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Here’s my 40 Day Follow Along

I’m an ex TV dramatist, mid fifties, with a decent online business already.

My next step in life and career is to get out of a very narrow niche and into this wide open water of affiliate marketing.

Here’s my introduction

Here’s my vision statement

DAY 1

Before I started this morning I thought about strengths and weaknesses

Strengths

• I’ve initiated the shut down of my previous business and this is now my only business venture. Focus is now total. (“To take the island first burn the bridges”)
• I’m pretty quick on the uptake, with a lot of broad technical and marketing experience
• Strong copywriting skills
• Integrity - I’m in this to help people
• A track record of success in a very competitive industry
• Living funds for six months plus a decent budget of very low xx,xxx to approach this

Weaknesses

• I can be poor on organisation - I’m going to have to be super diligent about my records and experiment design and implementation as I tend to race ahead out of excitement and then lose track of where I am
• I sometimes lose confidence and get defeated too easily - I will have to monitor and nurture my self-belief
• I don’t know any other affiliate marketers. This forum is going to be terrific but I need to meet others in the London/SE England area.
• Consistency - my sometimes emotional intuitive methods that worked great as a writer are not so helpful when what is needed is focus and repetition.

Daily affirmation:

God is good.
I am called
I am equipped
The best is yet to come

WORK

• Application for Mobidea - successful
• Application for Clickdealer - completed pending acceptance
• Application for Gotzha - completed pending acceptance
• Application for PropellerAds - successful
• Application for PopAds - successful
• I had already been playing around with FunnelFlux, so have the hosted solution and a domain already.
• I’ve been reading around on STM for a couple of months, so already have that reading covered.

QUESTIONS

None so far.

NOTES

Just FYI, here is the text I used when asked to talk about myself. Comments would be welcome (if I'm committing any obvious mistakes let me know!)

"I've been working as an internet market since 2007, serving the X niche in the UK from mywebsite.com

In the last tax year 2017-18 my company XXX 's gross revenue was £X (approx $k USD). 100% of this revenue was generated from my internet marketing activities.

Over the years I've become an expert email marketer but only in the service of my own products and services. I now want to get out my current tiny niche and move into a bigger marketplace so I can really turn up the volume.

I'm following Vortex's excellent 40 day tutorial on STM forum, and want to begin by getting to £XX,XXX profit per month within six months. To make this happen I've allocated an R&D budget of £X (c.$Xk) to put into learning affiliate marketing."

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DAY 2

WORK

Applied for five Mobidea offers - all five approved instantly.

One offer analysed in the spreadsheet supplied.

QUESTIONS

None.

NOTES

The quality of Vortex’ tutorials is outstanding. So easy to navigate through.

The one offer picked so far is was a gaming offer, direct billing, double optin on Vivacom in Bulgaria.

Now I need to wait for other networks to approve me so I can pick different offers.

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Love it man! Keep up the good work!

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DAY 9

(Done immediately after Day 2 because I had an offer approved in Mobidea)

WORK

Started at 7.00 am.

Decided to press ahead and set up the first Mobidea camp while I’m waiting for the other two networks to approve me.

Found this thread from Amy which explained how to set up the first campaign in Funnelflux - again, thanks SO much - made it a breeze and I took about a hour to complete this.

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...elflux-version

QUESTIONS

None

NOTES

Interesting how mindset is key - though I’ve been playing with Funnelflux a while now I’m still not at all happy that I can manage it, and I just had got the idea of it being super complex and challenging.

That had subconsciously been lurking for several weeks and putting me off starting the whole thing.

I had realised that over this weekend and was ready to do battle, but it still took an effort. Finally getting past that and diving in was a battle this morning - I even considered abandoning ship and going to Voluum at one point - but finding the step by step guide I list above was absolute gold and in the end it took hardly any time at all.

Your mind can be your own worst enemy, and I reckon this is the real battle with this stuff.

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DAY 10

Actually followed on directly from Day 9 above.

WORK

I had hassle getting the approval for the payment into PropellerAds - my fault, I’d forgotten my bank approval code - lengthy call to them got that reset.

Launched the first PropellerAds campaign about 8.45 am London time.

It was approved and working by 08.53.

Showed 11 impressions by 08.59, Seems super fast.

Checked that the offer was set up by checking the Tracker report in Mobidea - all good.

At 11.20:

Funnelflux showed 693 visits and no conversions

Propeller Ads showed 707 impressions and no click, no conversions for a cost of $1.65

Mobidea showed 56 visits, 56 clicks, no signups (100% LP CTR)

At this point I realised I’d set it running as CPM, not Smart CPM (I’d used the old forum thread in the previous post thread to specify bidding strategy.)

I left that campaign running to gather data and started work on creating a second camp for this offer using Smart CPM.

At which point I ran into a problem with FunnelFlux.

I’d be creating a second campaign going to the same offer inside Propeller Ads with (hopefully) better traffic. This leads to question 3 below.

I was contacted by a Clickdealer rep by email, asking me to reach out on Skype with answers to a set of questions. I did so and had a pretty frustrating time with the rep - they read my answers, then kept me hanging for over an hour, dripping the occasional question through, then after an hour there was nothing but silence their end. I had to leave for a meeting, so we postponed, and I reached out when I got back, but still no response. Strange way to run an interview, but I'm expecting it will all be OK.

I'm now deep in the mire with Funnelflux again, something about this system doesn't stick with me, not sure why. It's proving very hard to conceptualise it and I'm really missing a centralised Step by Step guide. Just doesn't come together for some reason. Will continue, and spend tomorrow really sinking into it.

QUESTIONS

1. Is Mobidea stats data really delayed an hour? I was seeing data within ten mins of launching.

2. Why are the Mobidea stats so different to the rest?

3. To create a second campaign in PropellerAds to go to the same offer, just with different traffic, should I create a new campaign inside FunnelFlux, or just a different funnel inside the same campaign?

4. Given the popularity of Voluum and the fact all this training is in Voluum, might it be better to go to Voluum from the beginning? I'm using the cloud based version of FF and given the current new low price of Voluum is $224 / month so there is currently only $45 per month difference in pricing at the moment.

NOTES

This is feeling very complicated already - I want a bigger screen! I guess it all settles down once you've done it a few times - but do people tend to have giant screens in general? Are there many people out there really working only on a laptop? If I'm going to need a desktop setup it's going to seriously impact my plans for the wandering lifestyle!

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Hey celador, thanks for posting this follow-along! I started one just a few days before you. Will be following along closely!

I'm going to take a shot at your questions, hopefully my answers are right (someone please correct me if I'm wrong!), but it might get you moving faster than waiting for someone more knowledgeable to respond:
1) No clue, but I don't really closely watch the stats by the hour
2) It shouldn't be that different. My tracker and Mobidea are *relatively* close to each other. (49K clicks on my tracker, vs 36K on Mobidea). There are a few threads that you should expect ~20% differences, but the difference in yours is enormous. In order of priority, I would: [a] double check and manually check to make sure the campaign link is redirecting properly to the offer, and [b] try again with a different offer. I saw that you have a relatively large learning budget -- I wouldn't be afraid of blowing an extra $10-20 on traffic here and there, just so you can learn a bit faster.
3) I would just do this to get past this quickly -- create a new campaign in funnelflux, and create a new campaign in prop ads. Consider the first $2 that you spent as money spent for a learning experience. Who knows, the "correct" answer might be to merge the two campaigns and utilize all of the data at our disposal, but I think we have bigger things to worry about at this stage!
4) No comment -- I'm using ThriveTracker, and after understanding how tracking works, I'm confident that I can set up any tracker relatively quickly. Would be happy to hop on Skype or something with you if you need any quick help along the way!

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Hey there!

Have you considered using ThriveTracker? Just like angle-lytics said above, once you understand tracking, you can get setup with most any platform relatively quickly. The difference with thrive is having the ability to start with a great platform at an affordable pricepoint. No skimping on features or quality, just offering a plan that competes for both value AND performance.

I'd be happy to chat more with you on the option. Please feel free to message me here or find me on Skype!

Cheers,

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Thanks for the comments above guys.

I had a lot of problems with the links I'd set up. I battled FunnelFlux another day, then decided that, for whatever reason, it's not clicking with me (too complex and subtle for where I am right now - or the graphical mode doesn't sit right with - whatever) so I needed to move on.

Looked at Voluum and was about to commit when I read a review of Redtrack by IamAttila and read his step by step guide. Redtrack is 1/10 of the price of Voluum with his discount and looked pretty straightforward, I liked what the founder Vlad says in a YouTube video , and they do a free trial, so I hopped on to experiment.

Suddenly tracking seemed a whole lot easier and I finally got up and running.

So I've set up and run three Mobidea campaigns - and now I'm into the next set of questions and I'm getting very different stats depending on whether I look at PropellerAds, Mobidea, or Redtrack.

Here are the results after a day - I've just broken one down into spreadsheet form here, but all three show this kind of difference, with more or every stat being different wherever you look.



As the last column shows I'm apparently earning from sending traffic to Egypt that isn't being converted by my offer?

Has anyone any clues on what's going on?

Also I've asked Mobidea support a few questions via the onsite chat box but am getting zero response after three days which is getting pretty frustrating. Is there a more direct route through?

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What you are experiencing is called "click loss" and it's an inevitable part of the paid traffic game.

Traffic sources will generally always show the most clicks ... they count every single hit or impressions, do not care about uniques/raws/sessions. It's in their interest to show as high numbers as possible, so to speak. There can be bots in the mix, some fishy clicks etc.

Tracker also counts everything, but due to the nature of the internet and the infrastructure, some hits will get lost in the redirect. There are many reasons for that : natural loss due to connectivity issues, some tech problems with either the ISP or the hosting or some browser/phone problems.

Affiliate networks always show the least clicks. Contrary to traffic networks, for affiliate networks, it's better to show less traffic ... it makes the EPCs look better They also do some pre-filtering (bots, VPNs ...) and usually show uniques, which drives the volumes down.

So to lose certain & of the traffic is normal, but it shouldn't be like 50% of course To lose about 10-20% between traffic source and tracker is ok, the finall loss between tracker and afffiliate network depends on the setup of a particular network and they way they count traffic.

You need to make sure your funnels are optimized, so fast loading speeds, no hosting problems. If that works fine, focus on the final ROI and ignore the clickloss.

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THanks Matuloo,

OK, click loss makes sense.

But, digging deeper...

1. Is it possible/likely that 13 out of 14 conversions are bots/fraudulent? On the one hand Mobidea seems to disallow 13/14 them for this offer - on the other hand they are saying I somehow got 18 conversions somehow on another offer in Egypt which I didn't set up. (And 18 is more conversions than either Redtrack/PropellerAds see.)

2. Happy to ignore most of the data and focus on the bit that counts, but which do I trust? The payout on the offer in Mobidea is $1.05 yet Redtrack is reporting $1.6. What's more the cost reported by RedTrack, (because of this clickloss?) is lower than the real cost - that means ROI or profit calculations generated inside RedTrack will always be inaccurate. Is there a way of allowing for that?

3. Why would Mobidea say that c.21,505 visits out of 22,832 were received but never reached the offer? This is SmartCPM traffic from PropellerAds, is it possible it's 94% bots?

Thanks, Phil

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Oh, totally overlooked the miss-matched conversions and only focused on the traffic figures, sorry

So what probably happened here was that large part of your traffic didn't match the required targeting of the offer you were promoting, so Mobidea redirected it to another offer that was able to take this traffic. Or there was a cap on the offer, once it was reached, the traffic went to a fall-back offer. Hard for me to say which one of the two cases is right, their AM has to confirm one or the other.

In order to reach accurate revenue data, use the "payout" token from Mobidea, so the correct amount is passed to your tracker. I don't have an account with them right now, so can't check what the exact syntax would be, but it must be part of your postback link.

You need to adjust the click cost in your tracker, to match the real price, taking the loss into consideration. So basically, up it by the % that equals to the loss.

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Thanks Matuloo.

That makes sense and I'll try again to reach Mobidea.

The postback link is generated by RedTrack and is currently:

http://mydomain.com/postback?clickid={{EXTERNAL_ID}}&sum={{MONEY}}&eve nt={event}&sub1={{WEBSITE_ID}}&sub2={{PLACEMENT}}

Does that make sense given no payout token? Or should I add it in as an extra parameter manually?

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I think the {{MONEY}} string is the token I'm talking about, not sure why the numbers don't match then. I didnt use redtrack yet, is it possible that you have to enable automatic payout settings? It's that way in Voluum for example, you can either set a manual payout in the tracker or leave it up to the postback.

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Hey Phil,

If you read my followalong I was having the same issues.
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First, on the payouts on valid conversions...
Mobidea was passing junk values in the MONEY token in the postback. One time, they passed 1 cent on a valid conversion. Checking mobidea, I saw that the concersion did in fact come through as 1 cent. 12 hours later, it updated to 1.05.
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Second were the inaccuracies in the conversions themselves...
I think there are 2 sources for this. One was, on 3 of the 3-4 offers I've run for them, the offers either change or are capped after my first few conversions. This is definitely frustrating, but what can you do.

There was one campaign where my tracker showed 2 conversion and MobIdea showed 7. Within Mobidea, these extras all reflected a payout of .01-.10. If you look at your reporting and segment by offer, I would bet you that your extra conversions are attributed to a non-existant offer. Any that are correctly attributed should match your tracker.

As matuloo mentioned, I have a feeling these are redirected traffic due to the offer being shut off or capped.

I also sent in support tickets days ago and have yet to hear back.
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On the click cost inaccuracies, I think there might be a linked post in the followalong that basically says that every day, you should be going in and manually update costs (your tracker should have a setting/option for this)

Later on, you can do this programmatically through APIs, but I think it's just one of those annoying things you just have to do.


Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

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Thanks for all your input guys, really helpful. I've got a lot of issues with Mobidea - just random traffic going all over the place even a few days after PropellerAds tells me the ads are closed, conversions at crazy rates, earnings that are going up even though no conversions for a few days, 1cent payments, etc etc. I have to track down a Mobidea account rep/support person to talk to about this as I'm sure it all makes sense, just seems weird from the outside. I've put in another email and will do a deep dive into the data along with the (very responsive) Redtrack support in the meantime, as I feel I need to really understand this if I'm going to move forward in a consistent way. I'll post a summary of what I find when I get it resolved

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There is a ton of other affiliate networks, so if Mobidea isn't clicking for you, feel free to explore the other options. From what I know, they are solid guys, but they don't necessarily have to be the right match for everyone.

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Yeah, was wondering about that Matuloo. I may well do. But I've found out a couple of things which help -

- I reached out on LinkedIn to a sales manager - she told me that the Support team were OOO last week, but things should be back to normal from now on. Seems odd. But OK, we'll see.
- Digging into the stats on Mobidea I found some real oddities - all probably because I hadn't selected the required carrier on the PropellerAds end so PA was sending these offers all sorts of traffic from all sorts of carriers. Looks like Mob was handling that as best it can and I was still managing to generate some income. Which is nice.

I'm going to try a camp with this set up properly and see where I get to.

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Sorry for the late arrival celador! But matuloo has taken great care of you it looks like, and I see great input from angle-lytics - it's always nice seeing new affiliates helping each other out!

This is the toughest stage - sorting out tracking issues and getting attention from AMs (which is hard because you haven't really made money for them yet) and learning how to interpret stats and why they're all different etc., but smoother-sailing is just around the corner!

Regarding accuracy of costs in tracker: This is a common issue. I haven't yet seen 100% accurate cost reporting from traffic network to tracker (Voluum+Zeropark is the only exception, because they're the same company and therefore have access to each other's database.) You can do a manual-adjustment, but even then, the cost would only be accurate on the campaign level, but not on the placement level or OS level (or any-traffic-segment-level).

With pop traffic though, most of the time you don't need to make decisions based on very accurate stats. Estimation/Approximation is often good enough when it comes to cutting placements etc.

What I would do is figure out the approximate percentage difference between the cost shown in the tracker, and the actual cost as per traffic network stats. Then I would just mentally make the adjustment when I'm looking at placement stats etc. (e.g. If there's around 30% difference, I would just add 30% to the costs I see in the tracker.) It's not the most accurate way, but for cutting placements etc. it's good enough.

I love your vision and affirmations! Do keep that up - it IS all in the mind - the reality will shape itself around that, not the other way around (unless you get hung up on current reality!)

Looking forward to your next installment!



Amy

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Thanks for those notes re costing Amy. Taken on board.

Wanted to divert today into a little note about mindset. I'm pretty excited, for two reasons.

Firstly

I started to get tracking sorted!

Looking back over the last week it's been one long mess of horror - utterly bogged down in setting up trackers, going round and round in circles, getting nowhere, reading all I can, not taking it in, just feeling I'm floundering.

I started with FunnelFlux, got nowhere really. Moved on to RedTrack. Got somewhere, but couldn't tie all the parts together. Realised that FunnelFlux was looking easier now I'd read lots more, went back to it, got a bit further - still couldn't make the darn thing work properly.

I've always been avoiding Voluum, from cost reasons mainly. But every time I looked at any of their docs, or looked at Amy's work on here, I really wanted it. Those docs looked really helpful.

Finally, today, one long lost week of frustration later, I paid for the first month with their current discount offer, bit the bullet and signed up for a month.

Walking through Amy's step by step guides on here it took me twenty minutes to go from scratch and get the first campaign up, and reporting real accurate data in real time. Now I have these worked examples in my notes file I can suddenly see what I've been trying to get hold of all week.

Any Lessons?

1. Tracking is central - don't skimp
Trying to save myself a few £££ in monthly costs (and not that many £££ as Voluum's new discount is not much more expensive than the hosted FunnelFlux I was using) has cost me a week of my time, and SO much mental pain.

I can only imagine how much time I'd lose in the future too.

If you have no experience, and you're not very techie, and you are a bit dense like me, really seriously look at how much clear info and walkthroughs are out there for the tracker you choose before you dive in.

2. I'm not nearly so smart as I thought
I thought it would be easy to make the other trackers work but I failed totally. FunnelFlux and Red Track are amzing products, and their documentation is great, don't get me wrong, plus the support teams of each tried to help me, but when you're as dense as I clearly am it takes simple step by step, worked examples for the specific affiliate network and the specific traffic source before I stood a chance of working out what's going on.

3. Step by steps are great
It's all very well trying to get a hold of the theory - and now I have a loose hold of a ton of theory - but the first tracking company to offer a library of written (not video) walk throughs that show you exactly how to plug in each network and traffic source is going to clean up.

I bet there are tons of people like me who go round and round in circles and give up simply because they can't make it work.

And secondly...

The other reason I'm excited today? I'm actually in the green on one of the old camps I set up in the middle of yesterday's mess: two signups, something like £2 profit on £0.40 costs. Wahoo! Everyone who said even a little green would make a difference to your state of mind, you're right. It's massive!

Thanks to everyone who has tried to help me in the thread above - appreciated.

Really looking forward to the next stage now.

Phil

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One more thing - this simple conceptual flow is what I've worked out. I think it's good - it seems to be working pretty well so far. I post it in case it can help others. Looking at it I can't believe how long it took me to get here, but, hey.

(I've replaced the specifics with Voluum-domain and xx's where you will get your own specific data)

PropellerAds sends traffic to Voluum offer:
http://voluum-domain.com/xxxx?zoneid={zoneid}&device={device}&browser={brow ser}&os={os}&country={country}&region={region}&isp ={isp}&useragent={useragent}&language={language}&c onnectiontype={connectiontype}&cost={cost}&visitor _id=${SUBID}

Voluum redirects that traffic to a Mobidea offer:
https://www.rotatemyurls.com/offer/xxx|xxx?tag={clickid}&website={trafficsource.id}&placement ={campaign.id}

Mobidea posts traffic data and conversions back to Voluum
http://voluum-domain.com/postback?cid={{EXTERNAL_ID}}&payout={{MONEY}}

Voluum posts data back to PropellerAds:
http://ad.propellerads.com/conversion.php?aid=xxxxxx&tid=xxxxx&visitor_id=${S UBID}

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Everything gets so much easier once you understand the tracking flow! Awesome job.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

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Tracking does look confusing at the beginning, it's not just you, we've all been through that stage. But once it clicks together, you will be able to use whatever tracking solution you want as they are all the same fundamentally.

It's great that you got it sorted at last and seeing some conversions and even a green campaign is priceless

Looking forward to your next updates.

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Quick observation - I'm running a direct linking pops campaign on PropellerAds to Egypt.

Mobile only on Orange, all the extended traffic options off.

I’ve got the campaign max daily spend at $20, with the Smart CPM bid at the maximum of $1.20.

(PropellerAds currently recommends $0.8 but I was curious to see what the max spend would do.)

PropellerAds predicts 25,000 impressions a day (which seems incredibly low to me given there are nearly 30 million smart phone users in Egypt. Which means PA are reaching 0.09% of phone users)

And actually I’m only getting 8,500 impressions even with that daily maximum set - it seems that PropellerAds spend won’t seem ever to go above about $5.

Does that seem right? No matter what I pay there are only 8,500 impressions available to me in the whole of Egypt on Orange per day?

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3G traffic is always quite limited, there is way more volume in WIFI. Plus propeller doesn't have access to all the smartphone users in EG either. Some networks are stronger in some GEOs and weak in others, depends on how they obtain their traffic etc ...

8500 seems a bit low anyways, maybe try to up the budget and make sure you are not limiting the targeting in any way.

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It's on full budget - ie max possible click price, and $20 / day when it's only spending about $5.

Checked the targetting and can't see anything strange. I've just used the Voluum Suspicious traffic stats to clean out placements with over 10 visits and over 40% suspicious traffic - including a lot of 100% suspicious traffic placements - and the max possible dipped to 17k.

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Try to raise the budget anyways, I'm not sure about their particular algo, but some networks do limit delivery for campaigns with low daily budgets, or even low account balance ... So it's always worth a try.

But could be that they really don't have more volume in that GEO. Traffic prices for Egypt are usually quite low, so the traffic networks don't really try to get more traffic in such countries.

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If an offer is in a remote GEO with mobile, how do you actually check out to make sure it's kosher (in my case for example non-adult). Just had a set of offers disallowed in PropellerAds cos they were adult. I was flying them blind because I didn't know how to see what the offers were. (Assumed they were not adult as they said adult traffic not allowed. Error, clearly.)

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If the offer you're pushing is not adult, AND you're sure you're targeting traffic that is allowed by the offer, then chances are it's the reviewer at the traffic network that is being redirected to another offer (because they're from another geo or using wifi to check out your destination campaign.

Try to get a screenshot of the offer page from the aff network and send that to the traffic network's support. Sometimes that does the job.



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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And on top of what Amy suggested above my post, try to talk to your AM and ask to get fallback redirects turned off. In case you're not sure what fallbacks are, check my older blog post on it : http://www.matuloo.com/damn-fallback...es-fight-them/

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@celador,

Thank you for sharing. Happy to hear it works for you.
We can schedule a screen-sharing session to help you with data slicing / dicing - will be happy to share some insights.

Vlad

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