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40 Day Pop follow along by a developer (11)

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Sup guys,

I'm a Brazilian software developer that lives & works in Germany. Currently trying to replace my job with affiliate marketing so I can reach location freedom. I know many guys that have online business or are succesfull affiliate marketers, they keep on travelling and can live anywhere, so I want to join them and not feel like I'm the poorest of them all. hahaha.

In the thread I will post my follow along for my first mobile pop campaign, I'm normally not great with keeping things documented, and this will be a good experience for me. I've worked with paid traffic 5 years ago, but the offer was proven, now I'm trying to work with mobile pop to get me back into the market.

When it comes to web development and hosting I had a lot of experience, especially because I already work with that in my current job. I work with a company that does satelite image analysis using artificial intelligence (I don't work with that AI part, I'm the web guy).

I've gone through the tutorial from Vortex, I did read the old one some time ago and I finally decided to try it now that is renewed to 2018/19

I'm going into this with realistic expectations, don't expect this to be profitable so soon. Money wise I have a $5k budget for my start in affiliate marketing, and will add $1000/month until I can get the hang of this.

Steps taken so far:
- Signed up for Mobidea, Clickdealer, Gotzha
- Signed up for Adplexity
- Signed up for PropellerAds, PopAds
- Added $100 to PropellerAds and $50 to PopAds
- Hosting static website in Google Cloud Storage

After talked to the affiliate manager from Clickdealer and she gave me some offers for Tier-3 countries.

Problems I had:
Finding many offers to test for the GEO's I wanted. I feel that maybe I need to check other different networks.
Finding more than 3-4 landers that are super different (some of the landers I didn't know how they worked)

- I've chosen to start with:
- geos: Thailand
- offer type: Sweepstakes

But I'm thinking of going into other GEO's like Malasya or Kenia.

My question would be if getting many geos is what is recommended, because from what I read on Vortex he recommended starting with one geo... or something like that.

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So I just started my campaign with PropellerAds, I felt that I was lacking starting this. I've been configuring everything for about 5 days now so I was getting impatient.

I got 3 landers from Adplexity that where kind of different, there wasn't much variety, some of them were very similar (changing just text and small images). Fixed the javascript code so they would work properly. I also added bot detection event from Binon thanks to one of the topics here in STM about it.

So here is the first results from the $10 campaign:


I've tested the campaign with a $10 budget and the results are in. Nice that I got some conversions (so I'm happy just for having conversions), but it was far from profitable, but that is not too bad, I feel that I could improve this campaign a lot.

Here is the Binom stats, so I think that is many things I can now check with the stats

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i think you forgot to add images...

Anyway seems like you got some conversation - that's fast. Good Luck!



LeadCloak

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Another day of mobile campaign, this is fun, but it can be overwhelming sometimes.



So after doing the first day, I've went deep into Binom and tried to blacklist as many zones of the campaign that had lots of bot traffic (followed the delete zones with more than 70% bot traffic)

Eventually I've checked the different landers and after there was one with less than 10% in the probability calculator that Vortex talks about, I've decided to take one of the landers that was converting well (it's one of the spinner landers).

I've decided in one of the offers because it had 3 conversion, and the other one had 2 conversions. Thinking about it now, maybe I should have run with the offers with one lander to check which one would convert the best.


This is how the perfomance of the zones that converted looks like:





LANDERS:

I'vealread ripped 3 landers from Adplexity, I was trying to find different ones but they are all very similar (specially the ones with spinners):

( I just noticed that one of the landers looks weird on mobile and that is bad. But that wasn't the one I ended up running for the second day)

Now… about the campaign. I did some things according to what I read from Vortex and I hope I'm not making mistakes.

For example after the first run I blacklisted all the zones with too many bots. And then I ran it again, eventually I also created different campaigns with different bids to see if with different quality of traffic I would get better conversions.

Things that I want to test:

Whitelist certain ISP that have converted compared to the other ones.
Blacklist all the placements that have been run X times the offer and have no conversions (probably at least 5x).

Problems I had:

First of all I've noticed that the ROI for my campaign is -89%, and I'm not exactly sure if that is ok for popunders campaigns. I'm guessing it all depends if I can change a lot with the landers, and if I can test different offers.

In the second day the ROI didn't improve, actually it seemed to get worse.

I want to be testing more offers, currently I was only testing 3 offers and I didn't get that many different landers because that was the ones I could find. So on my to-do list, I have, applying for more networks, so I can get more offers from tier-3 geos. I already applied from other offers in different geos in Clickdealer and Mobidea which I also will be testing to see if they perform well (all this offers were recommended by the account manager)

Questions I have:

Should I keep on going with only one geo? or should I've been checking other offers in other geos now that I'm getting the hang of it.

I've checked other follow-alongs, and people try many different geos from what I've seen.

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heads up: I don't think all the images in your posts are showing up properly

fwiw: I got similar results for TH this week, other geos I'm working with are doing much better so didn't bother continuing

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Now I added the images to imgur and got the bbcode. The images should be working

Yeah, I will check other geos too. It doesn't seem that I can get very far with this Thailand offers.

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Why your green zoneIDs have very low traffic volume? Using low bids?



LeadCloak

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I don't know. I did test with higher bids, actually I've tested with the maximun amount, so I would be 1st place and still the same.

That is just the places that got conversion after the full $10 ran.

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Have to tried to run camps with SmartCPM in propellerads? - https://propellerads.com/blog/pay-le...rtcpm-bidding/
Very nice feature!



LeadCloak

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I've been running camps with SmartCPM

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Nice follow-along vincentchase! Sorry for the late reply - was busy finishing work before the AWA conference, then was catching up on work after the conference.

Will read from the start and respond to questions you've asked.

If you really can't find several offers for the same prize+geo, feel free to test individual offers - it would just mean having to do more work (i.e. prepare 5 landers just to test one offer). Try to compile a list of as many offers as you can for tier 3/4 geos, identify language+prize combinations for which there are more than one offers (not necessarily in the same geo - just need to speak the same language so you can use the same set of landers), and test those first. That way, you can test more offers in the same amount of time.



As for landers - in adplexity, you can target by language instead of by geo. That way you'll see landers targeting all geos that speak that language, and see more results.

You can also download landers for a different prize and change out the prize (names and images).

Or, if you can't find very different landers, go for ones that are not very different. Basically just do your best in finding ones that are as different as possible.

Of course you can also take landers in other languages and translate them, but that can get expensive. It can be a very good approach - but if you spend the money getting proper translations done, make sure you invest the money and time to test lots of offers, and spend the money on cutting placements, in order to "conquer" that geo. If you're just wanting to test lots of geos to find low-hanging fruit, spending money on translations in the beginning can break the bank.


All great geos.

Yes - I would recommend to just run one campaign at a time in the beginning, because you WILL make mistakes, and it would be good to avoid making the same mistake across multiple campaigns.

Also, you'll be learning lessons from each campaign, so you'll get better and better. Applying what you've learned in the previous campaign to your current campaign will get you further than starting a batch of campaigns, learning from them, then applying what you learned in the second batch. Hope that makes sense!

More importantly: It will require spending money to identify bad placements when you're running in a geo for the first time. From the second time onwards, you'll have an advantage, because you already know which placements are the worst, and blacklist them from the beginning. So it would be cheaper to run in the same geos. The same thing applies to every traffic network you decide to scale to for that geo (i.e. you'll need to invest money on cutting placements on each network).

The actual choice would of course be up to you. If you're willing to spend more budget to learn faster, by all means run several campaigns targeting several geos at the same time.


Congrats on the first conversions! That's definitely an important milestone for every affiliate!

It's difficult to tell whether the campaign has potential - I would run another $10 to collect more conversions, then see whether I can cut some landers and maybe even one of the offers. Also, I would drill down into placement ("zone") stats and other stats like OS, browser, and carrier etc., to see what the best and worst traffic segments are, and make some optimization decisions.


LOL so I see that you've decided to run more traffic to the campaign like I would have done!

Nice to be able to cut a lander! And yes you should have run more traffic before cutting that offer (based on another stats calculator).

Thanks for the zone stats! That's what I would have asked to see. It's hard to tell whether the campaign has potential yet, because almost all the placements that have converted, only had 1 conversion. I would have also asked to see zone stats sorted by amount of traffic in descending order, to see the performance of the biggest placements.

Also - as mentioned before, you can also drill down to various traffic segments to identify the best and worst segments. The best ones you can potentially start a campaign to target them and optimize further. The worst ones you may decide to cut.


That's a great thing to test!

In your specific case though, I feel that testing more offers and landers would be necessary.

It's ALWAYS good to try to make a sufficient portion of the total traffic profitable, by split-testing offers and landers first. And THEN cut the unprofitable traffic to achieve a profitable campaign.

A typical newbie mistake is to just quickly test a few landers and offers, then spend time and money on cutting placements etc. - in the end lots of money is wasted on cutting stuff, and even if the campaign is finally profitable, it would be making pennies a day from the small amount of leftover traffic.

Not saying that's what you're doing! Just something to keep in mind.


Whitelisting is worth a try, but only if the traffic segment you're wanting to whitelist is a big one with enough traffic volume.

As for blacklisting placements: I would suggest cutting a placement that is in loss by 2x payout (whether conversions have been made or not). For larger geos that have a ton of traffic and a ton of placements, it may be good to cut at 1x payout without conversions, or even 0.5x payout without conversions, just to limit your losses. You can always retest some of those placements after your campaign becomes profitable.


You've pointed out the KEY!

As I've mentioned more than once already (because it's important!), we should focus mainly on testing landers and offers FIRST, to bring the ROI as high as possible, and THEN focus on cutting the unprofitable parts.

It doesn't mean you have to wait until the ROI is high enough, before starting to cut. You should start cutting from the beginning of the campaign. All I mean is the FOCUS should be on split-testing offers and landers at first, and then once the ROI is high enough, then focus on cutting low-ROI placements/segments.

So what ROI is "high enough"? That would depend on how much traffic you have. For smaller geos, you can't cut a lot of placements, because there isn't a lot of traffic in total. So you better make sure to split-test offers and landers until the ROI is closer to breakeven, before focusing on cutting to make the campaign green. For big geos, you can cut a lot of placements (and other traffic segments) and still have enough left to profit from. So your ROI can be a bit worse, and you can still cut a lot of placements/segments to make the campaign profitable. However, the larger geos are normally more competitive also, which means you'll need to test more offers and landers to get a decent ROI.


That's common - please refer to the lesson "When Campaign Performance Dives".


Sounds like a plan!


You can test other geos (as I've mentioned above).


Now that I'm all caught up - looking forward to your next update!




Amy

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