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Reaching first profitable campaign [Voluum] (10)

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Technicality:
Tracking: Voluum
Affiliate network: Clickdealer
Traffic source: PorpellerAds
I'm using Adplexity for landers.
My vertical is sweeps on mobile in tier 3/4 geos.

I've read most of the 40 days tutorial by @vortex, I've been playing along the tutorial with various offers from Clickdealer using both PropellerAds and PopAds as traffic sources.
I'm getting my landers from Adplexity - landers on popups and redirects; from the past 30 days; running 4-21 days; sorted by most visited; all tracking sources (besides None) for the offer's specific geo. After ripping the landers I deleted dead code and did some optimizations reaching to average of 1s loading time in GTmetrix for mobile test.
The offers I was running I got from my AM in Clickdealer with the criterias described in the tutorials. I ran offers I found landers for and that seemed okay to me.
I was using both PopAds and PropellerAds in different campaigns. Usually I was running only cellular traffic (if I also ran WiFi traffic for the offer I did it in a separate campaign). My bid was a bit above the average bid. All campaigns were (and are) SmartCPM.
I ran campaigns with several offers and several landers. Most of the offers were SOI but I ran several pin-submits.
After several campaigns I decided to give up on PopAds as a traffic source because I was barely receiving impressions and conversions (compared to PropellerAds).
I continued with PropellerAds and my AM's recommended offers. I ran more campaigns, trying to do optimizations and playing with the bid (SmartCPM) but couldn't even reach a break even campaign so I was obviously doing something wrong.

I decided to take an offer from my AM that I ran once and it converted well (but I was still losing money) and open a follow along to see what am I doing wrong.
I previously ran the offer with 2 landers, so I took the better lander to this campaign (https://www.peakconversion.com/2012/...al-calculator/ was in use).
The landers are from Adplexity. The chosen lander got a score of 1.0s in GTmetrix, the back button redirects to the offer (tracking.my-domain.com/click).

The offer (from Clickdealer):
Samsung S9 voucher/leadgen sweep in South Africa

• Payout: 0.25$
• Price format: CPA
• Flow: SOI
• Platforms: All
• Restrictions: No Adult, No Content locking, No Incentive, No Misleading, No Co-reg, No Misuse of 3rd Party Brands, No "FREE", No Brand Bidding, No SMS
• 3G + WiFi
• Carrier: All

I documented the offer in the offers log excel.
Campaign was set up correctly (checked) in Voluum with said lander and offer.
I document everything in my journal and I will post it as comments to this post.

Thanks for following! Any advice would be appreciated.

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Day 1:
Added blacklisted placements (2x payout strategy) from previous campaign. Blacklisted the following for the same reason: Opera Mini, Uc Browser and Cell C operator - after showing bad performance in previous campaign.
Bid = 2.21$ (bit above average).
Lunching Time = 16:28.

After running the offer for about an hour it seems like the offer is burning money fast and I got only 1 conversions.
I lowered the bid to see if I can get more conversions for less money with different traffic: new BID = 1.89$, cut segments : Android versions 2,4,7,9 (2x the payout and no conversions, also information from previous campaign). I continued the campaign.
30 minutes after said change I received 12 conversions! Yay me.
Could it be that the conversions are still from the previous bid? Since they all came so quick?

Edit:
No conversions for 2 hours since the change. I guess the conversions were from the previous bid.
I raised the bid back to 2.12$, lets see what happens

Edit:
I see some conversions coming in but very slowly..
I'll try to lower the bid again to 1.52$ and let it run for a bit. Removing Voadcom carrier (stats from previous campaign and current as well (-90% ROI))

Current campaign stats (after all the above changes):
Visits: 11,300
Clicks: 3,276
Conversions: 23
Cost: 16.22$
You could say it wasn't a good day lol
Personal possible conclusions:
Don't play with the bid too much too fast. Let it run for a bit and see what happens.
Put less daily budget for starters to feel where things are going.

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Hello,

it would help if you could post some data from your previous tests ... how much you spent on the tests, what exactly were the results. What have you done in terms of optimizations etc ...

The payout for the ZA offer seems a bit low to me too, try to find something better.

Anyways, will wait for some more data from you

Cheers,
Matej.

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Sorry for the delay, I didn't receive a mail about the comment in my thread

I spent a total of 100$, had profits of about 55$

The campaign was obviously unsuccessful, or did you mean something more specific?

Android was the only OS that worked so I ran only on this.
I removed bad placements.
Then I included only the browsers that converted well.
Excluded Android versions that didn't convert.
Excluded a mobile carrier that didn't convert.

I blacklisted the same placements on the current campaign as well

What other data should I provide?

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I was a bit unable to update, sorry. I didn't do much with the campaign so:

Day 2 - 7: Blacklisted placements with the 2x payout test. Add Vodacom carrier back. The average bid was changing so I kept my eye on it and changed it accordingly to be a bit above the average bid.

Campaign data:

14/04:

• Impressions: 18,777
• Conversions: 32
• Revenue: 8$
• Cost: 25.77$
• Profit: -17.77$
• ROI: -68.96%

15/04:

• Impressions: 17,216
• Conversions: 72
• Revenue: 18$
• Cost: 27.19$
• Profit: -9.19$
• ROI: -33.8%

16/04:

• Impressions: 11,362
• Conversions: 61
• Revenue: 15.25$
• Cost: 19.27$
• Profit: -4.02$
• ROI: -20.86%

17/04:

• Impressions: 12,761
• Conversions: 50
• Revenue: 12.5$
• Cost: 20.19$
• Profit: -7.69$
• ROI: -38.08%

18/04:

• Impressions: 8,276
• Conversions: 29
• Revenue: 7.25$
• Cost: 12.7$
• Profit: -5.45$
• ROI: -42.92%

19/04:

• Impressions: 6,247
• Conversions: 25
• Revenue: 6.25$
• Cost: 7.88$
• Profit: -1.63$
• ROI: -20.73%

So my loses have gone down. I believe its because of the bid change (it got down during the week) rather than the blacklisting of placements.

My plan:
I'll let it run until tomorrow. I'll keep an eye in placements and the bid. Tomorrow I'll blacklist browsers as well.

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I started new campaigns with 4 new offers, all the offers are from Thailand. 3 sweeps for iPhone and 1 for Samsung (2 different campaigns).

iPhone TH campaign:

• Offer 1:
  
  • Payout: 0.16$
  • Flow: SOI
  • Carriers: All + WiFi
  • OSs: All
  
  
• Offer 2:
  
  • Payout: 0.18$
  • Flow: SOI
  • Carriers: All + WiFi
  • OSs: All

• Offer 3:
  
  • Payout: 0.17$
  • Flow: SOI
  • Carriers: All + WiFi
  • OSs: All

Split testing the offer with a proven lander taken from Adplexity (proven from a previous campaign) for a day. I'm running the campaign on 3G traffic.

Data:
Offer 1:

• Conversions: 8
• Revenue: 1.28$
• Cost: 3.62$
• Profit: -2.34$

Offer 2:

• Conversions: 4
• Revenue: 0.72$
• Cost: 3.58$
• Profit: -2.86$

Offer 3:

• Conversions: 7
• Revenue: 1.19$
• Cost: 3.61$
• Profit: -2.42$

All the offers seem to convert, so I don't see which one I can disqualify now.
I'll blacklist bad placements and see what will happen tomorrow.

Samsung TH campaign:
Offer:
The offer includes a prelander. I defined the flow to go through my lander first (also a lander from Adplexity) then to the offer's prelander.

• Payout: 0.18$
• Flow: SOI.
• Carriers: All + WiFi
• OSs: All

I've been running the campaign on 3G traffic for a day as well.
Data:

• Impressions: 12,524
• Conversions: 22
• Revenue: 3.96$
• Cost: 7.88$
• Profit: -3.92$
• ROI: -49.76%

The offer seems to convert. I will blacklist placements with the 2x payout test and see what will change tomorrow.

Several problems and questions I have:
1) I see a large number of clicks, sometimes more clicks than impressions in Voluum. Why is that? I have a back button redirect script that redirects to the offer, that might explain a high number of clicks but not more than the impressions.
2) Not enough landers: I'm using Adplexity to find lander. In a lot of cases when I'm looking for landers in tier 3/4 countries for sweeps (Samsung, iPhone) I see very few lander variations (the most I saw was 4 different landers). Am I doing something wrong in how I look for landers? Because I find very few results.
3) I want to check more sweeps offers but not for phones, e.g supermarket vouchers. How do I look for landers for such offers? Can I traceback landers form offer ID in Adplexity?
4) I have a feeling that the South Africa offer can become profitable but I can't even get it to breakeven (i.e profit 0$ or above), what am I missing? What am I doing wrong? Am I spending too much on test and should blacklist things earlier? Am I blacklisting things too quickly?

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I'm not an expert on Pops traffic but I feel like you should go with an offer with at least a 0.5-1$ payout, even if your conversions are on fire, when you are paying 0.2c per visitor and only getting paid 16c you'll need one in 80 visits to convert to breakeven, if you are getting paid 50c then you will need just one in 250 visits to convert. It may not convert as well as the 16c payout one, but if it converts less than 3 times less than the original one you will still make more money

Also think of it this way, Thailand has a population of about 70 million people, 24% of its population use the internet, that leaves you with about 17 million people.

If you convert an amazing 0.5% of the entire segment of the population that uses the internet in Thailand you will get 85k conversions, at a 0.16c payout that's about 13-15k$... Is it really worth it investing money to get data for a campaign that could eventually make total revenue of 15k? And assuming you run at a 20% margin it will net you a cool 3k$ and that's before you factor in testing losses, wire fees to the traffic source & for wires from the aff network to you, server costs etc.

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Thank you @samkerstein for taking the time to document your journey!

Below are my thoughts...

True story. But PopAds has good quality and it auto-approves campaigns instantly once you're VIP (after around 10~12k in spend). This makes it the perfect network to test for cheap before scaling to other networks.

What you can do is set up a whole bunch of test camps on PopAds so you're not twiddling your thumbs while waiting on enough traffic to make decisions. But that would be for when you have the experience to juggle multiple campaigns.

I understand where you're coming from by excluding popads altogether at this point - testing on propellerads will save more time.


We'll see about that!

Often, you could be doing all the right things and still not see green. It may just be that you haven't tested enough offers.

Also, the first green campaign is often the most elusive for newbies, because it's harder to expect something you haven't experienced before (and thoughts = energy which will determine the outcome). Once you've seen a few green campaigns and learn to be optimistically expectant of them, your "luck" will improve. And of course, more experience will definitely help!


Good observation! It is true that some/many offers will perform worse for opera mini and uc browser, but not all. So when you have a green campaign, it really wouldn't hurt to run some traffic to these segments to make sure.


For future campaigns: It would make your life so much easier to just clone the original campaign and set THAT to the newer bid. That way when you're looking at stats, you know it's a result of a certain bid, and not a mix of multiple bids during different times.

Then you wouldn't have trouble figuring out which conversion came from which bid.

Your conclusions are good! These alone are worth the money you "lost" to gain the experience.


That's really not bad for a big geo like ZA!

You've done good optimization work by the sounds of it. Next time please feel free to provide more screenshots of stats and we can dissect them together.


It sounds like you may have optimized what you could.

I would suggest to test more offers with the winning lander, and then testing more landers.

Even test more offers+landers in another vertical.

You've not cut the worst placements, so would be in a good position to test new offers and landers for cheaper than before.


"Testing" a single lander is a bad idea. Try 5+, and well-optimized.

That way, when an offer doesn't convert, you can conclude that it's probably not a good offer, and not because your lander is crappy.

But since in this case, you're getting conversions, it would be good to finish the offer split-test first, and THEN do a round of lander split-test.


Good!

For this type of offer you can also test:

1)Landers that are of a different style than the offer's built-in lander. For example, if the built-in one is a surveys lander, try adding a spinning wheel lander in front of it.

2)Very simple landers - for example a 1-page lander that asks the visitor to pick out their favorite color for the "prize" (iphone or whatever).


1)Yup - backbutton will do that. I wouldn't worry about that.

2)Try setting less-stringent filters on Adplexity. Also, you can search for landers that are in other "prizes" and change out the prize (name and images) to suit the offer(s) you're running. Lastly: Ripping landers from tier 1 geos and translating them for lower-tier geos is a great idea, as the bigger affiliates with more innovation are typically competing in the tier 1 geos with better landers. Can try rewriting all the text into short sentences and using google translate (which tends to be more accurate for shorter sentences - and remember to rewrite any figures of speech into literal phrases first).

3)You can try for sure. But if you can't find anything, my suggestions in the answer above applies here as well.

4)It's hard to say without knowing your cutting criteria for the various segments. For placements though if you're cutting at 2x payout in loss, that should be enough. I would suggest to test more offers as was mentioned above. You can also keep cutting of course - drill down to various segments and cut the low-ROI segments which would typically be bigger cuts than cutting placements. This will get you green faster, although the resulting profits would be lower.

Testing more offers and landers first to increase the profits potential of the entire campaign is always the best recommendation.


@247media Appreciate your suggestions - make a lot of sense! However, pop is a bit different.

Low payout offers do have their merits. I've seen very low payout offers in the range of $0.10-0.20 make good profits (3 figures/day on one network which is pretty good for a single offer for pop).

Low payout offers will also allow you to gain experience for cheap. You can learn testing an optimization on very cheap spend. For example, compare cutting placements at 2x payout in loss, how much you'd need to spend to cut say 20 placements at $0.10 payout vs. $1 payout vs. $10 payout.

A good approach would be to use a low-payout offer to eliminate the bad placements and/or identify the best placements, then unleash the high-payout ones on the best placements. That way you can test and optimize for a lot cheaper, and reach green faster.

As for low total revenue - that's not usual a concern when it comes to pop, because typical pop camps don't last long enough to achieve that type of saturation (of the entire population). Basically test lots of offers, scale the promising ones to many networks, make short-term profits.

This is one of the reasons I don't recommend focusing on pop in the long run - in order to achieve consistency in revenues you'd have to be juggling lots of campaigns, and all the effort will make profits for only days/weeks (months only if you're lucky). But pop remains the easiest and cheapest to learn how to run paid traffic - which is why I wrote the beginner's tutorial around it.




Amy

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Thank you for your comment Amy! Helpful and insightful as always!

Good idea! Haven't thought about it! PopAds has a minimum of 2.5$ (compared to PropellerAds' 10$) which means I don't have to watch closely while testing low payouy offers.

So basically, except placements, once the campaign goes green it's worth to give a second chance to things I blacklisted?

What exactly do I need to provide? I don't want to overload with useless info and post a screenshot of everything. I would be happy if you could tell what things should I screenshot so it'll give more info about my campaign(s).

I would need to find more landers first haha

Isn't it a bad practice though to jump between verticals? I'm still not too fond with sweeps and pop


So if I have a problem with finding landers and I want to first split test offers and then split test landers that I translated/created myself, can I use this as a rule of thumb? Have my good Adplexity ripped landers split test the offers first (in case they convert, otherwise I can't conclude anything.




Thank you for your great advices Amy!

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Yup and you can do this with placements as well!

Every situation is different though.


Case 1: Campaign got green mostly from testing offers and landers

If you started the campaign by testing multiple landers and offers, and your final, winning offer+lander converts a LOT better compared to the rest of the offers and landers in the previous split-tests, then I would suggest retesting blacklisted segments.

However, if the winning combo is only marginally better than the other split-test candidates, then I wouldn't bother retesting.

You can also mind the 80/20 rule by only retesting the bigger segments.

Lastly, you can always drill down to winning lander > winning offer > placements (or whatever other segment), and only retest the ones that haven't spent enough to meet the cut-off criterion.


Case 2: Campaign got green mostly from cutting traffic segments (placements etc.)

Example: Let's say IOS traffic comprises of a big percentage of the total traffic but it converts badly. So that when you cut it, many of the other variables and segments would experience a significant increase in ROI (placements etc.) In this case I would suggest a retest.

It's the same logic as in case 1: Basically if you cut SOMETHING that is big enough and bad enough to result in a significant improvement in the other variables, then a retest of at least the biggest blacklisted segments would be smart.


The big picture: Try to focus more on testing offers and landers - especially offers - and on scaling - and focus less on optimizing. Getting caught up on optimizing to achieve an extra buck or two a day wouldn't be wise - you could be spending that time on scaling to multiply your profits, or testing to create more green campaigns in other geos.


Haha I suspect that most members have the same concern as yours - you're all so considerate!

But really, I wouldn't mind looking over any and all stats you may have - placements, carriers, OSs, browsers, brands, models, dayparting...anything you can drill down into in the tracker, that you can optimize at the traffic source. The latter is important - variables that you can't include/exclude at the traffic source, we don't need to look at stats for, because they wouldn't be optimizable anyway.

And it would help to show each variable's stats sorted in 2 ways: in descending order of impressions, and in descending order of conversions.

Having said that though: Making all those screenshots and uploading them to imgur and posting the links here can be time-consuming. I would suggest to start by showing offer > lander stats and also placement stats so we can see whether the campaign has even reached a point where it can be optimized or worth being optimized. Then for campaigns that look promising, you can collect more conversions and THEN we can look at the rest of the variables.


That would be the usual advice, yes. But with pop, and for initial testing, jumping between verticals wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing - because you'd be ripping and running initially anyway.

Having said that, there ARE merits to focusing on one vertical, because then you'd know:

-What types of landers convert best - lander styles, images, text.

-Which networks have the best offers in your vertical - and start building a solid relationship with them. You'll also "waste" less and less money on testing new offers as over time you'll have tested most of the best offers (recommended by AMs) in that vertical already.

But in the beginning when you don't really have a vertical focus yet - jumping around and dabbling in different verticals can be a good thing.


You can go that way! But then there's always a risk that the single lander you're using, is a bad lander. So it may require more spend at lower ROI when testing offers - to find one that you feel may be a "good converter" when you test better landers for it.

Another thing you can do is just take landers for the same offer type, but from another geo (tier 1 geos would be great, as competition is more fierce so landers tend to be more innovative), and just rewrite lander text in shorter sentences and use google translate (which has gotten quite good especially when used on short sentences). But then these translated landers wouldn't be "proven" either - they wouldn't have a track record, i.e. good stats on Adplexity.

So each approach has its own risks. Go with what you feel is right and observe results. Test both and compare if you like.


You're very welcome! And thank you for creating this follow-along!



Amy

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