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ObjectiveLength's $1 Follow-Along (2)

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This is a one week recap of my follow along.


Goal: Familiarize myself with push traffic and make $1 back.


Steps: Follow the $1 guide, optimize.


Day 1:
Followed the guide to applying to Mobipium and Popads. Straightforward, no issues. Flor became my AM.


Day 2:
Followed the rest of the guide for campaign creation, budgeting, and optimizing.

• Applied for Push Notifications TOP and received my link from Mobipium
• Created multi-geo Campaign within PopAds following the guide.
• Waited for approval which took a couple of hours.
• Set budget to 3.
• Within the hour, spent the $3 and took away the bottom 3 geos while noting the profitable geos.
• Re-ran with $3 geos again. This time it took a couple of hours to spend the next $3. Once again, following step 4. But noted that Turkey did well in both.
• Ran the last $4 which took the rest of the day to spend.
• At this time, I’m down $1.67 but well worth the time spent learning.

Day 3:
Created a new campaign which was approved later but this time focusing on Turkey. I had noticed that Turkey was getting more impressions and showed promise of being profitable. This day’s focus is running Turkey only campaign while following the same steps and removing unprofitable website IDs.

• Followed the same rules as Day 2. Refilled to $10. Set budget to $3.
• This time, I went through the website IDs to cross off unprofitable websites. Generating the report of unprofitable websites, I added websiteIDs to the exclusion list. These were ones that were high in impressions but haven’t converted or had conversions with and impressions but didn’t make my cut (<-$0.15).
• I refilled the budget to $3 and ran again.
• However, as I’m watching this, I’m clearly getting less traffic with my basic bid and removing high impression websiteIDs. I decide that it’s time to learn something new and get away from focusing on excluding sites.
• I spent $5.63 but made a profit of $0.42.

Day 4:
I signed up for Voluum but struggled with all the steps for campaign creation, offer creation, and subsequently linking popads, mobipium, and Voluum. Looking through the forums, I found Anitaway’s Voluum guide. Here are my steps that I took but noting that I don’t see my payouts in PopAds which makes it hard to follow my profit/loss. I’m only going to focus on the main tricky points of Voluum Set Up.


Voluum Setup Steps

• Affiliate Network >
  New affiliate network >
  Affiliate Network Name = Mobipium
  Advanced Parameters:
  Parameter = clickid
  Token = {tid}
  PayOut:
  Token = {pay}
• Traffic Source >
  New Traffic Source >
  Choose Template:
  Other Template > PopAds > Load Template
  Traffic source postback URL = http://serve.popads.net/cpixel.php?s2s=<redacted>={tid}&value={pay}
  Advanced Parameters:
  Name: External ID
  Parameter: IMPRESSIONID
  Token: [IMPRESSIONID]
  
  [Note: I was missing Advanced Parameters ExternalID > IMPRESSIONID > [IMPRESSIONID] which may be why I didn’t get conversions in popads. Anita left this blank as it’s only useful to see conversions fire in popads]
• Offers >
  New Offer >
  Offer Name = Mobipium-PushNotificationsTOP
  Offer URL = https://<redacted>.catchtheclick.com/?<redacted>={clickid}&tid2={campaign.id}&tid3={trafficsource .id}
  Save
• New Campaign Simple >
  Traffic Source = PopAds
  Name = 07019 Mobipium TR
  DirectLinking = Check
  Save

PopAds Setup Steps

• PopAds >
  Create new campaign >
  URL = <redacted>?websiteid=[WEBSITEID]&quality=[QUALITY]&categoryid=[CATEGORYID]&country=[COUNTRY]&formfactorname=[FORMFACTORNAME]&campaignid=[CAMPAIGNID]&campaignname=[CAMPAIGNNAME]&screenresolution=[SCREENRESOLUTION]&impressionid=[IMPRESSIONID]&bid=[BID]
• Create rest of campaign
  
  [Note: This is from Voluum’s Campaign Postback URL]

Mobipium Setup Steps

• Pixel > Please provide your callback URL here = <redacted>postback?cid={tid}&payout={pay}&txid=OPTIONAL
• Update

Day 4: Turkey Campaign is set up with Voluum. I’ve put in $15 with the same excluded websites from Day 3. This runs for the entire day into night. Flor contacts me in the AM (PT) saying Turkey has low quality

Revenue: $5.52
Spend: $6.84
Profit: -$1.32




Learnings:

• Running Push really is simply following through with steps. I don’t feel like I was out of my element which is good for familiarizing myself with the platforms.
• STM forum helped guide me through the Voluum steps which saved me time and going through support on a weekend.

Questions:

• Is getting into the nitty gritty of excluding website IDs the answer? I feel like losing traffic but upping conversion rates isn’t the way because of an issue with scaling.
  The answer may be finding a better offer that allows for more options of optimization like a landing page offer and testing other traffic sources.

Improvements:

• Get popads to show conversions after Voluum set up. Some people prefer not to have this but I like the information and I’m a small fish in the pond so my data isn’t that valuable.
• Understand my audience. I found that popads lets you get a general idea of what the converting websiteIDs do. I noticed that I did get conversions from file sharing sites but I bet that’s the reason for the low conversion quality since file sharers won’t be responsive to push ads.
• Run an offer with a landing page to get my hands dirty in optimizing landing pages AND to truly use Voluum’s features.
• Find a traffic network that allows individual bidding on website IDs so I can dial in the data from Voluum for my bids.

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Apologies for the late reply! Don't know how I managed to miss this one...

I've read all your steps in detail - excellent execution for someone just starting out. You've obviously learned all you could from the $1 guide, next step would be to go through the 40-day tutorial to get some practice with some pop traffic, and then "graduate" to either push traffic or native traffic.

Or, if you prefer, you could play with something completely different like Facebook. Learning curve is steeper, but it's a source that isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

You can take a look at the optimization lessons in the 40-day tutorial to learn how to optimize campaigns.

You can also try to scale to other pop networks.

But you're right - this kind of offer doesn't give you a lot of room for creativity. You can surely run other offers where you can use landing pages to pre-sell visitors to effect better results.

This is all covered in the 40-day tutorial.

Also, in approximately 2 weeks, I'll be posting a guide on how to run sweepstakes. The 40-day tutorial + that guide should give you lots of ideas on how to succeed with the sweepstakes vertical - which is newbie-friendly and has a ton of offers available on various aff networks and direct advertisers. So would be a good vertical to start with.


Sounds good! But a couple of thoughts:

-Regarding understanding your audience - some clarification: These aren't push ads we're promoting. If you browse to your offer link, you'll see a page with some fake video or something similar, with a small popup that asks you to subscribe to push notifications. These pages have the sole purpose of building a push subscribers list, which the offer owner will then make money from by sending PUSH ADS to.

-You made a good point about lack of responsiveness - this doesn't only apply to file-sharing sites. Basically popunder/popup ads are interruptive marketing - they disrupt the visitors' experience so most people will close them before they even finish loading. This is why conversion rates on pop traffic are low. This is why pop traffic is cheap compared to other traffic types. We get what we pay for.

-I wouldn't spend too much time trying to understand the audience. Pop traffic is not targeted - visitors are just a general audience with no commonality among them except they're all human beings (even that isn't true, as some traffic is from bots). Basically it's just a massive group of faceless people. Unlike when you run on FB where you can target by gender and age and interest, or when you run on adwords where you can target by keywords or websites focused on a certain topic.

The biggest difference in website categories are adult vs. non-adult - these can react VERY differently to the same offer and landing page.

Also, you can target for example torrent sites and promote a VPN offer.

Beyond that, like I said, I wouldn't spend too much time trying to segregate the audience.

-You mentioned finding a traffic network that allows individual bidding on website IDs - Zeropark fits the bill. But don't do your initial testing there - they have lots of volume but also more junk (the 2 go hand-in-hand). Test on popads/propellerads to identify a good offer+lander, then take that to zeropark and cut unprofitable placements (it's the same thing as website ids) etc.


Hope that helps! Have you made any progress since your last post? Again - apologies for the extremely late reply. Will strive to stay on top of things more.



Amy

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