Home > > Newbie Follow-Alongs

Follow Along by two Devs (24)

08-25-2019 07:10 PM #1 amomaxia (Member)
Follow Along by two Devs

Hey guys, me and my partner are both Web Developers and have worked at pretty large companies ourselves.
We found affiliate marketing and decided to hop on the train and try to leverage our skill set to have a competitive advantage in the space.
We're following the 40 Day Tutorial right now, around day 25-30.

We decided to create a follow along to document our process and really see our growth in the space

I'll be posting pretty regularly and holding myself accountable for updating this follow along with our progress.

Cya guys soon

08-28-2019 11:37 PM #2 jeffff (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by amomaxia View Post
Initially our postback wasn't configured properly. We had made two conversions by the time we had figured this out right around the $15 ad spend mark.
In Clickdealer under Reports -> Conversion report, you might be able to find some information about the two conversions you missed.

I did this same thing in Mobidea for a couple conversions and was able to find enough on Mobidea to correlate which click the conversions came from.

There might be an easier way, but the only way I found to update the conversions in my tracker was to manually fire the postback with the clickid I found in mobidea - I added the clickid and payout at the end of my postback url manually (something like &clickid=######&payout=#.##, with the actual values instead of tokens) and loaded that url in a browser.

08-29-2019 12:35 AM #3 amomaxia (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by jeffff View Post
In Clickdealer under Reports -> Conversion report, you might be able to find some information about the two conversions you missed.

I did this same thing in mobidea for a couple conversions and was able to find enough on mobidea to correlate which click the conversions came from.

There might be an easier way, but the only way I found to update the conversions in my tracker was to manually fire the postback with the clickid I found in mobidea - I added the clickid and payout at the end of my postback url manually (something like &clickid=######&payout=#.##, with the actual values instead of tokens) and loaded that url in a browser.
Weird i've tried this out on my end for clickdealer and couldn't see Voluum updating. I've got a chat scheduled with a Voluum Technical Advisor so I'll ask them about this and get this figured out.

My partner and I also setup our landers w/version control on our AWS S3 bucket through github in case anyone is interested I can make a quick tutorial for it. Reason why we did it was to be able to maintain versioning on our LPs, being able to rollback changes, have other people work on LPs without giving them access to our AWS (just giving them permissions on github to be able to create a new branch and only push to that one), etc. Not sure anyone else has something like this setup but we think its solid so far.

08-29-2019 04:48 AM #4 jaybot (Veteran Member)

I don't see that much click loss from here, but it's hard to tell without seeing your traffic source and comparing.

Visits are people that were served to your lander, unique visits is from one IP (so if the same person got served twice, it only gets one here). Clicks are those who actually clicked through your lander to the offer. Conversions are those who actually signed up.

CTR can go high if the same page gets clicked on more than once, even if it is the same visitor. So if there is a back button redirect on the offer, it will raise your CTR every time the user (or bot) clicks into the offer. Also some people are curious and click through, see the offer, go back again, and click through again

08-30-2019 02:13 AM #5 amomaxia (Member)

Hey everyone!

We got our Voluum plan upgraded to Profit, giving us SSL. We had to adjust our postback-urls and click urls in our landers (just needed to add an 's'); nothing too major to fix!

Once we got those fixed up, we adjusted the CPMs on our campaigns in PropellerAds, and re-fired them. We're running two campaigns at once:
1. First one has 5 landers | $10/day spend | Total budget: $50
2. Second one has 3 landers | $15/day spend | Total budget: $30

So far things look as expected with traffic showing up on Voluum. Hopefully, we see better results with SSL now. Keep you guys posted on how things go!

09-01-2019 03:33 PM #6 jeffff (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by amomaxia View Post
anyone know if there is a better way to embed images on the forum? The image tool is a pain to use for me
Upload to imgur and copy/paste the BBCode

09-03-2019 07:52 PM #7 amomaxia (Member)

Update to our campaigns.

So based on our old campaign we decided to take the best performing lander and use it for another campaign on mobidea.
got these stats:



CAMPAIGN 1:
$30 spend
33 Conversions
-22.38 profit
-74.6% ROI

Because the campaign has such a low payout we were able to rack up a bunch of conversions.

Our CTR for our lander was over 100%.

I only realised today that this was probably due to some redirects we had in our lander and that was messing up our stats.


Here are the stats from mobidea:


Before we had realized this we already had another offer queued up that our AM had recommended with a 10x payout of the Campaign 1 with the same sweepstakes offer (so we could reuse our lander in theory).

We had ran it and got these stats for it so far:


CAMPAIGN 2:
$12.26 spend
0 Conversions
-12.26 profit
-100% ROI

Using the same lander we had a worse CTR in Campaign 2 than we did Campaign 1, but still pretty decent. But since our Campaign 1 CTR was boosted im assuming our Campaign 2 CTR was also boosted.

Here are the stats from ClickDealer:



Next steps:

09-04-2019 06:54 PM #8 jeffff (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by amomaxia View Post
We're also considering buying ticks to AWA to put us on a timeline to grind. It's extremely premature but fuck it, can't hurt.
Yeah that's what I did, and the pressure is definitely on now haha don't know if it was a good idea or a bad idea yet...

Not sure if this is what you mean, but on my longest running campaign so far my tracker has 89k clicks with 78% LP CTR, (89k * 0.78 = 69,420) and Clickdealer is showing 56k clicks. Hope that helps to see someone else's numbers

09-04-2019 07:48 PM #9 amomaxia (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by jeffff View Post

Not sure if this is what you mean, but on my longest running campaign so far my tracker has 89k clicks with 78% LP CTR, (89k * 0.78 = 69,420) and Clickdealer is showing 56k clicks. Hope that helps to see someone else's numbers
So for Voluum at least based on this: https://doc.Voluum.com/en/tracking_clicks.html
Clicks are going to be when the click url is hit inside a LP.

So for example for our second campaign we got 2968 clicks and 12697 visits = a 23.3% LP CTR.

Voluum also doesn't seem to track unique clicks yet but it's something they seem to be implementing soon

Catch ya at AWA

09-09-2019 06:05 AM #10 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Apologies for the late arrival!


So we've ran a few direct linking campaigns to get the hang of setting up all of the tracking, offer, traffic etc.
Saw some cool results:
Very nice! That campaign that was doing -16% ROI - looks like it can become profitable with some optimizing! And those 2 that were doing -50% ROI weren't hopeless either!

If those offers are still active, please consider unpausing these and start cutting unprofitable traffic segments - for details on how to optimize, please see lessons on optimization.


The general idea was to run this offer with 5 LPs with traffic from PropellerAds and then test PopAds as well with a 30$ budget for each ad source.
I would actually suggest to do offer/lander split-testing on a single traffic source initially, and then scaling the winning lander+offer combo to other sources.

That way you're not spending twice the amount of money on testing the same offers/landers.


We had some fuck ups though.
Initially our postback wasn't configured properly.
We had made two conversions by the time we had figured this out right around the $15 ad spend mark.
Could have been much worse - I'm glad you guys caught this early. I've had fuck-ups that were a lot more expensive - and a LOT more stupid!


This was our stats for those few days:

Some lander stats:
So far so good!


For some stats we see things like CTR above 100%.
Whats the reasoning behind this?
Some landers have "back-button" scripts where when the visitor clicks back in their browser, the lander will direct them to the offer (either the same offer, or another offer depending on how you've configured your landers).

And these back-button clicks also count as "clicks" when your CTR is calculated - which will result in an inflated CTR compared to landers that don't have back-button scripts.


There might be an easier way, but the only way I found to update the conversions in my tracker was to manually fire the postback with the clickid I found in mobidea - I added the clickid and payout at the end of my postback url manually (something like &clickid=######&payout=#.##, with the actual values instead of tokens) and loaded that url in a browser.
Was about to suggest that - thanks @jeffff!

Aside from that: It's also possible to upload conversions manually, but ONLY if you can get your clickid from the aff network as @jeffff has pointed out. Instructions can be found here:

https://doc.Voluum.com/en/conversion_upload.html


CTR can go high if the same page gets clicked on more than once, even if it is the same visitor. So if there is a back button redirect on the offer, it will raise your CTR every time the user (or bot) clicks into the offer. Also some people are curious and click through, see the offer, go back again, and click through again
@jaybot You explained this so much better than I did! Thank you!


Theres a large discrepency between ClickDealer and Voluum. Between Voluum and PropellerAds not so much.
Are you sure you're comparing the right stats?

Between voluum and propeller, you'd want to compare landing page impressions.

Between Clickdealer and Voluum, you'd want to compare "Clicks".

Please make sure you're not comparing Voluum impressions/visits to Clickdealer's clicks - it's a common mistake.


My current debugging idea:

Setup another campaign, same offer but direct linking and see the discrepencies.

Setup another 2 campaigns w/ Mobidea, one w/LPs and one direct link and see discrepencies.

If this is normal then it's fine but i'm really feeling like it's not, especially when our DL campaigns were out performing our LP campaigns.

Will keep you guys updated.
Interesting - eager to see what results you'll get!


CAMPAIGN 1:
$30 spend
33 Conversions
-22.38 profit
-74.6% ROI
Unless this is a big geo that can withstand a LOT of cutting and STILL have enough traffic let over to profit from, I'd say move on.

If possible, try to test multiple offers at a time - doing so will increase your chances of finding something promising.

Also - we spend so much time fixing up landers, that we'd want to justify the time spent by using them to test more offers.


CAMPAIGN 2:
$12.26 spend
0 Conversions
-12.26 profit
-100% ROI
Sorry but what's the payout?


Next steps:

Going to reevaluate our LPs. Still seeing massive click differences between Voluum and our affiliate networks which i'm thinking could be related to our redirects in our LPs. Going to try to setup a simple LP from scratch and test on a small 5-10$ budget to see if theres a large difference in clicks.
Have a meeting with our Voluum Technical Rep on Thursday so hopefully that will be helpful.
Our AMs keep recommending us Tier 1 offers, sometimes Tier 2. We really want to run Tier 3/4 so we can test our LPs, traffic sources, etc. Gonna ask for specifically Tier 3/4 converting offers
The big goal for us right now is to just get profitable. We're going to keep at it.
We're also considering buying ticks to AWA to put us on a timeline to grind. It's extremely premature but fuck it, can't hurt.
Feel free to experiment with tier 1/2 offers too! But yes - tier 3/4 offers would be easier (and cheaper).

If you guys DO go to AWA, please come by the STM booth to say hi! @jeffff This invitation is for you as well!) Me and Matuloo and probably a couple of the other mods will be there!

And don't be shy! Talk to everybody. Go to every booth if possible. And go to every party and just talk to people. A lot of magic can happen when you talk to a lot of people.

The speeches are ALWAYS great but if you miss a few of them you can always watch them afterwards from recordings. Meeting people face-to-face is what you can't do once the conference is over.

Just ONE lead or one tip you get from people, or one collaboration, can be worth the cost.



Amy

09-14-2019 05:08 PM #11 amomaxia (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
Apologies for the late arrival!




Very nice! That campaign that was doing -16% ROI - looks like it can become profitable with some optimizing! And those 2 that were doing -50% ROI weren't hopeless either!

If those offers are still active, please consider unpausing these and start cutting unprofitable traffic segments - for details on how to optimize, please see lessons on optimization.
Tested out starting up the one that was doing -16% ROI again, but with cutting zones. For some reason our conversion payout dropped to $.05. Its pretty strange but i'm going to ping our mobidea AM to get more info.

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post

I would actually suggest to do offer/lander split-testing on a single traffic source initially, and then scaling the winning lander+offer combo to other sources.

That way you're not spending twice the amount of money on testing the same offers/landers.
Great advice! For now we're just going to stick to propeller ads.



Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post

Some landers have "back-button" scripts where when the visitor clicks back in their browser, the lander will direct them to the offer (either the same offer, or another offer depending on how you've configured your landers).

And these back-button clicks also count as "clicks" when your CTR is calculated - which will result in an inflated CTR compared to landers that don't have back-button scripts.
We've been testing out our offers w/o the back button script recently to cut down on variables. I added in some JS to prevent the user from backing out so it just stays on the same page. Rather than back into the offer. Does directing users to the offer from a back-button really improve CR that much versus just keeping users on the same page? I want to take a cheaper offer w/ a lower payout and test this once we have a successful funnel running.

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post

Was about to suggest that - thanks @jeffff!

Aside from that: It's also possible to upload conversions manually, but ONLY if you can get your clickid from the aff network as @jeffff has pointed out. Instructions can be found here:

https://doc.Voluum.com/en/conversion_upload.html
Deffo gonna read this and keep this in our back pocket. Haven't had many issues w/ tracking since we've played w/ it a lot more!


Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post

Are you sure you're comparing the right stats?

Between voluum and propeller, you'd want to compare landing page impressions.

Between Clickdealer and Voluum, you'd want to compare "Clicks".

Please make sure you're not comparing Voluum impressions/visits to Clickdealer's clicks - it's a common mistake.
Yeah we were compairing ClickDealer Clicks to Voluum clicks. Still seeing some click loss but not as much as before. Potentially attributed to bots?



Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
Interesting - eager to see what results you'll get!
Ended up attributing our clickloss to a combination of bots, not having SSL on our entire funnel and our back button/redirect scripts



Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
Unless this is a big geo that can withstand a LOT of cutting and STILL have enough traffic let over to profit from, I'd say move on.

If possible, try to test multiple offers at a time - doing so will increase your chances of finding something promising.

Also - we spend so much time fixing up landers, that we'd want to justify the time spent by using them to test more offers.
We've been slowly optimizing our landers now and using them to test our different offers in different geos! This is definitely making everything faster and easier.


Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post

Feel free to experiment with tier 1/2 offers too! But yes - tier 3/4 offers would be easier (and cheaper).
Been moving into doing some testing w/ tier 1/2 but still running our tier 3/4 offers

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post

If you guys DO go to AWA, please come by the STM booth to say hi! @jeffff This invitation is for you as well!) Me and Matuloo and probably a couple of the other mods will be there!

And don't be shy! Talk to everybody. Go to every booth if possible. And go to every party and just talk to people. A lot of magic can happen when you talk to a lot of people.

The speeches are ALWAYS great but if you miss a few of them you can always watch them afterwards from recordings. Meeting people face-to-face is what you can't do once the conference is over.

Just ONE lead or one tip you get from people, or one collaboration, can be worth the cost.
Just bought tickets Looking forward to seeing you all


It's been a little while since we've posted. I didn't want to post while we were running camps (I tried posting the other day but as i was writing up my post we were getting conversions which made me keep on updating the stats i was posting fml). Bout to post our current progress and results we're seeing

09-14-2019 06:24 PM #12 micoangelo (Member)

Yo can you please post a tut about with how to setup version control through github/ aws s3? That would be legit.

09-14-2019 07:46 PM #13 proxyguys (Member)

Remember with many traffic sources, especially pops, you will never see 100% of what the traffic stats show inside the tracker. Its not uncommon for people to close the popup before it even loads your lander which you still have to pay for. Ive had some profitable campaigns in the past where there was a 20-40% discrepancy but the stats backed out so we pushed forward with some pretty nice 5 figure days.

Also this is completely subjective statement but imo you need at least $100-$200 to test an offer with a low payout and $400-$600 to test an offer with a higher payout in order to get accurate stats. Of course this only works if your finances can support these larger test budgets.

I've had at least 10 campaigns where in the first $100 ad spend I would be at -100% ROI and ready to quit, but I kept trying and pushed further.. campaign ended up bringing me 20-50K profit each. It was just a reminder that it can be extremely easy to miss out on good opportunities with a micro test budget.

09-14-2019 08:48 PM #14 amomaxia (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by proxyguys View Post
Remember with many traffic sources, especially pops, you will never see 100% of what the traffic stats show inside the tracker. Its not uncommon for people to close the popup before it even loads your lander which you still have to pay for. Ive had some profitable campaigns in the past where there was a 20-40% discrepancy but the stats backed out so we pushed forward with some pretty nice 5 figure days.

Also this is completely subjective statement but imo you need at least $100-$200 to test an offer with a low payout and $400-$600 to test an offer with a higher payout in order to get accurate stats. Of course this only works if your finances can support these larger test budgets.

I've had at least 10 campaigns where in the first $100 ad spend I would be at -100% ROI and ready to quit, but I kept trying and pushed further.. campaign ended up bringing me 20-50K profit each. It was just a reminder that it can be extremely easy to miss out on good opportunities with a micro test budget.
Gotcha. Yeah we want to go ahead and test out more offers/LPs that are looking good for us. We can afford the bigger budgets but we want to go ahead and test on other traffic sources. We really want to just scale on Push instead as it seems more interesting to us, so we're trying to get a good understanding of Pop at least. We feel like we're almost there

09-14-2019 08:52 PM #15 amomaxia (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by micoangelo View Post
Yo can you please post a tut about with how to setup version control through github/ aws s3? That would be legit.
Will get a post up later today w/ a quick tutorial

09-14-2019 09:18 PM #16 amomaxia (Member)

So it's been a while since we've posted.
Mainly been working on grinding this shit out.
We've been continuing to work this camp we have in a tier 3/4 geo and gotten some cool results.
Tested out three landers. Here are some stats.

Payout: $.94

Lander 1:
COST: $28.01
REVENUE: $17.86
CONVERSIONS:19
CLICKS:1615
CTR: 12.93%
CR: 1.18%
ROI: -38.49%

Lander 2(Cut early):
COST: $6.02
REVENUE: $0
CONVERSIONS:0
CLICKS:75
CTR:2.82%
CR:0%
ROI:-100%


We had a few other landers we ran a quick test on but at the end we found that Lander 1 had the best stats.

Drilling down on this lander here are the stats for our zones.

Most Profitable Zones:



Least Profitable Zones:




Looks like we should have a winner

We're running a camp rn drilling down on Browser (only accepting traffic for Opera Mini.... what even is that? Will it work? Stay tuned ).
We're going to setup another camp blacklisting zones.
Since a lot of zones we have low spend on we won't blacklist those but we'll blacklist our trash zones that are costing a lot w/o converting/profitable.



We really thought about cloaking and going blackhat but we found a way to really tow the line.
Sped up our lander like a mofo too, base64 encoded, gzip, etc.

Since our lander was doing so well we decided to run the same type of sweeps offer (iPhone) in other locales. Running one in a tier 1 and have a couple more set in tier 2. Going to update w/ our stats around the tier 1 geo make a posting.

09-15-2019 03:11 AM #17 micoangelo (Member)

looking forward to it holmes. good luck on the camp!

10-02-2019 08:36 PM #18 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Sorry for the delay in replying! Still catching up since coming back from vacation.


We've been testing out our offers w/o the back button script recently to cut down on variables. I added in some JS to prevent the user from backing out so it just stays on the same page. Rather than back into the offer. Does directing users to the offer from a back-button really improve CR that much versus just keeping users on the same page? I want to take a cheaper offer w/ a lower payout and test this once we have a successful funnel running.
Disabling the backbutton is also a good thing to test - I've had success with that.

It doesn't always work better, depending on how good your backbutton funnel is. But it's certainly worth a split-test.


Yeah we were compairing ClickDealer Clicks to Voluum clicks. Still seeing some click loss but not as much as before. Potentially attributed to bots?
Here's a great post by matuloo that explains what clickloss is and what causes it:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...finitive-guide


Just bought tickets Looking forward to seeing you all
Please do come by the STM booth to say hi!


We had a few other landers we ran a quick test on but at the end we found that Lander 1 had the best stats.

Drilling down on this lander here are the stats for our zones.

Most Profitable Zones:
Nice!

It doesn't look like there are enough green placements to justify running a whitelist campaign - at least for now. But continuing to blacklist more placements may get you to green.


We really thought about cloaking and going blackhat but we found a way to really tow the line.
Sped up our lander like a mofo too, base64 encoded, gzip, etc.
That's really nice!! You guys are so talented - having good dev skills is really giving you guys an edge!

Next, try to figure out how to keep people from stealing that edge when they rip your landers.


Since our lander was doing so well we decided to run the same type of sweeps offer (iPhone) in other locales. Running one in a tier 1 and have a couple more set in tier 2. Going to update w/ our stats around the tier 1 geo make a posting.
That's the way to go! How's that going?




Amy

02-23-2020 06:54 PM #19 amomaxia (Member)

Update (its been a while):

Hitting consistent XXX/day rn in profit.

Working to scale up to XXXX/day.

Gotta keep grinding.

02-23-2020 08:13 PM #20 jaybot (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by amomaxia View Post
Update (its been a while):

Hitting consistent XXX/day rn in profit.

Working to scale up to XXXX/day.

Gotta keep grinding.
Jesus. That's a hell of a jump

How did you get there from where you were? Still doing pops/push sweeps?

02-24-2020 04:41 AM #21 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by amomaxia View Post
Update (its been a while):

Hitting consistent XXX/day rn in profit.

Working to scale up to XXXX/day.

Gotta keep grinding.
Oh WOW!

I share @jaybot's sentiments: Such a big jump in just 4 months!

Thanks so much for updating us!

But like @jaybot, I gotta ask: More details please?

Of course not asking you guys to reveal campaigns. But some general stuff like traffic type, vertical, keys to success - would be much appreciated! New affiliates can use all the motivation they can get!



Amy

02-24-2020 06:39 AM #22 s3ks3k (Senior Member)

Quote Originally Posted by proxyguys View Post
I've had at least 10 campaigns where in the first $100 ad spend I would be at -100% ROI and ready to quit, but I kept trying and pushed further.. campaign ended up bringing me 20-50K profit each. It was just a reminder that it can be extremely easy to miss out on good opportunities with a micro test budget.
What changed between the first $100 spent and after? I'd imagine that if there isn't any conversions after the first $20 spent, it's safe to say the offer isn't converting.

02-24-2020 03:45 PM #23 twinaxe (Senior Moderator)

Great to read about your success.

But more important, thank you very much for updating the thread.

Many people would just have went MIA and never post about it but it´s so nice to read that you succeeded.

All fingers crossed that you reach your next goals as well.

02-25-2020 01:26 AM #24 amomaxia (Member)

Moved over to FB sweeps, different ball game for sure. We managed to develop systems to help us maintain our operational flow on FB, and also technical systems to help with things like lander creation, ad setup, LP optimisation.

Facebook is much crazier and it takes a lot more operational work/startup cost to maintain accounts, payments, etc. but we've been managing to pull it off.

The biggest thing we've learned is to just treat it as a business and keep grinding. Nothing is really unsolvable, but you just have to focus and put it in the work. Learning to work around systems, milk your traffic is major. We're still only doing XXX, once we do XXXX i'll make a much more detailed post. Don't want to get ahead of myself yet since we've still got a long way to success.

Here are our day to day revenue stats for this February so far:

Home > > Newbie Follow-Alongs