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🏄Wakeboarder Rides Into Native Waters 🏄 (40)

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Hi STMers!

In my first follow along (Wakeboarder Trying to Get Some POPs Working) I said I would like to move into native as soon as I get profitable and consistent with sweepstakes. Thanks to you many of you guys here, I'm happy to say I'm entering a new chapter in my AM carrier. I decided to get into Native and COD offers. In the next few months, I will invest all the profit from sweepstake camps into COD offers and find something that's a bit more stable and rewarding.

As I did with my sweepstake follow along, I will try to document and share with you guys as much as possible.

Let's start with a list of things that I did until today.

• Read the most popular threads on STM
• Opened accounts with COD networks: AdCombo, Magic Hygeia, M4TRIX Networks
• Switched mobile.Adplexity to native.Adplexity
• Opened and funded account on MGID
• Talked with AMs about popular offers/categories
• Spent 30 min/day in Adplexity to get a filling what hot right now
• Opened a small mastermind group for COD offers
• Opened an account also on MadSociety because most of the users there are into native
• Get in touch with MGID rep

First Campaigns

Today I've uploaded the first 3 offers to MGID.

How did I pick my first offers?
1) MGID Traffic Insights

MGID has one great feature where you can insights for specific GEO (avg. bid, volume, trend). Based on this data I decided to start looking for TH and ES offers.



2) Find popular offers with Adplexity

I didn't complicate much here and just look for the offers that are receiving most of the traffic and running longest for the past 14-30 days.

3) Checking with AM

Almost all hand-picked offers from Adplexity were between top5 offers for particular GEO on the network. First positive sign. Thanks too @erikgyepes, I've asked my AM for the best combi pre-lander/money page.

4) Checking with MGID rep

Account manager told me that sending traffic to one of the chosen offers would be like beating a dead horse. I will find a new one and we will talk tomorrow more in detail.

What about banners and LPs?

My main goal is to find ASAP one good offer that would convert OK right of the bat (eg. ROI > -50%) and with that in mind, I decided to run tests with default pre-landers.

In every campaign I've uploaded 6 ads. 2 banners are from Adplexity, 2 are my own variation of banners from Adplexity and 2 are in totally different style.


Initial budget

I will spend $100/day per offer.

At the moment I'm not sure how much do I need to spend for some statistical decision making ... when to cut an offer.

Widgets: In some other follow along and groups people are talking: If widget spend 1x payout and 0 revenue = KILL and If the widget spends 3x payout and ROI < 0% = KILL.

I believe I just need to run some campaigns to get a filing for bids/traffic/volume. Also, insights from you guys are always welcomed.

Campaign: Honestly, I don't have a clue at the moment how much do I need to spend before I kill the campaigns. I will start with $300 which means the offer will be active minimum 3 day.


Challanges

MGID deposit: I think I will need to wait until next week to run first campaigns because my initial deposit needs to be confirmed.

Custom made lander: As we speak, a front-end guy is working on my custom-made LP for an offer that account rep recommend me today not to test it. I've already paid for design and psd2html. The idea was to make a lander where the user answers a few questions and get some personalized amulet. I will test it anyway ... maybe will work at least to try to collect some emails. Otherwise, I will just re-skin the old design and change copy and use it for some other offers. I believe that weight-loss/health offers can work great with questionnaire style landers.


Next steps

Because of the MGID deposit issue and bad weather, I will have time the whole weekend to find 10 additional offers as a backup. It's so much easier to run campaigns and test many offers when you have everything prepared (tracking links, banners, bids, settings, notes, ...).

MGID rep told me that tomorrow he will have more time and we will go through my plan and campaigns. Until then I would like to find 5 additional offers to get some insights from him.

That's all for now! I will post the next update when I get some data from my first campaigns. Can't wait actually.

Starting native feels like wakeboarding for the first time.


Cheers,
wakeboarder

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Awesome, I hope you will repeat your sweepstake success in native as well.

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Congrats for making the switch to Native, good luck

Looking forward to the follow along.

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Subscribing to this one! Go Tim go!



Amy

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Thank you chhikara, adig13 and vortex!

QUICK UPDATE

In the meantime while I'm waiting for funds to appear in my MGID account, I wanted to prepare everything I could before start testing the offers.
Here is what I've done over the weekend.

AFFILIATE NETWORKS
I've signed up to: Terraleads, Leadbit, Affiliaxe and DirectAffiliate

OFFER SPREADSHEET
I adjusted a bit my offer spreadsheet that I'm using for sweepstakes.



OFFERS
At the moment I've 11 offers ready to test. This includes 6 banners from Adplexity and 4 custom made for each offer, tracking links and everything else that come along. I asked AMs and MGID rep to give me some insights on the offers. They will probably tell me to remove a few of them, that's why I choose more than just a few offers.

ADPLEXITY
I'm dedicating some amount of my time just to explore offers, banners, landers, GEOs and different approaches that marketers are using on native. I'm writing down my own ideas to execute them later on when I will have a few stable campaigns.

RETARGETING
I know how powerful and profitable can be Facebook and Google retargeting so I'm looking around to see how this works with native. Anyone running retargeting camps with native?


I can't wait to start collecting data and optimizing campaigns. I didn't expect it will take a few days before then approve my CC.

Cheers,
wakeboarder

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Impressive prep work.

I will follow for sure to see how it goes for you.

Keep in mind that in mgid you can bid per widget, so cutting a widget that had X amount of spent isn't always necessary since you can simply lower the bid to whatever justifies the widget's performance.

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@daanja I've heard that mgid has this feature. Would you recommend to start using theOptimizer at the beginning or it's better to run a few camps and manually managing bids and widgets?

I guess it would be better to start manually to get a filling for bids/cpc/volume/etc. but looking from a different perspective, I believe I can save some budget with theoptimizer.

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I remember that in the Telegram group you mentioned that you are planning on using Theoptimizer.

If I were you I would start my native journey without a tool like this.

This way you get to know the traffic source in and out as you spend time working with it.

Once you know the source you can add a tool like Theoptimizer to do the work for you.

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In general, I would always recommend using an automation tool. Personally I use the optimizer, which is pretty great.

But just like you said - considering you are just starting out in native, I personally think that running at least the first couple of camps manually would be better for you learning wise.
Spending hours optimizing widgets manually isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but it will force you to get "intimate" with your stats and see performance trends and patterns you might have been overlooking or missing when automating camps..

But aside that fact, I think automation tools are great.

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Yep, I was thinking exactly about that.

I'll take your advice and start running campaigns manually.

Thanks!

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Solid prep work right there, with native it's more important than with pops, since the approval times are generally way longer ... at least with some networks, you will find out about this pretty soon Good luck and waiting for your initial results.

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Good luck and I would recommend using an optimization tool or at least checking the stats every 2-3 hours just to make sure a single widget is not eating up all of your budget.

Great prep work though and good luck.

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Great setup here Wakeyboyy, I'm anticipating a great thread already... your last one was fantastic and since that discussion with you on TG I know this will be 2.0!

This for sure, its funny how theres only so much preparing you can do before you just want the results to know which direction to continue with.

Have you managed to get a rep on your chosen source mate?

@eurosen that is very solid advice too, learning the ins and outs fundamentally of a source then bringing in tools once you have it locked and scaled is a great approach.

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Solid start wakeboarder!

Like others pointed out already, it is really important to do pretty much everything manually when learning a new traffic source. However when moving from Pops to Natives the differences in cost are noticeably higher and an automation tool like TheOptimizer may help you handle optimization tasks when you're not on top of your campaigns.

In case you decide to start automating your campaigns optimization process right from the start but are afraid to do so during the learning phase, day parting auto-optimization rules would be a great option to consider.
Basically you can automate specific tasks like blocking a publisher, pausing a specific content, pausing a campaign or even tweak bids only for the hours that you know you're not able to followup manually (ie. while you sleep, go to the gym or spent time with your friends)

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This will be a good one!!!

:-)

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Going good. MGID has a feature called Traffic Insights, which will show up on campaign creation. You can use that to get insights on what is working. Or better ask your rep on what you should start with.

Approval times are really frustrating, but that's how things are (coming from POPs). Also create some rules in theoptimizer which you can use with the native campaigns - that would be really useful. On the topic of the optimizer, Don't use TheOptimizer to upload the campaign to MGID - it messes up things! I reached out to their support but no response yet.

Looking forward to this follow along!

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I haven't tested this, but theoretically it should work: you could manually call MGID's postback URL and include the clickid's there. It should then fire the conversions on their side.

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Adcombo and/or similar aff networks are not exactly known to have compliant prelanders or in fact in some cases also landers
in their system.

I am not familiar with their official take on this, but I can tell you honestly
that the stuff on those pages or even some products are not kosher (and kosher is a very mild word to use here).

Be wary also of this fact.. In case you use any "smartlink" technology, you might get a current set of prelanders approved,
but then later on aff network ads some new landers to the mix..which could trigger the subsequent reject reason or in some cases account bans.

A simple example (not related to adcombo per se):
You buy popunders on IT carrier wind.. have a nice little flow.. all proper ips go to offer A from mundomedia (nice clean offer), all the rest of the crap (that dont quality)
is redirected to some smartlink (eg monetizer or Mobidea or xyz.. whatever)..
Campaing is approved, its has a nice ROI.. all is nice and peachy.
At some point a new page is inserted in one of those smartlinks (beyond your control) which has a js dialog.. and forces popunders to pop-over.
Traffic network detects this.. its serious violation of rules.. and you get a weekly suspend or permaban.
For what ? For 0,5% of traffic that was being directed to smartlink that got a noncompliant page in flow..

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johner991, I have noticed that as well. That's one of the main reason why I'm not using monetizer or other smartlink providers on with pops camp. Don't want to get banned or ruin relationship with account reps from ad-networks. Risk/Reward ration is not high enough, or maybe I just don't see too much added value in this.

CAMPAIGN UPDATE

Since the last updated I've adjusted my strategy a bit. I moved from COD to CPS offers and here are two main reasons why:

- low payouts
- approval rates (maybe it's just me, but I cannot accept 25% approval rate. It's bullshit or the call center don't do the job. )

After digging into Adplexity I've noticed that Clickbank/JVZOO/etc. offers are actually the most popular offers on native. On Friday I turned off everything all MGID/COD camps and moved to RevContent.

I picked 6 offers and start ripping, cleaning and optimizing landers/creatives.

Here are the 5 simple steps that I'm following at the moment when testing offers:

1. Find popular offer with AdPlexity*
2. Rip the most popular banners and landers
3. Create widget whitelist
4. Create few custom banners
5. Start the campaign with $100 / daily budget

*I think this step is a super important step. Most of the time I spend on the research actually. This includes talking with affiliate manager, traffic source rep, using tools like cbengine.com, similarweb.com, google.com etc. I'm trying to collect everything I can in this steps.

DAY 1

Yesterday all RC campaigns were approved and here are the results of the first day.

Spent: $558.64
Revenue: $211.76
Conversions: 5
ROI: -62%

ROI would be even higher but two really bad widgets spent $60 before I killed them. I will setup Theptimizer over the weekend, but until then I will work manually to get a filling for bids/ctr/etc.

Today I killed one camp and blacklist 5 bad widgets.

NEXT STEPS

- don't touch the campaigns! (That's the hardest part ) Only blacklist if something not working.
- trying to get my pixel on the offers checkout page. This would help me a lot with optimization
- prepare everything for 3 new camps
- adplexity+cbengine=❤️️
- talk with RC rep about BL camps.
- talk with AM and I will try to get some insight about one offer that's showing good potential
- start collecting push subs with OneSignal

That's all folks!

Cheers,
wakeboarder

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I was waiting for this update. By the way any particular reason to switch from MGID to revcontent

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Yes, I have a better relationship with my rep, their approval time is much faster, adplexity finds more offers for RC than MGID and overall I like their platform more.

I will definitely give it another try, but later on when I will be scaling from RC to other networks.

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Woow, Goodfella! Thank you for your feedback.

I totally agree with you. I've spent way to much per offer in the testing phase. I read so many threads where people are talking how native is expensive and requires a big testing budget, I had the wrong perception regarding the testing budget.

Here is the summary of all offers that I tested with native so far (COD/CPS, MGIC,RC).



Lesson learned : You don't need to spend [offer payout x 25] on native before you kill the offer.

NEXT STEPS

Testing budget
I will drastically reduce the testing budget per offer. Like Goodfella suggested, if the offer doesn't convert after 3-5x the payout I'll drop it like a GF that doesn't put out.

Offers
First CPS offers I choose solely on Adplexity data, but what I didn't realize that the offers (CPS) were 1+ year old. I'm talking more now with AMs and also in the next round of testing, I will include 3 offers from different vertical (CC sweeps, nutra and casino). Actually, now I see that I was 100% sure that my WL technique with adplexity Widgets will work out and that's one of the reasons why I have spent so much. But I did not realize I'm probably already 1923 marketers pushing the exact same offer with the exact same lander. Another lesson learned.

Launch
I hope I will new camps in a day or two. I don't have enough time for everything (job, native, pops ) ... But the good thing is that found some good sweepstake offers for pops that are doing good $$$ and I've almost covered the loss I made with my initial native test.

Whitelist camp
One widget actually did really well... I will spend $50 only targeting one widget and see if I can squeeze some profit out of it.

#########

Great thing is that I feel much more confident now with native when I've spent some money and learned how not to test offers. I bet the next testing round will be better.

Cheers,
wakeboarder

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Can you tell me more about the "notorious editorial" topic? I think I'm missing something here.

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In revcontent, u target your campaigns by topic. The editorial has a lot of bot traffic when you first test it.

Sent from my LGMS210 using STM Forums mobile app

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NEW TESTING ROUND

I've analyzed previous campaigns, talked with AMs, fellow STMers and did a new research with SimilarWeb+CBengine+Adplexity using different search parameters.

I'm testing 3 offers at the same time. 2 from CB and one from BitterStrawberry network.

####### OFFERS #######

Offer #1

Network: ClickBank
GEO: Canada
Niche: Weight Loss

Offer #2

Network: BitterStrawberry
GEO: Germany
Niche: Weight Loss

Offer #3

Network: ClickBank
GEO: United States
Niche: Weight Loss

####### OFFERS #######

Unlike the first time, all offers are relatively new.

I will test Offer #1 and #2 with the blacklist approach. Targeting 1 topic, mid bid and $100 daily budget.

Offer #3 is more of an experiment than anything else. I have a list of widgets that were performing great for Shopify store with Christian Jewelry I was running last year. On ClickBank I found an offer The Faith Diet. This should be like a perfect Tinder match.

I hope all the camps approved will be until tomorrow. Till' then I will find a more offers to test with native but in a different niche - CC sweeps and casino.

More updates coming soon!

Cheers,
wakeboarder

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CAMPAIGN UPDATE

After a few days here is a short update on what's going on.

Offer #1 (ClickBank: Fat Decimator System)
After $150 spend, 0 conversions and only 3 add to cards I decided to kill this offer.

Offer #2 (BitterStrawberry: Nutra / Protectvital Plus)
I was closely monitoring to make sure I don't spend money on bad widgets. Again, after $100 not a single conversion. I've paused the offer.

Offer #3 (ClickBank: The Faith Diet)
I decided to not test offer.

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As you can see I didn't have luck with chosen offers.

Anyway, on Friday I've already known that and start working on new offers. RC approved me one offer before the weekend -- CC Sweepstake / France.

I did one terrible mistake ...

I've setup bid $0.40 for all topics (editorial + push). Because of the high bid, this campaign overspent for $200. My daily budget was $100 but somehow when I refreshed the stats I saw it spent $298.

Here are the results:

21.9.2018
Spend: $546
Revenue: 7
Revenue: $140
ROI: -74%

I've adjusted the bid to 0.03, target only push topics and did some optimization (widgets, banners).

22.9.2018
Spend: $114
Revenue: 1
Revenue: $20
ROI: -82%

Because I know this offer is hot at the moment I've decided to run it for one more day. Again, I did some optimization (widgets, landers) and here are results for today.

22.9.2018
Spend: $199
Revenue: 4
Revenue: $80
ROI: -59%

It looks a bit better, but it's hard to say and decide anything because there are only 4 conversions. I will leave it until tomorrow and see if the ROI will stay the same and then decide to optimize it further.

I know I have spent way too much on this offer but that was my fail with the bid. If I get a few more conversions soon, I believe I can make this camp profitable. Also, because FR is huge GEO, I'm willing to spend more and I'm looking and this spend as a future investment.

What do you think?
Should I work further with this camp or call it a day?

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Sweeps can be ran on native?

Sent from my LGMS210 using STM Forums mobile app

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Well, I got feedback from my RC rep and he told me I'm not getting native traffic because they don't have much Desktop inventory in France.

He is recommending me push-traffic.

Not super happy about it but it looks like I need to find another offer/geo. Although, it's super weird to me that network like RC doesn't have more than $100 / day native inventory in France.

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Nice Follow Along!

Have you tested the FR offer on mobile yet? Or just desktop? I'm curious which converts better.

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Hey Wakeboarder,

Nice follow along. One of your questions caught my eye

The reason for this is that most CC trial advertisers use rotating MIDs (payment processing gateway for credit cards). The price on the LP signifies the price of the trial, so the first charge a customer gets on their CC.

First of all if one MID gets flagged and they find a recurring pattern of a $1 charge followed by a $50 charge after three days, they will be looking for other MIDs with a similar pattern and flag these as well. So advertisers want to spread the risk by using different payment patterns, which will cause different prices on the LP.

Secondly its possible they work with different MIDs providers (more MIDs = more cap and less risk of the offer going down). Some of them require a minimum first charge of $3, others require at least $5 etc. Also this keeps rotating in order to not put too much volume on the same MID.

It's not an ideal situation for the CR but it does keep the offers alive and able to receive bigger volumes.

-Stijn

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symba3 80% of the traffic for this FR offer was desktop.

gotzha great explanation, this totally makes sense. It's really awesome that we're getting this type of feedback to understand the vertical from advertisers side as well.

This campaign in on-hold for the past few days. Today I will re-evaluate this offer and decide what to do next... move on or continue with mobile native and push traffic.

I'm more interested in native traffic than push and I was surprised when I noticed that RC doesn't have inventory in France.

Last few days I'm in contact with STM member who is running the same FR CC Sweepstake offer with the same aff network and traffic source. We decided to test a few offers together and share details about the campaign.

Anyway, I will write a more in-depth update in the next few days when I will start buying traffic again and decide what to do with the current offer.

Talk soon!

Cheers,
wakeboarder

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Hey guys!

Today I re-evaluated my CC sweepstake campaigns and gather more data about this vertical. Here is what I've figured it out today.

- The majority of volume for CC sweepstakes comes from FB BH camps
- CC sweepstakes can work well with Native but it's not one of the top vertical

This is based on the feedback I got from AMs from top networks.

Based on this I've decided to dig dipper so I log in to native.Adplexity and select the following search filters:

- Traffic Source = RevContent
- Timeframe = last 45 days
- Running between = 9 - 35 days
- Sorted by = Received most traffic

Then I checked for 12 different GEOs (UK, AU, BR, SW, MY, ID, DE, IT, ES, NL, TR and PL) which creatives Adplexity throws out and I've categorized them based on the vertical (dating, casino, sweepstake, money, nutra, ED) and make a summary with chart pie in Excel. Here is what I got.





This got me thinking if this is the vertical I would like to stay in with Native.

I don't want to jump from vertical to vertical because I this is not the way the path to success, but to learn new traffic sources it's great to promote vertical that's obviously hot and ads are all over the place. Unfortunately, this is not the case with CC sweeps+Native.

What're your thoughts on this? I would love to hear your feedback because it will help me make some tough decisions.

Thanks!

Cheers,
wakeboarder

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This is the kind of research every affiliate needs to start doing before jumping into a vertical or geo!

Thanks for a most-valuable post! Gonna put this one in next week's newsletter!

Regarding jumping verticals - I'm not an expert on Native, but will leave this with you in case it helps:

If you have good justification for switching, I'd say go for it! Don't keep going down a road just for the sake of sticking with it, even when you see that it's not going anywhere.

Another thing you can potentially do: Use sweeps to identify good and bad traffic, which may cost less due to the low payouts. Then you can target the good traffic when testing another vertical. I know this works well for pop but not sure how it would work with Native, due to there being different categories etc., such that sites that have converted well for sweeps may not convert as well for offers from another vertical. But may be worthwhile to test nonetheless!

Will continue to root for you from the sidelines my friend...



Amy

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Amy

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just digged out this gold thread in mar19. thx wakeboarder for all the sharing so as other STMers comments

just wonder how are you doing with native now wakeboarder? still in cc sweeps and native or something else pls?

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@gritaction no, I’m not running anymore native/sweeps.

But there are other amazing native follow alongs that are active right now.

✌️


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Thanks for the reply wakeboarder.
May I ask, if it’s ok, do you find native not working, hard to work or you just don’t like native anymore ..?

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Native definitely works. You just need to test enough and learn by trial and error.

It’s not easy that’s for sure, but it’s not impossible. It depends on how determinated you are.

In my case is not that I don’t like native, but I’m in a niche where Facebook and Google are more convenient because I need very targeted traffic.

In general, for native you need broad offerrs (swedpstakes, skin, nutra ...) because you have less audience targeting options available.

A few weeks ago someone posted an amazing case-study running casino CPI offers on Taboola.

If I would be into native right now, I would:

- read Native forum category it multiple-times
- write down notes
- find/create a mastermind group
- open a follow along and update it DAILY
- stay focused

Everything can work if you put enough energy and resources into.

Push, Native, Facebook, Pops, etc... I know many people here that are killing it on this traffic sources right now.

Find the traffic source that fits you and then just keep learning and testing.

For example, I believe native is not the perfect fit “for my character”. I know it’s sound crazy, but I couldn’t get used to the fact that everything is so slow ... approval times, testing period, etc. I want immediate action.

Whatever you decide ... open a follow along and share everything. It will be worth it! This is probably the best advice I can give you.

Have a great Sunday man!


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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thanks a lot
cannot agree more regarding the "slow" part on native.
all the best buddy to your journey !

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