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[CASE STUDY] - $60k Profit on Taboola Running Casino App Installs 🤑 (42)

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[CASE STUDY] - $60k Profit on Taboola Running Casino App Installs

Hello guys and gals,

today I am going to share with you a recent profitable campaign we ran and all it's details.

I often hear people say that these days it's really hard finding a profitable campaign, it won't last, natives are hard etc etc.

As usual, most of these people never took the effort to at least test a few offers before throwing the towel and love to find excuses.

So, to prove them wrong, I decided to run a campaign on natives using an offer and traffic source available to everyone.

The idea is to find an offer available on affiliate networks using AdPlexity and trying to make it profitable.

So, without losing further time, let's get started!

First, let's fire up AdPlexity and see what's been hot lately.

I put a filter showing ads in the last 60 days that have been showing up for at least 14 days in a row.

This is how it looks like :



There are lots of results so need to filter them and combine it with info we got from our affiliate managers.

After spending some time reviewing the offers we decided to go with a Casino App install offer found on MundoMedia.

The reasoning on picking that offer was :

- It has a relatively small payout, between $5-$10 so it will take less budget to test it out.
- We saw it popping up quite often
- Our affiliate managers confirmed that it's an offer performing well for other people too

To get started quickly, I decided to get a few creatives and landers from AdPlexity to test the waters.

The creatives picked were:



and the two landers below on rotation :




We downloaded the landers directly from AdPlexity natives and were ready to use after removing some tracking javascript.

Another tool we used in this case study is TheOptimizer.io. It made our life easier by helping from campaign uploading, to cutting loses with automatic rules and having accurate spend / revenue on a granular level.

So, we fired it up and uploaded the campaign on Taboola ( where it was seen the most running and has quality traffic from our experience).It creating combinations of our headline with the eight images picked.
TheOptimizer also automatically created two variations automatically, one for iOS and one for Android, saving us time.

Before starting traffic, as we always do for every campaign, we put a set of rules on TheOptimizer.

These are used to minimise losses from bad publishers & bots, increase budgets automatically on good performance and pause campaign if things go really bad.

So, the rules used are the three below :

- Stop campaign if tracker NET < -$30



- Block publisher if tracker NET < -$15



- Block low CTR sites



- Increase daily budget to $200 if ROI > -30%
- Block super high LP CTR publishers and add to bot list ( so we can re-use on future campaigns and not spend money again)

After these were in place we hit the Start button and clicks started coming in.

Here's how the campaign looked the first couple days till three weeks after:

Day 1 - Ad Spent: $99.31 | Revenue: $80 | ROI: -19.44%
Day 2 - Ad Spent: $198.61 | Revenue: $130 | ROI: -34.55%

3 weeks - Ad Spent: $8,634.61 | Revenue: $11620 | ROI: 34.57%

As you can see, the first day was pretty good for a new campaign, with just about -20% ROI.

After this, the 4th rule kicked in and doubled the budget the second day, from $100 to $200.

That caused a new influx of publishers coming in and lowered the overall ROI to -35%.
At the end of the second day, the campaign was automatically paused by rule no.1.
However we enabled it back manually since most of the bad publishers were already stopped anyway and a few profitable widgets started popping up.

After letting it run for 3 weeks, the campaign was consistently profitable every day, doing around $3k in profit.

Apart from having a few stops for quality checks from the advertiser, the campaign ran for quite a few months, generating around $60k in profit overall.

Here are a few more screenshots of the publishers automatically blocked by TheOptimizer, campaign performance on the Taboola dashboard and some more stats.







Key lessons learned from this case study:

- Always use intelligence tools like AdPlexity to get started. It's easier to see what other are doing first instead of going in blind.
- Pick low payout offers if you don't have big budgets. Natives can get expensive really fast.
- Use automatic rules to stop publishers or bots bleeding money
- Collect these publishers into lists to re-use in the future so you won't spend money on the same bots again. We have huge lists built through the years.


Hope you enjoyed it and feel free to ask any questions you have.

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Beautiful- I love it man! Thank you for sharing this!

I have been diving into Taboola hardcore the last month and have a few questions if you don't mind...

1. Did you use Smart Bid or Fixed Bid?

2. You mentioned your accumulated blacklists and whitelists... how big was your blacklist of blocked placements that you had blocked from the very beginning? And what is your criteria on Taboola for adding something to a permanent blacklist?

3. On Taboola and Outbrain both I seem to always end up with 80% of my traffic coming from MSN placements, and in a battle over whether I can get the epc's higher than the cpc's on those 2-4 MSN placements enough to get decent volume. Do you get a lot of traffic from MSN or are you finding smaller 'gold nugget' placements and deriving most of your profitability from those?

4. It looks as though you had one month that just absolutely killed it and then the offer drifted away over the next 2-3 before you stopped it. That one month had an insanely high roi too. What do you think accounted for that super high spike of profitability rather than more moderate profability but over a longer time span?

Thank you for the amazing follow-along! EXTREMELY helpful and appreciated!

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Thank you for sharing this amazing follow-along!

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Amazing case study!

This!
More often than not, I see people jump from one traffic source to another after not seeing immediate green.

Huge lists, and historical widgets/sites/publishers data is what gives you the head start with any campaign on any traffic source.
One won't collect sufficient widget data per source when spreading his limited budgets across 5 different traffic sources

Even here on the forum I see many follow alongs with people being determined to make native work with X traffic source, only to switch to another after spending only a few hundred dollars

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Great question, I'd love to get more details too because really there was only one good month here(granted a damn good month). The other profitable months are $3k profit and the rest are all negative ROI.

I have tested social casino and was never able to keep quality compared to real money casino. The two big problems I've seen with social casino offers are 1) quality, and 2) cap. I'd wager it's probably one of those(or both) although idk how long a typical social casino CPI offer runs for, and definitely no idea how long it'd typically run on Taboola.

Awesome thread for sure appreciate the share, all great advice here

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Wonderful share
Great case study right there.
I also noticed like friends above on only one month spike on green ROI and the rest with negative and dies off.
I imagine thats due to ads fatigue?

Did you also test more than 2 landing pages and notice it helped? Wonder if a new landing page will helps on the negative ROI months

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Ok, to answer some questions.

It was a fixed bid

It wasn't that big, around 40 sites or so when I started since I didn't really have any lists for this niche. I only had a bot list, which I usually classify publishers with 80%+ CTR over 100 clicks or less than 1% over 100 clicks.

I got a lot of traffic from MSN and it was on average low profit. There were other low volume sites but with amazing ROI.

Im not sure tbh, it might have been ads getting burned out, competition, offer harder to convert since this pays for new signups only. I didn't put much effort after that since this started more as a case study.

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I think the main factor for good quality was that I was running on Taboola. We tried briefly on a few other sources but got paused right away.

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The great Besmir strikes again! Another one for the newsletter!!


Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

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Nice! Thanks for all the info- it is extremely, extremely appreciated! Fantastic case study!

Have you begun using SmartBid on Taboola since? Or still primarily doing fixed bid? (I realized after I asked the question that I think SmartBid is pretty new so it may not have even been an option when this case study took place)

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Awesome share! With Adplexity, TheOptimizer and a good offer it really doesn't seem that difficult, although it had to run for a while before hitting the green numbers. I think most people would've paused this whole thing early on.

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This basically is: giving the fish + teaching how to fish all in one .

Awesome share @bbrock32

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Thanks for sharing! Curious for the rules you have set how often do you normally run them? Daily, Every 10 minutes, Every Hour?

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All the above rules were running every 10 minutes, even though it's a bit of an overkill for pausing campaigns.

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I had a question about your block rules

All of your block rules consider data from the past 7 days.
How do you deal with lower volume widgets which do not gather enough data within that time frame to trigger the block, however may gather enough data over longer periods of time?

I personally use a duplicated rule, each duplicate version covering a different time frame in order to extend this criteria for identifying poor lower volume widgets.

So I was just curious if there any benefit to focus on the last 7 days alone?

Thanks!

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Yes that's a solution too, cloning rules with bigger time frames.

In this specific campaign we were also going through campaigns manually a few times a week so there was no real need.

For higher volume campaigns where spends are bigger and small spends across many days add up, I would just create a new rule covering larger periods.

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How has this not had more attention! This is gold!

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This is absolute gold! Thanks so much. Bit of a stupid question I’m sure, can you explain what the rules mean? E.g NET < - $30?

Thanks so much!


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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Just saw this now.

Basically that's a Stop Loss rule. So if the campaign is losing more than $30 stop it.

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Thanks for your share on this, great info!

Can I ask if the traffic you received from Taboola was tier 1 or tier 2? I assume for this offer it was tier 2...

Also, can I please ask how high you eventually set your daily budget?

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Thanks for the share mate .
Q: the ads are casino targeted. And the landers are kind of BH.
How did Taboola approve it? What’s the magic


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Regarding casinos, based on Taboola's advertising policies, it's OK as long as the affiliate follows some guidelines:

https://help.taboola.com/hc/en-us/ar...s-and-Services

And what about these landers make them BH? (Genuinely curious.)

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Just curious, how did you come up with your automated rules? Were they based on the payout? Are they general rules for testing campaigns on native ads?

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Hey, the traffic was def Tier 1 , mostly US / UK / AU otherwise it would have been pretty hard to have a decent lead to sale ratio for the advertiser to be happy.

When the campaign was profitable we put the budget to the max so the algorithm would give us an extra boost and more traffic.

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Haha , it's not blackhat at all. It's according to their guidelines and if you tried you would get them approved today.

We work closely with our AM there and we make all changes they require before we go live.

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Some are based on the payout and our experience so far running similar offers. Some are more generic that we use everywhere ( bots based on LP ctr etc ).

However this is not the only correct way to do it, it's just the way that worked best from our experience.

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Wait a second...? You made $60k and this is just a case study thing...?

Damn I cannot imagine if you were to go full force...

Awesome Besmir!!!

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exquisite my man!

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You know Besmir ... he certainly knows what the word "volume" means

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Wow, amazing! What affiliate networks should I look at for some good Casino offers?

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clickdealer has some. Gotzha has quite a few. maxbounty has some too but not alot. a handful. im sure there are lots more just look around

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Amazing man, incredible to see these casino app installs are still working !!

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Is this an aged or new taboola account? Heard mixed stories about the traffic quality, but could all just be rumours.

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This was on an aged Taboola account we've been using for years.

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Does the traffic quality between new and aged accounts vary?

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Which landing page hosting did you use? Was it fast enough?

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Great post! Not that it matters much but the Taboola spending screenshot is dated 2018, but was recent case-study?

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No I don't think they take that into account ( yet )

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We hosted landers on one of our servers we use for campaigns. We use dedicated servers from SingleHop for most of our stuff.

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Yeah correct, we ran this campaign in 2018 and decided to post results on Feb 2019.

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If I can ask, what was the offer, and was it a free spins and require a deposit? Or just a signup with no deposit? If it required a deposit was it $10 $20 or $25? Looking at geos and its pretty bleak right now for US so I assume this was a CA UK or AU offer?

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Some decent casino offers right now should look at, Hopa/Karamba (Cpl and FTD), Casumo, Neto Partners (FTD), ITS (yukon gold etc on cpl). A good assortment of new geos opening up as well.

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