Complete Newbie on AM - Documenting All My Steps (13)
Hey everyone!
I've made my account in the forum this week on the exact same day i decided I'd give AM a try.
A little background on me: I'm 23 years old and have been messing with digital marketing for a good while now (>02 years), but only to promote a web business I used to run (I ended up selling it for a decent sum of money that I'm now using as a 'bankroll').
I've already read lots of threads on STM (mostly the 40-day tutorial ones - thanks for all that material) and, although I feel a little lost with so much information, I managed to start taking action and plan my next moves.
So far I have:
- Set up accounts on PropellerAds and
- Set up my tracker (FunnelFlux, self-hosted)
- Launched my first campaign (generic video offer from
- Got my first and so far only conversion 
(with 10$ spent in traffic)
As the ROI for my first campaign was close to -98% I decided to try new offers before optimizing. Mobidea's offers don't seem very interesting though so I decided to join other networks to have access to a bigger pool of offers - and right now I'm kinda stuck as all my applications have yet to be approved.
While I wait I'm going to try and do something useful with my time (probably start learning landers).
I hope to use this thread to keep all my steps documented and also to measure my long-term progress.
Cheers and thanks for reading this! 
Hi Gabriel and welcome to the forum! Great to hear you're giving the tutorial a whirl!
I'm especially happy to hear that you're using Funnelflux. For pop,
Very important note: Direct linking to direct carrier billing offers does not work anymore. Good offers have become too few and too far between. It's still a great exercise for the tutorial, but please proceed to using landing pages as you are thinking about doing. Don't waste time with direct-linking anymore.
Looking forward to seeing your next update! Again, welcome to the family!
Amy
Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app
So, getting accepted into Affiliate Networks takes a lot longer than I initially thought. Still only have access to
In the last 02 days I learned the basics of landers, how to rip them using AdPlexity, and a bit of HTML, CSS and JS. Also set up all needed infrastructure. This is something I actually enjoyed and that I look forward to dive deeper into, especially the creative part.
02 things I'm a little confused about:
- Is it expected from me (an affiliate) that I have a company, corporate website etc. to get into Affiliate Networks?
- I'm not really sure mobile pop is what I want to focus on. But i plan on sticking to it until I get a really good idea about what I'm doing and have a few profitable campaigns under my belt - then I'd think about both the vertical and the traffic that I really want to work with. Is this a good approach?
Cheers!
So yesterday I finally got accepted into a new AN (Addiliate).
I got accepted today into a bunch of sweeps offers and already got a few landers ready to be tested. Mostly english speaking geos (SG, NZ, AU, ZA, US, UK), so let's see how this goes. If it proves too expensive I'll go for tier 2/3 geos like everyone recommends 
.
Also had a good chat with the AM at Addiliate and she gave me some good tips to help me start with those offers.
Will post results from testing in 02 days.
Gabrielle,
I wanted to come here and give you props for joining STM so early in your AM journey. It's something that would have saved me months, if not years of testing... Not to mention money!
Keep us posted, and don't be afraid to reach out if there's anything I can do to help.
G
And if you really want to make one, it can be a 1-page website. No need to make it overly complicated.
The more important thing is to be able to sound like you know what you're doing.
During the interview, tell the network rep about your plans, such as testing approach. Also tell them what is motivating you to do this and your desire to succeed. They mainly just want to know you won't be wasting their time by dabbling instead of giving this a serious try. Some networks don't like newbies, period, but many ARE willing to work with newbies that ARE serious about succeeding and are action takers.In case you haven't found this yet:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...shing-1-button
These are all newbie-friendly networks. I made sure of that before adding them to the tool.
However, if your ultimate goal is to progress to something like facebook or adwords, AND if you have the patience to beat the learning curve, then I would suggest that you consider starting with those directly and skipping pop. The reason why I suggest most people to start with pop is because it's the easiest to learn. Basically rip a bunch of popular landers, fix them up, ask the AM to recommend a few offers, throw them all into a campaign, use statistical tool to cut landers down to a winner, then use that to test more offers. In the meantime, cut unprofitable placements. Basically that's the bird's eye view for beginners.
Then once someone has pop experience, they'd be more willing to venture into the more-complicated traffic types. So pop is like the lowest barrier to entry that can build up a newbie's confidence to prepare them for the harder (but potentially more lucrative) stuff.
Worth noting here is there although pop is easier to learn and to make small profits, it's becoming harder to make major profits. Whereas for the other traffic types, I see the opposite trend: They're harder to learn, but once you put in the time and money, you can reap more profits.
Hope that helps!
Amy
@sellhealthg, thank you!! I'll definetly pm you if I have some specific doubts 
@vortex, thanks again for being so awesome
Well, it's been only 9 days since I got into AM, so I'm not 100% sure yet what I'd like to work with in the future. I'll definetly have to read deeper into native vs. adwords/facebook to understand how they work, how hard they are and what exactly is best to sell in each of them. So for now I'm gonna stick to pop . It's very good though to have that info and keep that in mind for the future.
Testing has been... not that bad. I've ran multiple sweeps so far on both AU and SG. AU has been ok with an improving ROI everytime i make changes to my campaign config in PropellerAds and to my landers. Far from green yet, though (~-30% ROI in the last test). SG was a total waste with pretty much -100% ROI even with multiple attempts to optimize the campaign. 
It's very interesting to see how the CTR changes dramatically between different landers.
I've read this thread: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ve-TIER-1-GEOs and decided to run my next offers/tests in less competitive GEOs.
Running in tier 3/4 geos first is definitely not a bad idea!
The thing about attacking the bigger tier 1 geos is you need a strong stomach for losing money at first. You'll need to first make sure to test LOTS of offers and landers to find a combination that is good enough to convert a sufficient portion of the total traffic, and then invest into cutting the unprofitable portion. Testing lots of offers and landers is necessary because of the competition. And investing into cutting the unprofitable will mainly involve cutting placements - and some of these big tier 1 geos have a sh*t ton of them, so that even if you cut with a strict criterion (e.g. no conversions after 1x payout or even 0.5x payout), it would take quite an investment to cut your way to profits. And you'd need to do this at every traffic network.
Nice thing is that once you've invested into identifying the good vs. bad placements, the next time you run in that geo on that traffic source, it will be much easier.
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Does this mean that I should not be following your 40 day Pop-Traffic Tutorial from 2017? Because in that tutorial you are supposed to start with direct linking and not move on to Landers until day 19-20. Or can I follow the tutorial but move on to using Landing Pages much quicker?
I'm a bit confused
Direct linking is still a great exercise. It will allow you to have a taste of running paid traffic to a simple campaign.
Just don't mass test offers in this way like I used to recommend.
And after setting up 1-2 direct linked campaigns, progress to the latter lessons involving landing pages.
The fact that you'll already have the experience of the first couple of direct linked campaigns, will give you the confidence (and patience!) you'll be needing to figure out how to prepare and test landing pages.
I could just skip the lessons on direct linking, but then people would have more difficulty in later lessons.
Analogy: It would be like me trying to learn calculus from the start before first achieving an understanding of basic math. It wouldn't be impossible - but most people would probably give up before they can master calculus.
Hope that makes sense! Please feel free to ask any further questions.
Amy
Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app
My worst day so far 
. Not a single conversion on some AU sweeps!
Decided to stop running the 05 offers I was testing and to get new landers once again.
I've been ripping popular landers off AdPlexity and doing some heavy editing in them (inserting scripts, modifying text, inserting call-outs, changing images etc.). Maybe that's not enough?
Gonna focus more on the next days on landing pages as well as finding good offers... I'm really obssessed with making sweeps offers work - it seems so hard right now to the point that I'm kind of confused, but, since I know that many people are making it work right now, I'm motivated to do it as well.
Something I found odd this time: I decided to try a new traffic source here (PopCash) - the CTR was through the roof on all landing pages (average of 16% across 3 very different landers), and yet not a single conversion happened. The campaign also reached it's spending limit in the blink of an eye. Very weird.
Cheers!
Originally Posted by gabrielmeirelles
My worst day so far
. Not a single conversion on some AU sweeps!Decided to stop running the 05 offers I was testing and to get new landers once again.
I've been ripping popular landers off AdPlexity and doing some heavy editing in them (inserting scripts, modifying text, inserting call-outs, changing images etc.). Maybe that's not enough?
Gonna focus more on the next days on landing pages as well as finding good offers... I'm really obssessed with making sweeps offers work - it seems so hard right now to the point that I'm kind of confused, but, since I know that many people are making it work right now, I'm motivated to do it as well.
Something I found odd this time: I decided to try a new traffic source here (PopCash) - the CTR was through the roof on all landing pages (average of 16% across 3 very different landers), and yet not a single conversion happened. The campaign also reached it's spending limit in the blink of an eye. Very weird.
Cheers!
You were testing 5 offers + multiple landers, and I'm assuming payout to be in the $1-2+ range. $27 really isn't much to spend.
Assuming you were only testing 3 landers, that would be 5 x 3 = 15 offer+lander combos. If average payout is $2, then you haven't even spent the equivalent of 1 payout per combination.
Having said that - if you're confident that your landers are good (load fast, function and display correctly), then I wouldn't spend more than 10x payout on testing any offer. So for example if the payout is $2 and you're testing 5 offers, $2 x 5 x 10 = $100 is the maximum I would spend to give the offers a chance to convert.
When it comes to landers, it's not very necessary to do heavy editing in the beginning. You can just test them as-is to set a benchmark. Main things to make sure: 1)They load fast, preferably under 1s if possible, definitely not over 2s, 2)they display properly on popular devices (use browserstack; make sure the most-important elements like buttons are above-the-fold because people hate scrolling), and that 3)they function properly (browse to them and click around to make sure everything works).
Don't spent too much time innovating on landers in the beginning! All you need to do is include enough of the most popular landers to make sure at least one of them will convert decent enough to let good offers shine! Read that 3 times until it sinks in.
The offer is more important. You only need a decent lander.
Hit up a few AMs and consult adplexity to find out which geos seem to be the hottest for sweeps right now, pick a geo (preferably an English one since you already have landers prepared), and run 2-3+ offers that have good track record (e.g. recommended by AMs as doing well for a few other affiliates; and/or doing high volume on Adplexity with positive trend).
Also, even while you're testing landers and offers, keep an eye on your placement stats, and start cutting from the beginning. For a geo like AU, if you're running on a traffic source that has a lot of volume and placements, cut aggressively - any placement that hasn't converted after 1-2 payouts should be cut. If you're getting a lot of volume and are wanting to cut faster, cut at 0.5x payout even. You can always turn them back on later to continue testing them, after you have a winning offer+lander combination. For now, you need to try to limit your losses, plus give the offers and landers good quality traffic in order to give them the best chances to convert.
As for the high CTR - I wouldn't focus too much on that. CR is the important metric here.
As for your budget getting depleted quickly, that's a good sign - it means there's lots of traffic available to work with. The question is: Is the traffic of good quality. This is why I often suggest doing initial testing on either popads or propellerads - their quality is best. Once you find a promising offer+lander, you can always tap into more traffic volume by scaling to other sources and focusing on cutting placements and testing bids. But to limit losses in the beginning when you're testing unproven offers and landers, it would be good to stick with sources you know have good quality - even if volume may be limited (i.e. popads).
Hope that helps!
Amy
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