere to express my thoughts and problems/concerns
- Get some helpful feedback from fellow STM members (and i've noticed Amy is offering a tonne of advice and posting regularly in active follow alongs which is a huge positive which im sure people are very grateful for )
- Give other people a chance to get to know me and open up possible networking opportunities, masterminds or friendships.
- Hopefully help others out as they learn from my trial and errors.

My long term goal is to be making a fairly consistent mid $x,xxx - $xx,xxx profit per day in affiliate marketing, working to my own schedule and never have to work a restrictive, prison like 9-5 full time job EVER AGAIN whilst being able to live in financial abundance and living a somewhat nomadic life.

Thanks for reading and i hope to keep this updated regularly, now on with with the show!

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All the best Captain Calypso! I'm working my way through the program myself, so it will be good to follow along with others going through the same struggle. See you at the top!

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Good luck captain calypso!

Keep this thread updated with details so we can give you practical advice on your campaigns.

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Hey Peter - Thanks buddy, and you too! Yeah, i'm also keen to see how you and the others doing the newbie guide go as well, we should all get a lot out of it

Thanks Bbrock - As soon as i start running traffic ill start posting some stats and questions, appreciate your support

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DAY 1 & 2

So i've just worked my way through days 1 and 2, not much to report, just laying the ground work setting up Voluum and applying for offers.

Loving the guides very much so far, Amy provides a lot of detail which is fantastic!

My schedule is a bit sporadic so i may have days where i cant do anything and other days where i can smash through a few lessons, i'll keep this updated as much as i can though.

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Good job taking action!

That is the best way to learn.

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You will learn from your actions a lot good luck

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Don't worry we won't hold you accountable for not updating often enough!

Starting a follow-along is one of the best things you can do to learn how to optimize your campaigns. All the best - and I'll be keeping an eye on this thread!



Amy

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Take action. Take action. Take action.

All the best

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Just a hint about Mobidea - when you apply for an offer, just ask their support via chat to get the offers approved. It's usually approved in less than five minutes.

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Thanks Block Guy - ill give that a go next time.

CAMPAIGN UPDATE.

So after yesterdays performance i paused campaigns 1 & 2 (Nepal and Nigeria) and reran campaign 3 (Argentina) since it didnt spend much of its budget, along with a few more campaigns, here are the stats.

Campaign - Argentina
Number of Offers - 1
Payout - $0.48
Conversions - 1
Adspend - $8.09
CPM - $2.33
Impressions - 3,474
Kill Whitelist calculator result? - KILL

Campaign - Belarus
Number of Offers - 1
Payout - $0.43
Conversions - 1
Adspend - $10.09
CPM - $3.06
Impressions - 3,296
Kill Whitelist calculator result? - KILL

Campaign - Egypt
Number of Offers - 3
Payout - $0.49, $0.46 & $0.35
Conversions - 0
Adspend - $20.03
CPM - $2.34
Impressions - 8,559
Kill Whitelist calculator result? - KILL

So im happy to see some conversions on the board but so far none of these offers are showing any potential, so i'll move on to some more.

Just to make sure i've understood correctly - the basic strategy we're running here is to throw some high quality traffic (using high cpm bids) at a huge number of offers knowing full well that most of them will be flops, but there will probably be a few that will show some promise (>-50% ROI straight off the bat) that we then have a decent shot at optimising into something profitable, is that about right?

So my thoughts on this are that we'd need to get systematic about this and just be testing offers EN MASSE, sending $5-$10 worth of traffic to 100's of different offers and cutting the majority that don't show potential.

Would it be worth going hard with this strategy til i find something with potential or keep progressing in the guide (and move onto landers) after testing a few more offers?

Thx for reading!

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Ok - i know i just posted an update a few hours ago but ive just run some more GEO's and offers and theyve hit their budgets so i'll report on them now.

Campaign - India Airtel
Number of Offers - 3
Payout - $0.45, $0.53 & $0.42
Conversions - 0
Adspend - $17.19
CPM - $2.33
Impressions - 7,377
Kill Whitelist calculator result? - KILL

Campaign - India Airtel, Vodaphone & Idea
Number of Offers - 1
Payout - $0.95
Conversions - 0
Adspend - $12.24
CPM - $2.33
Impressions - 5,252
Kill Whitelist calculator result? - KILL

Campaign - India Vodaphone
Number of Offers - 1
Payout - $0.33
Conversions - 0
Adspend - $10.94
CPM - $2.33
Impressions - 4,695
Kill Whitelist calculator result? - KILL

Should i keep doing what im doing or could there be something wrong?

I've been running ad delivery standard which is great cause you get results fast but could there be any benefit to running it distributed over 24 hours?

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I got the impression from the guide that the campaigns we are starting with are to help familiarize us with tracking traffic through Voluum, and creating new campaigns. The goal isn't to make a lot of money from such low yield offers. We might be introduced to other networks later on.

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Hey Peter - Ok, yeah i think you're right, i guess if this was still a highly profitable niche there'd be more people in it, lol.

I was however hoping to at least get some more conversions to work with and do some minor optimising as so far i havnt had anywhere near enough to do that, might just have to try a few more things i guess.

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Hey,

So ive tested almost all the Mobidea offers that fit our criteria (less than $1.50 payouts, soi or doi, game or video, tier 2/3 countries) and havnt got anything anywhere near -50% roi (nothing greater than -95% roi), most have 0 conversions which is quite frustrating cause i dont mind if im nowhere near profitable but not getting any data to work with sucks haha.

So im just reaching out to Amy or any of the others mods (or anyone else really) for advice on which direction would be best to go next. I dont care if im not profitable but not having any data at all to optimise with and learn from is a real pain so that is my #1 goal right now. I think my best option will be one of...

1 - Apply for new affiliate networks that offers similar offers so i can keep testing this approach using propellarads direct linking.
2 - Apply for different pop traffic sources and keep testing direct linking of the same Mobidea offers.
3 - Forget the video/game niche and go for good ol sweeps and pops (do these still convert alright on pops in 2018?) in tier 3 countries with payouts of less than $1.50. Rip landers and find offers from spy tools and go from there.
4 - Possibly app installs with pops (or maybr display but i know this ads a new level of complexity.

Or anything else you think would have a better chance of getting more conversions (and lessons)?

Truely appreciate any input right now as this lack of data is not a nice spot to be in, thanks

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How many offers have you tested? It sounds like you've tested quite a few. If you still couldn't find even one that does at least -50% ROI, that's not a good sign at all...perhaps the carrier-billing landscape has declined a lot faster than I had thought. That was not the case even a couple of months ago.

What I will do in the next few days, is do a test on smartlinks from several networks that have lots of carrier-billing offers, to see which networks+geos+carriers have potential, and post the results.

PropellerAds has quality traffic, so I seriously doubt they're the reason for the lack of conversions.

I would suggest choosing from the following options (while I do this testing to find out if the state of things are really so bad that my method can no longer uncover suitable offers):

1)Learn to run landers (by moving onto the landers part of the lessons). And yes, sweeps are still working! Or you can pick any major vertical you see running good volume based on Adplexity or other spy tools. As for app installs - I haven't run those in a while so don't know whether there are good apps out. If you want to test app installs on pop, make sure they are general enough that the general audience will be interested enough to download.

2)Test more 1/2-click offers from another network.

Regarding mobile display traffic - I wouldn't suggest starting there now. The general consensus is that it's difficult to turn a profit on that traffic nowadays. I'm trying to find out more about that - if I find anything I'll make a post or maybe even do a case study on what can run well on this traffic type. But in the meantime, I'd advise staying away until further notice.

Apologies for the delay in reply - will try harder to stay on top of things! You're an action-taker. Very few people would bother testing that many offers (you mentioned 30 as a start). Keep up that attitude and you have nowhere to go but up.



Amy

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I've tested a lot of offers as well and haven't had any success; I'm not the only one struggling with seeing any results!

What I do find frustrating, is that some of the offers DO have the potential to be very successful, except when I look at them further, a lot of the time they have poor quality images or text, or they are designed in a way that is going to guarantee they fail.

Keep up the good work, you'll see success eventually.

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Thanks Captain. I am new to this beautiful world. Just joined STM forum after getting advice from my dear friend. Currently I am going to start from 0. I don't know much about AM. Just started my journey by reading your post. Getting lot of positive vibes

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One question ... did you run a BOT test? The situation with BOTs, even in the 3G space got way worse lately, so running a bot test is absolutely crucial, bots wont convert.

Another question, did you buy just 3G traffic or wifi too? Wifi WONT convert well with these carrier billing offers, don't even bother trying.

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https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post338684

Please stay tuned!



Amy

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Definitely keep running this camp if only to get some practice with optimization!

I have a couple urgent tasks to take care of today, but will try to start testing either today or tomorrow. Depending on the results, I'll likely need to make my criteria of what an "acceptable" campaign is, less stringent. i.e. Accept lower traffic volume, lower ROI etc. just so members can get some practice before moving onto testing with landers.


Thanks for saying so! This is exactly what we're trying to achieve when guiding follow-alongs. The learning curve is steep and a ton of testing will be involved, but eventually if you don't give up, you'll get there. And we'll provide as much help as we can along the way.



Amy

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Since you've decided to use this camp for practice, let's learn as much as we can from it!

If you'd post some stats, we can look over them together:

-Placement stats since the start, sorted by descending visits

-Placement stats since the start, sorted by descending conversions

-OS stats

-Browser stats

-Device stats

-Any other stats you feel we should look at

(Best way to post screenshots into posts is by uploading them to imgur.com and copying and pasting the bbcode url here. The vbulletin attachment upload is so hit-and-miss I wouldn't recommend using it.)

Landers will definitely allow you to reach bigger profits and more easily, and sweeps is a great choice for newbies - lots of offers and landers available.




Amy

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Hey Amy,

Sorry for the slow reply, just been busy wit my day job and going through some of the newbie lessons.

Yeah, that'd be good, hopefully there's a few lessons for everyone to learn from in my data and experience. I'll share everything below, however ive also decided to stop running this one as there's just not the traffic available - i'm struggling to spend $10 a day and this just gets worse as i cut placements, so i cant see much value in depositing another $100 on Propellerads cause there's just not enough traffic. (If you suggest otherwise though and have any ideas i can definitely keep going with it though.)

https://imgur.com/87ux6hp

https://imgur.com/JhL6qN0

https://imgur.com/syFy6pT

https://imgur.com/y0j75rx

https://imgur.com/LNnsqy6

I'll just post the day by day stats so people can see how it's progressed over time.
https://imgur.com/ag3K0pZ

Thanks, yeah im just setting up my CDN now and will grab some landers very soon

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Hey everyone,

Just a quick update on where i've been and what i've been doing!

Basically i've decided to get into sweeps and pops in 2018 - reading around it seems that finding quality offers is the biggest issue but im guessing that the lower 'buzz' in this are of AM at the moment will mean lower CPM's and that i should be able to find some pockets of profit to gorge on

So in the last week i've....

- Signed up to 5 networks
- Done some spying around Adplexity
- Ripped, cleaned and uploaded a bunch of landers in my Geo of choice
- Setup all my offers and landers in Voluum

This took a little while as my day job of doom has taken up most of my time.

I've got 7 offers and 5 landers i was going to split test with, not sure if this is too much? My plan is to figure out which landers are converting best, cut the rest and and then use these to test as many offers as i can to find a real winner.

The biggest issue ive had the past few days is trying to get my landing page loading times down, and im trying to get this setup before i start running traffic so it's one less variable to factor in.

Here are the typical sort of loading times i'm getting from both pingdom and webpagetest.

https://imgur.com/VeCfOce

What would be a good speed to aim for? I've seen posts where people were getting below 100ms so i want to try and get my loading time down some more. I've been able to follow most of Amy's advice from Day 27 (Optimising landers for speed), i did have some trouble moving the CSS into the index file and also moving JS to the bottom of the page, but will keep working on it.

Is there anyway to figure out if my loading times are coming from poorly coded landers or from my S3+Cloudflare+NS1 setup?

Will hopefully have traffic and data in the coming days

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Goodness! Don't know how I missed your post from 10 days ago - profuse apologies in order! Thanks so much for providing the stats! I know you've moved onto sweeps, but let's still learn as much as we could from them, since you've already paid for them. I will look over them later and jot down some thoughts. But first, let me reply to your post from today.

Good start! Please be reminded though that you should only use conversions from a single offer to cut landers. What I suggested in the tutorial is start by rotating all offers, waiting until one offer reaches 2 conversions, then pause the rest and just use conversions from this offer to cut landers.


500 ms load time is good!

As for a good speed to aim for - obviously the faster the better. If you have a lot of lander elements, obviously the loading speed would be slower, but then the extra elements may make your page convert better. So, rather than working towards an "ideal" loading time (which doesn't exist) by deleting stuff that may affect conversion rates, just do your best to make the existing lander load as quickly as possible without having to butcher features.


I'm not technically-inclined either. Wished I could provide more advice than I have in that area!

But if you'd spend some time on researching further, I bet you would do better than I could. Google is your friend - all the information is out there. A+ for effort!

If you really can't figure something out, make a post to ask - there are tons of members here that know more about this stuff than I do.


Hm! Good question!

For DNS, you can google "dns speed test" and try various tools - like this one:

https://www.ultratools.com/tools/dnsHostingSpeed

I don't know how long is considered long. You can test a few authority sites and compare. Here's the DNS speed for our forum:



For S3 - in your S3 bucket settings, set the region to a location that matches one of the locations that are available for the page load speed tool you're using. For example, for pingdom, here are the locations you can choose to test from:



I don't remember what regions are available for S3. If there's no overlap between pingdom and S3, consider using another speed checker, such as webpagetest.org.

That way, you can test the S3 url of the webpage, to get the actual loading speed that would be experienced by visitors accessing your lander from a local server. Jot down this value. Then, test the CDN url of the same webpage, and compare the 2 loading time values - I'm guessing they should be similar.

So, if your DNS speed isn't excessive, your S3 url speed (when tested by a server close to the bucket's region) is reasonable (preferably under 1s and never over 2s), and your CDN url's loading speed is comparable to that of the S3 url - then you should be fine.

If you DO perform this test, could you please post some results? I haven't actually done such a comparison. Would be an interesting exercise for sure.



Amy

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Hey Amy,

Thanks for much for your response!

- Of course, if you want any more details from that original direct linking campaign happy to reveal it all as im not running it anymore, perhaps some lessons for others in it

- Ok, yes, ive read ahead now and realised you've already covered that in the lessons, i've run some traffic overnight and will hopefully have one of the offers get 2 or more conversions and then i can use that to test out as many landers as i can find.

- Oh cool, ok, i thought 500ms was slow for some reason. I've managed to optimise my CDN enough that im comfortable with the loading times, and also am consolidating a lander ripping + optimising system to increase loading times as much as possible. Right now after using a few speed tools im quite comfortable with my setup so will progress onto mass testing of offers and landers.

Also one thing i noticed is that entry alert popups on landers can mess up the results on pingdom, webpagetest, etc and show a much slower load time, so i just create a version of the lander without that script and the loading times recorded are much lower and probably more accurate.

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Moving forward im going to try and keep these journal entries...

- More frequent (daily ideally)
- Shorter
- Orderly

As i think they're too long and all over the place, i just want a place where i can report whats going on, what my next step is and any specific question i might have, and hopefully this will make these posts a lot easier and enjoyable for YOU to read and also offer any advice you might have. So without further adieu...

Campaign 1 - Germany Sweeps - WIFI

Spend: $25.63
Revenue: $0
Profit/ROI: -$25.63 (-100%)

Campaign 2 - Germany Sweeps - 3G

Spend: $18.77
Revenue: $6.17
Profit/ROI: -$12.60 (-67%)

My Thoughts - Not a bad start i guess, 2 conversions so far on 2 separate offers but they're both on 3G. I'm currently following Amy's advice and trying to narrow down the best offer (2 conversions on one offer) that i can use to test landing pages. I'm testing 5 landing pages and 4 offers right now and also have the bot checker setup so am at the stage where i just need a bit more data to find the best offer.

My final thoughts are that i need a lot more data to work with and when i do start on another GEO i should make a lot more effort to get lower payout Tier 2/3 GEO offers and landers as Germany is definitely on the pricier side to test.

Questions - I guess right now my strategy would be just to keep gathering data and wait until i have enough data to pick an offer to work with, is there anything else i should be doing now or thinking about?

- At what point should i cut wifi traffic out and just focus on 3G? How would you approach this statistically?

Thanks for reading!

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Campaign 2 - German Sweeps - 3G

Spend: $27.13
Revenue: $2.81
Profit/ROI: -$24.32 (-90%)

My Thoughts - So i decided to stop the wifi half of this campaign as it had 0 conversions VS 3 for the 3G campaign. The second day hasnt performed as well as the first, with only 1 conversion and 33% more adspend, which is a bummer.

So far i've got 3 conversions in total on 3 different offers with 3 different landing pages which isnt that helpful. All the offers payout around $3 and have had about $20 adspend each so far. I'm not sure whether to cut them or not if they reach $30 adspend with 1 conversion, im just chasing that up in another thread now.

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthread.php?39260-Day-28-31-How-to-Test-Landers-to-Find-Winner&p=340021&viewfull=1#post340021

Questions - ​None at the moment.

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True story. And I use the same approach as you too when measuring load time (i.e. disable the alerts temporarily).


Do note here that we're not even trying to find the best offer at this point - we're just trying to find an offer that converts well enough to give your conversions for cutting landers, without breaking the bank.

Which is why we're not using stats tools at all - just run until an offer shows promise - and our criterion here for a promising offer, is the first offer to reach 2 conversions without excessive spending.

Once we have such an offer, we can generate conversions from it to help us cut landers.

Once we have a decent winning lander, we would then go back to test offers for real.

You probably understand all this already, but I wanted to clarify just in case.


True!

Since the 3G campaign is doing better, consider using that camp to test landers. Once you have a winning lander you can use that to test offers on wifi again. You WILL need to spend a lot more money on cutting placements for wifi compared to 3G, because there's so much more traffic AND bot percentages are higher, but if you'd invest the money into cutting placements for wifi you can potentially enjoy more profits as well once your camp goes green. DO run a bot test for both 3G and wifi camps to identify and cut placements that have high percentages of bots.


Implement the bot test - it won't affect the performance of your campaign. You can eliminate bot-infested placements even now.


I get similar questions from a LOT of newbies, and I'm glad you asked this because it's so crucial to understand when to use stats tools to cut the inferior, and when not to.

You would ONLY cut the inferior to identify the best IF you can only show ONE candidate to each visitor - examples: Offer, Lander. To make this decision you would want to use a stat calculator to make sure you have enough data such that the "probability of being best" of the superior candidate is 90%+ (preferably 95%+) compared to the inferior candidate.

This is NOT the case with stuff like 3G vs. wifi, or IOS vs. Android, or Chrome vs. Firefox - for these, you would want to keep ALL segments that are profitable - the more profitable segments you target, the more profits you make. (By targeting more segments, you'll likely get traffic for cheaper too, and likely more traffic volume will be assigned - as some traffic sources will prioritize campaigns according to how many segments are being targeted.)

Making that kind of choice would be like looking in your wallet, finding a $100 bill and a $50 bill, and trying to decide which one to throw away - when the obvious answer is you should keep both.


Good call! After you find a good lander, you can choose to try wifi again if you like. It WILL require a larger budget to get it profitable, but you can potentially make a lot more money from wifi than from 3G just due to the traffic volume.

Will go answer your other post now. Keep grinding - you just got started and it's a case of so far so good!




Amy

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May someone explain me how can I make a post?

Thanks a lots !!

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Didn't you just make one? You've done it correctly!

Or did you mean how to create a thread? It's simple - just go to the subforum you're wanting to make the post in, and click the "+Post New Thread" button:



That's it!

(Apologies to captain calypso for hijacking the thread!)



Amy

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Thanks for clarifying about the testing process Amy - it sounds like this stage is meant to be just a rough and quick way to find a decent offer that converts 'good enough' so we can get down to testing landers.

Ok, yeah, thats exactly what i was thinking, re - find a winning combo then run them on wifi again whilst cutting bots aggressively.

Im still trying to get my head around some of the statistical side of things but i'll keep rereading your posts, ask questions and hopefully things will become clearer over time.

$$$ Today Results $$$ (GREEN!)

Campaign 3 - German Sweeps - 3G - New Offers

Spend: $21.35
Revenue: $0
Profit/ROI: -$21.35 (-100%)

Campaign 4 - German Sweeps - 3G - Single Placement With Original Offers

Spend: $15.66
Revenue: $18.17
Profit/ROI: $2.51 (16%)

My Thoughts - Ok, so here's whats happened. Campaign 2 from the previous day wasnt generating enough conversions (at least 2 conversions for one offer after around 7X/8X offer payout) so i decided to pause this and duplicate the entire campaign but run some new offers instead, this is campaign 3 with the new offers, as you can see it's not performing so great.

Now campaign 4 is interesting. After i paused campaign 2 i noticed that 2/3 of the conversions i had were from the one single placement, so just as an experiment i duplicated campaign 2 and set it up so that it would only receive traffic from this placement (aka whitelisted it). I know its best practice to blacklist and that im supposed to be testing for offers but it was too tempting not to try.

So i woke up this morning and found that my whitelisted campaign 4 was in the green with 6 conversions!!! My first profits since coming back to AM and a nice little win under my belt and the reassurance and evidence that it's possible and that i can do it, fuel on the fire This placement has over 50K traffic available according to my traffic source so i'll see how much damage i can do with it.

I'll keep this whitelisted campaign to the side however and not lose sight of the bigger picture, which is improving my funnel (offers and landers) so that i can make profit off HEAPS of placements, not just 1 lucky one i found.

Questions - So today ive had 6 conversions come in compared to 3 over the last few days and now i have a bit more data to work with. One offer has finally stood out with 4 conversions (the others are 2,2 and 1) HOWEVER most of these have come from my whitelisted campaign using 1 placement.

So my question is, would i be best to just run with this offer and use it as my control variable to test a bunch of landing pages even though it didn't really convert well on any other placements? (neither did any of the other offers) My thoughts are yes.

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Do not take this as the ONLY rule to go by. Running BL campaigns will generally allow you to run higher volumes and possibly also profits. But WL campaigns are also a valid approach to running campaigns, especially in case you see a low amount of HQ placements in the mix ... in such cases it's actually a wise decision to target just these via a WL and big very high for them and waive any caps.

You can confirm this yourself, run all offers for one more day, if that particular offers still shows better or at least the same performance as the others, you can use it as a benchmark ... this way, you will have one les variable to worry about.

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Very nice!! You have every reason to be proud! It's not easy coming back into the industry at this time, and after ALL that time. And you're seeing your first greens in just over a month - so far so good!


The "try not to cut too much traffic while you're testing so you can get testing done faster" is only a very general "rule".

The fact that every situation is different is exactly what made that step-by-step 40-day tutorial so difficult to write. In the end, out of consideration for the fact that most of my audience would be very green newbies, I had to chose simplicity over efficiency, i.e. establish rules that would apply in more cases than not. However, I've also stated a very important reminder time and again - and I'll repeat that here: Once you have some experience, learn to analyze your particular situation and make decisions accordingly.

Although the ultimate goal is to maximize daily profits, in the interim there will be a series of other, smaller goals that would lead up to that ultimate goal. It is important that you realize what the next such "smaller goal" is at any point in time, focus on achieving that - and make campaign decisions accordingly.

Let's take this particular case as an example: Your next goal would be to find a winning lander, ideally as quickly and for as cheaply as possible. By using traffic from all placements, the testing speed would be maximized, but so will the cost. By using traffic from only the best placements (or another type/types of traffic segments), the testing speed may be hampered, but the cost would be minimized, i.e. you'd get the most bang for your buck.

And this is where your decision on what route to take (or where in between the 2 extremes illustrated above), would depend on your particular situation. Examples:

-Cashflow: Let's say cash flow is a potential issue for you - in this case you may choose to save on budget as a higher priority than to maximize testing speed. If however you have a comfortable budget to work with, then you may choose to maximize testing speed instead.

-Traffic Volume: Let's say traffic volume of the geo+whatever you're targeting, is small - in that case you'd want to avoid cutting placements to further restrict that volume. If however you're getting a ton of traffic from a ton of placements, then it would be wise to zero-in on the highest-ROI placements (or other traffic segments) to avoid losing excessive amounts of money.


In your particular situation, you've found a high-CR placement that's giving you enough traffic volume to test landers in a reasonable amount of time - which serves your next goal. This is fantastic! Keep doing that until you get enough conversions to cut down to a winning lander.

After that, you can use the same placement to test offers. Keep in mind though, that when you only use one placement to test offers, that the performance may not be an accurate representation of the entire inventory. But in most instances I wouldn't imagine this to be a big problem - because offers you'd promote on pop traffic would be broad offers that cater to the general audience anyways. I'm just listing it as a potential concern.

Then, when you've found a promising lander+offer combination, you may want to target all placements again to see if more of the placements would be profitable then.


I'm really happy for you - not even mainly about the green, but just on seeing how you're becoming more confident about making your own decisions and getting less dependent on the 40-day tutorial. Looking forward to seeing further progress!



Amy

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Thanks Matuloo! Yeah, that makes sense when i think about it, i guess it comes down to what is profitable at the end of the day.

Yeah, ive ended up going with that offer as it had a few more conversions, good to see a stand out winner for a change.

Thanks as always for the encouragement and timely advice Amy, you've made a few good points here and the one that stands out for me right now is that every situation is different and that i should remove the training wheels and get comfortable making decisions based on the different situations (and not go for the one size fits all newbie approach).

In all honesty i had just started running a new RON campaign to test my landing pages but you've convinced me that in this case i'd be best to use my one high CVR placement - after all im not here to scale, im here to optimise my LP's + Offers and once i've found the highest converting ones THEN i can open the floodgates and use RON traffic. So ive paused that campaign i just launched and changed the targeting to focus on the one placement, i hope it can handle the extra testing budget im using on it

Thank you, yes, im feeling more confident and have a much better idea of what im doing than just a week or two ago, keen to see how things progress over the coming days, weeks and months!

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Sounds good captain!

I especially like the goals you've put in your signature!

You could even make posts in the "Revenue Milestones" and "Green Campaigns" subforums and linking your goals to those posts in your signature.

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...nts-and-Awards

Up up and away we go!



Amy

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Thanks Amy - i might do that once i get some more of my goals ticked off.

Hey everyone...so finally an Update!

The last few days i was meant to be split testing a new selection of landing pages with my best performing offer so i can narrow down to the best lander and use that to find the best offer out there.

BUT....

Disaster. Less than 24 hours after starting my landing page split test my campaign was suspended by my traffic source due to malware. Turns out Chrome had flagged my URL with the dreaded red screen of death "Deceptive site ahead" because they think my site might..."Try to trick visitors into sharing personal info or download software". So to counter this i purchased another URL, switched all the links out and was up and running with a clean domain however the next morning AGAIN, suspended and "Deceptive site ahead" warning...

My biggest issue isnt the site getting flagged, if it happened once every 2 weeks i can work with that, but it was suspended in well under 24 hours after being changed which will become an issue if i need a few new urls every single day. My initial thoughts are that it has something to do with my new landing pages (perhaps some sort of anti ripping code to sabotage other affiliates who rip the lander?) I'm curently trying to sort this out here in this thread - https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post340688

This is very frustrating as my data for the last few days is useless as well as being very much unprofitable as i dont know how long i was sending traffic to the red screen of death before my campaign was suspended. Im not a technical person and i cant find any good answers from google so i feel like this is gonna be a time consuming problem which may take some patience.

Will update you all and hopefully i'll be back online very soon.

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I've been watching the discussion in your other thread - have you made progress in your experimentation?

Fortunately for me, I haven't really experienced the same - I believe it's because I host my lander domains with an authority site of mine. Unfortunately for the rest of the members, I can't share experience in this area, as I don't have any. I can only speculate and provide what I believe may be potential solutions:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post339714

In the meantime I'll see if I can find out more information from veteran affiliates...




Amy

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Hey Amy - yeah i was able to sort this out for now, hasnt been a problem for over a week now so fingers crossed and see how we go

Reflection
So it's been about a week since i last posted and lots has been happening!

- I've finally got my mastermind going and it's been really great so far. I've kept it super small on purpose and been very picky about who to bring on board and its paid off. We have a group call once a week to just chat about whatever we're struggling with and also skype chat for day to day stuff. It's great to be able to talk through problems or frustrations that we're having and also to get someone else's perspective on things cause this industry can get very lonely sitting at home, and you cant really chat about this stuff with family and friends cause they'll have no idea what you're on about.

- I'm currently working on a large Tier 2/3 Geo with cheap traffic and low payout offers which has been great as i've got a heap of cheap data to work with. I've followed Amy guidelines and tested for an initial testing offer which i've used to find the best performing lander, and now im just collecting some more offers to run a mega offer split test using my winning lander.

This has been going well and i've been learning a lot - this campaign originally started in the -80% ROI to -70% ROI and ive slowly been working this down by testing lots of landers and just yesterday i got it down to -20% ROI using my best performing lander and a few placement cuts which was fantastic. The only problem is this campaign got suspended due to some redirect issues, and now after duplicating everything and restarting its sitting at around -45% ROI this morning... hoping if i run it a bit longer it will average out and go back down to -20% ROI. Currently finalising some new offers to split test with so will get that going in the next day or two.

So overall it's been a bit up and down, endless days and nights ripping and setting up landers and campaigns, dealing with flagged URL's, suspended campaigns and hunting down more offers, but overall i feel i've learnt a lot and its just a matter of time now til i can get a campaign of the green variety going

Question: Just one thing i am keen to figure out, how do we account for inconsistent campaign performance? As i mentioned above, my offer + lander combo performed close to -20% ROI for several days in a row and now suddenly after duplicating the campaign on both Voluum and my traffic source it's up to -45% ROI. This is very frustrating as i had a fairly consistent performance over a few days. It might correct itself in the next day or two, im not sure but interested in any theories on why this happens and how other affiliates manage this.

Cheers!

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This was driving me nuts when I started, so I've compiled the most frequent reasons for this and made it into an article here on STM, check it out :

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...n-all-the-time

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Mega progress! Excellent!

Matuloo has addressed the erratic behavior issue - yup it's annoying as hell but we'll just have to deal with it. Basically with pop, eventually when you have the experience, you'd want to be running lots of campaigns at the same time, and cherry-picking the promising ones to keep running. So when this type of erratic behavior happens, you wouldn't be as bothered by it, because it would just be a portion of all the camps you'll be running.

Just expend a reasonable amount of effort and if things don't look up, ditch it for now and try again later. Lots of good tips in matuloo's post that he linked to.

Placement cuts at this point, i.e. before testing offers, would not be final. So there's no need to cut carefully - I would even just cut everything that is in loss by 1x payout or above, just to leave the best-converting placements for testing offers with, in order to do this offer-testing for cheaper. Once you have a promising offer, you could then open up some/all the previously-blacklisted placements to see if they'll be profitable then.

Looking forward to seeing how you do on testing offers! That's usually the more satisfying part of the optimization process - has the highest chances of effecting large jumps in ROI.



Amy

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Thanks Matuloo, good post with some good insights.

Thanks Amy for your feedback. Oh ok, yeah i guess when you have a few campaigns going at once one of them will probably work better than the the rest & you dont get so worried by the ones that dont work.

Yeah, i guess i just wanted to make sure it wasnt something i was doing wrong vs something that is to be expected and is just part of the game.

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Hi captain calypso, what happened?

There were no further updates for more than 3.5 months now.

Eager to know about your progress. Did you hit a golden campaign?

I'm a newbie, hence, deriving motivation from your posts and seeing you succeed.

I'll be starting my follow-along very soon.

Would like to ask a few things though.

How much was the budget, that you had set aside per month for this on total (tracker, creatives, adplexity, traffic sources, others).

Thanks

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Captain calypso doesn't appear to be a member at the moment - the member status under their username is "Guest".

Although I don't know what their situation is, there are lots of reasons why someone would stop updating their follow-along - and here are the most common ones I know of:

-They ran out of money before they could start making consistent profits, so decide to leave affiliate marketing either temporarily or for good.

-They ran out of patience, either with the particular campaign, or the type of traffic, or affiliate marketing in general. Or they may have just run out of patience in updating the follow-along and just wanted to focus on running their campaigns.

-After trying affiliate marketing, they find that it's not really what they're wanting to continue doing. Or they may have moved onto some other projects.

-They got the campaign profitable and felt they no longer needed additional guidance, and/or did not want to divulge additional details that could potentially bring on more competition for them.

And the last case is what I wish for, for every member that have ever started a follow-along but somehow didn't follow through to the end.

The important thing is that YOU have faith in yourself - that YOU can make this work - regardless of whether any particular member was successful. There ARE affiliates that are making good-to-great money from paid traffic campaigns, and you can be one of them soon.




Amy

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