Home > Paid Traffic Sources > POP / PPV / Redirect

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little bit stuck, help please :) (11)

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Hey Stackers,

I am running a desktop offer in the US on a pretty big traffic source. The results i am getting are pretty decent. I have managed to scale it to consistently above 250$ profit per day for the last 14 days (so pretty happy but it has been a serious grind). But here is where I am puzzled.

I am only using CPA based bidding as have not been able to get CPM to work for me.

a) What is the maximum spend per day given the geo offer etc.. that I should be able to reach (I am struggling for $300 spend per day - that is with a lot of campaigns, I mean a serious amount 10's of them).
b) is it correct to think that I can spend a lot more in CPM?
c) where should I set my expectation with scaling this offer in this traffic source, i.e. have I reached the maximum and I should look to be aggressive with other traffic sources?
d) is it a must to use CPM bidding to be able to hit big numbers scale?
e) is it possible to do $X,XXX+ per day in one geo (US) on desktop on one traffic source?

appreciate any help as I am really stuck as to how to grow this more.


thanks

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First of all congrats on the profitable campaigns!

With CPA, the amount of traffic you get will depend mainly on 2 things: 1)Your bid, and 2)your conversion rate.

Every traffic source's algorithm will always aim to maximize profits. So they'll want to sell the most traffic to the bidder that's paying them the most amount of money per visitor sent.

And if your bid and conversion rate combined are resulting in your paying the traffic source less money per visitor, then your traffic will be restricted.


Depends on the traffic source and geo, the level of competition at any given time, your bid, and since you're running CPA, your conversion rate.

Again, depends on how much you end up paying the traffic source per visitor.

For CPM, it would depend on your bid. For CPA, it would depend on your bid and conversion rate. (Assuming same level of competition and same targeting and same everything-else.)

What this means: If you're bidding a high CPA amount and your conversion rate is high, you can get more traffic than by bidding low on CPM.

And vice versa.


I would suggest that you speak with a rep from that traffic source.

Write them to let them know you're ready to spend a lot more money with them, if they'd help you scale. Ask for a dedicated account manager to help you spend more money.

They'll be able to tell you how much traffic to expect at what bid, make suggestions on what bid model and bid amount to set to, which placements to target, etc. etc.

However, testing more traffic sources would be a great idea as well - the more traffic sources you run on, the more traffic volume you have at your disposal, and the faster you can scale. (That is, assuming you have an offer that has enough cap.)


Shouldn't be a must.


Unless desktop volume has drastically decreased since I last ran desktop (a year ago?), the answer is YES!

Again, it would depend on how well your offer converts. Nowadays, the difficulty lies in finding good offers with enough cap.


Hope that helps!



Amy

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Thanks @vortex that makes sense, what is curious thought that i tested a high, medium and low bid and yet sometimes the low bid completely smashes the high bid.







Thanks for the advice, I have a dedicated account manager although I am really mixed as to how helpful they are - in the 2 months of working with them, the only thing they have done is tell me generic advice or cost me money. I have even thought about asking to change them but not sure if that is going to be so beneficial.




Encouraging to hear. The offer I have has no cap

Your last point would lead me on to the following questions:

The structure that I am using is.

3 campaigns with different bids (high , medium and low) per geo and per OS version.
So the US for example has 12 campaigns. I am then duplicating (or trippling) the best performing bid.
Is this a good strategy or am I harming my campaigns by having so many campaigns.

The other thing that I am doing is :
I set up the tracker with 5 landing pages, for 2 different offers (10 pages in total) and set it to auto optimize based on EPV.
Should I be doing that? or in CPA campaigns I should have 1 landing page per campaign?

thanks

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Hey man! I think i can shad some light on this. First of all nice going on the profitable campaign. It's not something you should take as granted. Pop isn't the easiest ad format to convert for you.

Our process with CPA pop is as such:
Landing pages - No more then 3, It's more then enough to test it out. Test out different funnels if you got a mix, But try and zero in on no more then like 2 campaign for each offer and tweak that. We got CPA campaign running for months at a time with the same lander, if something works, leave it. Over optimizing got it's downsides also. Work with the conversions, Optimize sites, zones, but give things time. depending on what your running of course.

Regarding traffic volumes. Self Service platform has huge competition, you could be on one day the only advertiser that's bidding for US for instance, and in the next day your 1 in a million guys competing against you. So the bid you had yesterday simply doesn't cut it.

If a traffic source becomes not profitable, try more traffic sources. US is the biggest GEO in most traffic sources. So if your buying like a 100$ - 200$ a day with like 3 traffic sources, you could easily get the volumes you need

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just want to try and bump this thread a bit and also give everyone a bit of an update.

How I was able to get to the profit on the traffic source was by very very aggressively duplicating campaigns, i.e. duplicate 100+ campaigns 2-3 times per day. This seemed to be the only way that I was able to get any volume and / or a decent amount of conversions.

Since then my account manager told me to stop doing this (under threat of losing my account) - so I did. I now have 2 types of campaigns running.

Managed.
Self serve - CPA2.0

In both cases the volume is so low it is laughable and at this point I just feel like I do not know what to do.

My offer is converting at around 0.15% I have a direct relationship with the publisher, so I am able to set my payout very high. and I am looking at max 20 conversions per day. (double that with the managed campaigns).

I just totally stumped. I would say that it is the offer, BUT the same thing happens with any offer that I run.

any advice would be massively appreciated here.

thanks

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What worked for me to get traffic was to play around with bids in a few white listed zones on CPM. Of course there are days where I've noticed that average bids are down and no matter what you do, you don't get much traffic. Checked with chat support and was told that I was already getting majority of the traffic for my targeting and bid (which was already quite high). I can only assume that traffic was just low that day. The EASIER way for me to get traffic though was to sign up with as many traffic sources as I can and trying different formats (pop/push), bids and creatives.

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Yup that does happen!

The original point I made (i.e. traffic network always striving to maximize profits) actually doesn't contradict your experience.

If it were true that the higher the bid, the more profits you'll make, then there would be no need to test different bids.

But that trend is NOT true - and the reason why it isn't, is because there are other factors such as:

-Each placement converting at different rates, i.e. has different levels of quality.

-The different levels of quality means different competition levels (e.g. people bidding higher for higher-quality placements).


So let's compare 2 scenarios - in one camp you bid $1 and in the other you bid $2 (same offers and landers and targeting).

$1 CPA bid: lower-quality traffic = lower CR (con), lower cost (pro)

$2 CPA bid: higher-quality traffic = higher CR (pro), higher cost (con)

Because there are pros and cons with each scenario (opposing trends), we won't know which one will make more profits, until we run an actual test with the different bids - because like you've pointed out, a lower-bid camp can make more profits than the higher-bid camp.

Regarding traffic networks wanting to maximize profits for themselves: It's a similar story - except THEIR cons are YOUR pros and vice versa.

$1 CPA bid: lower-quality traffic (pro - to get rid of traffic fewer people want), lower CR (con - because they'd need to send you more visitors to earn each CPA), lower cost (con - they make less revenue)

$2 CPA bid: higher-quality traffic (con), higher CR (pro), higher cost (pro)

Again - the opposing trends will make it uncertain whether THEY will make more profits at the $1 or $2 bid camp, until you actually set up the camps to let their algorithms find out how much traffic from each placement to send to each of these camps in order to maximize their earnings.

I probably didn't explain that very well - but hopefully was able to convey the idea that testing is the only way to find out, and stats are the ultimate judge.


I hear you. Completely. Been there too.

It can be a very delicate situation - nobody wants to contact a network and tell them "my account manager sucks - can you assign me another one?"

I'm luckier than most - due to my being so high-profile on STM, networks knew me and would assign me to best managers. But I did still get a couple that weren't really helpful. And I didn't have the guts to ask for them to be changed.

I would either just go back to using the self-serve platform, or until another manager was reassigned (due to natural "shifting around" and account managers leaving the network etc.)

But really - if you have more guts than I do, you can absolutely fire off a support ticket to the network and say something diplomatic (read: nice) like:

"I have a big test budget, and need more guidance on how to spend it in a way that it will be profitable for me and your network. I've already tried all the useful tips from my current account manager but I'm still not seeing much success, and feel that maybe working with a different account manager will provide me with some new inspiration."



Hmm...are you saying that you're duplicating the best-performing CAMPAIGNS or the BID-AMOUNTS of the best-performing camps?

It would be interesting if you have multiple campaigns with the same bid and same targeting. I don't remember if I've done a test like that - if I did, I certainly don't remember the results.

As with everything else, the best thing to do is to test and compare.

Let's say right now you have 2 or 3 camps that are exactly the same. Pause all except 1 of them, then see if you get better or worse results than when all of them were running.


What are you using to auto-optimize? The traffic network's auto-optimize feature? A separate campaign optimization service? A tracker?

For CPA campaigns in general though, it would make sense to only use your best landing page and offer. If you run multiple offers and landers, the conversion rate would be very inconsistent - which would really "confuse" the traffic network's algorithm. I suppose this could either work for or against you depending on the situation, but safe to say that results will be unpredictable.


OK so that answers my previous question! Wow - of course the traffic network would have a problem with that. It requires a lot of man power to review campaigns.

To get more profits, here are all the possibilities I could think of:

1)Test more offers to increase performance to squeeze out more profits with the same traffic.

2)Scale to other traffic networks to get more traffic.

3)Start testing in multiple geos to monetize more traffic.

4)See if the offer you're running can be promote on other traffic types (e.g. push, native...)

5)Set up multiple accounts on the same network - which is against the TOS of almost every traffic network so is certainly NOT recommended. But this is what some people do - and they need to know how to cover their tracks like what people doing BH on FB need to do with multiple accounts.


Hope that helps! My best suggestion would be to not fixate too much on the lack of traffic volume. Pop traffic is fragmented, that's just the way it is. Instead of focusing on this and limiting yourself, look outside of that targeting. There are other geos, other traffic networks, other traffic types to monetize. No need to look straight ahead when there's beauty surrounding you and waiting for you to discover.



Amy

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Thanks @vortex for the incredibly detailed answer, and just wanted to apologise for not responding with a thanks sooner!

I took your points on board as well as some points that @matuloo (thanks) also made.

regarding the account manager and the multiple accounts, I approached it 2 fold.
I contacted the support in the chat and asked if it was OK to have a personal ad account and a business ad account to which they responded yes, as it happens automatically I was assigned a new rep on the new ad account, so I have 2 ad accounts now
Sadly it has not helped the volume hugely, as I was still able to get more volume out of one ad account (by duplicating 100+ campaigns like a crazy Son of a B.) hitting 500 conversions in a day, whereas now across 2 accounts I am averaging around 200.

So i will take your points on board

I opened with a 1 other network which is doing well (but still around 50% of the volume of traffic source 1) and I will plan on opening more, I also will open more countries.

Now just to find your popads tutorial :P

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Thanks @vortex for the incredibly detailed answer, and just wanted to apologise for not responding with a thanks sooner!

I took your points on board as well as some points that @matuloo (thanks) also made.

regarding the account manager and the multiple accounts, I approached it 2 fold.
I contacted the support in the chat and asked if it was OK to have a personal ad account and a business ad account to which they responded yes, as it happens automatically I was assigned a new rep on the new ad account, so I have 2 ad accounts now
Sadly it has not helped the volume hugely, as I was still able to get more volume out of one ad account (by duplicating 100+ campaigns like a crazy Son of a B.) hitting 500 conversions in a day, whereas now across 2 accounts I am averaging around 200.

So i will take your points on board

I opened with a 1 other network which is doing well (but still around 50% of the volume of traffic source 1) and I will plan on opening more, I also will open more countries.

Now just to find your popads tutorial :P

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Hi @aady83 and @vortex.

Thanks for the great info!
I'm starting to really explore CPA traffic myself to scale an offer (follow along is here) and after looking at your structure (see below), I have a question ...

My question is
[1] I'm only running campaigns at 1 CPA bid which is 70% of the payout (so payout is 0.56 and my CPA bid is 0.39). What sort of low, medium and high bids are you using which seemeded to work (e.g. 10%, 50%, 110%)?

[2] I'm running CPA campaign for 2 days and then making a copy of the CPA campaign where I exclude segments which were doing badly (e.g. bad zones, bad carriers etc). So over 10 days I might get 5 CPA campaigns which get more and more targetted over time. At the moment they ALL have the same CPA bid of 70% of payout (i.e. $0.39). Would you recommend
- First running 3 different CPA bids to find best AND THEN drilling down over time using the best CPA bid?
OR
- Do what I'm doing and then make copies of the most Targetted CPA Campaign at different CPA bids to see which does best?

I think the first option is the way to do but would love feedback!

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@aady83 I've completely missed your latest post!!

Another thing you can do: See if the traffic source has an API - contact their support to see if they could make it available to you.

If you can get access, you can either hire a dev or code something yourself to automate the duplication of campaigns from one account to another, so you wouldn't need to set up each campaign twice.

@grofit I haven't run CPA a lot, because when I was running pop heavily, CPA didn't really exist on a lot of sources. So let's see if @aady83 will chime in!

But based on my experience with CPM camps: Whether you cut segments before or after testing bids, shouldn't matter too much - as long as you keep in mind (while making cutting decisions) that the SAME SEGMENT can be profitable at one bid but not another.

Meaning, for the second approach (i.e. cut segments and THEN test bids), only cut segments that have really low ROI - because certain segments that have not-too-low but still-negative ROI may turn out profitable when you test bids.

However - this is based on CPM camps experience. If I remember correctly, CPA camps have auto-optimization in place, where the traffic source "knows" to "figure out" which segments convert the best and send more traffic from those, and which segments convert the worst and send less traffic from those. So the dynamics may be different. Ultimately only testing will tell - and the volatility in performance will likely make the results inconclusive the first time, so you may want to do a couple of tests and just go with whichever approach seems to yield better results.




Amy

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