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40 Days to $1/Day Profit Goal (46)

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Hi fellow newbies, experts and masters,

I wanted to start this follow along from the day I joined this community but at the same time, I wanted to prepare a plan so that this follow along can be useful for documenting my journey as well as a reference guide to what I am looking forward to achieving in the next few days, months and year.

Joining the forum was more emotional than I thought it would be because I had already waited 5 years to join STM. You can read my short introduction here in this thread.

Even though the purpose of this thread is to follow my journey in the execution part of affiliate marketing, I wanted it to document my education which is really the base, I believe.

From what I have observed so far from others and myself is that the biggest obstacle that I will have on this journey is myself. Over the years after going through tough financial situations, I have developed a habit of reducing costs and stripping all expenses to a bare minimum to save. This has been an integral part of my strategy for getting out of debt and this might be a hindrance when it comes to losing money before getting a considerable amount of data.

On the other hand, I am trying to sell a different angle to myself regarding the lose as an investment in data collection. I believe I have succeeded in convincing myself on that angle for now.

I have created 4 sets of funds and they are as follows:

Traffic Research & Data Collection Fund - $500/Month
Tools & Membership Fund -$200 to $400
Offer/LP and Conversion Data Collection- $1000/Month
Scaling Fund - $5000/Campaign

1.Traffic Research
This fund will be on backup to find new traffic sources for scaling profitable campaigns

2.Tools & Membership Fund
This is self-explanatory
Hosting - I do have a VPS hosting - $25/Month
Tracker - I have the budget for - Voluum or alternative
Spy tools - Adplexity(will purchase)
STM membership
I do have ClickMagick Tracker subscribed

3. Campaign budget
This is where I will be testing actual offers, lps and affiliate networks on a traffic source

4. Scaling Fund
This fund is standby for scaling a profitable campaign. I will not use it for testing or regular campaigns so that cash flow will not be a problem for the scalable campaign.

The next steps would be to go through my mindset and analysing knowledge to identify
1. What I know
2. What I think I know but really I don't know
3. What I know I don't know
4. Also, discover what I don't know that I don't know

The first and last set is the most difficult I believe.

As I mentioned before, I will be documenting what I learn/understand from each step of the follow along so that Masters here can guide me if my understanding is wrong. I would also like to help other newbies like me who are stuck where I can help with design, landing page fixing etc. (Skype: marketchimp)

Financial Goals
At the end of the day, I believe this is the motivating factor for all the struggle that has been gone through and will go through.

My initial goal is to learn practically and understand the real business of affiliate marketing but in order to prove that I have learned the basics, I should be profitable.

Timeline and Profit
within 40 days - $1/Day in profit
Will I be continuing this following along after 40 days? Yes!
2 Months- $3/Day in profit
3 Months - $10/Day in profit (Introduction of the scalable fund)
4-5 Months- $100/Day in profit
12 Months- $300/Day in profit

Affiliate Networks I am a member of:
Peerfly
CJ
Clickbank
Affiliati
SmartAdv
Terra leads
Maxbounty
Rakuten
Mobidea
I am an affiliate of more than 100 eCommerce fashion sites since I had fashion curation blog.

Traffic Sources
I have access to have run campaigns before:
Facebook & Instagram
Adcash
Go2Mobi
Propeller Ads
50onRed
Adwords
Bing

My beliefs:
I have been running FB campaigns for different niches but I am not sure they like affiliates. My account was blocked once just because they felt it was an affiliate(I tested an affiliates LP ) when it was a local business ad. It was unblocked the next day when I messaged them. Facebook and Google AdWords are good for lead generation but I have no experience using them for AM.

Even though I have used the other sources, I haven't got any results.

Coming back to knowledge part, these are the skills I believe I have since I have a graduate degree in visual communication and have been paid for doing it for several years:

1.Graphic Design - banners, illustrations-photomanipulation(photoshop)
2.Web Design - Landing page, website static and Wordpress ( Developing themes and templates)
3. Coding -HTML/CSS Basic of javascript,jquery, PHP
4. Campaign creation - Run campaigns on AdWords and Facebook, bing ( Adwords and Bing certified)
5. Video Editing ( FCP apple certified) I am not sure how that will help in AM
6. Campaign optimization ( Adwords and Facebook)
7. Lead generation for local businesses ( I have generated 1000s of leads (who later converted to $2million and $20 million worth in 2 verticals in last 2 years). These businesses have huge infrastructure and investments already in place and the return justifies it. I am still wondering how I can turn that knowledge useful into affiliate marketing.
8. Conversion rate optimization- I have been testing landing pages and web pages to improve conversion and usability. Nothing groundbreaking but basic heat maps and click maps with ab testing.
9. I love learning new stuff and technology so I think that's an advantage.

All the above assumptions and plans are based on my existing knowledge I think I have. The aim is to improvise, ditch and redesign this plan as I acquire more knowledge and move along The 40-Day Newbie Tutorial.

I will be starting The 40-Day Newbie Tutorial from today. As I am starting this journey along with my day job, I might have to take multiple days together and update the follow along once in 2 days or 3. Would love to get feedback and advice on my thoughts and strategy, and the plan.

Thank you @vortex for putting the tutorial together.

Again thanks in advance for everyone here.

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What am I reading:
Why Smaller Payouts are Better
Points Noted:
1. Smaller payouts are easier to test and cheaper to collect data
2. Higher payouts don't mean higher profits
3. Smaller payout campaigns are also scalable
4. Start small and work up

#Day 1: Some Preparation Work
Step 1 - I have created an account with Mobidea-Approved
Step 2- An account with Propeller Ads - Just logged in and checked the account.
Step 3 - Planned to get Voluum but then I came across BeMob which has almost all the same features (I Guess) and It's Free to start with! I could spend that money on Spying tools or Traffic.
Step 4 - Bought a domain for tracking and creating t.domain.com subdomain version for adding a custom domain to BeMob ( I need to finalize this first)
With most using Voluum, I ASSUME that it might be difficult to get help on setting up, troubleshooting and using BeMob.
Step 5 - Taking the time to read basics

Question:
Should I go with BeMob or Voluum?

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I wouldn't go with any of them.
They are both event billed and you are running Pops.
It's better and cheaper to use a self-hosted tracker.
Check Binom, it's a great tracker and has really good support who can help you to setup your server.
You can also check my thread here https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-The-Beginning to undrrstand why self hosted is better when running Pops.

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After going through the recommendation by twinaxe -For Newbies - How To Save Money In The Beginning,
and the following post, Demystifying the Confusing World of Affiliate Tools Pricing: Tracker Software

Voluum, BeMob, Benom, FunnelFlux, Adbridge, Trackrevenue and Thrive.


Wow! a lot of trackers and I am more confused than before now, this is a bigger rabbit hole than I thought it would be.


I don't want to set up a server and have a self-hosted tracker, prefer a hosted solution until I learn the basics and don't want to get stuck analyzing this too much at this moment. Best candidates are Thrive & Voluum to start with I guess. I am not sure if I will have the necessity to go beyond their basic plans in the next 60 days. In case I have to I believe I can afford to do that at that point.

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use the cloud-based tracker for the initial start that you can focus on marketing.

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You can focus on marketing just as good with a self hosted tracker.
A good tracker is running stable and reliable, no matter if cloud hosted or self hosted.
I have my server running with Binom for almost 1 1/2 years and had zero downtimes since them.
And I never had a dedicated server before.
If you can't setup the server yourself ask the tracker support and they will setup your whole server for free.
You need a server anyway for your landing pages so just get a good server and you can use it for landers and tracker.
OP will run Pops and will probably start with Tier2/Tier3 Geos where you can get a shitload of traffic for cheap and where conversions payout is low.
With that traffic and offers it doesn't really make sense to use an event billed tracker.
When I started Pops I also used Voluum.
After only few weeks I had running so much volume that the tracker costs would be really high so I switched to a self hosted tracker.
Also you shouldn't forget that 1,000,000 events doesn't mean 1,000,000 unique users.
An event is a call of tracking URL, another event is a landing page click, anither event is a call if the postback.
You see, one user can trigger several events.

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#Day 2: Picking Offers


Logged into Mobidea and Filtered out some offers as per the criteria and applied for them. Contacted the AM and have requested to approve the applications. Planning to find similar offers through AM also. I have created a spreadsheet and added all shortlisted offers. All are Games or videos in the Direct Billing & Single Optin category. Countries are not TIER 1 and 2


Will move on to tracker once they are approved. I am planning to go with Thrive Tracker with their Cloud Plan to start with. I don't want to get stuck here due to analysis paralysis. If it's a mistake, I will take it as a lesson.


Points Noted:
1. Stick with Lower paying offers to learn the optimization process with more data
2. Developing countries have fewer restrictions while having less competition, higher volume and cheaper clicks
3. Fewer steps for the end user the easier to convert an offer
4. Need to study and understand the restrictions on each offer
5. Looks for opportunities on offer page and discuss with AM if possible to get as much data as possible regarding an offer or converting GEOs

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#Day 3: Setting Up Tracking


I have signed up for Thrive Cloud Tracker

Took the Global Postback URL from Tracker and saved in Mobidea
http://trackerdomain.com/path/postback.php?tid={{EXTERNAL_ID}}&offerid=&amount={ {MONEY}}&subid=.&subid2={{WEBSITE_ID}}&subid3={{PL ACEMENT}}

The offers were approved by Mobidea and I have taken the original URL


https://www.offerurl.com?data1=Track1&data2=Track2&tag={Ex ternal_ID_from_traffic_source}&website={subID}&pla cement={sub_subID}


and changed it to

https://www.offerurl.com?data1={campaign.id}&data2={traffi csource.id}&tag={clickid}


added it to ThriveTracker as an offer with URL:

https://www.offerurl.com?data1={campid}}&data2={trafficsou rce}&tag={externalid}

Add Propeller Ads as a Traffic Source


Created a campaign and generated the campaign URL:
http://trackerdomain.com/path/lp.php?trvid=10001&trvx=45872778&campid={campaigni d}&creaid={bannerid}&zoneid={zoneid}


Hope everything is set up right. Tomorrow will work on the Propeller Ads Part 1.

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Day 4: Setting Up a Campaign on PropellerAds - Part 1

Had a very long and tiring day at the office. Came home excited to set up a campaign at PropellerAds to be disappointed. I am logged into Thrive Tracker but I am unable to access the account.



I am dead tired to think of a solution today, but I think will find a solution tomorrow. Wondering if someone has gone through this situation before?

Update: I figured this out - To my surprise, you can not log in to your tracker through Thrivetracker website where your account is located. You need to login to the tracker dashboard through the unique tracking URL login page. So simple. Silly me

Another lesson learned: never ever try to set up something when you are half asleep or dead tired, I dont know about others but I screw up 90% of the time this way. I should learn to control the excitement of doing something and consider the physical & mental state also.

Update:

I have set up a campaign on propeller ads. I don't find an option to select 3G or exclude wifi. This offer is only for 3G, how do I set it? Please help.

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Been wanting to go over your follow-along in detail since I replied to your other thread - finally found some time to settle down and focus.

I really, really like how you set up 4 budgets like that!

Now your aim would be to exhaust the 3rd budget every month but in a one that would give you the most bang for your buck.

Reducing costs is important as well, but testing broad is also necessary. The trick is knowing how to spend money efficiently.

You can do that by doing more research in the beginning to narrow down the number of things you need to test (landers and offers etc.) Also, running in the same geos over and over again will save you money, because the first time you run in a geo on a given traffic source you'll have cut the worst placements.

It would also help to limit the losses brought on by mistakes, which every newbie inevitably needs to make. The big thing is to remember to set daily and total budgets on each and every campaign. That way, you cap your losses if offers go down, or you made a mistake with the tracking or your campaign's targeting settings, or whatever else.

It would also help to not deposit too much money into a traffic network at any one time. That way, no matter what mistake you make, the most you can lose is your balance. Also, traffic networks would sometimes ban accounts, and many will not refund your balance. Lastly, traffic networks are going out of business all the time and when they do you don't want to have too much money stuck in there.


These are very humble and achievable goals! Let's work towards achieving them ahead of your schedule!


You're right about FB and Adwords not liking most affiliate offers. By that I'm referring to the shady or semi-shady CPA offers that many of us would run. For those types of offers, many affiliates are running them cloaked, in a blackhat way. This would require having access to many accounts - you'd need to either farm them yourself or buy them. Comes with an entirely new set of headaches newbies can do without, at least while learning the ropes and without coaching from a seasoned black-hatter.

How much traffic is your fashion curation blog getting? I'm assuming your traffic is free organic traffic? Instead of being an affiliate, consider selling products yourself. A good approach would be to test different products first through affiliate links on your blog, then picking the best-sellers and sourcing them yourself. Are your visitors from any one geo primarily? Would help if they were!

You'd basically have free traffic to test products with. Once a product is selling well, you can run paid traffic as well - like on FB and Adwords. There's so much potential there - may be a better way to start making an income than pop traffic. Ecom has more long-term potential and is definitely cheaper for you (again, because you have free traffic). Worth thinking about.


This is a GREAT set of skills!!

It's always good to learn new skills, but if I were you, I wouldn't be running pop.

Video editing skills for example will help immensely if you want to run on FB. Video ads can convert so much better than static ads in certain niches.

And did you know that you can run lead gen campaigns on FB? It's been out for a while now. Visitors no longer need to click on the ad to be directed to your website before leaving their contact details. They can now opt-in directly on FB. Some people are making a killing using FB lead gen ads to generate leads for local businesses. And you certainly have the experience for that!


Good call!


I agree! But it's not like you have much of a choice since you're still working a job. I have immense respect for people that can juggle a job and campaigns at the same time. Excitement is always a good thing and a powerful motivator. But yes - if you're overly tired, it may not be the best idea to do anything major, like setting up your first campaign.

Another things you can do is just set up something but not make it live yet. On PropellerAds for example, you can save a campaign as draft. That way you can go to bed knowing you've accomplished something, and then the next day when you're refreshed you can take a last look at everything before turning it live.


You've specified "Connection Type" as "Mobile". That's carrier traffic already. And I see you've selected the carrier in "Mobile ISP". You're all good.



Looking forward to your next update!




Amy

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Wow didn't know this. I'm running FB traffic. Could you go into details about this? Do you want me to start a new thread about this? Thanks!

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No need to ask for details - just go to your FB right now, start a Lead Generation campaign, and create an ad.



When creating your ad, click on "Show Advanced Options" to expand the "Lead Form" section:



Click on "+New Form" and then fill out your form details:



Have fun!



Amy

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Hi Amy,


Thanks a lot, means a lot to have your support on this adventure.


How much traffic is your fashion curation blog getting? I'm assuming your traffic is free organic traffic? Instead of being an affiliate, consider selling products yourself. A good approach would be to test different products first through affiliate links on your blog, then picking the best-sellers and sourcing them yourself. Are your visitors from any one geo primarily? Would help if they were!


The blog has very thin content so not much of organic traffic (200- 500 per month) as such for getting conversions or affiliate sales, I have been trying to drive traffic from Facebook and other sources where I can get some traffic and test the affiliate sales so that I can build an eCom site with Dropshipping like you said. Right now I am concentrating on running CPA as I have been planning this for years.

"Video editing skills, for example, will help immensely if you want to run on FB. Video ads can convert so much better than static ads in certain niches."


I have thought of this but I don't know how to find offers that are safe on Facebook, I have generated a lot of leads through videos alone, last year. I have been running campaigns for my local clients through my account and I think it's not worth risking that account with blackhat offers. I am also trying to find offers that can work with Facebook. Any advice would be great as it has a much shorter learning curve for me with facebook than POP"


"Some people are making a killing using FB lead gen ads to generate leads for local businesses. And you certainly have the experience for that"
Can we use lead gen ads for CPA? Is there a method/ type of offers we can use it?


I know that's a lot of questions. Thanks again.

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Day 4 -Campaigns went live
Network- From Mobidea


Tracker - From Thrivetracker


Traffic Source - From Propeller Ads


I think everything is setup wrong but I see 2 conversions which is awesome , to begin with. I need to fix the tracking, the issue might be with the tokens and subids. Need to figure it out.

All the offers campaigns I had applied have been approved. Am not sure if I should go ahead and set up campaigns for all of them or if I should wait to fix the conversion tracking issue before I continue.

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Day 5- I had paused the campaign and checked with Mobidea support about the postback. They said its fine and the subid was wrong.

I fixed the tags and restarted the campaign- Setup another campaign also. Now I see another conversion on the initial campaign without ThriveTracker catching it. No idea whats wrong again. I tried contacting the Thrive support and they havn't got back yet.

From Mobidea


and this is from Thrive


After reading the follow along threads, I feel it was a luck to get some conversions initially. I am not sure if I should continue direct linking and move onto working with Adplexity and some landers. I need to figure the tracking part first.

As suggested by Amy, I have been checking if I can find some whitehat offers to promote on Facebook. I see that the gaming niche is safe to try but I am not sure. A lot of confusion on how to proceed as POP is new(to me) and I understand learning tracking setup will be beneficial in all type of campaigns and traffic sources.

Signing up with ZeroPark today and planning to test some monetizer links.

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I wouldn´t recommend both for now.
Zeropark has lots of volume but also lots of crap traffic.
Also they probably have lots of remnant traffic from other sources.
I recommend to start with other sources and when you have successful campaigns running with a good funnel you could test it on Zeropark as well.

About Monetizer, I wouldn´t run Smartlinks in the beginning.
You could use them fort Backbutton for example or traffic that does not match your offers restrictions.
But you are just starting so in my opinion it would be better when you first learn how to really run campaigns with landers and individual offers so that you learn the whole process of splittesting and optimization.
When you understand the whole process and when you can run campaigns successful on your own you could throw in a Smartlink for splittesting.
But I would first learn how all these things work before I send my main traffic to Smartlinks.

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It really does sound like lead generation may be the better way to go for you!

Offers that can be run on pop are mostly shady or semi-shady. So not very safe for facebook in general.

You can seek out stickupkid's guides on how to run sweeps on facebook. He's a pro at that. Has campaigns that run practically on autopilot. But you will need access to accounts because you will get account bans, although according to stickupkid it won't happen half as often as if you were running nutra for example (the truly black stuff).

Alternatively, you can continue to generate leads for local businesses just like you used to do for your company, but this time you go in business for yourself. This can be extremely lucrative if you play your cards right. As for how to get clients, there are a million and a half courses out there, so I won't even try to talk about a topic I don't really have experience in.

I know people that are doing well with this. Target industries where the LTV of each customer is high. Dentists and gym memberships are the obvious ones. Try to tap into less saturated niches.

I used to know someone who ran a very successful lead gen biz by promoting this local hair loss clinic chain. He was giving out discount coupons and got something like $130 for each lead if I remember correctly. ROI was through the roof.

You can also look around for legit pay per lead cpa offers. For example in the finance niche (insurance, refinance etc.) Look for stuff you can run completely whitehat. You'll need to do your own digging. I would spend a solid few days just doing a search on google for "pay per lead offers" or "buy sell business leads" or similar, to see what's available out there.

I once promoted a lead gen offer that bought swimming pool leads. I don't remember what the payout was. All I did was set up a wordpress blog with a few posts on how to estimate the cost of owning a swimming pool, with an affiliate link leading to a form that people can fill out to get a "free quote" (and of course a phone call and maybe emails etc.) And the offer was one of those standalone in-house affiliate offers that wasn't made available through affiliate networks. I had to do some digging.

Of course SEO isn't as easy now as it was when I was doing it years back, but I heard recently that it's still not too difficult to rank for local keywords to dominate search results for local residents. And of course you can target by location on FB. A 3rd way to drive traffic would be from google adwords or Bing, i.e. paid search traffic. If I had time for more projects (which I don't at the moment) this is what I would do.

Hope that helps to point you in the right direction! You'll still have to do research and figure out things, but I feel that it may be easier for you since you already have experience with lead gen. I understand your excitement for pop because it's something new, and I'm not trying to turn you away from that, but really: Pop can only get more competitive, most of the offers are half shady at best, in most cases you wouldn't be building an asset, so it would be a here today gone tomorrow type deal. Unlike lead generation.



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Regarding your pop camps: Definitely fix your tracking first. Ask your AM whether you could pick an offer for the geo you're in, that either accepts wifi or traffic from the mobile carrier you're using, and just sign up by navigating to your tracking link (campaign link from your tracker - the one you put into the traffic network). That way you can generate the conversions you'll need to verify whether they're posted back to the tracker.

The aff network can just delete the conversions afterwards.

Or, just run the same offer that has given you conversions - but that would be costly.

Alternatively, ask your AM for offers that convert at least semi-well, that have very low payouts in the 0.05-0.20 range. And run those to generate the conversions you need to test tracking. That way you probably can get conversions for cheap.

If your conversions are showing up in aff network stats, it means the visitors are being directed to the offer. The only thing wrong is with your postback - conversions aren't being posted back by the aff network to your tracker.

After you fix this issue, you should move away from direct linking to the lessons on landing pages. The former does not work anymore due to a lack of good offers in general. But it's still a good exercise to go through when learning to set up campaigns.



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Thank you. I will learn the basics and finish the 40 days before I move onto bigger and deeper subjects.

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You can seek out stickupkid's guides on how to run sweeps on facebook.
Will check them out for sure. It's worth knowing what exactly is blackhat, semi/gray hat to understand everything in the right sense

Alternatively, you can continue to generate leads for local businesses just like you used to do for your company, but this time yougoin business for yourself.
I have that in mind but requires more daytime interaction with local businesses to make this work, at the moment with the day job 8am to 7pm I am occupied.

I would spend a solid few days just doing a search on google for "pay per lead offers" or "buy sell business leads" or similar, to see what's available out there.
Sure, will try that out too.

Pop can only get more competitive, most of the offers are half shady at best, in most cases you wouldn't be building an asset, so it would be a here today gone tomorrow type deal. Unlike lead generation.
I understand. It is competitive, shady and unstable, which is scary but at the same time that is what is creating an exciting feeling. It looks like its going to be like the taming of a beast but I believe I have taken up the challenge, I began this journey convincing myself to stick with it and learn as much as I can adding to my skillset without quitting. Every mistake will be a lesson learned in the field.


Verify whether they're posted back to the tracker.
Contacted the AM, Tracker Support and got everything fixed. I can see a conversion that was from the afternoon in my tracker.


After you fix this issue, you should move away from direct linking to the lessons on landing pages.
I am jumping to the landing page lessons, read Day 5 and 6. I believe I have got the basics of how the optimization process works.

The traffic is very slow on these GEOS anyway and I don't think they can burn through the daily budget of $10, they haven't come close to $5 in 2 days.

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Sounds like a plan!

Regarding whitehat vs. greyhat vs. blackhat: There's no clear cut dividing line between them. And the exact categorization isn't the important thing anyway. What's important is knowing whether the particular type of offer and lander angle will get approved by most reviewers or not.

If so, then you can run without cloaking. If not, then you would need to cloak, and make arrangements to get new accounts - because FB will eventually catch and ban the account (unless you're using something other than commercial cloakers that can somehow escape FB's detection).

How long each account can live will depend on various things, e.g. length of account life, past activity, how well it was warmed up with initial ad spend, how much has been spent, how aggressive the creatives are, how effective the cloaking technology is...

And then there is borderline permissible stuff that you can run without cloaking, but will still get accounts banned occassionally. And sweeps belong in this category. Again, how often you'll experience account bans will depend on the factors above, but comparatively, accounts should last significantly longer with sweeps than if you were running something completely blackhat - most nutra products for example.

Regarding pop being exciting - I can understand that. Will do my best to guide you there. The small geos you're running in may be good for a newbie to get some practice, but ultimately won't get you anywhere in terms of profits. And if you're wanting to learn how to optimize campaigns at a reasonable speed, you may want to run in a larger geo so you can collect stats more quickly.



Amy




Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Update:

I just checked the tracker and I see some conversion

This is my overall traffic in the last 2 days


I had set up a few campaigns(direct linking) before I got Adplexity, this is one of them, paused the campaigns with more than 5x spent and no conversions. This one just picked up conversions with traffic.

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To start with, I saw GREEN - I am very lucky for sure in that case. on that later...

Day 19-20: Introduction to Landing Pages

Notes:
Sweeps and Antivirus need preselling preparing visitors for the offer
Don't start from scratch - Find related landers and improvise
Split test 4-5 landers to find a good one

Read the following Posts:
Mobile Landing Page Need?
Do I Need To Run Landing Pages? How Do I Create A Landing Page?
Landing Pages, The Bridge To Victory -by caurmen
Landing page - what does it do?
Get ALL of STM's Free Landers Right Here! Dozens Of Landers For Dating, Adult, more
Taking A Landing Page from 2 Seconds' Loading Time To 34 Milliseconds Loading Time
Rules Psychology: How to Make it Pay
Day 21: Setting Up Hosting and CDN

I had some basic experience with Rackspace Cloud Files so went ahead with it.

Action Taken:
Signed-up for Adplexity
Domain Registered
I checked AWS and Rackspace.
Registered with Rackspace ( Had some research done a few months back)
Set up container
Uploaded files
Linked domain with Rackspace from Namecheap
created the subdomain and linked to the container through CDN

Campaigns:
I have 3 campaigns running

2 offers have non-frequent conversions but have not spent much to kill. Kill Run Calculator says Keep Running so I am doing that.

Screenshots below-
Main Converting Offer


1. Whitelisted Campaign with converting zones alone
2. Original Campaign at lower CPM

What I have done is shortlisted converting zone IDs and moved them into a new campaign with a higher bid. I am not sure if it's the right approach but dint want leave them untouched while working on the landing pages.

Plan:
Spy on some landers for a day or two then try to find a few ones that have been running for a week and then find similar offers on affiliate networks.

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Very nice!!

Although direct-linking should only serve as an exercise, seeing green is ALWAYS encouraging.

What's important isn't the few dollars in profits - it's what it represents - that you CAN make profits from affiliate campaigns.

No matter how many people have told you it was possible, it doesn't really become real for YOU until YOU start seeing green. And seeing green so early on should really help with motivation!

This little bit of green should be enough to propel you to more success real soon!

Sounds like a plan!

I would suggest to start with sweeps. Antivirus can be very tricky - many affiliates running antivirus are cloaking because extremely aggressive landers are required to achieve the best results - more aggressive than what most aff networks/advertisers and traffic networks will allow.

Plus, google has gotten so good at flagging lander domains, especially for aggressive antivirus landers.

Not to say you can't succeed with antivirus without cloaking, but it would be more difficult than running sweeps. Better to start with sweeps to get the basics, then figure out whether you want to cloak or push the compliance boundaries.

However, if you still want to run antivirus, let me know and I'll point out a few things to keep in mind.


Whitelisting can work well - when it works.

It depends on the traffic network and the geo (probably due to the different levels of competition), but sometimes when you whitelist placements in a new camp the traffic volume drops to a trickle - when that happens you'll know to take the blacklisting approach instead.

Another thing to try is what I call "whitelist by blacklisting" - basically instead of starting a whitelist camp with the best placements, I'd just blacklist placements that aren't on the whitelist, starting from the largest placements. You can blacklist gradually until all that's left are the placements you had wanted to whitelist, plus a bunch of placements that are so small it would take a long time to tell whether they'd ever convert. And if in the process you see a sudden decrease in volume, then reinstate the last batch of placement you cut (this is why blacklisting GRADUALLY is a good idea).

Looking forward to seeing you test landing pages - that's usually when you'll see real profits (compared to direct-linking).

Great progress! Thanks for updating.




Amy

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Hi Amy,

Thanks a lot, will try that. Will stick with Sweeps for now. One step at a time.

Yes, it's really motivating to experience it yourself.

There were 2 reasons(not sure if they are valid) for setting up a new campaign with whitelisted zone ids.

1. I thought, if I could raise the CPM bid just for that campaign, I would get more traffic that's converting.

2. I thought, if I didn't edit the campaign frequently, the campaign wouldn't be disturbed ( A practice I do on facebook but not sure it is relevant to these traffic sources.

Questions:

1. Do they review and approve each of the changes done?
2. Aren't we losing the traffic and conversion during the pending approval periods?
3. Does editing the campaigns too many times (not changing bid) like changing zone IDs whitelisting, blacklisting have an effect on the campaign performance?
4. For small geos and campaigns like these, do we have the time period( since the traffic is trickling even on highest CPM bid) to collect enough impressions on each zone before we can blacklist them?

I researched some offers and landers, I found one in sweeps that looks promising and has been running or a while. I was able to find a very similar offer on Mobidea but the screenshots are almost similar to the landing page I had seen.

5. Does it mean the advertiser has tested some landers already and integrated with their offer?

6. Is it worth testing direct linking with such an offer?

Sent from my SM-A510F using STM Forums mobile app

---

Oh yeah it's a good idea to test whitelisting. It's just that usually blacklisting has a better chance of working well for pop campaigns.

But like I said - when whitelisting works, it works. Just need to test. If you receive enough traffic to justify keeping it running, then by all means leave it running.

But if you only see a trickle of traffic coming in - you'd know to stop the campaign and try blacklisting instead.


If you're changing the campaign settings on the traffic source, then in most cases the answer is yes - the campaign would go back into moderation for another review and approval.

But if you're only changing things on your tracker - for example changing the landers and offers in rotation - then the traffic source may not become aware of the changes.

However, some traffic networks have automatic checks in place that will regularly check for obvious non-compliance on landers and offers. Some affiliates like to do the "bait-and-switch", by using compliant landers in the beginning, then after the campaign is approval would switch to non-compliant landers. Some traffic networks would catch that, some not. It would depend on how sophisticated the automatic checking is, and how clever the non-compliance is.

Also: Some traffic networks allow publishers (i.e. placement site owners) to ban ads they don't like shown on their site. So in a way, they help the traffic network to review our ads as well.


Well yes. But you wouldn't be losing money.


I haven't noticed this personally.


Time period? Please explain - not understanding what you mean.

We would often go by number of payouts when cutting placements. For example, a popular rule of thumb is, if a placement has spent the equivalent of 2-4 offer payouts without converting, blacklist it. (These rules of thumb are dependent on a number of factors. For example if you're operating in a huge geo with a ton of placements, you may want to cut at 1x payout or even 0.5x payout without conversions, just to put a curb on the crazy spending in the beginning. Once you have a promising offer+lander you can always retest the blacklisted placements if you wish.)

So the number of impressions isn't the most important - the spend is. The more money it spends (in relation to the offer payout) without converting, the less likely it would end up being profitable.


Good thinking! That's exactly what I would suggest.

Alternatively: You can STILL add a lander before it - maybe a REALLY simple one. For example for an iphone offer, if the landing page that's already integrated into the offer is a survey, you can try putting a one-page lander in front of it that shows the phone in different colors and asking the visitor to pick their favorite color.

But it wouldn't make/break the offer. So if you direct-link and it doesn't convert well, you can forget about adding another lander in the front.




Amy

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It's been a few days and seems like I am stuck. I have gone through a lot of landers on Adplexity but unable to finalize anything. All landers look the same and I feel a bit confused at the moment on how I should proceed from here.

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Try not to over-analyze. I know what you mean by being "stuck" - you see a sea of landers and are wondering which ones to rip.

Try this:

1)First, set up the following folder structure hierarchy:

Make a folder on your desktop called "sweeps". Inside that make one folder per sweepstakes prize - for example, one for "iphone x" and another for "MacDonalds sweeps" and so on depending on which types of sweeps offers you're running.

Then within each of those, start one folder per language, for example "EN" for English and "ES" for Spanish.

Finally, inside each of THOSE folders, you can have one folder for each specific lander.

2)Next, in Adplexity, set the date filter to the last 30 days, "Days Running" to 7 to infinity, "Ad Type" to "Popup" (can also choose "Redirects" to potentially get more results), "Language" to your target geo's language (or specify the target country in "Country"; better yet, choose all countries that speak the same language as your target country to get for results) , "Keyword" "on the landing page" to your prize (e.g. "iphone x", or just "iphone" to get more results), and the upper-right dropdown to "Received most traffic".

Note: If you can't find enough landers for particular prize, do a search for other prizes - you can customize those to your prize.

3)Just browse all the resulting landers and make a note of the different types that look completely different. We don't care about lander variations at this point.

For example, when I do a search on "iphone" with the Country filter set to United States, I find the following types of landers:


a)Amazon spinning wheel




b)Facebook spinning wheel




c)Google survey




d)Youtube survey




e)Slots




f)Apple survey




So I would create a subfolder for each type of lander and name it accordingly. I'd rip a few of each type to start. If the code of any lander is convoluted or otherwise too difficult for me to figure out how to fix, I would just try another one of the same type.

The important thing to note here is that, for an initial test, we don't need to worry about lander variations! Never mind some landers that look similar but some have popup alerts and others don't, or some have testimonials and others don't, or some have a countdown timer and others don't, or this lander's spinning wheel contain different colors or prizes from the other lander. We just want to test landers that have completely different look-and-feels.

When you have a winner, you can choose to test variations later - either rip variations or create your own, or do both.


Example of Amazon spinning wheel lander variations:




Example of Facebook spinning wheel lander variations:




Another very important thing to note:

Every traffic source/network has different requirements when it comes to approving landers. For example, most networks will disprove landers that contain trade mark logos (amazon, google, facebook, etc.). If you're running on a network for the first time and don't know their rules, you can just try running landers as-is to see if they get approved. If not, fix one thing that you feel is the main reason for the rejection, and resubmit. Try not to fix multiple things at the same time - that way you can see what you can get away with. The more aggressive elements you can get away with, the better. (This is assuming you're not cloaking of course - if you are, then none of this applies.)


Bonus tip: When you have more experience in ripping landers, a good strategy would be to just leave "Keyword" blank, and see what lander styles or angles can be tweaked and apply to the offer you're promoting, no matter what the prize is. You can even tweak landers from other verticals and tweak them for use with your type of offer. You can also NOT specify a language or country, for the same purpose: To see a wider range of landers, and customize them for use with your offer if necessary.


Hope that helps to get you "unstuck"!




Amy

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Hi Amy,

I know I am thinking a lot. That was amazing! Thanks a lot. Yes, I will implement it as soon as possible.

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No problem! And never fault yourself for thinking a lot! It can be a very beneficial quality!

Paid traffic can be complicated. Sometimes, details matter, and are what will give you an edge.

Other times though, details are unimportant, and will only serve to hold you up and waste your time.

EXPERIENCE is what you need in order to tell one case from the other.

Until then - you can use ours.

Have fun!



Amy

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Thanks Amy.

I found a gift voucher offer for H&M and then went ahead and downloaded a bunch of landing pages with different related keywords and sweeps type you mentioned. After going through the code and editing a few landers, ended up choosing 3. I modified the pages to suit the offer and have attached before and after below:

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I'm very impressed - you're obviously a skilled coder! Looking real great!

One point to note: A lot of the sweeps landers imitate the look-and-feel of authority websites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Youtube. This is to make sure of the trust that so many people have for these sites. This is why you would often see their logos on landers.

Many traffic networks won't accept logos on landers though - but you can still try using the same colors to get that trust from visitors in a sneaky, subconscious way. Blue and white for facebook for example.

I know you're eager to start testing, but it would be better to include a couple more landers. How about preparing 2-3 more? You're so talented - should be a piece of cake for you.

(Another tip: Choose the MOST POPULAR landers. I know you may be thinking that they may be saturated. Don't! On the contrary, the reason why so many people are using them means they are converting at least semi-well. Including at least a few of those would be wise - to establish a benchmark if nothing else.)



Amy

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Thank you. I understand, do you think I should check with direct linking if the offer will convert at least 5 times spent of the payout before I use the landers? or should I test multiple offers with multiple landers to find out what works straight away?

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For sweeps, you should definitely start by using landers - because without preselling, most sweeps offers just won't convert well, if at all.

The only exception is when a sweeps offer comes with a lander (or what affiliate networks call pre-landers) already built into the offer. Some smart offer owners (advertisers) have run traffic and tested landers just like we would, and found a good one so they incorporated it into their offer. Some of these can do well. (Trouble with these though is that other affiliates would also be running the exactly same thing so nobody would have an edge that comes with testing landers. You'd need to do volume to get a pay bump etc. in order to get ahead.)

I know what you're saying though. Normally it would be a good approach to use the least amount of time to do a quick test, find the best, then spend more time testing those. But when it comes to testing CPA offers, most offers will convert so much worse without a lander, that you would end up spending way too much money.


Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Thanks. I have started working on additional landers. Meanwhile, I just got my first conversion from one of the 3 landers above. I am not sure how to track the landing page but trying to understand it now. So far I have spent $10.01 at $2.190 CPM and conversion payout is € 1.10.

Traffic Source shows : 13,809 impressions
Thrivetracker shows: 11,407 clicks
Mobidea shows: 3 130 clicks and 1 conversion.

Average 3000 impressions per landing page and only 1 signup does it mean the landers are not good enough?

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My intuition made me doubt the previous campaign. I took a different approach and decided to go with another offer. if a pattern is seen in adplexity as Amy suggested it must be popular. I went ahead took a different offer Samsung Galaxy S9 Sweeps and ripped 12 different landing pages in total. Cleaned them and customized it to suit the offer.

It took around 6 to 7 hours in cleaning and fixing all the landers but I didn't want to leave any stones unturned with this one.
These are the landing pages I am running at the moment and planning to send at least 3 times the payout for each landing page. Hope that will give enough clicks.


I have still not figured out how to track the landers properly but what I have done is:

Created all 12 landing pages on Thrivetracker
Added them to the Campaign URL
Driving traffic to each lander equally that's 8.3% traffic share per lander.
On the lander, I am using the affiliate network tracking URL with a custom subid to identify the lander that sent traffic or conversions.

After sending the first batch of traffic - $10
I could track the clicks from each lander to the offer and then found 3 landers not passing any metric to the affiliate network.

This either means these landers are not functioning properly or they are not good at all. The first reason is the valid one so I edited them to find some more bugs. Hope it's fixed now. I cut down some zones that had sent a majority of the clicks and ate more than 3 times of the payout.

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Kudos on being so diligent on preparing so many landers!

Make sure you optimize them for speed, click around to make sure they function as intended, and check browserstack to make sure they display well on major devices.

I've never used Thrive, but would strongly suggest that you work with their support to double check you're setting up the tracking correctly. With trackers I've used, including Voluum and Funnelflux, you'd need to grab a universal "click url" from the tracker and put that same url on all your landers as the outgoing link. You would only specify the offers within the tracker, and aff links should not be inserted into the landers.

Also: Get at least a couple more offers from your AMs. If your only offer turns out to be a dud, it won't matter even if you were running the best landers in the world.

Run until one of the offers make 2 conversions, then pause the rest and just keep running that to generate the conversions necessary for cutting landers down to a winner. Keep an eye on spend - as soon as the offer/offers look a bit hopeless (i.e. the spend looks a bit excessive), cease traffic, post some stats here (on placements, offers, landers) and let's take a look before spending any further.

This should be fun! Looking forward to seeing how you do!


Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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This update is for several days of the last 2 weeks.


Necessity is the mother of all inventions. Correctly said. Even though I have not invented something I was able to discover some of my skills I thought I had lost.


My landing page integration process from ripping to cleaning and deployment has been reduced by half now. Still, I am able to save time but, I am still stuck at 2 points.


1. Integrating my landing pages with my Thrivetracker to pass conversion to propeller ads.


2. Get conversions with landing pages.


Good things so far:


1. I have 2 campaigns(direct linking) bring in conversion consistently. Payout is low but good for me to collect converting placements.


2. I have just got my first conversion on zero park with one of the same offers


So far for direct linking single submit offers other than these two I have got a few conversions here and there but not consistent conversion so I have been cutting budget eating zone ids and sources like a madman and I was able to turn one small campaign from negative to positive roi after 5 to 6 days. It was fun every day.


I have started to wake up at 5 am, snooze for 10 mins, have my coffee and start watching my campaigns and for bad placements.


Even though I am dead tired after work looking at the computer all day, coming home to check my conversions gives me a kick. I have also understood that patience is the key. I was trying to do everything 100% before I launched a test, for example, prepare 10 landing pages before I started a campaign but I had no time during the week to do it so i postponed that to the weekends. Now I realised that I could have worked on one landing page each day and I would have at least 5 of them ready by the end of the week. A lesson learned.


I had some issues with landing page integration as mentioned before but I was trying to get it fixed somehow. I understand now that I can not progress efficiently unless I am able to track the landing pages properly and I am not able to understand how Thrivetracker works with the pixel, might be I am dumb but I need a solution that works out of the box or the support that helps me out. I have paid the first month for Thrive and I am thinking if I should switch. Considering Binom has a free trial and they have offered to guide me in setting it up, I am interested in testing it out too.


With day job taking up most of the time of the day and me being exhausted my evening, I haven't been able to set up the tracking properly, I have got my first 3 conversions in pop ads for the same campaign I am running on propeller and zero park.

I have been rejected by Clickdealer, Affiliaxe and my maxbounty account has disappeared out of no where. Their database doesn't seem to have my email id anymore to reset the password . I am in Peerfly(Already) SMARTADV, MobiRider and Addiliate.


August Stats:
Spend: $187 on propellersAds
Clicks: 388,000
Conversions: 98 conversions
Revenue: $46
Campaigns tested ( I am not satisfied): 20 ( Not enough spend to statistically disqualify these campaigns (offers))
Profitable campaigns: 2


$15 on zeropark
Conversions:2
Campaigns tested: 5
Profitable campaigns: 0


$10 on popads
Conversions: 3
Campaigns tested : 2
Profitable campaigns:1


My Sweepstakes campaign with landing pages was a small failure as I didn't know which landing page was giving the maximum traffic to the offer. I am revisiting the idea of re-running some sweepstakes because right now I am failing in converting through a landing page. I consider this as the next roadblock to cross or milestone to touch. Again i have not sent a lot of clicks to this offer to qualify this as a complete failure.


Moving ahead in the coming week, I am planning to look for a better(for me to understand) tracker (try binom setup on digital ocean) and test landing pages for sweepstakes. I have considered the optimizer for cutting placements that are producing certain no of clicks without conversions.

---

You're making good progress.

Action is not the only measure of progress. The realizations you have come to will be very valuable as well going forward.

You've learned not to be a perfectionist in places you don't need to be. You've also gotten used to launching lots of campaigns and testing lots of offers - this is a major milestone, and what trips over a lot of newbies.

You spent $200 and made back $50, and have found several green campaigns, and learned how to optimize by cutting placements. This is really not bad for a beginner!

One thing to note here though: Cutting placements may by fun now because it's still be a novelty, but going forward, try to focus on testing offers+landers first (with special emphasis on OFFERS) so that you can make as much of the total traffic profitable as you reasonably can, and then cut out the unprofitable portion (placements and what not) to get better ROI. It's easy to become fixated on cutting placements, but it can be such a time-suck, plus you may not have a lot of traffic left at the end to give you profits. Something to keep in mind.

You've listed exactly what I was going to suggest.

All this may be a headache the first time around, but will become easier.

I've heard very good things about binom as well. Low pricing + great support.

And of course theOptimizer has become the industry standard. You may not need it right now, but when you want to tackle some of the bigger geos that have lots of placements, it can really come in handy. (And if you're running lots of traffic on a high daily budget, there's always the danger of having sneaky new placements pop up from out of the blue to zap your budget while you're not watching. A tool like that will nip it in the bud for you.)


A couple of things to point out here:

1)It's not necessary to pass conversions back to propellerads. You WILL want to pass conversions from the affiliate network to the tracker though. (And even if you really want to pass conversion back to propeller, you'd need to FIRST arrange for the affiliate network to pass conversion to the tracker, before the tracker can pass conversions to the traffic source.)

2)To pass conversions from the affiliate network to the tracker, you'll need to get the postback url from the tracker, append to that url tokens from the aff network, and insert the final url into the aff network's postback settings. I can help you figure out how to do that if you'd provide the following info:

-the postback url from your tracker

-the affiliate network's postback tokens (you'll most likely find a list of them listed on the postback settings page on your aff network dashboard - if not, ask your AM for them)

3)Landing pages have nothing to do with passing conversions - as described above, conversions will involve the tracker and the affiliate network only.

To implement tracking for the lander, all you need to do is this:

"Thrive gives you multiple codes to track different landing page flows and variables. How do you make sure that you track the click through from your landing page to the offer? Not a problem, just grab your LP Click Through Tracking Code and place it in any spot that links out to the offer."

(reference: https://support.Thrivetracker.com/hc...ding-Page-Code)

Of course, if you've decided to switch to binom, then the instructions would be different. But they should still be similar.

The "LP Click Through Tracking Code" will be the SAME on ALL your landers. You won't need to put your affiliate link ANYWHERE on your landers. You'll specify which offers and landers you want to run, within the tracker when you're creating the campaign.

Hope that helps! If you have further questions don't hesitate to ask. We can figure out the tracking together.



Amy

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Hi Amy, Thank you.

The conversion is working between the Affiliate network and the tracker. I was worried about not knowing which lander send the conversion or most click-throughs if the landing page -> tracker is not integrated in the right way.

My process of setting up a campaign on propeller ads:

Get the affiliate link from Mobidea:
https://www.rotatemyurls.com/offer/100000|1000000?data1=Track1&data2=Track2&tag={External_ID_from_traffic_source}&website={subID}&placement={sub_subID}

then fix the URL according to Amy's tutorial URL

https://www.rotatemyurls.com/offer/149156|13734?data1={campaign.id}&data2={trafficsou rce.id}&tag={clickid}

then for thrive change it to subid
https://www.rotatemyurls.com/offer/149145|13734?data1={campaign.id}&data2={trafficsou rce.id}&tag={subid} and add as offer to thrive.

Then create a campaign by selecting the target traffic source/network which will give me the campaign URL with the traffic source parameters for example if it is Propeller ads:

http://myURL.com/path/lp.php?trvid=1...r4&visitor_id=${SUBID}&campid={campaignid}&creaid={bannerid}&zoneid={zon eid}

I believe visitor_id-${SUBID} parameter passes the click id/subid to the ThriveTracker and

the postback URL I have given in Mobidea is:

http://myURL.com/path/postback.php?tid=&offerid=&amount={{MONEY}}&subid={{EXTERNAL_ID}}


I have signed up with Binom and Hosting with DigitalOcean, Along with theOptimizer, I believe it will be a time saver. It will be able to do that part of keeping an eye on the campaigns much better than I could, over the period of 24 hours including the 12 hours I spend at my day job and my 7 hours of sleep, I won't be able to even get 2 employees to do that kind of work at that cost. I am confident that I will be running a lot of campaigns in the coming weeks and I need something like this or else I will lose all my hair that I have now. I find binom to be easier for my eyes so I am willing to give it go because it is something I need to use for the majority of the time as an affiliate and I find the support to be super beginner friendly and responsive which is what I wanted.

Since Amy has explained the landing page integration part, I assume I got it. Will test it out. Now I am stuck at 2 places:

1. Finding the right offer to promote through landing pages
2. Finding the right landing pages to test

I am waiting for my tracking domain to be integrated with binom at the moment.

Updates: It just 20mins and it has been setup for me by the Binom support. Now it's time to start searching for good offers to test landing pages. any suggestions?

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It's been a while since my last update. I have been really busy early this month with a lot of offline stuff and my day job.

First things first, I got my first payment from Mobidea.



Second, I have been making slow progress, I was working on landing pages whenever I could during this period. I didn't over analyze the offer, I wanted to beat where I stumbled last time. So I picked a sweepstakes campaign and wanted to work on making conversions with landing pages.

Setup 12 landing pages for the offer:


Cloning and creating landing pages in Binom is much easier than Thrive for me, the customization of landing pages took more time. I have collected a swipe folder with more than 25 landing pages which I am planning to clean one by one in the coming weeks. Right now I have 12 landers cleaned and customized for this offer, set up on the tracker.



The campaign is also set up on Propeller. I am planning to send 2x the payout to each landing page to see which one sends more clicks and if lucky, conversions.

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Hi, nice thread and good process.
Few things though, the landers you posted above, do you run them on mobile or desktop?
In just ask because some are clearly mobile landers but many of them are shown in Desktop view.
About theoptimizer.io, although it´s a great platform I wouldn´t really recommend it for beginners.
In my opinion you should only automate tasks that you know inside out yourself.
Better run your campaigns for a while manually and when you have a good routine and can gauge all factors yourself you still can switch to automation solutions.
And nice to see that you run Binom, I absolutely recommend you to check their custom columns, I can show you some examples I created myself that make life much easier.
Oh, and from your screenshot above, you set $0.5 CPM for cost and you use Propeller Ads as trafficsource.
Better bid on SmartCPM there and use their cost token for more accurate cost tracking for the individual placements.
In Binom you can also set a Trafficloss % in the campaigns advanced settings, can be helpful as well for lower cost discrepancy between trafficsource and tracker.

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Thanks @twinaxe,

Few things though, the landers you posted above, do you run them on mobile or desktop?
I checked them on mobile views , all are running on mobile targeting. The screenshots were taken from my desktop while customizing them.

Better bid on SmartCPM
Regarding SmartCPM, what is the advantage of using it? What does Trafficloss% do in Binom and where can I find more information about setting custom columns?

cost token for more accurate cost tracking
My assumption was that Propeller doesn't pass cost value and we have to manually update the costs. I used to do that on Thrive. How do we do this automatically?

Thanks again for your suggestions.

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The advantage of using SmartCPM is that you don't pay the same fixed price for all placements.
You rather set a price that you are willing to pay as maximum and the trafficsource then sets dynamic bids per placement.
Not all placements are same in terms of quality so you also shouldn't have same costs for them.

About trafficloss, on Pops you can have pretty high traffic loss sometimes, depends on several factors like Geo, connection and so on.
Your tracker can only track costs of the traffic that arrived the tracker = the traffic that gets tracked.
When you have for example 25% trafficloss that would mean that the trafficsource sent 25% more traffic than the tracker tracked.
So your costs would be not really accurate.
When you set the trafficloss in the tracker it will be calculated with trafficloss and your costs will be more accurate.

About custom columns, to be honest but I don't know where to find more info about it.
I just checked the Binom documentation myself, here https://docs.binom.org/settings-main.php you can see how to add a custom column.
But the ones I used are formulas I came up with myself because I thought this could be helpful for me.

For cost tracking just use Propeller Ads {cost} token

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Thank you , I will create a new campaign with SmartCPM.

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Once again - sorry for the delay! Somehow missed your first post earlier, and then subsequent posts while I was busy (still am) with the China tour. But twinaxe got you covered (mega thanks!)

With 12 landers, assuming they've all been optimized for functionality, speed, and display, chances are good that at least some of them will be decent!

So now it's just a matter of testing offers until you find a decent one, then use that to cut landers down to a winner and go from there. Definitely start with AM-recommended offers that already have good track record with other affiliates, and/or offers that you see are doing good volume on Adplexity - this will be more efficient than picking random offers.

Smart CPM is great if you're testing - it will give you a sample of traffic from the widest range of placements. Kinda like ordering the tasting menu in restaurants.

Once you have a better idea of which placements are good, you can always set up separate campaigns to bid higher for more traffic from them. (Or lower for placements that are breaking even, which may push them into green.)

(At the time I started writing the tutorial, smart CPM wasn't available - thus I didn't include/recommend it. Another thing that didn't exist at the time was the cost token on propellerads - it definitely exists now and is recommended!)

Looking forward to seeing some stats soon!



Amy

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