Home > > Newbie Follow-Alongs

---

Rick"s Newbie Follow Along - Mobile POP Campaign - Guidance needed (9)

---

Holy moly, you lost almost $2k on offers with average payout of $0.4.

Before I answer your questions here are a few general things I would like to say.
You say you went through Amys Newbie Tutorial.
I know Amy puts lots of time and effort in her tutorials and they are really great.
I wished there would have been something like that when I started affiliate marketing in 2005.
And if you feel safer or more comfortable following these tutorials 1:1 then stick with it.
But I recommend to read the tutorials and most important to understand the process behind it and then apply these knowledge to slightly different campaigns.
Sure, if you are a complete newbie and first need to learn how to use a tracker and setup the links and all that stuff you should follow these instructions exactly because this is something that is the same for all marketers.
But when it comes to campaigns I would always try to do it at least a little bit different.
Just imagine how many newbies read the tutorials and start their advertising with these.
Imagine how many will do the same steps and then think about how many newbies do all the same things on the same sources in the same Geos with the same offers.
I did not go through the 40 day newbie tutorial myself so the above is just my very personal opinion, in the end do whatever you feel most comfortable with.
To lower the risk you can start campaigns with more tighter targeting thus less volume and then increase from there.

Then about your status snapshot, I recommend to switch to another tracker.
When running such rather low quality/high volume traffic like Pops an event billed tracker like Voluum gets too expensive.
Just imagine, you can get billed several times for each user.

User visits your tracking link -> One event
User clicks through from your lander to your offer -> One event
User converts and sends postback to tracker -> One event

You see, when a user converts that will be seen as 3 events for one user.
When I started running few hundred K hits on Pops per day I switched from Voluum to Binom, a self hosted tracker.
Costs $99/month for unlimited traffic.
For the tracker (and my landers) I use a server for another $40/month.
That´s all and enough for many thousands of hits per day.
If you want to I can also tell you the exact server I use.

Next are the trafficsources.
I would stick with Popads and Propeller first.
Zeropark has lots of volume but also lots of low quality traffic so you would need to filter a lot to get the good placements.
Popcash can work really good but only has fixed CPM.
On Propeller and Popads you have SmartCPM bids that can help you alot to control your traffic costs.

About the offers, you said you tested 250 offers.
How did you choose the offers?
Did you just pick them yourself or were they recommended by your AM?

To answer your questions:

>> What kind of CPM bidding that you used most of the time when you first started out a campaign? CPM or smartCPM? Is there really a need to use straight CPM bidding since smartCPM bidding will always do the work for us to bid higher than the competitions. Am I right about this?

When the TS offers SmartCPM I always use it, it helps you to keep traffic costs lower.
There is no need to pay equal for all placements, no need to pay the same for low quality placement as for good placements.
On some trafficsources you can the microbid on a per placement basis to give the good placements higher and fixed CPM for more volume.

>> Is it due that I am doing direct-linking without lander? I find that some other new members here have success with direct-linking, and we are told that we will eventually find profitable offers, I just need to keep testing. What about my case here, should I continue with the direct-linking approach after spending almost $2k? Up until now, I manage to find one offer that worth "keep running" after spending $50, but still not "whitelisted" yet.

It depends on the verticals.
Above you said

SOI/DOI in most cases need a lander.
Also SOI/DOI in low tier Geos mostly have pretty low payouts.
For low tier Geos better look out for good mobile content offers with 1click/2click flow.
When promoting mobile content offers then adult 1clicks or games for example can convert direct linked.
AV for example most/always works better with landers

>>Anyone has any suggestions(tools, services, or advice) about fixing ripped landers?

I would never rely on a tool to fix landers.
Go through it yourself, check that all tracking links are changed, that all token are corrected and stuff.
Use an editor with syntax highlight like notepad++ or Sublime for Windows or Kate or Sublime for Linux.

>>If we know which zones/placements that are converting in one geo+carrier, should we start a campaign with these placements whitelisted? I heard that we will punish with less traffic. I know the meaning of blacklisting, but not 100% sure about whitelisting. Does this mean that if we put these zones/placements in the whitelist, the traffic source will ONLY drive traffic from this whitelisted zones/placements, no other zones/placements else? Or the majority of the traffic will be from these whitelisted zones/placements, there is still traffic from other none blacklisted zones/placements?

Yes, when you run whitelist campaigns then you only get traffic from these whitelisted zones.
That mostly reduces the volume for these zones as well.
When you have a good campaign running you mostly don´t even need whitelist campaigns.
Sure it sounds good to only get traffic from the good zones and sure it can give you a high ROI.
But more important than ROI is the profit you make.
And when you have a good campaign running and blacklisted the high volume/low quality placements than the good ones will make good for the remaining bad placements 100 times.

All above is just my personal point of view.
I hope I could help you a little bit.
If you have more questions just hit me up.

---

Hi Rick! Your kind comment is much appreciated! Thanks for giving the tutorial a chance!

And twinaxe - wow! What valuable advice. Mega thanks for taking the time to write out such a big post!

I think everyone can relate to the sleeplessness when campaigns are running. There are tools you can implement later on to monitor various things. But yeah taking a break and doing a recap is justified and can be very beneficial!


First of all - I've recently done some testing on direct-linked offers, as members have been reporting that it had gotten difficult to find promising offers. When I started writing this tutorial last summer/fall, direct-linking to carrier billing offers was not nearly as difficult to make profits from as it is now. I'm in the process of giving the tutorial an overhaul:

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

The thing about tutorials is that they need to be updated constantly because the affiliate marketing world is in a constant state of flux. It used to be that testing lots of offers on a low budget each would still uncover enough offers to recoup losses. This is no longer the case - promising offers are too few and too far between.

So I do apologize for not having rewritten the tutorial in time. However, there was another thing that contributed to your having massively overspent: Cutting placements WAY too carefully.

Most pop camps get traffic from hundreds to thousands of placements. If you spend too much money on testing each placement you'll go broke.

So, it's not necessary to run to 10x payout. Usually when a placement is 2x in loss I would just cut it. I've relaxed the rule just a little bit in the tutorial to allow everyone to gather more stats for learning purposes, but nowhere near 10x payout.

Next - I'll answer your other questions...


SmartCPM will help you to bid more appropriately for each placement, such that you'll get traffic from more placements.

However, bidding SmartCPM means you're paying a different price for every placement, which would make it more difficult to decide which placement to cut - because PropellerAds, at the time I was writing the tutorial, did not have a cost token that would automatically update costs in Voluum.

But I believe it does now! I'll find out more about that. So that's another thing I'm going to update when I rewrite the tutorial!

I would recommend starting with SmartCPM, and then when you've locked into a good offer+lander, you can choose to test different bids at Fixed CPM by setting up multiple camps, and cut unprofitable placements for each camp. Fixed CPM gives you more control, but you may overpay for traffic from some placements.


I know what you mean. That happens to a lot of campaigns - the first day or two tend to give better performance.

For really small audience size, this may be due to saturation, i.e. some of the visitors have already been converted.

Other possibilities: Traffic sources may send better-quality traffic in the beginning, or affiliate networks may shave leads less in the beginning, or both. Disclaimer: This is my speculation only. And I'm making a generalization - absolutely NOT talking about PropellerAds or Mobidea specifically. I'm just listing possibilities.

This is why I've mentioned a few times that if an offer doesn't look like a winner right off the bat, then it's not likely going to turn into a winner. (Of course, this is assuming you're running decent-quality traffic, AND using a proven lander!)


Unfortunately, I don't think there's a tool out there that would allow you to "fix up" ripped landers automatically. There's just too much variation in how a landing page can be programmed.

I'm not technical either, but I learned just enough to get by. And later on I started partnering up with people that were good at coding.

I would suggest that you spend time on this until you're confident. Post as many questions as you have to. We could even look at code together - just paste it into pastebin and post the url here. I suck at coding too, but there are lots of members here that could help you. And of course I'll do my best to help as well!

Alternatively, you could hire someone to take care that part of the work for you - I've covered that in the tutorial so won't repeat that here.


When you start a whitelist camp, you'll only get traffic from the placements you selected.

You can test this approach and see what results you get. Sometimes this approach can work well.

For pop traffic though, blacklisting will often work better. Sometimes when you start a whitelist campaign, you'd get a massive decrease in traffic volume from those same placements compared to when they were in the original camp.

If that's the case, I would suggest what I like to call "whitelisting by blacklisting", which is basically just blacklisting the biggest placements that aren't on the list of placements you're wanting to whitelist - result: You'd be running the good placements plus a lot of mid- to small-sized placements. That way you stand to get more traffic than starting a whitelist camp.

Try both approaches - sometimes one works better, other times the other one works better.


Post it here! Let's take a look.


Don't be discouraged - many members have progressed to the landing page portion of the tutorial and are making consistent profits. You've spent money on learning. Yes you've overspent, but $2k wouldn't even pay for a single school term of my university education, and that was 20 years ago.

Based on the intelligent questions you're asking, I can tell you didn't spend all that money in vain. You just need to progress to the next step. Be proud of the progress you've made - I sure as hell am!



Amy

---

About Propeller Ads SmartCPM and fixed CPM.
On Propeller you can microbid on a per placement basis.
So just run the campaigns on SmartCPM and when you have converting placements give them a higher fixed CPM bid for more traffic or lower fixed for placements that convert but need lower bids to be profitable.
You can set the bids per placement on the Dashboard tab.

---

Hi @twinaxe, heartfelt thanks for your sharing.

You are so right about the competition between newbies, I never thought of that, but I think from now on, I need to think outside of the box on doing things.

As for the tracker, yes, you are right again. my subscription price is about USD$135 last month. With the kind of traffic quality I got, I don't think worth it. At first, I was thinking about moving to Funnelflux, but since you recommended Binom, I did a research on Binom, I found that a lot of good reviews on them. So, I will switch to Binom. Hopefully, I can get enough resources help to set up everything on Binom.

Question: For the server, can I host the Binom tracker on Amazon S3? Right now, I am using it to host my landers. Do you think it's a good idea?

On how to choose an offer, to be honest, I followed the instructions on newbie's tutorial, which is tier 2/3 Geos, SOI/DOI, payout less than USD$1.75, and offers are mostly mobile games, videos, and content. They are all offers from Mobidea. These offers are not recommended by my AM, I chose myself. Actually, I ran campaigns on 31 offers, not 250 offers. I gathered 250 conversions across these 31 offers.

I think I will use landers for my campaigns from now on for those SOI/DOI offers. I concur now that I need to design and fix landers myself at the beginning stage.

Question: When you say 1click/2click flow, what do you mean? Is this similar to SOI/DOI?

Again, thanks for your time for replying my questions.

Thanks & regards,
Rick

---

Hi Amy, thanks for your feedbacks, really appreciate it!

Ok, noted on the updated tutorial.

Yup, I admit I was cutting placements too carefully. I actually changed "Confidence" number in the "kill-whitelist-calculator" spreadsheet from 80% to 95%, and coupled with 5X or 10X payout, I think I agree that this is the reason I spent so much on campaigns.

Ok, I will follow what you recommend here.

Yup, I think I will start working on landers and learning some basic coding. I think I should be able to learn it. I think I was too eager to see results fast and try to speed things up, that's why I want tools to help me skip pass the coding stuff. I think I will just slow myself down and be patient.

Yes, I will try your whitelisting by blacklisting approach.

Thanks for the encouragement! I won't give up. Yes, you are right, I am thinking the same too. The $2k that I have spent, I won't considered it to be wasted. I know that always has fees that we need to pay to learn something new. The point is I find the people here are really helpful and willing to share their knowledge, which is really good to newbies.

Lastly, thanks for your guidance and help.

Thanks & regards,
Rick

---

Hi @twinaxe,

Noted and thanks.

Rick

---

The problem is that most newbies feel safer doing exact what they read in the tutorials.
Additional a newbie doesn´t know how to bid properly, that can increase the bids alot.
Read the tutorials and learn from it, understand the process and based on that knowledge build your own way to run campaigns.
Another problem is that even when I give you a blueprint of a campaign that is working for me and you copy it 1:1 (Same hosting, same tracker, same affiliate network, same offer, same traffic source, same targeting etc) you most probably will never get the same results as I do.
So understanding and adapting is the keypoint to success.

When I switched from Voluum to Binom I also tested several other trackers (FunnelFlux, Adsbridge, PixelK; before I used CPV Lab) but for me Binom just outperformed all of them.
Migrating from Voluum to Binom also is very easy (that also was a criteria for me).
When you first start Binom you can just enter your Voluum login details there and Binom imports all your campaigns, landing pages and offers from Voluum so everything is ready to run.

I also asked for help because I am by far no server tech guy.
Just ask the support, they are very nice and helpful and will take care of your setup.

I don´t know Amazon S3 but as far as I know it won´t work.
CDNs can only host static content like HTML and JS so running a tracker there won´t work.
I have a dedicated server where I have my tracker running as well as all my landers.
I will send you a pm with my exact server setup then you can check it yourself.

Ask your AM, in affiliate marketing assumptions about what aowkrs and what not mostly are wrong.
You can´t imagine what weird stuff can work and what quality stuff tanks completely.
Your AM is the source you should ask, he has insight what works in the network and what not.
Just tell what kind of traffic you run, the Geos you are interested in and if WiFi or carrier.
Talk with them, most AMs are very nice people so don´t be afraid to contact them.

I guess there is no way around it.
Even if there would be a software to do it automatically or even if you would hire someone to do it you should first know how these things work yourself.
It´s not hard at all, use a editor with syntax highlight to better see the code.
Check that all tracking links are changed to yours, check backbutton and then check JS files and remove the ones not needed.
You can also use seites like this one http://jsbeautifier.org/ to clean up the code a bit to make it easier readable.

SOI = Single Optin. A user fills a form, cliks send -> conversion
DOI = Double Optin. A user fills a form, clicks send, user confirms his email -> conversion
1Click flow = User goes to offer page, clicks "Subscribe" or similar button -> conversion
2Click flow = User goes to offer page, clicks "Subscribe" or similar button, user confirms with another click -> conversion

---

Hi @twinaxe,
Thanks for taking the time answering my questions.

I will go through them.

Rick

---

twinaxe - don't know how to thank you! You've answered all of the OP's questions and more.

binyan: I have nothing to add at this point, except that if you're wanting to run a few more 1/2-click offers via direct-linking just to get some practice, you can find recent recommended offers lists from Mobidea and ArmorAds in the Supplemental Materials section:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...ental-Material

Looking forward to seeing you get up and running soon!



Amy

---

Home > > Newbie Follow-Alongs