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Engineer new to Affiliate Marketing diving into Mobile POP Follow along (33)

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Hi all!

A brief background, my name’s Justin, I’m an electrical engineer from Minneapolis. I discovered affiliate marketing several months ago through Charles Ngo and opened me to a world of online marketing that I had previously had really no idea about. I had always wanted to expand beyond the technical realm a bit and broaden my skills into marketing and this seemed like a great fit. I decided this was something I really wanted to purse, joined STM about a month and have been committed to learning as much as I can. Thanks to everyone here for all the helpful posts for us newbies!

I’ve gotten setup with the resources I need and have already run some campaigns to get some experience with process. I think I’ll fell prey to the noobie move of diving into some campaigns without really have a good understanding of how optimize and properly analyze and cut so I ended up losing some cash on those but did get comfortable with setting up the campaign process and stuff. So, decided to take a step back, gain some more knowledge and put together this follow along to help organize my process but also with the goal of optimizing better, more efficiently and finally go green

Here’s where I’m at:
NordVPN account
Got Adplexity Mobile account
Voluum account
VPS server with LiquidWeb. CDN through cloudflare. Also setup with https for my domain. Learned some basic HTML/CSS/Javascript
Approved with Clickdealer and Mobidea (applied to Gotzha and Peerfly, no response yet)
Setup with PopAds, PropellerAds, Zeropark, PopCash accounts
Budgeting $300/month on traffic. Will expand once I get better at optimizing and have some green campaigns.

Found offers on Clickdealer/Mobidea these range from CPL,SOI, email submit, double optin, pin submit...
3 iPhone X offers Thailand
3 Samsung S9 offers Thailand
4 iPhone XS offers Singapore
4 Samsung S9 offers Singapore
4 iPhone XS offers Kenya

Landers:
Ripped 4-5 landers from Adplexity for each of the offer types and GEOs of my offers. Combination of different spin to win types and questionnaires
Cleaned them all up.
Add some useful scripts backbutton, vibrate, timeout.
Images optimize through Kraken.io
Uploaded to server. Verified functionality, https, and linking to Voluum Click URL
Tested speed on all landers on GTMetrix. Scoring nearly 99%+ in all of them.
Question: Since I’m testing these in Asia GEOs, should I evaluate on GTMetrix with a test server region closer to that area? When I do that I see load times of 2s or more, even though my PageSpeed score is good. Is this acceptable? Or does my CDN suck?

Campaign Setup:
I’m in the process right now of getting the landers and offers setup in Voluum and then creating the campaigns. I think at first I’m just gonna focus on running the Thailand and Singapore iPhone offers so I can focus on optimizing those and not have to many campaigns going until I get better at cutting.

My initial approach for testing will be nail down a good offer. From what I learned from my previously failed campaigns was I think I moved on to selecting an offer to early without enough testing. I’m gonna split test all the offers with all the landers and direct linking them.

Research on Adplexity showed mostly Thailand related offers running on PropellerAds and Singapore on PopCash/PropellerAds.

My next update I’ll have sorted out the details of how I wanna start running this campaign and traffic source specifics. Be in touch.

JZ

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Hey Justin and welcome!

If you need any help or advice at any time, please do not hesitate to reach out and mention @Voluum. I'll be happy to help you!
Though from what I see here, you've pretty much figured out the tracking part on your own.

Remember that you need to have enough data to make smart decisions, don't act too early on what you see! Check out some of the best practices gathered by Voluum experts here.

Good luck with the follow along, subscribed and waiting to see some results!

Karolina

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Hey @justinzing7

If you have your postback tracking in place on your campaigns I would suggest using Rule Based Optimization (RBO) to help you optimize the campaigns. RBO allows you to set "if" and "when" rules for optimization on a source or target level based on ROI, CR, eCPA or Conversions - to pause, bid up or bid down on a placement. This is especially useful for the countries you mentioned because of the high volume of low cost traffic available. here is a small guide on how to use it. if you have any more Zeropark specific questions support@zeropark.com is there for you.

Thanks

Neill

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Congrats on making the decision to test affiliate marketing out, it has changed the lives of many, and you can very well be the next one

Starting a follow along was a great idea too, it has helped many newbies to find success and there is a good reason for that.

Since you didn't raise any questions, I will not write more at this point, but as soon as you have some questions, just ask away!

Cheers,
Matej.

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A nice start of a follow-along JZ!

Yes - do use a test server that's located close to your target geo if possible.

Cloudflare is the fastest CDN around if I remember correctly. Optimizing the lander would be necessary. Some landers have redundant code that can be deleted. If in doubt, just download and fix up another lander.


Good approach! Nice geos. And good research skills!

Looking forward to seeing some stats for these soon!



Amy

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Quick update: Finished setting up the campaigns in Voluum. Will focus on iPhone X sweeps in Thailand for now with 4 offers and 5 landers. All 4 offers are signup form, email submit. I’ll also be testing direct-linking to narrow in on a solid offer.


Did some research on Adplexity seems like PropellerAds and PopAds were most popular for the GEOS and offers I’ve got. Will start with PopAds first.


Question: One of my offers has specific carrier restrictions? How would you recommend going about setting up my campaigns to test this?


I simply decided to split the offers and run in separate campaigns. One with 3 offers, all carriers and one with the single offer with limited carriers. Since I’m testing direct linking this gave me 4 campaigns. I’m budgeting $20 total (roughly based on (number of offers)*(number of landers)*(average payout)*5 ), split it as follows below. Using PopAds default settings mostly per Vortex’s recommendation in the 40-day tutorial with non-adblock only, popunder only and 3G+Wifi (with specific carriers as noted below). Bid at 1.2 * the average bid.


Single Offer Limited Carriers Direct Linking - $2.5 budget. 5000 estimated impressions
Single Offer Limited Carriers w/ 5 Landers - $2.5 budget. 5000 estimated impressions
3 Offers All Carriers Direct Linking - $7.5 budget. 8000 estimated impressions
3 Offer All Carriers w/ 5 Landers - $7.5 budget. 8000 estimated impressions


I’ll see how these perform initially and hopefully can find some time to update my landers to run a bot test today as well. Thanks, to Karoline at Voluum for the post earlier today about the Honeypot bot test feature!

JZ

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Yesss! Honeypot's super easy to use!

You'll find a very detailed step-by-step guide for getting the script and implementing it on your landing page here (it's a link to our Knowledge Base).

Karolina

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Good for you man. Very cool. You seem to be approaching in a deliberate, pre-mapped out fashion too (unsurprising for an engineer I guess!) which is good

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Thanks for the responses, keeps me motivated! So I ran my initial test, only got a single conversion from mobidea. It was weird because the payout for it was different from what I noted in my offer log. Went to mobidea, realized the offer was dead…so no conversions.




Several of my landers got decent(?) CTR so stopped direct-linking and lost a couple of the really low CTR ones. Running separate 3G+Wifi campaigns now in PopAds budgeting $10, also setup with Voluum honeypot bot test. Cut placements that were spending greater than 2x the payout with no conversions.



Question: How much should I be budgeting for these initial offer tests? The Thailand offers are pretty low payouts $0.14-0.17. Got about 21000 impressions total for about $20 but no conversions.

Also setup and launched PopAds Singapore iPhone campaign. 6 offers, 4 landers. Separate 3G + Wifi campaigns. honeypot bot test. Bidding +20%. This timed I used rule base paths in Voluum to limit a couple of the offers to their allowed carriers.

Was hoping to run on PropellerAds too as they seem to have more Singapore traffic but unfortunately waiting on some funds to transfer...

Don't stop believin'. Be in touch.
JZ

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I would drop these offers for now. Since they require specific carrier, there will be carrier billing involved and those offers simply don't work that good anymore. Focus on clean/simple SOI email collection.

That's the reason for the different payout, the offer was pulled so traffic was routed to some different one (fallback offer).

Based on my experience, propeller has better traffic than popads, so maybe try to focus on them. On top of that, there is also push traffic on propeller, that works pretty well, better than pops for sure, give that a try too.

Ever since the carrier billing offers got regulated, I never had success with that low paying offers to be honest. I honestly think you need better offers. As I mentioned already, look for simple SOI email submits, and try to look for those paying closer to $1 ... and look at other networks, Mobidea isn't that great either, they are great people but their offers are pretty poor lately. Clickdealer, gotzha ... these are better when it comes to sweeps.

Cheers,
Matej.

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Thanks for the advice, Matej. I cut the low payout Thailand offers and will focus on some others. Will definitely plan to run some push campaigns on PropellerAds in the near future as well.

I’m now good to go on PropellerAds so running some email submit offers for Singapore with $1.2 payouts there. 3G and Wifi separate campaigns. 6 offers and 4 landers. SmartCPM. Bid +20%. Mobile only1/24h, no adblock, no broker traffic.

Also running some Kenya pin submit offers on PropellerAds with $0.6 payouts. 5 offers and 4 landers, similar campaign constraints but only with the specified carrier, so no wifi.

I have some South Africa offers but they are mixed conversion flow with different carriers...I also have some Samsung S9 sweep offers with some prepared landers but in the same GEOs as my other offers that are currently running.

Is it advisable not to run these since I’ll be bidding against my other campaigns for traffic?

Either way I’m going to spend some time looking for better offers, will try to focus on CPL, email submit offers. Will also apply to some other networks as right now my only a part of Mobidea, Clickdealer and Peerfly. Still awaiting on Gotzha application status. I followed up with an email to them some time ago but still no response.

It's been nearly a month since I first applied to Gotzha. Should I continue to follow up with them or wait till I get some profitable campaigns under my belt and reapply?

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In case you're targeting a GEO or traffic segment with limited volume, you might end up bidding against yourself indeed. But then again, you are already bidding against others for the same traffic. So if you create multiple campaigns with similar targeting, but each of them with a totally different funnel and product, you can still do that as it's pretty much the same as bidding against others who are already running different campaigns in the same GEOs. Just don't try to bid very high, because you will just drive the prices up.

Hard to say what happened there, a month is a pretty long time, I know things can get busy but still... Did you try reaching out to them via a PM here on the forum? They have an account here for sure. You can always try to reapply but as you mentioned, it might make sense to gain some more experience before doing so. It's always better when you have some history and experience under your belt.

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Actually, Gotzha is integrated with Voluum so once you're approved, you can browse your private Gotzha offers from inside Voluum's Offers Marketplace.

Once you get in touch with them, maybe it's worth mentioning you're using Voluum and want to integrate the 2 accounts? I can't promise it'll guarantee you the approval but I can see it being helpful.

Karolina

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Some of my campaigns finished their initial test budget. Updated costs in Voluum.

Kenya Safaricom carrier campaign did pretty well, already seeing some green with some offers. The two green offers have different payouts so did an analysis based on this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...211#post289211

Showed that the clickdealer offer was 70% better than Mobidea offer so will continue to run until >90% confidence.

Attachment 20922

Lander results below for only the best performing offer (clickdealer) as well as A/B split test graphical bayesian calculator results. One lander is at 5% approx. probability of being the best but will run a bit more to be certain.

Attachment 20923
Attachment 20924

Question: At this point should I also be cutting placements like OS/browsers/zone IDs, etc already? or get more data to narrow in on an offer, to then optimize landers with and then start cutting placements? What about when to best test bids?

I had also had a Singapore campaign for 3G one for Wifi. Wifi offer results below. I cut the ones that didn't get conversions. Will continue to test to determine best offer.


Attachment 20925
The 3G campaign I'm not seeing conversions yet but it has very low impressions compared to the Wifi campaign and is spending money very slowly. Is there simply not much 3G traffic? I did increase my bid to it slightly above the +20% I had already had on it. PropellerAds doesn't appear to give estimated traffic for 3G or Wifi specific traffic...

Question: Should I alter my bid with the 3G campaign to get more traffic?

Per Matej's feedback I decided to run a Galaxy S9 offer also in Singapore (3G and Wifi campaign). I bid lower with these at +10% but also seeing traffic come in slowly and no conversions yet.

JZ

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Do not try to optimize too many things at the same time, seems like you have a winning offer so focus on that one and maybe cut the worst LPs too... then let it run for a while to see if the performance holds and collect more data. Next step would be to focus on the traffic source side of things. I would recommend to start cutting targets that will cost you the least in volume, which should be placements. If you cut the whole browser or OS, for example, the loos in volume will be huge.

3G traffic is really quite limited, so upping the bid could help to get more volume, but don't expect miracles.

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Quick update. So I had found a winning offer with my Kenya campaign and let it run some more.


LP1 was outperforming the others so I cut all but that one and developed some variations on it:

• V1 - Change up colors a bit giving it a darker theme
  
• V2 - Revised wording and addressed user through specific browser they are using
  
• V3 - Changed up the wording of the testimonials
  
• V4 - Revised wording, bit more aggressive, and try different script alert text.

So I also thought this would be a good time to test some different bids so I duplicated my campaign to 3 different staggered bids. This seem liked the right approach now that I had a single offer and mostly green campaign while also allowing me to test my lander variations at the same time.

Just letting that run now to determine best lander variation and optimal bid before optimizing.

Now that I’ve found a decent offer/lander combo I’m going to search for similar offers in different GEOs to try out. Also, reading up on Push and might give that a shot shortly with this offer/lander combo.

Keep it real,
JZ

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One thing I realized when testing bids with multiple campaigns at the same time is that I'm bidding against myself and my landers will be seen together. So I paused all but one of them, I'll run one for a day or so and then iterate through each one.

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Sorry for the late reply!

Usually I would advise against cutting landers based on CTR (should be based on conversions) but in this case it's more than justified - those landers with less than 1% CTR will never end up winners even if the conversion rate was through the roof.


Usually, if you're bidding average to ensure traffic quality isn't crap, and running several popular and well-optimized landers, spending 10x payout should be enough to get a rough idea. If you don't even get one conversion, I would suggest dropping that offer. So for such low-payout offers, $20 was definitely way too much. I would have cut them at $3-5, tops.


There are so many other advertisers in the bidding pool, I wouldn't worry about bidding against yourself.

However, the campaign with the higher bid may suck most of the traffic from the lower bid camp - this is built into the algorithms of some traffic networks to maximize income (theirs).

If you bid the same in both camps, chances are you'll get 50/50 traffic to each.

You can also just run traffic from one camp - and set up 2 paths in your tracker, one for each set of landers and offers.


You can follow up for sure, or apply to other networks. Can try the submission tool, or get in touch with networks in the affiliate directory:

https://stmforum.com/central-vendor-app/

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


Congratulations on the green!!


Good!


95%? Or 5%?

If a lander is at 5% probability of being best when compared to the in-the-lead candidate, then you can cut it - because it means the in-the-lead candidate has 95% probability of being best when compared to this inferior lander (90% would be sufficient, although 95% would be better).


I wouldn't test bids at this point - that would be too many moving parts. You're still testing offers and landers.

As for zones etc., yes you can start cutting even now, but you may want to retest them later on, after you find the best offer and lander - because the blacklisted stuff may be profitable then.


Feel free to experiment. 3G traffic is more expensive than wifi because it typically converts better. It also has way less volume than wifi.


Sounds like a plan!

And don't forget to look for other offers to test on the same geo! Now that you've cut some zones, you have an edge and can test new offers on the cheap. You can even start a whitelist camp to target just the best zones and use that for testing purposes.


If you're worried about your landers being seen together (by the same visitors), just do what I suggested above, i.e. run both sets of landers+offers using the same campaign, under 2 paths in your tracker.

That way, as long as you keep frequency at 1/24, each visitor will only be exposed to your campaign once a day.


Lastly: 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 - a waste of your valuable time.



Looking forward to your next updates!



Amy

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Exactly. You can add different paths to a single campaign in Voluum.

Default paths are those ones without rules applied - they do not have any traffic-targeting options.

There are also rule-based paths where the traffic is targeted within defined constraints. For example, you might want to display your offer only on mobile devices, therefore you need to define this restraint as a rule in Voluum. Voluum offers you a variety of conditions that might be applied.

When you add a set landers+offers as a path, you can add rules per each set / path and not the campaign as a whole.

Karolina

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I decided to not test bids at the moment and just focus on testing more offers and landers. I continued my bid at +20% but noticed that the average bid had dropped since I had originally launched so my original bid was fairly high above average. I changed my bid to +20% of the current average price. Was this the right approach? In the future, if I launch with a +20% bid and later the average changes should I readjust or leave it?

Kenya campaign has been running with the winning lander and 3 variations of it and doing quite well. All the landers did well with no standouts, LP1_V3 has only a 55% probability of being the best so will continue running.



Only conversions were on Android and Windows Phone so I excluded all other OS’s. Only one zoneID was in loss by 4x the payout so I cut that one for now.



A couple of the zones are doing really well so I’ll plan to launch a whitelist campaign with those. Should this be run at the same time as my main campaign?



I found some other related offers in this GEO so I’ll test them out as well.To test them should I include them in my main campaign?

Found similar offers in South Africa so prepped some landers including a couple variations of the winner from my Kenya campaign and launched that. This had 6 offers that were all of 3 different carriers so I used the rule based paths in Voluum to target them appropriately.

Thanks for all the great feedback everyone! Have a great weekend
JZ

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There's not really a right/wrong here.

I personally would just leave the bid the way it is - pop is all about staying away from micro-managing any one campaign, but instead run more campaigns simultaneously.


You can!

Depending on the traffic source algo, the traffic for these zones may shift from your original camp to your whitelist camp, but that would be OK as well - as always, test and see.


You certain could!

And if you don't want the new offer to cut into your profits, just specify a smaller rotation weight for the new offer in your tracker's campaign settings (e.g. a 70/30 split, 80/20 split).

Or just do a 50/50 split to get the testing over with ASAP.


This should be interesting! Looking forward to seeing some results!

Thanks JZ!



Amy

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I would say you can include them in the main campaign since they're related.

What Amy suggested here is great piece of advice: think first if you prefer to send only small part of the traffic to them (to see how they performs while still don't cost you that much) or want to be done with testing asap, and adjust the weights accordingly.

Karolina

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Hey @justinzing7 Try not changing the campaign bid but changing bids on a source level. Campaign bid is to broad, target bid is too small - sources are just right, razing and lowering source bids is where you can have a real impact on a campaign.

Thanks,

Neill

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Kenya Campaigns
Main Kenya campaign doing well!! I noticed I was getting some low traffic volume and, per some advice I read somewhere here, I paused the campaign for a day or so before starting it up again and it seems to be doing much better know. Below is the winning offer overall performance last 30 days.



I’m testing 6 other offers on it. I’m using a smaller rotation weight for these new offers. I’ve already excluded one as not viable. Below is stats on these last few days. One other is green as well, yay



I’m also on the 2nd round of lander optimization. Will let that run a bit more and maybe will do one more round of optimization.

In terms of placements cut so far I’ve only been running Android and recently cut one zoneID and one browser that was very in loss.

I launched a whitelist campaign with the winning offer on a couple promising zones. Not seeing much traffic on it so bumped the bid up more.

I also have a separate campaign targeting a different carrier for these 2 other offers but traffic coming in slow and no conversions yet.

Kenya Scaling
Thought since I was seeing some good results with this offer/lander combo I should try testing other sources.

Ran an initial test with two 2 winnings offer on Zeropark but saw no conversions. Do i need to test more? Didn’t see really any of the honeypot bot tests flag in Voluum either. I did noticed that the CTR was dramatically lower than what I was seeing on PropAds but I noticed that some of the websites had decent CTR. Would testing more than targeting the high CTR zones be reasonable approach or accept that it's not good source for this offer/lander and move on?



Ran and PopCash seeing great results already!



Also, just launched on PopAds but no conversions yet.

Any other sources I should give a try?

I'm finishing up some banners and educating myself more on PUSH and will try that this week as well.

South Africa Campaigns
I had launched a carrier targeted South Africa campaign with 6 offers in rotation with rule-based paths to target appropriate offers. One had shown to have a strong chance of being the best so excluded the others and allowed me to only run one carrier now. Pic below is recent data on winning offer. Testing with winning lander variations now.



Also, have a version with lower payout offers running on wifi. I have selected a winning offer and I’m seeing a good amount of conversions but still negative because payout is low. This one was getting a bit expensive but since I was seeing some green zones i thought I'd start cutting zones a bit aggressively so excluded all the ones in loss more than 2x payout (2*$0.2).

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Hey @justinzing7

- if you are struggling to get a campaign off the ground you can right to support@zeropark.com and ask for the best sources for your Geo and Campaign vertical.

Thanks.

Neill

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Awesome. I will do that, thanks!

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Wow! The last few days I’ve been seeing some great performance. Feels great and getting me stoked for what’s more to come!

Kenya
A couple days ago my main Kenya campaign had enough data so I exclusively started running the winning offer and lander. I did the same to my whitelist campaign and the PopCash campaign. I only did 2 rounds of lander variation testing so perhaps when I have more time in the near future I’ll test so more lander variations and even some completely new designs since I’ve got a solid offer and placements.

I also started cutting some placements and a web browser that wasn’t doing well on my main campaign and on PopCash. I haven’t had to touch the whitelist campaign and its been doing fire, 207% ROI!! Below is performance the last 72hrs.



I had also tried this offer/lander on Push on PropellorAds at but not seeing the greatest results. Will give some new banner options a try next. Below is the banner performance.



I also tried this on PopAds but not seeing nearly the performance. After some cutting I'm seeing the ROI improve a bit. Will need some more data before cutting more. Performance last 24hrs below.



Per Neills feedback I got some recommended best converting targets on Zeropark for this GEO and vertical on POP and will give that a try again as my initial start didn’t get any conversions after $10.

I also reached out to my AM to verify lead quality on this Kenya offer before I start scaling more.

South Africa
My carrier specific South Africa campaigns wasn’t showing promise so cut. The other one with a low payout CPL offer I’m running the best performing offer/lander and it was only about -30% ROI before cutting placements so now that I had gotten a good amount of data I started cutting pretty hard unprofitable zones. Below is performance last 24hrs, getting closer to positive ROI, will run more and continue cutting.



I’ll probably start this on carrier soon as well once I find the best placements.

I’ll also got accepted to Gotzha so will look for other offers I could run this weekend.

Cheers,
JZ

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Nice! You're well on your way to your first $100/day in profits now!

Regarding pausing and restarting - you may have read that in the "When Campaign Performance Dives" lesson. Nicely done!


All good testing! This is especially important when you're in the learning stage. Test everything you can think of and observe results to learn all you could from every campaign. You're doing just excellent!

When you get to the point where you've done all the basic learning, and are ready to go after profits, remember: Focus MORE on testing OFFERS and SCALING campaigns to more traffic networks, and LESS on testing LANDERS and on CAMPAIGN OPTIMIZATION. Pop is a numbers game because campaigns don't typically live very long. So speed of execution is the way to go.


Pop traffic is pop traffic - and you've already proven that the type of offer+lander you're running in suitable for pop traffic.

Having said that, traffic quality can vary greatly from network to network. Popads has the best quality I've experienced, but volume isn't there. PropellerAds is a good balance of quality and quantity. Zeropark has the most volume of the 3 but overall quality is lower. It's not possible to provide that kind of volume and maintain high quality.

(The above comparison between the networks does not always hold true - can vary depending on targeting - with different geos etc.)

Having said THAT - just because Zeropark's OVERALL quality is lower, doesn't mean it doesn't have good quality placements! The key is to run enough traffic so that you can uncover these placements (or ask their support for recommended placements like Neill suggested).

So the best approach would be to testing offers and landers on good-quality sources to lower cost, then take the best and scale to the higher-volume lower-quality sources and just focus on cutting. A source like Zeropark can require investing quite a bit of money just on finding the good vs. bad placements. But after you've made that investment, you can run on the best placements again and again to recap that investment.


Terrific!


Normally, I would suggest not to bother running a campaign that only has potential to bring in peanuts (and that's assuming you'll make it green eventually).

But in this case, you're using a REALLY low-payout offer to identify good and bad placements - which can be a very good approach because after that, you can run higher-payout offers on the good placements! (Or on remaining placements after you've cut the bad ones.)

Also: There is a shit ton of ZA volume on Zeropark, but it could take quite some money (4 figures if I remember correctly - but that would of course depend on your specific offer etc.) to optimize to green. So be sure to only test your very best offer+lander there if you don't want to bleed more than you need to.


Impressive! Good testing and optimization!

And checking lead quality before scaling = thumbs up! You're doing all the right things!


As mentioned above, try to look for higher-payout offers to launch on the good placements.

As I've suggested above: Once you're out of the learning stage, focus on testing offers and scaling, and less on landers and optimization.

I want to add that it's important to learn to let go of campaigns that are making you peanuts.

When I first got started I struggled with that for the longest time - until I realized that it was taking me probably 70%+ of my work hours to monitor small campaigns that really weren't worth my time.

Eventually I realized this, and learned to stop the small ones so I could devote more time to the bigger campaigns (optimizing and scaling), and also on starting new test campaigns.

Give up the pennies to make the big bucks.

I'm very proud of your progress - you're not making big money yet, but that will come if you keep up with the learning to gain more experience. Expanding away from pop is wise. You now have a solid foundation. Testing push is great - it's hot right now but I honestly don't see it as a long-term money maker. Take advantage of that while you can. After that consider expanding into Native if you have the budget, or even Facebook/Adwords - those 3 traffic types won't be going anywhere any time soon!

Looking forward to seeing how/what you'll do!



Amy

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Solid tips, just what I needed, much appreciated!

Great advice, as I've started to scale to other sources I was a bit deterred to find I wasn't have the same success initially like I had seen on PropellerAds so understanding that I'll need to invest a bit in these sources to find the best placements is helpful.


This is a great perspective. Changing gears to focus my time to my good Kenya offer/lander. Since I've been seeing some great performance with it this will be a great opportunity for me to learn more about scaling and get familiar with other traffic sources and such.


Regarding my campaigns, I’m not sure if I got lucky last week with a couple of days of awesome performance but since my last post I noticed a decline, still green though but considerably less than those couple days last week. Been toying with bids a bit to see if that helps. I'm also considering expanding my PropellerAds campaigns to include the brokered traffic at some point as well.



Focusing on scaling right now, so far I’m at:

• PopCash - launched last week and been doing great right away, haven’t even really had to optimize much, limited volume though
  
• PopAds - launched last week been about -40% ROI, slowly creeping up as I’ve been cutting placements, had first green day today, limited volume though
  
• Zeropark - Only 2 conversions with $40 spent…Been cutting sources per 2x payout rule. Per @zeropark’s Neill’s advice I reached out to zeropark support and got their top converting sources for my GEO. I’ve increased my bid on those specific sources.
  
• Exoclick - A couple conversions but barely any traffic, playing with bid to get more. Also, noticed that since I have javascript alerts, mobile vibrate and stuff that it’s limited some sites. Will remove some of these from my lander and relaunch at some point.
  
• Clickadu - Also low volume, playing with bids to get more traffic
  
• Adcash - Spent about $30 with only one conversion, I’ve been running CPM but they recommend CPA, educating myself on this a bit more and figuring out the technical aspect of their postback and such before I run this further.

AM said traffic quality looked good on their end but verifying with advertiser. Also, waiting on follow up on whether I can get a pay bump.

I’ve also been running a Push campaign on PropellerAds. Been testing several different banner variations but haven’t had much time to improve them. Will find some time this next week to learn more about this and sit down to think of some better banner designs. Was a bit confused with costs not showing up but found a post recommending CPC rather than CPM which I’ve been using, so will move to that.



Transitioning from PropellerAds and PopAds to some of these other sources and traffic types has been a bit difficult with more complexity and things to consider but feels great to see some progress and new challenges. As I get deeper into things it’s more motivating as things become more tangible and I realize all the things I want to learn and become proficient at. Excited for what’s to come!

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This is very common - so much so it's inevitable.

Definitely re-read the lesson "What campaign performance dives" and apply some of the suggestions!

Brokered traffic is a great way to scale, but the quality is almost certainly not as good, so unless your offer+lander is making the original traffic work, taking it to brokered traffic won't likely make things work all of a sudden. But for your specific case, since you already have a green camp, it would definitely be a smart move to test brokered traffic as well.


You're doing all the right things - I have nothing to add!

In fact, by exploring these additional sources, you're already ahead of at least 70% of the other newbies.

It takes money to test new networks - and not every one will work out - but if you're planning on sticking with pop for a while, finding more sources that work can really serve you.

A year or two ago, I would encourage you to test even more sources. But pop is on the decline - so expanding into push would be better use of your time IMO. Testing more pop networks can still be worthwhile, but I would definitely test push first like you're planning on doing.




Amy

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Good news is I got a pay bump on the offer I’ve been running! Bad news is performance tanked last week and then the offer got paused…

Ended up running a different Kenya offer several days ago offer with my winning lander fairly successfully. Scaled that a bit to other sources and have even started to seeing some green with it on push on PropellerAds as well. Below is the last 72hrs on primarily PropellerAds (pop & push), PopAds, PopCash, ExoClick and ClickAdu.



I’ve mostly been focusing on scaling and optimizing this Kenya offer and feel I have a decent enough understanding of the process now that I will more aggressively test lots of offers in different GEOs, particularly those with some higher volume, as well as explore other verticals. I think I’ll stick with Pop for the time being but also scale my successful campaigns to push as well.

I’ve been fairly busy with other things, plus the weather is getting nice here and in Minnesota you feel like you have to jump on that, so haven’t had tons of time but will keep at it and continue to update this thread.

Thanks for all the support!
JZ

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That's the way to go! Thanks so much for updating us on your progress!

2-figures/day is a nice start! I sense 3-figure days just around the corner...



Amy

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Hey @justinzing7

Just to add to @vortex 's comment.

Zeropark is the biggest network for Pop, Push and Domain which means we have the most flexible traffic, you can test all geos on any offer type at any bid and we will have some volume for it. This makes us the platform very good for testing offers as if it does not work with us it probably will not work anywhere. It can take some digging to find the subid's/settings that work, but once you have there is a lot of room to scale. Plus were always happy to give advice, hints and tips to get you started.

Thanks,

Neill

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