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Entering Paid Traffic World - TheCourage (17)

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Greetings!


Welcome to my journal, hoping it won't end soon.

You can read Introduction thread about me, thus I'll skip that.

02/24/2018

Currently I'm following "Newbie's First Steps" threads. (BTW Those are AMAZING!)

Network : Mobidea
Traffic : PropellerAds
Tracker : Voluum

And here are the results so far :



I know those are almost -100% ROI but I am still happy, I've learnt using tracker and setting up the campaigns.


Right now I send traffic directly to the offer, but I've just registered on Adplexity and going to add landers soon!


Question so far, Could someone recommend which vertical shall I try with landing pages and pop traffic for a start?


Thanks!




#RandomPic
100th year anniversary of restored Lithuania.

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Welcome to the other side

Good, you are taking action!

I will let pops expert to answer you as I am not doing pops

Good luck!

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Antivirus, utilities are the easiest to convert, and there are plenty of landers you can rip from Adplexity.
The first two months I started, I was able to make green campaigns in games CPA, antivirus/utilities, and adult dating. Was never able to make sweepstakes profitable.

But this might be my experience only, hopefully, Amy can chime in and give you more solid advice.

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Thanks for the tips!


02/26/2018

UPDATE #2

In these 2 days I've tried 3 (2AVs and 1 Sweep )different offers - sending 15$ of POP traffic to each of them. Ripped 3 LPs from Adplexity.

And here are the results :





So far nothing to cheer me up, I'll test some more offers and try different LP's to get at least -60~-40% ROI.

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Hey there!

Congrats with starting your new journey!

When choosing the offers, have you contacted our support team, or checked the Opportunities page? We regularly update our data, and try to share the best converting offers with our affiliates. For instance now there are some good offers for Costa Rica (mobile content).

Besides, we always recommend to run offers with LPs, as offers tend to convert better with an LP. You could try Coupons and Vouchers with pop traffic this way.

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Before proceeding any further with sending traffic to your campaigns, since you're using ripped landers, please take a look at the following threads.
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ing-parameters
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Ripped-Landers

Also, in case you are willing to utilize back buttons traffic, I'd suggest sending the visitors to a monetizer link, so that they have the chance of converting in another offer.

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@platinum @Mobidea thanks for great tips!

03/01/2018

No Good news yet.
I've tried going on with AV vertical. Been working with Tier 3/4 countries. I've chosen and edited 5 LPs.

Unfortunately, none of the offers converted well, I'm thinking of going to another vertical, seems to be I find a hard time to work with PIN submit offers, when people has to send TXT message to receive Antivirus.


Questions so far, how many offers to test is "normal" ? Like I've already tried like 5-6 offers, shall I go more with AV vertical or choose a different one?

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Sorry for being late! I was traveling when you started this - still playing catch-up since I got back.

Pop traffic has gotten competitive. In order to find profits you'll need to test lots of offers.

But first, you need to make sure you have a solid landing page. Testing 5-10 ripped landers would be a start. Once you have a winner, use that to test offers. 5-6 offers are a start, but if you don't start seeing at least -50% ROI, test another batch of offers.

You'll also need to optimize a campaign by cutting placements etc.

Let's examine what you did in detail. You're testing 5 landers, correct? Are you using a stats calculator to cut inferior landers to identify a winner? Also, you need to cut landers based on conversions from a SINGLE offer - otherwise your stats could be way off.

Thanks for following the 40-day tutorial! Be sure to read all paragraphs in each lesson - the methodology will stand you in good stead.

Once you answer my questions above, we'll cover the next step.



Amy

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03/06/2018


Morning STMers!

It has already passed over a week since I'm full into Paid-traffic and CPA. I'm learning more and more each day and I'm happy that I've chosen this.


About my campaigns/progressions.


Fortunately/unfortunately, I had to go through a lot of offers with huge negative ROI, but that's the game we choose to play.

At the moment, I got few campaigns who do really motivate me to keep going and I've been going green for a while!

Here's some info on my current campaigns:

1. (SWEEP)
Total Spent : 588$
Total Revenue: 706$
Profit : 118$

Chosen the best converting lander, cut some placements and currently getting 40-50% ROI (when investing 100$), unfortunately the country I'm targeting isn't so big, so I can't scale much.
Currently using PropellerAds for traffic, but tried as well PoPads,PopCash but with no luck, with pretty decent BID, I got about 2000-3000 impressions per day.


2. (SWEEP)
Total Spent : 114$
Total Revenue: 64.80$
Profit : -49.2$

That's Tier 1 offer, sweepstake, but I find hard time to get better CTR, that's probably because of the Tier, people in there are used to spinning wheels, quizes and etc. so they close it right away.
Been trying several LPs, cut some placements, still couldn't get better than -50% ROI per campaign, so I guess I'll just leave it there.


3. (SWEEP)
Total Spent : 15.26$
Total Revenue: 8.80$
Profit : -6.46$

That's my latest campaign, just testing. Tier 2 country, sweep. Traffic is quite cheap, but the CTR and CVR is pretty bad, might do something with the placements/try more landers.



So that's what I've been working with the past few days.

Yes, I've been using stats calculator to cut the landers. I've been reading 40-day tutorial over and over, that's helped me a lot and I now can see first positive results!



Questions :

1. Would you recommend me to use SmartCPM bidding? I've been using it on PropellerAds and I think I've been doing great, what's the downsides of it ?
2. I'm thinking of getting a cloaker, but it's not compatible with CDN, so what do you think if I would get reliable webhosting and host pictures with CDN? I'm afraid to lose pagespeed. Any ideas? Could someone recommend web-hosting where I could host my pop-up landers?
3. Currently I get about 0.8-1s. website load speed (with CDN) , is that good or bad? what's the average?

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Congratulations on the green campaign! And only after one week!! That's a feat!

If you have a couple minutes - please consider posting some stats to this subforum - it's quite a new forum section but if more people would post there, even more will start posting. You're under no obligation of course!

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...26-Green-Camps

Now let's take a look at each camp...

Have you tried Zeropark?

Now that you have a good lander+offer, it would be the perfect time to test more traffic sources! The more good sources you have to scale to, the bigger you'll be able to scale future green camps. This thread will point you to some of the popular pop sources, as well as how to find more for yourself:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post327140

Also - have you tested bids to trigger traffic from different placements?


Lander-fatigue, low CTRs, expensive traffic - yup, typical tier 1.

But some tier 1 geos have such massive traffic, it would be worth it to do more testing to get the campaign profitable.

Again, have you tested bids yet? That's something that can have huge impact on your camp.

And for a big geo with huge traffic, investing into cutting more placements may be a worthwhile investment - you can still have enough traffic left after the cutting to profit from. Plus you'll be able to run new offers in this geo again and again after that initial investment - just be sure to save your blacklist somewhere!

Also drill down into the various traffic segments such as browsers (even browser versions) and OSs (even OS versions). Start by cutting the worst-ROI segments, then waiting to assess impact, and cutting more if needed. Don't cut too many at one go. Many segments are inter-related, so when you cut one thing, the ROI of other segments can increase. So try to wait a bit to assess results before cutting more.

You may also want to test more lander variations. Quizzes for example - you can put so many new angles and spins into them. There are basically 2 big elements to test:

1)WHO is the sweeps run by and WHY?

WHO: The more aggressive landers will adopt the look-and-feel of big websites/companies such as FB/Amazon or the major browsers, big mobile carriers, major department stores or supermarkets or restaurants etc., and even use their logos. This kind of stuff can get you in trouble with the offer owner, aff network, traffic sources, and the law. The trick is try to make it look like the sweeps is run by a company that can be trusted. I'll leave it to you to decide how far you want to take this and how.

WHY: The common angle is "we're doing a marketing survey for our company - answer the following questions and be entered into a draw". But you can get creative with that. Google to see how the various REAL contest are run and why they're being run, and split-test them.

Basically make your lander sound legitimate - something that can be trusted.


2)The Interactive Element.

This would be the spinning wheel, survey questions, etc. Slots are another one. (I think I was actually the first one to test that idea, or at least one of the first - got some scripts from codecanyon etc. and tried to make them work on the lander - in the end I asked a mastermind buddy to program one instead lol!)

So you can be creative with different interactive elements.

And for surveys - you can get creative with the kinds of questions you want to ask too. During the brief time I was running sweeps a couple of years back, AU was one of the geos that was hot at the time. Paul Walker had just passed away, and a new Fast & Furious movie was due to come out. I designed some landers with survey questions on the movie, and on Paul Walker, with images from the movie - and some of those did quite well.

To see hot trends in different countries you can go to Google Trends:

https://trends.google.com/trends/topcharts

Last but certainly not least - this is a must-read thread if you're running sweeps - lots of gold there:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...stakes-secrets


Not a lot of info to go on here - will wait and see what you do with it! How much traffic are you getting daily? And again - have you tested bids yet?


1 - SmartCPM will give you traffic from more placements by bidding on your behalf (differently for each placement). This can save you time to get you more traffic volume, and give you traffic quality that is more representative of the entire inventory they have. This is perfect for testing offers and landers.

However, if you want more control, you can test fixed bids and cut placements that way. Either test staggered bids simultaneously (running cloned camps with different bids simultaneously), or start with a low bid, cut placements, increase the bid again and cut more placements and repeat. You can potentially maximize profits in this way.

You're certainly encouraged to test both Smart and Fixed CPM to see which works better for you.

2 - I've never tried to make a cloaker work with a CDN - perhaps start a new thread to ask the question?

3 - Can't tell you the average. I would say 0.8-1s is good enough, but obviously the faster the better! Just make sure you don't go over 2s or the lander may not even be worth testing - chances are you'd lose too many visitors. It's amazing what an extra second can do. We're all trigger-happy and impatient.


Please feel free to ask for clarification on any of the above. I'm extremely impressed with how far you've come over the course of a week! And am eager to see how far you'll go!



Amy

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03/14/2018


Good day Stackers!


Sadly, don't have much results to show. University, Work and probably the worst enemy - the comfort zone, took over.


Been running the same first campaign on the same traffic source, getting steady 30-50$/day profit. Tested other traffic sources, but without any good results, most of the network doesn't have enough traffic for my country.
Except for ZeroPark, they seem to have similar volume of my country's traffic as PropellerAds. Still optimizing on that network, getting (~-30-20%) ROI there. Testing different BIDS, cutting placements with no results over 2x Payout.
On PropellerAds I don't optimize my campaign anymore, changing bids just lowers reach, getting lower ROI. I guess the only thing to optimize left is to get better CTR.


What I've done in the past week :

1. Ordered translation for my LP (1st campaign), compared to the one which is already on the LP. Tested on my old LP with new translation and didn't see any differences. CTR got lower by like 0.3%-0.5% but that could be because of the different day and etc.
2. Ripped 10 landers and bought services to clean it up. Those will be my default Sweep landers, I'll just be changing the prize/language. Will use them to mass-test different offers.
3.Cut second/third campaign (mentioned in previous post), failed to get positive ROI after all the optimization, so just paused those offers.


Stats from Voluum (PropellerAds - yesterday's stats):


I've split 1 campaign into two different with different bids, zones.
First one bid is cheaper and getting more traffic, but the zones aren't the best quality while the second campaign got only 2 zones, but the traffic there is much more expensive so I have to bid higher to get any traffic.



The Bad Things :

Yesterday I've noticed that my leads are going to the holding. Seems that advertiser now has a rule to keep those leads for 2 weeks on hold and only after that time it gets released.
I'm going to stop testing/scaling this offer to other networks except for PropellerAds/Zeropark where I know that I'll get positive ROI.
Buying traffic and getting the payment only after 3 weeks (2 weeks for leads test, 1 week for payout) would throw me to bankrupt.
Going to test other offers to get some money to re-invest on traffic.




And finally,

Thanks for the nice words and your help! I do appreciate it! Reading and trying to put in my mind all the information you've recommended me.





That's all folks!

Wish me luck

TheCourage

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It's completely OK to be in the comfort zone in the beginning. You're getting great practice on how to optimize a campaign, and you now have a list of placements to blacklist for your next campaign you run in this geo. From now on, just ask your AMs regularly for any new offers for this geo and test them on the same traffic sources.

When you said you wanted to get better CTR, are you talking about testing more landers? If so, I think that would be a good idea BUT only from the perspective of being able to learn more about what lander elements work better etc. As far as maximizing profits of the current campaign goes, it sounds like you're running into the point of diminishing returns. I like your idea of testing more offers better.


That would be wise!


3 weeks of running campaigns without profits would exhaust your budget? If I were you I would arrange for more money to come in first - that way you'd be a lot less stressed out about spending money on testing. Now I understand why you'd want to stay in that "comfort zone"!



Again - thanks for sharing your journey! In case you haven't seen the newsletter from last week, I've included your follow-along in there - here's a copy of the newsletter which we also post to our blog:

https://stmforum.com/blog/why-nutra-...umbling-in-us/

You're doing just excellent! Don't be complacent - keep on testing new stuff! It's easier to spend money when you have profitable camps running. You've spent enough time on the current campaigns. Now would be the time to make money in other geos too.



Amy

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I am using landers for av and about to achieve positive ROI with US traffic. But My domain sooner got blacklist by google. I want to start again, what precaution should I take ??

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Try to get a domain on https://www.expireddomains.net/ or similar, that has some authority. It may help.

I don't have that problem, and my guess would be that it's because I host my landers on the same IP as an authority site that I have. However, not everyone has an authority site. Comparatively, getting a domain that has authority is way easier - and you can get them for cheap as long as you're not looking for something that has a LOT of authority. For starters, try getting domains that are around the same price as new domains, with the highest authority you can find for within that price range.

Try to get domain names that are generic, that you can assign an antivirus-related subdomain to, to make it sound more legit and relevant.

In the end though, having to replace domains regularly may still be a necessity - but using domains that have authority may lessen the frequency for you.



Amy

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Good luck with your journey! I can add that i was never be able to convert sweeps too, working with utilities, adult VOD subscriptions and antivirus offers. Also, i would recommend you to work with Mobidea, it's a good affiliate network, and you can get some valuable insights from their blog. But always split-test different offers, especially if you go with PIN/DCB offers.

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Welcome back, Everyone!


It's been 4 months without STM, missed the community much.. hehe

What happened?

I end up in April sitting with negative balance in my bank account and 0$ in my pocket hoping that Affiliate network will pass my leads and I will receive my first big payment from it. Luckily, everything went fine and received my payment. So I've decided to save up my budget and to refuse some things for a while when I get back on my feet.


In those 4 months a lot happened, I now see the whole POPs thing differently, It is now way easier to choose the offer and test landing pages.
I've earned over 40k$ revenue in total, biggest day - 997$!! Unfortunately that revenue stream wasn't too long, traffic source got saturated.
40K$ revenue sounds cool, but wasted a lot on testing so currently I'm on 2-3k$ profit from all time earnings. But that's worth it for sure,comparing to the knowledge I got



As well I got banned on 1 affiliate network for fraud traffic (though It was regular popunders) , there was about 700$ in the balance.
Decided not to keep proving them my truth, showing them the reports that the traffic was really from well-known traffic source, It just took a lot of time and nerves. That was a lesson to pick affiliate networks more carefully.



Despite that, on the other affiliate networks I finally got access on some private offers! Feels great when someone notices you and get to know to some offers which aren't public. wohoo!


What's going on right now?

Currently I'm running 5 different campaigns on 4 main traffic source, they are bringing xxx revenue per day.
Actually they WERE bringing, few days ago I've started using quite well-known cloaker to hide from spy tools and besides that website's loading speed is great, I went from 50% ROI to -30%, cloaker must've taken a big part of real users to the safe page.

If anyone could give me hand about this, I'd be really happy!


Although, I was thinking at first to learn the ropes and head to native, I have started to like POPs much, there are much less competition than before and GEOs variety is HUUGE!
So I'll stay with the POPs for a bit longer, I believe I can master it in the future!



I will try to update this thread when I get any news guys. I'll try to provide tips which have helped me in this journey as well.



Good luck and see you the next time!

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Hi there thecourage!! GREAT to see you again!

2-3k profits overall is a good start. Like you said, you now have the knowledge required to make more.

Sorry to hear about your ordeal regarding "fraud traffic". Some of these battles you can fight - if the affiliate network is willing to actually hear you out and examine the evidence to arrive at a fair verdict. But I do know of cases where (to the best of my knowledge - although the "truth" can be so multi-fauceted) the affiliate network is refused payment by the advertiser and just wants to pass on that loss to the affiliate.

There are insane amounts of money floating around in this industry and everybody wants a piece. Money is a real test of character. Some people will earn that money honestly while others are willing to lie and cheat to get more of it. Then there are affiliate networks that are trying so hard to stay afloat that they force their AMs to be dishonest.

But fortunately, there are still many good networks and people around.

You can for sure do a due-diligence check on a network before applying to them. A network that consistently tries to rip off affiliates will likely piss off at least one affiliate enough for them to write a bad review somewhere.

So for example, googling "cpa affiliate networks reviews" to find sites that allow affiliates to post reviews on various networks, or doing a search on "[network name] didn't pay" or "[network name] scammed", would be a good start.

However - negative reviews from affiliates may not actually mean the network is dishonest.

Some of us affiliates can be a real headache too. Running fraudulent traffic, generating fake leads, etc - some people would do anything to make a buck.

But if the traffic quality doesn't back out for the advertiser, then they would lose money. Some of them would refuse to pay the aff network for the traffic. Then the aff network would either need to absorb the loss or refuse to pay the affiliate.

Everybody needs to eat, so when the traffic doesn't back out, someone will suffer. So the dishonesty can go either way - and some affiliates will do shady stuff to send fraud traffic, then bitch up a storm when they don't get paid.

But I'd imagine that type of affiliate to be a minority - I believe most people that get caught would just be quiet about it instead of leaving a bad review. So if you're seeing more than a few bad reviews about a network, it may be a sign to steer clear.

All's well that ends well! Real happy for you!



xxx/day in revenue is nothing to sniff at! How many traffic networks are you running on?

The more quality traffic you have access to, the quicker and bigger you can scale. So if you're only running on a few sources, it would be a very worthwhile exercise to test more sources at your earliest convenience.

Now would be a good time since you have lander+offer combinations that are converting well - the better they convert, the less money you lose when testing new traffic networks.

This thread may help:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post327140



Cloakers are a double-edged sword - on the one hand you want it to be effective in cloaking your sh*t, but on the other hand you want as much of the traffic to still go to your money page as possible. What you want is a balance of risk vs. efficiency - you want to maximize efficiency without too much risk. And every cloaker is different in this aspect, plus you can tweak your settings to exert better control.

I'm not really at liberty to discuss cloakers in detail - try googling "reduce cloaker bleed rate" to find more information.



So glad to have you back! Please do keep us posted on your progress!




Amy

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