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Can I reach $5k/mo? Yet Another Follow-Along! (32)

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Hi all,

After some deliberation and reading, I've decided to start yet another follow-along on this forum, to note down any "aha" moments that others might find useful, and to also have a useful context to refer to when posting questions.

Goal is to see if I can reach $5k/mo with pop traffic, then perhaps move to push and then native.

Without further ado, let's get started:


Infra:
1 dedicated server in Germany for both tracking & LP domains + cloudflare + ns1 DNS
Binom as tracker
Adplexity account

Landers:
Ripped sweep from Adplexity for various tier3/4 geos

Offers:
Strangely enough, I couldn't find that many offers (SOI leadgen sweeps in tier3/4) in the 3 networks mentioned in the guide. Also spoke with the AMs and only 1 of them provided me with 2 offers. The others said they only have good converting offers in tier 1/2 geos and that they don't have cap for any other offer. I'm hoping this is just a low point in the sweeps business cycle so to speak and that more offers will be available to test soon.


Day 1:
Traffic source: PropellerAds 3G + WiFi with $15 daily spend per campaign
Landers: 2
Offers: 2 ($1.5 payout)

Negative return but not too bad. First line is 3G traffic and 2nd is WiFi.


Also, it seems that one offer is green with both landing pages:
(this is 2 offers x 2 landers tested)



I also noticed that traffic is spread quite evenly around zones so I couldn't really identify any high volume placements nor did any placements reach a spend equal or more that of the offer payout.

So for day 2 I decided to pause the other offer and continue running across all zones to get more data.


Day 2:
Not sure what happened here. The traffic is a lot less so either I need to raise my bid or the timezone of my Binom instance is different to that of my propellerads account. Also for some reason the green offer is a lot less green now.
Maybe I didn't pause the other offer in time to be in sync with the reporting dates on binom.

1 zone had a spend more than the payout with no conversions so I blacklisted it. But at this rate it's going to take forever. I've increased my bid in hopes of getting a bit more traffic.

Day 3:
Lol, it seems one of the campaigns is green now

But there are 2 problems. First of all, this is the WiFi campaign which is very weird, as it was always the 3G one that was converting. Not sure what to make of this. Perhaps there are more zones from wifi traffic so I just happened to fall into a good one. Second, it is still not reaching the $15 a day spend per 3G/WiFi type of campaign set on propellerads, so maybe I need to increase the bid more. And the 3G campaigns is now performing worse.

I will increase my bids again for day 4 and see what happens. Right now I'm at $1.2 CPM which is definitely above the first flattening point in the propellerads traffic diagram and close to the offer payout, hence the reason for increasing it slowly.

Also, I still get different numbers in Binom when I set the report date to "yesterday" vs the actual date of yesterday, which I find very strange.

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Day 4:

Offer died lol! At least I found out what landers worked.

I've asked one of my AMs for more offers so waiting to see what comes out of that.

Still a bit strange that other AMs aren't able to come up with more SOI sweeps for tier3/4 though. I'll keep looking and researching.

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Wifi can convert fine with lead gen offers, you don't need to focus just on 3G traffic. 3G was a must for PIN submits, but with simpleemail soi offers, wifi is fine to use.

These GEOs are harder to monetize when it comes to email leads, if you still struggle to find more offers, just move up a tier. Do not target the most competitive ones like USA or UK, but many european GEOs can do well.

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This is a good start! Any progress?



Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Thanks for the interest Amy!

I'm launching campaigns and testing offers but doing it very slowly because I still can't find that many offers. My AM from Clickdealer only seems to have Tier 1 geos, for both proven converting offers but also new ones. And in Gotzha I'm now trying some from Planet49 that my AM says are new, although most pay something like $0.05-$0.50 so not sure if they can really be profitable at such low payouts. And many of them have limitations such as only pay for leads over 23 years of age, etc, which is not something I can target in PropellerAds.

Will test the few remaining ones from Gotzha, also a good opportunity to build a portfolio of working landers and then see if moving to Mobidea offers is any better

Best,
Alex

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Low payouts are not a problem, in many cases you can actually make more $ with low payout offers. But obviously, there are limits to this ... $0.05 offers are hard to profit with, the traffic prices don't allow it to happen in most cases. $0.50 sounds better, I've done a LOT of $ with such offers in India, since they had very simple flows and the traffic very cheap. Anyways, you won't know until you test, so don't judge any offer based solely on it's payout.

You're right, targeting by age is not really possible on the waste majority of affiliate friendly networks. In such cases, you simply test the offer and see if it converts high enough to make up for it. Another trick is to use a landing page that asks about the age, so in your case it would be "are you older than 23 years?" ... and send those that answer "NO" to an offer that doesn't have age requirements.

Tier1 GEOs are more competitive, but that doesn't mean you have to avoid them like plague. The main reason that we recommend to start with lower tiers is the lower traffic cost, which means the initial learning phase will require lower budget. But as soon as you master the basics, feel free to explore the more competitive areas too.

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Lol, yeah that's kind of what I've been doing

I've tried some SG offers but paused them with no conversions. The BR ones at 0.05 are actually showing some green placements, even without drilling down per OS, Browser, etc. Interestingly enough, after drilling down, only android traffic is green, which is similar to what some other follow-alongs are showing.

My lander domain got banned/flagged by google though. I guess a 0.05 offer that's converting enough to be profitable has to be a bit aggressive or fishy, so I'm wondering if I should continue with it or just find something else.

I'll get a few more domains to have ready if one of them gets banned again and I will also try a few tier 1/2 geos!

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I never had solid success with that low paying offers, I've tested quite a few and if my memory serves me right, the lowest one that I was able to make good profits with was like 15 or 20 cents.

Personally, I would try to look for a bit higher paying ones.

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Matuloo has answered all questions beautifully. I don't have much else to add.

If android segment is green that's a VERY good sign! Why not continue?

And, low-payout offers are very good for a new affiliate that wants to learn optimization for cheap! You get lots of conversions to help make decisions, for a relatively low spend (of course this is assuming the offer converts decent).

Many offers that are suitable for pop traffic are fishy. If that's a problem for you, try to use pop as a learning tool only - once you have some experience on testing and optimization, expand into other traffic types.



Amy

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following and push.
personally doing revcontent with wordpress LP as well.
usually what payout serve the best , say payout range? thinking USD30-100 ?
if i use 3x cost rule and declare offer fails, is that legit?
e.g. offer payout USD30, and spent USD90 with no sales = give up campaign and try another one..?

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Most people do well with native traffic when using higher payout offers, but $100 is really a lot, you would need mad budgets to properly test such offers. Which is fine for those who know what they are doing, but I wouldn't start with anything like that. $30 might be fine, but not much more than that.

3x rule is fine, but it's not meant to be used as a rule for the WHOLE campaign. When we talk about rules like this, it's about per-placement or per-small-targeting-segment... etc. Let's say you want to test certain LP, if that one particular LP wont bring a lead after 3x payout spent on traffic, and all the other parts of the funnel are in line, that probably means the LP is not good and you can pause it.

Keep in mind that every campaign (funnel) comprises of several elements, so to properly test each of them, you need to spend more than 3x payout.

On top of that, every traffic source has many placements, zones or widgets ... so technically, you should test each of them separately, as the traffic quality can vary from one to the next.

This combination of factors makes it very hard/expensive to properly test every part of the funnel with a high payout offer, that's why we recommend the new affiliates to start with low payout offers. These offers always convert much easier than higher payout ones, so you need way less traffic to see if there is any potential.

The situation is different if you already have some experience or have a funnel that you know is a proven converter. If such a campaign doesn't see a single sale/lead after 3x payouts, there is a problem somewhere for sure and there is no need to go on with it, until you identify what the problem is.

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Thank you very much matuloo! I love your blog btw!

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Yes, I also noticed it was way too volatile for me to be able to reach any conclusion about which placements to blacklist. One day a placement would be profitable, the next unprofitable, the next 2 profitable, the next week unprofitable. I think the payout of the offer was too close to the traffic cost.

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The android segment was green most days with marginally positive ROI but I couldn't optimize it as the placements were very volatile (i.e. one day profitable, the other not) because the offer payout was so small relative to the cost of impressions. So I decided to stop the campaign but still a lesson learned that there needs to be a certain ratio of offer payout vs cost of traffic.

I've also tried some other GEOs such as SG and HK that while profitable ended up being way too small, at some point I couldn't even reach $10/day adspend so I stopped as well.

But another lesson learned and more offers to test on the way, so hopefully I should be able to post some more interesting stats soon.

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You're right, in some cases the numbers are just not there, so it's pointless to spend days on something that's limited to $10 profit per day with no options to scale further. Such GEOs/campaigns are still awesome for learning purposes though, so I'd say you got the value from these.

Anything new btw, did you make any progress?

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Not much progress yet, just tried some more offers and geos that didn't seem to work.

I've now switched to only testing new offers from Mundo, Mobidea, Gotzha and Clickdealer in hopes of catching something that isn't saturated or optimized by the advertiser or has a full opt-in list. I only stick to phone sweeps though as I'm not seeing landing pages on Adplexity for any other types of offers, at least not for PropellerAds. At least not with any consistency.

I may still try to add antivir, games and dating in the mix but it looks like phone sweeps are the most solid vertical.

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Carry on buddy! Success together !

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Sweeps, dating and some financial (or crypto) offers seems to be the most used in both POPs and PUSH traffic sources such as propeller, so focus on those.

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Adplexity Mobile will tell you what types of offers/verticals are working the best in any particular country.

Aff networks aren't the issue - Mundo, Gotzha, Clickdealer all have a ton of offers in various verticals.

Testing EXTENSIVELY is the key. Basically nail down a good lander quickly and then use it to test as many relevant offers as possible. The OFFER is the most important part of a campaign.

Secondly: Now that you have a bit more experience, don't be afraid to attack larger geos that have more offers to test, as well as more traffic to optimize.

I've just posted some lessons on optimization yesterday - check those out to get an idea on how to optimize campaigns. They're not very well-written - but will provide a good idea and will help you immensely if you're at a loss. I'll probably rewrite/add to them over time to make them better.

And don't be afraid to attach lots of screenshots of your stats here in this follow-along. Now that the tutorial is finished, I'll be spending a lot more time replying to posts on the forum - again, apologies for having been absent!



Amy

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Many thanks @matuloo and @vortex for your advice!

I've started testing a new offer in TH that one of my AMs said was converting very well, although for some reason most of their affiliates stopped sending much traffic there. I thought okay, probably for a reason but let's test anyway since it's a big geo.

Offer is a sweep paying 0.16, which already makes me cautious.

However, I'm finding that I'm still getting very low adspent on propellerads. I've had the same issues with SG and HK but I thought it was because they were small geos, even though I would raise the bid to the max.

But now for TH, I put the following bid:


I still get rather little traffic:


Is this normal or should I keep upping the bid?

Also, when adjusting bids, is it only the zoneids that change or is it the traffic per zoneid as well? i.e. would it make sense to run an initial blacklist on lower bids and then increase the bid to include more zoneids? Or does a lower bid means that I still get traffic from all the same zoneids, its just that its their worse traffic?

Thanks,
Alex

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So $0.64 revenue on $7+ in spend? Not looking good at all, unless all 4 conversions were made by a single traffic segment when you drill down to the various variables in the tracker.

$1 for TH traffic should be plenty. I can't recall how much daily traffic Propeller has for TH - have you verified that your budget is high enough? Also please make sure you're not throttling traffic, i.e. have "standard mode" selected rather than "distributed". If none of these is the issue, I would suggest to hit up PropellerAds' support on live chat so they could potentially look into your account settings to see if there's anything holding back the traffic, or verify the traffic volume you should be able to get at the bid you've specified.

As for your question about the bid: When running fixed cpm, when you increase the bid, you will get traffic from the more-competitive zones which you weren't getting at the lower bid, as well as an increased amount of traffic from certain zones compared to a lower bid. When running smart cpm, the system will TRY to give you a taste of all zones, by charging you higher CPM on more-competitive zones and lower CPM on less-competitive zones, so that ON AVERAGE you're still paying the bid you specified. And even for smart cpm, when you increase your bid you should get more traffic volume, and you do get traffic from the higher-quality / more in-demand / higher-competition zones. Sometimes, even if you do get a bit of traffic from high-quality zones when bidding low at smart cpm, it's not enough to tell how well it'd convert. This is why even when you're bidding smart cpm, testing different bids would still be recommended.

And yes - retesting blacklisted zones on a lower bid is a common tactic.

Another thing that may also help: The conversion rate for any particular zone can be assumed to remain similar even when you change the bid. For sure the conversion rate tends to increase when you increase the bid, because then your ad would be shown to visitors EARLIER rather than later, but I haven't seen day-and-night differences. So this assumption would be useful more often than not.

For example, on a source like Zeropark where you can specify the bid for each placement, let's say you have a placement that is currently in loss but not by much. You could actually take the conversion rate and calculate how much you'd need to lower the bid by, in order to reach say 30% ROI in profits. It doesn't always work out that way, but overall it's an effective approach to tweaking bids.



Amy

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Hey @cochiloco

One piece of advice to add @vortex said about specifying the bid on each placement. Make sure you are tracking your conversions in the traffic network, not only does this make your ROI more visible it allows you to use tools like Rule Based Optimization (RBO). If you are buying lots of traffic for a low-payout offer you will need to make tweaks very quickly. We find the best way to do this is to first optimize the sources you are buying from then digging down into the targets to do more granular optimization. This is where a tool like RBO can kick in, as there are 1000's of placements, you can set "if and when" to Pause, bid up or bid down based on a conversion metric. We go into a bit more detail here.

Also creating flows and paths in your tracking solution can be a great way to A/B test different landers for the offer and is a great way to extend the longevity of the campaign.

Thanks!

Zeropark

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Great tip Zeropark!

Automation is the way forward when it comes to cutting placements, especially on a large network with a ton of publishers such as zeropark.



Amy

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Okay, so quick update in 2 more campaigns I tested, just to make sure I'm on the right path.

Campaign 1:
Indonesia, Propellerads, testing 2 iphone offers paying around 0.18 and the only relevant lander I found on Adplexity.

After around $12 ad-spent, all conversions coming from Android but further drilldown into phone models, browsers, etc didn't reveal any significant correlations. Also they were all from different placements. Based on the adspent and the number of conversions as well as limited correlation (most adspent was on Android anyway), I've decided not to continue as it would take forever to optimize, especially based on the low payout.




Campaign 2:

Poland, Propellerads, testing 1 iphone offer and 2 landers. Offer pays 0.90 so looks more solid.

Started bidding quite high to make sure I get some decent traffic in both volume and quality. Set budget to $15 a day, spread over 24 hours (throttled)



However, after nearly 24 hours, I only have around $6 spent and no conversions:

Not sure if increasing the daily budget would make any difference so first I'll turn off throttling (move from distributed to standard delivery mode) and see if anything more interesting happens.

If traffic picks up, I'll add another offer to test in this campaign and will spend 2x10xpayout (2 offers, 10x payout each) to see what happens.

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I'm on the fence about campaign 2 (the PL iphone sweep).

I've changed the bidding to standard from distributed so there was no throttling. Adspend picked up and I got some conversions too. But after about a day, the adspend dropped again and the conversions, around 6 in total, are not enough to see a pattern in any other segment (OS, phone type, ISP, etc).

So I'm only left with cutting placements more aggressively or increasing the daily budget in hopes that it will result in more high quality traffic as it will run throughout the day. It's currently set at $15/day.

I was thinking of just running it slowly like this and cut placements but a) it's going to take forever and b) I'm seeing that I have to cut placements that have converted because they're not profitable anymore.




So no properly green placements since starting the campaign 3 days ago (though weekend traffic may not be representative). I'm thinking of throwing in the towel and testing something else.

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Agree that the camp looks hopeless based on what you said.

At such negative ROI, you'd need to find big traffic segments with very negative ROI that you can cut (or find at least one big traffic segment with hopeful ROI) in order to effect big changes in overall campaign ROI. Cutting small segments like placements won't likely do it.


Yes by all means try standard instead of distributed, and increase your budget, if you want to get more traffic.

Why not test more landers? 2 are too few. And why not include that 3rd offer from the beginning? Doing so would increase your chances of finding a good offer that converts decent enough to help you cut landers down to a winner.


I've changed the bidding to standard from distributed so there was no throttling. Adspend picked up and I got some conversions too. But after about a day, the adspend dropped again and the conversions, around 6 in total, are not enough to see a pattern in any other segment (OS, phone type, ISP, etc).

So I'm only left with cutting placements more aggressively or increasing the daily budget in hopes that it will result in more high quality traffic as it will run throughout the day. It's currently set at $15/day.

I was thinking of just running it slowly like this and cut placements but a) it's going to take forever and b) I'm seeing that I have to cut placements that have converted because they're not profitable anymore.

So no properly green placements since starting the campaign 3 days ago (though weekend traffic may not be representative). I'm thinking of throwing in the towel and testing something else.[/quote]

Poland has quite some traffic. Also, you're testing multiple offers and landers so can't really judge anything at this point.

Could you please drill down to offers and landers and share some stats?



Amy

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Many thanks Amy for taking a look!

Well, I only found 2 relevant landers on Adplexity for Poland and they're pretty much the standard Spin & Win and Survey landers used for sweeps in other geos too. So I thought I'd go with those.

For the offers, I started first with 1 offer because I was still waiting for approval for the other. Maybe it was a bad idea because now I'm not sure how valid my blacklisting was

The drilldown to offers and landers is as follows:


So there does seem to be a lander that is more promising than the other.

I'm only testing on WiFi traffic to begin with and after blacklisting the placements as shown in my previous post, the traffic now is only around $3 a day. I'm not sure if this means that PropellerAds' PL traffic is mostly around a handful of placements or if those were just the cheap placements and unless I raise my bid I won't get the rest of the traffic from the others. I'll be raising the bid (initially was at $1, max is $2) to see if I can get more traffic. This is the sort of sticking point I've had with other campaigns and geos as well.

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OK fair enough. You can always retest some of the blacklisted placements later - either when the campaign reaches green, or when the traffic volume gets too low.


I still think it's weird that you'd only get such low traffic volume - PL wifi has got to have more traffic than $3/day! Have you checked with PropellerAds support?

Yes by all means test higher bids!

To save some money: When you test higher bids, blacklist placements for which you're getting decent volume at your current bid. That way, you'll only pay for traffic from the more-competitive (and theoretically, better-converting) placements.



Amy

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Yes, they say this is all the traffic they have and that it's no guarantee that I'll get more traffic from their network. They say that even with the top bid, it's no guarantee that a single person will get all the traffic from the platform. Very strange attitude and answer.

I've then increased to the top bid of $2 and still hardly any traffic. And all after blocking around 10 placements.

I guess I'll be moving to other geos and testing different offers.

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Good call then! I guess pop volume must have shrunk recently.

How's the testing coming along?



Amy

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I've run some more tests and did manage to find some interesting patterns, such as a particular segment on particular placements being profitable. Thing is, I was too focused on cutting placements in the beginning and wasn't paying much attention to segments such as OS, Device, etc.

But with that and with a bit of back and forth, managed to make a small pin submit campaign marginally green:



Unfortunately the profit remains in the single digits per day and I have the top bid so not much hope in scaling that one on the same traffic source

But I think I do understand the end-to-end process for running, testing and optimization.

At this point, I'm not sure if I'm going to continue with POPs as I've found it quite difficult to find many offers to test since they come and go all the time so I'm always testing with a rather limited number of offers which doesn't help in building a proper portfolio of campaigns with high confidence in profitability i.e. extensively tested with multiple offers and landers and with a proper blacklist. A lot of times I have to re-test everything from scratch because I could only find 2 offers and 2 landers for a particular geo.

I think that for pops the most important thing is to spend long hours in a very condensed period i.e. 1-2 days before starting a campaign to setup as many landers and offers possible for the target geo and then launch. Otherwise spreading the same effort over say a week or two may dilute the results as by that time an initial good offer or placement might have already stopped converting, before you even start the campaign. So the window of opportunity seems to be quite short.

I think I'll run things a while longer until my account balance is down to 0 but will need to start looking for the next steps into finding something a less volatile that I can build up by small daily chunks of work rather than high spikes. So more like volatility in terms of months instead of weeks.

Many thanks to all the admins for all the help so far and to other STM members for the follow-alongs that gave me the aha moment of additional segments

Also special thanks to @twinaxe for the skype training which led to quite a few more aha moments

Alex


P.S: To all new members reading this, please do go ahead and try the POP tutorial. It really helps learn the ropes at a minimal cost. If I were to try the same thing with say, native and nutra offers, I would have probably spent 100x as much budget. I'm still considering trying native but now that I know what to expect, I have very different criteria about whether to do it or not and will have very different discussions in this AWE about it than I would have had before trying the POP tutorial!

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It's OK! It's great actually - this kind of analysis is exactly the kind of practice you need at this stage. Once you have the basics down, you can apply the same testing and optimization process to bigger geos to go after bigger money (of course, at the cost of bigger spend in the testing and optimization process).


100% in support of this view!


Twinaxe told me he may be making a big post soon to reveal more insight - stay tuned!


That's the idea and purpose of the tutorial - thank you Alex!

So what are you planning to expand into next?

Push traffic is still pretty hot these days, and a good strategy would be to lock down a good offer and lander using pop, then take that to push and just test ads.

Another natural progression from pop would be native, but of course a lot more cash will be needed to get that working.

Then there's FB and Adwords, which are just nice to learn because they'll be around in the long-run.

No matter what you choose, I wish you lots of fun and moolah!



Amy

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