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And So The Journey To POP Mastery Begins (16)

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Hello everyone,

I joined STM a couple weeks ago and I've been consuming so much information during this time. When I introduced myself in the "Introduce Yourself" section I said I wanted to start with either FB or Search traffic. Well I thought about it and decided to stop being stubborn and start with POP instead to learn the ropes. I can always transition to other traffic sources later.

After I read Amy's "40-Day Newbie Tutorial" like 2-3 times it was time to take action.

I went ahead and joined the following platforms.

Affiliate Networks:
- Mobidea
- Peerfly
- Clickdealer

Traffic Networks:
- PropellerAds

My plan is to post what I am doing each day or at least group up some days if I don't have much to add, for 2 reasons. One to keep myself accountable to work every day and also get feedback from other members.

Day 1 :

• Purchased FastVPS dedicated server and waited patiently to become available to use.
  
• Researched offers in 3 affiliate networks.
  
• Created Google spreadsheet to keep track of offers.
  

Day 2 :

• Purchased Binom tracker and had support install it for me on my server.
  
• Connected tracking domain through Cloudflare.
  

Day 3 :

• Wiped clean the entire spreadsheet from Day 1 and started from scratch
• Gathered 99 offers from 3 affiliate networks
• Setup postbacks with 2 affiliate networks and 1 traffic source
• Created new offer and new campaign in Binom
• Started campaign in PropellerAds
  

In this campaign I am currently direct linking to the offer since it already has a prelander. I only want to check that everything works tracking wise and postbacks are set correctly since I don't really understand tokens at this point.

You can see the test results below.



I understand that a small number difference is normal. I guess PropellerAds and Binom are ok, but what about Mobidea? The number of visits that Mobidea shows is way off. Is this normal or do I have to fix something?

One more question. Is there any way I can legally NOT pay VAT without having to incorporate outside of Europe? While doing small numbers VAT is gonna eat all the potential profits.... I know I should focus on learning and not on money, but hey it wouldn't hurt to know!

Things I will be doing the next days, get in touch with AMs and get a list of offers that are currently converting and also go through my list of offers and filter/group them based on similarity and geo. Also read through Binom's documentation.

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I can't tell anything about the traffic loss right now because the screenshot looks too blurry on my phone so I can't see the numbers.
I will check it later from my desktop PC.
But even when an offer has an own prelander it's worth to splittest with own landers and own landing page scripts.
And you should absolutely get a VAT number when you are from EU.
As far as I remember it doesn't even cost any money to get one.
Otherwise 20% of your money in Propeller Ads will be for VAT.
Think about it again, 20% that's 1/5 of your ad spend that you waste because you don't have a VAT.

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The difference will always be there, to some level. And it's usually the biggest when comparing traffic that the source sent and what the affiliate network recorded ... when talking about directlinking. The loss in your case is very big though, there might be speed issues with your server, which is taking the redirect to long to resolve.

I think there isn't ... you either have to be a registered VAT payee or reside outside of EU.

NOTE: as soon as you learn the basics, DEFINITELY focus on LPs, it's very hard to profit without them.

Will be watching your journey!

Cheers,
Matej.

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I totally agree. I will be using my own landers to promote offers. This was a quick test campaign just to see if I've set up tracking correctly.

You are right, I will talk to an accountant soon.

As soon as I've picked offers to promote, I will be using LPs. I won't spend any time direct linking.

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Update

Day 4 :

• Signed up for a subscription with Adplexity
• Downloaded a bunch of landers
• Started fixing 1 LP
• Signed up for AWS
• Created bucket and uploaded LP
• Finished all the tech stuff with s3, namecheap, cloudfront, route 53

Day 5 :

• Applied for a different offer
• Ripped and fixed 1 LP for the new offer
• Started campaign in PropellerAds
• Budget depleted in 2 hours with no conversions, or so I thought at first!

​At this point I have to say that I made my first ever conversion! Yay! Thanks to everyone in here for all the information and motivation!

You can see campaign stats below.



Now I don’t think I should continue with this campaign as it is. Maybe since I got a conversion I should focus on creating more landing pages and start a new campaign and blacklist some obvious bad placements, devices etc. What is your opinion?

Also could anyone please help me figure out what I have done wrong with postback between Binom and Clickdealer? I don’t see the conversion in Binom...

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I am sure that you aware of this but I just wanted to point it out...

They speak multiple languages in Belgium so make sure you have your language targeting setup right or direct Dutch/Flemish speaking visitors to another lander then French speaking visitors.

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I was aware of that but I just tested only one LP in dutch.





Based on this data though if I am gonna pursue this offer further or other offers for Belgium in general, I'll definitely test LPs for all 3 languages.

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I am not sure if your traffic source has the ability to target based on language but now your throwing money away by sending French speaking visitors to a Dutch lander.

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I can probably do that by setting rules inside the tracker.

Note: I haven't done it yet but from what I've read in the documentation it is possible.

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Congrats! Definitely an important milestone!

I know $1 may not sound like much, but in order to get there you've had to figure out hosting, CDN, tracking, traffic source, affiliate networks, coding, landers - etc. etc.

Definitely deserve a pat on the back!


The stats do look bleak - $18+ spend and only 1 conversion with payout of $1.

However, it's difficult to tell whether it's your offer or lander that's the culprit.

This is why I normally suggest to test multiple offers and landers in the beginning - see this post for an explanation:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post348214

At the very least, test a few landers and make sure to fix them up real good including optimizing for page load speed. That way, when you test an offer and it doesn't convert after say 10x payout in spend, you can say with some certainty that it's probably the offer that's responsible for the lack of conversions.

And of course, testing several offers at once will increase your chances of finding something promising.


This may help:

https://docs.binom.org/postback-url.php

Or just hit up Binom support - they're very helpful based on what I've heard!



Amy

Or, provide a step-by-step on how you have the postback set up, and I'll take a look.

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Update #2

These are the results from the last 24hrs



2nd conversion came in but I am launching campaigns wrong so far, so I decided to stop those campaigns. I am trying to optimize targeting from the start based on assumptions and what I've read in the forum instead of starting broad to gather data.

Campaign No5 there was a problem with the offer so I paused it as soon as it started.

Currently cleaning up multiple LPs for an offer I was told is converting.

Geo pop ~11m
Available traffic ~650k

After a lot of reading and some testing I fixed it. Problem was I wasn't passing clickid from tracker to aff.network to get the conversion data back.

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I wouldn't recommend it.
You are just starting running campaigns thus you don't have experience yet.
Better make a good campaign plan and execute it.
Learn from the results and when you ran enough campaigns to know how these things work you still can optimize or blacklist by assumptions.
Otherwise you risk to cut performing placements or to let bad placements run.

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The BR offer I agree is looking hopeless - good call on pausing it!

The BE offer - is that the one with $1 payout? Stats are showing only a cost of just over $3? Why pause so soon?


What are those assumptions specifically?



Amy

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I paused the BE campaign because there was not much traffic as I was only targeting mobile and tablet. Those 2,267 clicks it took two days to get them. I had already tested this offer for all devices and desktop drained the budget in 2 hours and was terrible traffic, no CTR and no Conversions.




I thought desktop traffic is bad with all those bots.

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So wrong

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Bot traffic is everywhere.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...traffic-share/



LeadCloak

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