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40 Day Tutorial - From Sweepstakes Hopefully To Barcelona (25)

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Hi all,

I have been here for past couple of months but only launched a lander+offer campaign today. In between I had been lurking around, reading (forum posts, cashvertising, problem solving 101 etc), attempted to learn programming, started exercising, anything but launching a serious campaign to move along in the tutorial. So here I am to hold myself accountable and fully utilize the money I have been spending on tools for AM. Do guide me along .

Affiliate Networks

• Mobidea
• Clickdealer
• Gotzha

Tracker

• Voluum

Traffic Sources

• PropellerAds
• PopAds

Spy-tool

• Adplexity Mobile

Offers:

I have been direct linking various offers from Mobidea and Clickdealer and I decided to go with iphone sweepstakes in Malaysia as I had a couple of conversions there and it seems like a standard for newbies anyway. Two offers will be tested; Mobidea (DOI) and Clickdealer (Pin Submit).

Landers:

I had a few ripped from last month and today, interestingly enough, I saw one with native language that was receiving traffic so I ripped that as well. I'm not proficient in programming thus I'd only managed to clean 3 landers without much issue. Speed optimization didn't work or was too complicated for me so I left it as it is. 3 landers will be tested, 2 in English and 1 in native language.

Day 1:

I set up the campaign and left it running overnight (same timezone as Malaysia). I woke up to 2 conversions on the Mobidea offer and I was ready to pause the Clickdealer offer. However, the 2 conversions did not register on Voluum (somehow I always screw up entering offer URLs) and I had to fix the links. Meanwhile, 3 conversions registered on the Clickdealer offer and so I had a dilemma. I decided to leave both running for a day to get more stats and also to get confirmation that my link was truly fixed. These are the results at the end of the day at around 10X offer price:

http://

• Cost on the high side at $3.2 CPM but that was the recommended bid.
• 2 x Conversion on the Mobidea offer didn't show but that is totally my fault.
• Clickdealer offer eventually overtook the one from Mobidea, thus the Mobidea one will be paused for D2 until further notice.

http://

• At this point LP1 is a clear winner. It might have to do with it being in native language or something else for me to find out.
• LP2 will be cut for D2.
• Contemplating translating LP1 to English and LP3 to Native Language for further testing. Does that make sense?

any input will be appreciated !

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Hey!
Nice start
Yes, English in MY can work, but it's highly recommended to use native language.
You have not bad ROI with your best LP, but I would also recommend to test more offers (if you have enough cash flow), cause in GEOs like Malaysia there are tons of good offers.
Regarding your question:

I would not order the translation, because in Adplexity you can find thousands of LPs. Just try to search more, and you'll find it! Don't spend money, because landers for sweeps usually long, and it can cost much money. I would recommend to leave the best LP and try to find more in native language (you already know it works better).
Good luck!

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Hey, any method is good as long as you make it work!

Thanks for choosing Voluum. 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!

If you want, you can manually upload conversions that occurred but weren't registered by Voluum using Conversion Upload feature.

To upload conversions, go to Settings → Conversion Upload and provide a one entry per line in the Conversion upload text field in the format:

click ID , payout , transaction ID , conversion type

Each value must be separated with a comma but you do not need to provide all of them.

Example 1:

If you'll provide a click ID value only: i.e. c384EFV6JHQODRN70575OK6U, it will increase a conversion count by 1 and add a payout value to the revenue according to your settings in an offer element setup. If you have set payout tracking in your offer element setup to Manual and set a payout value to 1, it will add 1 to your revenue. If you have set payout tracking in your offer element setup to Auto, no value will be added to your revenue.

Example 2:

If you'll provide a click ID value and a payout value, separated by a comma: i.e. c384EFV6JHQODRN70575OK6U,0.75, it will increase a conversion count by 1 and add 0.75 to the revenue.

Karolina

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Thanks!

Yeah that actually makes sense. Sometimes I miss the obvious .

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As I can see there are all 3 types of LPs in Malay:
1) Wheel
2) Questions
3) Instant winner
You can also find LP with boxes, it also works good.
I marked what I would run and what I don't recommend: https://take.ms/iYQV4

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Thanks for doing this @mrbraun, really appreciate it. I will rip, fix and test them as soon as I can!

Day 2:

I haven't had much time as my wife's friends are in town and we have to take them around. Nevertheless, I'm still running this campaign to get data. As earlier mentioned I will be pausing the Mobidea offer and LP2. Here are the results:

• ROI on the Clickdealer offer improved from -25.38% to -14.83%

• While conversions have increased, it is not in proportion with the increase in visits too for my best lander and ROI has dropped markedly. It is only day 2 so I don't have enough data to make any conclusions but what I can do is to reduce costs by dayparting (It doesn't make any sense to run a campaign when people are sleeping and not giving me conversions I suppose).

• Seems to make sense for me to not advertise overnight from midnight to 8am.
• Seems like I'm bleeding from slackers who are waiting for work to end from tea break onwards (15:00 to 19:00).

That's all for today.

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Hey, @kramnave!
To be honest you don't have enough data to analyze day parting. I recommend to run at least 3-5 days to understand which time parts you should block. And 90% of my camps I run with full-time targeting, so be careful with that. May be you will see that it works, just the ROI is not so high.
So now I would recommend to test more, to collect more data.
Also as I can see your CPM is $1.20. You should get much more traffic is GEOs like MY with this CPM. What targeting did you set if I may ask?

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Hey @mrbraun,
yes think i was too eager to reduce costs and should not daypart this early, considering I’ve only really gone through a weekday and a weekend. I should just go test more landers and offers.

I think my traffic is lower because I’m targeting a single carrier (bounded by offer) and android users only, since I have been reading that Apple users has no interest in participating in iPhone sweeps.

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Yes, Android traffic works better for sweeps. I also run android only in 90% cases.

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Day 3:

• Tried dayparting but removed that later at the advice of mrbraun.
• Made the decision to get rid of LP3 and just go with my best lander.

Day 4:

• Good thing I removed dayparting else I would have missed out on 7 conversions. Thank you @mrbraun!
• Really happy to get 35 conversions and being in the green for the day.
• Wondering to test other landers in this current campaign or with another traffic source when scaling (being in the green helps with motivation ).
• Next steps would be to cut really bad placements, bad mobile devices.
• Back to reading tutorial Day 33 onwards.

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Nice result!
Yeah, would be nice if you could test more landers. But your ROI is already good
So, continue and collect more data.

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Summary of Campaign Till Now:

• The campaign has been profitable so far. On the 27th however, things were sluggish and I created another campaign at a higher SmartCPM bid. It has since been more profitable than the original campaign at a lower SmartCPM bid.
• I had cut larger loss-making placements along the way (-2x-3x payout).
• My top 3 placements represent 76% of all conversions. Therefore I have decided to whitelist them tomorrow and play around with bids. Here comes my dilemma and inexperience; will a bid of say $2 CPM get more traffic than $2 SmartCPM bid if the placement has been averaging $1.9?

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• Conversions plummetted suddenly, not even getting 1 in 24hrs on my best performing placement.
• Checked with AM and she confirmed that it was a capped offer (the noob in me thought it was an individual cap rather than an offer cap.
• Since there is no way for me to know when the cap is reached and gain further experience, I have decided to stop running the offer but I did learn a lot from the experience.
• Overall +$48.80 profit, 18.11% ROI.
• On to other offers to continue my education.

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Wow - nice start and the green is encouraging!

Nice optimization efforts!

As for your dilemma - that would really depend on the situation. Too many moving parts - different competition levels, how much other people are bidding and so on. Testing both and comparing results is recommended.


Drill down to hours of day stats in your tracker to find out what time the cap is occurring at - it should be pretty evident. Then the next day just stop traffic before that hour. As more and more people are running that offer, the cap will be reached earlier and earlier in the day, so you'll need to evaluate every night and adjust accordingly for the next day.

Many of the best offers come with caps nowadays. I wouldn't suggest to stop running the offer just because of that.

In addition, your AM may increase your cap if your quality is good and your traffic consistent. Wouldn't hurt to ask!




Amy

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Thanks Amy @vortex, I took your advice and ran the offer again, I was profitable until it got paused. I tested other offers on push for a couple of days with some losses until i ran a similar offer back on pops and have been slightly profitable. Not much but I had left it running on the same creative that I used for the past few months and it has not lost any money nor required any additional effort on my part other than a day of optimization.

However I had run into hardware issues and more importantly, being unable to focus and having doubt. I ran sweeps as I was following the tutorial, applied for COD products(nutra, not FB friendly) because I felt I wanted to move into ecom eventually and actually started to source for products for a Shopify store and thinking about creatives(video ads + animation). I'm in between thinking I should hustle and am able to handle everything or that I should just focus on one route. Agonizing and will probably find my way but wanted to share that I'm still afloat .

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Nice follow along your progress is really interesting . If i was you i would focus only on POP/PUSH for now and continue to explore new niche and GEO .

Start to have a stable income with push or pop traffic and also more experience and then you can switch to some other traffic source or even start your Shopify store.

In case your NUTRA/Shopify testing is a total fail you still have your old cashflow

Good Luck

Edit : Most picture are not clickable on your post, there is a 404 error

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Thanks, all i did was to rip landers and follow the tutorial. Maybe the key for me not to have lost any money while testing only a few offers was that my creatives were not in english. Guess that can be a direction in ecom as well. Underserved markets.

Sent from my SM-G965F using STM Forums mobile app

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Thanks for the update @kramnave! And glad to know that you're experiencing some initial success!

When you say "hardware issues" what do you mean exactly?

You've observed a an important thing about pop campaigns: Landing pages don't burn out quickly - unlike banners. The same ones can work for months.

Also keep in mind: Sometimes when a campaign's performance declines, all you have to do is stop running for a day or two to "reset" it and then start running it again. Or, start a new campaign but with all the exact same settings and the old performance would come back (until it declines again eventually - at which point you can repeat).

Regarding what you should be focusing on - @euforio has a point for sure. I however have a bit of a different perspective - I'm increasingly in support of establishing long-term assets (or at least something that can last longer than the typical cpa campaigns). So if you start testing Shopify, you have my blessings for sure!

Pop can still make you money for sure, but a lot of testing needs to be involved. Basically the approach is to keep testing lots of offers and landers, uncover the gems, and scale rapidly. Keep doing this for a few major geos on multiple traffic networks and you'll have something.

But quite frankly, for the amount of time effort you put into pop, if you'd put that effort elsewhere you can get better returns. But they ARE perfect for the beginner to learn!

I don't run push, but people all over are succeeding with it, so it wouldn't be a bad choice to keep riding that wave in the next while. And using pop to lock down a good offer and lander first, before taking the campaign to push and focusing on testing ads, can be a good approach.

Sorry I'm not able to make that decision for you! But hopefully I've provided some food for thought. Please do continue to update us on your progress!



Amy

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Currently running on 1 laptop fan now, awaiting new ones to arrive . Anyway I kinda decided to test a bit of everything, after all things won't happen overnight and in between collecting data I should have the time but need to watch out for finances. Eventually would like to own a niche product and create a brand out of it. Even if it doesn't make me rich, I'd still need a front for my would be erectile dysfunction/sweepstakes empire .

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Haha you made it sound like it was something extremely serious - replacing laptop fans doesn't sound too bad!

Owning a niche product and creating a brand doesn't sound too shabby! I have plans to do that myself sometime in the future, likely with new-age related products.

Please do continue to update us on your adventures!



Amy

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Hi all, given the title of the thread and AWE being a few days away. I thought it apt to provide an update. Well, I have FAILED and won't be joining you guys this time round. I did not make enough to cover all expenses required for the trip but I should make it to AWA.

Anyway, since my last update, my lone campaign started to receive less traffic and despite getting confirmation from my AM that the offer was still profitable for others, I left it to fizzle out as I didn't think it can be scaled. Failing to get me to commit to deciding what I wanted to do next, she pulled up a list of offers that was doing well in the network. I picked an offer (sweepstake, pin submit) in a larger geo than my previous offer and went out to find landers to run pops. I must admit that I was lazy AF and only settled on 2 landers. 1st lander was already running and targeted on my geo and 2nd lander was running on other geos but mine. What is interesting is I made a bad rip for the 2nd lander (I'll explain what happened at a later time) but decided to run it nevertheless. How bad was it? Lets just say that some links to pictures are broken and the usual pop-up to explain what was going on to the user didn't run. Being the lazy me, I made no modifications to both landers. BTW, the broken lander converted much better than the 1st.

Stats for the 1st day (less than 24hrs)


Stats for the 2nd day (full 24hrs)


The offer was converting and I started to optimize daily, first running on my broken lander, cutting OS versions, browser versions, placements and for some reason or another, cities.
The offer started to be profitable and doing XX daily and I started playing with push after a couple of weeks and this happened...


I had my first XXX day!

I had a few more XXX days and was asked to scale this offer. I tried various things, ran push with 5 sources, tried MrBraun's generic creatives (nice ROI btw) and tried pops with another source using smartCPA.
This happened...


I made a loss despite conversions increasing by 50% as my costs increased 270%.

Where it went wrong:
1. Though profitable, margins were'nt great on push campaigns as payout wasn't fantastic and costs were high.
2. Tried a smartCPA goal campaign on a source I wasn't familiar with and ended up losing $50 with no conversions.

By this time I knew that I had to attempt to ask for a pay bump to continue my trying to scale with push. However it seems that the traffic quality wasn't great and I got rejected.

Where it went wrong:
1. Not checking traffic quality with AM while I tried to scale with different traffic sources.

I gradually stopped all the push campaigns for this offer and concentrated on pops. Remember I was trying out different things? I was running another smartCPA campaign that had only 1600 visits and 1 conversion for 5 days.
Then on the 6th day, this happened....


stats improved and this was yesterday...


This campaign did nothing for 5 days, I could have killed it and moved on but on the 6th day it came alive and provided my best ROI to date, freeing up cashflow for other things. I'm still baffled
about what happened and if it was due to some hidden testing/algorithm or was it nudged in a way by my whitelist but most importantly what I have gained is opening up my eyes to the bid levels
required to attract traffic and conversions from certain placements.


Where do I want to go from here? Continue testing offers obviously but having done pops and push for sweepstakes, I do want to try my hand at doing sweeps on FB. I do see FB as a very important platform for any future verticals/endeavours I may want to settle on in future due to its reach and targeting. One main reason I haven't started is that I'm worried of my personal social account being banned and I do not want to pay $1000 to test a farmed account. Any advice will be appreciated. In the meanwhile I will
go read up on @stickupkid posts on running sweeps on FB. BTW pin submits sweeps are definitely a no no for FB due to it being a subscription?

Please do comment on where I can improve on my campaigns so far.

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If you are planning to do FB in future, give some accounts a 1 dollar spend on a total whitehat campaign to warm up accounts in meanwhile. If you are at the point to start with FB, you are ready to rock since you did some spend on the account(s) already. Warming up accounts with some spend is quite a must.

Your personal account won't go down by running sweeps, just the ad account. Unless you go really hardcore ofcourse... but that's not needed for sweeps. I am using the same angles for lead gen/pins/IVR, at the end the ad and prelander are the same, only the offer behind is different.

Make sure you don't mislead (dont say FREE when you run a pin submit, since its not free). It will give much complaints and you will get banned. So pins are not allowed indeedo, but it's very do-able with the right approach to reach xx profit a day from in a very short time. Going to xxx/xxxx a day -> I advice to spread your winning camps on 3-5 accounts!

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Ok, doubt I'll go into nefarious activities and get my social account banned then, that brings quite a bit of relief. Guess I'll just go and try to warm up a few accounts now. Do I need to incorporate a business to create a FB BM though?

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You don't need to, but for invoicing/accounting/administration it's wise to have all things set, regarding VAT etc. Ofcourse not sure which geo you are and what regulations apply.

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First of all, CONGRATULATIONS on your first 3-figure profit day! Quite a milestone!

I wouldn't consider not being able to make AWE a failure. You've already come a LONG way in a few months.

This IS strange!

Have you compared placement stats before and after the massive increase in conversion rate, to see whether there were changes in traffic distribution?

Hoping to see you at AWA!



Amy

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