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I, Newbie, Made a Bet... Help me win it! (33)

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I made a bet with 4 friends of mine and I am hoping I can get some pointers here.

Here’s the challenge. Each of us has $500 to spend in pure media buying (server, tracking, hosting and other software costs covered independently).
Note that all 5 challengers are noobs. We're familiar with AM but none of us have had much experience, let alone experienced a success before.

The person that generates the highest profit over the course of 4 weeks wins.
(in the unlucky scenario in which none of us would break a profit, the person with the highest ROI on $500 costs wins)

Available tools: Adplexity, PureLander, Voluum
Format: display (pop or banner)
Vertical: open
Geo: open

I will be posting updated in this follow along about my media buying progress, as well as about the contest itself.

I am hoping to get your support and advice as I'm swimming through this, and hopefully STM will be the unfair advantage that will earn me the top of the podium on July 10th.

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My first question comes regarding the segment to focus on for this challenge.

Note: I've optimized campaigns before and played with pre-landers in the sweeps vertical following vortex's 40-day tutorial. However, I was not able to turn the campaigns green. That's about the extent of my experience at the moment.

Geo
What geo's will allow me to make the most out of the $500? From what I've read before, sounds like I should be sticking to low payout, low CPM geo's. Any recommendations?

Format
Sounds like banners can really help boost conversions, but I've never worked with them before. Adding an unfamiliar variable for this challenge scares me a bit... Would you guys reckon I could figure it out rapidly on the limited budget I have or should I stick it to what I know - pops?

Vertical
The million dollar question Based on the answers I'll read for the first two points, I'll use the "What's Working in Affiliate Marketing in 2018" report to make a choice. But again, if there are any low-hanging fruits that you guys would recommend, that'd be awesome!

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This one looks pretty interesting!

If you haven't run banner campaigns, I'd suggest not going for that ad format. Not because it's hard to convert on banner traffic, but mostly because it is hard get good ctr banners approved.
Pop/Redirect traffic should be a good option, especially because lots of affiliates have moved away from pops therefore the competition shouldn't be the one that used to be a few months ago.

Here's what I would do in your situation:
Step 1: Head to Adplexity and analyze all potential sweepstakes (SOI) campaigns that have been running for at least 5 days during the last 30 days.
Step 2: Try to figure out if the top performing offers are direct from the network detected from Adplexity or brokered. If brokered find the main network or advertiser and see if I can get access to.
Step 3: Ask for the top performing offers list from the network list generated on step 1 and try to get as much information as I can.
Step 4: Compare the data from both information sources and check traffic availability on the sources I know how to handle and have access to have enough volumes.
Step 5: Quickly prepare landing pages, add some hidden links that help on detecting bot clicks then prepare the campaign for approval.
Step 6: Cut low performing placements aggressively including those with bot clicks.

As for the GEOs I think $500 is enough to test and optimize 2-3 campaigns and yet get at least one profitable. Just make sure to use all the information you can get in the beginning so that you know what performance thresholds you need to look for in order to first break even, then profitable.

Hope the above helps

Ps. I usually don't like betting on something but in your case, you can add up the winning position prize to your overall ROI

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That's an interesting way to create more competition, haha!

For geo, definitely some developing countries with high population. The usual suspects are countries in the Middle-East, SE Asia and Latin America.

In terms of format, maybe Push Notifications are also worth a try for cheap? Otherwise, pops imo - would stay away from Display/Banners.

Don't have the million dollar answer for vertical, unfortunately. Using the report based on the traffic type and source you choose sounds the best way to go about it.

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Perhaps ditch Purelander?

I mean... If your ripping via adplexity I can't see any value in having pl.

That should give you a bit more to spend on traffic.

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With 500 bucks and not much experience it's a (fun) way of throwing away money honestly. Why not combine skill sets of your friends and put the budgets together to find the sweetspot somewhere!?

But oke, with 500 bucks I would go for Facebook and try some lead gen offers.

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Hey eurosen, the $500 is purely media buying spend. Adplexity and PureLander are tools I would be using regardless of the challenge, so we're deciding to ignore the software costs here.

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$500 really isnt a lot ... I could see it working out in some unsaturated GEO with adult dating ... there are some small high quality placements that can produce great results ... if you can find them, which might be quite a challenge with the low budget.

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@platinum That's golden. Thanks for sharing your thought process. I just got done re-reading the newbie resources, and I agree with you. Prep work is where the difference will be made on such a limited budget.

@manu_adefy Cool, thanks! I'll use platinum's approach to find out which geo's are best-profiled for an easy win in those regions you mentioned.

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Are you the only one on stm?

That will give you an unfair advantage 😁

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What is good network to start with Leadgen offers? Can you point me on something?

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Adcombo, Mundo Media, Advidi, Clickdealer, Online Activity, VIP Reponse for example. Or you go direct with Response Concepts, Kobi Digital or Planet49.

*please don't PM for introductions or contact details of account managers, I can't vouch for people I don't know.

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Adding some direct aff networks/advertisers to the list BigBang Ads, ZinQ Media, Fluent.

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Ok so based on your recommendations, I'll be running sweepstakes on pop traffic. Next I'll gather up offers, create 4 different angles to test out and prepare 4-5 pre-landers for each.

Talk to y'all when I have made some progress. (I'm humbled by the overwhelming attention this thread has already received. Thanks a lot!)

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Wow isn't this exciting!! Reminds me of the Hunger Games back in the day (which unfortunately was before I joined STM).

Platinum's approach is solid - spending the time to do more research upfront can help you to narrow down the number of offers to test. I too would have recommended low-payout sweeps + pop + developing geos - because $500 really isn't a whole lot.

Are your friends also on STM? If so, it would be even more exciting if they could each start a follow-along too!



Amy

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I've chosen to run sweeps in a tier 3 APAC geo.
I'm testing 3 offers for the same product. Different advertiser, same LP it seems.

In order to test my first angle, I've ripped one survey lander and one spin the wheel lander from Adplexity. I made 3 different variations of each using the exact same copy (proofread by a native speaker). The only difference for each is the design, aka the theme/logos used. That's a total of 6 pre-landers.

I ran an initial $10 to the flow ($3 per offer, $0.5 per LP+offer combination). Given that the offer payouts range between $0.10 and $0.14, I figured that would give me plenty of data to base my decisions on.

Here are some initial observations:
* Except for one which was redirecting to itself, the pre-landers are getting decent CTR's (ranging from 10 to 30%)
* The traffic seems clean. 20% BOT traffic across the whole campaign, and no individual placement has more than 50% bot (using caurmen's zero load bot script)
* 60% of the traffic came from one placement

0 conversions came through on one offer. I will test a second angle with the same budget tomorrow.

Question: When testing my second angle, do I re-include all sources or do I keep the current blacklist that I got from running the first angle (I'm using rule of thumb of 5x payout loss)? I'm thinking that if my first angle straight up blows, then those sources I have blacklisted could be decent sources with a different angle. Thoughts?

Cheers!

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They're not fortunately I'm not cheap in sharing the information they need from here though. As of now, they're still researching and planning. One of them will be launching today while the others are prepping the landers still.

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Quick update.

Turns out one of the offers I ran yesterday had converted 3 times, but the postback was not set up properly.
-> I have a converting offer to test my angles and PL's with!

Based on the data for that offer, my second angle has less than 10% probability of beating angle 1, so I'm cutting it out. Tomorrow I'll split-test another angle, trying to bring my ROI closer to 0.

Current results:
Budget burnt: $13.55/$500
Current CPC: 0.0015
Current EPC: 0.000122

Campaign ROI (incl. 3 offers + 9 landers): -97%
Best offer ROI (incl 9 landers in split test): -92%

I'm already seeing some challenges regarding the low payout of the offer ($0.10), but remaining positive.

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@silvertongue you might want to be careful with such low payout offers regarding the test budget, especially in high volume countries.

In my opinion lowering down the total number of landing pages will help you lower the required test budget. Head to adplexity and start testing the 2-3 top performing landers according to your spy results. If they have been running there for quite some time according to a campaign ad trend you see, odds are that lander is a good candidate.

Also please post some screenshots on how your traffic is spread among placements and ctr

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Progressing nicely!

Question: How much traffic is the campaign getting per day?

And I'm eager to see the ROI of the best lander+offer.

Now would be a good time to ask other affiliate networks for similar offers in the same geo, so that once you have a winning lander, you can split-test your current offer with some new offers.

As for that placement that gave you 4 conversions, I wouldn't do anything about that just yet - you're still doing initial testing. Once you have a promising offer+lander though, you could try cloning the camp to set up a whitelist camp with the best placements and bidding higher to see how it does. Whitelisting often doesn't work too well on pop sources though - often you'll end up getting very little traffic volume from these. But the more good placements you can include, the better your chances.



Amy

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Question: when you guys talk about starting a new campaign, how do you go about it? Stick to the same geo but different vertical or offer? Stick to the same offer but in a different geo?

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Could be both ways you mentioned and more... You can start new campaigns in the same GEO and with the same offer, just by doing different targeting or using a different source. You can change one thing and call it a new campaign, just as you can start in a completely different vertical with a different traffic type from a different traffic source.

It all comes down to the current results and what you want to achieve.

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Basically now that your whitelist campaign is giving you traffic, you can test for cheap/free or even with slight profit.

I would keep testing offers using that camp. Or even start testing another vertical (starting with new offers and landers) on these whitelisted placements.

Then, once you have what you feel is a good offer+lander combo, run that on the other placements too, excluding the really bad ones you've blacklisted previously.

You can actually use this same approach for other geos that have a ton of traffic and placements, i.e. run until you have enough good placements, then either start a whitelist camp or cut most of the other placements to leave mostly the good ones running, then use that good traffic to test for cheap.

Since testing lots of offers continuously is a basic necessity to profiting from pop traffic (until you get access to special intel or exclusive offers), being able to test for cheap will definitely give you an edge.

And of course, you can start testing other geos at the same time. Once you know what you're doing, it would be good to test multiple geos at a time as long as you have the cashflow to do so - that way you're not holding your breath for a single campaign to succeed.



Amy

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Thanks for the advice guys!

I'm unfortunately back to ground zero. My advertiser didn't make the switch to https and other offers I have do not convert nearly as well on that campaign...
I tried starting a new geo, but the landers behaved really weirdly (insane CTR's) and I didn't get any conversions after spending a significant budget.

The challenge ends in 2 days and I'm in 3rd position. I'm now looking for Hail Mary. Thinking of running pure media buying on the Monetizer smartlink and cut source aggressively. Thoughts?

Here is the current ScoreBoard
* Me: -87% (130/$500 spent)
* Player 2: -35% (200/$500 spent)
* Player 3: -83% (250/$500 spent)
* Player 4: -97% (434/$500 spent)

Note I have some spending leeway as I didn't have so much time to focus on media buying over the past week.

**$350 in 2 days to get profitable. How would you invest it?**

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With 2 days left, in order to maximize your chances of winning, you need to spend money a LOT faster than what you've been spending.

With so little time left, it would be difficult to start testing landers and offers in a new geo from scratch and cut them using statistical tools.

I would suggest doing one or both of the following:

1)Contact all your AMs right away to see whether there are more offers you could test in the same vertical+geo as your previous campaign. You had a lander that worked so basically you just need to test more offers. Run those offers for half a day to a day - you may not have time to wait for statistical significance, just choose the offer you believe is the best and pause the rest. Start with the blacklist from your previous campaign (and perhaps go through placements stats again and blacklist those that didn't convert after 1x payout of your previous offer, before running traffic this time around). Hopefully the campaign will generate some profits for you on day 2.

2)You mentioned running monetizer - that's worth a shot! Go through monetizer's aggregated stats (results from everybody) and pick 10-20 geos that look the most promising, then target all those geos in a single campaign and bid the minimum allowed. If you do this on PopAds, minimum bid allowed is 0.30CPM (0.0003/view). Run maybe $30-50 and then cut unprofitable geos and leave the profitable ones running. In addition, drill down into various traffic segments to look for pockets of profits, then set up new camps to target them. For example if you see that IOS traffic for CountryX+CarrierY is in profit with 2+ conversions, set up a new camp to target this.

I'll make a note to check back later today in case you have further questions.



Amy

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Thanks Amy! I couldn't find more offers in the geo where my lander worked. So instead of wasting more time, as you suggested, I'll just run Monetizer and test a ton of geo's for the rest of today, then optimize tomorrow and try to spend quicker.

I'll keep you guys posted. Thanks for the support!

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I'm experimenting huge traffic loss with Monetizer. Anyone knows how come?

Denmark - bought 1030 impression, monetizer displays 170
Cyprus - boughts 1200 impressions, monetizer displays 439
etc..

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Can you please show some screenshots?

Also - in the meantime, try asking Monetizer support via the chat (when you're logged into your monetizer account).



Amy

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Sure. Here is Monetizer:


And here's the traffic source:

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After running $30 to the Monetizer link from 20 geo's on two different traffic sources, I've found 4 profitable segments that have converted twice. Today I'm pushing more traffic to both to see if the conversion rate and performance maintains. If they do, I'll unleash the dragons and try to squeeze as much profits as possible to catch up to player 2, currently in pole position.

Current leaderboard:
* Me: -80% ROI / $237 spent
* Player 2: -34% ROI / $219 spent
* Player 3: -77% ROI / $250 spent
* Player 4: -97% ROI / $432 spent

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Weird - I can't explain this either. And because I haven't run monetizer in quite a while, I don't have access to any stats I could compare to yours.

Did you hit up Monetizer staff to see if they have any insight?

Also - I noticed that in some geos, Monetizer clicks are actually HIGHER than popads impressions.

Are the timezones in your monetizer account and popads in sync? If you're not sure, try to increase the time range on both platforms to make sure you've captured ALL stats from the beginning up to now.


Excellent!!

Even if you don't end up winning, you should be able to catch up to Player 3! Rooting for you!!



Amy

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Yeah same time zone, but oh well..

Last day of the challenge y'all! I'm still in 3rd position.

Unfortunately, the performance of the segments didn't maintain when I created individual campaigns. The payout on one of them dropped from $4 to $0.20. Trying to push a bit more traffic today to see if I can get it back, but i'm not seeing much else I can do to catch up.

Looks like it won't be a win after all... but thank you all for pitching in and guiding me along this journey. Looking forward to brainstorms with the other players later today and share findings.

Cheers!

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In affiliate marketing as well as any other part of life, it's the same - you win some and you lose some. It was a fun and friendly competition and now you have several friends to continue sharing tips and tricks with. THAT is the big win for everyone involved!

Imagine how much more effectively you can all work as a group. Heck if you could each test 25 new traffic sources over the next month that would be 100 sources in total! And if you guys end up with 30 good ones you're golden!

Same goes for running in different geos and sharing placement white/blacklists. You'll all get 4 times as much benefit from the same investment.

Granted, having everyone compete for traffic in the same geos and traffic sources can be tougher than running on your own. But then you'd be up against other competition anyway - what's 3 more people?

And if you guys stick with bigger geos, the additional competition won't even be noticeable. And you guys can always keep SOME stuff from each other - such as landing pages or even specific offers - just to avoid/delay saturation.

Please do feel free to update us on how you guys get on! All the best! And thanks for sharing such a fun exercise!



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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