Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Push Traffic

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CHEATSHEET: DO's and DONT's of Push Traffic (31)

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We have this nice tradition here on STM to sum up the DO's and DON'Ts of different traffic types.

I think it's time to sum up these also for PUSH, which happen to be the new favorite traffic source of 2019 already!

Leet's get straight into it!

✅ DO's:

• DO separate campaigns (desktop, mobile, tablet)
• DO test multiple verticlas (push can works great with high range of verticals from dating to casinos, sweepstakes or nutra)
• DO test multiple creatives, at least 3-5, your campaigns will live much longer and not saturate so fast
• DO test multiple offers in the chosen vertical + if there is too much going on do use your trackers AI optimization
• DO make your ads believable and consistent throughout the funnel (from icon to landing page and offer)
• DO check if the traffic source is sending you correct geo and language
• DO focus mainly on icon and headline (from my tests same icon and different headlines can make difference)
• DO use emoji's in the headline, they can improve your ad CTR
• DO test different user activities (bids, CR and volumes can differ a lot!)
• DO test multiple traffic sources (each offer can have different performance on each source as every source manages their list differently)
• DO test multiple landing pages and angles (spy tools might help you a lot)
• DO get rid of bad placements, optimise periodically
• DO start your own global blacklist (it will save you ton of money)
• DO test offers with various payouts (from low to high)
• DO use traffic sources tokens (so you can have even more granular optimization options)
• DO update your creatives frequently as they tend to saturate fast (watch your creatives CTR over time)
• DO bid competitively, but do not overbid if it's not needed. Check if your ads are getting impressions and clicks, if yes, the bid is good enough.
• DO run on CPC if you starting without a blacklist
• DO run on CPM if you have a good blacklist and a healthy CTR
• DO watch bids as they change on daily basis, you may quickly find out that you are bidding too much or too low
• DO get proper human translations for your landing pages (translate also the names in the comment section, make the comments sound reliable and relevant)
• DO use frequency capping when you start so you do not pam users with the same ads (at least 1/24h)
• DO monitor your domains and have backup domains ready as they can get flagged from time to time
• DO host your landers on a CDN or a VPS with a central location to your main geos
• DO optimise your landers and images for fast loading (use https://gtmetrix.com/, https://tools.pingdom.com/ or https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to check your landers performance)
• DO scale your campaigns to other traffic sources and geos
• DO expect quality problems with certain offer types, not all offers can monetize push properly.
• DO use lower daily budget limits with new campaigns, many push sources overspend.

❌ DONT's:

• DON'T expect it to be easy, you have to spend money to make money
• DON'T mix desktop/mobile traffic in same campaigns, bids, CTRs and performance can be totally different
• DON'T mix multiple geos in one campaign, reasons same as above ^
• DON'T be afraid to spend $$$, especially with higher payout offers
• DON'T be afraid to test smaller geos (there might be lower competition, but higher returns in terms of ROI)
• DON'T host your landers on a shared hosting
• DON'T keep running the offer if it clearly sucks. If it's -80% ROI whereas others give you -30%, something is wrong
• DON'T set high daily budgets on new traffic sources to you as they may have overspend.
• DON'T be afraid to kill placements aggresively
• DON'T be afraid to experiment with traffic sources, the more punk it is to deposit or manage the campaigns, the higher chance that the competition is not there yet
• DON'T run on CPM if you don't have a blacklist
• DON'T get demotivated if you get kicked from offer for bad quality, test different offers/offer payment models (CPS vs CPL) or verticals
• DON'T get demotivated with daily swings that are common on PUSH (I've seen multiple times falling from +4 figures to -3 figures from day to day), look at longterm weekly/monthly results
• DON'T get comfortable when profits are good, you can always do better! Launch new campaigsn, verticals, new geos, scale to new traffic sources and so on.
• DON'T wait to start with push, regulations are coming
• DON'T be afraid to test tier-1 GEOs and high payout offers, they can work well.
• DON'T try to run pure adult offers with mainstream push networks, toned down softcore stuff can work.

Traffic sources with PUSH traffic

• PropellerAds
• ZeroPark
• MegaPush
• RichPush
• AdCash
• Adsterra
• Plugrush
• Exoclick
• TrafficStars
• Admaven
• LizardLeads
• DatsPush
• Pushground

These are main takeaways from my own experience.

I'm curious what are your DO's and DON'Ts?

Do you agree or disagree with these above?

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Stickied and gonna include this in the newsletter!

Thanks Erik for all the value you've been adding to the forum - especially to the push section!



Amy

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Nice summary! And you kinda summed up all my push related experience in this post, so not much to add really

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Thanks for the guide, @erikgyepes !

I've seen Amy mentioning several times in the newbie zone, that its a good idea to test on pop traffic first and then move the best performing lander+offer to push. (which may be in -ROI, but push could flip that to +)

Do you think it is wise to just go straight for push, without hindering yourself with pops campaign test? From my understanding, pops is considered cheaper to test with than push.

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Hey @daliu5!

That's a good question!

Yes, pops (and redirects) are the cheapest traffic type that you can find and for that reason it's the best source to learn the basics, that will hardly change, just because of the simplicity and costs of it.

On the other side, even that pops looks cheap at first sight, you have to count in: clickloss, high % of bot traffic and tracker event costs (if your tracker charges for that).

At the end, it might not be as cheap as we thought.

When, I personally started running push, I skipped pops altogether and focused purely on push.

If you want to go straight into push, here are few more tips:

In the beginning you should find offers with easy to convert flows (like SOI offers), these will get you more conversions and datapoints, so you can proceed faster.

Also you can start in less competitive (cheaper) geos.

This approach will get you more data in the start for lower costs.

As you get more confident over time you can start experimenting with different offer flows and higher payout offers etc.

To sum it up, you can start with pops if you are a beginner with media buying and need to learn the basics, otherwise I think it would just double your costs and efforts.

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Awesome post buddy, I especially agree with these Definite Do's and Dont's.

- Yep high payout offers :P

- I want to be at least -40% roi off the bat if you're way off this its more effort then required to get it working, keep hunting for good offers and funnels

- Gotta risk a bit of pay for those conversions

- Massive, especially with higher payout offers. The swings are large in terms of ROI from day to day

- As well as this, DO retest your winning creatives every 2 weeks, you will get new subscribers seeing your ads and often profit comes back after the initial burn outs. Rotate the winners

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Good stuff. I'm new to AM and starting out with push to learn the basics, and hopefully maybe turn a profit before google nerfs it.

Couple questions if anyone is willing to give their input.

1. I'm planning on focusing on tier 2/3 geos for cheaper traffic. I'm hoping I'll be able to get away with just using a VPS for the time being... do you guys think I'll be able to get away without using a CDN for now? I'm guessing that depends on load times for my LPs... aka test it out. What kind of load times would you guys recommend for LPs? Who are the go to VPS providers and CDN providers these days?

2. I'm trying to avoid spreading myself to thing push network wise so I'm thinking of joining say 2-3 networks max. Does this seem reasonable? Any suggestions for good networks to start off with?

3. I'm going to be focusing on low payout offers to get more data points for cheaper, say <$10 payout offers (sweeps, dating, leadgen etc). Any CPA networks you would personally recommend for those type's of offers in tier 2/3 geos?

4. Any suggestions for which push spy tool to go with? (I think theres only two?).

5. Worth it to try out low payout offers in tier 1? Or stick to tier 2/3 for now? Got... lets say $5000 budget.

Thanks in advance!

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I not see any problem with VPS (I run on VPS mostly these days and there are no issues at all).

The reason why CDNs got popular with affiliates was mainly because of POP traffic, where it's extremely important to have fast loading landing pages because of huge click losses that can happen. Of course you will benefit of CDN on every traffic source, but I do not see it as tragic with push as I would see it with pops.

That's very good approach. I don't really want to give suggestions on networks as results can differ radically for everyone. Just choose any 3 from the list I tested all of them (except LizarLeads) and they all can work.

Gotzha, Clickdealer, YepAds.

Spypush is decent.

It makes sense if there are high payout alternatives for the same vertical.
Good example might be SOI flow vs CC submit flow.
In this case you can later utilise the data you got and switch the flows.

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Thank you for the quick reply Erik... I'm bookmarking this thread as I have a feeling I'll be coming back to it a lot

Going off your answer for my fifth question - I think I'm going to stick to tier 2/3 for now to keep things simpler and cheaper.

Now excuse me as I have to go sign up/apply to a some networks now! Cheers

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Awesome post thanks.

I’m a newbie with push (should probably do a follow along) so not familiar with all the terminology. What’s the icon? (You say do focus on icon and copy). Is that the 192x192 image or using emojis in the copy?

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Let me add one thing here. When Amy started to work on the 40-day tutorial, push wasn't around yet. Actually it was, but it wasn't popular among affiliates at all, while push was widely used by pretty much everyone. That's also one of the reasons why she chose it as the go-to traffic type for new affiliates. This being said, I personally believe, push is also a very good option for newbies to learn AM with.

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Yes, it's the 191x192 icon.

Using emoji's is actually another thing to DO! I totally missed this one, adding it to the list!

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Damn Erik, this is pretty much summarizes this entire ad format in it's entirety! Love how you summarized it

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Thank you for your post. Do those networks accept newbie?

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I was contact directly their AM on skype and they accept me.

You can find contact on them here on STM in affiliate contact directory.

If they see that you are dedicated and know what you want they dont have problem with that.

Thats my experience. I am also new.

Sent from my Redmi 6A using STM Forums mobile app

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Ok I will search in forum, thank you

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Here is the link to the contacts directory, it's directly in the top menu, so you don't have to search for it: https://stmforum.com/affiliate-directory/

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Fantastic share Erik. Really helpful and motivating

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Incredible thread! Thanks Erik!

-Chris

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Excellent description actually.
I would add to this list of network EvaDav.

We have a lot of TRAFFIC with any GEO and offer the highest conversion rate on the market.

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Which network has the most of ADULT Dating Push traffic? Anyone knows?

By the way great tips on Push traffic, thanks!

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Most networks do not have adult traffic, at least not much of it. Take a look at exoclick, that's the only large adult only network that offers it I believe.

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Would you recommend the best way to work with emojis in the ad text?

I tried some online sources for copy/pasting. Eg: getemoji.com

All looks good in Firefox, but then when I edit the same campaign in another browser like Chrome or Opera the emoji is not displayed (just a rectangular). I've read that some desktop browsers support them and some don't. And that it's better on mobile phones.

Is there a more reliable/predictable way than to configure the campaign in Firefox using copy/paste of emojis and relying on the ad preview of the traffic source interface to assess if the emoji will display correctly?

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Awesome post! Thanks for sharing!

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Yes, emoji can help you to increase your ad CTR!

Some traffic sources have in-built emoji's for quick selection.

If you are on Mac OS just hit: Control + Command + Spacebar and you can select your emoji's from there.

Or you can use this site: https://emojipedia.org

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Great, thank you! Could you give me an example of a traffic source that has them built-in?

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Megapush and Zeropark for example. They have a small "smiley" icon next to the ad title and message.

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RTXplatform has them built in too

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@erikgyepes This is such an amazing guide and so helpful as I want to focus on push with sweepstakes. Thank you so very much for writing it. I will be using this along with @vortex sweepstakes 101 guide as my bibles (is there anything else as mind blowing as these two guides on the subject I should be aware of)

Please forgive the following noob questions but I am going to launch-in and whilst I know I will lose money (sorry buy data!) I want to give myself the very best chance to start with:

In your guide you talk about testing multiple offers, ads, landers & traffic sources; what is the optimum number per offer please...i.e how many ads and landing pages should I initially test per offer for push. I read a post by Charles Ngo and he said something to the effect that if a noob test 3 offers and a Super Affiliate tests 6 the SuperAff will have a much better chance of success which is obvious of course but I don’t think he was speaking about push which may be different? Please don’t say it depends (although I’m sure it probably does) but initially I have to commit to specific numbers of course and I would much rather go with your rather than mine!! for obvious reasons 🤣 Once again thank you so much for the wonderful guide and the treasure trove of other content I have read and enjoyed here you are providing so much it’s amazing!


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Hey @harvcam, thanks for the kind words!

As for testing offers, you can start with 3 and depending on the results you can add more volume (% weight of the traffic) to the good ones. The bad ones you can then swap with another offers and test them as well.

You can do also something like send 80% of the traffic to proven offers and 20% to new offers that you are testing (so you are continuously testing new stuff)

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I had the same experience... push traffic can still do well with another push based platform. At some point, I would actually recommend that people who want to collect their own push list would start with push traffic, since the people who accepted one push prompt seemed to be more willing to do that again The situation might have changed but I totally agree with you here.

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