Traffic quality drop across the board (6)
Hey guys,
I've been quite successful with mobile push notification ads for this entire year and was featured in the STM newsletter a couple months back due to the revenue I've been doing. I have had many profitable campaigns on pretty much every push source you can name but I mainly use 4-5 sources which I have found to be superior. Recently, seemingly overnight, my conversion rates dropped like crazy and I have actually been losing money every single day for the last 2 weeks. I've even had a campaign running since March which had never had an unprofitable day until recently in mid August and since then all my campaigns have just gone downhill. I've launched heaps of new campaigns with varying success, some being profitable for a few days and then they just die with no warning. I'm struggling to get anything profitable, even my go-to offers and relatively new offers which have been profitable on multiple sources until now. Have users caught-on to push ads and they now ignore them or just click it regardless or am I just going crazy? In August I noticed a huge drop in traffic quality on every single traffic source I run campaigns on. I've changed creatives, custom LPs, everything and even changed to whitelist instead of blacklist, have been doing deep-dives into my analytics on every parameter possible and yet it just keeps getting worse. I think I just need to take a break or something. I'm actually going overseas on vacation for a month and a half in a couple days and maybe it's just what I need.
Anyone else running big volumes on push noticed this quality drop or is it just me?
Sorry for the rant, I just needed to vent. Maybe I became too complacent with my consistent campaigns that had been profitable for months and months which is generally unheard of, especially in push.
Most networks will tell you "Nah, it was our best week ever!" or my favorite "We're doing higher numbers than last year."
They are lying.
We have multiple large affiliates across many different types of advertising that have all noticed the same thing you said above.
It doesn't matter if its 5c adult traffic or $3 per click google ppc traffic. Same problems.
We've actually been doing some digging into this for a couple weeks now and haven't found any concrete reason as of yet, but I do believe
some of the following are true:
1) Stricter billing regulations are making it harder for advertisers to bill anyone, like they used to.
2) Less billing companies out there. A few have folded up in recent times.
3) More government lawsuits. People who used to take anything and everything are finally being a little safer.
4) The death of the landing page. We are seeing better numbers with more Ecom style designs, instead of the typical landing sales page.
5) Shaving sales at the advertiser level. We have seen some advertisers ratios go from nice to crap overnight and after doing a little digging,
we believe that they are not paying out on trials, when only a trial is sold. I believe that some companies are only paying out when the end-user
purchases the trial and an upsell or two.
6) Smarter end-users. People are finally learning that free isn't free. Who knows if this is true, but I figured I'd throw it out there.
We are actually reviewing advertiser(product owner) stats right now and comparing them over the last 12 months. If we notice the drop, as you stated above, we email them. We see how receptive they are to answering questions, suggestions, etc. If it seems shady, we kill their offers, or dig deeper.
With so much competition on the internet, it's getting harder and harder for people to make money the old ways.
Time for something new!
Hope at least 10% of this is reasonable. 
J
I think it's because you are active on the most violatile, newbie-friendly, competitive traffic source at the moment, honestly. I am not sure if the current traffic sources can deliver fresh/quality traffic at the moment since so many affiliates/agencies are jumping into push and squeeze it like a dry sponge.
Why not translate your successful funnels to other/similar traffic sources. Google, FB, E-mail, far more consistent!
Exact the same happens to me with spending daily 10k on push. I guess the networks getting nervous that the time of high bids is comming to the end. Blacklisting isn't succesfull because the extern dsp connections just get a new source id the next day to grab money again. Happend to me 5 times in 1 week on datspush,zeropark,propeller...
My own push db has still the same quality and no dropes. So its just on the traffic network side that they mix in more crap to make more profit with extern dsp shit atm.
I'm seeing kinda the same issue with higher tier countries.. Need to test a bit more tho. I'm running mostly on Zeropark and Propeller.
I would say it has to do with the "maturing" of push as a type of traffic. The easy days are gone, the surfers got used to the format by now to some extent, which results in lower revenue you can generate from the same amount of clicks. This always happens with every new type of traffic. It's an inevitable cycle pretty much.
Then there is the increased competition that pushes bids higher to the level where it's not that easy to become profitable anymore. So the straightforward and easy to copy funnels are not that effective anymore.
And then there is the effect that codeflame mentioned, publishers would like to keep the same revenue levels and do everything possible to trick the buyers and avoid landing on the blacklists.
When all these mix, it makes running the traffic more complicated.
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