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2 Lessons Learned By Advertizer.com (Pay Special Attentiom to TIP #2!) (51)

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I saw this FB post by MrGreen yesterday that I feel everyone would find interesting. Pay particular attention to tip 2!

You can find the original post here:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?sto...00007417326821



It's been 3 months since the birth of Advertizer.com.

Our goal was to create a super easy-to-use traffic source for mobile affiliates. We achieved that. I want to share two important lessons we’ve learnt so far:

1. We made a massive mistake at the start. We told our affiliates what currently worked at the time “You should run apps, lead gen, dating and pin submits.”

This tip was based on real data. It was true at the time. However, in the past 6 months, the ad tech industry has gone through heavy regulation, FB vs Cambridge Analytica, GDPR, Chrome blockers etc.

With change comes opportunity.

The opportunities that have been dominating Advertiser in the past month is COD (cash-on-delivery) and e-commerce offers in Tier 2 and Tier 3 countries. If you have any COD/Ecom campaigns currently running on FB, then this is an easy move for more scale. You only pay once you have made a sale (ping leemonetizer on Skype for instant approval).

2. https links convert 4x better than http links.

This is relevant for every affiliate running any traffic. If you are buying iOS traffic on Safari browser and not using https links, then stop reading right now, and get your links secured. Now watch your conversion rates soar.

This has been an issue for the past 3 months.

That is all for now! Exciting times ahead, I’ve never experienced such turbulence in the industry in my 12 years being here.

This is the time when innovators shine.



Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Thanks, just working on SSL cert for S3 bucket.

Can you tell more about iOS and Safari browser... what happens if you're using http?

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Same question here.

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Very interesting insight, also plan to implement SSL ASAP.

I wonder what happens if the part of the flow is not on HTTPS. ie. the affiliate network or the offer itself?

Anyone has data on this?

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This is accurate information and currently is specific to iOS traffic.

While I haven't seen 4x improvement, a strong 2-3x for sure. This is a definite change if you have not done so already, it will help.


Cheers,

Andrew

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Third-ed ... if anyone has any tips for smoothly setting up SSL with s3/cloudfront/route 53 combo, please let me know! I'll start doing some digging on my own in the meanwhile. Would love to migrate my stuff over ASAP, esp. as the new chrome version will start flagging unsecure sites next month too, iirc.

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A few hours ago I start writing step-by-step tutorial for setting up SSL with S3/Cloudfront/NS1. I will publish it later today.

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Haha rad. Cheers to you for working on that, and thanks for the heads up because I almost was about to do the same, as I just figured it out. There were a few subtleties that certainly deserve the explanation from a guide, such as having to issue the certs from ACM in the `us-east-1` (N. Virginia) region in order to work with cloudfront.

Now, the one unfortunate side-note is that Voluum does not support SSL for custom domains, but only from the dedicated domain, so I'm not sure how I'll be able to make my entire funnels SSL, tracking domains included. I don't like to expose my dedicated domain, as it makes it too easy for someone to follow me around in the spy tools as opposed to being able to switch out tracking & hosting domains as often as needed...

I've emailed Voluum support to see what their stance is on supporting SSL for custom tracking domains. I'm a little concerned that the upcoming chrome update might flag the tracking domains as 'insecure' and pause the redirect chain before it hits the rest of an otherwise secure funnel.

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Trying to figure this out as well.

Also having problem using Rackspace CDN with SSL under a CNAME (subdomain) as it throws an error: your connection is not secure.

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What's the full error that chrome shows for example? Though the setup will be a little different than a full amazon stack, I had a similar problem with the SSL certs I first issued, in reverse though, where subdomains worked fine, but my apex domain (i.e. without `www`) displayed as insecure.

It turns out I needed to issue my SSL certs with both the wildcard, *.mylanderdomain.com AND the apex mylanderdomain.com . Once I reissued a cert with both listed, my problem was solved

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Please update us about their response.

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Once more I have to recomend Binom, there you can get SSL certificates for free for your domains.

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would you consider western EU markets under tier2?
I had great success in FR and DE with COD on Advertizer in the past but cant get it going lately.
Upgrading to https now as we speak, will retry it then.

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Just got a reply:

Good to know it's an option, but TBH, an extra $50 a month seems a bit steep to me, especially considering I can get free SSL certs for hosting already. We've already got one tracker mentioned above that provides it for free. Though it sounds like a bit of a pain in the ass, I think I might start migrating my camps to a new tracking solution. Anyone know if there's a cloud-hosted tracking solution that offers free SSL certs for custom tracking domains? (hope we're not derailing this Advertizer thread haha though its been fairly relevant)

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This should be free.

Especially when you already pay for the tracker and SSL is now a standard.

Everyone can get free SSL certificates using the Open Certificate Authority https://letsencrypt.org/.

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Yes, these are the ones that Binom uses as well.
When you add a new landing page or tracking URL the certificate can automatically be installed without any additional work.

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Its a real shame Binom doesn´t have a cloud version.

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As of beginning of 2017 they told me they didn’t support SSL under CNAMEd domains for their CDN.

However I remember you use Serverpilot which makes it as easy as 1 click to enable SSL for your landers.


Sent from my iPhone

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We seriously have performance drop though, not better performance for sure because of the redirection speed.... You can see the pictures below the before and after making it a huge difference in response time.

Before installing the SSL:


After installing the SSL:


We really have no ideas why everyone else is having performance increase though, the fact is the response time is dropping at least 5 times here and hence the performance drops too on the conversion rate. Is anyone having the same issue like us?

PS:/ It might not be an issue for banner/native/social traffic, but definitely an issue for pop/redirect traffic*

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It's exactly what I was thinking too.

It's slower so it will heavily affect pops. To be fair, iOS pops were always crap for us.

When you have intent though (banner, native, social), the 1s extra wait will probably not matter.

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I'm buying native traffic (iPad), Not sure if I should switch to SSL? Would that increase conversions? Using Voluum without SSL now.
I hate that extra $49 per month for Voluum just to have SSL custom tracking domain.

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Are you sure you are comparing the load time of the same resource? From what I see your first resource was taking 768ms, the second 273ms before the SSL, and after SSL 1th resource takes 1200ms, 2nd one 255ms, so there is a bit of fluctuation which is normal. But yea maybe I'm wrong, but good if you take another look at it

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I just talked to a friend who met Voluum rep in Romania and they told him they can do it for free if he sends them the cert files.

So hopefully they will step in and make the things clear.

Glad to see some hot discussion here though.

I think we will need a guide for this for sure, just need to figure out the best ways to set things up.

Sent from my SM-G930F using STM Forums mobile app

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Yes, the first redirection is our tracker with the SSL installed, the 2nd one is actually Monetizer link with SSL installed too, the 3rd one onwards are some other redirections that are for the entire funnel. But the SSL is responding at least 3 - 5 times slower than the ones without the SSL no matter how many attempts we try. And the CVR% tells it all too as normally we will have around 3% - 5% but now the CVR% drops all the way to 1-2% which is super terrible.

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I'm very sure if you're using Native as a source it will greatly help ( especially desktop traffic as the "Not Secure" label is gonna be very obvious in the URL address bar ), because after July, Google Chrome will tell the users all websites that are still with HTTP as "Not Secure". For more information you can refer to this link here: https://security.googleblog.com/2018...e-to-stay.html

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Yeah, totally agree with this statement too.

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If you want/need SSL but are concerned with load speed I would highly recommend you look at using Cloudflare instead.

With the right configuration you can generally turn on orange-cloud/proxy mode over most systems, and this will let you use flexible SSL where the SSL negotiation is only between the client and the Cloudflare edge server (and then regular HTTP to your back-end).

Because those edge servers - it being a CDN and all, are extremely close to almost every user, the SSL negotiation is much faster.

The big performance killer for SSL is the round-trip negotiation that exacerbates any latency you have between the user and your server. Putting that SSL negotiation end point as close to the user as possible is critical.

We use Cloudflare for FunnelFlux managed so that we can provide fast and free SSL on all domains (i.e. unlimited domains, all with SSL). We will also shortly be forcing our managed systems to SSL by default, i.e. everything is generated in HTTPS by default and it rewrites everything to HTTPS. It's kinda in the customer's best interest to do this these days to prevent issues (especially ones they don't even realise exist).

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Thanks for your great tip! I use Cloudflare. It already has SSL setting for free plan and by default "Flexible" option is selected.



I can access all my landing pages with and without https in URL. Just not using https at this time. Seems like I better edit my landing page URLs @ Voluum to https but would that interfere with tracking? or break everything! https shows "Secure" in Chrome's address bar which is nice.

Still unsure SSL custom tracking domain would increase Native conversions for iPad though.

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I was completely ignoring ssl when it comes to my AM activities, have to look into it now, maybe I'm missing out a bit there

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Any huge difference between Cloudflare and Cloudfront SSL? Thinking of using Cloudfront instead though. Thanks Zeno!

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Might have an obvious answer to this after July Chrome's update, in theory it should definitely help in terms of conversions. About breaking everything or not, I think it's better to ask the Voluum support, they can definitely answer your questions.

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For anyone concerned about SSL speed let me add something.

HTTP + SSL (aka HTTPS) was much much slower than a plaintext HTTP connection, but things have changed long ago. As of end 2017, SSL added an overhead to the request size of about 2% and to the request time of about 5ms (YMMV).

Things are changing very quickly though with TLS 1.3 (the latest version of SSL - which btw is an old term). This version which is now only supported by most recent versions of browsers (64% of support worldwide) has a shorter handshake (the process of establishing the secure connection) involving only one round-trip instead of 3.

Plus if a client is connecting to your server a second time, even after an extended period of time, a new feature called 0-RTT will allow the client to just initiate the data transfer without any handshake. In more practical terms it means that for every human, the first connection may be slightly affected (still <= 5ms), but any other connection wont.

Finally SSL (or TLS) is needed to have HTTP/2. If you didn't know, HTTP/2 is the new version of the HTTP specification that provides a massive speed boost. In particular if you serve multiple resources from the same domain (like the lander, the images, the stylesheets and scripts), the browser will only use a single connection instead of multiple (less handshakes, smaller latency, even with the SSL overhead) and use compression on the HTTP Headers as well, saving some bandwidth and time.

HTTP/2 has many more interesting features (especially preloads), that can make loading your site (or lander) much quicker than the old unprotected HTTP.

If you want to know more, please ask. I may be a complete newbie at AM (launched my first campaigns just a couple of days ago, very bad ROI and going to open a Follow Along), but I surely know something about Web development and speed optimisations

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I’ve been using TLS and HTTP2 for my campaigns (pop traffic included) and didn’t see any performance issues vs. HTTP.

SSL was slower a few years ago but nowadays is not a problem. Not even for pop campaigns IMO.


Sent from my iPhone

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This link should explain a lot regarding https vs http on Safari.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208672


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Following. What are the reasons that account for https having a 2x-4x higher CR compared to http?
Also from the previous replies, this issue pertains to mobile iOS devices using safari browser?

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I think there is confusion for the affiliates, you are talking about the pages of the offers and not the prelanders that belong to the affiliates.

The problem is the registration form, if you don't have forms you don't have to worry about the https right now. If you have a form, actually your conversions triple them by going to the https

The same consequences with Mozilla:



With the message: "your connection is not secure, the identifiers could be compromised"

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On my side I have test https on my landings for a month, I don't know the technical reason but I am sure that the conversions have dropped (20-30%).

Voluum's answers didn't convince me so I prefer to stay on http until it's really considered a reliable tracking

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Actually we saw a massive increase when securing just our redirect links (no forms).


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Effectively, it's my confusion with the Apple link. You talk about the deliverability of the ads link before displaying the prelander/offer

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Same here, but what is your traffic channel? Pops/Redirect I believe? I think it won't affect much for those that use banner/native/social though.

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Perhaps one of the mods can get someone from Voluum to respond to this?

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@zeno

Could you elaborate more on the "right configuration"?

Is there anything the should be turned on/off while using the "orange cloud"?

EDIT: Is this what you mean? http://docs.funnelflux.com/technical...tting-free-ssl

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Maybe that clear RED "Not Secure" text in address bar is enough to kill conversions specially on phones as it looks more visible on smaller devices.

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To the best of my knowledge, you can use SSL with custom domains on Cloudfront but you need to provide your own certificate, go through many more steps to get it active/working, and you can only use one certificate per distribution. So if you wanted many domains using the same CDN distribution you would have to constantly update a SAN certificate to cover these.

Whereas with Cloudflare they provision and deploy certificates automatically the moment you add a site to your account. Overall, I think Cloudflare also has a better network - and in particular a much greater presence in LATAM, Africa and the Middle East.

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Yeah, it has gotten a lot better. You should still test your own links to look at the differences of course. We can definitely be fast, of course advertisers, offers etc. are another story (god knows what tech they are using).



Yes, that guide lays it out pretty well. The key things are:
- Add a page rule that sets cache level to bypass, security to essentially off (presuming you don't want any filtering happening), browser integrity check off
- Set SSL to flexible in crypto tab
- Ensure back-end is set to take the IP header passed by Cloudflare and ensure that IP is used by PHP and other systems (FunnelFlux looks for this header automatically) - https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en...quest-headers-

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True, mainly Pop traffic

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Matuloo has written a comprehensive guide on how to implement tip #2:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ns-with-VOLUUM



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Here is also my take on this topic:

2 Dead Simple Ways How to Setup 🔒 SSL/HTTPS for FREE with CloudFlare/ServerPilot

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Just got a response back in regard this to this:

I guess that's unfortunately not an option anymore. Bummer!

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How to be approved at Advertizer.com??
There is problems with the site?

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No, just not eveyone is getting approved.

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