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Journey to Conquer the Fear of Media Buying ⭐ (40)

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Ofcourse I can't check your wallet, but see it as a neccessary investment. Luckily you can unsub from all above quite easily I think (a month of Adplexity-exploration could give you already quite an idea of what's working, cut those costs first I would say). Also having one conversion "already" is good. You are doing something good, you just need to figure out was parts need improvement. Some easier to realize than others for sure but you will find that out quite soon!

STM and Voluum are really needed IMHO.

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hi @heikoo

Nice to see people with fear, as I have mine as well. I quit my job 15 years ago, and I've literally done 12 different things.
My most recent business, a school, just went down because a dispute with partner. And to make matter worse, I lost tonnes of money in a scam as well.

Right now, my fear of failure is through the roof, and I'm struggling with analysis paralysis.
I was so happy to find step-by-step + active community here in STM.

I'm fighting hard, and will definitely persist.

Wish you success and smooth camps all around.

Cheers,
Pon

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Hi Heikoo,

Nice to e-meet you. I'm also on the Day 14-15 in Vortex Tutorial. I chose Binom version. I finished learning HTML and CSS in codeacademy and am learning the Javascript. It looks so hard to learn JS. I was about to quit but saw your post... Really hope we can proceed together and never give up.

Cheers.

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Wohaaa this looks promising! Great updates man!

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Nice job @heikoo
Thanks for tagging me, I've already subscribed to this thread. And if you have any questions about tracking or your Voluum setup (although I have to admit, @vortex is very meticulous in her guide), you can always count on me. I'm here every day.

About our Anti-Fraud Kit and Honeypot (bot test)



This one is just for fun though the one below is a tutorial.



And here's the Voluum doc with all the info on Honeypot - the bot test:
https://doc.Voluum.com/en/honeypot.html


Karolina

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Nah, move on for now. You'll have a ton of offers to go through.

You don't want to get attached to an offer just because you worked on it

Plus, you can always pause/archive the campaign and come back to it in a few weeks/months if you wish to try again with your future awesome knowledge.

Right now, you got the basics and got some conversions going, so you can easily take that to some more promising offers/geos with more reasonable payouts closer to $1 CPA

Good luck!

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The last couple of days i have been doing more research on finding good offers. As @jaybot and many other suggested, its best to not sign up to multiple affiliate networks because your money would be caught up in the affiliate networks until you reach the payment threshold. I decided to look for more offers and go a little bit further with my testing. To speed up the process of getting into green numbers, my plan now is to run multiple offers/geos at the same time. As i already said, i don't wanna spread myself everywhere, thats why i have decided to go with ClickDealer as an affiliate network for now. I found a couple of SOI Offers for Italy, more offers for ZA and i have got a couple of offers for Greece and Cyprus (AFAIK they speak 80% Greek in Cyprus). I still believe its kind of difficult to find 2X SOI Offers for the same niche. Say, i want to promote a S10 Leadgen Offer.. i can only find one on ClickDealer, the only exception where i found several offers for the same niche was ZA. Whatever, ill figure it out.

Anyway, I have applied to these offers (About 10x Offers or so) but my Affiliate Manager did not approve them yet (I can't blame her, its almost christmas) - What i decided to do while i wait to get offers approved is to download landers from AdPlexity. I decided to check other geos with a similar niche, rip those landers and change the language to have some variety next to the landers that this GEO already has seen. Unfortunately i am still not knowledged enough to tell if a lander has a redirect or not (I can tell via the HTML, but when it comes to JS, i am still a big noob). It's time for me to put STM to good use and start researching more on this topic!



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I think thats exactly what i will do. I should not have got hung over on this one offer anyways. Rookie Mistake . I appreciate your solid advice, man!
And you keep up those green numbers, cause you are motivating as hell

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There is not much else to report, i try to get my campaigns up and running as fast as possible! Will report back if i have anything newsworthy to tell you!

Suggestions/Opinions are highly appreciated!

best regards
Heiko

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Sounds good! But one thing:

Stay far away from Greece for now. Payouts are nice, but really, really hard to convert consistently.

Other than that, great!

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This may be controversial, but I wouldn't focus on the speed optimization all that much.

You get the idea, and you know how to test it, that should be enough.

If you ripped it from adplexity and people were already sending tons of traffic to it, then it's probably OK to use (as long as it's clean).

The reality is, a lot of landers are using all sorts of jQuery and other scripts to make pages do fancy shit these days which mobile devices can absolutely handle, but it does take a hit on the page loading speed overall.

Anyway, I wouldn't get hung up on it. You can about squeezing every ounce of speed out later. And at that point, you can hire someone else to do it.

I'm more curious about this:

Profit: -1.74$

and this: 703 Visits

That's not a lot of data to go on, honestly. Is that popads or propeller?

Your CTR isn't too bad (depends on the offer, bid, and placements), you can improve that later.

You need to push a bit more traffic before giving up. Bid might be a bit high for ZA if only getting 703 for $1.74. A SmartCPM at 1 should be getting you roughly 1000 visits for $1.

I would throw at least $10 of traffic at an offer before giving up.

I know that might sound crazy at first, that's part of the psychological prep you have to go through though. (I just blew threw that in the past hour and I'm letting it run anyway because lunch is coming up and lunchtime on the west coast of the US is usually good for conversions).

I know big affiliates probably spent that in the last minute, or even second. That still sounds crazy to me, but hopefully we can all be there someday

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Hi there,

Not much to say today. I edited more landers for IT and fixed up some minor issues on the landers. On the recommendation of @jaybot i decided to focus on getting the campaigns up first and then when i have spare time while the campaigns are running, i can try to optimize the speed. So i did set up a campaign for PopAds and a Campaign for PropellerAds. As i write this, my campaign on PopAds has been approved. I follow jaybot's follow along as well and he mentioned that he doesn't run campaigns on christmas. I can sort of relate to that, and i feel like that the CR will be lower than when i would run it, for example after christmas (beginning on the 27th of December) - I don'T know if i shall start today or not. I will check out some posts on STM regarding that matter (if i can find any) or wait for a suggestion. Otherwise i will just run it after christmas.

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Thanks for your answer!

Okay, will do the speed optimization when i have some more spare time and when the campaigns are up and running. I noticed that when i open it via my Phone it's way faster than 1.6 seconds. Maybe like 1 second. I don't think i could close a Pop-Up that fast . We'll see whats happening i guess.

About the ZA Campaign:
It was basically a campaign that i already have tested, so the campaign had already some zones blacklisted, and i also changed the bid manually on that to recieve higher quality traffic. I think in total i have spent around 15 dollars to test on that campaign, and when is started running the offer again (the one with the 1.74$ loss) i only added 2 more offers to the campaign, so i haven't made any chances. I doub't i would've gotten any more conversions as i was going with @vortex 'es rule of "If the offer doesn't reach 1x Payout within 10x the spending on the campaign i shall cut it overall and come back to it later" - So that's what i did. Not sure if i did something wrong here, but i wasn't comfortable throwing anymore money at it... maybe i should've?

Getting over that mental block of losing money is still something that i have to overcome..reading your journey is just mindblowing seeing all those losses in the first days and you still kept going. Huge Kudos to that!
Oh i bet, we will be there someday! It's just a matter of sticking around and not giving up, right?
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Suggestions/Opinions are highly appreciated!

best regards
Heiko

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Whats up?

Yesterday i found 4 more landers for my IT Campaign. I luckily also found 1 more offer from ClickDealer that i am going to use.

There is not much to report right now but heres the summary for todays testing:

PopAds:

STATUS: RUNNING

9 Landers
3 Offers (1 Offer is waiting to be approved by AM)

PropellerAds:

STATUS: APPROVED

3-4 Landers (apparently my landers are to aggresive and even some text like "You won.." is gonna get my campaign rejected by Propeller Ads. Really unsure if i shall even continue to use this as a Traffic Source...
3 Offers (1 Offer is waiting to be approved by AM)

ExoClick (I have some money left in my ExoClick Account which i used for nonsense testing in 2018 - Figured i might give it a go)

STATUS: APPROVED
9 Landers
3 Offers (1 Offer is waiting to be approved by AM)


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Will report back once i got more infos/my results

Suggestions/Opinions are highly appreciated!

best regards
Heiko

Edit: 8:17 AM (GMT 1+) : Finished the 9th Lander and gonna add it to the PopAds and ExoClick Campaign. ExoClick Campaign got approved ! PropellerAds is still rejected..
Edit 2: 9:23 AM (GMT 1+) : PropellerAds approved. Selected it to be distributed throughout the day, but so far i have spent 1,50$ in 20 minutes. I really start to dislike PropellerAds
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Hey Heikoo, you have learned and adopt quickly that is undoubtedly appreciated, although such traffic sources are not related to my expertise but if you have plan to start social media feel free to hit me, i would love to help such people who have courage to take action rather than making excuses.

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GL man, some more stuff for you to learn down the line (as I see you focus on also learning coding):
- Git for deploying landers
- Basic JS, to make stuff like countdown timers, quizzes etc.
- Modern CSS with Flexbox (forget about floating items)


Also focus on just launching a lot. There's a big element of luck or being at the right place at the right time in AM, so the more you launch, the more money you spend, but the more opportunities you have to get lucky with a really good offer or unsaturated flow.

In regards to your favicon issue, most mobile browsers don't show it, so it doesn't really matter.

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The results are in: Terrible Performance. Honestly. I thought i would get at least 1 conversion out of almost 2000 Clicks through the landers but i didn't get one single conversion...

Here are the stats:

Propeller Ads :
Visits: 9,566 UV
Clicks : 1,060
Suspicious Clicks : 1.32%
CTR: 10.87%
Profit: -4.87$
ROI - 100%
Conversions 0

PopAds
Visits: 8,404 UV
Clicks : 870
Suspicious Clicks : 0.46%
CTR: 9.68%
Profit -6.29$
Conversions 0$
Conversions: 0


Exoclick:
97 UV
5 Clicks
Supicious Clicks : 20%
Conversions : 0
ROI : -100%
Profit -0,03$

Where do i go from here? Do i just scrap all 3 offers and make new ones? I thought i would get atleast 1 or 2 conversions out of all this. Especially with a CTR of ~9%..

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Chin up, the holidays are kinda sucky for a lot of us



That's one small camp yesterday. And that is a solid offer with a good WL. Some days just suck.

A couple things I would do (but take it with a grain of salt, as always): pause popads and ExoClick and work with just propeller to start.

Propeller is good quality traffic. They also reject ads a lot. It's nothing personal, they just have strict rules. If you can't say 'You won an S10!' just delete it to 'S10!' or change to 'You've been selected!' you'll find a way around it. It's worth the hassle for their traffic.

Next step, would be to dive into the zones with your tracker on the camp in propeller, sort by negative profit and see what's eating your money. CTR of 0%? Block that shit. No conversions and cost 1/2-1/3 of the payout? Block it. Etc.

Also, how are the landers performing? Which ones are getting clicked through more? Can you pare it down to 1-2 landers?

The problem with splitting between 3 of the same offers, if you also need to send 3x the traffic to compare results... Is it being split evenly by the tracker?

That's all I can think of for now

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Atleast i am not the only one, lol. I don't know. Yesterday sucked. I thought i would get atleast 1 conversion but it still kind of bothers me to see all this money gone, hence the name of this thread.

As you said, i have cut some bad performing zones, will let PropellerAds run another day, after i have cut those zones that mostly ate up my budget yesterday. After about 4$ spending yesterday, i had a pretty good idea of which landers are working and which don't. I had 9 Landers and 2 of them had a CTR over 10%, so i only selected those 2 and cut out the remaining 2, on all my traffic sources. Luckily the best lander was approved by PropellerAds

The traffic was split evenly between all the 3 offers.

I'll give it another shot, but when do you decide to cut the offer completely? After spending 10x the payout on budget without any conversions, or what do you recommend?

thanks for sticking around @jaybot

Thanks, JS is definitely the next thing i want to conquer and master. I feel like you are pretty lost if you don't have any programming knowledge in the media buying industry (if you don't have any partners that know this sort of stuff)

You are absolutely right, Maybe i should just launch more, test more, and i shall recieve more opportunities.
Im glad you point out the favicon issue, because i could not figure out that problem yet lol.

Thanks for your comment

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Such nice progress - and helpful tips from members!
@heikoo I'm so sorry for the late arrival! AWA and the holidays made me miss a lot of good posts, plus I'm preparing to write an FB tutorial for newbies. Still playing catch up but getting there.

I'm glad you didn't dwell on the $1 guide. It's just a simple and cheap way of giving people a taste of what running paid traffic is like. Even the 40-day tutorial is just another introduction - once you have a few profitable pop camps under your belt, I would recommend that you "graduate" to push or native traffic, which are less saturated (but require more budget to get profitable - which is why we're starting with pop).

Please try not to feel that way.

By starting a follow-along, you're keeping yourself accountable and getting feedback - which fulfills its purpose.

Your current goal should be to LEARN, not to EARN. Not yet. There will be time in the future for that.

And in order to learn, you need to SPEND.

So, as long as you're spending wisely to learn this business (without losing a ton of money on silly mistakes - such as forgetting to set a reasonable daily budget!), I'd say you're doing a great job.

Try to define your goal in terms of spending, e.g. "I'll spend $xxx/week on traffic". And aim to further your learning on that budget.

Of course, a profitable campaign would be nice to see, but learning the nuances of how each traffic source works, how to test bids, how to convert visitors - should be of higher priority.

As long as you're willing to spend a certain amount of money every week, with the intention of learning as much as you can, you'll naturally head in the direction of profitable campaigns.

And spending+learning is something you CAN control, vs. defining success in terms of profits, which is something you have little control over as a newbie, and will only serve to give you unnecessary pressure.

Lastly: Am I correct in assuming that you're using your savings to make this affiliate marketing thing work? If so, I would STRONGLY recommend that you get at least a part-time job or freelance work to offset traffic costs. Otherwise, the stress can consume you.


Mobile content can also be gaming subscriptions, video subscriptions, cookbook recipes, astrological forecasts, and other stuff I don't recall off the top of my head.


I wouldn't worry too much about not understanding coding lessons while going through coding tutorials. Just do your best.

Then, while you're cleaning up landing pages and have SPECIFIC questions, google them THEN to learn more about the specific issues.

However, when it comes to loading speed, I agree that you should spend time to improve on it. Perhaps make a new post to ask for feedback from the community on how to optimize a specific lander - I feel that everyone can learn more about speed optimization (myself included).


See the "Add a favicon" section in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ders-for-speed

Adding a favicon can drastically reduce loading speed, because then browsers won't spend time looking for it.

As for decreasing trust/CR - nobody will care about that as far as pop ads goes.


Thank you for the acknowledgement! I'm working on an FB guide for newbies, so please stay tuned!


It seems from your later posts that you've learned how to cut landers properly, i.e. using the stats calculator.

Higher CTR does NOT equal higher CR. I can build a lander that has super-high CTR for example by automatically redirecting all visitors after 2 seconds, but it doesn't mean those visitors will go on to convert. On the other hand, landers with lower CTR CAN mean that only the "right" type of visitors are clicking through - for example ones that are convinced by the lander angle - so that a higher percentage will go on to convert.

Exception: Some landers have such horrendously low CTR that it would require an impossibly-high CR in order to break even. Those you can eliminate without waiting for the stats calculator.


PropellerAds is pretty strict about the use of logos - if you're not cloaking that is.


SOI and DOI offers, at least the ones with low payouts that we're used to, can usually be promoted the same way.

SOIs usually have higher CR but lower payout compared to DOI offers. So it all "works out".

Once of the most common newbie questions is "when should I give up on an offer"? That's not an easy question to answer, and experience will help greatly.

As was described in the tutorial: There are 3 main elements to every pop campaign, offer, lander, and traffic. In the beginning you'll need to do your reasonable best to ensure the quality of each element, so that as a whole, you give the campaign a good chance to make some conversions.

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Good/best case scenario: If your traffic quality is good enough, and at least one of the offers in rotation is good enough, and you're using popular and well-optimized landers, then you'll get enough conversions to cut down to a good lander without spending too much money.

After cutting down to a good lander, you can drill down to various stats and decide whether you can optimize to profits by whitelisting or blacklisting. This is where experience comes in. The rule-of-thumb is if the ROI is -50% or better, you can probably optimize the campaign to profits. But every campaign is different. If you're operating in a large and competitive geo, you may find that even after testing a LOT of offers and landers, you can't get to -50% ROI, so you'd need to blacklist massively from a lower ROI all the way to green. But this is only when there's a lot of traffic available for you to cut, so that you'd still end up with enough traffic in the end to make money from.

OK/average case scenario: If the ROI is too negative, you can either 1)test more offers using that good lander, or 2)test more landers (variations of the best + completely different ones). Get to an ROI that's high enough and THEN blacklist/whitelist your way to profits.

Worst case scenario: If an offer's converting worse than once every 10x payout in ad spend, eliminate it unless you have a good reason not to. Then use new offers to cut landers. Don't use low-converting offers to cut landers - would be too expensive.
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That's just a general approach you can use. Again, experience counts for a lot. Over time, you'll know how to spend your test budget wisely to get more bang for your buck. Also, if you test several offers in several geos at a time, you'll be able to tell which one looks the most promising, and just focus on doing more testing in that geo.


Generally speaking, popads has better quality traffic, but propellerads has more traffic volume (and quality is still good!)

This is why I usually start my testing on these networks.

If your budget is limited, I would suggest to test offers and landers on PopAds first - as long as there's enough traffic for your geo so you won't need to wait many days for e.g. lander testing to finish.


Again, CTR is generally not the best metric to use when cutting stuff. But if you're running in a geo + traffic network where there are tons and tons of placements and you're bleeding to death, and need to cut placements quickly, try to make some conversions first, determine an "approximate range" of CTRs of placements that are green, and eliminate placements that have CTRs that fall outside of that approximate range. (However, after you reach green, I'd still recommend to retest these prematurely-blacklisted placements in batches.)


If you've already spent money cutting placements, you can test other ZA sweeps offers. (Signing up to more networks if you need to - I've listed quite a few networks that specialize in sweeps offers in my sweepstakes guide.)

Or, just try the easier geos first, and save ZA for later.


The low payout isn't the issue. It's the low payout PLUS low conversion rate that's the issue.

Some offers have really low payouts, but convert like gangbusters. I've run offers with $0.30-$0.50 payout with pretty good daily profits.

So, if you give up on it, it would be due to the overall performance of the campaign, not the low payout.


If you're bidding a reasonable amount, you can rule out traffic quality as the cause of the lack of conversions.

If you're using at least 3-5 landers that are popular and well-optimized, you can rule out landers as the cause of the lack of conversions.

Which would leave the offer as the culprit.


@jaybot is definitely on-point with his advice! And I'm not just referring to this particular piece of advice, but in general. His follow-along should be a must-read for all newbies.



Again @heikoo, I'm really sorry for arriving so late, and looking forward to participating in the rest of your journey!



Amy

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Ooh, rare disagree!

Maybe things have changed. But I find it's the exact opposite. I find propeller has better quality traffic (and easier tools to optimize), while popads has a shit ton volume in most geos, including a LOT more bots, which will result in higher CTR. However, PopAds has decent ZA traffic.

heikoo, you're asking about difference between Mobile Content vs. Sweeps... they're basically they same. Mobile content has higher payout so is harder to convert in theory, as the subscriber has to submit their phone number/pin to sign up vs a simple email address. However, it depends on the offer.

Especially ZA.

If you are looking for a ZA iPhone 11 (or X!) sweeps offer with a generous payout, look into mobile content in ZA. Last I checked, there is one with a payout of like $4

But.

Amy is right. ZA is a beast (I fucking hate that geo... every time I think I've mastered it, I'm wrong). You can always come back later. It's not going anywhere.

Wanna stick to English? Go crush KE, SG, or IN

Branch out in to Europe? ES, PL or IT even FR ain't too bad.

LATAM tons of options like CL are cheap and can convert really well.

Tons of options.

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No worries at all!
Yeah, i've read a lot of stuff on here already and it seems like push is the new big thing in Media Buying, will definitely give this a shot after i have some profitable campaigns on Pops. But ONLY when i have some profitable campaigns. Maybe even Facebook, but i've heard its difficult to keep accounts alive.


Exactly why i started to make this follow-along Typically i am not the guy that wants to do stuff like this, but i definitely need this feedback! And i am very greatful that people like you and jaybot are taking time out of their busy schedule to help out the newbies.

No. I am working with CB since 2016, Revenue Share to be exact, i am receiving x,xxx per month from CB alone, so i got sort of a stability. I also have an established Youtube Channel which gives me about 500-1000$ per month (used to be more back in the days, unfortunately that times over lol). The money that i am spending on Ads and Tools, is money that i have saved up from my previous affiliate incomes. I sort of got a recurring income from CB and Youtube that pays my bills but it varies every month, like everything in Affiliate Marketing.

The Stress is always there for me unfortunately. I tend to get stuck in my head and ask myself all these "What If" Questions, but i know that the only way to learn this is through facing the fear of spending, failing and learning

I am glad you cleared this up for, really did confuse me alot lol






Yes, i figured a lot of the stuff comes from practicing and experience. A lot of landers are always built in the same way (with JS, CSS, and HTML)
I will definitely work more on the landing page speed as i really have to get this down well, in order to compete with my competitors.

Yes, i noticed that in my latest testing with the IT Offer. I got 2 conversions now with a Lander that had a CTR of 1.13%. My other lander had a CTR of 13% and had 0 conversions. I don't feel like i am ready for the DOI Offers yet. Do you approach them the same way as SOI Offers? Or should it be more wise to for example, put an Alert right when the user exits the page to the offer that says "Bla Bla Bla... Step 1: Enter your email etc. etc. - Step 2 : Confirm your eMail/Pin Code etc - I feel like it kind of reminds the user to confirm everything in order to really have a chance of winning.

For the 3 Main Elements, I am definitely still lacking on all 3 of those, but hey, thats what i am here for, right?

Great stuff, currently i am at the "OK" Scenario, i think. See below and you know what i mean! Basically willing to spend some more money on cutting and improving the campaign i am currently doing


It definitely feels like i need to do way more testing in order to get myself to the green numbers. I am looking into new offers and geos to test in the next days and will pick up on PopAds again. So the Idea behind the Za Sweeps Offer Testing is, to reuse the old campaign that i used, i have already kind of optimized and cut zones with, and try out some new offers? That sounds like a good idea!




Yeah, i am really thankful for you and jaybot for sticking with me through this. I have read his entire journey and similar ones in this subforum as well. Love all the positive vibes and encouragement you guys have for newbies!
It's no problem that you are late. Hope you had some great holidays!

Thanks for the recommendation! I hate ZA as well. And i only had 2 campaigns there haha. I already have my eyes on SG. I will definitely run some offers in there in the next upcoming days!
I haven't seen that ZA Offer, will give it a look right after i wrote this post in ClickDealer!
Thanks again for clarifying the difference between MC and Sweeps. Still getting used to all these Media Buying Terms

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So yesterday i was running the IT Campaign again. Here are the results:

UV: 4.490
Clicks: 626
Conversions: 2
Revenue 1.60$
Cost 3.42$
CTR: 13.27%
CR: 0.32
ROI - 53.28%

I am not sure where i have seen this, i think it was written by vortex, but everything above -70% ROI is not worth working for (i think that's what i read lol). So yesterday when i came back and checked those thats, i decided to dive deeper into the optimization process. I checked the landers (Previously i had 9 Landers and Cut them down to 2), and now i saw that lander 1 had a wopping CTR of 22.71% but 0 conversions, i checked the other lander that only had a CTR of 3.92% and it had 2 conversions (only -6.47% ROI) - I decided to cut out the first lander (for now) and stick with the converting one. I then proceeded with checking the zones, and there was one zone that was eating up my traffic and didn't convert yet, so i decided to cut this one out (for now) as well. I had 3 offers (2 from ClickDealer, 1 from Advidi) - The money was evenly split but unfortunately the AdVidi Offer did not get a conversion, which is why i cut that one as well.

For all these optimizations, i plan on retesting them (as well as all the other landers again) when i finally reached a green number. But now my main goal, is to learn as much as i can in the next upcoming days, possibly improve my lander even more (in terms of speed) and testing more offers.

Heres my plan to sum this post up :

- Work more on the current campaign to get it into green numbers (Optimize Speed, Cut Bad Zones, possibly increase the CPM)
- If the numbers are green, scale the campaign, test the other landers again with the improved campaign

- Find offers in ZA that i can test on my already optimized campaign
- Find offers in T2 Countries and test A LOT
- Read more on STM until my eyes bleed

Sounds like a plan?

best regards
heiko

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I haven't run pop traffic in a few months - so things may have changed in the meantime. However, I don't know about popads having a "shit ton of volume in most geos". I just checked the volume estimators on both networks, and PropellerAds still has 3x as much traffic as PopAds (worldwide, raw, not unique).

UPDATE: I started looking for screenshots of popads inventory stats and found that the numbers on my popdas dashboard are significantly lower. Here's mine:



And here's an example of one of the screenshots I found - this one's from Mobidea's blog:



(reference: https://academy.Mobidea.com/wp-conte...nventory-1.png)

Can someone who also has a non-VIP popads account post the inventory chart? Makes me wonder whether the fact that I have a VIP account has anything to do with it. @jaybot Perhaps this is why we're making different observations. I may even have been getting the "better quality" portion of the traffic - no idea.

I would encourage anybody who's reading this, to do their own testing. When I have the opportunity, it would be nice to run the same camp on my account vs. a "normal" account and do a comparison.

At any rate: @jaybot Thanks for pointing this out! This is why having a community is great - more people = more different viewpoints = a more complete picture.


Indeed. But it's a lot easier if we stick with the safer, whitehat stuff. Although there are never any guarantees you can keep an ad account alive forever, I will do my best to describe methods that will minimize the likelihood of getting accounts banned.

Also: Each person can legitimately have up to 2 BMs with up to 5 ad accounts each. And most people have friends and family that will not run FB ads in the foreseeable future, that can be rented or even used for free.


I'm really relieved to hear that! No need to worry about you then.

Would you mind me asking: Are/Were you promoting products on CB? Or selling your own? And is there any way to double-down your efforts in that area to turn that x,xxx/month into xx,xxx/month or more?

I understand that in spite of having all this money come in, spending money to learn something new can be hard on the heart - hence my previous question.


You can test both, i.e. the same landers you used for SOI offers, and also the 2-step angle. I've had success with both.


My general suggestion as outlined in the tutorial is this:

-To ensure traffic quality, run on a good-quality source (like propellerads/popads) with a not-too-low bid.

-To ensure lander quality, rip landers that are popular (i.e. received lots of traffic over at least a few days; used by many) and well-optimized for functionality + display + speed.

-That way, when you test offers and they don't convert, you can "place the blame" on the offer. You never know for sure 100% - but at least it would be a good guess (again, assuming your traffic and lander quality are good).

Whereas, if you're bidding very low and/or just using a random lander, and the offer doesn't convert, you wouldn't know which of the 3 elements to blame.


Yes you can certainly reuse your blacklists! However, ZA isn't exactly a newbie-friendly geo. @jaybot made some nice geo suggestions.


The -70% ROI rule of thumb sounds about right. However, if you're running in a very competitive geo that has a ton of traffic, you may need to optimize from a low ROI by cutting aggressively. In that case though, you should still have enough traffic left over after all the cutting, to make your money from. For beginners though, the -70% ROI should be a decent guide.

The optimization sounds about right assuming you used the stats calculators to cut landers and offers.


If you cut offers and landers according to the stats calculators, then there would be no need to retest, because those calculators are already pretty stringent in their cutting criteria.

Placements/zones though, can be retested when the campaign turns green - especially if your cutting criterion is on the aggressive side, e.g. cutting at 0.5-1x of payout in ad spend without conversions.

And, of course placements/zones can also be retested when you find a better-converting lander+offer combo - because how well a placement converts will depend on how good the offer and lander are.


LOL!

Optimizing the current camp sounds good!

Retesting landers - as mentioned before, unnecessary if they were cut using stats calculator.

ZA - if you're finding that you're throwing too much money at it, can try at a later time.

Testing other T2 geos - good plan! But mind your test budget - if you want to test multiple geos at the same time, run some initial traffic to each to see which one looks the most promising, then focus money and time on optimizing that. That way you don't lose money learning the same things from multiple campaigns. (However, if budget isn't an issue for you, feel free to test as much as you can!)

As for reading on STM until your eyes bleed - the brain can only stay focused for so long at a stretch. Also, knowledge is great, but it needs to be implemented in order for us to assimilate it into our existing paradigm. I find that the best balance is to read some, test some, then read some more.

Lots of fun ahead!




Amy

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Oh, Amy with your facts and numbers and screenshots. I can't compete with you there

Traffic inventory shows about the same for me:

US Popads:



US Propeller:


Propeller does have more. And in ZA it's like 10x more. Smaller geos like a bajillion times more.

But.

Running a fresh camp at average bid on Popads vs Propeller will result in more traffic. Granted, I have not done a real scientific study for this. But it sure feels that way. There are a ton of reasons why this might happen. So, I definitely agree with you on:

Yes. Definitely never take my word on anything. I'm usually wrong, so always be testing!

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Thanks for the answers above. I will take them into use and respond to them later this weekend or hopefully next week. Just here to give a quick update

Just giving a quick update here. Today i got pwned by France :


I think its safe to say that i am not ready to tackle these GEO's yet. First because i am starting out with no WL or BL and second, because my payout is way to low (0.80) per lead in a T1 country. I decided to stop the campaign after -50$ losses and some optimization.What i did was, i had 10 creatives for Push, i saw that one of those was getting 3 conversions and had a ROI of only -3%. So i stopped the other creatives, focused only on this one and cut out the landers that were not converting as well. I highlighted some zones that were in the negative payout zone (1x -0.80) and let it run for antother couple minutes.
Unfortunately it didn't go that well as you can see. I now understand why people should rather start in other GEO's that are easier first.


Anyway, for the upcoming days and probably weeks i have decided to stick to T2 and T3 and just test a lot with Push and Pops, AFAIK if something works on Pops it might as well work on Push (sometimes), so thats why i am trying out those 2 for now.
I probably won't be updating this in the upcoming days as i really wanna focus on getting a lot of campaigns running and get some more data.

Anyway, lets see how i will perform in the next weeks,

Ttyl

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It´s not only the payout, the thing is that in IT for example there are many good CC submits with payouts of $15-$25 or so.

That will make it harder for you to compete.

When others run such high payouts in the same vertical with good optimized lists you have no big chances to succeed there.

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Ackchually...

For a virgin SOI camp in FR with No List those are nice numbers: 19k visits 1.5k clicks, and 10 conversions are pretty sweet. The -$50 loss and -80% ROI is rough, but.

You'll have to do it at some point, just make a note of the zones you were running, you can always come back to it later and the zones are usually still good/bad. One of my first Tier1 mistakes was running in the US for an hour or two. Fucking killed me at the time, but I got some decent data from that. And now I can run a pops camp in US at any time and only get slightly killed

Plus, those conversions you got in FR are probably from good global zones. Check them against other geos you've ran and see if they line up. If so, then you've got something to work with.

In fact, you can also do that backwards and try an extremely restricted WL camp using zones you've found to convert from other geos and see how they work in FR without losing too much.

And... Oh shit, this was Push? Hi-Q only?

You're probably bidding too much. Even if you set a daily budget of $10 (an you probably should to start), you can overspend like crazy if you're bidding too high, even on propeller. I wouldn't start bidding at anything above 0.01 and even that may be too high.

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Execution is key, and the more i throw myself into Media Buying, the more i seem to get the idea of just doing it. I had 2 not so well days but let me start from the beginning.

So, i tried all the god damn ways to make Pops in SG works but the volume was just not enough for me, or i was too stupid to scale it up. 3 Days ago i got this idea stuck in my head, since i am switching more and more to push i could try to make SG work with Push. So what i did yesterday, was set up 2 Push Campaigns in SG (CPC Model on PropellerAds) with some really nice landers that i optimized a couple days ago (does speed matter on PUSH?, as much as it does on POP?).

Anyway, here are the results from yesterday




To give you a better understanding - The 3 Campaigns in the red were a Multi Click Offer with 2 Offers on the Landing Page, they were promoting the same, but just with 1 Lander that has been working for me in the past. The top campaign, which is green, was 3 landing pages with 1 offer. Once i was setting the campaign up, the conversions that day came in pretty quickly, and if hadn't been experimenting with bids (as you can see in the second screenshot), it would've been a green day. However, i know that there are people that are just waiting to get their hands on my stuff, so i decided to try to scale up faster by testing bigger bids, in order to get more volume. Unfortunately it didn't work so well, as you can see. However, i almost reached the second milestone (50 a day in revenue) and i was pretty bummed that i didn't reach it yet LOL. Anyway, i tested a couple things but didn't have enough time yesterday so i just let it sit the whole day.

Yesterday after starting these campaigns, i was running them for 2-3 hours and there were clear winners in the creatives and the lander. So i cut out the rest and decided to focus on those. Unfortunately, after optimizing the campaign i started to recieve less clicks and less conversions. And i didn't cut any zones at that point. I did cut zones when i got home in the evening. But only like 2 or 3.

Today i actually thought it would get better again, but i have read that especially POPS and Push can have some major fluctuations. And today i think there was one of those days:





Although i must say, it doesn't look that bad, i just have the problem, the moment i make a new campaign for a bigger bid is the moment that i start to lose money and get into red.
Anyway there are more campaigns today tho, and this is because i recieved an eMail from my Aff Network that they have some new offers in, and there was one in particular that i thought is amazing to promote. It's phone that just came out on the market and i thought if i would be the first one to promote it, i may have hit a goldmine.

Well, it didn't quite work that well (the 2 campaigns on the top are the new campaigns i have made today, first one is POP, second one is PUSH). For those 2 i only used landers that have worked well with other campaigns that i have created before (was that a mistake, should i go with a lander that works, or shall i do a new test of landers, every time i get a new offer to promote?) - Anyway the third campaign was another Bid Test from the campaign that was in green yesterday. As i was having green yesterday, i thought it would be time to scale it up and see how it performs from a 0.2 Bid to a 0.32 Bid. Well the result wasn't that great to say atleast (3rd Campaign) - The fourth campaign on the is the one that was green yesterday. Almost break-even but not so much.

And today i also decided to go through all my POP Campaigns that were in the same category as the fifth campaign and decided to make a Whitelist of converting zones for me. Its only like 60 zones or something so not that big of a WL, but i wanted to try it with the new offer that i got, so thats the fifth campaign, but i just created this a couple hours ago. I am not that familar with WL/BL, is there a specific guide to follow, or any tips that i can use along the way of building my whitelist / blacklist? Because i am not sure if i am doing it right.

So thats the last 2 days. I must say the fear is still quite there but not as much anymore as it used to be. I still believe that i couldve done more testing today with bids, but the fear quite got me good today. I really have to jump over my shadow for once, dont you agree? Are these stats that i showed you, even relevant, or should i keep increasing the bid to tell if the campaign sucks or not?

Does it make sense to do a Bottest on Push Campaign or shall i rather not do that/is it pointless?

With Push, is it smarter to increasing the bid on 1 traffic source to get more volume, or is it smarter to have the same bids on multiple traffic sources, promoting the same vertical with the same funnel?
I think i still need to learn A LOT about optimization, bid testing, managing fluctuations and emotional self control on this.


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Slightly killed, lol. Yeah i have made some notes along the way of running this stuff in FR, but i am still not comfortable with this GEO, its so crazy to lose so much money in such short time
Wow, i have never heard of that. I will definitely take a look into this

It was medium and HQ, and yeah. The CPC pretty much kicked my ass pretty damn good haha!


I tend to always forget my competition.. Yeah i really should stick to other GEOS at first, before i am comfortable spending enough money to test T1 Geos and gather good data. Would you recommend running CC Submits in T2 or T3 Geos, without a list, or should you first gather a good WL using Leadgen Sweepstakes, and then move onto CC Submits when you have your list ready?


Thanks for the recommendation on the emojis and text, definitely got some great ideas out of those!
Yeah i realized that these big banner images are actually not needed tho. I still try to throw in 1 or so in a campaign of 10 creatives, just to see if it works any time.



Yup, noticed that i get kicked in the nuts pretty fast on ZP hehe.



Uh huh! Its a work in progress tho, i still try to make everything as clean as possible without wasting to much time on it, but i am getting better at it!



I might have wrote it in the wrong way! I didn't want to optimize all the landers i had, only like about 5 or so, that i have ready to go when i need it urgently. At this point i think i only have about 6 or 7 landers ready to be changed within a couple of minutes. A couple of the Giftboxes, Questionaires etc. just so i can extensively test it. Thats one thing that was great today too. As soon as i saw the new campaigns in the eMail that i recieved today, i went ahead and got into my folder of ready LP's and changed them. It only took me like 25 minutes to get 4 landers ready to go!




4AM, love your dedication! I am exactly the opposite, lol. I get up at 4AM!
Anyways, you are definitely right and i will not touch ZP for the next couple of tests now as they always have seemed to give me a bad ROI, definitely my mistake.

Thanks for the recommendations on the Push Campaigns, i really should be spying more on campaigns but you and twinaxe gave me a good direction of what i have to do in order to create good creative. Are you still using CPC when doing Push or are you using CPM?

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Push is made for CPC. CPM simply doesn't make sense. I know some older posts talk about how CPM can work, but those are... older.

I think admaven guy had a nice post about why CPC and Push go hand-and-hand, but I'm too lazy to search for it.

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Another question that just came up in my head: How do you decide when to pull the trigger when scaling up on a push campaign?


Lets say i have a green campaign on Day 1 with a Bid of 0.2 CPC. On Day 2 i want to get more volume and decide to scale up and raise the bid up to 0.3, i get a lot more clicks but the green campaign turned into red. Now how do i go from there? I read from twinaxe's posts that the more volume you have the worse the ROI can become but when do you decide if its best to just pull the offer all together or when do you decide to keep just blacklisting zones?

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In the end you can use the good ol´ testing formula for this as well.

Number of landers x number of offers x average offer payout x 10 = budget

When you just want to scale it´s pretty easy

1 LP x 1 offer x offer payout x 10 = budget

When you don´t see chances to succeed after half of the budget cut the test.

Btw, how did you try to scale?

Did you increase the bid of the profitable and running campaign or did you create a new campaign for the higher bid?

In case you created a new campaign, did you start RON or with bad placements from the original campaign excluded?

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Thanks!

No, for every higher/lower bid i learned to create new campaigns, as i've heard heard the campaign will perform worse when changing bids while its running/has already ran.
So i pretty much duplicated the campaign on PropellerAds with the bad placements already blacklisted and only changed the bids and disabled the bad performing Push Creatives.

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Alright, treat the campaigns basically like a new campaign.

Unluckily there is no guarantee that all bids work equally good.

But the good part is that you don´t need to test landers and offers again so testing such stuff is done pretty quick.

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Bam!




Just tested lots of offers and got a winner. Yesterday i got up to 30$ in revenue and last night i went back to the computer just to top up my PropellerAds Account and use a higher bid. Turns out the higher bid was not that good.

Anyway my biggest revenue was today in the morning when i decided to let it run for a couple of hours straight



But then. Then i went ahead and gave it another run (same campaign, no optimizations done yet) and this was the result



Can anybody tell me what happened here? I tried to scale it with a bigger bid (with a new campaign of course) - That didn't work so i thought i just stick around with the other sucessful offer, but now i went from a ROI of 343% to a ROI of -70% and even -90% (if i go by specific hours of the day) - I asked the AM, he said he doesn't know and that its best to stop the campaign for now. The weird thing is that this all happened in 5 hours - How is a campaign that has avg. ROI of 300% suddenly turn into red with avg ROI of -80% without even changing anything?

edit: Landers and Tracking URL Are not flagged by Google, already checked those. After checking the Zone ID's i noticed that even the biggest zone which gave me a 307+ ROI is now at -80% ROI - Something is definitely wrong..

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Let me be the first to say, fuck yeah! Those are awesome numbers when you zoom out.

As for the dramatic swings, I don't know the offer, or geo, or really anything. With my shitty math, it looks like a $0.40 payout that converts like mad, and you crushed it for a few hours.

Unfortunately, it's hard to tell what the fluctuations are without running it a full 24 hours.

And even then, that might change by the day of the week. So you would have to run it 24/7 for a full week to make any real decisions on what happened.

Now, I know you probably don't have that luxury.

But you're probably doing yourself a huge disservice by not running it a full day first.

People work, eat, sleep, go drinking, and other activities throughout the day. It's really difficult to pinpoint what happened without gathering enough data.

That's certainly not enough time for the any reasonable advertiser to go 'oh shit, turn that off now!' They usually wait 1 day minimum. And usually 7 days before they make a huge adjustment.

I could be wrong.

But I could be right.

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At first congrats, stats look good so far and you see that it´s definitely possible for you to run higher numbers.

But as jaybot said, big fluctuation can happen when you only compare few hours with few different hours or so.

That´s why it´s important to run campaigns for longer to get a better overview about the average longterm performance.

Surprise, surprise

How did you run your campaigns otherwise?

Only for an hour, then pausing, then for another hour later?

So the campaign was running for some hours, then you paused it, then you resumed the same camapign and suddenly conversion went down the drain?

If so it would be good to know why you paused the campaign.

And I am a bit confused about the screenshots

The screenshot at the top is from when?

Then the second one is from the best hour and the third one from the worst hour or what?

Is this a push campaign or Pops?

What about LP CTR and in case it´s push, what about creative CTR?

Same for the good hours and the bad hours or different?

And in what Geo do you run the campaign?

Maybe the good hours were prime time and the bad hours not.

Let´s try to solve the misery

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Geo is PH so the payout is pretty massive if you ask me, maybe the advertiser realised that and made changes. Because the offer does not show up in the affiliate network anymore and I have no answer from the AM about the offer yet.

I usually run campaigns throughout the day but because it was a very good and fast converting campaign in a T3 geo I wanted to make sure that the leads are actually getting approved by AM and advertiser. Not that I am spending 500 dollars on traffic just to get told that my leads are bad.

Sorry for the confusion. The first screenshot is in the morning after I hit the 307+ ROI, the second one are the stats of the hour , in this case 5 AM and the third screenshot is the one after I got approval from AM that I should send more traffic, 10 AM.

Landers had a ctr of 80% to 95% and now after the bad hours one has a ctr of 32% , the second one has a ctr of 37% and the third one has a ctr of 45%.

Creative CTR is 3.33% with about 300.000 impressions. I had one more creative that was similar and this one had 2.07% CTR with 130.000 impressions. After my last try to get some impression by making a new campaign with the same settings like the old one the first CTR had 1.47% and the second one has 1.57%.

I wish I could test it out now but the offer seems to be gone or not accessible for me :|. I wouldn't have paused the campaign in the morning if I knew my leads were okay. I know that I should except some fluctuations, but I can't be that terrible just from a couple hours to the other. Hope y'all can shed some light on this!

Thanks for help Jaybot and twinaxe

Sent from my SM-G965F using STM Forums mobile app

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If you want to send me the offer in PM, then I can check if I see it or not (when I have an account at the network).

Because when you can´t see it anymore it sounds like it got paused.

That way we could at least try to find out if it only happened for you or in general.

And yes, about $0.40 for a SOI would be very good for PH.

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Sounds like it got paused or severely adjusted by the advertiser.

The only way to know is to wait for a response from your AM at this point.

0.40 for PH would be yuuuuuge. Most offers are like 0.08 if I remember.

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Yep i send it to you via PM

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Checked it myelf and can´t see the offer in my account.

So it´s good possible that it got paused.

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Thx for checking twinaxe.

Its still great and i am happy i got the Chance to run this offer, i would just imagine how big the payout would've been if I had run the offer for 24 hours straight if I had the chance. Still got about 40$+ out of the campaign. And I also have a little whitelist for PH now ))

Sent from my SM-G965F using STM Forums mobile app

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But only use the data from the converting time for the list.

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