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My Native Ads Journey to $x,xxx/Day (18)

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Hello everyone,

I've been into IM for a while now (7 years) but I've mostly dealt with free traffic, recent events have caused me to shift my focus to paid traffic and as a consequence I decided to give Native a try. I started running some tests 6 weeks back and have already spent about $2.8k on C.O.D offers in Eastern Europe, unfortunately I couldn't turn any of the campaigns profitable so I decided to shut them down, I'll be focusing on SOI and CC Sweepstakes for the next few weeks. Hopefully I'll see some profit.

Traffic Sources

My main traffic source will be RevContent, I still have some funds on MGID (around $300) so I'll think of some campaigns to run there as well.

CPA Networks

I have accounts on Clickdealer, Spicyoffers and RevenueLab, I'll try offers from all 3 Networks.

Tools at my disposal

Voluum and Native Adplexity.

Campaigns that I'm running right now

I currently have one active campaign on RevContent and one that is Pending.

Some info about the active one:

It's a CC Sweepstakes offer, GEO is UK and it's been running for 3 days.

Total spent on this offer so far: $32

Revenue: $12 (one conversion)

Profit: -$20

I've been optimizing it by removing placements by bad CTRs and bumping the bid for the Adv_Target that converted. I'm currently waiting on 2 creatives to be approved on this Campaign as the sole creative running has an Avg CTR of only 0.11% so it's not being shown that often.

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Some updates for today:

That sole creative from my only active campaign had a horrible CTR today which resulted in low traffic, I've only spent $3.81 so far. To improve this I re-activated one of the previous creatives that didn't perform that well but its CTR today is better than the 1st creative already, I assume it has to do with banner rotation, ideally I think I should have 3-4 decent creatives active at all times.

I created 2 more campaigns on MGID for a SOI offer, I'm currently waiting for them to be approved.

I created 1 more campaign on RevContent for the same SOI offer, just a different language.

Integrated the Bot Detection script by Caurmen on every LP, this should give me more insight on my traffic.

Where I'm at now:

Running 1 CC Sweepstakes for UK with Revcontent, working on optimizing it. (2 creatives for this campaign are pending approval)
2 Pending SOI campaigns on RevContent
2 Pending SOI campaigns on MGID

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I'm not a native expert at all, but one skilled person once gave me a tip that has proven itself very useful, so let me pass it on ... with most Native networks, you have to be VERY patient and give the campaigns time ... so do not mess with bids too fast, do not pause ads to fast ... in some cases (especially with lower bids) it can take several days for the ads to real get into rotation properly. This has to do with the CPC algos that try to push the ads with highest CTRs.

Another great tip was to create several campaigns in advance, wait for approval then pause and re-enable as needed. As you probably already found out, approval times on native networks can be very long.

Looking forward to your future results

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Updates:

Total spent yesterday: $7.67
0 conversions

Unfortunately the 2 MGID Campaigns have been denied even though I'd talked to my AM previously and he said that they were good to go, not sure what happened there.

The Revcontent Campaigns and extra creatives are still awaiting approval.

I'll take matuloo's advice and give the 1st campaign some time, though the statistics confuse me to say the least.

Here is an image of the Parses Javascript drilled-down report for the 1st campaign, for the past 3 days:

It seems like the "CTR" (non-bot traffic) is either very large, or even above 100%, which doesn't make sense, or very low (though this may be due to low traffic, so it would make sense for some placements). I'm thinking that maybe I set up the script incorrectly, but I'm not sure how.

This is an image of the actual CTR, from prelander to offer:



CTR here seems very weird too. Again, some placements haven't gotten a lot of traffic so of course that the CTR won't be very reliable yet, the first 3 placements still seem weird though. What's telling me that most of the traffic is possibly very LQ/Bots, is the Avg session duration on Google Analytics for my Prelander, here is an image for today:



To make matters worse, the avg session duration for yesterday was 3 seconds. I feel like I'm buying a LOT of bad traffic percentage wise but my statistics don't work properly.

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When CTRs are high like this, there is usually some problem with the setup ... it can be an autoredirect, backbutton redirect that redirects to the click url ... or something like this. Do you have any such scripts on the LP?

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Can't tell from the code as I'm not sure what these scripts would look like but when interacting with the LP I can't find anything wrong with it from either mobile or desktop. No backbutton redirect, no autoredirects or anything similar.

I got the LP from Adplexity

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Some updates for today:

I added 4 more Campaigns on Revcontent. Matuloo is right, I shouldn't waste so much time with waiting for approvals.

Their initial CPC is low so when they get approved (hopefully) I won't have to deal with overspend issues.

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Update:

3 Campaigns from Revcontent were denied while 3 were approved, let's see how they go!

The other active campaign is still running at very low traffic and its extra creatives were disapproved for "Excessive Content Submission", I assume there is a limit to how many Creatives I can have in "Pending"

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Revcontent specifically are not so bad. All of my campaigns are usually approved within a business day.

Taboola takes forever, and mgid completely varies.. Sometimes approval takes 3 hours, other times a week


Edit: Concerning your CTR, Matuloo is right - there is definitely something off with your landers. In my experience, a back button redirect would do that.

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I think that I might've finally found an offer that could potentially yield a decent ROI.

To clarify some things, the 3 Campaigns that were approved yesterday on Revcontent are all for the same Offer and same GEO, I created 3 of them to try some specific variations and see which performs the best.

Here are some statistics:

Ad spend: $22.70
Revenue: $11.1

This is without any optimization whatsoever on placements, adv_targets, devices, etc. Just a basic blacklist template on Revcontent.

I want to approach these Campaigns differently than I did the first, I feel as if I started cutting out bad placements, creatives and adv targets on the 1st one too fast, I also think that the vertical and angle for the current offer is better.

Some worrying things:

A huge percentage of the traffic seems to be of very low quality, it's similar to what I experienced with the 1st Campaign, ridiculously low session time per user in Google Analytics as well as having some placements with unnaturally high CTR. Though as previously said, I'll gather some more data before deciding what to cut out.

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Unfortunately that is very normal with most native sources, especially Revcontent. You will just need to lookout for these sorts of placements and cut them off.

When you say unnaturally high CTR, are you referring to ad ctr or lander ctr?

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Lander CTR

Here is a screenshot I just took of my Voluum statistics:

As you can see, the top 2 placements have a low CTR, while the next 3 have an unnaturally high CTR. Wouldn't a redirect or backbutton script affect each placement the same?

What's even weirder is the 3 high CTR placements being mostly non-bot traffic (according to the Parses Javascript)

The 2nd placement by volume has 78% "natural traffic", according to the Parses Javascript, but only a CTR of 9%, as seen in the image.

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Unfortunately I can't properly optimize these campaigns as RevContent is barely sending any traffic to my Ads, so there's no data for me to analyze.

The campaigns went from $30ish spend per day to under $5 in just several days, raising bids doesn't seem to have done anything, I'm not sure what's happening. Some particular Ads have a decent enough CTR (0.2%+) but RevContent is barely sending any traffic to them, some Ads are still on 0 impressions.

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Yup it most likely would ... this looks like some BOTs on specific placements... The javascript bot test will only detect the lower quality bots, the more advanced can still get through. Maybe you've hit a few placements with such advanced ones And maybe not, it's very hard to judge without running some more throughout tests ...

Weekends mean way less traffic for certain verticals and GEOs ... that might explain the lower traffic. But it can also be the algo ... time to start more campaigns to have better reach... having more campaigns also makes it easier to wait, while the algo is deciding where to put your ads in the chain.

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This is the first time I have looked at this thread but it totally mirrors my experience so far.

I've probably started 20 campaigns on Revcontent so far and about 4 of them got good amounts of traffic but weren't profitable, and the other 16 got no traffic at all or just a tiny bit then petered out.

MGID has been way more consistent in that regard- tends to spend exactly what you set the budget for, etc. Have made about 700$ in revenue on MGID so far and only 50$ in Revcontent, although still struggling to get profitable on MGID so I certainly haven't mastered it by any means.

Its obvious Revcontent is working for lots of folks so I am chalking this up to my own ignorance so far.

My rep says to pick lots of topics and use their Tier 1/Tier 2/Tier 3 whitelists/blacklists based on the quality I want and that this should ensure my budget gets spent.

Have been doing that to some degree but seems hard to optimize when you have so many topics like that though so I've continued selecting single Brands and single Topics too, but with mixed results.

I have mirrored Matuloo's advice from above on this latest attempt though and I have six different campaigns set up for one offer, including several brands by themself, two topics by themselves, the Tier 1 template spread out over a number of topics, and another single Brand with lots of geo's. Then going to be patient, not change bid a ton, and just wait and see which campaigns get traction.

Determined to make Revoncent work if it kills me!



PS (Note: Their 'Tier' templates are referencing quality of sites, not geo's, in case that was confusing)

PPS Big thanks to mrinfinity for the thread!

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UPDATE

For the past few days I've been trying to figure out how to scale up the volume for my Campaigns, I've had some upsides and downsides but the traffic coming in is still in low amounts, it's not that good on the conversions side either. I also blacklisted some Widgets that had >100 visitors and 0% CTR.

Meanwhile, I decided to try and test this offer in other GEOs as well, I might have to come to terms that RevContent doesn't have a lot of traffic for the current GEO that I'm targeting. I launched a total of 6 Campaigns for 3 different GEOs, each Campaign has 5 creatives and they are currently all awaiting approval.

I launched another Campaign for a different offer that's related to Black Friday, this is for US so there should be plenty of traffic for me to analyze data.

All of the offers that I'm currently running are SOI, I'm trying to get as much data as possible on volume and traffic quality for different widgets (trying to get some good WLs and BLs), devices, geos, etc which is why I think that SOI is the way to go.

I also registered on Taboola, I'd like to test some WH offers with HQ traffic. Nothing serious, just some little tests.

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Great work man! I'm hustling as well

Been focusing on running traffic on Revcontent on sites where I can go manually see myself when the ads are up and what spot they're in, and where I know the 'culture' of the site. Figure I should start out just trying to really learn the traffic flow for a couple big sites.

Nothing profitable yet but I've finally been able to keep a Revcontent campaign going for several days without either letting the engine 'die' or having to shut it down when it overheats, so that right there is a victory in my opinion! And getting some conversions, so that's good, although again, not profitable.

Another thing I did (which I should have done sooner) was look up the words 'Revcontent' and 'MGID' here on STM, and read dozens of past posts on them. Lots of gold that is for sure!

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Great idea ... some networks are stronger in certain GEOs, but most of them should have solid volume in all the major ones. It's always worth a try anyways, because the bidding situation might be more favorable in another GEO.

Consider trying different offer types too, DOI or per sale/trial ... many experienced native guys suggest that running higher payout offers works better on native, to justify the higher traffic prices.

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