Amy's 40 Day Guide Follow Along (with Binom) (52)
Alright, so I figured it may be cool to do a follow along starting from scratch with Amy's 40 day guide...from someone who is very bad technically and brand new to this side of the business.
I plan to post each day what I did, notes on what I did, and questions I had at the end of the day.
I started yesterday, and will post everything with detailed notes etc from the day before. But I did do about 20-30 hours of research before starting the 40 day guide, going through threads in the forum, taking notes. I did this so I could try to get a better understanding of how some things work and terminology etc to give myself a base before starting the guide.
Although the 40 day guide is used to follow
And even though direct linking is not working as well as before, I'm going to stick to following the steps to learn the process and familiarize myself with tracking etc. Don't expect to be profitable direct linking, but am going to do it anyways to learn.
Just a quick background...I have had a ton of success with SEO and right now I know and understand SEO so well that it's not really a challenge right now. As far as this side of the business I know just about nothing other than some basics...and I did do make some good money with Adwords and direct linking to clickbank offers back in the day...but other than that a lot of this is like physics to me so far and I can tell it's going to be extremely challenging to learn.
My weakness is that I have trouble learning (it takes a lot longer for me to learn than the average person) and I am not technical at all (so it's easy for technical things to confuse me).
My strength is when I want to make something work I will never give up.
Lets see how this goes! After just 1 day I already give all of you who have made paid traffic work so much credit! I can see that it takes a lot of hard work, determination and concentration.
Last quick note: I may do multiple "days" of the guide in one day, or even do no days some days (have a ton of SEO work and consulting to do outside of this still), but I will make notes of everything.
Please feel free to comment on any notes or answer anything I list in the troubles or questions part of each day! Appreciate as much feedback as I can get.
October 10 (Day 1): Started 40 day guide
- Signed up for
- Signed up for propellerads.com (traffic network)
- Signed up for binom.org (tracking)
- Signed up for dedicated server (OVH for 1kk clicks per day – more than enough) found here https://www.ovh.ie/dedicated_servers/game/171mc1.xml - again probably way more than I need but better safe than sorry
- Signed up for tracking domain with namecheap
- *waiting for dedicated server to be setup* - took about an hour or two
- Hopped on with binom support so they could setup tracker on the server, super simple, they did everything
Notes From Day 1:
- Affiliate networks (sign up as publisher), traffic networks (sign up as advertiser)
- I was really nervous about using binom since the step by step is for
Questions I had at the end:
- Find out: If I have a fast server in Canada, should I not promote Asia offers? Do I need different servers for different areas?
October 10 (Day 2):
- Starting to look for offer in
- Start with Egypt, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey, Brazil, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman , Russia, Poland
- Categories: Games (CPA), Videos (CPA)
- No adult, payout $1.50 or less
- Signed up for 3 offers and logged in offer spreadsheet as per Amy's guide
My 3 offers:
Mobidea Indonesia 18857 - Games - ID - 3 - Oomphcinta € 0.15 Direct Billing, Single Optin Oomphcinta All
Mobidea India 18219 - Videos - IN - Tata - 180 Degree Bollywood Mirchies € 0.11 Direct Billing, Single Optin 180 Degree Bollywood Mirchies All
Note: took out my links, but everything else from spreadsheet is above.
Aff Network, Country, Offer, Payout, Conversion Flow, Carrier, OS
Notes From Day 2:
- Make sure enough traffic available >5,000 visitors per day for your geo\carrier or not even worth it.
- Don't us publishers need a VPN to promote gaming offers in a 2nd tier geo in order to see the landing page/optimize the campaign? I know we need paid traffic, affiliate network, tracker.......But what about VPN? Isn't that necessary as well?
o The VPN will change your IP to that of a specified country, but it won't be an IP of a mobile carrier. In other words, you will appear as someone browsing from the specific country but only via WIFI and not from a phone with a data plan for a mobile carrier in that country. For offers that accept WIFI traffic, you should be able to see the actual offer page by using a VPN. But for offers that only accept mobile carrier traffic, just using a VPN alone will not be enough. Either the aff network or the owner of the offer site will likely redirect you to an offer that accepts wifi traffic for the country you've set your VPN to.
So, if you're wanting to see the offer page of an offer that only accepts mobile carrier traffic, here are your options:
1)Ask your AM for a screenshot of the offer (some networks will provide this in the offer description area).
2)Go to Fiverr (or similar) and ask someone that lives in the target country, that has a data plan with the respective carrier, to browse to the offer and take screenshots and/or record screencast and send them to you.
3)Subscribe to a service like geoedge (don't expect it to be cheap!)
You won't need a VPN for mobile content offers, for these offers you would need a service with carrier IPs to check the offer pages.
As you correctly posted you would need a service like Geoedge.
But to be honest, I never try to check the pages from carrier offers.
In the end there are only two options, either they convert or they don't.
About your three offers, Brazil and India are pretty hard to convert.
Awesome thanks for the feedback! Right now I'm focusing on just learning the process and not worrying about converting...want to learn how to set everything up properly, tracking, etc...butt hat is great to know.
Btw, did you receive my PM?
Great to see You Greg take action on this...will follow this thread and getting inspired to take action too as even I'm new to all this.
October 11 (Day 3):
- Created new affiliate network in binom
- Found my postback URL in binom (it’s in settings)
- Set that for my global postback in Mobidea making necessary replacements for REPLACE fields
- Went to offer spreadsheet and made necessary changes for final offer URL
- Created new offer in binom and filled out details
- Setup new traffic source for PropellerAds in binom (note: this gave me some trouble – see notes below).
- Created new campaign in binom
- Also did go in and add my other 2 offers to my tracker…helped me get a little more familiar with the process.
Troubles From Day 3:
- For the traffic source thing, the postback URL really confused me. There was nothing about this in the 40 day guide that I saw…and in the postback URL there were some parts of the URL that had “REPLACE” in them. I wasn’t sure if I had to replace those with anything…and if so where from? I hopped on with Binom support and finally figured out that I replace those values with the URL in my traffic network account (propellersads). So I grabbed my “aid” (affiliate ID) and “tid” (traffic ID I’m guessing) from my propellerads account and replaced the “REPLACE” text with those values in the postback URL.
- It also confused me that the visitor_id differed in my propellerads account and in my tracker. In my tracker it was visitor_id= {externalid} and in my propellerads account it was visitor_id=${SUBID}…binom support explained why and I somewhat understand but don’t fully grasp this yet.
- So although I understand what these things are doing, my biggest struggle at this moment is knowing when to use which services tokens at certain times. I know it’s suppose to be the information the RECEIVING system expects (thanks Caurmen) – but that is still the tricky part.
Notes from Day 3:
- I almost missed this so be careful if using a different tracker than
- Definitely had to really concentrate and hop on with binom support for some help, which they were great with. Understanding all the tracking URLs and postbacks and what goes where is tough, especially when following a guide for Voluum and doing it with Binom…but I think I got this day correct…although I’m not 100% sure why I did everything I did, just going to move forward and worry about that later.
- https://trackingtokens.com/ a good source for tokens (thanks erikgyepes)
Little bit off topic but the trackers name is 
Hahaha, I must have bitcoin stuck in my head.
I went back and changed titles and above threads, thanks!
October 11-12 (Day 4 Part 1):
- Quick note I noticed
Mobidea top converting DL offers here: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...393#post339393 - Got held up adding funds to PropellerAds. Wouldn’t accept my credit card, then used debit card and a message kept popping up that “This content can’t be shown in a frame”. Contacted support. Contacted bank.
- Decided to move forward with steps while payment is pending\getting figured out
- Did steps to setup my first campaign and saved it as a draft until funds hit account (these steps were quick and easy)
- Signed up for some more taffic networks and affiliate networks while waiting
- Tired of waiting on propellerads, so I moved to popads
- Setup 3 traffic campaigns in popads and waiting for approval
Notes:
- Good to test with propellerads and popads and use zeropark to scale up profitable campaigns
- Definitely feeling a little lost with some things after setting up my 3 traffic campaigns but just going to see where they go and take it from there.
Questions:
- When setting up traffic campaigns, how important is choosing languages for an area and knowing specific languages…and if it is important where do you find out which languages to pick?
- What is the postback URL for when adding a traffic source in tracker? I know when I hover over it, it says to fire conversions back to traffic source...but what exactly does that mean? And maybe a better question is when do you use this or not use it…or should you always use it?
- And I couldn't find a postback URL for popads like I did with PropellerAds...do they not have one?
- How do you figure out a good max bid?
- For categories (what type of traffic) do you usually choose the specific category (like games if it’s a games offer) or do you just let all categories come?
Not all trafficsources support postback and I usually only use it when needed.
For example when running campaigns on CPA where the trafficsource needs to know about the conversions.
For categories only choose adult for adult offers and all others for mainstream.
Thanks!
And yes I meant knowledge of languages in targeted area. For example if targeting Brazil...should I actually target specific languages...and if so how do you find out which specific languages to target?
October 12 (Day 4 Part 2)
Notes:
- Target carrier\3g and wifi traffic in different campaigns
- Good to separate mobile and desktop traffic in different campaigns
- Target all OS at first (one’s they accept)
- Target all OS versions at first
- Phone and tablet for mobile offers
- Devices: probably don’t need to do anything here
Just waiting for campaigns to get approved from PopAds!
Alright my campaigns are mostly done (been running all day). I have a one that's still running (more on that shortly - used SmartCPM and getting way more impressions cheaper).
These are the stats in Binom. It says 1 lead but I don't think I have any...the lead is not showing in my
My typical click loss looks like the 2 campaigns below:
Campaign1:
Propeller: 4,406 impressions
Binom: 3,720 clicks
Campaign2:
PopAds: 1,038 impressions
Binom: 805 clicks
Mobidea: 526 clicks
Although one was really bad:
Campaign3:
PopAds: 4,951 impressions
Binom: 3,764 clicks
Mobidea: 537 clicks
Not sure what happened with that one!
This shows how much cheaper I'm getting impressions using SmartCPM. I remember reading to use SmartCPM, but forgot to implement it until this last campaign, and there's a pretty obvious difference.
Another weird thing is when I organized my stats by date in mobidea I got the following:
But when I organized by offer...
So that confused me as well because the one shows a lead for 0.02 and then the other shows none (and of course the lead Binom shows doesn't show, as that is a $0.17 payout per lead).
Not too concerned about no leads, as I'm direct linking, and didn't necessarily search for good offers. Just wanted to get my feet wet.
Felt good to just get campaigns going, get a little familiar with tracking and traffic networks etc.
Amy (vortex) informed me to skip ahead to the landing page section as the next parts are about optimizing direct linking campaigns (which is out dated)...so I'm just going to read the guide up to then (Days 5-18), and then start the action parts again when I hit the landing page part (Day 19-20).
Just a quick update, I did have some conversions come in - and I know I read this is common as the pop-unders will sit hidden for a while and it's not uncommon to get conversions days later...
Checked my
Vortex helped me figure out that I accidently put my original offer link in the offer URL for my tracker instead of my final offer ID
I still had "?data1=Track1&data2=Track2&tag={External_ID_from_ traffic_source}&website={subID}&placement={sub_sub ID}" on the end of my offer URL instead of the final version "?data4={campaign}&data5={trafficsource}&tag={clic kid}"
Dumb newbie mistake, but something for you to check as well if you are not seeing conversions in tracker (we also went over my postback URLs and everything else seemed to checkout).
Setting up some new campaigns for the offer that seems to be converting just to double check this was the issue.
Wow Greg - if this isn't one of the most-detailed follow-alongs on here!
Thanks for taking the time to record everything! I've seen your notes that you took when browsing the forums in your initial research phase - mega impressed with that monster of a document!
Will jump right in to provide feedback...
What I DO know is that in most cases, the difference in speed won't make or break a campaign - whereas having a good lander+offer+targeting WILL.
If you have a big campaign running profitably, it may be worth getting a server in the target geo to see if there's a difference in conversion rates. But if the campaign isn't profitable in the first place, I seriously doubt the difference in redirection speed will turn it into a profitable one.
o The VPN will change your IP to that of a specified country, but it won't be an IP of a mobile carrier. In other words, you will appear as someone browsing from the specific country but only via WIFI and not from a phone with a data plan for a mobile carrier in that country.
- It also confused me that the visitor_id differed in my propellerads account and in my tracker. In my tracker it was visitor_id= {externalid} and in my propellerads account it was visitor_id=${SUBID}…binom support explained why and I somewhat understand but don’t fully grasp this yet.
- So although I understand what these things are doing, my biggest struggle at this moment is knowing when to use which services tokens at certain times. I know it’s suppose to be the information the RECEIVING system expects (thanks Caurmen) – but that is still the tricky part.
The first one will ensure that conversions are passed from the affiliate network to the tracker, and the second one will pass conversions from the tracker to the traffic source.
The first one is mandatory - because without seeing conversions in the tracker, you can't really optimize the campaign (would defeat the purpose of having a tracker). The second one I usually wouldn't recommend - maybe I'm just paranoid, but I don't like passing more data to the traffic source than is necessary.
As for the different tokens on different services: That's the most confusing part indeed! You can look at it as each service having its own "language" that it speaks, i.e. when their link is triggered, they will only recognize their own token names. That whole explanation I included in day 3 of the tutorial is the best I could come up with. The concept isn't too complicated, but trying to use words to explain can make it sound more complicated than it really is. Reading through that a few more times may help!
Will try to explain it in another way. Let's say the conversion postback at the aff network looks like this:
http://track.yourdomain.com/postback?cid={{EXTERNAL_ID}}&payout={{MONEY}}
When the affiliate network receives a conversion, it will notify the tracker by running/triggering this link - synonymous to yelling for your friend across the room.
But right before triggering that link, the aff network would need to replace the variables with real values - so replace {{EXTERNAL_ID}} and {{MONEY}} with the correct values. And the aff network won't know which values to replace with if it doesn't recognize these variables! This is why when we grabbed this postback from the tracker, we had to replace these variables with the ones specific to
So, by triggering the link,
Now, in order for the tracker to understand what Mobidea is saying, it will need to understand what "cid" and "payout" mean - this is why we grabbed the postback from the tracker in the first place - the token names are already understood by the tracker.
So then the tracker would store 12345 in its database in the "cid" column, and store $1 in its database in the "payout" column.
Recap: There's a person doing the yelling and a person receiving the message. In this case person yelling is the aff network, and person receiving the message is the tracker. Aff network communicates with tracker by triggering the postback that came from the tracker. Aff network needs to understand the variables so they can replace them with actual values - therefore when we set up the link we need to make sure the variables are obtained from the aff network. Tracker needs to understand the token names so they'd know which columns in their database to store the values under - but this is never an issue because the token names came from the tracker in the first place (because the postback url itself came from the tracker).
Another piece of crucial data: When adding the offer link to the tracker, we need to append the clickid. When the tracker sends a visitor to this offer link, it will effectively be "the person yelling" when triggering this offer link. And when it does, it will replace the variable {clickid} with an actual, random value. Same thing I said above on how the person doing the yelling will need to understand the variables, and the person receiving will need to know which token names to store the values under in its database, all applies here as well.
Sorry for the wall of text! Hope I've managed to shed a little more light on how tracking tokens work.
PopAds has the best quality pop traffic of all the best-known networks. Volume is unfortunately on the small side for many geos, but it's cheaper to do initial testing there. And once you become VIP (doesn't take much - maybe 10-12k in spending) they will auto-approve all camps immediately. Makes it my first choice when doing initial testing - set up a campaign and see traffic in 2 minutes.
Here are a couple threads on popads you may find helpful:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-for-Beginners
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...re-experienced
But of course you'd never know what the quality of the ad text is like - the original owner of the lander could have used google translate, and you wouldn't know.
When on Adplexity choosing which landers to rip, including some landers that have received lots of traffic over a few days will really help - at least you'd know they must have been decent converters (or else whoever was using them would not have run so much volume for so long).
When you have a profitable campaign, it wouldn't hurt to pay someone on fivver (cheap but slower) or onehourtranslation.com (fast but expensive) to get proper translations by native speakers. But there's really no need to spend that money and time for initial testing.
Or, you can just focus on geos that speak English (or any other language you know). And some affiliates DO do exactly that. But understandably the competition will be greater.
And I couldn't find a postback URL for popads like I did with PropellerAds...do they not have one?
Once you find a promising lander+offer combination, feel free to test different bids! The higher you bid, the better-quality traffic you get is the usual trend, but of course you'd also be paying more for it - so only actual testing will tell you whether the additional costs are worth it.
Most pop traffic comes from torrent sites and consists of all types of visitors - like anybody and everybody. It's a broad, general audience. So we can only run offers that are broad, like sweepstakes, antivirus, apps that have broad appeal, etc. Niche offers don't do well on pop in general.
Another consideration is that for most geos, volume is already an issue - to get good volume we usually need to scale to multiple networks. So by targeting categories, we'd be restricting the volume even further - and chances are the offer won't convert much better if at all.
Campaign3:
PopAds: 4,951 impressions
Binom: 3,764 clicks
Mobidea: 537 clicks
Not sure what happened with that one!
And the low-value "conversions" are quite common with these 1/2-click direct carrier-billing offers. I did find out the reason from my AM way back when - unfortunately don't remember why anymore. You can check with your AM for sure. All I remember is that 1)we can't do much about them, and 2)we don't need to factor them into consideration when optimizing campaigns. Conclusion: Just pretend they're not there.
Looking forward to seeing you start using landers Greg! Again - thanks for such detail documentation of your experiences!
Amy
Alright so been playing with more campaigns to get myself really familiar with everything, and I thought I had my first profitable campaign, although I'm wondering if something is up and have some questions with discrepancies...
So here is my tracker showing a profitable campaign...
Pretty cool...(notice is shows 83 leads).
Here is my traffic source...
What's weird is they show 77 conversions...not 83...
Then the part that is confusing me most, here is my
It shows 110 leads...but only € 0.73 revenue...the offer is € 0.11 per conversion so why do I only have € 0.73 revenue? Is this common?
My other question would just be the discrepancy between traffic network (77), tracker (83) and affiliate network (110)?
And one more I just noticed is that my cost in my tracker says $8.82 for that campaign, yet the real cost was $10.31 as seen in my traffic network...which throws off the conversions numbers. How come the difference and how do you deal with or account for that?
Thanks to anyone that can answer these!
Edit: And Vortex just saw your answer to all my above posts, thank you! That's awesome feedback.
It looks pretty strange.
When Conversions would only appear in tracker and trafficsource I would think that probably something is wrong with your postback.
But when the conversions show up on
Maybe you have wrong targeting and traffic was redirected to Smartlink with very low payout?
OK, after what you pointed out I went and checked my traffic campaign and I forgot to choose Mobile ISP as "Tata"
I'm guessing that's what happened with the lack of $ in affiliate account...
But I don't think that would cause the other differences with numbers would it (77, 83, 110 for leads; $10.37 ad spend compared to $8.82 ad spend)?
Just want to make sure I know how to account for that type of stuff moving forward!
hey, just wanted to say thanks so much for this follow along!
I'm also using
I'm also usingBinom but 1-2 days behind you, will be following closely behind
There may just be a delay in the conversions being passed back - to verify this, perhaps stop running traffic for a few hours.
This is a possibility because I see a decrease from the number of conversions at
It's also possible that binom has yet to update stats (which would explain why it has fewer conversions AND hasn't passed the latest conversions to Propeller). Can you check with binom support to see whether stats are refreshed in real-time, or are updated periodically? And if the latter is true, whether there's a way for you to manually trigger an update?
The profits shown in Mobidea stats is the only remaining strange thing - please ask your AM about this. I hope it's not because you've only made something like 10 "real" conversions and the rest of them being the "junk" type conversions that are worth 0.01 each (like that 0.02 "conversions" you got the first day).
Direct carrier billing offers are normally weird in how conversions are accounted for, but most people don't encounter all these issues. Greg you got thrown into the deep end - but once you start promoting other types of offers after proceeding to using landers, conversions should be more straight-forward (and numbers should be consistent for the most part!)
Amy
Another thing to note: When comparing stats across different platforms (e.g. tracker vs. aff network vs. traffic network), keep in mind that they may all be in different time zones.
Propeller stats are in EST.
Amy
Wow, thanks Amy. You've been super helpful.
So I'm going to let everything sit over night (all traffic off) and see if any of the conversions catch up...
Also I wrote my "affiliate manager" (seems they have an e-mail support and not a AM assigned to you now?) and asked them about the
Will update tomorrow on all of that...currently going through Day 19 and getting myself more up to date on basic CSS, Javascript and Jquery.
Alright all numbers are still the same after letting everything sit over night...not going to get too worried about this right now as I'll see how the numbers look once I start doing landers and work from there.
Haven't heard back about the numbers in
Outside of that, here is my notes from the last couple days for anyone interested:
October 13 (Day 5-18 Notes):
- If a campaign is in a loss, the typical newbie reaction is to lower bid and retest. The right move is to blacklist bad placements and increase bid
- Higher bids get the best traffic, lower bids get the worst traffic…profitability lies in finding the sweet spot.
2 Approaches To Bid Testing:
A)
1)Run your original campaign (assuming at around average bid or slightly higher) until at least most of the larger placements have received enough traffic for you to decide whether to cut or not.
2)Once most of the bigger unprofitable placements have been cut, clone the campaign (so that the new campaign has the same placements blacklisted from the start). For the new campaign, set a higher bid, at least $1 higher than the bid in the original campaign.
3)Run this new campaign until, again, most of the bigger unprofitable placements have been cut.
4)Repeat: Clone the 2nd campaign, set a higher bid (at least $1 higher than the 2nd campaign), run and cut placements.
5)Can repeat until you have 3, 5, or even 10 campaigns, all running at different bids.
B) 1)Run your original campaign.
2)As soon as it's profitable or at least close to breaking even, clone it several times (3...5...10...), and set them to different bids. (Again, the higher-bid camps can inherit the blacklisted placements from the original camp.)
3)Run and cut placements for each campaign.
Note that B costs more money but is quicker.
- Average pop campaign only profitable for a few days to a few weeks
If A Profitable Campaign Declines:
- First check offer. Make sure offer still getting traffic in dash…check with AM, etc.
- Next, try setting up the same campaign in traffic network to try and “reset”
- Next, try increasing bid
- Also could try setting up identical camp with increased bid
- Next, run a bot test (https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...live-campaigns)
Note: I also setup some more direct linking campaigns today to further familiarize myself with everything.
- Do a search on Adplexity to see how other people are running landers (or if direct linking)
- Wifi has a lot more bot traffic
- To save on test budget, it would be wise to run a bot test first to blacklist placements that have high-percentages of bot traffic (https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...live-campaigns)
- Note: Even for carrier traffic, bot traffic is starting to crop up. Consider running a bot test for carrier traffic camps as well.
- How to run white hat landers: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...on-POP-traffic
- How to run sweep offers: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...eepstake-offer
Finished taking notes on Days 5-18
October 13-14: Day 19-20 (Intro To Landing Pages)
- Make sure to read https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...A-Landing-Page
- Building simple mobile landing pages: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Actually-Works
- STMs free landers: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ing-Adult-more
- Use Adplexity for spying and ripping landers: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...e-stm-discount
- Start split testing with at least some ripped landers as they are somewhat proven
- Probably makes sense for me to hire someone to fix up landers…Can use upwork or freelancer, possibly fivver. Possibly find someone full time
- Service for quick banners and landers: http://www.bannerslanders.com
Starting the Code Academy beginners tutorials…
- Can use HTML/JS beautifier to help make coding easier
- Useful tools:
| Image optimization | https://ezgif.com |
| Screenshots | https://imgur.com/upload |
| Reduce the image size | https://kraken.io/web-interface |
| Test Page load speed | https://www.webpagetest.org |
| Mobile Simulator | http://mobiletest.me |
| To see the same offer on other networks | offervault.com |
- Note: spent a few hours reviewing CSS and JS code…didn’t want to spend a TON of time here until I know if I need more. I couldn’t write most of the code, but I can read and somewhat understand it (I did a little Visual Basic and c++ programming 20 years ago, and have worked with basic HTML a bunch).
Aweomse job description from Vortex for hiring someone for landers:
// BEGINNING of job description (see what I did there
)This is a full-time job that will last for one month to start, and could potentially lead to long-term employment.
Your responsibilities will include the following...
1)You will have access to a repository of advertising landing pages such as this one: http://www.example-of-a-lander.com
The advertising pages will be on a variety of categories, including sweepstakes (e.g. "You have a chance to win an iphone") and antivirus.
You will be requested to fix errors that result from downloading these ad pages from the repository, then make modifications as requested to the code. Changes can range from minor (e.g. replacing images or text) to major (e.g. replacing entire background / structural theme or adding extra functionalities).
2)In addition to downloading and modding existing pages, you will also be requested to code ad pages from scratch based on mockups and requirements.
Most of the ad pages will be displayed on mobile devices so you will need to know how to design accordingly, and make sure that the pages are responsive.
3)When not busy doing the above tasks: You will be asked to study as many ad pages as possible, to learn about the various techniques that are used to boost sales, and make a list of the code snippets that are used. e.g. Entry javascript alert popup, device vibrate, etc. etc. This will help you to become more skilled at building effective ad pages.
4)Occasionally you will be required to edit images as necessary in photoshop, for use on the ad pages.
The following skills are required for this job:
-Intermediate to advanced skills in html, php, css, javascript, jquery
-Intermediate photoshop skills
-Experience in advertising / marketing would be an asset
Ongoing project: Designer, Developer
Project Stage: Fully Specified
Programming Languages Required: HTML JavaScript
Project Type: Ongoing project
Other Skills: Adobe Photoshop CSS jQuery PHP
// END of job description
Next up is setting up hosting and CDN for landing pages. I’m particularly bad with this stuff (hosting, CDN, servers, etc) so preparing myself for some frustration
Some more quick notes from today for anyone interested:
October 14: (More Notes – Got Distracted By A Thread)
-
Note: got distracted by this thread for a couple hours (and am also probably stalling a little bit on starting the whole CDN\hosting stuff) and found a lot of help in this thread as he’s just ahead of where I’m about to be: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...me-POP-Working
o > Do NOT just rip a lander and think your done. Spend a few hours changing the lander up, make sure its properly translated and sounds natural in their native tongue. Ripped landers give you the highest chance of failure. Ripped landers that are changed up to be a bit new and unique drastically drop that failure rate. Landers made from scratch offer the highest earning potential.
> Running the same type of offer on the same traffic source that 5,000 other affiliates have been doing for the past 3 years is putting your shitty ripped duplicate lander in front of the same people that have already seen it 500 times and know its a scam. If your going to run networks like PropellerAds, be unique, stand out, be different, don't be lazy. That shitty ripped duplicate lander will at least do better on a "virgin" traffic source where its userbase hasnt been raped to death already.
> Traffic sources that allow aggressive ads have the lowest quality traffic (generally speaking). Traffic sources with the strictest rules often have the best quality traffic that they protect. Find a way to exploit that.
> I've spent $80 testing a lander out in a geo and made $0 then the next $20 I spend I make $300, start optimizing out bad zones and boom now Im at 300% ROI consistantly...etc. With a low budget your most likely missing good zones. Obviousely the offer you are testing makes a big differnce, probably not spending $80 on one zone for an offer that pays 50c
> Low payout offers have massive scrub, sometimes as high as 80%. If you run the exact same offer from two affiliate networks you will likely see a difference in EPC so make sure your split testing affiliate networks.
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Note that the above could be good advice after the newbie stage (although Vortex recommends newbie's stick with ripping landers to start etc) ^^^ the above alludes to cloaking
- Other awesome advice:
o
1) Be consistent and don't stop testing offers/landers/geos until you find something that's working
2) Don't test only offers that your AM is recommending you.
3) Ask for the payout bump multiple times... negotiate. It's just business, nothing personal.
4) Open accounts on major pop networks and put some initial deposit asap. When you find a green camp you can test those networks immediately.
5) Join a smaller mastermind group and/or find a couch. I've noticed that the mastermind with just one person is optimal for me. Groups of 3-5 are too big because there is too much noise.
6) Build good relationships with your affiliate managers and account reps on ad-networks.
How i missed this follow-along??? Following for sure!
Good Luck and Thanks for the detailed notes.
LeadCloak
Hey leadcloak what you quoted was notes I took from wakeboarder’s follow along just FYI!
And yes I believe he meant coach!
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Just a quick note,
All leads from Tata were paid correctly...so beginner's like me, be aware of this stupid mistake. If you are getting leads but not getting paid what suppose to, this is something to look at. Make sure you are choosing the carrier(s) the offer accepts.
Hey Greg,
First off all thanks a lot for all these valuable information.
Do you use any token in postback URL to get the zone ID from traffic source?
Originally Posted by dkpalash
Also, just a quick update...got the Canada campaign to about -35% but got stuck there. I definitely wasn't quite ready for this geo yet, could have definitely learned some of the same lessons with other geos cheaper. Only lost $300, but by far my most expensive campaign.
I'd learn from my mistake and not try to go too big too quick.
I think I need to go back and test more landers and offers...I pretty much picked out a winning lander and was using it across all campaigns, and another senior member told me they tested it and it didn't convert well for them, so I'm going back to the drawing board.
Have a few campaigns doing a few dollars a day still, but did have some campaigns slow or stop converting as well...and I'm pretty sure this is normal with pop (pop is a game of speed from what I hear).
So the plan from here is to restart with everything I've learned.
I need to get a better process down, and then start retesting everything. I may even move to a different vertical to get a totally fresh start with landers and offers...
This weekend is dedicated to Facebook ads (I am learning FB ads in depth the same time I'm learning this stuff) and my normal SEO stuff...so I'll be back to pop this up coming week with a new plan in place!
Originally Posted by GregMorrison
Actually i was asking, how do you get placement ID/Zone ID from traffic sources?
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It's all part of the game...sometimes you can't put a price on a lesson either. Sure, it temporarily negatively effects my overall campaign ROI from a numbers stand point...but in the long run it could help it significantly.
I believe the placement\zone ID comes from proper global postback URL from affiliate network...but don't take my word for it there, I'm still pretty new to this (only about a month in).
PS - I will be likely taking a 2 week break from pop, I've committed to shooting about 50 new SEO videos for our OMG members for 2019, and have to put current customers first.
I'll update on how the new game plan goes when I get back, as I figured out I need a new approach
Need to test more landing pages. Need to test more offers. And I was jumping to blacklisting placements right away, and have to re-structure my approach for that as well! Be back soon!
Hey Greg, are you still seeing lower volume with PropellerAds? and with other popunder traffic networks as well?
thanks in advance!
No conversions. I tested each of the landers to make sure they flow through the offer and work well and they appear ok. Not sure if I set something up incorrectly regarding tokens, but I think its clear I need to cut these offers and find new ones. Another thing I noticed is that the url for the landers includes the amazon S3 domain in the prefix, maybe I missed a step to point it to the domain I purchased. I'm going to review the tutorial again to make sure I didn't miss a step.
Also, I think it might not be that wise to test multiple traffic sources (I'm going to just try PropellerAds for now). Re-reading the tutorial and other threads it appears the best thing I should do is find a decent offer (using all landers), then split test the landers with a decent offer to find the best one, find better offers, then scale to other traffic sources if its profitable. Is this the correct approach?
EDIT: The tokens and postback urls finally clicked for me. I actually had two conversions for the offers specified above but it wasn't being sent back to the tracker as I set up the postback url incorrectly. Now I have a better understanding of the global postback URLs and the tokens we need to add to each offer when making the final offer links.
-2 landers are a bit few - try 5. Basically you need to ensure there's at least one lander in there that can help offers convert. Also make sure they're optimized (load fast, display well on popular devices, function correctly).
-Yup your landing pages should be using a custom domain - you'll find how to do that in the tutorial (instructions may be a bit outdated but I'll be writing new ones in a few days).
-Testing approach as you've described is the one I suggest for newbies - it will stand you in good stead until you modify it based on your own experience.
Congrats on figuring out how the postback works!
When you try to drill down into your stats for a PropellerAds campaign, are you not able to see ZoneID (or a similar name) listed as available data?
Amy
Originally Posted by sheet731
But quick update, because I'm so busy with SEO\OMG stuff I stopped most campaigns I was working on and made some whitelist campaigns just to let them sit and haven't touched them in 2 days (along with a couple SmartCPA campaigns). So far so good...
I think when I get time I can actually take that one that's at +183% and play with bids and more landing pages and really ramp it up...it's a $2.40 payout on a MT flow offer, and that's from a whitelist I made.
But pretty cool to see some automated income going as I haven't touched a thing with pop in a couple days.
Although it's only $25 over 2 days, I can only imagine how scale-able this can be considering I've only been running campaigns just a month now and made TONS of mistakes along the way!
Just read through this whole thread and it is amazing thanks for all this Greg!
Originally Posted by bravich
Can you please help me to set up the
And only because of this i can't move forward.
I think Greg have some good direct supports from some experience AM. This is why he able to manage the whole thing ASAP.
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Originally Posted by dkpalash
Can you please help me to set up the
And only because of this i can't move forward.
I think Greg have some good direct supports from some experience AM. This is why he able to manage the whole thing ASAP.
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Originally Posted by GregMorrison
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Originally Posted by dkpalash
1)In binom, go to Settings, and copy the first link under "Postback URL". It should look like this:
http://trackingdomain.com/click.php?cnv_id={network_token}&payout={payout}
Change this link to:
http://trackingdomain.com/click.php?cnv_id={{EXTERNAL_ID}}&payout={{MONEY}}
Next, paste this into
2)In binom whenever you're adding a new offer, change your original affiliate link, which look like this:
https://www.rotatemyurls.com/offer/94925|19283?data1=Track1&data2=Track2&tag={clickid }&website={subID}&placement={sub_subID}
Into this:
https://www.rotatemyurls.com/offer/94925|19283?tag={clickid}&website={trafficsource}& placement={campaign}
I'm very new to binom as well - but this should work! If it doesn't please let me know. We can definitely figure this out.
Amy
Super helpful follow along! Been using this and Amy's guide to navigate through this.
This is my second day and I've just submitted a campaign through propellerads. Im hoping to get a good handle on tracking/lander/optimization in 2 weeks time.
Wow, I just signed up while on holiday and am nervous/excited regarding how to go about AM but have read through the thread and know it's doable (even if budget may be more an issue for me). Will tackle my own FA with Amy's guide in a few weeks when I'm back home. Thanks for the thorough overview of your process Greg!
Hey Greg awesome progress, but I had question maybe the more experienced members can answer. Is it normal to have a LP CTR% around 30-45% for sweeps offers using pop traffic, which your screenshot on the prior page indicated? My landing pages are in the 0.5% - 5% range so I'm curious to know what is the benchmark for these type of offers and traffic.
Originally Posted by bravich
Also of course - traffic source etc.
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Originally Posted by GregMorrison
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Wow! Didn't think it will take such a short time to see conversions, especially since you never did thorough research on the offers. Congratulations!
Originally Posted by GregMorrison
Originally Posted by patohmahinge
The really important thing is that when testing landers, use offers that have good track record (e.g. recommended by AMs as good converters). And choosing popular landers (from spy tools) that have received a great deal of traffic over at least a few days would be important as well. Then once you have a decent winning lander from your split test(s), testing more offers would be wise too. Lastly, it is necessary to ensure that you send decent-quality traffic - e.g. from a trusted source, and either from a whitelist of good placements or if targeting all placements, at least bidding average or above.
In a vast majority of cases, this should be good enough to uncover the promising offers. Once you do, spending time to do additional research on the offer itself, and tailoring your lander to it, may be worthwhile. Doing too much research in the beginning may waste time unnecessarily - unless it's a higher-payout offer where additional time spent on research is justified because it could result in larger savings on test budget.
Amy
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Just a quick update since I haven't updated in a while. I haven't touched pop traffic in about a month because I've just been crazy busy with OMG Machines stuff\SEO and FB advertising...
With that said, I stopped many campaigns I was working on but left some profitable ones...doing about $5 a day in profit on auto-pilot.
My question to some of the more experienced members (for direction on where to take it from here) is how often do you find campaigns that kind of run on auto-pilot like that (and is it possible to be more in the $xxx or $x,xxx+ range per day on auto-pilot)?
I'm in a position where it doesn't make a ton of sense for me to do the short term style of making money...so trying to see where to take it from here. I've heard that pop is quick moving and campaigns are short term, but I'm not seeing that with these couple of campaigns I have going...so would love some feedback on that!
Or if not pop, what areas are more more long term in this area of the business?
Thanks for the update Greg!
To answer your question, pop traffic is definitely not the way to go if auto-pilot camps are what you're looking for.
Doesn't mean it can't happen - just not the norm.
I've had pop camps that, like yours, were stable and profitable for months - but a vast majority of those were either small camps, or camps that were targeting low-competition geos (or both).
(So if you see offers for small geos and/or with weird targeting, e.g. for a not-very-popular OS/browser/device/etc., that may be a good opportunity for longer-term profits.)
Here are some tips that can increase the longevity of pop camps:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...formance-dives
As for which other traffic types can give you profits that will last longer with little intervention, adwords and FB would be much better candidates than pop, but the audience size will need to be big (which means your offer will need to be general/broad and not too niche) or saturation will set in sooner. The smaller the audience, the more frequently you'll need to replace your creatives.
I'd love to hear what advice other members may have on this topic as well - everybody likes autopilot profits! Sadly though, pop isn't the way to go. Yet another reason why I was encouraging you to expand away from pop.
Amy
Yes, I'm keen to know that what is it possible and what traffic sources can have better potential to earn $xxx or $x,xxx+ range per day on auto-pilot too.
Knowing this will make me have more motivation to continue learning AM and testing
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