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Just another..follow along (20)


06-14-2019 06:38 PM #1 thickeyebrows (Member)
Just another..follow along

Hi my friends, joined STM last week and if you're keen to know more about me, I have created an "introduction yourself" thread here.

Without further ado, let's begin with the tutorial.

Day 1
Nothing too difficult here. Basic administrative matters. Applied for all affiliate/traffic networks recommended. Got accepted by Mobidea immediately, while the other 2 are pending approval (*note* at this time of writing, I got rejected by Clickdealer and still pending approval from Gotzha) Also signed up for Voluum (Entry plan) and currently they don't offer SSL for custom domain under the entry plan, therefore I opted for the dedicated domain with SSL given by Voluum.

Day 2 - 8
By following Amy's instruction in the tutorial, I managed to find myself 5 offers in Mobidea. Applied for it and again, it was approved immediately however, it took them awhile to appear. No offers from Clickdealer (*note* at this time of writing, I was rejected) and Gotzha since I was still waiting for approval. At this time of writing, 2 offers has been paused and when I did my initial filtering, the first offer had EPC $0.01 but it doesn't matter, I just want to get direct linking out of the way and move to landers as soon as possible.


Day 9
To be honest, it was quite daunting as I was afraid that I am getting the settings wrong. However, on hindsight, it was unnecessary worries, if you follow Amy's tutorial properly, you will be fine. At this stage, it did felt like I was following blindly, but deep down, I knew things will get tough in the upcoming days..

Day 10
Exciting day! It's time for us to run our first ever campaign! It's pretty hassle-free with the concise and clear information provided by Amy. Only thing I did differently as compared to the tutorial was to turn off broker traffic (after seeing a comment from Amy in one of the thread). I thought the approval process will take awhile but I started seeing visits in my tracker after ~15 minutes wait, and I got my first conversion within the first hour. Well, i took a triple-take on my tracker to finally realised I had my first ever conversion, not going to go into too much details, you just have to experience it yourself.

Once I finished my budget ($10), I had 8 conversions, ~-80% ROI. Also did up reading on clickloss, did experience it and understand it's normal so not an issue for me. I was running the first offer (20748, refer to my previous screenshot)



Day 11 - 12
Reading, understanding, memorising. Rinse & repeat 3x. Well, I developed a habit at work to re-read things at least 2-3x (if it's important), so I think I did read more than 3 times, given that I have more time on hand now. (deactivated all my social media)

Day 13
Yay! Time to run another campaign! This time from Popads. As usual, followed Amy's tutorial to the T. Sent $2.5 worth of traffic to the same offer on day 10. No conversions, no problem. Gained valuable "experience" from this.

[Question] Why does visits and unique visits differ in the tracker? Does it mean that some user has been shown the offer more than 1 times? Apologies if this is a stupid question. @vortex



Day 14-16
Reading, understanding, memorising. Rinse & repeat 3x.
Looking forward to the upcoming tutorial and should be able to provide some update after the weekend.


06-14-2019 06:44 PM #2 micoangelo (Member)

Congrats on hitting 80% ROI on your first try.

Why not keep running your campaigns on the network that was successful for you instead of starting a new one on pop ads?


06-14-2019 07:08 PM #3 thickeyebrows (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by micoangelo View Post
Congrats on hitting 80% ROI on your first try.

Why not keep running your campaigns on the network that was successful for you instead of starting a new one on pop ads?
Sorry, my bad! That was a typo! It was meant to be ~-80% ROI. Can't continue running an unprofitable campaign, can I?


06-14-2019 08:28 PM #4 anshdeb (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by thickeyebrows View Post
Sorry, my bad! That was a typo! It was meant to be ~-80% ROI. Can't continue running an unprofitable campaign, can I?
-80% ROI on day 1? To be honest, that means nothing.

EDIT: Just noticed that you only spent $10 so far. Its too early to jump to a new traffic source. You need to stay consistent with this one and start optimising it a bit first off all. Don't jump traffic sources just because you had one bad day on one. Its a very common mistake I see and this way it will be very very hard for you to see positive ROI.

Like I always say, every offer, from every network and every traffic source can perform well, you just need to be consistent and work with dedication.

Not trying to pull you down, because I am so glad that you took the first step (where most people don't reach) but in my opinion you definitely need to spend more time and gather more data.


06-15-2019 02:25 AM #5 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Congratulations @thickeyebrows on taking action! And -80% ROI with 8 conversions on your first try is not too shabby at all!

You're so right - that first conversion really felt good didn't it? You'll be making so many more, but that first one will always hold a special place in your heart.

Regarding whether to turn brokered traffic on or off - in terms of getting better quality of course you'd be better off turning it off. However, if you're looking for quick results and therefore need more traffic volume, then including brokered traffic from the start wouldn't be a bad idea either. As always, there are seldom an absolute correct way to do all this.

-80% ROI is a bit low to be trying to optimize the campaign, unless you're operating in a big geo with lots of traffic (which will allow you to cut a lot of non-converting traffic and STILL have enough left over to make profits from). You're direct-linking which removes one element you can optimize: The lander. So there's not a lot of room for optimization, which means -80% ROI may be too low.

You can still try to optimize it if you like, if just for the practice. Or, proceed to the lessons on landing pages instead - because nowadays it's hard to make money by direct-linking to 1/2-click offers. I've only included them in the tutorial because they're super-easy to setup, so they make for a great 1st campaign. I want to get you guys to this first major milestone in as simple a way as possible to build some momentum.


Like I always say, every offer, from every network and every traffic source can perform well, you just need to be consistent and work with dedication.
@anshdeb That's a pretty bold and general statement.

Not every traffic source has good traffic - I've seen ones that have traffic so shitty, I couldn't imagine anyone was making money on them. Granted, just because I wasn't able to do it, doesn't mean other people couldn't. But I wouldn't recommend spending all of one's time to get every traffic source working when there are easier ones available.

Here's just one of many examples where switching traffic sources is paying off:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post373319

You do have a point that jumping around TOO much can be a bad idea, because every traffic source has nuances that will take time to learn. But starting with a couple of sources right off the bat to see which one gives better results can't hurt either.

As for every offer from every network can perform well - I REALLY don't know about that one. Some offers are just duds, period. Then there are offers that will never be profitable on the traffic type or source you're wanting to run it on. Plus the network's scrub/shave rate can really throw a wrench into things as well.

Being dedicated and making a consistent effort is certainly important, but spending time and money beating a dead horse wouldn't be wise either, so balance would be good. And that's where experience comes in.

Lastly: There are so many offers out there! If we're not careful with budget, and spend too much money trying to make a single offer work (especially an unproven offer), we may run out of money before finding that next great offer. This is true at least for CPA offers that are suitable for pop traffic - many such offers aren't around for very long, plus pop camps tend to have short lifespans. So a better approach may be to mass-test offers on a low-ish budget for each, then pick the real gems that start performing FROM THE START to optimize and scale.

We don't have to agree on everything for this to be a good discussion! Thanks so much for your input - and best of luck on your push follow-along!


[Question] Why does visits and unique visits differ in the tracker? Does it mean that some user has been shown the offer more than 1 times? Apologies if this is a stupid question.
Not a stupid question at all. Please never worry about that - if you have a question chances are others have it too.

Yes some users may have seen the offer more than once. "Unique" means per IP I think. Also, there may be situations where multiple users can come from the same IP (e.g. VPN or proxy users).


Great start to a great journey! Looking forward to seeing what you can do!



Amy


06-15-2019 03:44 AM #6 anshdeb (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
@anshdeb That's a pretty bold and general statement.

Not every traffic source has good traffic - I've seen ones that have traffic so shitty, I couldn't imagine anyone was making money on them. Granted, just because I wasn't able to do it, doesn't mean other people couldn't. But I wouldn't recommend spending all of one's time to get every traffic source working when there are easier ones available.

Here's just one of many examples where switching traffic sources is paying off:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post373319

You do have a point that jumping around TOO much can be a bad idea, because every traffic source has nuances that will take time to learn. But starting with a couple of sources right off the bat to see which one gives better results can't hurt either.

As for every offer from every network can perform well - I REALLY don't know about that one. Some offers are just duds, period. Then there are offers that will never be profitable on the traffic type or source you're wanting to run it on. Plus the network's scrub/shave rate can really throw a wrench into things as well.

Being dedicated and making a consistent effort is certainly important, but spending time and money beating a dead horse wouldn't be wise either, so balance would be good. And that's where experience comes in.

Lastly: There are so many offers out there! If we're not careful with budget, and spend too much money trying to make a single offer work (especially an unproven offer), we may run out of money before finding that next great offer. This is true at least for CPA offers that are suitable for pop traffic - many such offers aren't around for very long, plus pop camps tend to have short lifespans. So a better approach may be to mass-test offers on a low-ish budget for each, then pick the real gems that start performing FROM THE START to optimize and scale.

We don't have to agree on everything for this to be a good discussion! Thanks so much for your input - and best of luck on your push follow-along!
You make a great point here Amy, I stand corrected here haha.

I just meant in this case (Day 1 and $10 spent) is too early to decide anything I believe personally. Yes maybe if the trend continues on day 2 with literally 0 improvement, it would make sense to kill everything and get back to research.

But yeah you are right some offers and traffic sources are just plain crap thats very true.


06-23-2019 04:46 AM #7 thickeyebrows (Member)

What a week! I was clocking average 12 hours daily at work..not much time for AM but we have to adapt to our circumstances, isn't it?
So let's jump right back into the follow-along.

Day 17-29
So after going through the materials for day 14-16, I have decided to go with what Amy recommended. Sweepstakes offer!

"Ah..I have to spend money again..?" - My reaction when I was pulling out my credit card to make payment for Adplexity.
Is it a-must to have? Not really, if you have the time to ripped landers manually but time is of the essence for me.

Faced some difficulties setting up hosting and CDN, this is the part where I faced difficulties (refer to screenshot from Amy's tutorial).

"com.amazonaws.services.cloudfront.model.InvalidVi e werCertificateException: To add an alternate domain name (CNAME) to a CloudFront distribution, you must attach a trusted certificate that validates your authorization to use the domain name. For more details, see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCl...s-requirements (Service: AmazonCloudFront; Status Code: 400; Error Code: InvalidViewerCertificate; Request ID: 25d15627-5feb-11e9-879a-97298612ffa3)"
There's simple solution tutorial to the problem here (for those who encountered the same problem as me)

The real difficult part is in fixing up landers. Can see how beginners without programming background will struggle here.
I fixed 3 landers because (i) either the landers are too difficult to fixed (ii) More translation required.
Regardless, I have decided to test with this 3 landers as form of practice/experience.

After everything, I am ready to run my first campaign with landers.
At this point, I am running 2 offers in the same GEO. (offer A and offer B).

What I have done is to create a campaign for each offer for WIFI traffic only to determine if thse offers passes the "10x payout challenge"
Both offers did and I created 2 new campaigns for each offer for 3G/LTE traffic only. Again, they passes the "10x payout challenge" - I should have probably skip this step and go ahead with optimising after those offers passed the "10x payout challenge" the first time.

I looked through the data and these are the things I need to do next;
(i) cut one of the landing page - not converting at all
(ii) identify placement to cut
(iii) probably to target Android at traffic source only since iOS is not converting at all


06-24-2019 08:40 AM #8 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Making great progress! And this is in addition to your 12-hour day job? Wowsers - I'm inspired and motivated!

You've figured out a TON of things for yourself - good stuff!


What I have done is to create a campaign for each offer for WIFI traffic only to determine if thse offers passes the "10x payout challenge"
Both offers did and I created 2 new campaigns for each offer for 3G/LTE traffic only. Again, they passes the "10x payout challenge" - I should have probably skip this step and go ahead with optimising after those offers passed the "10x payout challenge" the first time.
I agree!

Even now, you can stop one of the campaigns for each offer. By running both campaigns you're spending double the money to split-test landers and cutting down to a winner.

Allow the remaining 2 camps to run and cut landers until you have a winner, and we'll see if the ROI is decent-enough to justify optimizing further.

Even before you arrive at a winner: If at any time, it's not looking like any of the landers has hopes of achieving at least -50% ROI without cutting placements etc., I'd consider to stop testing the offer. One of the most common newbie experiences is trying to take a hopeless offer and make it profitable by cutting placements heavily - until there's almost no traffic left, and the campaign is making pennies a day in profits. Not worth it.


I looked through the data and these are the things I need to do next;
(i) cut one of the landing page - not converting at all
(ii) identify placement to cut
(iii) probably to target Android at traffic source only since iOS is not converting at all
Do use a stat calculator to cut landers!

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Banners-Part-1

Please feel free to show various stats (offers, landers, placements, OSs, and whatever else you feel we should look at) when you have more data! Don't be afraid to attach too many.



Amy


06-24-2019 02:21 PM #9 thickeyebrows (Member)

Do use a stat calculator to cut landers!

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Banners-Part-1
Yes, I did! I had 3 landers, let's call them LP1, LP2 and LP3.
It was clear from the start LP3 is the winner. LP2 had conversions here and there..LP1 is just..LP1..

I decided to stop offer B as it was paying much lower as compared to offer A (at this point, I am still running both WIFI and 3G/LTE campaign for offer A) and I figured I will have no chance of a profit given the conversions. So as part of my to-do, I cut placement, excluded iOS and also cut LP1. After using the stat calculator, I knew I had to cut LP2 but I was too curious and I wanted to find out how LP2 will perform after optimisation. As expected..it was a disaster!

I also managed to ripped a new lander, LP4. It was similar to LP3 and I thought it will convert well.
However, I was wrong. I was observing close to 100% CTR, thought something was wrong and after inspection, I realised I did not fixed the lander properly. I had to cut LP2 and LP4 now and focus solely on LP3. I realised the WIFI campaign was not doing well and I stopped it as well, leaving only the 3G/LTE campaign to run.

LP4


LP3


Result at the end of last night


Seeing how I went from -80% to -20% after some optimisation made me hopeful and I thought I could have my first breakeven day sooner than I thought. I made further optimisation (cutting a mobile carrier who had 0 conversion and some placement who failed the "2x offer cost" test) and ran traffic to the campaign since this morning.

Result as of now


Underwhelming result, I did thought about trying day-parting or maybe even testing bids according to the lesson plan. However, I concluded that maybe this is not the right offer for me to test further. I will probably let traffic run till 12/1am to see the final result.

Couple of mistakes/things I learnt/need to learn after this campaign:
- Lander is extremely important. If I have the experience, I will never ripped LP1 in the first place. I will need to get better at fixing them.
- Stats never lie. I should have never given LP2 a second chance
- I will need to be able to judge "potential profitability" better and faster
- To be more efficient with campaign so that I don't spend 2x the money testing

[QUESTION]
@vortex
If you have been searching for lander on Adplexity lately, I am sure you'd have seen this lander.



Can someone tell me how this lander work?
It is a lander, on top of a lander..? (thought it was pretty clever)
When visitor click on "Skip Ad", it brings them to the landing page and to the offer page.
How should we be setting this up so that it will be track properly in our tracker?
Did anyone figure out how to change time setting in PropellerAds? (I had to update cost manually but the timezone is..screwed up)


06-29-2019 07:50 AM #10 thickeyebrows (Member)

In the midst of launching a new campaign, ripped and fixed up my landers.
However, I am faced with one problem. Do let me know if you have a solution to this please.

I got a getURLParameter('brand') in my codes. When I tried to access the lander via S3 and manually input "?brand=Apple" into the link, it works.
Whenever, I try to input the link manually without "https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/mydomain.com/index.html?brand=Apple" the amazon s3 portion, it does not work.
BUT, it works when I try it on my mobile.

Anybody know why is this happening?


06-29-2019 08:47 AM #11 diplomat (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by thickeyebrows View Post
In the midst of launching a new campaign, ripped and fixed up my landers.
However, I am faced with one problem. Do let me know if you have a solution to this please.

I got a getURLParameter('brand') in my codes. When I tried to access the lander via S3 and manually input "?brand=Apple" into the link, it works.
Whenever, I try to input the link manually without "https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/mydomain.com/index.html?brand=Apple" the amazon s3 portion, it does not work.
BUT, it works when I try it on my mobile.

Anybody know why is this happening?
It's a bit difficult to say without actually seeing your code/lp. Are you using any adblockers that might cause it?


06-29-2019 07:12 PM #12 thickeyebrows (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by diplomat View Post
It's a bit difficult to say without actually seeing your code/lp. Are you using any adblockers that might cause it?
Think I found the solution for now. It's probably due to caching. Each time I will reupload the updated lander with the same file name and I think they kept showing the previous version. What I did was to rename my files and it works perfectly.

After resolving the issue, I launched a campaign in Kenya with 5 landers, payout is $0.80 and MT Flow conversion type. I decided to test out Popcash, am seeing more than 50% clickloss (eyeball math, is this normal in Kenya?) and no conversion at all.

Actual spent on traffic is about $16 and it seems like another nay-campaign for me.


07-03-2019 02:35 AM #13 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Seeing how I went from -80% to -20% after some optimisation made me hopeful and I thought I could have my first breakeven day sooner than I thought.
Holy moly! Optimizing from -80% to -20% is no small accomplishment!

The general approach to optimizing a pop campaign is to focus on testing offers and landers first to make major leaps in improvement, then fine-tune by cutting targeting segments.

Starting from -80% ROI, unless you can multiple landers and/or offers to cut down to winners, AND/OR operating in a big geo where you can afford to cut a lot of traffic and still have enough to make profits from, I would consider ditching the campaign.


Couple of mistakes/things I learnt/need to learn after this campaign:
- Lander is extremely important. If I have the experience, I will never ripped LP1 in the first place. I will need to get better at fixing them.
- Stats never lie. I should have never given LP2 a second chance
- I will need to be able to judge "potential profitability" better and faster
- To be more efficient with campaign so that I don't spend 2x the money testing
Haha I wouldn't feel too bad about that LP2! However, it COULD have turned out to be the winner, even though the stats calculator suggested otherwise.

Stats calculators will only tell you the likelihood of something turning out to be the winner, and the certainty is never 100% (even if it says so "on paper"). But if we follow the stats calculator's suggestion when making cutting decisions, we'll save a lot of time and money. We must maintain a balance between accuracy and efficiency, and the extra accuracy would not be worth the massive additional effort and cost it would require.

What I'm trying to say is: Even if the LP2 had won out in the end, we should still trust the stats calculator.

As for judging "potential profitability" better and become more efficient in testing - that will definitely come with more experience - which you're acquiring now. You'll get there!


@vortex
If you have been searching for lander on Adplexity lately, I am sure you'd have seen this lander.
As far as I can tell, it's just a lander used to collect push subscribers. The goal is to get visitors to click on the "Allow" button at the top.

It's basically what the recent $1 guide is about. Looks like someone is doing some massive testing of push offers from multiple aff networks, on multiple traffic networks, targeting lots of geos. You could be doing the same.


Did anyone figure out how to change time setting in PropellerAds? (I had to update cost manually but the timezone is..screwed up)
PropellerAds' stats are in the EST timezone.

So if you want to manually update costs in the tracker accordingly, either:

1)Set your tracker's timezone to EST, manually update the cost, then change it back to your preferred timezone.

OR:

2)Figure out the timezone difference between PropellerAds and the timezone your tracker is set to, and set the time range for the cost update accordingly (if that makes sense).


I got a getURLParameter('brand') in my codes. When I tried to access the lander via S3 and manually input "?brand=Apple" into the link, it works.
Whenever, I try to input the link manually without "https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/mydomain.com/index.html?brand=Apple" the amazon s3 portion, it does not work.
BUT, it works when I try it on my mobile.
As you're found out yourself, it's a caching issue.


I decided to test out Popcash, am seeing more than 50% clickloss (eyeball math, is this normal in Kenya?) and no conversion at all.
Don't recall what the "usual" clickloss is for KE on Popcash. You can try to improve your infrastructure though to make everything faster and that's about all you CAN and should do. Aside from that, there's not much else we can do.

$16 without a conversion - if the offer is a low-payout one, then indeed, sounds pretty hopeless.

I'd rather test more offers on smaller budgets each, than spend a lot of budget trying to make a single offer work. Exception would be if I KNOW an offer has promise, e.g. an AM I trust has told me so, or an affiliate I know is having success, or if a spy tool indicates big traffic has been run consistently for at least a few days.

Awesome progress @thickeyebrows! Looking forward to your next installment!



Amy


07-06-2019 08:41 AM #14 thickeyebrows (Member)

Busy testing offer and received an email from Propeller saying my campaign has been suspended.
When I checked in Propeller, it says "Malware site detected" (see 2nd screenshot).
I checked my domain and it is working fine. In this case, should I get a new domain??

Edit: Found the root cause. Site was indeed classified as deceptive site by G. Time to get a new domain.



07-13-2019 01:21 AM #15 thickeyebrows (Member)

Sorry for the lack of updates. I did not quit AM, I was trying to launch as many campaign as I can, clocking average 5 hours of sleep daily but none of the campaign came close to breakeven. One changes that I've made was to switch to Binom. It was hassle-free thanks to their IT support, managed to get everything up and ready within an hour.

I am going to test 2 offers this time round. Both Samsung S10 sweepstakes offer in United Kingdom and South Africa.
The United Kingdom offer was recommended to me by my affiliate manager, South Africa I chose myself.

United Kingdom $2 Payout
Initial setup for this campaign: Android, 3G/LTE, blacklist Android Webview, whitelist browser language: English. 4 landers.

I bid $1 for a start and let the campaign run. When I checked (left it overnight), there was only 4k+ hits with $3+ spent, low CTR and no conversion. I figured I must be getting low quality traffic therefore I cloned the $1 bid campaign and decided to test the offer with $2 bid. One of the lander had low CTR as compared to the rest hence I decided to cut it for the $2 bid campaign.



Still getting low CTR for $2 bid even though I had a conversion. It's the same set for landers that I have used for other Samsung S10 campaign in lower tier geos and I was getting 15-25% CTR there, the difference is huge in Tier 1 (probably because they were so exposed to all those ads already).

What should I be doing now? Two options: (i) Continue testing with higher bid (i.e. $3) (ii) Kill this campaign



South Africa $0.25 Payout
So this was an offer that I had ran before. I was getting good conversions but didn't manage to optimise it to profitability. Maybe something went wrong in my optimisation process therefore I wanted to test it again.

This time round instead of the usual SmartCPM, I tested CPA Goal.
Initial setup: Android, 3G/LTE, blacklisted Android Webview, whitelisted browser language: English.
After ~6-7hrs, this is the result I got.



Again, LP4 was lacking significantly as compared to the rest but I am going to leave it as it is for now. I want to collect more data.



Is there anything I can do to drive more traffic under CPA Goal?

Also, if CPA Goal is helping us determine which zone is better for conversion, why are we not using this approach for all our campaigns?
--> Start with CPA Goal, once we have gathered enough data, start a whitelist campaign, profit(?)


07-13-2019 03:13 PM #16 thickeyebrows (Member)

I have decided to pause the UK campaign and in an attempt to get more traffic for my ZA campaign, I created a new CPA Goal campaign with a bid of 90% of payout, I cut LP4 (which has significantly lower CTR as compared to the rest) as well. Initial CPA Goal campaign bid was @ 80% of payout.

I was trying to see if I am able to get traffic on both CPA Goal campaign. 80% payout bid suffered and it's obvious that the new campaign was receiving most of the traffic.

Decided to go SmartCPM route again as I really need more traffic to make all these work worthwhile.
CPA Goal result.



Next Steps





07-14-2019 01:16 PM #17 thickeyebrows (Member)

$1 Bid Campaign

Oh boy, this offer did not even managed to clear 2 conversions with 10x payout spend in traffic. I'd have bin it if this is the first time I am running this offer. Seeing how the recommended bid was in the range of $2+, I think I am getting all the junk traffic here. I decided to create a new campaign to test with bid of $2. Still a bit surprised with the low CTR..



I tested 4 landers and the only conversion I had..was the lander where I had the lowest CTR.. -_-



$2 Bid Campaign

I did not make any changes here. I cut LP4 shortly after the campaign as it's CTR is really low compared to the rest and also, I am getting conversions for other landers. I cut some placement that cost >3x payout, a total of 3 placements. I cloned this and prepared to test a new campaign with bid of $3.



$3 Bid Campaign

Did not do much here apart from monitoring the stats to cut placement that cost >3x payout.
Again, noticed low CTR as compared to $2 bid campaign. Not sure why..
Seeing how ROI is lower than the $2 bid campaign, I will not test another campaign with a new bid.
I will go back to the $2 bid campaign and optimise there instead.

With regard to low CTR, how much does day and time affect performance? I tested the $2 bid campaign after 5-6pm ZA time while I tested the $3 bid campaign early morning (8-9am) ZA time. Should I conduct such test in future at similar day/timing? If yes, should I test $3 bid campaign again?



I decided to do some analysis on the data I have gathered.
I realised I was experiencing less than ~20% (between 15-19%) clickloss, from Traffic Source (TS) to landers. This should be normal, I guess?
Next, I was looking at clickloss from tracker to affiliate network, I was shocked to see ~33% clickloss!? Is this normal?
I had 564 landing page clicked in Binom but only 378 registered in affiliate network.
What could possibly cause this? Or am i interpreting the stats wrongly?

Next Steps


07-17-2019 12:54 AM #18 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Edit: Found the root cause. Site was indeed classified as deceptive site by G. Time to get a new domain.
Yup - unfortunately this kind of thing is becoming a more and more frequent occurrence.

Registering several domains ahead of time and setting them up so they're propagated and ready to be swapped in at anytime would be the way to go.


What should I be doing now? Two options: (i) Continue testing with higher bid (i.e. $3) (ii) Kill this campaign
As long as your bid isn't so low that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel and getting garbage traffic with seriously bad conversion rates, I wouldn't suggest to up the bid without seeing any indication that the offer+landers are worthy of further testing.

I would just cut the offer after 10x spend without conversions UNLESS I have reason to believe it's a really great offer that deserves more test budget, and/or the geo is so big that even if the offer converts at eg. -90% ROI I could still cut my way to green (which is not recommended but is doable).

Everyone has their test strategy. My style is I'd rather spend a little bit of test budget on each offer, and test a ton of offers, than potentially waste test budget on duds. Most of the best offers should start to show SOME conversions from the beginning. So by setting stringent test criteria, I'd be catching only the best offers to scale.


Is there anything I can do to drive more traffic under CPA Goal?
Also, if CPA Goal is helping us determine which zone is better for conversion, why are we not using this approach for all our campaigns?
--> Start with CPA Goal, once we have gathered enough data, start a whitelist campaign, profit(?)
I didn't experiment with CPA a whole lot while I was running pop heavily. It wasn't even available on that many networks before.

But as far as I remember, to get more traffic, you'd need to increase one or both of 1)your bid, and 2)your conversion rate.

Generally the more money they can get for the traffic they're selling to you, the more traffic they'll want to give to you. What can limit traffic is if your bid is low, or the CR is low - either/both of which will result in your paying the network too little money for the traffic.

As for gathering data using CPA camp and then starting a whitelist CPM campaign - that idea is worthy of a test! Why not go ahead and test it? Then run a smart cpm camp "as normal" and see whether the best placements identified by the 2 camps are the same, then decide from there which approach to use.


I was trying to see if I am able to get traffic on both CPA Goal campaign. 80% payout bid suffered and it's obvious that the new campaign was receiving most of the traffic.
Haha I hate that - in cases like these you'll just need to test different bids in sequence rather than simultaneously - which although isn't terribly accurate, is the best we can do (without getting multiple accounts on the same network which is against the TOS of most networks).


Decided to go SmartCPM route again as I really need more traffic to make all these work worthwhile.
This is important! If you can't get traffic volume, don't waste your time with the campaign. Mind the 80/20 rule.


Bid @ $1.00 - I am bidding above the first bend but significantly lower than the recommended. Is it ok?
Generally speaking $1 should be high enough to get conversions! You still got 1 conversion in the first 10x payout's worth in ad spend, so may have decided to test it further anyway.

And even if you HAD binned this offer, it wouldn't have been the end of the world, as there are so many offers around.

There are different approaches to testing - you could cut offers more accurately by spending more test budget on each, which would make it more unlikely to cut a decent offer by mistake. Or, you could cut offers less accurately but more cheaply, by spending less test budget on each offer, which would make it more likely to cut a decent offer by mistake. You'd need to find a sweet spot that will neither cut too many good offers prematurely, nor waste too much money on too many dud offers. But there is not a way that can achieve both absolute accuracy and absolute effectiveness.


I will be checking the stats closely and will be cutting placement once hit 3x loss (noted in the tutorial that we can cut once reached 2x loss for larger geo as there will be enough traffic. Not sure how "big" ZA is though.)
ZA is certainly a big geo! But if you're targeting 3G ZA traffic on propellerads, they don't seem to have a lot. Zeropark has a lot more - you may even need to cut at 1x or even 0.5x payout without conversions just to curb the bleeding in the beginning.


With regard to low CTR, how much does day and time affect performance? I tested the $2 bid campaign after 5-6pm ZA time while I tested the $3 bid campaign early morning (8-9am) ZA time. Should I conduct such test in future at similar day/timing? If yes, should I test $3 bid campaign again?
Time of day can affect performance for sure - difference can be night and day (can't help but use the pun sorry!) at least for conversion rate.

You COULD try to retest the $3 bid, but quite frankly, with the limited volumes for ZA 3G traffic on propellerads (if I remember correctly!) the conversion rate would need to be MUCH higher for the campaign to stand a chance of reaching profits, as there really isn't huge room for cutting.


I decided to do some analysis on the data I have gathered.
I realised I was experiencing less than ~20% (between 15-19%) clickloss, from Traffic Source (TS) to landers. This should be normal, I guess?
Next, I was looking at clickloss from tracker to affiliate network, I was shocked to see ~33% clickloss!? Is this normal?
I had 564 landing page clicked in Binom but only 378 registered in affiliate network.
What could possibly cause this? Or am i interpreting the stats wrongly?
Not too long ago, clickloss of above 20% could point to problems. Nowadays it's getting more and more out of hand.

The clickloss from tracker to aff network does seems a bit excessive though. It could be tracker speed or the aff network redirection speed or slow loading speed of the offer page. There's nothing much you can do about the latter 2 possible issues; if you pinpoint the problem to the offer page loading too slowly you could let your AM know and maybe they could work with the advertiser to improve their site. As for tracker speed, see how far your tracker server is from your target geo - you can potentially improve on the redirection speed - please see here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post375583

And of course, make sure tracker server resources are sufficient to handle the traffic volume.


I have decided on which lander to use (LP2 - more conversion, better CTR, better CR)
I will test offers now. Found 2x iPhone offers. I will fix my lander to reflect the correct "prize" to determine which offer is better
I will be testing with a new $2 bid campaign, including placements I have blacklisted during the first $2 bid campaign while testing landers. I will be cutting placement that cost >3x payout here as well
Cutting at 2x payout in loss is usually sufficient. The rest sounds like a plan!




Amy


09-05-2019 02:56 PM #19 thickeyebrows (Member)

long time no see! been awhile..
had a well deserved summer break in Japan..energised and ready to go again!

had some small success before my break.
tried an offer in Canada (Casino vertical) but what I did here was to use Sweepstakes LP on this Canada Casino offer..
Oh boy, conversions were flying through! I had $20 profit on my first day.. However, the campaign was killed by the third day..

To do now is to find similar Canada offer and run some traffic with the same lander~


09-07-2019 08:38 PM #20 vortex (Senior Moderator)

To do now is to find similar Canada offer and run some traffic with the same lander~
Welcome back! Great to hear you're well-rested, and that you've found a good lander angle!

Coincidentally, casino is the vertical I'm planning on doing my next guide on! Don't know when it will actually be done though.

Just want to point out that you don't necessarily need to limit yourself to testing this angle on Canadian offers only. I know each country has its own culture, but it's worth testing the same angle on different geos - especially other tier 1 English-speaking geos, and ESPECIALLY the US - which is similar to CA culture-wise. Enough so that the two audiences would often respond similarly to the same thing.

Looking forward to some delicious green stats!!



Amy


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