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So it begins... (5)

06-06-2018 10:36 PM #1 aomega08 (Member)
So it begins...

Hi everyone...

I registered to STM a couple of years ago, I don't even remember how did I find this place, but anyway... at the time my bank account was quite limited, so I quit the subscription and in the meantime I moved from IT to GB, instantly tripling the amount of cash I can save per month. And now here I am, ready to finally give it a try.

I resubscribed a couple of weeks ago, and immediately opened a Limited Company and found the 40 day bible by vortex. I remember that, when I quit, The Mobile Cookbook was the MUST read, but I found the new guide much simpler to follow (less messing with creatives and landers in the beginng). Thanks vortex!

According to stickupkid's Failure of the Galaxy Summary I'm on step 4 of my road to failure

Just to comply with the above expectations, I want to do x.xxx.xxx next week. Joking aside, I would love to close my first year with a break-even from all the expenses (STMForum, Voluum and an Accountant are quite expensive, and I haven't subscribed to AdPlexity yet), which means ~15$/day of revenue.

My steps until now:

  1. Registered to Mobidea, PropellerAds and Voluum, set the postbacks, and went to pick some offers as specified in the guide.
  2. The offers I picked had no registered conversion on mobidea (it shows global stats from all affiliates), so I decided to look for other tier 2/3 offers with some conversions and a decent CR.
  3. Picked 8 offers for Argentina, all with the same requirements and carrier, one from Colombia and two from Panama (games and videos of course).
  4. Set up the tracking and the campaign on PropellerAds with very broad targeting (the strict minimum required by the offers) for the most promising AR offer. I set the bid to the suggested price of 0.6 CPM.
  5. GOT MY FIRST CONVERSION WITHIN 5 MINUTES. I can officially say that I have been profitable in AM (for about 15 minutes) - lottery win?.
  6. After a couple of hours there was no Placement worth cutting, but a few of them were receiving a suspiciously high number of visits.
  7. Went to setup S3 and CloudFront to serve a Bot Trapping LP (following this guide), but still doing DL.
  8. All placement were looking natural (< 20% bots - or no JS), experiment failed
  9. In the meantime, I notice that most of my traffic (> 60%) is from Android WebView browser, but my conversion is on Chrome. I suddenly remember I had read a post on STM claiming that WebView traffic is most likely smart bots.
  10. Immediately go to PropellerAds and blacklist the Android WebView and Android Browser traffic.
  11. Everything falls apart, PropellerAds cannot provide me enough traffic.


End of day one.

  1. After the first night, the campaign has spend a total of 5$ and I still have only one conversion. I increase the bid to 1.2 and got another immediate conversion (yay!).
  2. After a couple of hours I notice that the traffic is still struggling, so I stop the campaign.
  3. I've now subscribed to many other traffic providers but haven't put any money there yet (any suggestions?)
  4. I've setup the Colombia campaign which has the same issue (after removing the WebView, no more traffic) and one of the Panama offers.
  5. For this Panama offer I actually setup two campaigns, one on 3G and one on WIFI (same offer). I already have a bot trap LP so I'm not too afraid of testing WIFI.
  6. Carrier traffic is even slower than AR and CO, but WIFI is very fast, in a few hours it drains my allocated 15$ budget without a single conversion .


Lessons learned:



Disappointments:



Next steps:



Stats!

Impressions: 22710
Conversions: 2
Cost: 24.96$
Revenue: 0.97
ROI: -96.13%

Any suggestion is very welcome!

Thanks!

06-07-2018 12:45 AM #2 vantagezone (Member)

Good luck, test, test, test, and wait for it.... Test

06-07-2018 01:17 AM #3 maynzie (Moderator)

Wow haha, conversion 5 minutes in! Beginners luck? I think not :P You've jumped right in and really made this happen mate!

0.97 revenue for 2 conversions, must be an really low paying offer, which might be hard to get profitable in your first shot at a campaign. I would probably pick an offer with a bit more conversion dollar room, maybe speak to your AM and ask for one of the best performing offers in Tier 3 so you can keep out of the competition but also have a good shot at getting profitable.

06-11-2018 01:51 PM #4 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

Hello,

propeller is likely the biggest POP source, so if they don't have the volume ... it will be hard to get it elsewhere. 3G traffic is always lower, wifi holds much more volume, that's normal.

TIP: for wifi traffic, you need lead-gen type offers, PIN submits (carrier billing) will NOT work with it, don't even bother.

Anyways, I see you are directlinking ... this is very UNLIKELY to bring decent results for you these days. Absolutely learn how to get good LPs and resume your testing. I would also recommend to stay within 1 GEO for now, while testing multiple offers in it. If you want to test more GEOs at all costs ... go ahead, but make sure there is enough offers to test - finding the good offers is the biggest challenge right now.

06-13-2018 01:15 AM #5 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Apologies for arriving late on scene!

The biggest piece of advice to you: Move onto the lessons on how to rip+fix+test landers ASAP. As matuloo has pointed out, direct-linking is unlikely to net you profits nowadays. Please see this post:

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

Still, launching a few direct-linked campaigns has given you the experience and confidence required to progress to the next level: Using landing pages. AND you even got some conversions! This is definitely a major milestone.

So, forget about direct-linking and mass-testing carrier-billing offers - that approach used to work, but as good offers became more and more scarce, has turned into a waste of time and money.


Disappointments:

I really wish I found some very BAD placements, in terms of bot traffic. Instead even on WIFI I couldn't get any placement with more than 35% bots (just a few very small placements - 5 views, 1 click - not statistically significant).
I LOL'ed at the fact that you would list that as a "disappointment".

The lack of bot traffic is definitely a plus for conversion rates. Also, the bot-trapper method we're using will not identify ALL the bots - so the percentage we ARE able to detect are already conservative estimates. We certainly don't want that percentage to be bigger than it needs to.

As for webview traffic, that has become a bigger and bigger issue recently. You're right in deselecting that traffic from the start. There's not much you can do about the decreased volume after doing so. Test different geos to with webview filtered out to see which ones still have healthy traffic volumes and go from there.

And of course, you can just run on more sources to access more traffic. Zeropark for example will allow us to exclude webview from campaign targeting by the end of next week:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post346693

Looking forward to your next update! Again, I would strongly recommend that you STOP DIRECT-LINKING and move onto landers NOW!



Amy

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