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2019 Guide - Aggressive Follow Along! (40)

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Quick intro of myself here:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-Let-s-do-this!

I won't repeat too much of what was in my intro post, but the short of it that due to some fortunately unfortunate circumstances, I'm giving myself 3.5 months of doing this nearly full-time to try to break into the industry. At the 3.5 month mark, I'll be making a call on whether I think I'll be able to make it or not :-).

Hopefully this aggressive timeline gives me the kick in the ass I need to grow as quickly as possible.

Before joining STM, I got a single campaign launched with two offers, but wasn't able to get a single conversion. I wasn't sure if it was my traffic source, offer, or tracking setup, and got a bit frustrated -- decided to join STM soon after this, since it was a huge time waster racking my head over it.

My original plan was to join STM start a follow along without looking at any other threads to avoid the trap of analysis paralysis, and focus on pure action.

Luck has it that within minutes, I came upon this very action oriented guide that's in the midst of being updated for 2019!

Fortunately, I had a lot of the first round of steps completed already, so I've been able to get a big head start on the guide.

I'm planning on laser-focusing on mobile pop until I can get it profitable, and figure out where to go from there.

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3 month budget: $5K ($1K tracking, tools, forums; $4K traffic and translations)

Networks

• Mobidea (approved before starting this)
• Advidi (approved before starting this)
• Clickdealer (approved)
• Gotzha (pending approval)

Traffic Sources

• PropellerAds
• PopCash
• PopAds

Hosting (for when I need it)

• Vultr

Tracker

• Previously Thrive, have switched to Binom as of Jan 24

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Progress today:

Made it to Day 10 in the guide. Fortunately, I was already approved for an offer on MobIdea meeting the proper criteria, which allowed me to get started quickly.

The biggest challenge was understanding tracking -- I 'kind of' understood it for a while, but I was able to work through the cycle today and was able to crack it in a couple of hours.

Not sure if this will help anyone, or if anyone can even read it, but drawing this out helped me 'get' tracking. If anyone wants me to explain anything, make it more legible, or if anything is glaringly wrong, please let me know!
Attachment 20287


I think having to set up tracking on Thrive using on instructions for Voluum helped me get there. I had to question a lot more things along the way.

Deposited $100 into PropellerAds, submitted a campaign for $10 following Amy's guidelines, now just waiting for approval. Estimated impressions: 29,000

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Open questions:

• I posted a question here on Day 9: Setting up tracking on Voluum wondering about one of the parameters. Unsure if I'm missing something here.
• If I have an Direct Billing, Single Opt-in offer for 3G conversion flow, do I want to select "Connection Type: 3G / LTE" (as opposed to All, or WiFi / Broadband) in PropellerAds? What I'm wondering is, what happens to mobile phones, for example, that are connected via WiFi? Does the offer / their carrier actually prevent them from going through that conversion flow? Should I be allowing all traffic or limiting to 3G / LTE?

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Latest update:
Approved for 2 offers from Advidi -- I was able to get these set up into campaigns and launched in ~15 minutes for the first offer, and <5 minutes for the second offer.

I'm stoked.

My first time (prior to this followalong) probably took me a good 12 hours :-).

Waiting for some traffic before moving onto the next step: Optimization! More to come.

Also got approved to ClickDealer, starting Monday.

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Good news: Got my first conversion! (Mobidea)

Bad news: It's not showing up in my tracker (Thrive).

I attached a screenshot from a Mobidea report below:


My first impression was that my postback URL is incorrect (see the second to last bullet on my first post). Digging deeper, I couldn't match the timing of this conversion with a click ID in Thrive. The only IP that even comes close to matching shows up in my tracker 2 hours later.

Furthermore, looking into my MobIdea stats, I somehow got this conversion without it registering a visit or click.

Anyone have any thoughts? Should I be looking back into my Postback URL, or is there something else going on here?

Thanks!
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Edit: I had another conversion come through, and it seemed to come in fine, so it leads me to believe that the PostBack is fine, and I think it might be just a one-off. Although, on the second conversion, Thrive and MobIdea both reported $0.10 conversion value, before MobIdea updated it on their end 12 hours later...which required me to go into Thrive and update the revenue for the SubID. Is this normal?)

Edit2: another conversion and it seems like my mobidea {MONEY} token on the postback is passing junk values. Last conversion, it passed $.01, and I wasn't watching live, but I think it reflected that way in the mobidea reports before updating itself to the correct value a couple of hours later. I'm guessing I will have to take this up with mobidea support

Edit3: My tracker was showing 3 conversions, while MobIdea was showing 6. When I broke out conversions by offer on MobIdea, it shows 3. I'm seeing a lot of what I think are bugs on their end -- will probably try to focus my offer selection elsewhere.

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Random note:
I think the biggest thing slowing me down are campaign approvals from the traffic sources. Sometimes I'm waiting 12+ hours just to get data to move onto the next steps. I'll have to brainstorm the best way to parallel process things.

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Latest update:
Got through a Day 14-15, and Day 16 posts, along with a ton of the linked posts within. My last campaign took ~18 hours to get approved on PopAds

Here's my plan moving forward into tomorrow.
* I'm going to focus on sweeps, particularly iPhone offers.

Of the networks that I'm accepted to, within sweeps, it seems like its either promote iPhone X, or promote gift cards. I'm going with iPhone X since it seems like it would be easier to rotate within landers.

There are also a lot of suggestions within posts to ask AMs about sweep recommendations -- basically every AM I've spoken with doesn't seem to have any recommendations on mobile SOI sweeps, tier 2-4, with payouts <$3. Oh well. There' are also fewer offers available for Tier 2-4 than I would have imagined, but that's probably a function of the fact that I'm only searching between 3 affiliate networks. Given all of this, I'll basically be testing every offer I can be approved for.

Onwards!

* Tomorrow, I'm going to rip landers via AdPlexity, and (hopefully) start running traffic, along with a bot test. I have a VPS and domain set up already (I noticed that's a future lesson), so hopefully I should be able to move quickly.

Random notes:
* My AMs seem to be on the other side of the world, so I think it's slowing things down a bit. Still trying to identify bottlenecks and improve efficiency. Main bottlenecks so far: [1] Approval time for offers; [2] approval time for campaigns on traffic sources (my last PopAds campaign took ~18 hours for approval)
* PopAds inventory tool is incredibly helpful in figuring out how much volume you have for different languages in a country! Thanks for the suggestion in one of your posts....Amy(?? it was one of you awesome heavy-posters! )

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Great follow along angle-lytics !

Keep us updated.

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Today's update:
Approved for about 7 offers, and planning to rotate about 4 of them for now, as they're all in the same language.

Downloaded a ton of landers, have the ~14 or so that I want to leverage. I suspect that I'll probably have 8-10 after working on cleaning them up.

Wanted to get these launched today, but I'm at a good stopping point, so will try to get an early start tomorrow.

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Test! Test! Test! And keep updating!

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Ok -- latest update:

According to my time tracker, I've spent about 8 hours making ripped landers my own.

I definitely spent a lot more time than I should have, including spending several hours combing through code (an affiliate made a very deliberate attempt at obfuscating their LP), and debugging others, but I learned a TON.

This is probably one of the first things I'll have to outsource once I get my legs under me. It's relatively low effort for anyone who has javascript experience, and should just require simple signoffs and tweaks of minor details on my end.

Also spent way too much time (~2 hours) trying to get SSL set up on my VPS.

Next things up for me ASAP tomorrow:
* [~2 hours] Finalize LPs. [a] finish localizations of some of the landers (mostly names/pictures of 'commenters') [b] complete variations for some of the more aggressive landers
* [~1.25 hours] Test and optimize load speeds. I don't think I'll have too many issues with this. Some of the LPs I've tested already have a load speed of ~1s
* [~1 hour] Set up bot checks for the first time
* [~1 hours] Launch a small campaign to test to make sure everything is set up properly
* [~1.5 hours] Launch a larger scale campaign with my ~11 landers and ~4 offers

Looking back, I feel like I should not have spent this much time on the LPs, just so I can at least go through the motions to learn. However, if I had to do it over again, I would probably go the same route that I took.

My thinking here is that I'll give myself much more usable data to work with, and have a much better shot at having a promising LP + offer combination to actually work with, which should prove far more useful than simply going through the motions. This will also _potentially_ allow me to find something early on that I can leverage to scale, accelerating my learning even further.

Open question:
* I know carrier traffic tends to convert far better than wifi for things such as 1 click offers...does the same hold true for e-mail submits? This answer is probably very easily searchable, but I need to call it a night.

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I think carrier is gonna convert similar for an SOI either way. But carrier will be more expensive than wifi. Let the data tell you what's working though it'll be different in every geo.

If you're doing pops on Propeller maybe try their push inventory too. I see plenty of ppl running sweeps offers on push so they must be working. Plus you could even use the same LPs to test, just a slightly different flow with the ad/headline.

One comment I have about this part in your OP:

I've been at this for almost 2 years(basically fulltime) and still not 100% consistent. Same with another friend of mine who started around the same time as me(Q1 2017). Some people figure this out in months and start doing $1k/day profit consistently. That can happen. But I'd argue these days, for most people, it takes a lot longer unless you personally have a pro specifically telling you exactly what to do every step of the way till you learn to walk on your own.

IMO 3-4 months is not enough time, on average, to actually make it. Some can. Most won't. Just my 2 cents. Keep at it though & best of luck!

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Thanks pinkcat. Yeah, it's definitely an aggressive timeline, but I'm giving myself 3-4 months to get to a point where I can decide whether this is a good fit for me or not, rather than make it my full time income.

But you're right -- I definitely have to keep a realistic lens to all of this and not be blinded by all of the $x,xxx/day being thrown around.
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Latest update:
I'm a bit disappointed at myself. I spent most of the day "trying" to launch, but I kept finding things here and there that just drained time.

I followed caurmen's bot check post and couldn't for the life of me get it set up properly on Thrive, without adding tons of complexity. In the end, I went with matuloo's advice in the same thread, and I'm just running some traffic direct-to-offer with the bot check script as the LP so I can get data quickly and build a blacklist. Originally I had been planning to run it as a pre-lander, but now I'm seeing that this might not make complete sense for mobile, as it just adds to the load time.

The other thing I got caught up on were dynamic callouts on some of my LPs. I realized that I either [a] don't have access to some of the parameters being called out, or [b] need some programming done to split out strings from certain parameters (for example, country seems to come through as 'EG - Egypt' instead of just Egypt).

I also got thrown for a bit of a loop when I realized that the tracker is actually tracking some of the things that aren't captured in tokens -- I'm assuming through the LP itself instead of through tokens in the URL. This was probably painfully obvious to some people, but it's definitely news to me!

Instead of trying to solve all of this, I should have just launched a subset of my landers instead of burning time. Lesson learned.

Open question:
Let's say the tracker is already tracking something such as browser, and I also decide to add it as a token request in the URL to a traffic source, and call it "browser". Let's say the values come in as "Chrome Mobile" and "Chrome: Chrome Mobile" or something like that. How do I call out one versus the other? Judging by the callout code, I have a feeling I can only call something out if it comes through the URL/token, right? -- I may be totally off on some things here :-)

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Answering my own question from yesterday:
I read through Amy's post again, and saw that there was a part where she inserted tokens into the LP from the tracker parameters itself, rather than from the traffic source tokens. In this image, I'm guessing this is what I'd want to put if I wanted to insert a carrier name. This makes sense over grabbing it from the TS token, since you'll have a consistent result every time. Again, might be painfully obvious to most, but it wasn't to me :-). The part that confused having identical token names within in the TS tokens, and the part where I had absolutely no clue that the tracker itself tracks some of these parameters!
Thrive.png  Views: 35  Size: 35.7 KB  ID: 20385" class="thumbnail" style="float:CONFIG" />
While investigating this, I came up with the question of "what if the tracker token and TS token have the same name?" After running a quick test, it seems that the TS token takes priority and overwrites the tracker token. Good to know. I went ahead and prepended the token names on all of the TS tokens.

Bot checks:
I ran a direct-link javascript redirect bot check on PropellerAds and PopAds running about $10 worth of traffic to each. Unfortunately (fortunately?), it seems that all the top placements (that make up the top 80% of volume) have >45% valid clicks, so I don't have anything to blacklist. I did only run carrier traffic to PropellerAds so I might run this test again later. For some reason, I thought I'd come up with a fairly significant list of placements to blacklist. Oh well -- if anyone has any thoughts on this or questions on my targeting, please do comment!

Edit: I just found caurmens other post on zero-load bot testing. Testing it on one of my LPs. I'm not sure how to get this to display natively on Thrive, if its even possible, but I should be able to get a list of placements for that 'offer' in the advanced reporting.

Campaigns:
I just submitted my first round of LP-driven campaigns to PopAds! Hopefully review comes through quickly.

I have a list of 9 LPs rotating out to 4 offers, split out into 6 campaigns (each of which target overlapping segments of LPs/offers), primarily segmented by combinations of traffic type (Adult vs General, Carrier vs WiFi, Mobile vs Desktop, LP type, etc.). I'm running about $10 worth of traffic to each campaign, though I'm a bit worried about how much traffic I have access to on PopAds for this GEO. I'll have to see how this plays out.

I think Amy mentioned that she would start out with WiFi rather than carrier traffic to get data on the cheap, and expand from there, but I figured that at this stage in the game, I value the extra data that the additional up-front target-everything approach will give me over the extra spend.

Hopefully I'll have some good stats to share tomorrow!


Edit:
Open question:
If I have overlapping audiences on multiple campaigns in popads or propellerads, do I bid against myself?

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Very sorry for my late arrival!

I'm striving to wrap up the 40-day tutorial - but the bot test part is delayed because I'm working with Voluum to test their new bot detection / anti-fraud feature which will take time. But I'm working on the lessons after the bot test lesson, and hoping to be able to post those as soon as the bot test lesson is done.

However, since you're using Thrive, my lesson won't help you anyway - so I'll answer your questions on caurmen's method.

First of all: No need to EVER be disappointed at yourself.

We're always just doing the best we're able under the present circumstances. And even if you don't feel you are doing your best, everyone is entitled to making mistakes, being lazy, etc. Keep working on improving and never fault yourself. It will just make yourself feel bad, and the negativity and is not conducive to success in any way. You've come so far in such a short time! I'm proud and so should you!


Regarding dynamic callouts: I haven't used Thrive, but based on this page, it seems that you'll need to add php code to your lander:

https://support.thrivetracker.com/hc...ding-Page-Code

If that's the case, then I don't think my S3+CDN setup in the earlier lesson can handle this - because php is dynamic and I believe my setup can only handle static landers.

Can you please get confirmation from Thrive support regarding this? Ask them if there's a way to call variables dynamically on landing pages without adding php code to the lander.

If their answer is "no", then you'd have to either 1)Switch trackers (consider funnelflux or binom) or 2)Host your landers elsewhere (consider landing page servers provided by funnelflux - you don't necessarily have to use their tracker - their lander servers are a standalone service).

Yes - you can just launch landers that don't have lander callouts, just to get some practice. Ultimately though, being able to call out user details on the landing page can be a powerful tool.

One thing I'd like to clarify about lander callouts that may help: The tracker itself can automatically detect a lot of information about each visitor: geo location, IP, device, model, browser, etc. etc. All you need to do is tell the tracker which parameters to pass to the lander, then of course specify in the lander code which information you actually want to display and where.

As for "EG" vs. "Egypt": Other trackers I've used, would already have BOTH in their database. They'd be represented by 2 different tokens. I don't know if Thrive has both the 2-letter code AND the full country name in their database for you to pass - something to check with their support.


You might.

And when you do, usually you'll see the campaign with the higher bid and/or broader targeting will suck traffic from the camp with the lower-bid and/or narrower targeting.

For initial testing don't worry about it - look to see which offers are promising first and go from there.


In the lander code, you can first grab the value that is passed by the tracker - for example "Chrome: Chrome Mobile" - then you can slice and dice this text string. Here's the pseudo code - you'll need to look up the exact javascript code, either from one of the landers you rip, or on a programming site - because I don't code well enough to give you the full code off the top of my head:

var browser-edit = getURLParameters('browser')
If (browser-edit=="Chrome: Chrome Mobile")
{
browser = "Chrome Mobile"
}

Hope that makes sense! If you really can't get this to work, please make a new post to ask this programming-specific question, and I'm sure one of the tons of programming experts on this forum can help you. (And if you don't get a reply, I'll figure it out for you.)


The more landers you test in the beginning, the more confident you can be that the winner of the batch will be a true winner (and not just the best of a bunch of crap so to speak).

If you test lots of landers in the beginning, after you have a winner, you'd just need to focus on testing offers.

Having said that: Testing more landers will require more test budget. So make sure you don't go overboard.

5-10 really solid, i.e. fully-optimized landers should be enough to let good offers shine. If you find a good offer, testing more landers / lander variations would be worth it.

How many offers you can find, that you can test with that set of landers, will make a difference as well. If there are a ton of offers you can test with that one set of landers, then it would be worth it to test lots of landers even at the beginning, because chances are you should be able to find at least one good offer among them.

And of course what your AM tells you and how much you can trust them will play a role as well. Let's say an AM you trust, that has always given you solid tips in the past, tells you a certain offer is simply awesome, then it may be worth it to test lots of landers from the beginning to allow that offer to really shine.


In general, carrier traffic will convert better - both for 1/2-click flows and other flows.

For 1/2-click flow offers, the fact that carrier traffic converts better is no surprise - because a simpler conversion flow will naturally convert better (all else being equal).

For other conversion flows, the reason carrier traffic will typically convert a bit better, is probably because there's less bot traffic - although the percentage of bot traffic in carrier traffic is quickly catching up to that of wifi traffic nowadays.

However, carrier traffic IS more expensive. So I would suggest to test an offer on wifi traffic first - assuming the offer's conversion flow is the same for carrier and wifi.

But, if the offer has DIFFERENT conversion flows for carrier vs. wifi, I would suggest to test the simpler conversion flow first, i.e. the 1/2-click flow on carrier traffic. My reasoning is that if the offer doesn't show any promise for the simpler flow, then the conversion rate can only get worse for wifi. Only if the offer converts half-decent on wifi, would it make sense to test it on the more-expensive carrier traffic.


You must have figured this out by now: You'll need to target 3G traffic ONLY, at the traffic source.

If you send wifi traffic to an offer that only accepts carrier traffic (in fact, if you send ANY traffic that is NOT accepted by the offer), the affiliate network will automatically redirect your visitor to an offer that DOES accept that traffic.

And this "alternate" offer will, in a vast majority of cases, not convert as well as the main offer you're testing - especially if the offer you're testing is recommended by your AM as being a hot offer.

In short, try not to send traffic to an offer that doesn't accept it, where possible.


Lastly - a comment on your situation:

I went back to read your intro - and I think you're in a REALLY good position to give AM a serious try.

You have enough part-time income to cover your expenses. You already have some AM experience. You're very analytical and pay a lot of attention to detail. (Based on what I gathered from your intro and this follow-along so far.)

Plus, you're focused, and I can sense your determination to succeed.

This post may help to map out a route for you:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post362595

I would suggest that once you've optimized a few pop camps, to try either push traffic or FB.

3 months may or may not be enough to be making consistent profits (although I do know of quite a few people that have managed to do this!), it's certainly long enough to find SOME indication of promise, for you to justify sticking with it further.

I wish you all the best! 2019 will be a big year for many people - I can feel it.

Looking forward to your next update!



Amy

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This is going to be a really long one.

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First, Amy, thanks a ton for the response. Super helpful!

Also, your vote of confidence definitely helps a lot, so thank you for that

That page left out a section for javascript – I think I was able to get it implemented successfully!


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Highlights:

• Set up 6 campaigns, based on different major traffic segments and LP variations:
  
  • Adult, WIFI (General LPs)
  • Adult, Carrier (General LPs)
  • Adult, Carrier (Carrier-specific LPs)
  • General, WIFI (General LPs)
  • General, Carrier (General LPs)
  • General, Carrier (Carrier-specific LPs)
  • Note:
    
    • I decided to split out by major traffic segments, as I think this will be very telling at spitting out anomalies in a single glance. This also helps targeting/segmenting via offer restrictions.
    • I think in the future, I want to further split these out by mobile vs not-mobile/desktop, as right now “WiFi” contains all of it…though I’m hesitant to do it without large volume. I would probably kill the General / Carrier-specific LP split as I get better with the coding aspect of the LPs.
  
  
• Each campaign is rotating offers/LPs that apply to those segments
• One GEO
• Promoting 4 phone sweep offers
• Mistakes: I made a ton of simple mistakes. Cutting these down will be a big theme as the campaigns become more complex.
  
  • Big mistake #1: Ran traffic to the wrong offer due to a bad copy/paste. I switched the offer back over to the correct one about 8 hours in.
  • Mistake #2: I think I’m sending some desktop traffic over to some LPs that call out “model” and “brand”. I haven’t dealt with this yet, as I think there are higher leverage things I can focus on for now.
  • Mistake #3: I forget exactly what I corrected, but I think there was some lander code that needed correcting
  
  
• Targeting: I bid for top 70% of inventory, and included all devices (incl. desktop) types in WiFi traffic, as traffic seemed a bit sparse. Popunder only. I set a bid amount that was large relative to the average (2 or 3x, which was still put me in the 6^th-10^th spot), as I want to focus on getting as much data as possible for now – I’m less concerned about making profit overall on this set of campaigns. I’ll be much happier if I can string together $X-XX profit a few days in a row towards the tail end, even if I end up in the red overall.

Now on to some details.

Bot test:

This continues to be the bane of my existence!

Out of the 6 campaigns I set up, most of them are chugging along slowly, and 14 hours in, are not close to the budget cap of $10/campaign (will share these numbers later).

HOWEVER, one of the campaigns, General, WIFI (General LPs), ate up all of the traffic within the first 2 hours. I’m assuming a lot of this was bot traffic.

I set up caurmen’s bot test on one of my landers yesterday as a test, and it seems like it works great!

The only problem is that it completely fudges up numbers in Thrive, with no way of filtering it out.

My solution here is to export all of the data into Excel and filter things manually to get to more accurate numbers.

Given that I only had the code on 1 of 9 LPs, and I don’t want all of my stats in the tracker UI to be useless, I’m running yet another separate $10 camp just to run bot traffic on, and I’m running it with the same targeting as the campaign that ate up my budget. I expect to see some placements I can cut after this.

Campaigns:


I’m not too concerned about the campaigns themselves yet. What this is telling me is that carrier traffic in my GEO has weak volume, but that’s fine, since WiFi seems to be converting and has significantly higher volume.

My priority here is figuring out the best offer first, so lets move on to that.

Offers:

14 hours in, I’ve decided to cut 2 offers.

I didn’t realize Offer 2 was running the wrong offer until about 3K impressions in, so I’m making an assumption that it converts, for now.


I’ve decided to cut offers 3 and 4.

Using a statistical significance calculator, we can be >90% sure that Offer 1 performs better than offers 3 and 4.

Reasoning for different impression #s is due to the fact that offers 3 and 4 don’t allow adult.

Should get more hits on the two converting offers now, and be able to make a judgement on the LPs.


Landing Pages:

Carrier-specific LPs have very little volume. I’m thinking of shifting my focus away from those for that reason.

LP8 is a very aggressive lander, and I’m a bit nervous about scaling that one to other sources, if it comes down to that, but I’ll worry about that when I get there.


Now that I have traffic narrowed down to 2 offers, I should hopefully ramp up conversions on the LPs to make some decisions.


Next steps, in order of priority:

• [Tomorrow] Analyze and cut unprofitable bot-infested placements
• [Tomorrow] Run significance tests on the LPs based on the new subset of offers, and cut down to top 2-4
• [Tomorrow] See if I can get one of the campaigns or segments into green
• [Tomorrow] Start analyzing desktop vs mobile traffic, as that’s going to be a high-impact lever (bids? Placement cuts?)
• [Later] start investigating ways to squeeze more profit (back button redirect, etc.)
• [Later] focus on trying to get the camp to +50% ROI before scaling vertically (test more offers, lps, etc)

Edit: read my tomorrow list, and I think I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, given that I only have 4 conversions . Either way, excited to see what tomorrow holds.

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About 40 hours in so far.

After feeling pretty good yesterday, I found myself in a slump today.

Given that I had 4 conversions yesterday, and just finished cutting 2 non-converting offers, I expected to nail 5-6 conversions today and hopefully have some good data to draw conclusions from.

HOWEVER, I only got 2 today. Talk about a momentum killer!

I struggled today to figure out what to do next. I tried to do it intuitively, but at every step along the way, I ran into the same conclusion: I don't have enough data.

I think tomorrow, I'll start going through the optimization flow chart in Amy's guide, as much as I wanted to try to figure it out on my own. This should help me get out of analysis paralysis mode.

Note: I'm posting a bunch of stats from Excel, since I can't get Thrive to do what I want it to do (although its great at getting the data I need to throw into excel!)

Campaign-Level Data [Overall] (Excluding any traffic I ran purely for bot tests):



Campaign-Level Data [Excluding traffic to the non-converting offers...i.e. what my stats have been had I not even run the other two offers]:



All screenshots moving forward exclude traffic to the non-converting offers

Offer-level data (note: offer 64682 had the first 3K of traffic directed at the wrong offer)



LP-level data:

1018 CTR is artificially high, as there was a rogue link that counted clicks every launch (basically bot checking)


Connection Type-Level Data



OS-Level Data



Device-Type Level Data


Segment by Device-Connection-OS





My first instinct tells me to cut landers:

1. LP 1010 (3K impressions, very low CTR, 0 conversions)
2. LP 1014 (same deal)
3. any other LPs with CTR of 1%, single digit clicks, and 0 conversions -- EDIT: on second thought, I have two LPs with only a few clicks that actually have conversions, so I'll keep those, for now and only cut 1010 and 1014.

From there, I'm not completely sure what to do, given limited conversions.

Some notes:

• I want to test more offers after cutting LP, but I'm running into the problem of not many sweep offers available for SG within my networks
• Bot checks did not bring back anything conclusive
• I'm weary of cutting placements at the moment due to volume constraints -- each camp burns through about $3/day on average
• One traffic segment, PopAds[General] - SG - WiFi - iPhone X (General LPs), has TONS of volume (can burn through $10 in 2 hours...I had to limit the spend), but doesn't seem to be converting well. Not sure what to cut here (I'm guessing I have to cut aggressively), but I do feel like I have to do something, as there seems to be too much traffic relative to the rest of the volume. Again, this feels very difficult due to limited conversions.
• I do feel like I can get this profitable, but if I do, I feel like I'll end up generating maybe a couple of dollars of profit a week :-).
• I'm almost tempted to move to a higher tier GEO so I can access more traffic and offers. Again, I'm prioritizing speed of learning over everything else. Might be a bad idea -- who knows!

Anyways, like I mentioned at the beginning of the post, tomorrow, I'll likely go through the optimization flow chart in Amy's guide to avoid analysis paralysis and make some progress.

ONWARD!

---

I think I could really use the help of some of the more experienced folks on here at this point to help point out gaps in my thinking, or gaps in my approach!

So I'm thinking of pausing this camp (at least for the next few days) and changing directions. Do you guys think this is premature?

• I just realized adult traffic on my 2 converting offers is not allowed. That specification was tucked away in a spot I wasn't expecting in the offer terms. This was by far my best performing traffic. I performed some further optimizations, but without adult, I don't think I stand a chance. My AM is also out of town for a few days, so I'm unable to double check for the next few days.
• I simply don't have access to many sweep offers in SG. I applied for a few more networks last night, so hopefully this changes.

On my next camp, I think I would approach it this way:

• Most important: Look at the offers available to me for the GEO ahead of time, and make sure there are plenty to test
• Tier 2 GEO with good volume
• Start with the 2-3 landers that have been performing best for me so far
• Start with a built in bot test to each of my landers, now that I have a way to view this without mucking up my stats
• Start off with far fewer mistakes, so I don't have as much data that I need to throw away!

-----------------
Anyways, on to the latest stuff before having the thoughts above:

Highlights:

• About 9 conversions since my last post
• I made two huge mistakes:
  
  • Yet another one of my landers had incorrect/missing callouts. I fixed this and conversions basically went from either 0 or 1 to becoming the majority of my conversions
  • I mistakenly thought adult traffic was allowed for two of my offers. I recently realized that this wasn’t the case, so I had to pause those campaigns. Unfortunately that was my most “profitable” source of traffic.
  
  
• Worth noting that there’s probably ~$80/day of volume on PopAds[G] – SG – WiFi – iPhone X (General LPs) that I haven’t tapped into yet. I’m guessing this means I could be cutting placements far more aggressively?

MACRO-LEVEL
Overall campaign-level, since inception:


Overall campaign-level, with data from cuts-to-date removed (is this the correct way to think about this?):


By date:


LATEST CUTS:
Adult traffic was cut, as explained above. However, I’ve included that traffic in the calculation of the next few cuts, as I think it was still good data to make decisions on.

Placements:

• I cut placement 36286 due to 4x payout, and no conversions.
• I also cut a small handful 3-4 placements that had 0-1 clicks with 500+ impressions

Cutting LPs:

• Decided to cut vR94N, since it was behind 4DN3w despite the first 7000 clicks of 4DN3w being based off of an erroneous lander (90% confidence at the overall-level based on the current stats, inclusive of 7000)
• Cut r7Cg5 for desktop traffic only. At the mobile level, I think it’s only ~75% confident compared to the top performing lander.

FINAL view (adult removed, placements removed, LPs removed):

---

Ran some more traffic, cut any placements with 2x spend w/ no conversions in the campaign that had lots of traffic, but still running at really low ROI (-85% or so).

--
Unless someone suggests otherwise, I'll be regrouping and starting again from the ground up tomorrow, with an emphasis on finding a GEO (or groups of GEOs) with a lot more offers to rotate between where I can use the same LPs. Hopefully I get into the affiliate networks that I applied for on Friday to get the ball rolling.

Likely swapping out from Thrivetracker as well, so I can run proper bot tests without mucking up my data.

I'm going to take tomorrow to plan, and focus on executing hard the rest of the week. I'm considering trying push, but I'll likely stay with pop until my first profitable campaign.

I have a much better idea of what to expect through all points in the process now, so hopefully this run goes a lot better.

---

Latest update -- I probably won't be posting for a few days, as I'll be heads down trying to get these campaigns launched, and finishing some work at my other job.

I made the jump to Binom. Took a lot longer than I had hoped, but I I'm already really liking it a lot. Has a lot more flexibility than I expected.

I think campaigns might take a little bit more configuration than I was used to, but so far the benefits likely outweigh any cons.

It was nice going through a complete refresher on tracking, between setting up the new tracker and setting up a bunch of new affiliate networks.

Just have one spot that I'm nervous about as far as tracking is concerned -- passing click IDs from the tracker to the networks still has me a little bit confused -- I'm not exactly sure how all the different networks are handling this info before passing it back through the postback.

Running a small test tonight to make sure everything is tied together properly.

Also, there has to be an easier way to keep offers organized. This literally burned up hours of my day today, flipping through the networks, then a tracking sheet, then the tracker itself.

Anyyyways -- onto the campaigns.

Latest plan is the following:

I have about 20-25 offers to go through between 3-5 GEOs. I'm going to use my best performing lander from my previous tests to flesh out winning offers.

Will cut any obvious placements along the way, but I think in the end, I should have at least one GEO/offer combination that shows some promise. If this doesn't happen, then I'll definitely need some help figuring out what to do next. (or maybe the answer will be to test more offers)

From there, I'll start some split tests of landers against the incumbant lander, using the winning offer.

Hopefully this gets me on the right track.

Today, I launched a quick test of 1 GEO with ~5-8 offers, again using the winning lander from my previous go at this. Once I confirm my tracking is set up properly, I'll run a test of 10-15x payout.

I'll plan on launching 1-2 GEOs a day for the next few days.

I'm already seeing that each Geo will likely have a different lesson to teach me, from the setup and research that I've done so far.



Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

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Hi angle-lytics, sorry for arriving late. I just noticed that you've started your walkalong also.

Before I started to my current GE offer, I was focusing on SG iphone sweeps campaign also for about 2-3 weeks. For me, the best performance is Carrier Specific landers and target the specific carrier 3g traffics only. My results are quite break-even, some days minor profit and some days lost. However, I've decided to stop it and change to another GEO because the traffics are too low and it doesn't seem like will generate enough profit after optimizing (just like Amy says, if the campaign unlikely to create more than $5-10 a day, it's better to work at Mc Donalds, haha).

Anyway, my scenario is quite similar to you. I've been wanted to start Affiliate marketing for years, but haven't have the chance to start previously. And now I've got a more stable income which enough to cover my expenses, hence I allocate a budget and give my self a few months to test whether Affiliate Marketing is a fit for me or not.

Now even though my budget almost finishes and I still haven't seen any profit yet, but I think there are so much to learn and so many opportunities in this Affiliate marketing and STM forum. I believe that if we keep continuing, don't give up and keep improving, it's just a matter of time that we'll be making a significant amount of money from here.

Let's learn together!

---

Womp womp. After running my tests overnight my LP CTR is about 4x lower than what it used to be on my old tracker.

Looks like today will be troubleshooting day. Will probably start by running some side-by-side split tests to make sure.

With every setback comes learnings.

Let's do this!

EDIT: Something is definitely going on. Ran a split test and getting about 13% CTR on my previous tracker, and 1.5% on the new one -- same targeting and just very minor changes to the LP. Digging deeper
EDIT2: Removed bot checker script, and removed back button redirect. CTR seems to be back up. Will re-introduce one at a time and see how that impacts things.
EDIT3: Added back in bot checker -- CTR still up. Will see if I can find a different BBR script to test. If that doesn't work, I'll just leave it out for now.
EDIT4: aaaand we're back in business!

---

I was going to hold off on posting an update for another couple of days, but I see that Amy's in here responding to follow-alongs today, so I'll go ahead and post an update

I think I'm starting to get there. This might just be optimism speaking here, but I think I might be able to get something profitable in the next week if I'm lucky.

Everything is starting to feel much more clear.

--------
Overview:
Here are my campaign stats since Thursday morning through EOD Friday (about 36 hours of traffic):

Campaign 1:

• I launched this campaign with only 4 hours left in the day on Friday, so I’m really hopeful of this one

Campaign 2 & 3:

• These were using the same GEOs (different from 1, 4, & 5), same landers, and the same offers – just different traffic sources. The difference between the sources is absolutely astounding.

Campaign 4 & 5 – CUT:

• These were also the same GEO as each other (but different from 1, 2, & 3). I went ahead and cut these, as #5 was getting no volume, and #4 just felt like it would need way too much spend to gather enough data to get profitable.

-----------
My new approach that I used for these:

• Guiding factor: Test the sh*t out of everything. Between Thursday morning and EOD Friday, I tested 36 offers between 3 GEOs and 2 traffic sources. I will be launching a couple more GEOs and offers over the next few days. Everyone seems to have a breakthrough when they start focusing on testing tons of offers, so I decided to follow suite.
• Guiding factor: Cut down on complexity and variables. If a decision is not 100% clear cut, then there’s a level of complexity in there that I can remove for now, that I can test in the future.
  
  • I chose to test all offers under a single lander – the best lander from my previous campaigns, to get to a point where I can identify the #1 offer (almost there for one of the GEOs), and then test the sh*t out of lander variations.
  • I also saw the back button redirect that I mentioned in my last post was adding complexity, so I cut that out completely.
  • Removed desktop traffic completely, again, as it was making decisions much less clear cut.
  
  
• Run *all* mobile traffic for a given geo, bid about 1.5X average or high enough to get into the top 5-8 spots
• Try to capture remnant traffic that I don’t have offers for using a SmartLink – my thinking here is that I may be able to find pockets of profit that I don’t have offers for, that I can find offers for, or chase down the converting offer from the SmartLink and run that directly
• Optimization:
  
  • I’m not even looking at the larger segments (WiFi vs Carrier, OS, Browser, etc.), until I find a winning offer. I want to keep all of that volume at first, and avoid cutting out large amounts of traffic based on potential ‘bad’ data (a la un-optimized offer selection)
  • I’m cutting any placement that hits 30-50 clicks with 0% CTR. I do have bot stats, but I find myself using CTR. I may introduce these placements when I find a winning offer to re-test.
  • I’m also cutting any placement that does 1x avg payout without converting. I may introduce these placements when I find a winning offer to re-test.
  • I’m figuring out what my best converting offer is at any given time, and running it against the other offers in the significance calculators, checking a few times a day. My guideline for offers is 95% significance.
  • Once I have a winning offer, I’ll start looking into larger traffic segments, probably starting off by looking at WiFi vs Carrier, or combinations of variables (such as WiFi – Android, Carrier – iOS). I’ll look towards cutting any segments that are performing terribly out completely, and dig deeper into ones that are performing “ok” to see if there are any sub-segments to cut. I haven’t figured out my criteria for this yet, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
  • Here’s where I’ll re-introduce some of the older placements (maybe even in a separate campaign to isolate), so I can figure out whether to add those placements to my “perma-blacklist” list
  • Once I have something profitable, I’ll basically clone the targeting/campaign and run split test campaigns, one where I rotate out variations of my winning lander and completely new landers, and one where I continuously test offers.
  
  
• Scaling:
  
  • I’ll try not to get ahead of myself here!

Other thoughts, happenings, and ramblings:

• Made the switch to Binom. To say that I’m impressed is an understatement. I feel like I can finally analyze data in the way that my brain wants to.
• Started IP targeting for carrier traffic. This is a gamechanger.
• I tried launching the same campaign on multiple sources (PopAds and Propeller) and the difference in performance between the two for identical tests are astounding. I’m thinking of adding this in to my typical launch practice.
• It’s being drilled into my head through experience to TEST EVERYTHING. There was an offer I almost wrote off because it was so ugly and poorly set up, but it’s currently my best performing offer. This also applies to payouts – even a 20 cent payout offer can beat out a $4 payout offer. Test to completion as well. I cut an offer early because I thought it was hopeless, but I realized I left out 4 hours of data. Factoring in the extra 4 hours, it was actually the best performing by far.
• My LP server went down for 2 hours. I’ve set up site monitoring via Site24x7 for the time being so I can jump on this quickly in the future. Anyone have any recos for monitoring? I haven’t done any research yet, and will probably hold off for a few days.
• Domain got banned while I was sleeping and ran traffic for about 4 hours or so. Anyone have any solutions for monitoring bans / shutting down traffic / rotating out domains when these bans happen, or is it more of a custom-programmatic solution?

OPEN QUESTIONS:

• I was testing offers direct along with my LP, but it was adding complexity to my decisions on whether to cut an offer or not (its difficult to compare something driven by clicks to the offer versus impressions to the offer). My thoughts here were – should I evaluate the direct link vs LP-driven paths completely separately? My gut tells me yes. I think the answer here might be yes – but if your budget (or traffic) is limited, test only the LP-driven version, and maybe add in the direct link to test after cutting down to a single offer.
• If I’m running the same landers and offers for the same GEOs across different traffic sources, should I treat data from the different traffic sources completely separately when it comes lander-offer-geo combinations or can I combine the data when making decisions? Again, I think the answer here might be that best practice would be to evaluate separately, but again if budget (or traffic) is limited, it won’t kill you to combine them.
• Same questions as above, but I’m wondering this for offers that span across multiple carriers as well. I think the answer again, would be budget (or traffic) dependent.
• When using back button re-direct, I can’t figure out if Binom is actually sending people to the BBR offers only if they click back, or if its actually ROTATING the offers. Won’t be putting my effort towards this for now since I'm not utilizing this. I’m sure support will be able to answer for me.
• PropellerAds seems to not want to report back cost data for certain campaigns. Anyone have any experience with this?

Looking forward to posting Day 3 / 4 stats and hopefully getting to profitability. Feel free to make suggestions on my optimization process or anything else!


Edit:
UGH!! I forgot to update my SSL cert last time I switched domains. I was wondering why performance was so bad today.

CTRs were basically 1/10th of what they should be for about 12 hours straight.

Now I'm a little afraid that I made placement cuts on bad data -- oh well. I was going to reintroduce those placements eventually anyways.

Mid-$XX mistake, but better to do it at these stakes than $XXX or $XXXX. For that, I'm thankful.

I'm also more upset that I have a chunk of bad data than the $XX lost. AM problems!

---

Just came from lawmence's follow-along. Thanks for helping out a fellow newbie - that's always nice to see!

I haven't forgotten about you either! Getting to your follow-along next. Again, apologies for the delay!

This will take a while - I'll try to post a reply by tonight. If not, then tomorrow. Still at the hospital taking care of my girlfriend, but will devote every minute in between to writing out a post.



Amy

---

Loving your approach - keep going!

---

First of all - good reasoning, and it's GREAT to test out any and all ideas!

But here's what I would do:

-I would test general LPs and carrier-specific LPs in the same campaign - no need to split into 2 separate campaigns when your targeting is the same.

This means the 2 Adult+Carrier camps can be one campaign, and the 2 General+Carrier camps can be one campaign, basically just rotating all those LPs in one campaign and cutting them using the recommended stats calculator.

-Secondly - regarding wifi vs. carrier: If an offer accepts both wifi and carrier traffic, and has the same conversion flow for both types of traffic, then I would suggest to test wifi first. Wifi traffic is cheaper and there's more volume available for testing more quickly, and if the offer converts badly on wifi, chances are it won't convert considerably better on carrier. (Again, this is assuming the conversion flow is the same for both types of traffic.) If the offer converts at least half-decent on wifi, I would test it on carrier.

So I would start with the Adult+WIFI and General+WIFI camps (assuming you're rotating the same offers across the wifi and carrier camps, AND the offers have the same conversion flow for carrier vs. wifi). For the offer that wins-out in the Adult+WIFI camp, I would test it on Adult+Carrier (with General+Carrier-specific LPs); and for the offer that wins-out in the General+WIFI camp, I would test it on General+Carrier (with General+Carrier-specific LPs).

-I agree with everything you said about splitting out by major segments - carrier vs. wifi, and mobile vs. desktop; and what you said about not doing the same for segments that don't have large volume. Many pop networks seem to prioritize campaigns based on how broad they target, where the broader the targeting, the more importance they'd assign to a campaign, and the more traffic volume would be assigned.

The advantage of splitting by major segments is so you can bid appropriately for each segment. Also, like you've pointed out, it helps targeting/segmenting via offer restrictions.

Having said that: There are also advantages to going really broad at the traffic network, and then doing all the traffic redirection (what traffic goes to which offer) via tracker rules. First advantage would be what I said above regarding potentially getting more traffic volume. Secondly, the more primitive traffic sources may not even give you a lot of targeting options, which essentially forces you to go broad.

When you have more experience and not afraid to invest test budget, and want to go granular: One method would be to just throw a whole bunch of offers into a camp (you can control what traffic goes to which offer via tracker rules) and optimize by major traffic segment. So, instead of comparing overall offer stats for the entire campaign, compare offer stats for the Android OS, the IOS OS, the Chrome browser, etc., to find out which offer converts the best for each major segment. Then you can either just use tracker rules to run the best offer for each major segment, or set up separate camps to target each segment and run the best offer in each.


Hmm...I don't know if it would work in Thrive. For Voluum if you're rotating multiple offers, you can't do caurmen's bot test at the same time, because a bot test lander requires you to list 2 offers and 2 offers ONLY: 1 being the "real" offer and the other being "parses javascript". So if you're rotating 4 offers, I don't see how you can implement that correctly - unless Thrive's setup will somehow allow you to do that.


Your Adult+WIFI campaign is breaking even right off the bat - this is good to see!


There will always be less carrier traffic compared to wifi traffic (at least until the cost of mobile data is so cheap that it's comparable to that of wifi). But for larger geos, carrier traffic can generate significant amounts of profits as well.

And since your Adult+Wifi converted so well, when you've identified the best offer of the 4, can test it on Adult+Carrier traffic to see how it does (and which carrier(s) are profitable).


The trend: The more aggressive the lander, the better it converts. Pop is basically about aggressive landers.

Agree with everything you said in this section.


Time to sneak in a nap while my gf is napping - will try hard to get to your subsequent posts later tonight. In the meantime, please read my comments about optimization in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post363661



Amy

---

Latest update:
Having a little bit of trouble holding performance on anything that has promise. It could be +60% one day, and -30% the next.

I'm unsure if it has to do with day of week, competition, or just random chance. I'm having profitable days on and off for some camps.

Launched another GEO in the meantime with another 10 offers or so.

I'm considering either going all out testing more LPs or putting my efforts towards something like push. TBD!


EDIT:
Did some digging and I think I've been a little bit too hesitant to cut off large under-performing segments, such as Chrome, from 'mature' campaigns, which usually makes up the majority of traffic. Just made some major cuts -- we'll see how things progress. Better to cut off a large chunk of volume than to bleed cash.

This seems important in the larger GEOs -- in one camp, I basically cut off my arms and legs worth of volume, but I think the remaining volume should be more than enough to keep me going. Lets find out :-)

Side note -- I ran some traffic on ZeroPark for the first time. Definitely was not prepared for how different it was from Propeller and PopAds. Expensive lesson, but there seems to be a ton of volume, so worth figuring out over time.

EDIT2:
I think I'm going to start going all out testing LPs for at least the next 7 days. I have a few GEOs narrowed down to single converting offers, so thinking about it, this is where I can put my invested $$ to good use and use this as a leverage point and learning experience. Have been going hard the past few weeks, so I'm going to take a breather for the rest of the day.

Re-read a post on Charles Ngo's blog. Two quotes that stuck is:

I shouldn't be getting flustered over daily changes in performance. I can only focus on making sound decisions. I used to play a LOT of online poker when I was 17-18 -- I could lose $1K in a day, but I was always able to stay level headed, because I knew my fundamentals were sound and decisions correct.

This is part of my decision for not jumping to push quite yet. Either way, if I have even better landers coming out of pop, I can certainly leverage those landers if I make the push jump!

--
I'll definitely have to keep a much closer eye on funds as well. I feel like I've been burning through cash really fast. I underestimated how expensive it would be to launch new campaigns.

I could be losing $10-20/day on campaigns that I'm working on stabilizing, but when I launch a new GEO, that -$20 turns into -$100.

I think the biggest area of opportunity here is to know how to cut losers faster. Losing placements, losing campaigns, etc.

I might stop focusing on launching for the next week and focus on growing what I have in front of me. It's getting a bit more difficult to manage with so many moving pieces.

---

What was the surprising difference? Was looking at ZeroPark only today and wondering whether I should apply. Decided it was enough to practise with PropellerAds for now - my immediate problems aren't to do with traffic, they're all about how tricky it is to fix up landers!

Have you been getting his email series about email affiliate marketing? Can't work out whether he's seriously saying this is his new thing, or whether it's just an angle to sell a course or similar?


That's the biggest problem right now, we don't know if our fundamentals are correct - leads to the too many moving parts thing you talk about. I know exactly what you mean!

But we'll get there.

-
One thing that is really striking me is how unwanted the traffic is by the people we're sending it to. At the moment, I'm basically getting one conversion per c. 1k-2k views views of an offer page (bearing in mind I'm still direct linking, haven't managed to swipe a lander usably yet). That makes me feel like the biggest spammer!

And when you put that against how much traffic you can get in a lot of the geos, which is sometimes only a few tens of thousands once the pie from any one given traffic network has been divided up, I can't quite see how you can ever make much money doing Pops.

I must be missing something - or landers make a hell of a difference. What kind of conversion rates are you getting from a good lander based camp?

I'm used to getting 1 email sign up per three-four views of a landing page. One new sales lead costs about £1.20 as a result and you can go on talking to them and making them offers for months/years via email if you do it right.

---

There were additional decisions to make such as "do I want premium inventory, remnant inventory, etc.?" and I was also shocked at how much volume there was.

I started the campaign and impressions started coming in like a fire hose.

I think this may require a different strategy -- very aggressive cutting and finding a whitelist of placements quickly. I'm not 100% sure though, but I'm sure this will come with time and experience.

I'm sure you've seen it by now, but as a marketer, definitely pitching a course :-).

I think I remember reading a post from johnaff on here about the bizopp space being ~$1M-$10MM if you have a good offer, so I'm sure that's what he's after.

But from my own observations and reading around the forum, most of what he mentions about things moving towards that space definitely seem to ring true

exactly! I think we have enough tools at our disposal, especially with this forum, to get there.

My top lander is getting between 12%-35% CTR from lander to offer, depending on the GEO/targeting.

Conversion rates, somewhere between .05% to 0.6% per lander impression, depending on the offer and targeting.

Landers do make a hell of a difference! Some of my landers were doing -100% ROI, while some where doing breakeven ROI during my initial tests!

I saw a case from caurmen where he was doing XX or XXX/day on a pop source, and scaled to X,XXX/day by spending most of his day trying to scale to 30-60 different sources!

Regarding the unwanted traffic, for me personally, this is just a means to an end for me. Pops are the fastest way to get up and running to learn the fundamentals quickly, so from here, I feel like I can move on to other mobile sources!

---

So it's been a few days - apologies! I was busy the rest of that day tending to my loved one. When I finally returned to the forum it was night time at the hospital so I couldn't clickity-clack on my keyboard - so ended up replying to other posts on my phone. It's near impossible to do multiple-quotes replying through the app.

Then for the last few days I was catching up on other STM work and personal work etc. Finally have a whole weekend reserved for answering posts and hopefully finishing the tutorial!

Anyway - getting back to replying to the rest of your posts above. Specifically, I'm reading this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post362999

I know it's been many days since you posted it, but I'll still provide some feedback that can help you in future campaigns. I've been dropping the ball lately on replying to posts in the forum. Once the tutorial is finished, things should get back on schedule.

Pop traffic is volatile - so performance can vary day-to-day.

And performance can indeed take a sudden dive. It's all too common in fact. Here are some of the things you can try, to extend the life of a pop campaign:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...formance-Dives

Also: You were testing multiple offers and landers, which will introduce further volatility to the campaign, especially given that you weren't getting much traffic. This is because each offer+lander combination is only getting a bit of traffic every day, so the daily performance can't be representative of average performance. (You know...one day this lander+offer makes a conversion, the next day another lander+offer makes a conversion, etc.)


That flow chart was meant to be a crutch - and ONLY when you're running a direct carrier billing offer to smaller tier 3/4 geos and without a lander (so yeah - a pretty restrictive set of criteria).

I'm striving to finish the lessons on optimization as we speak - hopefully will be out tomorrow. In the meantime, I've left some tips on optimization in this post the other day, that you can try:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post363661

As for not having enough data - that can only be due to one or more of 3 reasons:

1)Your offer(s) and lander(s) are converting like sh*t. In this case, just test more offers and/or landers.

2)You're not getting enough traffic. In which case, try increasing your bid to see if you can get significantly more traffic. To avoid "messing up" your current camp's data (such as if you want to cut placements at 2x payout in loss at the current bid), you can duplicate the camp to run a quick test on bid vs. traffic volume. Increase the bid in $2-4 increments for example, every hour on the hour, to get an estimate on the hourly traffic you get at each bid. If you get to $10 CPM and still don't see a lot of traffic, chances are the geo (and whatever other targeting you have) just doesn't have much volume on that traffic network - in which case you may want to try another geo.

And of course, keep in mind that once you have more experience and confidence in testing and optimizing, you should scale to other networks. It adds up.

Particularly, if you're doing testing on PopAds, be aware that this network does not have a lot of volume. The traffic it does have is of higher quality than most other pop networks, which makes it an awesome network to test on to save money. But keep in mind that once you've used it to find a good lander+offer, you could and should scale to networks that have more volume - such as PropellerAds and Zeropark.

3)You haven't given it enough time. For example, if you're still testing landers and offers, then you should expect fewer conversions than when you're down to your last offer+lander.


Quite a few landers still haven't received enough traffic for us to tell either way. And statistical-significance hasn't been reached yet for all landers. And 2 of the landers are green (may be lottery conversions, but still). So there's hope!


Wifi is definitely showing promise, considering it's such a big traffic segment and the data includes inferior landers and offers.


Based on very limited data, the 2 main OSs seem to be performing around the same. This can change as you cut offers and landers, and collect more conversions.


Nothing to really comment on yet, except we should focus on mobile as there's not much traffic for desktop for this geo on this traffic network (although this can change with the bid).


This type of analysis can be very beneficial when it comes to deciding what to blacklist/whitelist!

If we only had more conversions to look at, it could get very interesting.

In my optimization lessons I'll go through a simple example on how to drill down multiple-levels deep into stats like what you're doing here, to figure out whether cutting a low-ROI segment would negatively-affect any major segments. Please stay tuned!


Why go on intuition when you have a stats calculator that will tell you exactly which landers to cut?

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Banners-Part-1


Regarding not many SG sweeps offers - consider signing up to more networks to get offers. Also check Adplexity to see what types of offers are doing big volumes - it could be sweeps, or something else. Identify a couple of offer types and test away.

Nowadays, it's better to pick a couple of geos and focus on CONQUERING them, instead of dabbling in lots of geos. This is because competition levels have increased, and it's no longer easy to reach profits by dabbling.

So pick a geo and go deep. Throw offers and landers at it, find out what the best/worst placements are. As new offers come out for this geo, test them. Run in the same geos again and again so you don't start from scratch every time.

Volume constraints - we've talked about before. You can choose to keep testing on PopAds until you have something promising to scale (and in the meantime start other campaigns so you're not twiddling your thumbs), or just start testing on e.g. Propellerads instead.

General+SG+Wifi - if you have enough volume there, then keep testing to see if you find a promising offer+lander. To limit your losses, you can cut placements at 1x payout, or even 0.5x payout. You can always turn them back on at a future time to do them justice - AFTER you find a good offer+lander.

Focusing on learning like you're doing is the right mindset. Even when/if you expand away from pop traffic later on, what you learn by running pop can likely help to reduce the learning curve, and amount of money lost.


Sounds like a plan - the time and effort you've spent hasn't been in vain!


Again - you paid tuition to learn these lessons - good stuff!

You'll find that a lot of offers that explicitly forbid adult traffic, will actually convert well on them. This is partly because you have a lot less competition as the offer is not allowed on adult traffic. The reason why some advertisers (i.e. offer owners) don't want adult traffic, is because they're not able to monetize that traffic as efficiently. Some affiliates would just run adult traffic anyway, and most aff networks would turn a blind eye as long as the advertiser doesn't catch you AND your traffic backs out for the advertiser so they don't bitch. That's a very personal decision that only you can make. It's similar to having to decide whether to cloak or not - profits can potentially be greater but so are the risks.


Addressed above. Definitely worth focusing more on.


The answer is a definite yes!

In fact, once you have a winner lander+offer that you feel stands a chance of becoming profitable with further optimization, you should just drill down to stats for just that lander+offer and make optimization decisions mostly based on these. If you wish to drill down to multiple levels of stats, into multiple variables, then just set your starting date and time to the time when you made your last lander+offer cut to arrive at the last winning offer+lander. That way ALL the stats you'll see, will just be from this offer+lander.


Cutting based on low CTR can also be a good way to save money.


Looking hopeful! Basically just need to run until the winning lander emerges, then collect more conversions and drill down to various stats to make some optimization decisions.


Great initial testing plan!

After some of this testing, hopefully you'll find a couple of geos you feel you'll want to focus on until you conquer them (on this and at least several other big networks).


So did you find out exactly what was causing the vast difference in CTR?


Will start a new post to avoid going over the character limit again...



Amy

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Awesome thank you Amy. Super helpful as always.

Yes! It was from my back button redirect code using Binom.

Initially I had this as the back button destination:
https://tracker.url /click.php ?lp=1&to_offer=2&event10=1

Apparently in Binom, this causes the BBR to count as a click.

To disqualify it as a click, you can add the "&exit=1" parameter:
https://tracker.url /click.php ?lp=1&to_offer=2&event10=1 &exit=1

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Moving onto this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post363663

Good call!

As you gain experience, you're more confident in your decision making. I can definitely sense it - great thing to see!


Definitely an accurate observation!

If you're a realist, you can attribute that to statistics: The more you test, the better your chances.

If you believe in energy and how we each create our own reality, then it's the BELIEF that "the more you test, the better your chances" that is resulting in the success.

Either way - testing extensively WORKS.

Warning here: I know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but it would be wise to identify a couple of geos and then focus on conquering them on multiple traffic networks. For larger geos, it takes quite an investment just to cut placements. So it would be to your advantage to run in the same geos again and again to capitalize on the initial investment. Not to mention if you already have winning landers for certain offer types for this geo, you can test new offers very quickly.


GREAT insight.

Just 2 comments:

-Regarding back button redirect: You may want to make it a habit to include this on EVERY lander, because having one is better than not having one. If you don't have one, when visitors click back they're lost anyways.

-Regarding desktop: Next time, can just target desktop in a separate campaign. If there's not a lot of traffic though, I would just focus on mobile and skip desktop altogether.


That's the way some pros do it.

On some traffic networks, the broader your targeting, the cheaper the traffic, and/or and the larger the traffic volume they'll assign to your camp.

Depending on the volume of remnant traffic, it may be worth split-testing smartlinks.


This is definitely a good approach, especially for smaller geos.

But even for larger geos, your approach would be wise - I would avoid cutting out major segments as well. But placements you can certainly cut aggressively to limit losses quickly.


Good!


*applause* I'd say you got good value out of the time and money you've spent!

Regarding which segments to cut: I would definitely start with the ones with the most-negative ROIs. And of course, you can drill down into various variables to assess the impact of cutting out a segment, on the other segments.


Congrats on switching to Binom!

Yup IP targeting is fantastic - not enough affiliates take advantage of this. Some traffic networks are using outdated IP databases that are no longer accurate. Also, being able to cut IP ranges that don't convert will give you an edge over the competition in terms of optimization.

As for monitoring tools: Pingdom is often recommended for server monitoring. As for lander domains being flagged by google - please ask Binom support - they have a feature that will do that for you. Also, Google Safe Browsing has an API that you can use - you can write a script (or have it written) to check Google Safe Browsing periodically and alert you when a domain is flagged.


Regarding how to evaluate direct-linking to an offer vs. using landers: You would use the same stats calculator, where "trials" = impressions and "successes" = conversions.

I hope you haven't been entering clicks as "trials"? Offers shouldn't be evaluated in isolation when they're pre-sold using a lander.

To be clear, "Trials" should be impressions on the lander, unless you're direct-linking, in which case it would be impressions on the offer.

As for whether to repeat lander+offer testing on each traffic network, I wouldn't recommend going this route. Pop traffic is broad, general, untargeted traffic, so results should be similar. Of course, given the volatility of pop traffic, when you repeat a split-test, even on the same traffic network, you may get a different winner each time. But in general, certain offers and landers will outperform certain other ones more/most of the time.

I'm always talking about "efficiency vs. accuracy" when it comes to campaign optimization. You can choose to repeat your testing on each traffic network, thereby be more accurate, but then you'd sacrifice on efficiency, by spending more money on testing. In each case, there should be a sweet spot on the spectrum that you can choose for yourself. In this specific case, I would recommend to just test on one traffic network, then scale the best offer+lander to all other networks.

For pop traffic, speed of execution is key, because everything is volatile so you'd want to milk profits while you still can. Offers typically don't stick around for too long either. So most of the time, efficiency should trump accuracy.

And when you scale, the 2 things you'll need to test on each new network would be 1)placements, 2) bid.

As for offer performance across multiple carriers: Yes the performance can vary, but more often than not, the variance shouldn't be night and day. So if you test an offer on one carrier and it sucks balls, I wouldn't waste money testing it on other carriers. (Of course, this is under the assumption that the conversion flow for these carriers is the same.)

Regarding PropellerAds not passing costs: I haven't had a chance to observe this. Would be really weird if all your campaigns are using the same traffic source settings in the tracker (for PropellerAds). Have you asked Binom support about this?


Nice catch! 1/10th - wow!


CONGRATS ON THE FIRST GREEN!

I know it doesn't look like a lot of money, but this is a big milestone! And with more practice, and by targeting bigger geos and/or scaling to more networks, profits will increase, and costs will come down as you become more efficient.

And your point about analyzing only data that pertains to the winning offer+lander, is of course correct.

Campaigns #1 and #3 also look promising! -50% ROI is really not bad considering camp #1 still has multiple offers rotating, and camp #3 has a ton of traffic and therefore lots of room for optimization/cutting.

And your entire post on optimization and your thought processes is simply fantastic:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post363697

I don't have a lot to add - you already know enough to further develop and refine your optimization strategy. All you need is more experience.


I would start doing all of the above now. Maybe leave the LP testing for later if you're seeing enough profits when you scale.

When scaling the same offer to other geos, "carrying-over" placement blacklists would be a great start. I HAVE seen many placements perform badly across geos, although don't have conclusive evidence. But excluding them at the start should get you to green faster, and you can always retest the placements later.

As for targeting options, unless I've observed certain traffic segments to perform badly consistently across many campaigns, I would just target everything for the new geo.

And scaling to push would be another great idea!


All good plans!

Regarding adding a generic banner: That used to work quite well and was a great way to make fast profits - I basically just threw up some generic banners and mass-tested offers. But banner traffic just converted worse and worse for me until I gave up on it altogether. By all means give it a test if you like, as long as you don't have any expectations going in.


This is normal for pop camps - especially for smaller camps with low ROI and/or profit margins. Pop camps performance tends to be volatile, so low-ROI, small profit camps tends to dip back into red easily.


Agree with you!

And the more offers+landers you test, the better your chances are of finding an offer+lander that converts well, and the less you'll need to cut to get green. But for the larger geos, unless you're running the best offer on the market and with the highest pay bump, cutting aggressively is often the way to go.


Basically: Test landers and offers on another network first and only scale the best to this network. Cutting aggressively would be the general approach.


Again, wise decisions.

And this is exactly why I'm recommending to stick with a couple of geos, then expand to others over time. It's expensive trying to break into and conquer a geo.

Went over the character limit again - will make a new post.



Amy

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You have every reason to be proud! I sure am!

And you're very welcome! And thank you for having taken all that time and effort to document in such detail everything you've done and learned. My guide can only provide a general approach. It's follow-alongs like yours that can really help new affiliates see the specifics in action.


That's very nice to hear! The attachment is inaccessible though.


So you're only $500 in the hole? That's a real feat!

Basically you've spent $500 to learn the trade. And you've learned more than what most courses or mentors can teach you - and those would certainly have cost you more than $500.

But yes, cashflow can be a real issue. Not many traffic networks will allow you to without your balance. You could certainly ask though.

And getting funds stuck across many aff networks is no fun. It's either that, or limit yourself to just running with a couple of networks. There's no easy decision there. Affiliate marketing using paid traffic is definitely a game that gets easier as you gain experience and have more cash. But in the beginning it's really tough trying to build up enough cash - and this is one of the main reasons why I always advise for affiliates to refrain from quitting their 9-5 until they're making profits consistently and are confident they'll no longer run into cashflow issues.

If you asked me, I think you've learned enough from pop to move onto something else.

Pop is easy to learn, but it's no longer easy to make consistent and major profits from.

You've used it as a learning tool. That was great!

If you wish to stick with pop, I'm not going to discourage you. After all, there are still people making very good profits there.

But in order to get there, they have moats that you don't yet have, such as a team of people, good relationships with aff networks / advertisers that can get them the best offers and payouts, good relationships with traffic networks that can get them the best traffic at cheaper pricing, etc.

Not that you can't get to where they are. You can. It's just that I believe if you'd put the same effort elsewhere, that you can potentially make better ROI on your time and money.

Push is really hot right now and lots of people are making money. I don't know how long that will last, but you can capitalize on it while it does.

If you're looking for something more long-term, Facebook and Adwords would be my recommendations. SEO would be another good one, but it takes longer. So a good approach would be to do paid traffic first to make fast profits, and at the same time set up SEO sites and grow them over time into valuable assets you can profit from far into the future, or sell off eventually. Ecommerce is also something you can grow over time into a long-term asset, and you can use both paid traffic and free traffic to grow this business. List-building is another great option that can be done using paid and free traffic. And if you do ecom, learning to nurture your list of customers to increase life-time value would be a must.

Again, apologies for my absence as of late, but you've managed to figure out so much on your own already - so all's well that ends well. I believe in everything happening - or not happening - for a reason. Keeping a follow-along may have provided more motivation for you to approach everything you did in a more systematic way, and the lack of input may have "forced" you to be more independent and creative in thinking for yourself.

I've followed a LOT of follow-alongs over the last 3 years I've been moderator, and many affiliates were very lost in the beginning and could have given up if they hadn't been led by the hand. You're not in that group. You have very impressive analytical skills, superb common sense, and in spite of not having a lot of cash, were bold in testing many approaches, and many offers.

And you DID come a LONG way in a month. If you reread this follow-along, you'd see that in the beginning you were not certain about anything, and then with more experience you became more and more confident which really showed in your later posts.

I'm confident that no matter which traffic type you choose to conquer next, that you'll become a master at it.

The only limit I see is the amount of cash you have at your disposal. See if you could get something going on the side to make some stable income. You'll find that having money come in can have a huge impact on how willing you are to spend it on testing - which as you have seen is one of the keys to success in this business.

Please do update us on your progress from time to time, whether it be in this thread or new ones. I look forward to subsequent updates from you! And thanks again for having created such an amazing follow-along!




Amy

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It was my understanding that for FB and Adwords, uniqueness and added value played a role in ads getting accepted or at least not banned. So wouldn't that rule out most types of affiliate offers?

I thought that this is why most people were doing Ecom with these traffic sources, as it's quite easy to determine automatically that an LP is just used as a doorway pointing to the same domain as a bunch of other ads (as it he case with affiliate offers) but not so with Shopify stores as one would have to manually identify the similarities between products. Plus for some reason physical products are usually treated a bit better.

For SEO, just my 2 cents after building a nutra site with >60k unique users a month to see it crash&burn during the Medic update: From what I've been reading, the general consensus is to avoid niches that you can get a university degree on, unless you and/or your writers have significant credentials and social media presence in the niche. Apparently the EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, trust) profiling of Google has tightened quite a bit and even people who are legit professionals in some fields have been hit (e.g. sites of medical practices, opticians, etc). That includes the Your-Money-Your-Life niches (finance, health) but not only.

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Thank you so much for the vote of confidence Amy.

You're definitely right on the finances. I do have access to additional capital if I end up profitable -- it's during the learning phase though that's tough. I might try to find a way to bring in an extra $1K-$2K or so a month for additional testing budget (anyone need any extra hands on anything? I'm a jack of all trades and operate best with CEO types who needs someone to be on top of everything/everyone/operations )

Might also try to tighten up my personal budget significantly to free up testing budget as well, though it wouldn't be without straining some personal relationships.

One fortunate thing on the finances is that I can use these losses to offset income from my current gig for taxes, so that's good.
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My next step is to figure out exactly what I'm going to focus on next.

I was pretty sure that I was going to try to invest my time to get pops to a consistent $XX-XXX/day, but now I'm starting to second guess myself.

It seems like all of the big guys are on FB, so that's where I'm currently leaning, although push does sound appealing for short term profits -- I don't think it's a good idea to split focus between both though.

I almost wish that someone would just come to me and tell me which TS and vertical to focus on, so I can hyperfocus on those without second guessing myself, but I know pretty much anything that's been proven, works. It's just a matter of choosing and committing.

Will need to make the decision the next couple of days.

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If you're talking about shady CPA offers - then I agree with you. But there are perfectly legitimate products and services that offer good affiliate commissions.

Some of them can be found on affiliate networks we're familiar with, but you can also look at networks like commission junction, shareasale, linkshare...

Plus, many companies have in-house affiliate programs that aren't offered through a network. They'll all just a google search away.

And then of course there are ecom offers - networks like Giddyup, Affiliaxe, MagicHygeia and many others, all have ecom offers of physical products. (Disclaimer: STM does not endorse any aff networks - please join at your discretion.)

And then there are "greyhat" offers like sweepstakes, that can be run on FB without getting account bans very often, if you stick with more whitehat advertising angles.

I'm not an expert in FB (yet), but I don't believe FB has a problem with multiple people sending traffic to the same end domain, as long as the domain isn't associated with scams, or blackhat practices, or has content that contains keywords that trigger FB's filters.

Thanks so much for sharing your experiences about your nutra site - and sorry to hear! That's very valuable advice. In the end, no matter what type of business we're in, there are risks. We do all tend to generalize by saying SEO sites have longer longevity than paid traffic campaigns (I preach that all the time myself), and overall speaking it is true (or I wouldn't keep telling people so). But every business is different, as is every business owner, so individual cases will be different.

Have you built any other sites since then? I hope that setback hasn't deterred you from SEO for good!

Thanks again for all the advice!



Amy

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I haven't built any other sites because I first need to figure out what went wrong, even though I don't plan to launch any new health-related sites. That site went from 2k visitors a day to 100 a day and all content was legit with scientific references and links. Interestingly enough, I recently removed the 1 affiliate link it had (it was nofollow and redirected through prettylinks, a wordpress plugin) as well as any repeating text in pages such as "Editors tip: try reading our review of X".

Since then I saw a sharp increase to 300 visitors a day within a week. Long way from 2k but let's see if it keeps rising. But it makes me think that the only way for SEO sites nowadays is to build an email list and completely mask any affiliate or promotional intentions, at least for nutra and health.

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Just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading your follow-along and I learned a bunch of stuff while reading it.

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That's a really nice tip!

And it makes perfect sense - affiliates are notorious for being aggressive/misleading in promoting products. And google is getting better and better at identifying text/words associated with that kind of approach. So when google sees a lot of sites with this kind of content all pointing to an affiliate product (prettylinks or not), it would make sense for them to "ding" everyone in that neighborhood.

I agree that email marketing may be the best way forward. Messenger chat would be another. Push notifications would be a 3rd. Same idea though: We need to own our traffic and be able to communicate with them directly.

Thanks again for sharing such valuable "in the trenches" experience @cochiloco!



Amy

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@angle-lytics Have you figured out your next step? A penny for your thoughts.



Amy

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Yes! My latest follow-along is here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...st-stop-XX-day


I wanted to run FB, but found myself procrastinating for almost 2-3 weeks while researching content and strategies around FB accounts. I have a main one that I use to help with my friend's health foods eComm store that I didn't want to compromise. I'm still a bit confused on what exactly people are referring to when they talk about 'accounts' though (FB accounts? Ad accounts? Both, depending on the context...similar to 'traffic sources'?). Either way, I'm warming up some accounts at the moment!

Since I was itching to run some traffic, I thought going into Adult display would be fun, as it's kind of the closest thing to the version of AM that I had in my head all these years -- plus I thought learning Adult would be something that I could take lessons from for years to come.

A LOT of the lessons that I learned from going through your guide helped me get started without much friction!

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Ah right I saw that follow-along! Didn't notice it was started by you as well.

I see that matuloo is helping you with that one - you're in great hands! Kudos for making the jump - although adult has become a bit too competitive in recent months/years. I would sooner recommend push or native or FB or Adwords. But there's ALWAYS a way to make something work, and you're already seeing some green, so have fun with that!

Regarding FB: When people refer to accounts they mean both FB+Ad accounts. The 2 are bundled together, and activity on the personal part of the account can affect the ad account considerably. As a mod I can't really discuss accounts in detail, but you can rent them or buy them - or farm them like what you're doing. There are account renters/sellers lurking on the forum - do a search, and/or browse a lot of threads in the FB section and look at members' signatures. Not all are genuine and there are scammers out there, so if you want to go this route, be careful.

Have fun with Adult!



Amy

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