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Phil's Newbie's First Steps Tutorial Follow Along (58)

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Hello All,

I decided to start a follow along for Vortex's The Newbie's First Steps tutorial. I have the infrastructure set up, selected some offers, and ran some campaigns. There's been some bumps along the way, but I got past them and am able to make progress.

I am a complete beginner and so far the tutorial is doing a great job taking me by the hand so I can actually learn.

I am on day 5-6 where I verified tracking is working, I started a Campaign Journal, and updated campaign costs in Voluum.

My tracking seems to be working, I see similar number of visits/impressions in the three interfaces.

The next steps will be optimization but I'm at a point where I have no conversions at all. Granted I did not run the whole suggested $100 worth of traffic, but after $50 it feels like I may be flying blind and thought I'd start this follow along before I spend another $50.

After seeing zero conversions with over 22,500 impressions, it feels so random to hit something with the recommended -50% ROI for continuing with the optimization tutorial. I realize so far it's money well spent because of the experience I'm getting.

So this first post is really a sanity check about how it's going so far. Hopefully we can figure out how to get me some conversions to have something to optimize.

Screenshots:

Attachment 18359

Attachment 18360

Attachment 18361


Thanks,
Phil

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I did some digging into Mobidea offers. I looked at a few of the offers I used for some of my campaigns. Under Opportunities I see for the last 7 days one offer had 911,845 clicks and 43 signups, which is one signup for every 21,000 clicks. Another offer had 1,929,559 clicks and 45 signups or one in every 42,000 clicks. If I'm analyzing this right, I never had a chance for signups with these offers with my 4,500 or so views for each, is that correct? Since I'm direct linking, there's really nothing more I can do to make the offers more attractive for more clicks.

Until I hear otherwise with recommendations, my next strategy is to dig deeper into the offers and try to find something that has better click ratios. And also to limit the offers to the Operator and OS that is getting the clicks according to the Mobidea stats.

Also, it looks like I did not attach the screen shots in the first post correctly. I saw the images yesterday but I do not see them today. I'll have to look into that.

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YIKES!!!! I just realized I posted this in the Adult Traffic Follow-Alongs subforum!!!

Can a moderator please move it to Newbie Follow-Alongs?

Thanks

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I think I misunderstood how much to spend on each "fishing" campaign. I was spending $10.00 on each. But in a lot of replies in other threads I keep seeing spend 5x payout, if no conversions, end it and move on. I spent $10.00 each on 5 campaigns with payouts of between $.32 and $.53. Looks like I could have better spent that money on a lot more campaigns.

Like I mentioned earlier, in addition to the recommended guidelines for selecting our first offers, I am digging a little deeper into the offer stats to find something that shows a decent conversion ratio. It has not been fruitful yet, still not conversions, but I'll keep trying.

I've read a number of other newbie follow-alongs and it seems -50% ROI using the critera we're following is very rare. Is it possible and I just need to keep trying?

And I wonder if there are experienced marketers out there doing something different to get conversions from the same Mobidea direct link offers we're targeting?

From here I plan to keep searching for offers that have at least gotten conversions in the past 7 days. I also plan to end campaigns after 5x payout is spent and run many more offers.

I also plan to read ahead and learn landers. Maybe I can move on from this direct link phase then apply the optimization lessons to campaigns that use landing pages and hopefully generate some conversions.

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Hey Phil!

Congrats on your start and for now all the conclusions you've made are right. Try to test more offers, don't be afraid to annoy the Mobidea support team (support.mobidea in Skype) and ask them to recommend you the best, ask all the questions you have and research a lot. Test the offers yourself (through the VPN or turning off the Safety Fallback option in Mobidea). The -50% ROI is still possible to improve, normally we start giving up when we see -80%.

Besides, yesterday we had a webinar, where one of our account managers explained how to pick the best offers, how to test, etc. - check it here, it might be useful.

Hope it helps, and keep us posted!

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Hi Mobidea,

Thanks. I actually attended that webinar live, it was very useful, especially learning about the Mobidea Academy. I applied one of the ideas presented and got my first two conversions yesterday. But the offer took 8 hours for just 1,500 impressions, so still not what we're looking for. By the way, the account manager who took care of the chat was excellent. She was fielding questions about topics not even related to the webinar. I can't remember her name but I was impressed and thought you should know.

I will indeed hit up your support team in Skype. I've had a few back and forth emails with them.

I didn't know about the Safety Fallback option. If I understand it correctly, when it's on, there is a possibility of me sending traffic to totally unrelated offers if my offer is not available for some reason?

I'm not sure what you mean about testing through the VPN. I cannot find anything about it in the Mobidea knowledge base.

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I'm at a point now where I really would appreciate someone offering some concrete advice. I have run 15 campaigns using the recommended tutorial criteria and tried offers recommended by Mobidea. I have 2 conversions out of 43,000+ visits. And those conversions came from a campaign that had only 1,400 visits in an 8 hour period. I feel like if I keep doing the same thing I'll get the same results. I have learned how to create campaigns and everything seems to be set up properly.

How is everyone getting these first conversions for this part of the tutorial in order to have something to optimize? Should I just move on? I promised myself I would follow the tutorial as close as possible to learn this right.

I have read the tutorial through day 4 over and over, I do not think I'm missing anything. I have read other newbie follow-alongs. I can't seem to make any progress and find even one campaign I can work with. I realize this is probably mimicking the real life of an Affiliate Marketer but I can't even pick the lowest lying fruit out there.

Any advice and suggestions would be very much appreciated. In the mean time I'll continue to read and maybe something will click on what I can try differently.

Trying BB code this time for the screenshot.

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I just saw Amy is revamping the 40 day tutorial specifically because of these Pop offers are not converting very well anymore for us folks just starting the tutorial. Her thoughts and some new ideas are in the The Newbie Zone -> Newbie's First Steps -> Supplemental Material sub-forum. One of the suggestions is what I was considering, jump to the Landing Pages lessons to get conversions.

I will be reading all the recent developments in the supplemental material then get started again.

Thanks Amy, I'm glad it wasn't something I was doing wrong and that you're on top of it!

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I went through the S3/NSOne/CloudFront setup. I still cannot access my test lander using my domain. I get an error "The request could not be satisfied. Bad request". It's been 24 hours so the DNS propagation should be done. The error is from CloudFront so I think the DNS is working. I can access the file from the S3 link. I have gone over every step of the setup and it all looks correct. I have researched the error and still cannot find what my issue is.

Any suggestions?



I also have questions about selecting offers for the landing pages tutorial, I'm finding it challenging to find Mobidea tier 3/4 countries that:

- Have 3 -5 offers similar enough that they can logically be rotated, And
- Have enough landers show up for the offer in Adpelxity for the country and language, And
- Have payouts low enough for me to afford testing. (I found one category of offers that fit all critera but the payouts averaged around $7.00)

Again, any suggestions? I did apply to AmorAds but haven't heard back from them yet.

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According to your stats, would be good to focus on Costa Rica, there are several good offers for this GEO. So you could actually stop on 1-2 GEOs and choose an offer portfolio for them, even if the offers are from different networks. This way you will test the networks as well and see which offer converts better. Very often affiliate networks have similar offers, providing different conditions though (depending on their agreements with advertisers).

I think it will be easier to find offers according to your requirements this way

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Hi Phil! Apologies for arriving late on scene - have missed your follow-along somehow. Lemme get started!

First of all, a word about images: The attachment upload function of vbulletin is screwy (I can't see your attachments in the first post for example - it's very hit and miss), so for in the future, please upload your images to imgur.com or similar and post the link into your post here. Imgur.com has a "bbcode url" that you can just copy and paste into a post. That way it's a)reliable and guaranteed to show up, and b)the pictures will be displayed in their original size instead of a dinky image that needs to be clicked on to blow up.

First thing to check when you're running camps for the first time and not getting conversions: Have you checked your stats on the affiliate network to make sure the traffic has been going to the right offers?

If so, all good. If not, then make sure you've grabbed the right aff links and entered them correctly into the tracker.

Secondly: Carrier-billing offers that convert well are decreasing by the day. In fact, I'm rewriting the 40-day tutorial to shift more focus towards using landing pages (i.e. the latter lessons) and less emphasis on direct-linking (i.e. the earlier lessons). I never meant for direct-linking to be something to pursue long-term - rather, it's a very simple type of campaign to set up - this is synonymous to installing a rail for toddlers to hold onto when learning to walk.

There's no need to wait for me to finish rewriting the tutorial - the gist of the change can be found here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Major-Overhaul

Basically just get some practice, then move onto using landers ASAP - even if you can't find any promising offers through direct-linking to allow you to learn optimization.


Do ask your AM for the best-converting offers and test those.

I didn't suggest that from the beginning because there were a lot more good offers around when I started writing the tutorial months ago.


LOL I really should read all posts before replying! Now I know why your username looks familiar - you DID thank those "update announcement" posts!

So yes - moving onto testing landers would be the best course of action.


As much as Mobidea is a great network, don't limit yourself to one network.

Apply to more networks (through the 1-click tool I linked to from the tutorial) and ask your AMs for sweeps offers - those would be the easiest to start with.


Did you manage to get this to work yet?




Amy

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That's ok, I figured you're pretty busy. So I kept plugging along.


I got it to work by using Imgur and "bbcode url" like you suggested.


Yes, the Mobidea stats page shows the right offers getting the visits. And Voluum shows very similar stats for the same offers, I think I'm good there.


I did this too. Surprisingly most were offers I already selected. I tried to go after offers that had higher CR percentages as shown on the "Opportunities" tab on the offer page.


Yes, I found the supplemental stuff just in time as I didn't really know what to do next to get conversions at that point.


I applied using the 1-click tool yesterday, we'll see how that goes. It occurs to me that I'll need to figure out how to configure the offer links that I paste into Voluum for offers from the new networks I use. And the Global postback URLs.

Regarding sweeps, am I right in thinking the sweeps offers need to be for the same "thing", like iPhone 7, or red wagon? So the landers selected will be relevant, I'll need to find 3 - 5 sweeps offers for the same "thing"?


I did finally get S3/CloudFront working just a few hours ago. I ended up deleting the CloudFront Distribution I created originally, created another, updated the DNS with the new CloudFront domain name and it worked. I have no idea what was wrong with the first try.

So on to landers, a whole new world. Until I get accepted into some more networks, as you probably saw, Mobidea gave me a suggestion for offers to look at. Now that I got the S3/CloudFront working, I plan to resume the tutorial by selecting some offers, ripping and fixing some landers and get a campaign going.

Thanks and keep an eye on this thread, I know I'll have more questions.
Phil

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That's correct! All landers and offers in the same campaign will need to be for the same prize.


Amazing! And looking forward to those questions!

Now that I've replied to the thread, all updates you post will appear on my subscription feed - and that's the first thing I check daily when I log in. So will be sure to stay up-to-date with your progress from now on.



Amy

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I'm ready to create my first lander campaign in Voluum. I have my offers and ripped/fixed landers. I cannot find where in the tutorial it describes how to add landers to Voluum and how to create campaigns with landers. I mean I can probably do it but without explicit instructions for this first time through it's likely I might miss something. There are so many "make sure you do this" in this tutorial I'm sure there are some for these steps also.

I do see the Add Lander in Voluum, and know to use my landing page URL but I don't know if I need to modify the URL and if so what to add. And when creating the campaign I do not see lander specific instructions. Are these instruction included and I just can't find them?

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You didn't miss anything - I didn't do a step-by-step on how to add lander urls to Voluum. It's quite straight forward - basically just add the lander url as-is.

Although - I did forget to mention something: If you're wanting to display visitor data on the lander - such as their location, device brand/model, anything else that Voluum can detect - then you would need to add some tokens to the lander url when adding it into Voluum. This post explains all:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ing-Parameters

I'm going to add this information to the tutorial now - thanks for the reminder! It's important to ask questions - and they help me to make the tutorial better as well.

Do ask questions if there's anything you don't understand - it's important to know how to echo these parameters on your landers.




Amy

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I ran my first multi offer, multi lander iPhone X sweeps campaign. I stopped the campaign after only $10. No conversions as expected but I'm very pleased with the results. The 4 offers and 6 landers got equal visits so that's working, that's really all I was looking for this first pass. My landers got 91 clicks out of 3,641 visits and that's encouraging.

One mistake I made was not specifying target device. Most of my visits were desktop and the landers are designed for and look better on mobile.

I didn't implement the Bot Testing Script yet. I need to understand it better and read up on it more. I have read caurmen's go to thread on the topic, but I'm still not there yet ready to implement. I need to understand it better before I even have intelligent questions.

Next steps are get the bot script working, then either tweak this campaign or put together another one and try to get conversions.

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Kudos on progressing to using landers!

What are the payouts on the offers? And is your geo a developed country or a developing country?

Doing a bot test when you have multiple offers can be troublesome. AFAIK you'd need to set up 1 path per offer+lander combination. So for 4 offers x 6 landers you'd need to set up 24 paths - more details here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...tection-Script

Perhaps testing 2 offers at a time would be easier. I really do need to add more info on bot testing to the 40-day tutorial. It's not as straight-forward as I had originally imagined (before caurmen passed away, I had never used his most-recent method of bot-testing).

In the meantime - please keep asking questions and we'll get this set up together.




Amy

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The offer payouts were between $2.10 and $2.31, it was Australia. I was having trouble finding multiple similar, lower payout offers in the less developed GEOS. Conversions were not a priority so I went with a developed country. I'm more interested in the nuts and bolts right now. I think I wasted too much time in the beginning worried about getting conversions and learning is really my priority at this point.

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4 offers + 6 landers at ~$2 payout. Yup - $10 won't be enough for an initial test for sure.

Did you run that camp further? If not you should!

You're right about it being unnecessary in worrying about getting conversions when you're learning! Even when in the future when you'll be launching camps for profits, you'll never know whether that next camp will make you any money. The trick is to launch lots of campaigns efficiently (i.e. without spending more time/money than is necessary) and optimizing and scaling the ones that show the most promise.

Looking forward to seeing some stats soon!



Amy

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I am trying something a little different and using ZeroPark for traffic. My ZeroPark campaign has been pending and waiting for approval for 11 hours now. I submitted it at about 12:00 noon EST.

This seems like a long time to have to wait, especially if I want to focus on a potential offer I just found, testing it with a few different campaigns would take days. Is this acceptable for folks running campaigns? All my PropellerAds campaigns were approved within 5 or 10 minutes.

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So my campaign was finally approved 15 hours after I submitted it. I was under the impression campaign testing was a faster process, not drawn out over days.

Also, I asked this in another thread but it might get more eyes here: I set the ZeroPark campaign I ran today to a $5.00 daily limit. I edited the campaign by removing some countries in ZeroPark. I want to rerun the campaign but it says "Out of daily budget". It seems no matter what I put in the Daily Budget and Campaign Budget I cannot rerun the campaign. I tried putting in $10 for the daily budget, didn't work. I tried $10 for both DB and CB, didn't work. How can I rerun a campaign in ZeroPark that has run out of daily budget?

I'm sure there's a simple way to do this but I cannot find it.

Thanks

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According to Zeropark's TOS:

Reference: https://zeropark.com/terms-and-conditions/

I'm afraid there's not much you can do about campaign approval times. This is just one reason why I tend not to use zeropark for quick testing - I'd use popads which automatically approves all camps (once you have VIP status - which doesn't take long at all if you're running volume). You can consider doing your initial testing on Propellerads if you're eager to test new offers.


Haven't run there in a while so don't remember how to do that. Are you sure you can't change the campaign status from pause to active? Did you wait a bit before checking again to see if the status would automatically change?

If you can't figure this out, do put in a support ticket at Zeropark.



Amy

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Amy,

Thank you for pointing out the ZeroPark policy. I'll have to learn my networks.

Regarding rerunning the ZeroPark campaign, after trying a few more things I figured out what I need to do. My first campaign was for $5.00 but $14.51 was actually spent (as expected). I need to set the daily budget to something over cumulative daily spend to be able to run it again. And no waiting for approval again when rerunning it so I'll be able to test at my pace.

These little hurdles feel so big sometimes until they are surpassed.

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Ah yes - you said your spend was $5 and you've increased the budget to $10 and still couldn't get traffic going. That threw me off.

So that campaign actually overspent? You've set your budget at $5 but it spent $14.51? That's pretty steep. I hope I've misunderstood.

But yes, in order to resume traffic, 2 conditions must be met:

1)The daily budget will need to be set to an amount greater than what's been spent in the current day, and

2)The overall campaign budget will need to be set to an amount greater than the total cost over the life of the campaign up to that point.

I agree with you - learning AM is about learning a whole bunch of little things that although seem so little, can have major impact. The good thing is that most of those things you only need to learn once.


It's been a few days - how are you getting on?




Amy

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Yes, that's correct, overspent by almost 3x. I tried Mr Payne's Video Tutorial: How to Quickly Reach Profit Using Afflow and Zeropark. He said overspend like that is expected because ZeroPark is serving my traffic all over the globe and it takes a while for it to stop when the budget is reached.

By the way, that campaign didn't go too well. I only got 18 conversions on $100 spend. I ran the campaign 7 times, stopping after about $15 spend each time, and optimizing each time by pausing countries, etc that were not close to converting. There was one offer that had two conversions. I tried to optimize it but couldn't get it to convert again with it's own campaign. Andrew showed 210 conversions in his example with $100 spend, mine didn't come close and I'm pretty sure I followed it to a tee.

I'm currently trying two Mobidea offers that look promising and trying both with PropellerAds and ZeroPark as a traffic test.

I plan to build my next campaign where I put some real thought into the offer and angles for my landers. It will be another multi-offer multi-lander campaign, find the best lander, optimize, and take it from there.

It's discouraging that POP traffic is supposed to be the easiest for beginners and I only have about 25 tiny conversions total after $300 spend.

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I am researching offers on Mobidea for my next campaign. I am really digging in so I can get at least few relevant landing pages.

I'll give the offer because I know I will not be pursuing it, 17899 - Games - EG - Mobinil (Orange) - Pacman. The screenshot on the Mobidea offer page is this:



When I enter the approved offer link into my browser, it takes me to different completely unrelated offers each time I try and they are nothing to do with games, let alone Pacman. Is this because I'm on my desktop and/or not in Egypt?

This is the offer link.

Can someone help me understand what's going with this?

Also, it seems if I want to research an offer and see what the visitor will see, I actually need to apply for the offer first to get the offer link. Do the affiliate networks mind if you apply for 20 or 30 or 40 offers at the same time knowing I likely will not be pursuing them?


EDIT:
I should mention I get the same behavior with other Mobidea offers too. For example an iPhone offer took me to the iPhone offer the first time, but then random offers when I use the offer link again.

And I also have offers that send me to the correct offer page each time I try.

Any tips on how to research offers for landing page ripping and creation information?

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Ah - you were targeting multiple geos. Makes sense then. I was about to suggest that you request for a refund.


Multiple geos, Andrew's tutorial - are you testing afflow?

Things have changed significantly since Andrew's excellent guide. Indeed, things have changed massively even since MY 40-day tutorial. This is why I'm revamping it:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Major-Overhaul

The major reason for the revamp is because there are a lot fewer good 1/2-click offers than there used to be. You'll need to rely more on your AM's suggestions, plus spend less money on testing to uncover only the most promising winners.

I've laid out a more suitable test methodology in this recent post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Direct-Linking (2nd post)

I remember you were running sweep offers - what happened? The sweeps vertical still works. I would suggest to stick with that until you see profits.

You can still run afflow, but put a pause on that until I publish a post on how to make it work with the help of an automatic optimization tool - it's due to come out in the next week or two. So please stay tuned!


In order to see carrier-billing offers and experience the same flow your visitors would, you'd need to be surfing from a mobile device using an OS that is accepted by the offer, PLUS your phone needs to be on a data plan for the respective mobile carrier and be set to use data, not wifi. Otherwise, the aff network would either direct you to another offer (one that accepts wifi traffic or carrier traffic from YOUR mobile carrier, depending on whether you're using data or wifi), or to the same offer but with a different flow (e.g. PIN flow instead of 1/2-click flow).

You can find discussions related to this topic in the thread below, and the threads linked to from within that thread:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...st-view-offers

That pacman game: It would be difficult to create/find a lander that would make it convert better. I talked about landers being a double-edged sword here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ypes-of-offers

And because this type of offers requires so little pre-selling, a lander will often do more harm than good. You're encouraged to do your own testing - if you succeed you'll have an advantage over the droves of affiliates that are trying to direct-link to these offers - but if you're wanting the easier way out, I would suggest to test sweeps offers with landers you can get from Adplexity (or from spying in the wild).


Best to ask your AM. But why would you want to get so many offers approved if you're not planning on testing them?



Amy

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To get the offer links to research so I can get relevant landers. This was before you pointed out that I'd need to surf from mobile to do it. I wasn't having luck and figured maybe I'd apply for a bunch of offers so I wouldn't have to wait for approvals to slow me down. I won't be doing it.

I didn't stay with it but now I will. I've got to stop jumping around and stick to one thing.

Thanks as always for the advise.

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Didn't read the entire thread but that part got my attention. I tested Andrew's method when I joined Monetizer just a few weeks ago. In fact that was the reason I joined Monetizer as I was really curious to try it. Got only 100 conversions after $300-$350 spent and didn't really find any good segment worth my time to focus on. That Youtube video was posted almost 1 year ago when direct linking was probably converting much better than now. Clearly it doesn't convert like that anymore and is only getting worse everyday.

I'm not saying it's dead now. I'm doing very good on Monetizer now (~$15K revenue generated after joining 2-3 weeks ago) but I had to create a very advanced smart system for finding offers, testing, etc to make this work. I would not recommend trying it for newbies these days. In fact today I was thinking this has become the most difficult vertical for a newbie to start from. Mobile these days works best with landing pages and not remnant traffic but standard/premium traffic. If the offer page clearly says this is the price and subscribe you need landing pages. There should be a reason for someone to pay!
Also remnant traffic from Zeropark is not that good for top segments. There is no traffic left as remnant for a segment with high potential. Maybe bots only!

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Sound advice thanks Kian!

I'm guessing you're using an automated system with very-intelligently-crafted rules and criteria?

A commercial automatic optimizer service like theOptimizer can be a solution. A post on that is in the works...

Congrats on your success with Monetizer!



Amy

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From my experience mobile is the most unstable vertical I have ever tried just as pop traffic is! Offer paused, Offer capped, etc everyday. Conversion changes every hour. A target/publisher is profitable one day then red the next day! To make this game work you need to have a smart system in place. Both technical and on mind! This is not easy and it is a fast game.

I started using TheOptimizer but even that is not enough. I can only pause/run publishers/campaigns. I asked them to add a new feature and I was happy they are considering it for future updates: Moving targets/Zone IDs/Publishers across different campaigns (Blacklisting on campaign A, Whitelisting on campaign B based on rules set) but even the current version is helping me half way and so far I'm happy with it. I hope more affiliates request this feature so they upgrade their system faster.

Automation is key for mobile and also for pops/redirects. Too many segments (Geo/Carrier/Mobile or Tablet/OS/Mainstream or Adult) and too many tiny campaigns. It really gets out of control if things are not automated with advanced smart rules. Seriously I would not recommend mobile now for newbies.

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Thanks for your insight Kian. I thought I'd try the Monetizer/ZeroPark strategy for the experience and since someone said a few months ago it was still viable.

Onward with my quest to create a campaign successful enough to at least gather data to optimize.

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I'd say try direct offers with landing pages, you will have much higher chance to find your way in mobile CPA world these days. Still you will have to test a lot to find a promising combination of LP/Offer but easier than finding a top converting offer for direct linking these days.

Also personally I would not recommend Zeropark to start with. I was new to Zeropark as well just like Monetizer. Their bidding system is a bit complicated to understand. I spent $10K there and played with it a lot to learn how the algorithm works exactly. It's not really smart bidding like Propellerads but it keeps the average bid for your entire campaign almost same as your campaign's general set bid. The targets inside may cost above or below your campaign's bid but the average cost per visit for that campaign would become what you set as the bid. You will overpay for a lot of targets inside. Of course you can adjust the target's bids manually but then it becomes even more complicated!! I finally learned how to make it work but after spending $10K so not really sure it's the best option for newbies. Propellerads is better to start from I believe. Use Smart CPM model there and go with landing pages. You'll have much higher chance to succeed!

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Agree with Kian on 2 points:

1)The importance of using a landing page. Landing pages has become almost mandatory. Direct-linking was still possible to make profits with up to half a year ago, but not now (unless you use blackhat tactics like iframing/clickjacking - all that good stuff).

2)Zeropark is not the best option to start with. It's a fantastic network with great volume, but like kian said, more complicated to learn. Plus traffic quality is mixed due to their getting traffic from so many sources (thus the big volume - pros and cons). I would suggest to do initial testing of offers, landers etc., and to determine the best-converting traffic segments (OSs etc. etc.), on sources like PropellerAds or PopAds, before scaling to Zeropark.

I'm more optimistic about mobile pop though than Kian. It really depends on whether you're aiming to make xxx/day or xxxxx/day. There are newbie members that are making xx-xxx/day using ripped landers and without using automation. But if your aim is beyond xxx/day, then that would like require having a team and/or automation and/or some other edge such as very good discounts on traffic, exclusive offers, etc.



Amy

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Thanks Amy and Kian for the advise about ZeroPark. I joined them for the Mr Payne method and I do like how it integrates with Voluum so well. I joined PopAds but haven't tried them yet. I might try a campaign or two with them to compare with PropellerAds if I can find some conversions.

Honestly my immediate aim is XX/day with the long term goal of 2XX/day - 3XX/day.

It will be landers for sure from now on. I just need to figure out how to put a set of them together that match the offers. I can do the ripping part, it's the subject matching the offer part that's slowing me down.

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Please elaborate? Let's see if we could help you save some time. Most ripped landers you can just fix up and use for a quick test without doing major customization.



Amy

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The problem I'm running into is twofold, finding landers for pop offers and finding multiple offers in a GEO that can use the same landers. I'm good with fixing up the landers, I have some HTML/CSS experience.

For example, take the Mobidea Most Recent Top Offers List recently posted. I cannot figure out what most of the offers are actually selling, or if I do, I cannot find an appropriate lander. If I do happen to determine what the offer actually is and find a lander, it is rare to find comparable offers that can be used within the same campaign. I do try to research the offers as much as I can by looking at and translating the offer landing page.

The only thing I've been able to find so far that I can work with are iPhone sweepstakes. There is no doubt about the offer, I can find landers, and I can find multiple offers in the same GEO.

I've run two multiple offer, multiple lander campaigns for iPhone X sweepstakes. I have only one conversion. My landers are getting what I think are plenty of clicks, almost 5% for both campaigns combined. I was able to determine which of my 6 landers are performing better than the others and turned off the 3 worst. I then added funds to the campaigns and reran, still no conversions.

If I continue with mobile pop, what I think I need is suggestions on how to put together a "suite" of offers in the same GEO that I know what the offer is and I can find landers for. (I am subscribed to AdPlexity Mobile) Also, I'd like to know how the pros are doing it in mobile pop.

I feel comfortable with creating and running mobile pop. I'm starting to think it's time to move onto something above newbie where I stand a better chance of getting some conversions and have something to optimize and eventually a positive ROI. Any suggestions on what I might focus on next and maybe some STM reading to point me in the right direction would be appreciated.

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Ah I see!

Those are carrier-billing offers that are meant to be direct-linked to, for practice purposes, before the newbie is ready to progress to the next step of ripping and fixing up landers.

Usually you would do some research and talk to AMs etc. to decide on a vertical - like sweeps for example. And then you'd want to find out which geos are doing well for that vertical at the moment - again, by doing research such as looking through Adplexity stats and chatting with AMs.

Then you would rip landers in the respective vertical+geos (in the respective languages).

And if the geo is hot, and you're working with at least a few big affiliate networks that have a wide range of offers, finding offers shouldn't be a problem. You can join more networks if you need to - by looking at Adplexity to see which aff networks have offers in that vertical+geos.


Regarding getting only 1 conversion: We REALLY need to start analyzing stats together. There's a big difference between wasting money on a hopeless campaign, and investing into optimizing a promising campaign, and it DOES take experience to tell which case you're dealing with. 5% CTR tells me nothing. We need to see how you're cutting landers, what your placement stats look like, what you're bidding in which country, etc. etc. - all the details.

Analyzing stats together would be the most valuable part of the learning process IMO. Let's forget about carrier-billing offers for now. Sweeps is still doing decent so feel free to keep running that. And please start sharing stats!




Amy

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Thanks Amy, I started gathering the stats and screenshots for the Sweeps campaigns I already ran, but then decided to run new campaigns from fresh to discuss. I plan to run the same Mobidea offers for the new campaign. I should have it by tomorrow.

I'll also start looking at other networks I've been accepted in and put another campaign together.

I haven't been including too much detail because I thought there was nothing there to see without any conversions. But I get your point that you need to see everything in order to make useful recommendations.

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Yup! In the very least, I could tell you for example "you're not testing enough landers" or "these offers have spent enough money without converting - let's swap them out for a new batch"!

Looking forward!



Amy

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Here's the campaign I ran earlier today. My overall conclusion is I do not have enough data to optimize, but it may have some promise. As I look at the numbers, I may not have spent enough.

Network: Mobidea
Offer: Sweepstakes iPhone X
GEO: Australia (AU)
Traffic Source: PropellerAds
CPM: $2.33
Payouts: $2.10 - $2.31
Revenue: $4.41 Ads Cost: $15.83

Profit: ($11.42)
ROI: -72.14%
Period: 4/12/2018


I rotated 4 different Mobidea iPhone X offers with 6 ripped/fixed landers.









I originally setup the traffic for Android and iOS but then changed it to just iOS after about $10.00 spend. I got to thinking a majority of Android users do not care about iPhones for the most part. I happened to get both my conversions after I made the change.







Here is the lander performance. iPhoneX01 is the winner.





I'm not sure what else to include, so let me know if there's anything else.

Optimization points if the campaign is worth running again:

• Just run iOS
• Keep the iPhoneX01 lander
• Run campaign with another traffic source?
  
  • ZeroPark - This the only other traffic source I currently have funded, but I've been told the traffic is not good quality
  • PopAds?
  
  
• Anything else recommended

So, for "Day 28 - 31 How to Test Landers to Find Winner", I'd say I have scenario 1, "There aren't enough stats for the current offer+lander combo yet, for you to tell whether there's a good chance to get green".

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Nice setup! And although it's still VERY early, I would say this campaign has promise!

But there's one major thing that needs to be clarified:

How did you arrive at the conclusion that iPhoneX01 is the best lander? You can't base cutting decisions on just 1 conversion for each of 2 landers out of 5. Please tell me which method you used to compare landers.

I wouldn't test this on another traffic source for now - no point in wasting money split-testing the same offers and landers in multiple places.

Also: Do these offers only accept 3G traffic? Or wifi traffic as well? Because right now you're only targeting 3G traffic - and although sometimes it does convert better, it's expensive. So if the conversion flow is the same for both 3G and wifi, I would definitely include wifi from the start. (If you're not sure about the conversion flow, the offer description should tell you, or you can ask your AM to explain it to you.)



Amy

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My thought process was simply lander iPhoneX01 got the most clicks. I didn't consider conversions because I figured after the click, the offer lander takes over and is responsible for the conversion. I know this isn't the case for all offers, especially when we need to "warm up" the user before they get to the offer lander. But I was thinking my iPhone landers are not really doing much warming up, no real angle to persuade a conversion.


They accept both 3G and WiFi. I probably should have asked this question first before I made this decision. I noticed that if I target "All" (3G and WiFi), PropellerAds does not allow me to specify the specific 3G networks. So I targeted 3G only to be able to target the right networks.

EDIT: Elaborated on the lander thoughts.

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I ran another campaign, very similar to the last one above except:

• I used what I think are my best two landers based on the fact they get the most clicks.
• Using just the two offers that have ever converted on any of my iPhone X campaigns.
• Targeting 3G and WiFi instead of 3G only.

Similar results. I'm not sure what to do next to get more conversions for this campaign. Is it advisable to start tweaking zoneid's by blacklisting zones that get a lot of visits but no landing page clicks and/or conversions? And/or whitelist zones that have a higher percentage of landing page clicks and/or conversions? I'm not sure two conversions is enough to make those decisions.

In PropellerAds, I know how to blacklist, but I can't find how to whitelist zones. Everything I found says you can do it but nothing I see says how.







Advise on what to do next would be appreciated. My goal is still have a positive ROI campaign and it feels like I'm still not even close.

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I'm pretty sure I am stopping mobile pop campaigns. I just do not know what to do next to improve and this is dragging out too long. At Amy's recommendation I'm sticking with iPhone sweeps but no matter what I try, without any concrete suggestions, I am just wasting money. I feel like I'm proceeding blindfolded. I feel like I need to get lucky to progress. I was hoping to be further along by now but I go days just treading water.

I thought maybe a Mastermind group would help. I asked to join an active beginner mobile/pop/sweeps group 5 days ago and didn't get a reply. I also asked to join another newbie pop group.

I am trying to read other threads to get ideas of what to do but nothing is striking me except to keep fishing for a campaign that might have potential. But without suggestions that pertain to what I've done so far, I'm totally lost.

I want to keep going with pop since I think I'm learning a lot about it, but unless I find some direction on what do next, I am going to give Facebook a shot. I feel I could have more control over Facebook campaigns with their targeting options.

Goals:
A positive ROI campaign
A steady $10/day campaign

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I wouldn't recommend using CTR to judge a lander - unless the CTR is abysmally low - so low that it would take an impossibly high conversion rate in order to break even / profit.

I've seen too many landers that have lower CTR than the other landers in the split-test, end up being a winner.

CTR is not what will make you money, CR is.

So - base your cutting decisions on conversions. And if you're using the stats calculator:

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

Then the verdict will naturally be based on conversions anyway.

I understand your thinking process, but in reality, landers DO have the "responsibility" of pre-selling the prospect. By adding a lander to the flow, we're making the prospect click through one more thing - so if the lander doesn't pre-sell at least well enough to offset the "harm" done by requiring the extra action, then we may as well be direct-linking to the offer.

And yet, if you do a split-test between using the most popular sweeps landers in use by affiliate right now, vs. direct-linking without landers, you'll see the difference. It would be difficult to make an offer profitable without using a lander.

Basically, the typical sweeps lander will pre-sell the prospect by doing one or more of the following:

-Explain WHY the prospect stands to win an iphone and WHO is behind the contest. This is where affiliates use misleading angles like posing as a big trusted brand like google or amazon or a mobile carrier or an internet browser, using the respective logo, to earn the trust of the prospect. Examples of WHY would be a)the company is conducting a customer survey to improve their services, or 2)doing customer rewards to reward their long-time customers.

-Make the prospect invest a little bit of their time and effort, so that they'd feel deserving of the prize, as in the case of the survey lander.

-Make the prospect feel like they're in luck and has won something fair and square - the spinning wheel lander for example.

Hope that will encourage you to test more landers! They DO work. And once you've split-tested the more popular landers out there, you can get creative and try to test new angles to beat the best lander. (If you want to retain that edge though, trying to figure out how to avoid spy tools would be necessary. Otherwise, try to NOT make your lander stand out - by keeping a similar look-and-feel as the popular landers, and just rewriting the ad copy. This may be less effective, but would give you an advantage over affiliates that just rip and run.)


Does the offer only accept traffic from specific networks?


Don't be discouraged! Your stats are still looking promising! Too early to say, but the ROI on a couple of the offer+lander combos are looking good so far!

When cutting landers, use that stats calculator as mentioned in the post I've linked to above. And test more landers!

Once you have tested 5+ landers and end up with a winner, you can use that winner to test even more offers - that's when the profits is more likely to happen (although you may find profits during the lander test if you're lucky).


It's easy:



In the screenshot, the "Exclude" is toggled off, meaning any zone ID you put in there will be targeted, i.e. whitelisted.

If you're wanting to list zones to blacklist, you would toggle that setting - then any zone IDs you list would be excluded (blacklisted).


Facebook DOES have more profits potential, but the learning is a lot steeper.

But if that's what you're wanting to do, you have my blessings - but with the recent unstable behavior, it may be better to wait until things settle down before testing FB.





Amy

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I see, it looks like I need to focus more on the landers. I have to admit I did rip the easier landers, I didn't try any that required action like "spin" or a simple quiz because the code intimidated me. But I'll dig into a few of them and figure them out.

And thanks for the insight on landing pages. It's making more sense now. It's the positive aspects of the extra step the prospect needs to go through, the getting involved by playing a little game for example, that I wasn't considering.

The offers accept traffic from 6 networks plus Wifi, PropellerAds has 6 networks available. But only 3 of the networks accepted by the offer are available in PropellerAds. So I don't know how that works if I select 3G and WiFi in PropellerAds and am not able to specify which 3G networks. Maybe the answer is to run two separate campaigns, one WiFi, the other 3G with the common networks specified?

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Actually based on my memory, code for the spinning wheel and the quiz should not required any/much editing/fixing. You may just be psyching yourself out.

Just dive into it. If you get stuck figure it out and if you need help, ask.


Running wifi and 3g in separate campaigns would be a good idea anyway. As 3g traffic is more expensive, so if you run both at the same time you'd either by underbidding for one or overbidding for the other.

If the offer has the same conversion flow for both wifi and 3g, I would suggest to just run wifi first, because the traffic is cheaper. If the offer doesn't look promising, then there would be little point in testing 3g - chances are it won't convert too well there either.

However, if the offer has an easier/simpler conversion flow for 3g (e.g. 1/2-click carrier-billing), then I would suggest testing 3g first, even if the offer accepts wifi as well. If the simpler conversion flow doesn't convert well, chances are the more-complicated conversion flow on wifi traffic would convert even worse.




Amy

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While working on my new landers I saw one of my own landers on Adplexity. Looking at it further I noticed in the Outgoing URL Redirection Chain there are URLs I do not recognize.

- The first URL is my Voluum Click URL.
- The second URL is the Mobidea offer link.
- The remaining tracking.cohortdigital.com.au URLs, I do not know what they are.

Do these extra tracking.cohortdigital.com.au URLs look legit?

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I am not exactly sure about this but it can be redirects from the advertiser of Mobidea before it hits the offer landing page. Maybe you can use Affilitest to check if the redirects match?

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Thanks Wes, I didn't know about Affilitest, I'm adding to my toolbox. It came up with unknown destination for the URLs.

The URLs are probably OK. That landing page is very very bare bones, no JavaScript, CSS is embedded, so nothing hidden in the lander.

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Yup it looks like the extra URLs are redirects at the affiliate network.

As long as your traffic is ending up at the correct/intended offer(s), you're fine.

To verify this, log into the aff network and view offer stats. If you're seeing traffic for the right offers, that's all you care about.

How are things going in general? Do you have any stats we can analyze together?



Amy

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I ripped some of the seemingly more complicated landers, spinning wheels and quizzes. You're right they're not bad at all.

Unfortunately I still do not have what I think are meaningful stats to analyze, still chasing conversions. Every campaign I run only gets zero, one, or two conversions with 5x (sometimes more) payout spend. When I compare the campaigns there is not a common zone that gets more than one conversion. I have two offers out of 5 that seem to be the best and they convert about the same.

So I have been looking at combined stats from multiple campaigns. I know this is not ideal because there are variables between each campaign, but it's all I can do with my results.

I have looked at zones that have not converted with a high number of impressions and have started a blacklist that I incorporate.

I am confident that one of my landers is the best (a spinning wheel), 4 of my 12 conversions came through it. The rest of the conversions were spread out among 6 of my other landers. 5 landers have no conversions.

I also tried ZeroPark for traffic for two campaigns and got zero conversions, used 7x spend most recently.

I tried joining 4 beginner mobile pop Mastermind groups, I got no replies to my requests. I am hesitant to keep spending money on these campaigns because I can't seem to get any meaningful conversions.

If I had one wish right now it would be:
I wish someone would recommend (via Inbox) a specific lower payout ($1.50 - $2.50) mobile pop offer(s) that has a good chance to convert. One that is either not worth their while or they've moved on from it but it still converts. Or maybe an offer they just know is a good recommendation. I know this is question for Affiliate Managers but they do recommend the same offers to a lot of other affiliates.

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OK - let's use the best-performing variable so far to improve on the other variables!

You have a lander that seems to be a good converter. So just use that to test a bunch of offers - which up to now has been the weakest link. (Also, make sure the lander loads as fast as you can make it.)

When you find a good offer, use that to test more landers.

If you want to save money, you can even start a whitelist of all the placements that have converted so far - although it's possible for traffic to dwindle massively, it's worth a shot.

Or you could just keep running your blacklist camp - it should be cheaper now that you've cut some placements.

Then of course, if you feel that the geo you're running doesn't have that many more offers, you can try another geo.

I understand why you'd want for someone to recommend a converting offer, but really, it won't help you. It would just be one fish and you''ll just go hungry again tomorrow. Don't worry - you'll get better at fishing for yourself. Just need to keep the faith and test more.

I've heard big affiliates say that there are some great CC sweeps out. Perhaps ask around to see which networks have them?




Amy

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Thanks Amy, as usual great suggestions.

I'll run some whitelist campaigns. As you mentioned the traffic will dwindle considerably but that's OK.

I also think it's time to try other GEOS as you suggest. I've been avoiding different languages but it's time.

CC sweeps meaning Credit Card Sweeps?

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Credit card sweeps yes!

Oh so you've just been targeting English geos? (I'm assuming.) Most of those are competitive geos like US/CA/UK/AU/NZ/ZA. Profits potential of most of these is BIG to HUUUUGE, but it would take more testing and a LOT more cutting to make them work.

In the beginning, it would be better to target tier 3/4 geos (i.e. developing countries). Less testing and less cutting to get stuff profitable (relatively speaking).

Don't dread other languages.

1)You can rip landers that are already in the target language (although if you can't tell how good the translations are, you should test more landers to improve your chances).

2)Google translate has improved vastly over the past year or two. If you rewrite your text into short sentences first, and keep everything literal, google translate will often do a good job. Can't beat free!

3)If you really want good quality, try some of the Fiverr translators. You can get 1k words translated for as low as $5 depending on freelancer. They'll likely take longer than expensive places like onehourtranslation.com (up to a week or more usually) but they're so much cheaper. Choose translators that have lots of gigs under their belt and a high star-rating (4.5-5) and you can't go wrong.




Amy

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Yes, I was targeting Australia, mostly because there are a lot of Mobidea iPhone X offers available (and the English ).

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Haha I thought so!

AU is a great geo for sweeps....at least it was when I was running sweeps before. But like I mentioned in the last post, you need to be prepared to test a lot of landers and offers, find the best combination, and THEN cut a lot of placements before you can make it profitable.

Which is usually too daunting of a task for newbies. Try to stick to developing countries at first.



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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