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Pop-Sweepstakes Followalong (6)

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I started a follow-along in ppv. Now I realize that I should have started it here. So just copying everything from there to here. From now on, would be updating here.

Hey STM,

I am Nitin Sethi from India. This will be my follow-along for Pop-sweepstakes vertical. I have about $1000 in budget but am committed full time to make affiliate marketing work.I tried some direct-linking offers in the past (without much result though). There was just one camp that I could reach break-even.

I will be using bemob as my tracker (as it is free!) and PropellerAds as my traffic source. I have got into 2 affiliate networks: Mobidea and peerfly. I have also applied to Gotzha but haven't got into yet.

Details regarding my first camp:

I have chosen a sweepstakes offer in Sweden. I created 2 landers (Translated into Swedish using google translate) and uploaded them to my amazon bucket. Now waiting for my affiliate network to approve them and then I'll start driving traffic.

A few questions:

1) Which affiliate network is good for sweeps (Tier-2 and Tier-3 geos?). I am not finding much sweepstakes offers for these countries in the networks that I am into. So am being forced to run for Sweden!

2) Request: Can any STM moderator please have a look at my landers and advice me if they find it good enough! I'll message you the link.


Update2:

I submitted the landers but the network rejected saying that they have to be in native language. So I converted them to Native language and submitted them again but the network rejected again saying that my lander implies a giveaway and not a sweepstakes. They also asked me to move to some other geo.

I got a little confused and lost for a while because most of the offers in my networks are of US,France, Germany etc but then after some search I found a few offers from Singapore. So I asked my affiliate manager of Mobidea to recommend me some offers for this geo and she recommended me 2 I-Phone offers for that geo. Now I will be trying those instead. (A day's hard work got waste, feeling bad about that but nevermind- I learnt a lot about landers etc.

Update3 : I created 3 landers for iphone sweeps and submitted them for apporval to one offer of peerfly and one of Mobidea. Peefly asked me to make some changes (remove popup, remove countdown timer etc) and submit it again. So I made the required changes and submitted it back. All 3 landers got approved by peerfly.

I also submitted the same three landers to Mobidea on 9 March but haven't got a response yet. I pinged my am again yesterday but no reply. So I am now planning to promote just peerfly offer with my 3 landers (no other option!) but then I won't be able to test for offers. (and not sure how well does that offer convert).

While I was waiting for approval from both the affiliate networks, I also created 2 landers to test an offer from Egypt and submitted it for review to mobidea. No reply for that too yet!

I also created a direct-link campaign for a peerfly 1-click offer for Thailand. For that campaign, Popads shows me about 4,227 impressions, my tracker bemob shows 2879 impressions while peerfly showed me just 526 impressions (with 3 conversions!). I was not sure why am I getting such a high click-loss. So I created one more similar campaign with high bid just to make sure I am getting real clicks and not bot traffic. The result was almost same though(high click loss). Now I am trying to identify the reason for the same, so have created the same campaign with redtrack as my tracker. Waiting for popads to approve it. If I do not face such a high click loss with redtrack, I can conclude that reason for the loss was my tracker bemob. While if I see the same click-loss, I'll have to try something else.

Since I have very limited amount of offers, I also applied to gotzha and clickdealer too. Clickdealer did not approve me and gotzha hasn't responded back since a few days . For mundomedia, the affiliate manager contacted me, asked what all I was running, I told him one of my campaigns is running at about $1 per day profit. He asked me for campaign details and the link saying he is simultaneously moving my application for mundomedia ahead. I gave him the link. He has stopped replying to me since then. (I pinged him a few times in last few days-he is just ignoring me)

I want to move as fast as possible but seems like something or the other is stopping me (approvals and all!). I just wish I could get more offers to try and faster lander approvals but nevermind!

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Update:
Here are the results of the campaign I tried with the other tracker:
Popad impressions: 619
RedTrack: 428
Peerfly: 100
(direct-linked campaign)

So that means there was no issue with the other tracker. The clickloss is most probably due to some other reason. (I think the offer might be taking too long to load)

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Update:
Today was a good (or better ) day. I got into bitterstrawberry and the affiliate manager recommended me some offers to try (thank you my am). Now I have a few offers to test. I will start making landers for them while I am running/collecting data for my iPhone offer.

I also got an 2 iPhone offers in bitterstrawberry. So I finally ran my campaign with 3 landers and 3 offers (1 peerfly and 2 bitterstrawberry).Here are the details:



We can see 6 landers in the above screenshot but in actual there are 3 basic landers. The landers in above screenshot which have bitter before them are a little agressive versions of those same landers (like has a popup, countdown timer, "You have won" text etc.). This is because peerfly did not allow agressive landers while bitterstrawberry was fine with it. Anyway, I realized that I am actually getting far more clicks on non-agressive landers with text "You can win" than on agressive with text "You have won". I think this is because it is tough to belive "you have won" for a random person. The chase "you can win" probably catches more attention than "You won".

For tomorrow I am planning to entirely remove "you won" type (landers with bitterstraw in name before them") landers and just keep the normal landers with the 3 offers in rotation.

On digging further into my stats I also saw this:

Most of my traffic had gone to "Apple" device vendor which has the least ctr (just 0.62) , far less than other vendors. I feel this is because a person who already has an iPhone would far less care about winning an iPhone than a person who doesn't. (We value things we don't have). Hindsight realization though, but I am happy that I managed to catch this! I will also cut this device vendor for tomorrow. Its midnight in this geo, so the campaign has stopped/paused for the day. Now I'll wait for tomorrow to get more data and optimize further.

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Hi @nitinsethi and thanks for starting this follow-along! You're making very good progress!

Sorry for my late arrival!

Gotzha has plenty. You can also go to our directory and do a search for "sweeps":

https://stmforum.com/affiliate-directory/

Also see this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ks+sweepstakes


You can post the links here - most people have a subscription to Adplexity anyways so it's not like you'd be giving anything away.


Good testing! And I agree with you that it's probably due to a problem with the offer.

Are you observing the same with other offers from peerfly? What about offers from other networks?


Different networks have different tolerance when it comes to landers being misleading/aggressive.

The trick is to test different degrees of aggressiveness in order to find something that is borderline acceptable.

Either that, or cloak (not recommended but I won't stop you from doing it).


Unfortunately, this is common experience, especially if you're just starting out.

Once you're doing good volume, traffic reps and affiliate managers will start giving you more attention. You must prove first that you're worth that attention.

Hang in there!


That's a great discovery/observation! However - be careful about making conclusions based on CTR only - wait until you've collected some conversions! CTR doesn't make you money. Conversion DO!

I haven't run sweeps in a long time. When I was running them, the more-aggressive landers still did better than the less-aggressive ones, but not by much. I guess things have changed over time - so many affiliates running the same landers for years - it was a matter of time before people would catch on.

And this is good news actually - as less-aggressive landers get approved more readily by traffic and affiliate networks.


2 things:

1)Do NOT cut landers based on CTR! The only exception is when the CTR is so low that it would be practically impossible to reach green.

2)Please use a stats calculator to cut landers!


Again - although this is good observation, be careful about making decisions based on CTR.


This made me LOL a bit!

I reply while reading posts in the order they were written, and not after I've read all posts. There's something amusing about issuing a warning while reading a previous post, and then be proven correct in a later one!

Having said that - we really can't conclude anything from a single conversion either! But like you said, gathering more data and let data speak would be a good way to go!

Valuable lessons are being learned here - good progress!

And of course - congrats on your first conversion! And since it showed up in the tracker, you know you've set up the postback correctly as well.


You're very observant - that quality will really stand you in good stead in this business (and pretty much any other endeavor you decide to pursue).

Spotting stuff like this can allow you to save some money - with such massive clickloss it would be unlikely for the offer to STILL come out profitable. In this case I would just cut the offers early - instead of spending 10x payout on them without seeing conversions (which although may not actually happen, is probable with this type of clickloss) and cutting them then.


(Trying to refrain from giving you an "AHA! I told you do!" )


Again, the "don't cut based on CTR" advice applies here as well.

The ROI for Apple isn't bad! Keep in mind that when you cut other stuff (placements etc.) the ROI for Apple will increase. Most of the variables are related so that when you cut a segment from one variable, the performance for other variables will increase.

I would definitely collect more conversions first, before looking through all stats. When you do, try to spot two things:

1)Traffic segments that are very positive that you can whitelist.

2)Traffic segments that are very negative that you can exclude.

And the bigger the segments that fit one of the above criteria, the better, because the more improvement you can make to the overall campaign's ROI by whitelisting/blacklist them.


Why? Just one conversion will make it reach break-even!

Especially when making decisions on the bigger segments (like Android!!), try to collect more conversions before doing so.


Wait - how many offers and landers do you have running at this point for this campaign?

Based on the screenshots you've spent only a total of $4.22 and already made one conversion with $1.35 payout. That's a "so far so good" case!


Thanks for showing all those screenshots and your thought processes! Looking forward to seeing more stats! I've enjoyed the discussion.



Amy

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Hey Amy, Thanks a lot for the reply. It was really helpful. You really motivated me to write further.

I ran a 5-6 more offers (making 2 landers for each of them) after this but did not see any conversion.

I think my mistake was that I was cutting offers too agressively (I would cut an offer if I don't see a conversion within 3x the payout.

I would keep checking my stats every 10 minutes to see whats happening. I feel that is wrong and I should not do that.

So I have decided I will do a few things:
1) Check stats only every 3 hours.
2) Spend atleast 10x the payout no matter what before removing an offer and moving to next one. I know losing money feels bad, but if I don't make this a rule for myself, I'll just be wasting money.
3) Cut a placement if no converion in 1x payout. (I am being agressive here).

Your point of refraining from cutting bigger segments (like "android") too is very insightful.

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Good!


Try to test offers from other networks - Mobidea doesn't have a lot of offers anymore. I kept it in the tutorial because their interface is the most well-organized which is perfect for newbies to follow step-by-step. Wished they had more offers.


Remember that 1)not every affiliate is running pop traffic, and 2)other people may have optimized their campaigns already - for example have split-tested lots of landers, have already cut placements that don't convert and are running the most profitable traffic segments.


Yes you can certainly test more landers!

But after the initial round of lander split-testing, I would focus on testing more offers first, then when I find a promising offer, consider coming back to testing more landers.


It's really up to you.

I often talk about the concept of accuracy vs. efficiency. These are like yin and yang, where the more you have of one the less you have of the other.

You can spend more time and money on testing each offer, which will make you more accurate but less efficient. Or you can spend less time and money on testing each offer, but test more offers, which will make you less accurate but more efficient.

However, I would suggest to start with at least 5 landers in the beginning (popular + well-optimized), so that you can be relatively sure that there's at least one decent one among them. This is necessary in order to even "catch" any promising offers. You don't want to risk testing offer after offer after offer and not getting good results, when it's because the lander you happen to be using, sucks balls.


Awesome! Congratulations!!

This is a very good strategy, and one I'm been recommending for some time: Test offers and landers on pop, then take the best combination to push and just test ads there.

Keep up the great progress!



Amy

P.S.: vBulletin attachment doesn't work half the time, and even when it does, the images appear tiny. A better way would be to upload images to imgur.com, copy the bbcode link and paste it directly into the post. That way it works 100% of the time and the images show up nice and big. Half the screenshots you've posted are not being displayed - which would be a waste of your valuable time.

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