40 Day - Non-techie Total Noob with Binom and not much $$ (5)
40 Day - Non-techie Total Noob with Binom and not much $$
Hey everyone,
I’m a complete noob when it comes to AM, so I was planning to lurk around a bit and try and learn as much as I could from others mistakes before I got my feet wet. But in the end I thought f*#K it, this looks like too much fun to sit in the side-lines, especially after reading Chee’s follow-along. Apologies for any omissions, I wasn’t really thinking about documenting it as a follow-along when I was doing it - it was a spur of the moment thing.
So here goes…..
For my first campaign I’m using:
PropellerAds
Binom as tracker
Got accepted to Clickdealer and apparently Gotzha, but I haven’t been able to log in after setting up my account (I’ll figure that one out later)
Binom setup was easy peasy. The guys there are super helpful. Used Digital Ocean for hosting the server – hosted it in London, which I think has caused me issues for my first campaign, but I’ll get to that later. I won’t bore you with my struggles understanding and setting up the tracking – but it was intense…
Picking an Offer
As per Vortex’s guide I narrowed down five ad choices in
In the end I picked some Android battery saver tool in Peru. I was drawn to the Opportunities tab and saw that it seemed to have a good conversion. Not sure that this tab is worth paying attention to or if it’s just smoke and mirrors? It sold me anyway.
At this point I started wondering if having a server in London is too far away for direct linking and these Peruvians would lose patience and drop out. Tried to remember if I’d met any impatient Peruvians.
Also, I noticed that only one operator was listed. I guessed that this meant that the offer would not work with other operators?
I checked the population of Peru, just to try and give me a sense of if the market could be saturated – at 30 mil I guessed that there could be some more mileage. But because the offer seemed to be limited to only one operator it did make me think that it could be saturated already.
Buying Traffic on PropellerAds
Sorry, no screenshots here. But I followed Vortex’s instructions. I just placed the Ad for 3G and not wifi, based on the conversions shown on the opportunities tab of Mobidea. Set the bid on Smart and the amount to what was recommended by PropellerAds.
One thing I noticed was the Broker Traffic checkbox. I’ve heard that broker traffic has a reputation of being a pile of shit. However, with this unselected the estimated traffic was only 2.9K! So I selected it just to get some numbers.
Starting the Campaign
Before starting the campaign, there was only one more thing to consider: where to put all that cash when it starts to roll in. I opted for the Cayman Islands.
Starting the campaign and was glad that the data seemed to be flowing correctly! I think that this was the main goal for this campaign after my struggles with tracking. Also got one conversion which also proved that my postback link was working as well.
So despite the lack of conversions, I’d notch this up as a success, just because the technical setup seems to be working okay.
Next Steps:
· Consider the distance to my server when picking my next offer
· Look for an offer with more than one operator so I can get more traffic
· Try a Clickdealer offer to test that my technical setup with Mobidea wasn't a fluke
Any feedback is appreciated. Cheers!
Hey therichness, congrats to your first campaign.
About server distance and stuff, you should know that Pops have a rather big trafficloss anyway compared to other traffictypes.
And especially carrier traffic has mostly higher loss.
Unluckily we only see your tracker stats and not from the trafficsource so maybe the trafficloss is still in normal range.
Apart from that, do you use CDN (although this campaign looks direct linked, but you should use one when working with landers) and fast DNS for your domains?
Will also help to reduce trafficloss.
Now imagine you only buy Propellers own traffic on Propeller Ads and it´s converting very good.
Then you buy traffic on another platform that brokers traffic from Propeller, will Propellers traffic on the other platform then also be a pile of shit?
Thanks twinaxe, yeh this was a direct linked campaign so no landers using with CDN. Good to get your views on brokered traffic as well - this is all new to me. Cheers!
Sorry, can't stop the irony.
Sorry for the late arrival @therichness!
Even later on in the tutorial, when we get around to using landers and running "for real" with profits as the aim, I would STILL recommend to not spend too much time when deciding which offers to test. Basically for the first round of testing, any offers that have SOME sort of promise - recommended by an AM, have good stats in Adplexity (lots of traffic over at least a couple/few days), or have good stats as published by the aff network - just give them all a test.
The offer is the most critical factor of a campaign that contributes the most majorly to its success (or detriment). Testing lots of offers as efficiently as possible is the way to go.
This is one drawback of self-hosted trackers - you need to install one instance of the tracker at one server location at a time.
However - the difference in redirection speeds should NOT be so great that it would break a campaign (that wouldn't otherwise be broken).
In the future, if you run big volumes, do consider deploying multiple installations in different parts of the world. But until then, the cost/trouble would only outweigh whatever extra fraction of improvement in performance you'll get.
Pop camps are short-lived anyway, and so are most offers. Just let the stats tell you - if stats are hopeless, it doesn't really matter whether it's due to saturation, or if the offer itself doesn't convert well, or what the issue is. Running a quick test is the best way to find out.
Having said that - many networks DO have their own publishers, and since some networks have more stringent requirements for their publishers, traffic quality can differ from one network to the next. PropellerAds' traffic quality is better than that of most other networks, so I would definitely suggest to do initial testing WITHOUT the brokered traffic. My reasoning is that if you can't make Propeller's own traffic profitable, then chances are the brokered traffic won't help you either. But once you have a promising lander+offer combo, unleashing brokered traffic on it would make sense.
Starting the campaign and was glad that the data seemed to be flowing correctly! I think that this was the main goal for this campaign after my struggles with tracking. Also got one conversion which also proved that my postback link was working as well.
So despite the lack of conversions, I’d notch this up as a success, just because the technical setup seems to be working okay.
Completely agree with you that being able to verify all the tracking is working properly counts as a success!
· Consider the distance to my server when picking my next offer
· Look for an offer with more than one operator so I can get more traffic
· Try a Clickdealer offer to test that my technical setup with
I would recommend to just test one more direct-linked offer at most, and then moving onwards to the lessons on landing pages. DCB offers are really easy to set up, which is why we're using them to get practice setting up our first campaign or two. But they won't very likely make you profits. So do try your hand at ripping and fixing up landers - things will get interesting from that point.
Please feel free to give us an update on your progress, and share as many screenshots of stats as possible so I can take a look and provide feedback.
Amy
Hey Amy,
Thanks for the great feedback.
Yes I am embarking on ripping landers today after signing-up to Adplexity. I am non-tech, so this part has a very steep learning curve for me (I did the code Academy lessons you suggested).
I will post a part 2 to this follow along once I get some fixed up.
Cheers Rich
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