Stairway to Profits - Push+Dating follow along (27)
Hello everybody!
As I said in my first post I would have started a follow along as soon as possible. I’m going slower than expected, but I still have a regular job… so can’t do many things every day.
I picked push traffic to start because from the researches I did I understood that is a newbie-friendly traffic source. And I’m running SOI dating offers (Pretty popular on push as I saw from spy).
Anyway, here’s how I set up my first campaign. (4 actually):
I made a spy session on Anstrex (suits more my budget currently) and selected the creatives with the most traffic and time-running.
Launched 4 different campaigns:
1 Campaign with copy/creatives copied from spy
3 campaigns with 3 angles took from spy but different images and copy
In total, I launched 12 different ads. No landing page
Here the results:
Day 1
Launch: 3 pm
Stop: 5.30 pm
I paused the campaign because I understood I made a mistake in setting up the tracker. Basically, I wasn’t seeing the Creatives ID in the tracker.
- Clicks: 641
- Spent: $15.18
- Leads: 5
- Revenue: $13.5
- ROI: -11.07%
Day 2
Launch: 11am
Stop: 16 pm
Another mistake in the tracker: Stopped the campaign because the tracker wasn’t showing the conversions.
- Clicks: 1473
- Spent: $40.91
- Leads: 6
- Revenue: $16.2
- ROI: -60.40%
Day 3: Today. I just launched the campaign and gathering data. Hopefully, no more technical issues.
First thoughts: The offer seems good and the traffic too. However, still need data to say something definitive. After today I will read the data. See the ads with the best CTRs and Conversions and decide if going on.
My impression is that I will need a landing page to increase the CVR. In fact it was 0.078% on day 1 and 0.04% on day 2. So, even though I optimize the ads, the room for improvement is big on this side.
So, my questions at this point are:
- The landing pages used for dating are all quiz-landing pages (All with the same questions btw. Probably all dating affiliates are following the Finch’s post about the rules psychology LOL. So, it's something that is working) Question is: What tools can I use to build quiz pages? ( I have no tech/coding skills) I thought about Leadquizzes, yet, I accept any suggestion from you guys.
- How do I block bot traffic on Push?
Thanks in advance! Will update you soon on the progresses.
TIP for other newbies (heard this somewhere, I don’t remember, but it’s turning out to be great for me): Keep a campaign journal where you write every changes, result, whatever that happens in the campaigns, with date and times of the change, etc.
Basically, write down everything you do. It helps later to remember things and understand better what you’re doing/what you did.
Ello Ello
Yesterday didn't have time to update my follow along. But here I am.
Basically what happened is that the traffic source spent much more budget than the limit. I know it's usual with push (notifications that get clicked later) but the over spand was way too much ($96 spend against a $48 limit).
I went to check my previous camps and I saw it happened for many ads in the past. I just didn't notice because the campaign spend was still lower than the limit. But some ads spent much more than the limit. Plus, my balance is negative now.
I didn't really liked how the assistance managed this and not even how they tried to resolve. FOr this reason I'm thinking about chaning traff network.
Anyway, these are the results:
Day 3
Clicks: 3369
Spent: $95.69 ( I took the actual spent from the network, not the tracker)
Leads: 11
Revenue: $29.7
ROI: -68.96%
Here the stats from the tracker:
I followed the posts about cutting ads and statistical significance by Caurmen. So, from the data gathered so far, I cut 6 ads out of 12.
These are the winning ones I picked (ids of the ads in the tracker): 21872, 21875, 21877, 21878, 21879, 21781.
NOTE:I also used some data from the campaigns of the first 2 days to take decisions. Though, the tracking wasn't on point. That's why I don't have the screenshots. Basically, from the previous campaigns, I only now the CTRs of the ads. SO I used those as well to choose the best ones.
So, I now have 6 ads.
My plan now:
- Add a pre-land.
- Create new ads from the winning ones.
- Understand if I should go on with the current network or change to another one.
Again my question to you guys is if you have any suggestions on how to build quiz style prelandings. And how to identify and cut bot traffic. I know that for native you have to block widgets with too high or too low Landing Page CTRs. But how does it work for Push traffic?
Wait for your suggestions, critiques, bashing, whatever.
Cheers! And good ROI to everybody!
@free_waves What's the Update?
And which geo are you promoting, offer payout, tracking software and affiliate Network...?
I've only this questions right now 
but will throw more questions in future 
Hello 
Overspending is an issue with push networks indeed, but not all of them are overspending that much, what network did you use for these tests? Based on my campaigns, megapush can shoot over the budget quite a lot, while propeller for example respects the budget pretty nicely.
The traffic quality also varies from one network to the next, so you need to test a few to see which ones work the best for you.
Pre-landers are pretty much a must in dating, definitely get some LPs. And you are right, the quick/questions LPs are the most used in dating. What most affiliates are doing is spying and ripping what the others run.The clever ones also make some edits to the LPs... different colors, different images, some changes in the copy or in the questions. Spytools can help you here, some of them offer the option to download the source code. But in many cases, you still need to clean the code, which requires coding experience. Or you can hire someone to do it for you, check this thread for example: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Service-(BETA)
As for blocking the bad placements, you can follow the same logic as with native ads that you mentioned... if the clicks don't go through the LP or too many of them do, it can be either poor or bot traffic. But the best way is to rely on conversions, if your budget allows that. Run traffic, block non-converting placements, focus on those that give you leads.
It is also a good idea to run some kind of a bot test to detect the worst placements... you can try the javascript trick, bot trap or a anti fraud function of your tracker (in case it has some).
Hello everybody!
I didn't post updates because I had to deal with setting up a server for the lander. I'm not techy at all, so I took too much time...
However, thanks @matuloo for the answer! I was running on AdNow by the way.
And @mahakal, you're right! Following I'm including that info.
However, I launched one more campaign with the 6 winning creatives I picked from the previous camps and added a quiz lander.
Here some numbers:
Tracker:
Affiliate Network: ProfitSocial
Payout: Average $2.4 (It's a smartlink offer. So, the payout changes accordingly to the offer showed)
Traffic Network: PropellerAds (Changed network because of that big overspend issue)
Geo: Italy
Clicks: 1052
Spent: $26.40
Leads: 4
Revenue: $9.64
ROI: -63.48%
Screenshots from the tracker
Broken down by day:
broken down by creatives
What do you guys think I should do?
I'm thinking about restarting the campaign from scratch for these 2 reasons:
- I changed traffic source, so probably the creatives that worked on AdNow aren't the same that work here on PropellerAds.
- I had issues uploading a quiz downloaded from the spytool. So, to launch the campaign sooner, I created a lander on my own. However it was different then the most popular ones I found from spying.
What's your take on this?
I didn't personally have much success with dating smartlinks, but to be fair, I didn't give it that much effort either, mainly because Im doing good with pushing specific offers.
What I would do would be to sort the landing pages first, that can really be the "make or break" point with dating. I don't really remember when I had a profitable dating campaign without using a LP for the last time.
Put your focus on obtaining the LPs first.
Thanks @matuloo.
Eventually I decided to start it again from zero with the winning creatives I got so far, plus a bunch of them I will rip from spying. And a pre-land taken from spying. Even to have cleaner data. Because a part of the campaign has been run on adnow and the other part on propellerads. So, I'll move in this direction, then let's see.
Originally Posted by free_waves
Originally Posted by free_waves
Hello guys! What is up?
Eventually I decided to start the campaign from scratch on Propeller Ads. However, not completely from zero. I took the creatives that worked so far and used those ones.
I launched the campaign on Friday 20. And made it run for 2 days, Friday and Saturday.
Here are the stats:
CPC: 0.015
Budget: $20
Creatives: 4
Prelander: 1 (took from spying, but with changes in copy and images.)
Clicks: 1322
Leads: 9
Cost: $19.97
Revenue: $12.21
ROI: -38%
Screenshot from
The lander took from spying surely worked better than the one I used first. And the creatives look promising.
However, the bad side is that I'm using a smartlink and not a normal offer. So, respect to the previous camps, the payout dropped to an average 1,35$. And the conversione rate of the offer dropped as well.
These two things basically killed my ROI. If the payout stayed the same that I had in the first conversions ($2.7), then ROI would be positive. With a 24.3 Revenue.
So, I reached out to my aff manager and asked her if I can get a fixed Payout. Waiting for an answer now. If not, I will probably shift to another offer with a fixed payout and forget about smartlinks forever. There are already too many varibles to watch. ALso worrying about the Payout isn't ideal.
Regarding the things I can control, this is my action plan now:
- blocking low quality zones.
- creating creatives similar to the ones that converted so far.
- Test a new angle
Waiting for your feedback. Should I go on like this?
Or do you think that after all the budget spent on this offer I should move to something else?
I had the same issue when I tested dating smartlinks. Eventually I had much better success running normal offers as long as you can figure out how to get acceptable lead quality otherwise you won't last very long on the offer (and you won't get sufficient cap to scale). This was something I never figured out after getting kicked off half a dozen offers (in which I just got tired and gave up). So maybe you'll have better luck.
Just a few things I learnt when testing dating, hope it helps:
1. Images are key, I rotated 20+ set of images on the same lander structure (survey type with images etc.) before I found a set that would work (usually it was better to rotate a few) and it was also better to have banner to match once you found the winning set.
2. Direct offers usually have multiple landers themselves which can affect your performance so would suggest to test them or if your budget is constraint at least turn on a VPN and select the ones that look the most different.
3. Figure out how "aggressive" you can run on each traffic source you're using because some are stricter regarding things like nudity whilst other is more lax (though nudity isn't always the best converting anyways - but at least you know what you can do).
Thanks @sushiparlour.
Okay, this thing of having the ad image matching with lander image is something I already had in mind. After your suggestion I'll give it a try.
Some tips on how to get quality leads? Or am I asking too much 
?
I would suggest to focus on specific offers too, that always worked better for me in dating.
You can also try what sushi suggested, so matching the banner with the offer or even the LP so you stay consistent throughout the whole funnel. It's not a must, nor does it always work better, but it's another thing you can try and possibly benefit from it.
@matuloo might know more about quality. I've consistently gotting kicked off offers which is why I gave up on dating for now. The minimum would be to at least pass some information about your traffic to your AM and talk to them about it so that if they see a segment that works for quality they can help you flag it or at least buy you more time on the offer.
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
And to add some up to date info: these days, the offer itself is what matters the most. The advertiser has to be able to monetize properly on the backend, otherwise there is nothing we can do about increasing the quality. When talking about dating specifically, some offers rely just on a monthly membership fee, while some others also sell ad space in the members area, send out emails with ads, upsell all kinds of stuff and even resell/coreg the leads. I'm sure you can guess which ones are able to profit more per lead.
And even with a good offer, you will lose some offers here and there, it just happens and its part of the game.
To sum it up, make sure you test more offers to be able to find the ones that are monetized properly and then focus on the steps outlined in the thread I linked you to.
If you want to take it one step further, you can focus on filtering the traffic: exclude BOTs, exclude VPN traffic, exclude out-of-geo and wrong language traffic ... you will lose some leads this way, but the overall quality will be better.
And one more trick: you can mix the traffic to increase the average quality. For example, if you have access to some high quality email, social or members area clicks, mix with banners and pops and the final quality should still be ok.
Thanks @matuloo, I will shift to a specific offer and implement the things you shared in the thread!
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
Do you think this apporach could work as well?
Hey guys!
It's been a long time since I don't post.
Here's what happened:
I launched one more campaign testing a different offer. I used variations of the ads that converted more so far. And a landing page took from spying. Though, I tweaked it a bit.
Traffic network: ZeroPark
Affiliate Network: CPAmatica
Offer type: DOI
Offerpayout: $2.4
Ads: 5 (5 images, 2 headlines)
Clicks: 1479
Conversions: 3
Cost: $23.15
Revenue: $7.83
ROI: -66%
Here the stats from
Do you think I should keep it running and optimizing, or should I move to another offer?
The general rule is spending 5x the payout, and if yo get 0 conversions, kill it. But what if you get some conversions but still negative?
Here I spent 10x the payout and got a -66% ROI, do you think I should move to something else?
Is it possible to make it work?
I'm more inclined to test a new one. Improving the ROI is surely possible. Yet, I should improve it from -66% to at least +30% to make it worth. I don't think that usual optimization can bring such an increase in conversions. I should come up with a totally different angle and lander imo to make such an improvement possible. So I think it's better to test a new offer.
Though, I still wait for your opinion.
BUT, there are so many things that might have gone wrong ... from the ADs and LPs all the way to the offers and the actual placements you bought clicks from, there might be a lot of BOTs.
The current funnel you have is obviously not working. So you need to start changing things. The question is, what to start with, right?
Since you only tested 1 offer so far, I believe, I'd start by adding a few more offers into rotation.
What is the GEO actually? $2.40 is quite low for a DOI, unless you're targeting a lower tier country.
As for the LPs, how many have you tested so far? 5 ADs isn't a lot either, so you will need to test more of them too.
But let's take it one step at a time, register with some more affiliate networks (advidi, unitedgap, clickdealer ... ) and get more offers to test.
Hey @matuloo! Thanks again for the answer.
The GEO is Italy. Does it still make it a low payout offer?
Anyway, I'll subscribe to the aff network you named and start to test 4-5 offers. I definetely made a mistake to start testing few offers.
So, I will pick 4-5 offers and test to find the best one.
In the meanhwhile, I launched another one, but forgot to share the stats. However, it doesn't change what I?m going to do now.
Here the stats of the last offer tested:
Traffic network: ZeroPark
Affiliate Network: CPAmatica
Offer type: SOI
Offerpayout: $2
Landing: Network pre-landing
Ads: 4
Clicks: 3359
Conversions: 5
Cost: $33.8
Revenue: $11.66 (Some conversions happened on desktop, that’s why the revenue is more than 10$. Desktop leads have a higher payout. Still weird because I excluded desktop traffic)
ROI: -65%
Still shitty results.
I will proceed as you said. Pick a bunch of offers. Test them. Find a converting offer. Then optimizing the landing. Then ads etc.
Will update you soon!
Italy is definitely one of the countries with lower payouts, but I've seen some offers paying the same rates for SOIs, look around a bit
BTW: dating generally works better with true adult traffic, so I would recommend to look at the big adult traffic networks such as trafficfactory, trafficjunky, trafficstars ... you can mess with POPs and PUSH too, but learn how to use the ones I mentioned too.
Thanks a lot @matuloo for following me and sharing info. Anyway, adult traffic is on my radar, but will probably test it later. Firstly, I would like to achieve stable results with push traffic before learning another traffic source.
So, I will probably test new verticals instead of changing traffic source. I re-read Erik Gyepes follow along on push traffic. And I will take some inspiration from that. I'm grabbing a bunch of offers and will test them. Then, trying to optimize from that.
Will update you guys soon!
Cheers!
Originally Posted by free_waves
Thanks @matuloo ! I truly appreciate it And I will definitely keep it in mind.
New data update on the way.
I decided to not focus only on dating and test different offers. I used one only landing page and 4 different creatives for every offer.
Here all the results:
Offer 1 : Voucher - Payout: $1.60
Clicks: 1039
Conversions: 9
Cost: 40$
Revenue: $14.40
Profits: -25.60
ROI: -64%
Offer 2 : Dating DOI 1 - Payout: $5.49
Clicks: 1404
Conversions: 1
Cost: $40.38
Revenue: 5.49
Profits: -34.89
ROI: -86%
Offer 3 : Dating DOI 2 - Payout: $4.9
Clicks: 1589
Conversions: 3
Cost: $46
Revenue: 14.78
Profits: -31.22
ROI: -67%
Offer 4 : Sweepstake CC submit - Payout: $16.53
Clicks: 3671
Conversions: 3
Cost: $95
Revenue: $49.59
Profits: -45.41
ROI: -47.8%
This is all.
Offer 2 is definitely a loser and made the mistake of letting it run too much before killing it.
If I put the stats in the calculatorr, the Offer 1 is the a winner. Though, it only counts clicks and conversions and not the payout.
The best ROI has been achieved by the sweepstake offer (Offer number 4).
I think I will focus on this one by:
Testing new creatives for this offer.
Testing 2 more landers.
Testing similar offer from other networks.
If it doesn't work I will move to the voucher offer. In fact, out of 9 conversions, 8 came from the same ad. So, will create variations of this one and test. But for now, let's just focus on the offer number 4.
If you think I am wrong let me know guys. Hoping to get some feedback from you.
Based on my push experience, the CC sweeps offers worked the best with push traffic, so I'm not surprised your test showed the same results. It's not a lot of clicks/conversions, so the reliability of this data is questionable, but I would also focus on the CC sweeps now.
The right LP can make a HUGE difference with cc sweeps, you need to push it on the edge and use as aggressive LP as the source allows, otherwise it will be hard to be profitable.
Testing 2 more landers.
Testing similar offer from other networks.
Here are the updates from Saturday campaign.
2 different samsung sweepstake offers (Same S10 cc submit offers. Just different aff network and, thus 2 different landing pages)
2 pre-landing pages copied from the spytool
12 different ads.
Here are the stats:
Offer payout: $16
Cliks: 2625
Cost: $67
Conversions: 0
Revenue: 0
ROI: -100%
I wasn't expecting this. This campaign came after testing 4 different offers from 3 different verticals that were very popular. Then I just picked the same offers and funnels that are being runned, yet I had 0 conversions.
Affiliate marketing is a fucking UFC fight aganist Conor McGregor.
This inspired in me this reflection:
I just runned what everybody is running (The landers and ads I used are being run since August by the big guys). The offer is freaking popular. Yet I had -100% ROI. I am not complaining at all, it's part of the game.
But what I think is that ripping and running funnels doesn't bring me that far. Or at least this is what happened: Never had a breakeven camp up until now. Yes, I can test more offers, landers etc.
But what I feel like is that I'm competing with guys that have much bigger budget than me. Much more experince than me. And all those competitive advantages like:
- They are media buying killers or they have access to some high quality traffic I can't access.
- Direct relationship with the advertisers if not owners of the offers.
- A solid team of media buyers/copywriters.
Despite all these advantages, I'm still trying to fight them with their freaking funnels, buying a lower quality traffic than the one they have access to, with lowers payouts and yada yada yada. Plus, there are tons of other newbies doing the same.
Essentially, we are all fishing in the same lake. With the same bait, the same boat and the same fishing pole.
Maybe I will bring home a bunch of carps. But I will never able to fill my boat with tons of fishes.
So, yes, I will keep testing offers. But I will focus more on creating some sort of competitive advantage. The first thing that came to my mind is copywriting, considering my skills and my resources. So, coming up with different angles, headlines, pre-landers etc.
Sooo, from now I will focus more on offers where I can create new angles, headlines, advertorials, take inspiration from old controller. Obviously, I will still rip and run to see what is working. But I will add my creativity to it.
And also, keeping running offers will increase my media buying skills giving me one more advantage.
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It was a long post, sorry! But just wanted to put my thoghts out there, hoping for the opinion of someone that has more experience than me. In the end, this is not about push traffic, FB ads or whatever. This is about affiliate mareting in general.
Cheers to all and have a great week ahead!
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