O Pop, Pop, wherefore art thou Pop? (3)
Hello everyone and welcome to my follow along!
I recently have started with POP campaigns and decided to document them here where I can get feedback and where I can also offer some value to community.
At the moment my main traffic sources are PropellerAds, Zeropark & PopAds.
I have access to around 15 affiliate networks.
FunnelFlux is my tracking tool, I also use AdPlexity for spying and ripping LP’s. For hosting I use Amazon.
I went through a lot of materials before but Amy's 40-day newbie tutorial is that helped me to finally started with pop campaigns. I started with direct linking as she said in tutorial, I tested 15-20 offers, only one was positive but I couldn’t scale it because of low traffic, it was tier 3 offer with only one carrier that was allowed.
This experience helped me to learn some basic things, but I knew that I should start with Landing pages as soon as possible and so I did.
I set up system for testing that helped me tremendously, because at every step I know what I have to do and what I should do next.
After I have tested another 15-20 offers with LP’s I found one campaign that I believe have pretty good potential.
In the next picture you can see results without any optimization so far. It’s tier 1, sweep offer.
I have run bot test (300ms redirect) and it said that almost 50% of traffic is human.
My traffic source for this campaign is Zeropark, CMP is $10.
On next image you can see my stats LP + offers:
On next image you can see my stats on offers:
So I have few questions regarding this campaign:
[1] Is it enough data to kill some of the offers? All offers had similar stats since yesterday when Offer 3 got more conversions and better stats than other offers. So should I kill other offers or should I continue gathering data?
[2] With CPM of $10 I got very high visibility on Zeropark, maybe it’s to high bid, maybe should I try put smaller bid to get cheaper traffic which can put me in positive ROI? But would I get lower quality of traffic if I do it?
[3] Some tips, how should I proceed?
Thank you for reading it! 
Wow! Tier 1 and you're almost breaking even? And on ZP no less? Great job! 
[1] Is it enough data to kill some of the offers? All offers had similar stats since yesterday when Offer 3 got more conversions and better stats than other offers. So should I kill other offers or should I continue gathering data?
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...211#post289211
Next time, you can check stats on the calculator regularly to progressively eliminate offers.
Have you cut landers? Here's the stats calculator to use:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Banners-Part-1
It would be more accurate to run until an offer makes 2 conversions, then pause the other offers and just let that one offer generate enough conversions to cut landers down to the last lander (i.e. the winner), then use that winner lander to test more offers (new offers + old offers that were paused prematurely). I usually like to eliminate landers first because it's WAY easier to find a lander that works, than a good offer. A half-decent lander will allow a good offer to make conversions, but not even the best lander will make a dud offer convert well. So it's suggested to test landers first to find a decent one, then use that to test offers to find a promising one (at least close to breaking even or better), then optimize the campaign to push it into green.
Try to use optimization techniques to give that last boost, instead of relying on it to get a severely-red camp to go green. In other words, make sure to test enough offers and landers (with emphasis on offers!) to find a good combination first, before focusing on optimizing/cutting out unprofitable traffic (placements etc.)
But will the lower quality offset the lower cost? That we won't know until we test.
The other direction is true as well: We also won't know whether bidding higher will get us better-quality traffic that will convert well enough to justify the higher costs.
HOWEVER: Traffic quality coming from a specific target/placement will usually not change much no matter the bid. The reason why the overall traffic quality changes with the overall campaign bid, is because you'd be getting traffic from different placements when you bid differently.
So on most traffic sources where you can only set one bid (the overall campaign bid), when you bid lower, you get traffic from the lower-competition placements, because more of your competition have discovered that they don't convert very well and have therefore blacklisted them. Some of the best placements may not even start giving you traffic until you bid high - because more of your competition have seen how well they converted and have increased the bid to get more traffic from them.
Zeropark is different from most other pop networks, in that they allow us to set different bids for each individual target. This is what you can do:
-For targets that are doing higher ROI (say 50% or above), increase the bid by say 20-30%, to see if profits increase. Can repeat until profits starts to decrease, then change bid back to the last value. (If profits decrease after the first time you increase the bid, can try decreasing the bid to see what happens.)
Note: Don't judge based on ROI. Bidding higher will mean higher cost, so ROI will likely decrease. What we're hoping to do is get more traffic volume so that the profit level would increase. It's synonymous to marking down the price of merchandise in order to sell more of it. Total profits would be higher, although ROI would be lower.
-For targets that are in mild loss (say by -30% or less), decrease the bid to see if you can lose less. If so, can decrease until the target starts to turn a profit.
-Clone the campaign, set a higher campaign bid, blacklist targets from the original campaign that were getting decent traffic levels. (Obviously, also blacklist the low-performers you've blacklisted in the original camp.) Doing so can potentially give you access to high-quality targets you did not previously have access to at the lower bid. It will also give you more traffic from some of the targets that were only sending small amounts of traffic in the original camp, to allow you to better-evaluate how well they'd convert.
Also: Always keep in mind how valuable your time is. Only do this type of bid-tweaking for the larger placements. It's so easy to end up spending a few hours doing this type of minor tweaking and it's not conducive to your bottom line. Focusing most of your time on testing new offers/landers and on scaling campaigns to more traffic sources will likely increase your profits way more than tweaking bids for small placements ever could.
You're still new at this game. Now would be the time to build a foundation.
Look for the lesson on scaling and try to test at least 5-10 networks (the more the better - but if your budget is limited, 5-10 would be a good start) by scaling your best offer+lander. NOW is the best time to test new networks because you have a good offer+lander combo that convert well - this way you lose the least amount of money.
On each network you'll need to cut placements and test bids again. But once you make that investment, subsequent campaigns you run will start off with a bang because you'll already know which placements convert the best. You can even clone the original campaign and blacklist all but the very best placements, and use that camp JUST for testing offers and landers.
Often, it takes cutting a lot of placements to make a tier 1 geo profitable. You must be either targeting a smaller or less-competitive tier 1 geo, or have a really good offer on your hands. Either way, I would suggest focusing on scaling at this point - all your subsequent campaigns you'll be running in this geo will benefit from your present efforts.
Amy
Hello everyone!
First of all, thank you Amy for such a good answer!
I was traveling for almost a week so I didn’t have much time to manage this campaign, but now I will focus more on this campaign and try to make it profitable.
The campaign is still in almost break-even state with a minimum of optimizations, I just cut a few bad targets. I have found the best landing page in my first batch, but for offers, I needed a little bit more time and data to get statistical significance.
I found 2 more similar offers from other networks which I will test. I will also try a few new landing pages with different angles.
I tried to scale it on PopAds, I put bid 20% higher than average bid and I still didn’t get any conversions in $20. Next, I will try to scale it on Propellerads. Maybe I should also try to scale it on desktop devices because now I only target mobile devices? Maybe I should through the day target desktop devices because people are on their jobs and they spend a lot of time on desktops and after job hours I should target mobile devices?
Now I have an interesting situation because a very big portion of traffic come from iOS and ROI is -10% which I suppose could be easily changed after cutting some of the bad targets. Android gives me a positive ROI of 32.19%, so should I make a new campaign and target only Android devices to get more traffic from them?
Tablet devices have good ROI, should I also try to make another campaign where I will target only tablets, could this give me more traffic or I shouldn’t bother with it at all?
In the case of carriers, there are 3 dominant carriers with almost equal amount of traffic where one is break-even, one is almost break-even ant third is at -22% ROI. What would you suggest to me regarding this situation? Should I first focus on cutting bad targets and that could possibly change this situation regarding results of carriers? Or should I cut this one with ROI of -22%?
As I have most of my traffic from iOS devices so that’s why I have also very big portion of traffic from Safari, regarding results it’s not bad at all for now. What would be your suggestion regarding Facebook and Chrome on iOS, should I pause it, or situation could be changed if I first cut bad targets?
On Zeropark I have this situation where with bid of $0.0221 my bid position is >5 and I need to put bid of $0.05 to get the position of 5. So my question is if I put that bid what would happen, will that disrupt eCPA that I have now to worse and I will start to lose money? Or is it something that should also be tested because even with that high bid I could be in profit?
Thank you for reading it and thx in advance for answers!
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