The Most Boring FA Thread You Will Ever Read... Guaranteed! (72)
The Most Boring FA Thread You Will Ever Read... Guaranteed!
Or your money back!
Alright, this FA will be pretty boring. I won't update it everyday. And I can't promise that it will enlighten anyone. But. I'm spinning wheels right now and need to do a brain dump. Feel free to comment on my verbal diarrhea 
Short intro: I'm jaybot. Started in PPC with Bing/Google/FB and Clickbank stuff awhile back, way after it was cool. That was basically doing paid search to blog post/landing page /email list ---> offer funnels. Had some minor success with nutra-type ebook stuff. But, I always hated how it's too difficult to track CB offers. And how all paid search, and a lot of native (gemini, taboola, etc.) networks shun you for misleading pages, and god forbid direct-linking.
Anyway, joined STM. Did Amy's awesome vortex 40 day tutorial. Did her also awesome $1 tutorial. Then came back and continued pop. And I really like it. I've tried push. Not for me atm. I'll come back once I've got pop down.
So, this is me since Jun 8th on
Lot's of fun! Still pretty red, but it's not 100% loss, so I'm not fucking up too much.
But... you can see I've already destroyed the 1 million 'event' cap for the basic
I could go to self hosted, sure, but I *like* Voluum and don't want to leave after already paying for a year. Should I suck it up and start using ZP instead (as their events don't count)? Would love to start using ZP, but that's another, what, $99 a month on Voluum for the SSL on your custom tracking domain? So... kinda fucked either way on tracking.
But back to some other numbers:
A good day can look like this:
A bad day looks like this:
And this is today (so far):
Mostly doing SOI mobile content/sweeps/lead-gen/voucher in Tier 2-3 countries as they're easy to convert (although AU has been nice to me lately). Had some luck with a cool offer in ZA until everyone else noticed, and then the bids jumped from like $2 CPM to like $30 CPM or something absolutely ridiculous. I'm told this is common for carrier offers in ZA.
Using Wifi instead of 3G has been mostly shit. Perhaps I don't have the patience for it. But it seems way way way harder to convert as the process for signing up turns an SOI into a triple-click-SMS-pin-code-CC-submit bullshit. No one has time for that, do they?
Speaking of which, I've tried CC submits. The payouts are crazy good for a reason. When I have the capital to blow on offers like that, I will. But for now, nah.
But GR has single-opt ins with good (like $10) payouts. But I've found it's mostly a crapshoot and you must use aggressive. So propeller ads will flag you.
Today I'm running offers in PL, AU, ES, ZA, KE, and CZ. I should probably not be testing this many geos at once. But I feel like I'm building something.
It's shocking how different traffic from one source to another is. Popads is amazing sometimes. Propeller is amazing sometimes. Othertimes, pop is shit and propeller is good. Sometimes, they both suck (or the offer is shit).
But I haven't had much luck with other sources. Ad-maven seems good, but very low volumes in most of the geos I'm trying. Plug-rush has great support. I will say that. But their traffic is very much skewed towards adult. Popcash I've hard is good, I will try again next time I want to scale, but I didn't find much good for ZA recently and stop using it. Yes, I've signed up to clickadu, ExoClick, hilltopads, etc. But I can't see a reason to use them until I need to try scaling again. Unless they have some magical traffic that converts better than anyone else.
Oh right. Networks.
Everyone says try multiple networks. I signed up to a bunch using the STM tool. Of course I have mobidea, gotzha, CD, mobipium, and a slew of others. But I keep ending up back on CD. Even if its the same offer, it always converts better on CD. For me. (Obvs, if I had a few extra thousand $ to blow on testing this, I could show some statistical variance, but I don't. So I won't).
Every other day I'm torn between pausing all my bleeding red offers and just having a green day. Even if it's only a few dollars. Speaking of which, I've noticed that if I wake up in the morning and check the stats and it is even a little green, it will be an overall green day. If it's a little red, no matter what I do, it will be a red day. Perhaps psychological, but interesting to note.
Not sure what else to write here. Let me know if you want/need more info. I'll be happy to share.
Today is a good day so far. Hopefully, I don't fuck it up:
It just occurred to me to stop messing around with my red offers and really get that green one working better.
Running CPA on propeller for a change. Obviously not necessary, as the top campaign is CPM, but that's a different source and a different beast.
I'm shocked the offer above is still good. I thought it died a month ago. My network AM said nope. So I started it again and lo and behold. Now if I can keep it steady and scale it without fucking up, I'll be happy.
how are your landing pages? Are you split testing multiple ones and keep on optimizing your funnel that way? It seems you aren't too far away from cracking break-even... 22.86%
haha I know the feeling -looking at green days vs red days
@jack01 I split test many moons ago and got lazy once I found one that converts well. There are only so many variations on a spinner you can do 
(boxes and quizzes have never worked for some reason) I guess I could try some more. The next time it tanks (like today or tomorrow) I'll definitely do that. As I've seen other geos love a newer lp and hate this old one, so that's definitely a good idea!
Anyway, last night... I didn't fuck up too badly:
I suppose I should've kept the CPM, eh? CPA took a giant dump at me later in the evening. Still overall green though. Also added a new source last night, we'll see how it turns out but so far... today...
Rookie numbers, I know. But as I said, if it's green early in the day... unless I fuck up majorly, it usually stays green by the end. I just wish Propeller CPA was as good as CPM, I wanna test a bit more before going back to CPM only.
New source seems nice so far, but we'll see.
Shiiiiiiit.
I was a good boy and let the CPA campaign run without touching it. About half way through the day, was looking at a healthy $22 profit. So, I decided to try some more CPA campaigns, and scaling to another source. Which of course... cost money. Still up for the day, but it's sad seeing all that red turn green quickly.
And so, I wake up today to a sea of red:
Dammit. I know, I know... statistical significance and blah blah blah. But it will be tough to not dick around with it and let it run. That's possibly the hardest thing to do. Not dick around with zones and cutting OS and browsers while bleeding money.
Since I woke up red, I'm sure it will be red all day. Hopefully, I'll be surprised.
On another note. I cannot figure out Ad-maven. To use their smart-bid thingy, you need two different post back urls? So... the xml.ad-maven in the tracker, but also use a http://pop.rtb-passthrough.com, plus you have to set a Goal afterwards, and that equals the value(?) of the conversion, but you have to... have to... it's the most confusing shit from any ad platform I've seen in awhile. I'd love to use it, if it made any sense. I'm trying to use their vanilla CPM instead, but even that is anyone's guess as to how high or low your bids are, as there is no real time bid or traffic estimation, just a static recommended rate card from 2008 or something. I wouldn't even complain about it in a post if there was some sort of support on the site. Or a support email. The only support I can find is a FAQ with like 5 articles. I'm sure it has decent traffic, I just wish it were useable by humans
Ok. Back to staring at numbers and losing money!
Whoops.
Funny enough, by not touching the Propeller CPA stuff I had (actually Smart CPM with CPA guessing, I'll explain that in a bit), it actually rallied and half way through the day, I actually went green for an hour or so. Other sources took a giant dump. I figured the day was fucked already so I blew another $10 on a push campaign. No conversions there, but that's expected. Push is expensive.
Then, I also noticed I'm not running the actual Smart CPA 2.0 thing. Propeller allows you to auto-adjust bids to try to match the CPA you set within a SmartCPM campaign. That's what I was doing so far. Well, I knew, but I didn't know the difference or didn't trust it as much. I don't remember.
So, I created a new Smart CPM 2.0 campaign. Which cost a lot at first, as usual. But actually ended up the campaign with the most profit, the whopping $4 for the day.
I thought, hey that's neat! I'll try it on this other tiny campaign (the amazing $0.93 profit with what, 3 conversions?) that I never turn off because it's just there and never red.
Another bad idea. Got 0 conversions and cost about $5 in the red with only few hours.
Whatever, shit mistakes that happens from testing. Most disappointing for the day was the $-9 with 1 conversion for no good reason. Same SmartCPM but totally different zones. Also, the 10 conversions with a loss of $-7. Same thing SmartCPM.
Reading grofit's thread here, I'm also curious if the SmartCPA 2.0 cuts out from the same pool. Since this is a smaller geo, it's possible. I'll let it run another day and try not to end up in the corner sobbing over my wasted youth.
Speaking of which... so far today:
Already twice as bad as yesterday morning. With twice the expletives uttered from my mouth. Good news, is it looks like one of the other sources (popads) has picked back up. Bad news is, the CPA 2.0 is at an eCPA of $18.1809 completely destroying any profits... and the SmartCPM is sitting at $-9 for 2 conversions. God dammit.
Looking at the zones that the algorithms (for both CPA and Auto-bidding CPM) I find some questionable decisions, like freezing zones that have conversions (maybe delayed?) while leaving open zones with tons of garbage traffic with no chance of conversion ever. But A) you can't unfreeze it, you have to wait for the algorithm to do that (with CPA 2.0) or turn off auto-bidding entirely on the SmartCPM and B) I don't wanna mess with the algorithm. Yet.
So... I'll wait a bit before doing more damage.
Appreciate the glimpse into your day to day psychology and the red/green dynamic man... that is exactly how I feel too! An emotional roller-coaster this IM stuff
Anytime I'm having a bad day and am losing money I always start creating/optimizing landing pages. I feel like if I do that and show the IM gods that I'm being conscientious they will reward me with more conversions (and it seems to work too, perhaps just because it stops me from messing with stuff on the campaigns lol)
But yeah, regardless of whether you're slightly red or slightly green overall, it seems you are certainly mastering the processes and logistics of this stuff, which can only help you make money in the future, in one way or another!
Originally Posted by jack_l
You're definitely on to something. I probably should have done something more productive with new offers or landing pages. Instead, I went outside and cleaned the yard. But it still kept me away from any tweaking damage
Alright. Well...
$-3 for the day, I won't cry too much. I didn't tweak anything major. Just paused some shit campaigns. Spent most of the day staring at stats and comparing zones between CPA and CPM campaigns. But... I just think, what if--? What if I turned off that source entirely and just took in all that green for the day? I'd have $25 profit. Shit.
So today... well, I woke up to $0.26 green... But that was before I started writing this post... Now, fucking fuck fucker:
So tempted to pause that $-5.17 campaign and go about my day. But. That should be good. Maybe. You see, it got paused while I was sleeping because of daily campaign limit. So I unpaused it and added a little. It should be ok. I... won't... touch it!
In other news, while looking at other trackers (
Decisions.
Ok! Nothing to write home about but yesterday ended up with:
$+3 . Phew! That's a relief after all the losses near the top. I added a few more sources (popcash, adcash) last night as well. Which didn't change much yet, but I woke up this morning with a nice surprise:
Looks like the propeller ads Smart CPA 2.0 finally picked up some steam! Hopefully it holds out. As all the other sources seem to be not so great (even popads, which is usually good on Sundays) today.
Man, I would love to pause it right now and just take the profit. But I know that's not how this works.
Let's hope I don't fuck today up
Originally Posted by jack_l
(and it seems to work too, perhaps just because it stops me from messing with stuff on the campaigns lol) Originally Posted by jaybot
Wish you more green days and keep up with the updates. definitely not "most boring FA ever", want my money back
Hey... that worked out:
That's a nice number. And that's just the CPA 2.0 campaign. Despite all the other things which did nothing or lost money. Weird. Propeller has a lot of nice traffic hidden away
Added another source last night, and finally figured out CPA postback with Advertizer (using a really good tutorial by/for BeMob, because there was nothing for
Moving along. This morning is not as good as yesterday, but still not bad:
Discussed with
It would still be cheaper for a year of BeMob or RedTrack. But. I've already paid for a year of Voluum. So... I'll finish out this year and pretend I went with another tracker? Shit, that almost makes sense.
Anyway, I'm going to be like jack_l and try to make the IM Gods happy. Hopefully they will reward me for my offerings :P
I think the lesson here is: don't sign up for a yearly plan (even to save money) until you've tried out all the trackers with trials and monthly plans before deciding on that sweet annual deal
First of all @jaybot - apologies for being late to your thread - I've been cooking up a guide for the forum and going through all kinds of personal emergencies.
Your FA is anything BUT boring! You're analytical and organized and the FA is a joy to read - and provide feedback for.
Speaking of which - below are my thoughts...
I would encourage you to revisit google ads and FB sometime in the future - you'd be hard-pressed to find higher-quality traffic than from these. And the scalability and longevity is there - at least more so than a lot of other traffic types.
It IS true that push can be volatile, but so can pop. But yes - making some profits with pop before "graduating" to other things sounds good!
I could go to self hosted, sure, but I *like* Voluum and don't want to leave after already paying for a year. Should I suck it up and start using ZP instead (as their events don't count)? Would love to start using ZP, but that's another, what, $99 a month on Voluum for the SSL on your custom tracking domain? So... kinda fucked either way on tracking.
Using ZP is a good idea, but make sure you have a good offer+lander that you've proven to convert well, using other sources, before taking the combo to ZP. They have the volume, but volume means they have lots of sources, so quality varies widely from source to source (whether it's traffic brokered from other pop networks, or traffic from their direct publishers). Using an unproven offer+lander on ZP, especially in higher-volume geos, would be asking for a bleeding rectum.
Regarding SSL - nowadays it's become more and more of a standard practice. So ZP or not, it's something you should consider getting. https://Voluum.com/blog/case-study-s...formance-gain/
Self-hosted trackers can give you significant cost-savings, but unless you deploy to servers in multiple geographical locations, the distance between your server and the target geo you're buying traffic from can result in slower loading times - something that's crucial to pop.
So - I definitely understand your frustration. This is yet another reason to explore FB and Google when you're ready. In the meantime, use every trick in the book to increase profits and get a leg-up on your competition so you could better-absorb tracker fees. That's the best advice I have regarding that for now.
A good day can look like this:
A bad day looks like this:
And this is today (so far):
Now would be the time to consider which campaigns are worth your time, and which ones aren't.
Campaigns that are NOT worth your time are the puny ones - ones that have little/no volume on the particular traffic source even when you bid high. Exception: You're only doing TESTING on that source because it has good-quality traffic, AND planning on scaling the best offers+landers to other networks that DO have the volume, later on.
Also: Campaigns that are receiving good volume, but is always borderline breaking even or slightly profitable - DON'T keep trying to cut small placements to inch towards increasing ROI! You'd still be making peanuts and that's assuming the campaign won't dip into the red due to volatility. Plus - remember tracker costs?
(Try to focus more on testing OFFERS and LANDERS - emphasis on OFFERS - before optimizing the targeting. And even then, only optimize the bigger things.)
I've been there - was struggling to optimize 50-100 campaigns and spending the entire day doing that. Was doing minor tweaks like cutting placements here and there etc. while the campaigns gradually died on me.
The day I realized I need to focus only on the big things when optimizing, AND the importance of ditching small campaigns, was the day I started allocating most of my time towards TESTING and SCALING - which are the tasks that resulted in leaps and bounds in profits.
Nowadays with tools like theOptimizer,io, you can afford to do fine-tuning on auto-pilot. And I'd encourage that if you have the budget. But doing fine-tuning manually may not be worth the effort.
So yup - if a campaign is too small, or not really going anywhere in terms of profits, nix it. Your time could and should be spent elsewhere.
When my sweeps guide comes out you'll get a lot more insight on how to run sweeps offers - I got some really cool tips from quite a few experts. You'll also know which geos and offer types are doing the best right now. Please stay tuned - ETA 1-2 weeks from today.
Speaking of which, I've tried CC submits. The payouts are crazy good for a reason. When I have the capital to blow on offers like that, I will. But for now, nah.
Something to try: Use a good SOI offer to cut non-converting/bad-converting placements first, then test CC sub offers on the best ones (either a well-pruned blacklist camp, or a whitelist camp of good placements). That can save you money.
Everyone says try multiple networks. I signed up to a bunch using the STM tool. Of course I have mobidea, gotzha, CD, mobipium, and a slew of others. But I keep ending up back on CD. Even if its the same offer, it always converts better on CD. For me. (Obvs, if I had a few extra thousand $ to blow on testing this, I could show some statistical variance, but I don't. So I won't).
But at some point, you'll want to also test offers from other networks. Testing offers is the BEST way to increase ROI, bar none. When you find a good offer and succeeding with a geo, you'll want to test more offers with the same targeting, so you'll run out of offers to test if you only stick with one network - even one as big as CD.
I'll provide a list of other great networks and direct advertisers to consider in my sweeps guide.
If you don't give up on campaigns that only make you $5/day or less, you won't have time to discover and scale that next campaign that will make you hundreds or more.
Starting a campaign up again after pausing it a few days can sometimes help.
Starting a NEW campaign with absolutely everything the same as the original campaign can help as well. (Don't clone/duplicate at the traffic source - set up a new campaign to mirror all the settings of the old one. You can just duplicate the campaign in the tracker though.)
Doing these can 'reset' a campaign to breathe life into them again.
Good landers don't "go out of style" or stale for months. So if you find something that works well, by all means just use that for a while, for your initial testing.
But once you find a good offer, it would be good to test more landers for it. Try to tweak the lander to be more relevant to the look-and-feel of the offer page for example can help conversion rates.
And so, I wake up today to a sea of red:
Try to get past that and instead go for VOLUME.
It may be counter-intuitive, but picture this:
Day 1 - Set up 20 test camps $10/day budget -> spend = $200, rev = $30, profits = -$170
Day 3 - Cut 15 hopeless camps, testing more offers and landers for 5 remaining camps and increasing budget to $30/day to speed up testing, set up 10 more new camps -> spend = $250, rev = $100, profits = -$150
Day 7 - Cut 7 of the 10 recent camps and increase budget for the 3 remaining ones to $30/day, keeping the older 5 camps running, all camps now semi-optimized -> spend = $240, rev = $300, profit = $60
Day 8 - Scale 8 camps to 5 new networks at $20/day budget -> spend $1040, rev = $600, profit = -$440
Day 9 - Cut some of the camps on some of the networks and starting optimizing the rest -> spend $640, rev = $450, profit = -$190.
Day 11 - Campaign optimized and budgets increased -> spend $1120, rev = $1500, profit = $380.
These obviously aren't actual figures, but the point I'm trying to make is that every time you throw up lots of campaigns - whether new test campaigns or campaigns scaled to new networks - you WILL experience a massive hit in profits. But then you'll learn to cut the hopeless ones EARLY ON and focus on optimizing and scaling the gems so you can make back your losses and more.
It's like a roller-coaster - the lower you plunge to, the more momentum you have, and the higher you can soar.
And make sure you can tell the difference between a HOPELESS campaign, and one that has a chance to be a winner with additional optimization!
If it's the latter, and you're stopping it just because you're too scared to spend money to optimize it because you went gung-ho with setting up a bunch of campaigns without being prepared to spend money optimizing them - then you're "not a good boy" (to quote your earlier comment).
I know it's hard to remain imperturbed when you have multiple camps bleeding money, but try not to let your fear play you.
Another bad idea. Got 0 conversions and cost about $5 in the red with only few hours.
Now go set up more!I haven't used redtrack, but if I was running pop heavily still I would totally consider testing it. Sounds like significant savings.
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Amy
Ok, ok... dammit Amy, so much good info! Some points:
1) I noticed the awesome case study by affiliatecase on using CPA to get acquire zones for a whitelist, and then use those on a CPM CC submit (or *anything* in that geo)... and was thinking of doing the exact same thing days before he published it. Brilliant. And will try soon. Hopefully before everyone else catches on!
2) I am doing SSL with everything on my side, but
3) ZP sounds similar to AdCash with tons of brokered traffic that you can turn on/off, but way better. I know this offer converts, so I'll be taking it there soon. IM gods willing
I'll update again in the morning. Two more hours to stay green for the day (I know, I know, I should be focusing on VOLUME :P )
Good morning! (or whatever wherever you are). Yesterday's finish:
Floating around $20. I will not complain. Added a few more sources to try and scale this, but that means there will be more red soon as I figure out the new sources, new zones, etc. Had a nice chat with a lot of ad networks support and think I've finally figured out the weird goals system on AdMaven, and a few other networks.
This morning, so far:
A healthy morning. I may play around with some of the CPM campaigns to see if I can squeeze more traffic. I also have a feeling that propeller will shoot me more traffic in their CPA 2.0 if I set an even higher daily budget. Worth a shot. Will also attempt a CC submit in lieu of the CPA I've been using so far. I expect damage. I hope it won't be too bad
If you're wondering about all those weird white lines with 0 cost... Those are latent CPA campaigns in a testing phase (e.g. Adsterra, Advertizer, Clickadu) which will explode into a mess of red and green soon.
Anyway, off to blow more money. Wish me luck!
Sooner or later though, you WILL need to upgrade or switch anyways - when you outgrow the events in their entry plan.
If you're wondering about all those weird white lines with 0 cost... Those are latent CPA campaigns in a testing phase (e.g. Adsterra, Advertizer, Clickadu) which will explode into a mess of red and green soon.
Anyway, off to blow more money. Wish me luck!
No luck needed - I can see that you're willing to test and has an analytical mind. Keep up the attitude of persistence and something will give sooner or later!
Amy
Alright. So... yesterday.
Did pretty well, even with the damage I sustained. I told you a CC submit would do that ($-13), ah it was worth a shot.
This morning:
Although, it's already stumbled a bit since then. Actually a lot, since the tracking for a new source wasn't updating cost. Whoops. More like $3 Green right now. Seems like the offer is down on all sources today. Maybe it's a holiday in that geo? Who knows.
In other news, I went with
I may have to go with Amy's suggestion to simply use their default domain, but that would make me have to update all my tracking links on all my landers, and campaigns across all my sources, and cry myself to sleep at night. Fuck.
Wow, so much good info in this FA. I'm only about 3 campaigns in with pop and this has so many insights I hopefully won't need to learn the hard way anymore!
Originally Posted by vortex
Fuck.
I saw my main geo was just taking a dump yesterday. This fucking geo. So I knew it wouldn't be pretty. Took the day to revive some previous campaigns (from other geos, obvs) I've had luck with and stick them into CPA bidding camps on a few sources. Should be interesting to see.
So this morning:
Mostly vomit. But. Don't get confused about those 18 conversions, that's not my main one, that's continuing to suck at $-7. This other one is a campaign I decided to revive and put on CPA. It worked. Not enough, but it's promising.
On the tracker issue. Spoke with
The nice thing about a red day (sometimes), is that you feel like you're fucked already, might as well try something new
In all seriousness though - my advice is to NOT wait until you have a red day to test new stuff.
Make testing a part of your daily routine. The only times when you can justify stopping testing, is when you're scaling a winner to every major traffic source.
And when you have several good camps running, having one go down won't frazzle you as much.
Everyone knows mass-testing needs to happen before you'll see magic, but you also need to learn to be EFFICIENT when testing, or you'd go bankrupt before you start seeing consistent profits.
So I'm not suggesting that you splurge your entire budget on testing offers today, this week, or this month - but DO start testing more offers, get more experience on identifying which campaigns have promise and which ones don't, so in the future you can juggle more and more test campaigns because you know how to spot winners and losers early on, nix the losers in the bud, and optimize+scale the winners. And all while being EFFICIENT time-wise and spend-wise.
You'll get there eventually.
Amy
Alright, kids. Not pretty:
Told ya so. My main offer / geo was still fucked, so I went fishing (for offers). It was about 20 dollars worse until that random $20 payout came in (shit, I should optimize that! we'll see...)
Today will not be better, as I finally got ZP working and Jesus, do they have a lot of traffic? Yes, they fucking do! And it will flood your offers and drain your bank accounts immediately! Awesome!
I also added some new CC Submit from another network who claim it's good. We shall see. But for now, gaze upon my folly:
Added a bunch of new offers / geos I've been meaning to try and well... you're seeing the results so far. That thing Amy said about Volume vs. Optimizing has been at the back of my head, and it's starting to make sense though.
Will I optimize them?
Will they improve?
Will I simply say 'fuck it all!' and go drinking?
Tune in next time for Jaybot's Boring Follow Along!
On another note, Amy, you're a sweetheart! You can laugh allllll you want! I write intentionally funny to keep myself from crying at this SEA OF RED!
@jaybot your thread is awesome. I am wishing you all the best on the journey.
Originally Posted by jaybot
!). If you're ever unsure what's included in your current plan (1M, 3M and 10M caps reset each month) or whether it pays off to switch to another one (you can add up to 3 custom domains on Profit plan, all include SSLs), just reach out to your Voluum contact, he'll help you out!
We'll fix the copy you see in the panel after requesting SSL for a custom domain this week so it isn't confusing but just to clarify - on Profit plan and higher you get SSL for every custom domain you add to Voluum FOR FREE! Current copy there is a leftover from some time ago we simply missed to update.
Good luck with all and I hope you'll grow to love Voluum so much you'll stay with us longer than this year! Releases we have coming up will be the cherry on the cake, just wait and see.
Karolina
Don't worry, I'm still here. And still bleeding money for your entertainment! So, I continued my downward spiral:
This was for three reasons: My main Geo was still taking a major shit and propeller ads had a dDos attack rendering it unusable for pretty much the whole day, AND I was fishing for new offers in new geos. So... yup.
I'm also messing around with a CC submit offer that supposedly converts well. In fact, I even got 1 conversion on pop, so it's possible. However, I of course fucked that up because the tracking link didn't include the clickID (new network,
It gets kinda better though, yesterday's final:
Ignore the $-11 for now. That's over $200 in revenue and not 100% loss. I'm happy. about $70 was pure profit from one campaign. What happened? The original geo started working again. This fucking geo.
How did I know? I had a few low bidding bellwether campaigns running on that geo, which if they start converting, I know it's back up and running again. If they don't, I don't lose too much. I'm sure there is a better way to do that, but I'm too dumb to figure it out.
So, why the huge costs? Still fishing Still blowing money on that CC submit (no more conversions), and some new geos that I have no business being in. For the record, DE reacts to landing pages wayyyy differently than other geos in Europe :P It's amazing the CTR difference for similar landing pages in different geos.
Also, still dicking around with ZeroPark. It's super complicated. I'm sure I'm doing everything wrong. Net loss at $-96 so far. Is there a tutorial for ZP? I dunno, maybe I'm just using it wrong. So many options. pre-selected, premium, remnant, eCPA, etc. And a looooot of unfiltered garbage traffic so far. I'm sure it's brokered, but still. I spend more time cutting sources/targets than any other source. Granted, they do have a fuck ton of traffic. It's just difficult finding useful traffic.
Onto today, so far:
Skipping the full stats today as it would be too difficult to see on any screen less than a bajillion pixels.
Honestly, it wasn't this bad until I noticed the cost tracking for a certain source (that starts with H) simply doesn't work and I updated it manually. Something to note: most traffic sources cost tracking is garbage. Either totally off, or not working at all. Come to think of it, I'm positive I'm even more red right now because of a mostly great source (that starts with an A) has shit cost tracking too.
Anyway, I gotta go... kids are screaming. Wife hates me, etc. Happy Sunday!
This is why I ALWAYS advise to use another network to test offers and landers first, and then ONLY bring the best to Zeropark, and focus on cutting aggressively. They do have good traffic - you just need to separate the wheat from the chaff, and without wasting necessary money.
I know it's hard to get past the fear of seeing a sea of red - especially when you don't yet have the experience to tell whether or not the spend is worth spending or whether you're doing testing properly. But it IS a very necessary step if you want to experience significant growth. Again, not suggesting that you suddenly and drastically increase your spend - but increasing it gradually like you're doing as you gain more and more experience is the absolute best thing you can do to spiral upwards.
And your sense of humor can be oh-so-helpful when things look bleak - which in this business is unfortunately a frequent occurrence.
And it's just one conversion. You'll live.
Ignore the $-11 for now. That's over $200 in revenue and not 100% loss. I'm happy. about $70 was pure profit from one campaign. What happened? The original geo started working again. This fucking geo.
How did I know? I had a few low bidding bellwether campaigns running on that geo, which if they start converting, I know it's back up and running again. If they don't, I don't lose too much. I'm sure there is a better way to do that, but I'm too dumb to figure it out.
Using small campaigns as bellwethers sounds pretty smart to me!
And it's important to know how to extend the longevity of a campaign - one of the ways is to pause/resume them once in a while to see if they'd start converting again. Duplicating them regularly can help too.
There's no harm is testing new geos. It's just that by sticking with the same geos, you'd spend less money on optimization because you've already cut the worst placements in the past, and preferably on at least several traffic networks. But in the beginning when you haven't yet "carved out" your "regular" geos, you'd need to test different ones anyway.
And CC submits WILL require a bigger budget to test. If you're not yet comfortable doing that, why not go back to testing SOI offers?
Cut AGGRESSIVELY. eg. For placements, cut at 1x payout in loss or even 0.5x payout in loss to curb the bleeding fast. Drill down to every variable you CAN drill down and eliminate the worst-ROI segments as early as possible.
AND/OR: Identify the highest-ROI segment(s) and set up a whitelist camp(s) and optimize that, so you can make some profits fast to offset the losses from the original blacklist campaign.
I learned that the hard way in the beginning - kept quite a few campaigns running because I mistook them for profitable camps when they weren't - just because they appeared to be profitable in the tracker.
Wasn't the tracker's "fault", but automatic cost-tracking simply isn't accurate, and this is true for any and all traffic sources that pass costs to the tracker. Zeropark+
And even if you manually update tracker costs, when you drill down to individual traffic segments (e.g. placements), the costs STILL won't be accurate if you're bidding smart CPM.
The only way to ensure 100% accuracy would be to export placement costs directly from the traffic source. Then you can export placement revenues from the tracker, and use an excel sheet or something to combine them (if you want my excel sheet let me know). But it's a lot of hassle. I would just make placement decisions using half-accurate results and leave it at that. If a placement is really big, I would spend the extra minute to look up its actual cost on the traffic source, but that doesn't happen very often.
Amy
Secondly we now have a fantastic on-boarding manager called Adam, who’s job is to get newbies and newcomers on Zeropark going without any rectal pain. When you sign up just tell him the offer type, country and targeting settings and he will happily provide you with a whitelist which should prevent a rough ride. Or alternatively, you can contact support@zeropark.com for whitelists.
Thanks,
Neill
Originally Posted by zeropark
First off, I laughed for about 15 minutes longer than I should have done at this quote.
Secondly we now have a fantastic on-boarding manager called Adam, who’s job is to get newbies and newcomers on Zeropark going without any rectal pain. When you sign up just tell him the offer type, country and targeting settings and he will happily provide you with a whitelist which should prevent a rough ride. Or alternatively, you can contact support@zeropark.com for whitelists.
Thanks,
Neill
That's great news! Will spread the word. Is it him that's been posting all the tips on the best sources to target?
Amy
Takes ages to collect enough stats.
Hi there! I've been gone for two whole days! Did you miss me? Of course you did!
Awwwwright, past two days:
Ooh, that already looks better. But let's add some push money:
Hey, that's break even! but let's add some more push money on top of that:
That's about $50 green. Sure, it's spread out over two days. And yeah, I'm taking money from two push sub collections, but hey. It is what it is.
I'll have something fun to show you tomorrow
Originally Posted by twinaxe
I would try RON but it's CCSub in FR. Too much money to spend for stats. Which also makes SOI harder since everyone and their dog is running CC Sub in FR. Chicken and egg problem. :/
Originally Posted by jaybot
Originally Posted by jaybot
But often high profit and high loss lie close to each other.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Originally Posted by caravaggio
Nothing nefarious, I promise
Just money from monetizer which from existing subs (which I'm not adding to atm) + money from new push sub service I am testing.
Hi! You know the band Green Day named themselves after a day where you do nothing and just sit around smoking pot?
Well, that's not what it means to me 
+
+
=
$107. Green. Day.
And a lot of that came from, you guessed it: one offer.
Lost some to testing some newer stuff, but I ain't complaining.
Btw, do you just take the tracker stats or do you also compare the revenue as shown in the tracker with the adspend as shown in the trafficsource?
Because on Pops you usually have some trafficloss so that trackerstats often are not 100% accurate.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
I usually just use what's in the tracker. It's close enough, although sometimes reports cost more than what the traffic source says (rarely less), but manually updating isn't usually worth the few dollars difference (at my level).
Maybe I should give it a try.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
If you love @jaybot's potty-mouthed writing style as much as I do, here's a link to a case study he wrote:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...tudy-by-Jaybot
I'm telling you, read it for pure entertainment
Karolina
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...tudy-by-Jaybot
I'm telling you, read it for pure entertainment
Karolina
Originally Posted by mrdeath4
In baseball, three strikes in a row is a bad thing. It means you're out.
But.
In bowling, it's a good thing. I don't bowl very often. But in bowling, when you get three strikes in a row it's called a Turkey.
And Turkey is also a good thing.
Because everyone likes Turkey.
If you don't like turkey, I cannot help you, and you might as well stop reading this FA. And rethink your life.
In any case, one more day of this, and I can call it a Turkey:
$105 Green for the day.
Let's hope for a Turkey.
Because everyone likes Turkey.
But congrats, you are a good example for how it should be done.
Negative day? - Whatever, no need to get depressed or demotivated.
Keep going and green numbers will come back.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Gotta love this thread. I think it's the only thread that I'm looking forward to read when I check out STM. You have done crazy progress man, well done!
Originally Posted by diplomat
Hope to join you at the top someday
Originally Posted by mrdeath4
Originally Posted by twinaxe
NO Turkey!
I mean it's still $64 Green. But it ain't XXX.
Just like bowling, this shit is hard
Of course, it may have been XXX if I didn't blow $30 or so on an offer my AM randomly suggested.
But I've learned that anytime my AM suggests something, it's a good fucking idea to at least try it.
This time it just happened to be a miss.
Well, and I still ain't ready for anything as crazy as a $40+ payout CPS offer in the US
Anyway, we keep going.
Originally Posted by jaybot
The good news is,
$130 Green yesterday.
The bad news is, you can see I'm not running a lot of volume.
While I would love to start scaling this offer on a bunch of sources, but the reality is I'm fucking broke at the moment. Still waiting on about $4k on a Net30 network, plus $1k or so from Net15, and switching push sub collection to a new network, plus random balances on a bunch of new networks I was trying out. Etc. etc. etc.
No choice but to wait it out.
Like most things, finding that balance is part of the game, I think.
Isn´t it possible to get faster payments then?
On many or most networks you can get weeklies when you generate $1k a week, on some platforms even with $500 a week.
I made about $70 yesterday. But before we get into that, let's take a deep breath and write really long post.
Cause that's what you're here for
While we wait on incoming funds, it's always a good time to reflect and check our stats so far. Especially before it's gone. Cause if you're on a cloud solution which wipes your history if you don't pay them extra, you ain't getting it back
So last month.
Feb Profit.
$2009.74 Green
Compared with the previous month.
Jan Loss:
-$93.07 Red.
So definitely an improvement over that.
But only $1916.67 for the year so far. (stop cackling super affiliates! You were small once, too! )
So still a long way to go.
And just to scare away any newbies (just kidding, stick around, this is important)... here's how much you can lose (don't worry, you won't if you're smarter than me):
But don't forget that monetizer will save your ass:
So, only about a -$532 loss. That's pretty good!
Oh wait, but we're missing June, July, and bits of August (
So we can tally that for... -$911. That's still not bad, right?
Helluva education for about $1000, right? Right!
Oh yeah... plus STM x 8 months so -$800
And Adplexity, of course, another -$600 (STM discounts do help).
And Tracking costs, shit, can't forget that, another -$1500 (holy shit!)
What else... oh right, hosting and overages (S3, Cloudfront, Route53, and Hetnzer), -$700 <--lesson: get the fuck off of cloud hosting if doing volume on pops ASAP
So, all said and done: approximately -$4500 Red
You know what? That's pretty close to the stated 'expect to lose roughly $5000' learning AM. That's kinda freaky.
And now you pretty much have it broken down into why.
You're welcome
On your campaigns you lost "only" about $900 which is pretty good.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Originally Posted by twinaxe
TLDR: this shit is hard
Currently I am enjoying my journey as a newbie. But when I see all the blood (all the red numbers) I sometimes question myself if such suffering is really necessary and if all the blood will make a new / better life..
Originally Posted by jaybot
Monetizer, Propush, Pushnami
Alright kittens, it's time to recap.
Almost the end of July, so I figure I should show you what happened in June:
Trackers:
Pushsubs:
Should mention that even though push lists are completely dead, they still gave me $120 of free money. Not shabby for zero effort.
Anyway, I spent $56k in a month (don't tell my wife). And the AM gods were kind enough to return $67k back to me (do tell my wife). So about $11k profit for last month. Minus $1k for playing on FB until it finally makes sense to me.
Still not enough for daily hookers and blow. But I can possibly afford some baby formula on the black market now.
I just realized I didn't run a sweeps campaign in the US with baby formula as the prize... and now I'm sad I missed the opportunity. I hope one of you motherfuckers at least tried it.
So.
Main offer picked back up, did some magic in Taboola (back to 30%ish ROI). Even more magic in revcontent (close to 100% ROI) and mostly failed at a bunch of random ecom stuff.
I don't have much else to say except July is looking roughly the same (without ecom failures).
And pics of cats are always good.
But.
I will be attempting to blow money on a few new sources soon (GDN thanks to @matuloo and Solo Ads (wtf are those?!) thanks for @quintyfresh ), so look forward to seeing more typical Jaybot-Red™ coming soon!
$11k profit... not bad AT ALL!
US+CAN clicks only.
Originally Posted by matuloo
Here is a Google Ads screen I just made to keep you motivated
US+CAN clicks only.
I’d like to take this moment to say google ads UI is the most complex clusterfuck I’ve ever used. And I’ve used some pretty shit UI like ad maven. I thought FB was bad, but google is… worse. I’m sure I’ll get used to it. In a year or two. Just want to bitch.
Oh. And I want those impressions. Google doesn’t want to give me as much as you. That CPC too… what’s your targeting? Any resources on GDN I can skim?
Originally Posted by jaybot
For this particular campaign, it's very broad and using web traffic as the objective. It's using audience segments based on the websites in my niche... I've set this up over a call with a google rep, he was telling me what to do and I'm still kinda lost at what we actually did... it's super confusing with so many things to set up. At first, I started with a higher bid, then lowered it slowly to see if the traffic stops... and it didnt
So maybe try with a higher bid and then work it downwards.I need to look more into this as there are apparently very cheap clicks up for grabs
Originally Posted by matuloo
For this particular campaign, it's very broad and using web traffic as the objective. It's using audience segments based on the websites in my niche... I've set this up over a call with a google rep, he was telling me what to do and I'm still kinda lost at what we actually did... it's super confusing with so many things to set up. At first, I started with a higher bid, then lowered it slowly to see if the traffic stops... and it didnt
So maybe try with a higher bid and then work it downwards.I need to look more into this as there are apparently very cheap clicks up for grabs
I didnt cut anything, just taking what they are willing to send. Since I don't care about any conversions for now, I'm ok with that. Basically just testing what they can send and how the traffic behaves on the site in an attempt to lower bounce rates and increase time on site and the other on-site parameters as I believe that should benefit the SEO too.
Any reading materials on running GDN traffic that you recommend I should read?
I hadn’t even used traffic, just conversion goals. So that makes a lot more sense. I should run a few garbage traffic campaigns to get their gtag pixel some data. Thought I could skip it. I guess google no different than FB TT and even Native now. Everyone needs pixel warming. I hate pixels.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
@jaybot it's really impressed and inspired!
thanks for sharing such many details. and especially i like your writing style and sense of humor!
It took me dozens of hours, but I finally read it all. Thank you very much~@jaybot
I like your effort and humor. I hope I can be like you in the future
Originally Posted by bobzhang
Hats off for your endurance
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Hats off for your endurance
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