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Starting the tutorial with initial $100 a day goal and then, to infinity and beyond. (21)

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Hello All,

Background:
I dabbled in AM in 2016 but due to financial situation I have to leave this space and work full time. Now that I have a decent bank roll to get into AM part-time (everyday 7-12PM), I am getting into this seriously.
Thought of doing FB but realised that my foundation is shaky so am going to follow Vortex 40 day tut.

Till today:

Day1-Day2:
- I got accepted with Mobidea and ClickDealer. Got 3 offers approved from ClickDealer that I liked.
- From Yesterday am waiting for PropellerAds to send me the coupon for $50 for new users on $200 deposit. If I dont get a reply by the next 24 hours I am planning to just deposit and get on with it as I want to start the campaigns.
- I will be setting up Binom tracking in the next 6 hours.

Thank you @vortex for the awesome tutorial. I was lost in the AM space before I found it.

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Day 3:
- Have setup Binom in digital ocean platform (Thanks Binom for the free month and also the digital ocean credits). It was very easy to setup (used the auto install script).
- Have setup the campaigns in the binom tracker.

Issues to be resolved:
- Still waiting to hear back from propellerads rep in STM (contact them via the chat option in their website but they just told me that they have notified the concerned person and will get back to me).
- Did a $20 paypal deposit in popads and that is in suspended state. The amount has already been debited from my bank account. Have sent them an email but havent heard back from them yet. Think the suspension is mainly due to the address details in paypal and where I am now.

While waiting for the issues to be resolved will browse through the forum to gain some knowledge.

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Great to see you back into AM!

Looking forward to your progress!

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@erikgyepes, thank you for the kind words

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Day 4:

Update:
- The campaign in propellerads platform is live. Seeing some conversions. Will wait for the $10 to be spent.

Clickloss
Ad Network - 12654
Tracker - 11489
CD
Total Clicks - 8326
Clicks - 7784

- Not sure if this click loss is normal for carrier-specific 1-Click offers.


Issues (being resolved):
- Popads: Being Sunday I was not able to get my payment processed by Popads (paypal deposit is still in suspended state).
- Propellerads: I still did not hear back from the rep in STM but got a account-specific coupon via email for $100 first time deposit ($25 extra ) so I used that to get the campaign live so that I can get on with the tutorial.

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Hello All,

I got a message from my AM that part of the leads were fradulent and asked me to optimize.
I went to Binom and found the zone ID using the Token1.
When I went to the propeller ads I found that even though there were 1 fradulent lead (as per AM) from each of these zone, those zone generated multiple conversion. How do I go about this?

Fradulent leads:

Propeller Ads data:




1. I blocked them temporarily for this campaign since I dont know how to deal with this kind of situation. would be great if anyone can share how they deal with these kind of situation. I will also look around in the forum. Thought would add it to this thread as part of follow along.

2. Also, how do the Offer network figure out what the fraudulent leads were? Do they have a list of IP or something like that? If so, can we get it from them and add it to the campaign when we start?

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Total spent across two traffic sources: 8.73 USD out of 12.5 USD
Conversions : 15
ROI : -72.50%





Just finished reading Day 13 explanation post and almost all the linked posts (That was a looooot of information. I have to go through them again in a few days coz I am not sure how much my memory will be able to retain.)

Going to start day 14-15 today.

Made a mistake launching the current offer in popads as they have <1000 impressions per day even with a above average bid (With all the filters related to carrier). Lesson learned.

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The propellar campaign has finished spending 10 USD but I notice a mismatch in the amount spent between the ad network and the tracker. Is it due to clickloss or something else? @vortex could you please help me on this question.


PropellarAds Screenshot



Tracker Screenshot

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Apologies! Had your follow-along opened in a browser tab from a few days ago, got distracted, and forgot to reply.

Unfortunately, this is only too normal.

Most of the typical affiliate offers we're running are lead-generation offers - visitors sign up to a list (e.g. "win an iphone") and enter into a co-reg funnel, and then get bombarded by emails etc. - as the offer owner aims to make their money back (that they've paid to the aff network - and in turn, us - to obtain those visitors).

So, when the offer owner fails to make their money back, i.e. conversion rates are low, they will inform the aff network that "hey - leads coming from your affiliate ID xxxxx is not translating into profits for me - their traffic quality is low - please kick them off the offer because we don't want to continue paying for those leads".

"Traffic quality" is basically a measure of how responsive the visitors are and how likely they would respond favorably to the offer and the monetization tactics after they enter into the funnel.

"Low quality" or "fraudulent" are just terms that are thrown around when the offer owners are seeing lower-than-normal returns from the subscribers you're bringing.

Pop traffic is basically the lowest-quality traffic you can get online, mainly because of 2 things:

1)Pop traffic is interruption marketing. People would be browsing around on a website when intrusive pop ads would pop up out of nowhere - which is why most people don't even interact with pop ads.

2)Pop traffic does not allow targeting by different audiences. They're just a general audience - you can't target by gender or age or interest etc. Different people are interested in different things, so it's hard for us to make ads with offers that everybody would be interested in.

...as opposed to say Facebook or Adwords, where you can target by demo/keyword etc. and cater your advertising angles to each audience.

The advantage of pop is that it's cheap. That's it. You can of course run camps on FB (and I would encourage you to try that once you understand the basics of running paid traffic campaigns!) but the traffic is so much more expensive. You get what you pay for.


So - how to get better quality on pop? That's the million-dollar question.

There are a couple things you can do:

1)Not all pop networks have the same traffic quality, so definitely track this!

When adding an aff link to your tracker as a new offer, add a tracking token to pass a traffic source ID to the aff network. This way, when the aff network tells you your quality is too low, you can ask them "can you please check which traffic source ID is sending bad-quality traffic?" Not all aff networks will entertain us, but some will check for you, and there's a possibility that only one traffic network out of multiple (if you're running camps on multiple traffic networks) is responsible for low-quality leads. That way you can just pause your campaign for that traffic network, without having to stop promoting the offer.


2)Don't be too misleading in the ad.

For example, you can tell the visitor they'll get the moon after they sign up to the offer, and boost conversion rates that way. But when they discover after signing up that they're NOT getting the moon, they will ignore anything else the offer owner pushes at them (to make their money back).


3)Qualify your visitors.

This is a more-advanced tactic, but what some veteran affiliates would do, is for example segregate visitors by age. For example, visitors that are 25+ y/o usually result in higher-quality leads (you can ask your affiliate manager for this info). So what you can do is have a landing page that says "Are you over 25?" with "YES" and "NO" buttons (for example), where clicking "YES" will lead to the offer that requires higher-quality traffic, and clicking "NO" will redirect to another offer - one that does not have very strict requirements on quality.


And of course, another option would be to just promote another offer. Some offers are just not meant to be promoted on pop traffic because of the level of quality they're looking for.

To answer your question about which zone IDs to block: There is no way for you to know this information. You can try to add a tracking token to the offer link in the tracker (like what I suggested to do for the traffic network) to also send zone IDs to the aff network, but unless you generate at least 10-50 conversions per zone, there wouldn't be a way for the aff network to tell which zones are bringing bad quality. Still, it would be a feasible thing to do in the future when you start running a ton of traffic volume.

Hope that helps!


Haha - don't worry about not being able to retain all that information!

I'm certainly not expecting you to.

I mainly just wanted to keep similar information together in the same lesson. When you actually have some experience, you can always go back to re-read some of the lessons.


Yup - looks like normal clickloss to me. @matuloo has written an excellent guide on that topic here:

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



Have you had a chance to test some landing pages?



Amy

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Thank you so much for your reply @vortex (Amy). So many people in here needs your advice. Thanks for taking the time and giving me a detailed answer.


Your response cleared up many of the doubts that I had in my mind.
As you mentioned I also felt the quality of traffic is not that great in pop but it is a good source to learn
I will go through @matuloo 's guide on clickloss, now.

I did . I have just created the update post to this follow-along. I feel kinda lost (I really wonder how you guys made it. I am feeling lost even with so much guides and help in this forum.)

Best regards,
CholaN

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Sorry for the delay in updating this follow-along. The past 12 days were kinda crazy with me traveling.

• I also went into the default mode of just learning and not taking action on many of the past 12 days.
• Was kinda trying to pull me back into getting into action and launching campaigns.
• The biggest problem that I faced was when I made a wrong decision to choose 2 offers from a European country (germany) and with a payout of 3.12 USD (which increased my testing budget). I will go through them in this post.

Things Done in the past 12 days

1. Started collecting landing pages from the forum and elsewhere by paying a bit of money. Now have lots of landing pages for sweeps/Gaming/Nutra/Adult and about 4 landers for app install verticals.
2. Set-up hosting and CDN in AWS
   
   • The cost of CDN seems to be higher (will end up paying 15-20 USD this month at the current rate of traffic) not sure if I have to move to cloudflare. But that is a decision that I can make once I get hold of launching and optimizing campaigns to green.
   
   
3. Started offer+lander testing (Made a lot of mistakes) (@vortex and others too, could you please guide me with your inputs on this)
   
   • Choose two offers from germany with a payout of 3.15 USD.
   • Since both offers offer same reward I used one of the ripped landing pages which I had. (Did not use multiple landing pages and also did not test both offers in both the ad networks)
   • Launched the campaign in 2 ad networks
     
     • PropellerAds rejected the campaign (lander) saying that it was against their TOS.
       
       • I changed the lander to match their rules (less aggressive) and got the campaign approved
       
       
     • The other network accepted the campaign (lander)
     • Used the option to distribute traffic throughout the day (not sure if this is impacting the conversion rates in the negative way, as I sense that most of the conversions happen in the germany evening time but then again maybe its too early to optimize based on time)
     • I also made the mistake of not converting the offer currency EUR into USD so was basically trying to cut things at 2.xx USD rather than 3.12 USD.
     
     
   • Since the payout is 3.12 USD (I had to spend till 60 USD which is a lot of money and psychologically kept pulling me back.) (Condition to Check For: See whether any of the offers has made a total of 2 conversion or more, with a conversion rate of one conversion per 10x payout in spend or better.)
   • The aggressive lander outperformed (2 conversions at ~7X) the less aggressive lander (1 conversion at ~7X) keeping the cost in mind I choose to go with the agressive lander and offer combo.
   • I also made the mistake of cutting some placements at 2.XX USD rather than at 3.15 USD.
   • Did not do the bot test yet.
   • And after spending some more money on the aggresive campaign the latest results are as follows:
   
   

Going Forward:

1. In a dilemma as to continue with this campaign by spending more money on this or to test other campaigns. (For me, Fear of losing money is more than shiny object syndrome at this point.)
   
   1. If I am to continue, what should i look out for
   2. When should i stop (either costwise or datawise)
   3. I feel as though breaking this barrier is the first hard task that I am undertaking since I started this follow-along since I am spending real good amount of money on this (as a beginner in pops)
   
   
2. Reading Day 34-35 as of now.

Best Regards,
CholaN

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Nice follow along thread, mate. I just read everything from the top as I am also going through the 40 day course by vortex. Your journey is really helpful as I have already learned a thing or two which I didn't know earlier. Things will come as I take action, and journey threads like these are really motivating me to take action. Keeping an eye on this FA for future updates.

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Since I am losing money fast I am thinking of taking a slightly aggressive approach to optimization.

My main lead sources are Desktop (could be a lucky conversion) and Smartphone





And in Smartphone I got conversions only from samsung and generic (unknown)




I am thinking of whitlisting samsung to get traffic only from that.

And in desktop I got my 1 conversion from Deutsche Telekom AG


By cutting the other non-profitable placements I should be able to bring my ROI upto -29%
-18.45+3.37+2.84+2.69+1.88+1.44 = -6.23 = -6.23/21.58 = -29%


Not sure if this will bring the campaign to green. just a thought.

hmm, I just realised that I cannot just whitelist Deutsche Telekom AG I also have to whitelist the smartphone ISP source. In that case I will just do the first cutting of placement via device models.

I will just whitelist:
Desktop and Smartphone - FormFactors
Unknown and Samsung - Devices

Will let the campaign run for $10 (after whitelisting)

Overall Campaign data till now:
Spent: $45.60
Revenue: $12.49
Profit: $(-33.11)
ROI: -72.61%
Payout: $3.12
Conversion: 4


Edit-1:
My thoughts: And one other thing that I noticed is that all the conversions are single conversions from different placements (could be lucky or one-off) so if I am not able to get decent conversion after the above cutting should I be looking at different offers or should I continue to test until I reach $100 USD in testing, hmmm.
Maybe more data can make this campaign green in the long run but I am not sure when to stop testing.
Also I can spend the amount of money on some other offer with a lower payout and try to get it to green.
Maybe I am over thinking, Confused

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New day - New Update. I know I missed a day between the last update and this one.

So looking at the data of yesterday I realised that since the default timezone is different in tracker, ad network and offer network I kinda messed up the way in which I calculate ROI. I think it is easily solvable but since I dont have much experience I will have to spend some time on this.

But overall, after making the optimizations the campaign looks better.




Overall (Lifetime) Data of the campaign:










Last 3 days data (1 day without optimization & last 2 days with optimization):








Yesterday Data (After optimization):








Conversions seems to be only form Smartphone:



Since I do not have placements with good number of (>1000) impressions or having spent 1X or 2X the payout I do not have any justification to cut any placements.

The only optimization that I can do is remove desktop traffic but I am not sure if it is advisable.

With the above doubts in mind, I will let the campaign run for another $10 to see where it leads.


Edit 1: After thinking a lot I have decided to remove desktop traffic. So the campaign is now running with $10 budget and desktop traffic removed.


Best regards,
CholaN

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Nice progress!

Payout is quite good - not high at all.


Best to test at least 3-5 landers. Otherwise you won't get a good idea of the "average" range of performance for the offers.

If that lander for any reason isn't working well, you'd have no idea. You may just think that the offers are duds.


I would actually just use one network to split-test offers and landers first, to find a promising offer+lander combination, and THEN scale that to other networks. There's little point in spending twice the amount of money to conduct the same split-test.


If you're seeing indication that traffic seems to be converting better in the evenings, by all means start dayparting - just remember to re-open up your targeting to include all hours for a re-test, once you have a good offer+lander combo, and/or have cut out the worst placements / traffic segments.

If you have sufficient stats to prove that traffic DOES convert better during certain hours of the day, you can start ALL future campaigns in that geo to run during those hours. Again, you'll want to test other hours once you have a good offer+lander combo etc., but targeting the best traffic from the beginning can save you considerable money when split-testing offers and landers.

You can apply the same idea to placements as well, i.e. by starting all future campaigns in that geo with a whitelist of the best placements. That way you do split-testing for cheap. You can always open up your targeting later on.


You can absolutely cut placements at 2.xx instead of 3.12. It would just mean that you'll have to retest all the blacklisted placements later on - when you have done some split-testing of offers and landers and have identified a good offer+lander.

Also keep in mind that when comparing lander performance, you need to be using some sort of statistical calculator. Please see the lesson on how to check for statistical significance. 2 conversions vs. 1 is hardly conclusive - the less aggressive lander could very well "catch up" if you had run more traffic.


To combat the fear of losing money: Instead of setting your goal to breaking even or making profits, set your goal to spending a certain amount of money every week/month. Consider your goal achieved as long as you've spent all your budget - this is something you have 100% control over (compared to setting a goal to make profits, which you can't guarantee will happen even if you try your hardest). Of course you'll still do your best to spend that budget WISELY and efficiently, but psychologically you'll let yourself off the hook. Just set aside that budget and write that off as a loss.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but try it and you'll see what I mean. You have to spend that budget anyway in order to even STAND a chance of success - so may as well consider it a loss right away - or write it off as tuition for learning the trade - so you won't be holding your breath constantly for a campaign to reach profits. This is important when you're still in the learning stage.

As for your dilemma: Split-testing offers and landers from the start will make your decision easier. If you've split-tested 5 landers with say 2 offers that are recommended by AMs, first of all your chances of finding a good offer+lander would be higher. Secondly, you'll end up with a decent lander - the winner of the 5-lander split-test, which then you can use to just focus on testing offers with.

Once you find a offer+lander that does close-enough to break-even, such that you feel you could optimize your way to green by cutting unprofitable traffic (and still have enough left over to make money from), then focus on optimizing by cutting.

If you're not split-testing, and your only lander+offer isn't close-enough to breaking even, then there would be no point in focusing on cutting.

I'll respond to the rest of your posts in a couple of hours.



Amy

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Hello Amy,

Thank you very much for your response.

It makes sense. I think my Laziness took over and I just used a ripped lander. I will make sure to test 3-5 landers in the next offer I launch in the next few days.


Ah its so true. Another mistake of mine in not following crucial steps. I did spend twice the amount for getting the same data.

Actually this advice is golden and right on time coz I am going to remove the throttling and test the conversion in my next test. I was thinking of what else to do since the daily spend is limited after all the optimizations and this reminded me of the throttle.
Also, I have started a different spreadsheet to note down the placement and traffic hours related data for Geos to serve as a roadmap.


I will read up that post now. I was also planning to go through all the "Free Tools to Make Your Camps Green Faster" posts.


Another Golden nugget. Thank you so much. It makes a lot of sense to me. I think this will help me concentrate on the campaigns more.

Lesson learned: The one step which I did not do properly (Split testing lander+offer) is something that will give a hard time for almost the entire duration of the campaign.

I am going to go through the 40 day once again with the a new offer. Not the entire 40 days but from Day 27- Day 37, might take 3-4 days in actual. I am going to do this mainly coz I did cut some corners in many of these days. The $3.12 offer getting to interesting point (new post below) but irrespective of whether it will give me a +ROI or not I am going to start a new offer this monday to do Day 27-Day 37 (implementing all the inputs from you in my follow-along response).

Best Regards,
CholaN

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Yes, I have mentioned the same @vortex days as my previous post coz eventhough I went through all the posts in the 40 days tutorial I am not testing Bids yet. So what I am doing now corresponds more to Day 34-35 of the guide.

Yesterday, I decided to cut placements and test the campaign further with $10 in popads and then also launched the campaign with the same placement cutting and same budget of $10 (I dont know why I did this )

The ROI in popads looks much better (still red) compared to propellarads for this offer.





Looking at the browser data in popads it seems that Facebook is the traffic source with positive ROI but very less traffic.



Looking at the Quality Score, higher quality 9 has positive ROI.




Not much to do with website ID and other data:



And propellar ads at this point I am not sure if I want to mix it with this offer. So I am just going to do one or two more test for this offer in popads and see if I can make this green and then try scaling it up in propeller pop or push (have to check for push tutorial if I decide to scale it there but that is not the focus now).


Possible next steps:
1. Remove the throttling with the current setting and see if it help with conversions (also more placements with higher quality websites) ?
2. Increase the quality score to 8 and above ?
3. Increase the quality score to 8 and above & remove throttling.

Thinking of doing 1 for a test budget of $10 and see how it pans out.

Best Regards,
CholaN

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Your "aggressive optimization approach" is good! However - 2 thoughts regarding that:

1)Split-testing offers and landers from the start will still make your life easier. The closer to profits you are without optimization, the easier it would be to get to green.

2)Whitelisting in pop sometimes don't work as well as blacklisting. The main factor here is how "narrow" your targeting is - if you're whitelisting major traffic segments that have lots of traffic, you're good. If the traffic source algorithm "feels" that you're targeting too narrow, it will deem your campaign not important, and assign less traffic to that campaign. So, if you're finding that by whitelisting, your traffic volume decreases massively to the point where there wouldn't be any way to turn a profit of more than a buck or two, then widen your targeting either by whitelisting more segments, or by returning to the original broad targeting and blacklisting the worst segments.


Overthinking is natural and can be beneficial, especially in the beginning when you don't yet have a system down.

2 things I can suggest to your approach, that I think will help the most:

1)I know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but focus more on testing offers and landers first and foremost! Get as close to breaking even as you could before focusing on cutting unprofitable traffic (this could be -50% ROI or -30% ROI or a higher/lower ROI depending on how much traffic the particular geo has). The lower the ROI you start with, the more money you'll be spending on cutting, and the less traffic you'll have left over to make profits from!

Focus on split-testing a few popular landers first to find a decent one, then you can either test more offers with that one, or start another lander split-test by throwing in landers you've customized or even designed from scratch.

Testing more offers will likely give you better value though - in the beginning all you need is a decent lander that's good enough to let a good offer shine.

2)Have multiple campaigns going at the same time. This way you're not holding your breath for any particular campaign to perform well, which is great both from the law of attraction standpoint and from a psychological standpoint. More importantly, you'd be able to compare them and focus on the most promising campaign to continue. When you only have one campaign going, it's harder to decide whether you should continue or not - whereas with multiple ones going, you're see a range of performances, so would get a better idea on what's good vs. bad, and be able to pick the best to continue with.


That's a common problem. Just set all platforms to the same time zone.

Or, if a platform only shows stats in one timezone, then just set the other platforms to the same timezone.


Are you proud of that small bit of green? I know I am!

Now you've added another arrow in your quiver on how to optimize a campaign.


Just test out every idea you feel has a chance to teach you something!

Right now, focus on LEARNING, and not on making profits.

Once you know what you're doing, you'll be able to tackle bigger geos and scale with more confidence, without wasting money. But before you reach that stage, massive learning needs to occur. Right now, you're running small campaigns so you're learning for cheap, where any testing that you do will not cost you big money, so take advantage of this. Work out the kinks now instead of finding things out when you're running big campaigns where you'd be paying multiples of the amount to learn the same lessons.

What I'm trying to say is: Nice work on deciding to remove desktop traffic to see what that would do!


Nothing much beats the quality of Facebook traffic (with the exception of Adwords and a select few others).

I'm writing a big guide on how to run on FB - please stay tuned!


Certainly helps targeting! Can try to just target quality 9+ - but beware of the possible massive decrease in traffic I mentioned before. Can also mess around with bids to see if you can get more volume.


Yup - doing the offer and lander split-testing on popads first would be wise. It doesn't have a lot of volume, but quality is good. This is perfect for beginners that don't have a lot of budget but have time to wait for split-testing results.

Sounds like a plan! If you have the funds though I would suggest doing all 3 tests (as mentioned above, every test will help you improve and save money / make more money in future campaigns).

Awesome progress!



Amy


Amy

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@vortex Thank you so much for your reply

1> I understand it now. But I seem to have taken the hard route to understand this.
2> Hmm, makes sense. I will check if I can do this in my current campaigns.

1> I agree with your point
2> True. As of now running only one campaign is making me spend more and more since it is the only one while I also do not get to see a 'range of performances'.

I will do the timezone related task today.
Yes. I am very happy to see green coz it help me psychologically to keep on going since I feel like I am learning a lot in these campaigns

Thank you

Oh thats great news. I think it is really needed since even though I do facebook marketing for my company I am having issues keeping my ad accounts when running affiliate offers. Looking forward to your awesome guide.

Yep, what you said happened. I tried 9+ but the traffic almost stopped. It took 10 hours to spend 5 USD without any other throttling. What I can do is increase the bid and see if it helps.


Thank you for your feedback. I have done the first and secon test. I will also do the third one. Will posts the result of the past two days in the next post.


Best regards,
CholaN

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In my previous update on day 22, I mentioned the possible next steps:
After my update I tried all the three and now the campaign is in green. I will list out the changes I made and the results below.

1. Remove throttling (spend per second in popads) on 8th



Observations:
It took about 12 hours to spend 5 dollars.
Had one conversion
ROI -45%



2. Increase quality score to 8 and above (with removed throttling since no point in having throttling with the current setup) on 9th



Observations:
Took ~12 hours to spend 5 dollars
Had 2 conversions
ROI 23%


3. Since I was done with the possible next steps that I thought of I went ahead with the bid testing (after reading @vortex reply yesterday)




Observations:
Had 5 conversions
ROI 231%


Yipeeeeeee

Next steps:

• Now I will try to add another 5 USD to see if it sustains.
  
  • And if it does sustain, will keep it running to milk it out.
  
  

Since I dont haven't read about other traffic sources yet and also since I want to go through the 40day tutorial from day 27 to day 37 I will stick with pop for a few more weeks.

Also I have to move my CDN to cloudflare this weekend since I can use the amazon CDN bill payment money to test a few more offer as for now.



Best regards,
CholaN

p.s this is not the end of this follow along.
will update in a few more days.

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Conducting lots of small tests - THIS is what I was talking about!

Your curiosity and willingness to test every worthy idea has paid off!

And this knowledge will help you in all future campaigns.

One reminder though: Please check the actual costs within the traffic source interface, because the costs in Voluum can be way off at times (through no fault of the tracker). Make sure you're actually making profits. I've lost quite a bit of money on PopAds before I learned this lesson.

Congratulations on your first green!



Amy

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