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What happens after the 40-day tutorial (6)

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Hi guys and girls!

I've successfully completed Amy's awesome 40day tutorial and am now trying to move.

My first attempts are related to sweeps offers from MaxBounty and running traffic from PropellerAds + PropellerAds.

One of my bigger problems right now is, that I don't have an Adplexity account, which would eat too much into my budget, so I've tried some manual spying and used the landers from this forum etc.

First day:
Offer - 1.66 payout Sweeps offer from MaxBounty. Allowed countries: UK only

I've heard good things about PopAds and their targeting options, so thought this might be a good time to try it out. Deposited 100USD and set the campaign up in Voluum and PopAds.

I was really impressed about the "Categories" targeting and how much you can narrow the audience. I was told that two categories don't convert at all - Image sharing sites and Video sites so I left these out. However I noticed that available volume dried up A LOT. At this point it was okay as there was still plenty of traffic for testing, but scaling could have been tricky.

I set a budget of 15USD for day one and let it run on 3g connections.

Day two:
First test yielded no conversions. I created an identical campaign for wifi traffic for another 15USD and let it run. Still got 0 conversions.

In my mind I thought I should walk away and cut my losses.

Still had some questions:
1. As I wasn't using a lander yet (just to try the offer out, would have included it later), maybe this was the cause of no conversions?
2. Maybe UK was too competitive geo, although I bid fairly high as well
3. As I wasn't using a lander I was affected by a lot of bot traffic without a way to detect it (I was trying to combat this on day one with 3g-only traffic)

Day three:
Went back to MaxBounty and talked to my AM.
Picked another sweeps offer that seemed to be doing well, also offer page looked professional etc.
Offer details:
Sweeps, allowed for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, payout - 1USD per lead, single opt in, network EPC 0.25
Downside was that again allowed countries list was T1 - Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

I had read that Push Notifications are converting really well on PropellerAds (and also that it's good for sweeps) and gave it a try. Added a picture and text (I speak german, so it was easy) and was ready to go. Estimated traffic looked good, targeted all Androids.

Again I'm not using a lander yet, at least not for testing phase, do you think I should use a lander already... or is lander even necessary with these kinds of SOI sweeps offers?

Campaign was approved almost immediately, Voluum seemed to be working correctly. However no traffic started flowing. I contacted support who told me:
"With the push notifications it's a little bit different - the subscribers get a 24 hour time lag after they subscribe for ads before the first ads start. "

At this point I'm waiting for this to happen, it hasn't been 24 yet.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about what I've tried so far and answers to my questions.

I'll check in soon when the push notifications traffic has started flowing.

See you soon!
R.

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Hey haavre , congratulations on getting started!

Manual spying is of great help in many situation, but still it lacks on giving you some important information (spytools can) like how many days a specific offer has been running, what landers, what traffic networks, offer networks and much more.
In case your budget doesn't have room for a competitive intelligence tool like Adplexity, I believe their weekly newsletter can be of great help
http://sneakpeak.adplexity.com/lp2/

Since this was your first campaign on PopAds, I think it was not necessary to cut out high volume categories like file sharing and video streaming site categories, rather than just adult traffic. Instead, focus on cutting out low ctr /non converting placements.

UK is quite competitive to crack down, I would check less competitive countries first. Look out for T2 SOI offers, they should be easier to convert while at the same time practice on less expensive traffic.

Even though in a lower percentage compared to WiFi, bot placements are present in carrier traffic as well. Start using landers and try to implement* one of the below methods to create an idea of the traffic quality.
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ffic-in-Voluum
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...live-campaigns
* You can easily get lost in chasing bot traffic, make sure not to waste too much time on it and focus on the campaign.

Nowadays using landers has become like a must. Without an additional metric besides visits and conversions it is pretty hard to properly optimize your campaigns. On top of that, a lander will help on stimulating a visitor to convert way better than a simple opt-in form of an offer. Definitely don't skimp on landers.


MrBraun has just posted a thread regarding Push notifications on PropellerAds, check it out
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...n-propellerads

Furthermore, I would suggest the following:
- Signup for more affiliate networks, Maxbounty can have good offers, but still you need to have access to more offer sources.
- Get more information about the offers your AM is suggesting. EPC is just not enough, volume of traffic an offer has received as well as the conversion rate can be really helpful.
- Create an optimization plan for your campaigns.

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Awesome, I really appreciate your feedback, platinum!

I noticed the AdPlexity sneak peak option as well and actually signed up a few days ago - should get my first one in few days.

About PopAds - yes, forgot to say this, but I also excluded adult traffic as well in addition to the two categories. Good point about not excluding categories prematurely. Will try again with all turned (other than adult) on and will just start blacklisting (I have a rudimentary blacklist already with around 100 placements).

About geo selection - I agree about UK (and Germany etc) being too competitive. However, I've found that better-looking (and -performing) offers are often only available for T1 geos. For example I didn't see any sweeps offers in MaxBounty for T2/T3 geos. And more often than not I've read that "offer is everything". So I'm a bit torn between picking a good offer vs. good/easy geo. Still not fully sure how to tackle this, maybe I should look at other marketplaces, not only MB and Mobidea.

Regarding landers - yes, good suggestion, actually I was building one today. I'm currently subscribed to Leadpages and been trying it out. What do you think of it in terms of speed? Would be good to hear some experts opinions. I also tried uploading fully custom ripped landers there (spinners for sweeps offers) and seems it can be done (i.e. you don't have to use their ready-made templates). I'm still doing some tweaks to get the loading time down. As a side note, I have quite a bit of development background, so this is not too difficult for me and actually quite interesting work
Next step is to use the links you provided to add the bot check setup - I've already read it through last week, but didn't have any landers yet back then to implement them on. Looks like there's agreement on the best practice how to do this, so should be quite straightforward, knock on wood.

And finally, about push notifications - actually reading through MrBraun's thread that you linked to, was the one thing that made me want to try it out. Still haven't received almost any traffic from there, so can't make any conclusions yet, but 24h mark is close so shouldn't take too long anymore.

To finish off, couple of extra questions:
- which networks would you recommend joining (in addition to MaxBounty and Mobidea)? Maybe it's worth noting that I'm not interesting in adult campaings atm.
- is Leadpages okay solution for hosting landers?

Next steps for me:
- finish my first lander, create couple of tweaked versions of it and use them in campaigns + optimize
- see how push notification trial run goes and decide how to continue
- add bot check to landers
- check out the adplexity newsletter and steal some ideas
- figure out how to leave nice in-line responses like platinum did

See you in the future!
- R.

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One more quick thought - as offer owner can't probably never see how the push notification looks like that generated a lead, this means that we could run super aggressive, right?

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Quick update - the traffic finally came through.
I'm a bit confused, looks like lander got 42 visits (according to Voluum), but Propeller reports only 27 clicks (and 10 800 impressions).

I don't think 0.25% CTR is great at all.
Another downside is that in Voluum I can only see visitors who opened the push notifications (which makes sense), but limits optimisation opportunities considerably.

Still thinking of changing my push notification copy to be more aggressive (currently it's not aggressive at all). Any thought on this?



R.

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Hi haavre and good start! Plenty of great advice from platinum as usual!

I haven't had a chance to run push traffic myself yet - will ask mrbraun to see if he could drop by sometime to provide some guidance.

Because I haven't run it, I can't tell if 0.25% CTR is good or bad. Are you getting conversions at all?


Please clarify what you mean by this. Are you not able to see conversions?


You can try, and see whether Propeller will approve the camp or not.



I haven't used this service myself, but I remember it's a page builder for building opt-in pages to capture leads? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

If I'm right, then that's not the kind of landing pages we're looking for.

As for hosting, I don't know how fast they are - you can test lander speed on pingdom or webpagetest.org to find out. Also, I don't know if leadpages is using a CDN to serve your pages to ensure loading speed is optimized for your target geo.

For us affiliate marketers running paid traffic, lander loading speed is essential, because nobody likes ads, least of all pop ads which are disruptive and annoying by nature. Opt-in pages are different - they are usually served to a niche audience that has some level of interest in what they're offering, so people tend to have more patience in waiting for the page to load. For ad not a chance - if your page loads slower than 2s you may as well pronounce it dead. Preferably you'd want to keep it under 1s if possible, and absolutely under 2 s as a minimum.


Haha are you referring to the quoting function? It's simple - 2 ways to accomplish this:

1)Using bbcode QUOTE tags:




2)By highlighting the text you're wanting to quote, then click on the quote icon in the bar at the top of your post editing area:




Another tip: When you're posting images and want them to look big and clear, upload them to imgur.com, then grab the bbcode link and paste it directly into the post and save. Don't use the forum's attachment upload function - it's screwy and unreliable and doesn't work right half the time, and even when it does the image appears small. It's a vBulletin thing.


As platinum emphasized, running with landers is a must!

And please don't try to build custom landers at the start - there would be no way to predict the performance of your new landers! Rip landers you see being used a LOT - if so many people are using it, chances are it's because it's converting at least half-decent.

What you can do is join Adplexity for a month and rip a whole bunch of sweeps landers in every language - enough for you to play with for a few months.

Alternatively, you can browse to sites that serve popup/under ads, click around to trigger ads, and rip them from there. You'll need to get a VPN to set to the geo that speaks the language of the geo you're trying to rip landers for. Also, change the VPN connection frequently to trigger new ads, as many advertisers would set frequency to 1/24 (pop up once per 24 hours).

As for sites to spy on, here's a list I grabbed from Zeropark a few months back:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6hdgq90prw...00-zp.txt?dl=0

These sites are for US (i.e. I set the camp in ZP to target the US geo when I copied them), but a lot of these sites also send traffic from other geos because they're big torrent sites that have visitors from all over the globe. If you want a list more customized for your target geo that's different from the US, you can log into ZP, start a "TARGET" PPV campaign, fill in any dummy campaign information, and save it, and you'll be shown a screen of a huge list of urls to choose from. Simply click and drag to highlight all the urls and copy it. Then browse and rip to your heart's content.

When you rip via manual spying, you won't see stats like you would in Adplexity, that would tell you e.g. which landers are the most popular. But if you spy for long enough and see enough landers, you'll get an idea on which landers are being used a lot. Or, you can always just make up for that by ripping and testing more landers. Try 5+ to start.

PopAds is a very nice place to start - it has the best-converting traffic I've seen among all the major pop networks. Volume is lacking though, especially if you're wanting to run 3G traffic.

Speaking of 3G: Since your offer DOES accept wifi, there would be little point in testing 3G traffic which is more expensive and has a lot less volume than wifi.

Some offers have different conversion flows for wifi and 3G, where the conversion flow for 3G is a lot simpler than for wifi (1/2-click for example), so conversion rates would be higher as well. In this case, it would be worth it to test 3G first (because if not even the simpler conversion flow will convert, then chances of the more complicated flow converting would be even smaller; in other words if 3G doesn't look promising I wouldn't even waste time testing wifi). Otherwise, if the conversion flow of the offer is the same for 3g and wifi, I would suggest to test on wifi first because it would be cheaper and your testing would go a lot faster due to the extra volume.


I definitely agree with platinum on not restricting categories from the very beginning. Over time if you're finding that certain categories are consistent losers, you can blacklist them for all future campaigns for sure, but not before.

Basically pop traffic itself is broad-intent traffic, i.e. not niche. Visitors are not from any specific demographic and don't have any common trait across them. This is why when choosing verticals to run on pop, we'd usually want to choose ones that are general/broad in nature, offers that the general audience would be interested in, and sweeps is one of those verticals.

In that sense, categories shouldn't matter too much. However, having said that, there are types of sites where visitors may be less responsive due to the nature of the sites. For example adult sites - we all know what people are usually doing when they're browsing those - and they'd be so absorbed in the act that something like sweeps offers would not likely be attractive enough to get their attention. (A scary antivirus might. Or a very interesting looking game - because they may just be bored and looking to be entertained. I've promoted both successfully on adult traffic. And then of course there's the obvious adult dating, adult games, adult cams, male enhancement etc. - but I won't go into that too much since you're not wanting to target adult.)


Good move. And yes - for sweeps you NEED to use landers. No doubt about that. The only exception is if your offer already has pre-landers built-in - some advertisers would be smart and incorporate pre-landers into the offer (we just call them "landers") and either split-test the different versions themselves or get affiliates to split-test them, to find out which ones do the best. They would look like our typical landers - have survey questions etc. Those you could direct-link to.

Let me give you some intel about sweeps: Apparently CC submit sweeps offers are all the rage these days. Payouts are higher and conversion rates are lower than the pay-per-lead sweeps offers you typically see though, which makes them not very newbie friendly, but definitely something to keep in mind once you have a bit of experience - or you can try them out now if you're bold enough for a challenge. Be prepared to spend a larger budget though.

(A smarter way if you want to save on budget: Find out which geos the best CC submit sweeps offers are in - you can talk to various AMs to find this out. Then, seek out good CPL sweeps offers for the same geos. The CPL sweeps will have lower payout and higher conversion rates, which would make it a lot cheaper to collect data to cut placements. Once you've cut most of the biggest and worst placements, you can run the CC Submit sweeps offers.)


UK is competitive for sure. Traffic is expensive, and there are a ton of placements you'd need to blacklist.

Once you've made that initial investment in blacklisting placements though, you can run there again and again with new offers, landers, etc.

But if you don't have the budget, then I'd strongly recommend that you start with tier 3/4 geos (basically developing countries instead of developed countries).

There are plenty of sweeps offers in those geos. If you're not seeing them on your current aff networks, join more. Gotzha for example has some of those if I remember correctly (I remember TH is one of the geos they specialize in - but if you join up your AM will recommend the best-converting ones for you to try).


Looking forward to your next installment!



Amy

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