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Another Engineer Diving Into Affiliate Marketing?!?! (5)

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Hi everyone,

My name is Ryan and I'm an ex-petroleum engineer from Houston, Texas. I was laid off recently due to some of the M&A activity currently going on in the industry and they gave me a nice severance package as a result. I actually have a friend who actually "made it" in this industry and is making high $x,xxx per day. He is my inspiration to give this a try since I have the time and money! Who knows, maybe this decision could potentially change my entire life path. If anyone's interested about the current state of the global oil industry give me a PM and I'll gladly answer.

Current status:

• Read through Amy's 40 day guide about 40 times...
• Voluum account
• Adplexity Mobile
• Server + CDN through AWS (and SSL/HTTPS for tracking and landing pages)
• Approved with Mobidea, Clickdealer, YepAds, and AdCombo (Gotzha & Adividi, if you're reading this please let me join you!!)
• Mainly been using PropellerAds with Pop and Push (I heard Push was hot through the recent 2019 report haha)
• Budgeting around $1,000 per month on traffic

Progress so far:

• Set up tracking on affiliate networks, Voluum, and traffic source to make sure all data is accurate, recorded, and accounted for
• Ran some direct link offers and offers with landing page to make sure everything works
• Ripped a lot of landing pages relevant to each offer for split testing (total of around 10 landing pages)
• Double checked these LPs to make sure the code looks clean and my traffic ain't bein' redirected nowhere
• Currently I'm working on sweepstakes + push in Tier 3 Geo's
• My main focus is to work on fundamentals so in the future I can scale and look for opportunity quickly

Recent campaign progress:

• Originally ran pop + sweepstakes in Malaysia, Kenya, and Greece
• Captured a few conversions but nowhere enough to be profitable
• Started running push to a specific Kenya offer that was showing good initial results
• That offer got pulled so now I'm kind of stuck!

Screen cap of my voluum campaigns: (imgur is not letting me upload for some reason)
https://gyazo.com/4ac6f3e0ee444ecd0305d08d2c4713ec



Some general questions...

• What is the minimum a payout should give in order for it to be viable?
• How do you tell between a good offer and a bad offer? They all honestly look the same to me and I don't see how it can make such a large difference between success and failure
• Am I bad or are my offers just bad so far? Some of my offers don't convert AT ALL even though my AM says they convert for others. That must mean my creative/landing page must be bad then right?

Objectives moving forward:

• Continue to aggressively launch campaigns
• Testing A LOT of offers
• Ripping, redesigning, and catering LPs to the specific audience (and sometimes creating your own!)
• Keeping a close eye on campaigns to optimize through blacklisting or white listing zones
• Printing money

Any other suggestions on what I can improve?

Not bad for 0 to 19 days?!

Happy Easter,

Ryan

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Over the weekend updates!

It seems that over the weekend a lot of people were really busy! All my of AM's seemed to be on vacation so I had to wait until today to get approval on a lot of campaigns!

So what I did was that I went back through all my previous offers/campaigns and took a more in depth analysis on why some things worked and why other things didn't. While my previous Kenya offer got pulled, I found another one on a different network I was already approved for and went through a similar approach to how I was breaking even previously.



Turns out this was actually my first profitable campaign!!!

If you're wondering what I did differently, it was a combination of a lot of different things I learned over the week:

• Pop is definitely out of favor, I have the nice Voluum plan which lets me see if clicks are suspicious or not. I'm not sure how accurate this is but it at least gives me the semblance of an idea. The biggest issue is that there are so many bots that cut margins so thin that it can make a campaign unprofitable.
• Push is definitely in but you have to use CPC and not CPM. There are some posts that talk about the different approaches to bidding, but I definitely think in this current meta-game that CPC is the way to go. I did some trial testing with low bidding on CPM vs CPC and CPC won hands down. If you bid low with CPM, it just takes longer with the same results.
• Might as well learn push and milk it before we get milked. The set up is 97% identical anyways. Two caveats are potentially that push dies even faster than pop and...
• Angle testing. I came up with a ton more creatives since it's honestly not very hard to do TBH. I'm an okay coder to where I have 3-4 different landing pages ripped clean but far from where I can design my own. I think with push creatives matter a lot and having a mix of them reduces banner blindness (or I guess push blindness lmao)
• Time zones are absolutely critical. The good thing is that PropellerAds allows you to day part pretty effectively. You can't really send them Push notifications in the middle of the night because I think when people wake up they just clear it.

Next steps:

• I scaled my Kenya campaign up to where I had a daily budget $50 dollars a day
• I also increased my bid to be a little more competitive and have a higher reach
• Unfortunately this caused me to lose profitability in one way or another
• Fortunately, I have collected enough data to see what zones are making me money and which ones are bleeding me dry
• I'll probably start a blacklist vs. whitelist campaign tonight and see what data comes out of it
• The most interesting thing is that when comparing push to pop, I'm grasping at a lot more straws because I have a lot less data to analyze. Rather than blasting them with unwanted pops, the consumer is consciously choosing to click on my notification. That must mean my funnel is garbage and either my landing page is not effective, or my offer doesn't convert. I think this analysis require deeper thought because it could be a combination of a lot of unknown variables. I think only more testing and intuition can develop this skill.

Other observations:

• Seeing how this approach worked to some degree in Kenya, I thought maybe I'd give it a try in the United States. Well, something is up because the CTR was 0.1%. I'm guessing the Americans have already been supersaturated with these kind of offers and they don't gaf anymore haha. Or the offer is bad idk. But all I know is that Tier 1 countries are EXPENSIVE at like 12x the rate of Tier 3/4 Geos. Now I know why all the veteran affiliates suggest to do lower tier countries.
• I tried an offer in Thailand for some grocery store voucher with a built in survey prelander and tested again CPC and CPM just to confirm my previous suspicions about CPC being superior and I was right. I also learned that offer payouts below $0.50 are honestly pretty garbage. The cost of traffic is hard to offset the potential payout and makes it completely unworthwhile imo.

Objectives moving forward:

• I would really like to define what criteria an offer has to meet in order for it to be a viable offer. The only sure way to know is to burn money and test it myself, but there must be a way to spot potential through intuitive lead generation.
• I am literally rotating through the same 3-4 landers just in different languages. Recently, I've been a bit more detailed about looking through adplexity and realized some affiliates are really cleaver and cloak their links through some sort of software (traffic armor) or some clever refresh trick like meta/double meta refresh. The only issue is that ripping this code is a lot dirtier because you literally get a giant chunk of white javascript/html that takes a couple hours to read through. So, I would like to figure out a way to expand lander creation/testing effectively.
• If anyone is around where I'm at would like to have a pseudo-trial-mastermind on skype I would really like to hear your thoughts on how you approach certain objectives or if you're in a different vertical that's facing similar issues. I feel like the bottom line skill development in affiliate marketing is fundamentally the same and the only different between verticals is a small tweak to mindset and methodology.
• Finally, if there's any veteran affiliate that is willing to talk on skype for even a couple minutes as a onetime thing, I would be infinitely grateful for your tutelage. That falls in line with another goal I have of trying to find a mentor somehow.

Anyways, if you've read this far. It would be awesome to leave a comment. I would love to hear your feedback no matter how long/short it is.
I'm also looking forward to matuloo and vortex's response (if you guys do ).

Best,

Ryan

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Great progress, dude!

I had similar conclusions with the low payout offers. I also ran some in Thailand and while I was getting conversions wasn't profitable and seemed like a lot of time would be needed to optimize to a effective state and just not worth it.

I had I also had some difficulty going from Pop to push. I had a good offer/lander combo on pop but it just wasn't performing as well with push. Getting more creative with banners, going to CPC from CPM (like you mentioned) and accepting some loss to find the profitable sources helped for me.

Also, consider doing a couple iterations of lander optimization in your profitable pop campaign. Take your winning lander and test a bunch of stuff like, CTA button color, text, size, different wording of testimonials, scripts, pics etc.

I'm also looking into expanding my lander creation capability. Since, I'm still starting out with this stuff too I think I'll continue to rip landers to have something sort of proven to work with but want to start testing these alongside custom created ones. I have Dreamweaver and trying to find some time to get better at it. I think that will provide a good resource for development for me until I reach a point where I just contract it out. I'm interested in what approach you find.

I'll be following along!
JZ

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@failedpetroleumengineer Hi Ryan! Welcome to STM and thanks for starting this follow-along!

I was once an engineer also, and also got laid off when the plant I was working at got shut down due to downsizing of the company (and the entire automotive industry in general - in North America back in the day).

It's the best thing that's happened to me, and I'm sure everything will work out for you as well!

That really, really helps.

Expectations are everything - and since you personally know someone that's already successful in this business, you KNOW it's possible.


Thanks for making me smile! But really, the tutorial was designed to help new affiliates to start taking action right away. Thanks for taking action eventually!


None really.

Of course, higher-payout offers has more of a chance of higher profit margins, but conversion rate is a crucial consideration as well. A low-payout offer that converts well result in more profits than a high-payout offer that converts badly. For example, I've seen an offer with <$0.20 payout result in 3-figure profits from one traffic network on the first day.

Another advantage of low-payout offers is that it allows us to cut bad placements for cheap. Say we're using the 2x-payout in loss as rule of thumb - I'm sure you can appreciate the difference in ad spend required to cut 20 placements for a $1-payout offer vs. a $10-payout offer ($40 vs. $400).

A good approach would be to use a low-payout offer to cut placements first, and then launch higher-payout offers. This way you can minimize costs and maximize profits potential.

For your reference, the Great Caurmen has written about this topic here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...e-Often-Better


I like to just mass-test offers to uncover the gems, without examining/analyzing them too much in the beginning. But that's just because I'm impatient and lazy - I'd rather just spend the money and let stats talk.

But this post by Caurmen should answer your question:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...low-Testing-It

Often, it's difficult to tell how well an offer will convert just by looking at the offer page. Actually taking the trouble of going through the conversion process yourself (i.e. by signing up to the offer) can give you a better idea on the funnel, if you don't mind spending the time. But there are factors that you can't really see. For example:

-There may be scrubbing/shaving going on behind the scenes at the affiliate network (where not all conversions are credited to you).

-The landers you use will also make a big difference.

So in the end, you won't know for sure without sending actual traffic to the offer.

Difficult to say for sure without knowing details.

There are mainly 4 factors involved: Offer, Lander, Traffic, and Tracker.

Since you're using Voluum, redirection speed shouldn't be a problem, so you're find there.

For traffic, as long as you're running on a good-quality source (which you are, by running on PropellerAds) and not bidding too low (normally close to $1 or above), you should be fine.

As for landers, if you're ripping the most popular landers from Adplexity, and optimize them to make sure they load quickly, display properly on major devices and in major browsers, and function correctly (making sure everything "works"), and testing at least 5, then you should be covered.

By ensuring all of the above (i.e. fast tracker + quality traffic + popular and well-optimized landers), if an offer STILL doesn't convert, then you can assume it to be a dud.

And your plans to mass-test offers is definitely a good idea!


If you'd like to joint venture on that, let me know!


Indeedy!


This is the best way to learn + the best way to get the most out of your ad spend + the best way to increase your chances of success for future campaigns.


Oh wow!

Very nice! What a motivating boost to morale that must be! Congratulations!


It is true that bot traffic is rampant.

However, keep in mind that advertisers will only bid as high as they can afford to, i.e. market prices are driven by quality of the traffic.

Being able to identify and blacklist bot-infested placements will definitely help.

Having said all that - I agree that pop is on it's way out. This is why I keep encouraging everyone to expand away from pop. It doesn't mean you can't make it work - but if you'd invest the same amount of effort into some of the other traffic types, potential returns can be so much higher.

But (I believe that) pop is still the cheapest and easiest to learn the basics with.


Thanks for those tips on push! I don't run push myself, but it's always interesting to learn what's working out for people.

And milking it before it declines sounds like a plan!


Pop volume is quite fragmented. In order to make substantial profits, you'd need to run lots of campaigns in multiple geos on multiple traffic networks.


Also: Now that you've eliminated the worst placements, testing more offers or landers on it will be cheaper.


I believe you may be overthinking this a bit - but would certainly love to know any insights you come up with!

Pop and push are both broad traffic consisting of a general audience, so what works for pop should also work for push.

You've already "locked down" an offer+lander that was converting on pop - all you need to do on push is test ads.

I definitely agree with you that there are too many unknowns, and the importance of testing. Stats never lie.


Exactly!

But once you've optimized a few campaigns, don't be afraid to tackle tier 1 geos! The main things to watch out for are:

1)More offers and landers need to be tested to find a combination that will convert enough of the total traffic to yield acceptable profits, and to minimize the amount of spend necessary for cutting placements etc.

2)More traffic segments need to be cut (placements etc.), meaning more ad spend invested initially. It may be necessary to cut more aggressively to limited the bleeding - cutting at 1x payout or even 0.5x payout without conversions can work better than 2x payout if you're bleeding hard.


I'm assuming you're talking about push? If that's the case then I'll take your word for it and refrain from commenting. For pop though, low-payout offers can still be profitable (as was mentioned before).


Regarding masterminds: Do check out the masterminds subforum - you can either join an existing mastermind or start your own.

Regarding finding a mentor: There are some on the forum that are accepting students. If you read a few follow-alongs and pay attention to the signature you should be able to spot at least one.

Looking forward to looking at more stats together!

Have fun Ryan!



Amy

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Update: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...fe-has-changed

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