Home > Push Traffic >

---

Come Laugh at My Newbie Mistakes (then help me please! haha) (51)

---

Hi!

So this might be the most random entry into affiliate marketing!

TLDR Quick History: Always loved the web, been a dream of mine for years to work full time on a net business, worked building websites for a while, almost achieved my dream through Amazon FBA but didn't enjoy it/like where the business was going. So I sold it off and now I am using the proceeds from that sale to (hopefully) set myself up in AM.

So, now for the random story: A friend of mine introduced me to the $1 guide on STM, so I bought one, did it, and enjoyed it.

Then he started Vortex's amazing 40-day beginners course and I tagged along. But, then he QUIT! and I didn't want to, I wanted to carry on. So I joined STM. I'm half way through Vortex's course and loving it, hopeful for the future.

I want to thank everyone for these excellent guides. Making AM a success is extremely important to me. I have a young family and my dream is to provide for them and be happy in my work. I have really enjoyed the little that I have learned about AM and so excited to learn more!

One day I hope I can help others too by contributing to the STM community. It would also be a dream to attend one of the AW conferences in the future.

I've read so many success stories on this forum, then looked back at that persons first posts. It has inspired me that everyone starts somewhere. With a lot of work and perseverance, I hope I can post my own little success story one day. I still can't quite believe that people make a living from AM, It seems like a dream.

Budget: Approx $9K USD (+I have a job)

Goals: To achieve an income of $100 a day by the end of 2020 (12 Months time). Do you guys think this budget/time frame combo will be realistically achievable?

Thanks in advance for any little info nuggets that anyone wants to throw my way!

Gav

---

Sup Gav? Quick turn on your goal(s) - yes, probably if you don't quit and stick with it. But don't focus on how much you will earn after xyz time that's a trap most of us fall into, now I don't want to spread bad feelings or anything you can hit that in a few weeks, main challenge will be consistency and that you can achieve only grinding ( testing ) non stop. Now that I said that, you can probably think to yourself sure not a problem at all ( after all earning xxx/day is what's motivate you ) but once you dive into everyday grind you will see that it's not such an easy task. At least that is hardest part for me.

Questions.

1. Ofc if you run in other GEOs at least try with Google translate and then later if you see potential you can translate more accurately on Transey or whatever. You can also spy on other people translations and adjust to yours but that way you can never be sure how accurate translation is.

2. No man that's a script for calling out particular users, you should adjust as broader as you can as long as it isn't specified different in offer. So if your offer doesn't say only for this or that carrier you should test all of them, you need to adjust your lander to your offer, don't adjust offer to LP if I understand you correctly if not my apologies.

---

Hi Ivan, thanks for the reply and advice.

So are you saying that earning $xxx isn't the true problem but earning $xxx consistently day-by-day is the harder problem?

Are you saying it's harder to find consistent profits just while your learning or is it always going to be hard to find consistent profits even when I have experience?

I do worry that people who are successful in AM are the 1% and there are plenty of others that don't find success. I just want to know that it's a viable business if I work hard and persevere. Because I don't like to rely on luck.

I will try translations for the landing pages in English then.

I'll take you advice and ditch the mobile carrier Landers and find two more with broader appeal.

Thanks for your help!

---

Manchester you say? So maybe you remember Only Fools and Horses tv show and famous words from Del: "Don't worry, Rodney. This time next year, we'll be millionaires!" All I'm saying don't think about how much money you will be earning in a year cause I think it could be dangerous mindset sometimes Don't get me wrong everyone is different and I might be wrong but when you think like that then you have some expectations and if something went wrong it can lead to disappointed. There's a lot of grinding in the middle of that so I say just dive in, focus on work and don't think about anything else just launch and test, test, test. That's most important part in the grand scheme of things when you just starting out. Best of luck mate in a few months you will have much better picture of how's things are and what can you expect.

p.s. No one will laugh on your mistakes today you are fresh, tomorrow you can be super affiliate, nobody knows that, everything is possible.

---

Yeah! Me and my wife love only fools and horses! So funny. That's a proper British classic comedy. I'm guessing you like it too? I can barely watch the episode where they smash the chandelier. Oh my god, it makes me cringe so badly every time.

You make perfect sense Ivan, when you say not to concentrate on the money and more on the work and improving every day. I've had experience working on big projects, where it's impossible to focus on the end product. You just have to put your best effort into the little part that you are completing that day.

I'll make a mental note to base my success on working hard, launching, testing and learning then. Thanks for the advice. I appreciate the honesty.

Good luck to you as well Ivan. I hope we both find success!

---

Hi @manchester! Thanks for giving first the $1 guide and then the 40-day tutorial a try. Now that the holidays are behind us I'm back to work full-time! Apologies for my late arrival.

Just wondering though: Would you mind me asking what happened to your Amazon FBA business? Sometimes things just take a dive right before they become wildly successful. I always enjoy learning what works and what doesn't, and the causes of success and failure.

As for contributing to this community - you ALREADY have by starting this follow-along. It's not easy to start a journey, and being willing to spend the time to document what you do by putting everything under other people's scrutiny is admirable.

Let me answer your questions and provide some feedback on what you have so far...

Good budget! As long as you don't give up and your seed money doesn't dry up, you WILL succeed in one way or another.

To me, "failure" is only a case of giving up before success is found.

Having said that, there are a million ways to make money online. The 40-day tutorial is a good introduction to paid traffic, because pop traffic is easy and relatively cheap to learn, but there are easier ways to make bigger money consistently.

Once you have experience with pop traffic, and have a couple of green campaigns under your belt, I would suggest to try push and/or native. Also, I'm preparing to write a newbie guide on FB - hopefully when you reach the point where you have some pop experience, it will be ready.

So yeah - there are many options. You have an interesting journey ahead of you.


Malay actually isn't the only language in Malaysia. Chinese (simplified) and English are also pretty widely spoken.

Tips: On traffic networks that allow targeting by language, you can choose a particular language and use landers written in that language. Alternatively, you can prepare landers in several languages, and set up rules in your tracker to detect each user's browser language and direct them to the set of landers written in the same language.


Several options:

-Try fiverr - you can get up to 1000 words translated for $5-10.

-Google translate can be decent if you'd first rewrite the content into VERY short sentences, and without any figures of speech.

-Download landers that are already written in the target language. Of course that's no guarantee that the translation is good, but if you only pick ones that have received a lot of traffic over several days, chances are they're decent converters (or the affiliate running them would have paused them sooner).

I wouldn't recommend spending too much on translations before you even know if the campaign will end up profitable. When you hit green, you can always spend a bit more to get proper translations done.


You could change the wording so it doesn't say "Celcom" or "Maxis". But first, make sure it's not from a script that's detecting and displaying each user's mobile carrier - if so, then the lander will display a different mobile carrier for each user.


Definitely agree with Ivan there! Having occasional 3-4 figure days is a good start, but being able to reach CONSISTENT 3-4 figure days will take a good system - which you will gradually develop as you gain experience.


A part of the reason is that many people just aren't prepared to go through the learning curve, and/or ready to invest the money required for testing and learning. But of course, there are a thousand other reasons why someone doesn't succeed. You need to look inside of yourself instead of at everyone else, as each person's situation is different.

Affiliate/Internet marketing skills can definitely (100%!) be used to create and grow a viable business. The great stackman once said in a post, something along the lines of "when you test a lot of stuff, things just can't NOT work out" (sorry if I paraphrased it inaccurately - I tried my best - can't seem find that post anymore although I KNOW it's on the forum somewhere). It's one of the most motivating statements I've ever heard.

In other words, if something isn't working out, it means we're not testing enough stuff. i.e. Something needs to change.

Whether it be the offer/funnel, or the pricing, or the audience targeting, or the bidding, or the creatives (ads/landers).

There are millions of business that need more leads and customers, and for as long as this remains true, marketers like us will be in demand. And there are thousands of ways to achieve this goal - and the methods are constantly evolving with new ideas and new technology.

The 40-day tutorial is only a "way in", and shouldn't be treated as the only way to make your money forever after.

Sorry for sounding really general - just wanting to point out the bigger picture.

Looking forward to your next update!



Amy

---

Hi @vortex,

Thanks for stopping by my follow along to give me some advice.

Yeah, I don't mind. The summary of what happened is I started a brand that was making money, but I ran into cashflow issues with ordering suppliers (you need a big budget for FBA).

So I started doing retail arbitration, which I was lucky to be successful at. It got to a point where I was moving too much stock to do it from my home and needed a warehouse and staff.

I visited a good friend of mine and his large warehouse operation and he offered to help me setup. But after seeing his day-to-day life, I realised that wasn't what I wanted, and I had stopped enjoying what I was doing.

So I decided to sell everything. It was only a side income, and I always worked full-time during doing it. So now I have some business experience and a chunk of money that will hopefully allow me to be successful in AM.

My goal is to earn a full-time income online, but I want to be happy too. It was probably down personal preference really, I'd probably attempt development of a brand again but I didn't enjoy Retail arbitration at all.

If you have anymore questions just let me know.

I'm so excited to run traffic and find some success in pop and then try another method. I like the look of push/native/FB, but how can I decide between them? I want to pick one method and stick to it. Then make it work before I move on.

I'd love to know your opinion on which one is kinder to newbies and easier to make a profit from? Push/native/FB?

Because at the end of the day my main goal is to go full time by the end of the year.

Regarding the Malaysian Landers: Thanks for your advice and everyone else's help, I've nearly finished them now, I was very happy with the service and price of diverse (like you suggested).

I read your post this morning and that quote cheered me up immensely (I had just realised I'd been working on the wrong copy of a landing page for 30mins so I was a bit pissed! Haha)

I just needed to hear that success in AM is possible and not down totally to luck.

I know I need to concentrate on moving forward and perseverance in my journey. As well as asking for help and taking good advice.

Making AM work is the most important thing in my life after my family. I am determined to make this a success and I'm not going to give up until I do.

I hope that in 12 months time I can look back on this post and be happy with what I've achieved and I also hope I've made a lot of friends here on STM along the way!

Then maybe I can help someone starting out just like me.

Regarding the follow along: should I update my original post with my progress or should I add new posts to this thread? Can't decide which is better?

Gav

---

Thanks for sharing your experiences Gav! I bet a lot of members would love to learn how to do retail arbitration from you! Would be wonderful if you could find the time to share more about that, although I understand you may be too busy at the present.

Just one question for now: At the margins you were making, would it have been feasible to hire someone to replace you?


Push is the easier and cheaper to run compared to native and FB. You'll likely find success sooner with push.

However, there's no telling when push will be regulated. There's a chrome update coming out in February that will limit the volume of push traffic. But my guess is that push will still Thrive for a while yet. Just don't know until when. But as of now I would still recommend push for newbies. You'll find twinaxe's posts helpful.

Native on the other hand has been consistent in the last couple years as far as I've heard. The "downside" is that traffic is expensive so you'd need to promote stuff with high payouts to net a profit. You know how right out with pop traffic you're cutting placements at 2x ad spend? With low payout offers in the $1-3 range you're looking at spending $2-6 to test each placement. With native you're looking at offers with payouts that are $10-20++, so it takes quite some budget to cut placements that don't back out for you.

FB and Adwords and Youtube are major traffic sources that won't be going anywhere anytime soon. So if you have the patience and the budget, figuring out even one of them would be worthwhile.

And then there are relatively new traffic sources like Pinterest and Linkedin that I hear people making a killing on. I haven't run those myself so can't comment.


I'm looking forward to seeing you post your results in the "Success Stories" section before the end of year 2020.

Another piece of advice: Stay curious and be excited to test out new stuff! This industry is evolving constantly. What works today may not work tomorrow. But the ones that are willing to test, will find new ways to make things work.

Also be aware that affiliate offers isn't the only way to monetize paid traffic! Once you get the hang of paid traffic, there are lots of possibilities available to you.

You can collect leads and sell them to businesses.

You can start an agency and promote other people's products and services for a recurring fee.

You can sell your own products (physical/digital) and services.

Etc. etc.

Looking forward to seeing how your journey will unfold over the course of the coming year.


Normally people like to add new posts instead of updating the original post. That way readers can see the progress.

Also, there IS a character limit for posts, so if you keep adding to the original post, you may hit that limit (although, thanks to my own lengthy posts, I've secretly increased the character limit several times already...but there is still a limit).




Amy

---

Probably, Just. I was doing it part time myself, so if I had gone full time I know I would have made more. I suppose having to expand into a warehouse would have hit my profits. Although I knew two of my friends who were making it work, and one offered to help me set it up. But like I said I had lost enjoyment of it. The thought of having to employ someone and teach them how to do it filled me with dread. I realised that I prefer to work on my own. So I wanted to explore other methods of making money online, now I had a little money behind me.

I will say one thing tho, I do miss the profits in Q4!! my god, I couldn't keep stock in. As fast as I got it to FBA it would sell within hours! I did get mad feeling in September to start it all up again just for Q4, but I want to move on now! I'll do my best to answer any questions about Retail Arbitrage if anyone has any.

Thanks for your insight into push. I think when I "graduate" from pop it will be my next challenge. I don't mind so much about making immense profits while I'm learning. I'd rather get my skills up to scratch before trying to attempt those higher payout offers, or I would definitely waste lots of money!

It would be a dream to be able to post a success story next year! If I can make this work, go full time and just provide enough for me and my family by next year I'd be over the moon. So now i'll have to get stuck into the hard work. Thanks for the vote of confidence Amy!

I'll stay curious! luckily I really love learning new things.

I also need to keep my head down, stick out the bumpy ride of learning AM and keep the faith that I'll get there in the end.

Thanks, Gav

---

Day 26 - Optimizing Landers for Speed

This days work was an eye opener for me. I've come from the world of WordPress and optimising single page landers is very different to optimising a wordpress website. I spent a while on this day, due to family commitments and the holidays. But I can't say I didn't enjoy it!

It was so interesting finding new ways of speeding up a one page website and then testing out your score in GtMetrix.com. Although I was getting wildy different page loading times, depending on the time of day, I'm pretty happy with the result.

Some ripped landers I found difficult to optimise to the the speed I wanted (< 1sec). Because they had been coded using Bootstrap or JQuery. I think in the future it might be beneficial to re-code the landing pages that work in vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript? All of them were pretty simple designs, so it shouldn't be an issue with a little work.

It was a little frustrating sometimes, digging around and fixing up other peoples code to make stuff work better and faster!

I had the greatest success with speeding up my landers by:

1. Reducing the HTTP requests.
2. Optimising images and converting them to base64
3. Making sure you have a favicon.ico
4. Using the waterfall graph to pinpoint problems in my loading times
5. Getting CloudFront to auto compress my files and serve them GZipped.

I've never used Amazon S3 before for hosting so that has been a learning curve too, but I really like it so far!

I struggled to find landers in the language I needed, so on the advice of lots of helpful people I had someone on Fiverr do it for me. I was really pleased with the price and delivery time. I would definitely recommend it and I will use that method again in the future. I don't speak Malaysian (surprisingly!) but the seller had great reviews and lots of them so I'm confident it'll be ok.

Onto the Bot testing!

Questions:

1. I had a quick scan through the bot testing lesson and it has a guide about calculating the percentage of bots for each placement in Voluum. I am currently using BeMob and they don't seem to have the same feature. I asked their customer service and they confirmed they didn't, just BOT rules. Does anyone know how I can get a Bot percentage calculation per placement in BeMob? Maybe Carumen's parse JavaScript method as suggested by vortex? or is there another easier way in BeMob?

Gav

---

Setting up my multi offer / Landers on propeller ads

I just setup all my Landers and offers in bemob, then a campaign in propeller ads to send traffic, it went for moderation and they rejected it saying the Lander was misleading? Saying I can't say "you won an iPhone"

I tested different levels of aggression in my landers, so some are aggressive and others are gentle.

Not sure of my next step here? Do I just send it to moderation again and hope they see a less aggressive one this time? Or should I change all the Landers to be less aggressive?

I don't want to piss off propeller ads and get banned or something but I want the best chance not my pops being successful.

---

Coming along nicely!

For aggressive on propeller... it's always worth a shot to try, as it depends on the geo/vertical. But once they say why, it's best to avoid that reason.

Just edit the lander/s that has the 'you won an iPhone' and change it to 'iPhone!' or 'you've been selected!'

If you want to sneak your other landers in the rotation later: first just send the traffic to the fixed lander until it gets approved.

After it's approved, you can change the rotations to all the other landers you wish.

But! Propeller will periodically check the pages, and if they find one that breaks the rules, they'll reject again and pause the whole camp.

---

Thanks @jaybot, that's great advice. I'm editing the landers so they are less aggressive. (keeping a copy of the aggressive landers just in case! )

Gav

---

Hey manchester, about aggressive landers and stuff...

Try to run as aggressive as possible but don´t overdo it so that you don´t run into trouble on the traffic sources.

First important thing is the text in the JS alert because that´s the first that the reviewers and users see.

Try to paraphrase it a bit.

"You won XYZ" vs "Today you can win XYZ"

It can also help to run landers that look a bit like big and trusted websites like Google or Facebook but don´t look like 1:1 clones.

Facebook look can work good because you can find many landers with some fake social buttons at the blue top bar togetehr with fake comments at the bottom.

That way you still can run "semi-aggressive" in sense of looking a bit like a trusted website but it´s not too aggressive because you don´t clone anything or use real brand logos or so.

---

great advice @twinaxe, thanks.

So you have to get right up to the line with aggressiveness, I had no idea. Glad I asked this question!

Now you've mentioned it, I'd seen a few trusted website clones on Adplexity.

gav

---

I don't want to sound pedantic but let's make a difference between "trusted website clones" and landing pages that are built to look like trusted websites.

This is important because clones would be rather 1:1 exact copies, same style, same colors and real logos.

And this will definitely get you into trouble.
Not only with trafficsources but also with Google safe browsing for example.

Using same color scheme, layout and stuff is mostly ok as long as you don't pretend to be the trusted website.

Similar and lookalike is ok, using brand logos or exact copies is not OK.

---

I changed my landers to be less aggressive and they passed review at Propeller Ads.

I put a budget of $10 into the campaign just to get things started and a few numbers coming in.

Here are the results of my very first multiple landers & offers testing:

Offer Results:



So, looking at those numbers I would say Offer 1 passes the test of at least 2 conversion for less than x10 payout? So I'm guessing I'll pause the other offers now?


Lander Results:



Looking at the landers, I guess that "Quiz" is looking like the best performing lander right now. But the 40 day guide says to test more once I have a good offer, so that's what I'll do next.

Questions

1. I'm a bit confused about how much traffic to send though each time I test things? to find a good offer I just sent $10 through randomly. But I suppose that didn't matter as I was only trying to reach 2 conversions for less than x10 payout.

But how much traffic should I send through to test the landers? I looked on the 40 day guide but I couldn't see any indication. Maybe I missed it.
I had missed it. Just got to the part in the 40 day guide that says you don't want to specify a budget for test traffic. So I think that answers this question.

2. When I update costs from propeller ads, should I use the amount before VAT or +VAT? (It's a tax here in the UK).

Thanks,

Gav.

---

Thanks for sharing Manchester.
Q. For the community. On the Lander Results, is it normal to have a 3:1 ratio on the Clicks to Uniq... columns?

---

Hi manchester, this is a great FA and I definitely will follow you! I think Amy has in mind about if you could have some time to share like mini case study or tutorial about Retail Arbitrage

I hope you will reach all your goals by the end of 2020!

---

Hi @4964420454t

Thanks, I'm only just starting and I need all the help I can get!

But I am determined, so either this year works out or I'll run it into the ground trying! Either way it should be an interesting story.

As for retail arbitration, I'm not an expert by any means. I have a few interesting stories and things I learned. I'd share them with people one day if they are interested.

It's just difficult right now as I'm so short on time at the moment, I have twins that are 14months old and a job.

Trying to make a success out of AM takes up every spare second of my day. I'm currently getting up at 4-5am to "work" on AM before work and most nights the twins don't let me sleep that well! (They make up by being cute!)

Anyway, I don't want to complain, just to explain why I haven't gone further into my story of RA.

Thanks so much, I will be ecstatic if I do!

Gav

---

Yes, use offer 1 now to find the best lander.

Guessing and assumptions are your enemies in marketing.



No clear winner yet, keep running and testing.

I use this formula for such campaigns for each test round

Number of offers X Number of landers X average offer payout X 10 = Test budget

First testing round is to find an offer that can be used to find the best lander.

Lets say you have 5 landers, 3 offers and average offer payout is $0.30 (that´s more or less your setup).

Then the maximum test budget for the first round (finding a good offer would be) 5 LPs X 3 Offers X $0.30 X 10 = $45

But as I said, it´s the maximum budget.
When an offer converts 2-3 times stop the test immediately and run the next round to identify the best lander.
So when an offer converts 3 times after only $4 adspend then you don´t need to keep it running until you reach the budget.

Stop it and continue with the next round.

Then the calculation will be like this: 5 LPs X 1 converting offer X offer payout (let´s say $0.30) X 10 = $15

With these $15 you try to find the best landing page.

When you have a clear winner after this test you will use this lander to test offers.

So this will be your task now, to identify the best lander.

You calculated a test budget and with that budget it should be possible to find a winner.
Of course you can always adjust the budget if needed, but always keep an eye on it to don´t soend too much on campaigns that have no chance to bring the money back.

When you see VAT on Propeller the first thing you should do is to get a VAT number.

Otherwise you pay flat 20% more than needed.

Get a VAT number and you don´t have to pay for it anymore = instant 20% increase in ROI for your campaigns.

---

Looks like things are coming together!

Understood! Life is about fun - I have a lot of respect for people that don't chase money blindly.


Caurmen's method isn't tracker dependent. You should be able to do it with ANY tracker.

Basically it involves putting some code into the landing page, and creating 2 offers in the tracker - one would be your actual offer, the other could be anything - google.com for example.

However: According to caurmen, most bots are outdated browsers that can't read javascript, and only browsers that CAN read javascript will trigger the invisible link.

Honestly though, the assumption above may be outdated - because it's been a while since caurmen wrote that tutorial.

Ultimately, the best way to find out how (in)effective the method still is, would be to run some test data to compare bot % vs. conversion rate, to see whether high % of bot correlates with low conversion rate. Too bad I don't have that kind of time right now.

Some trackers now have bot-detection capability - if yours does then I'd suggest to try it.

Otherwise, you can always just weed out placements based on conversions. It takes more money, but that way you can be more confident you're not cutting potentially profitable placements.


Based on what I know, reviewers would refresh the page a few times to see all landers in rotation. Just resubmitting a campaign without changing anything won't be a good idea. You probably won't get banned the first time, but you never know.

Propeller is pretty strict about saying stuff like "you have won", and about aggressive landers in general. This is why some people resort to cloaking.

The good news is that you CAN get pretty similar CR by saying something like "you can win" - of course this can vary from one case to another.


Haha the old bait and switch trick!

Yes, it does work - at least it did way back when I tried it. But I stopped doing it because sooner or later the traffic network gets really pissed off and you risk losing the account.

To me, if a person is willing to take that kind of risk, they may as well cloak, and/or create and operate multiple accounts.


Nice! That first offer looks promising at -57% ROI, considering you haven't done any major optimizations yet.

To compare offers and cut inferior ones, see this:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...211#post289211


Yes I find that the 10x payout to be adequate. The $10 is only because it's the minimum amount you can set the daily budget to. The 10x payout may be greater or less than the $10.


That's right - it would be difficult (if even possible) to set a budget to test landers, because we'd have no idea how much spend it would take for lander stats to reach statistical significance. For example, if one lander converts quite a lot better than the others, then stat sig is reached sooner than if landers convert at around the same rate.

Some affiliates like to set a maximum test budget - like the one suggested by twinaxe. It's a good thing to do especially for newbies - as having a maximum budget will keep them from overspending on campaigns that have little hope of turning into winners.


That's a good question. I guess you can do it either way. As long as you're consistent, and can tell whether you're in profit "for real".

Scenario 1: Include the 20% VAT when updating costs. That way, a green campaign is actually turning a profit.

Scenario 2: Exclude the 20% VAT when updating costs. That way, only a green campaign with 20%+ ROI is turning a profit.

Of course, we haven't factored in other business costs such as tracker, hosting, and spy tools. But those are pretty much fixed costs - so as long as your gross profits for the month exceed the sum of these expenses, you'd be making a net profit.


No worries - we understand!

It's always very inspiring to read about how new affiliates juggle a day job while learning affiliate marketing, plus attend to their family.

I even knew of someone who had a full-time job, a part-time job AND kids, who was trying to learn AM. (I forget who it was and what happened to them - one of the many students that was in the 6WAMC courses.)

Gives me that motivation to do more work instead of squandering time on excessive sleep etc.



Amy

---

Interesting - I've never looked into such data. Are you referring to lander clicks (from lander to offer)? Or impressions/visits? Voluum doesn't even have the former I don't think.

Which tracker are you using? This may be a good question to ask your tracker support as well.



Amy

---

Confusing Results

I was encourage by the previous test results and decided to pause offers 2 & 3 for now and proceed with offer 1 to test my landers.

I was due to be in work that day, not at home taking care of my kids, so I set Propeller ads up for another $10 of traffic but this time I decided to test the "distributed" traffic option, so It would give me more time to look at statistics throughout my day at work. I also cut approx 4 placement zones that had reached >x2 payout (as the 40 day guide suggests).

Here are the results for yesterday alone:



Surprisingly, the extra $10 of traffic with the best offer only resulted in 1 more conversion

During the course of the day yesterday, the statistical calculator suggested I cut "draw" and "simple" so I paused those two landers (that's why they have less total visits).

Now I'm considering my next step, the lack of conversions from using the one "winning" offer and cutting under performing landers was the opposite of what I expected.

I'm still under the x10 spend rule for each lander (Just). So I might send some more traffic through to see what happens next. I was very surprised to see the total lack of conversions after doing so well yesterday.

That's another question is the x10 spend rule per conversion? so if I had 2 conversions at $0.35 x 2 = $0.70 x 10 = $7... or is it $0.35 x 10 = $3.50? Not sure when to stop testing for offers that make a few conversions.

If I do send $10 more traffic, that will put my total spend up to around $35 in traffic.


Notes
@twinaxe Thanks for the detailed and very helpful post yesterday. I loved the graph! the data was so clear when using that. Do you have a link for that calculator?

Your right, I need to remember that and not jump to conclusions.

I loved your formula for working out test budgets too, I'll definitely be using that one in the future, I really needed a bit of guidance for budgets.

I have a company but I'm not VAT registered. I will add that onto the list of things to do for a 20% ROI bump!

@vortex Thanks for your helpful reply

As for a tracker, I'm glad that I went with Bemob first because I didn't want to start paying for a tracker until I knew what I wanted. Now I'm realizing that I made the right choice. It would be nice to have some indication on how bot infested a placement is. I'll decide on trackers later because it's too tempting to waste time focusing on deciding on tools rather than learning skills, for now I'll push on and look at conversions like you suggest.

I wan't to try and keep my learning as manual and hands on as possible in the beginning, so I can learn and understand AM skills thoroughly. Then in the future I can look for time saving technology.

As for lander aggressiveness, I've decided to keep on the clean-er side. I don't want to get banned. Propeller ads accepted my gentler landers.

You deserve that extra sleep for all the amazing work you do on these guides and the forum! Plus I have no idea how you run your own campaigns too. You must be busy! (but please don't stop!!!) haha

Although having kids cuts down your time drastically, it does give you a stone cold determination to succeed like I've never felt before. I know my family is counting on me, so I'm working harder than I've ever done before!

Gav

---

Hi Amy, I was referring to Manchesters results in post #17 , but it could just as easily apply to post #24 .
I'm going to guess that the ratio of 'clicks' to 'Uniq..' has something to do with manchesters page design.. possibly he has a 3 or 4 click survey leading to some kind of offer?
I was just wondering why we would see significantly more clicks than uniques on a landing page.

---

Trying to find conversions:

I put another $10 through propeller ads to test the landers like I said I would in the previous post. I changed the distribution back to standard and ran the successful offer to the 3 landers I was trying to decide between.

Here are the final lander results including all the traffic since I started:



The $10 spend netted me 2 extra conversions.

Here's the stats for each lander:



I'm not too sure if I should carry on with these landers or not? Is the conversion rate good or bad?

It all depends if the x10 payout rule is per conversion or not? Because they are over if it's $0.35 x 10= $3.50...
But if it's per conversion then it's 4 x $0.35 = $14 before stopping.

With these numbers, should I:
1.Carry on, pick a winning Lander at random, test more offers?

2. Or should I look at finding new landers now if these aren't working?

I've spent $35 in total at this point in the test.

Thanks,

Gav

---

It may just have been a bad day. Still, I would check everything to make sure nothing's down, including:

-Lander: Is it up and running? Did it get flagged by google?

-Offer: Is the traffic still going to the intended offer? Check with your AM to make sure nothing's wrong with the offer.

-Stats: Compare lander CTR with previous CTRs to see whether there's a big difference. May indicate an issue with traffic quality, for example another advertiser is hogging the best traffic leaving you with the junk.

You can try to increase your bid to see if the conversions will come back.

Right now, your priority is to cut landers down to a winner, so that you can use it to test more offers. Make sure you were cutting offers and landers according to stats calculators. If you didn't, redo your testing.

The 10x spend rule - depending on who you heard it from, could apply to landers or offers. Personally, if I'm sure I'm running good landers (popular and optimized), then I would only give an offer 10x spend to test it. If it doesn't convert at least 1-2 times, I usually wouldn't bother with the offer. (I said "usually" because there are exceptions, such as if I'm trying to break into a competitive geo that has a ton of traffic.)

The 10x rule is mainly applied initially, i.e. the first 10x payout in ad spend. You can also apply that rule after that if you wish, i.e. cut the offer if it no longer converts at least once per 10x payout in ad spend, but by that time, you should have enough stats to make a better decision than just based on this rule of thumb.

For example, if you feel that you're very close to hitting on a winning lander (i.e. statistical significance may be reached soon), then you may want to just keep running this offer for a few dollars instead of swapping offers at this point. Ultimately though, I wouldn't recommend using that particular offer plus the winner lander to optimize the campaign (by cutting unprofitable traffic), unless a miracle happens. You'd go broke trying to optimize your way from -80%+ to positive ROI, and won't have any traffic left after the extensive cutting. If you keep running such a low-converting offer, it would only be to help cut down to the winner lander so you could proceed with the next step of using that to test more offers.


You're kind as always!

It's really great to have a "why" that can motivate you to work hard. You definitely have my blessings. Although nobody can predict the future, I truly believe that with your budget, determination, and reasonable time frame, you have a good chance of achieving your goals before the end of this year - may it be with pop or another traffic type.




Amy

---

Ah I see!

The high ratio may be a sign of bot activity. For example spy tools that may have come to "check out" the lander multiple times from the same IP.

The multiple questions on a lander should not be recorded as clicks - normally, only when a visitor clicks on the "click url" which leads visitors away from the lander (e.g. to the offer), would the click register in the tracker as a click.

I just remembered something else too: For landers that contain back button scripts, when visitors click "back" on their browser, that would register as a click too. So if for example they click through the lander to land on the offer page that would count as one click, and then if they clicked back twice that would count as another click - so a total of 2 clicks by one visitor.

Just remembered another possibility as well: If the tracker is counting uniques based on IP, there are cases where multiple different visitors can have the same IP. Some ISPs have a range of IPs that are shared by all users. Also, some visitors may be using proxies - so multiple visitors coming from the same IP.

But yeah - tracker support should be able to answer this question way better than I can I'm sure!



Amy

---

Haha - those lander stats are the worst!

The best case scenario is if one lander really stands out as being superior to the rest - makes it quick and easy (and CHEAP!) to finish that round of split-testing.

But when they go neck-to-neck like this, it's hard to decide what to do. If this trend keeps up after say 3-5 more conversions, I'd suggest to just pick a winner and start another round of split-test (with offers or new landers).

Because ultimately, our goal is to achieve improvements in ROI, NOT try to very accurately identify the best lander. So if the 3 landers keep going neck-to-neck, no matter which one we choose, the ROI would be similar.

I wouldn't apply the 10x rule to landers - that would be way too big a spend (i.e. 40x payout for 4 landers).

At this point you have several options (including the ones you suggested):

-Just pick a "winner" lander, and start another round of split-testing (with offers or landers).

-Run another 10x payout to get more lander stats (conversions) to help you pick a winner more accurately, and THEN start another round of split-testing.


Not to laugh at your misfortune, but you're seeing the equivalent of every affiliate marketer's nightmare. An offer that converts badly but still generating conversions, and landers that are performing similarly. The only thing that saved you from bleeding massively is the fact that the payout is extremely low. Imagine if you had done that with $3.50 payout.

As you gain more experience, you WILL test more efficiently, and catch these bad case scenarios earlier.

Also, your decision on what to do hinges heavily on how confident you are that the landers are good. If I'm using popular landers with good stats in spy tools, and I've optimized them to load quickly and display and function correctly - then any offer I throw at them has better convert well, and right off the bat, or it wouldn't make the cut. (This is with the assumption that I'm confident about the traffic quality I'm getting at my bid - which, again, is something you'll develop a feel for as you gain experience. For a beginner, just make sure you're not bidding very low - around average to start with would be good.)




Amy

---

@vortex Thanks so much for your two detailed replies.

Thanks for the nice thoughts Amy, I'll try my best to show that your confidence in me isn't misplaced! haha

I'm looking at the numbers and like you say, I don't know how this offer+landers combination is going to work.

I'm NOT confident that the landers are the absolute best, I've fixed them up well and I know they load fast. But I ripped them when I didn't know as much as I do now. So I think I might try and find some good english language sweeps landers on Adplexity and have them translated.

As for the offers I don't know, they converted well in the beginning. But I'm getting the feeling that I just need to start again with offers / landers in the same GEO.


I am glad I didn't need to do a x10 spend on a $3.50 payout offer!

As for bidding, I've tried to keep it high like you suggest, to get good quality traffic. Here is a screenshot from propeller ads:




I feel like the next step for me is going to be concentrating on finding more good quality offers and landers and starting the testing again over again

Gav

---

Bidding higher won’t solve the problem.

This is tough to say. But.

Your creatives likely suck compared to what others are running.

The optimization costs can be lower and you will continue to get traffic from day 2 onwards if your CTR is higher.

The optimization cost is simply them charging you at CPM to see what your CTR will be and then what they can squeeze out of you.

If they will be losing money on giving you traffic, then they won’t give you traffic.

Finding the balance of creatives that get high CTR but still have CR at profit is difficult since you have to go through the whole optimization shit every time just to find out.

If advertizer and push ground aren’t charging you for optimization, it’s probably best to test there and then bring your best creatives over to propeller once you’ve got it down to ONE creative that does best.

---

Your right, the CTR does decide your optimization costs.

The funny thing is, that my creatives are ones that have done well in the past. I literally have them running on another camp right now and they have a higher CTR, it's very confusing.

The differences are minor, mostly just a change in the gift card amount.

I love advertizer, but the moderation times are annoying. And I love pushground but my credit card is getting rejected there currently, hopefully I can get that fixed soon, I love working on pushground. Hope their traffic lives up to what they promise!

It's a shame because I like propeller, I want to work with them. But I have a few little niggles like the optimization costs and duplicating camps constantly that put me off

Sent from my Mi 9T using Tapatalk

---

The optimisation costs are only a real problem when you only have fail campaigns that don´t even compensate $1 per creative.

3 creatives = $3 max, every halfway good campaign should be able to compensate $3 over their lifetime, not even per day.

Also don´t test too many creatives in a very beginning on unproven campaigns.

This also helps to keep the costs lower.

But really, I create sometimes 50 or 70 or so campaigns per day and I also have to pay the optimization cost for each and every single campaign.

And although I also think it would be nicer without the cost I don´t see it as a real problem because in the end you only have to pay it once per campaign (or new creative).

When I create 70 campaigns for example where I know already that they work it would be total $70 max running 1 proven creative per campaign.

When these 70 campaigns then make only $5 profit per day then the first day would be $350 - $70 optimization cost = $280 profit and all following days would be the full $350 profit.

I think we can all agree that we would avoid every additional cost but when $1-$2 optimization costs would make or break your campaigns then it´s not the cost that should be improved but your campaigns

---

Most of the camps I set up to test offers fail and don't make any money at all.
Is it different for other people? Do other people make money on most offers they test?

I'm currently using propeller to test offers,

As much as I'd love to have 50-70 camps all turn a profit, it's not realistic for me and my AM skills.

Most of offers I try, I fail to get working, which results in a loss + the added optimization costs-- (when testing on propeller). At a glance, of the 10-15 or so camps I've set up in the last few days, only two of them are green, with a total of $2 profit between them.

I guess what my main question then is:

Is it worth testing on another TS like EvaDav, Pushground, Advetizer where I don't pay optimization costs, then bringing my best camps to Propeller so I can be sure that most camps are going to overcome my optimization costs? OR is it still worth incurring optimization costs and testing offers on Propeller because their traffic is in some way superior?

Trust me, I'm trying

---

Probably not, I also have more fails than successful tests.

This is pretty normal.

The trick is not to get everything you test running on profit.
It´s rather to test fast and effective and make sure that your winning campaigns have enough potential to compensate the costs for the failed tests.

It´s not all completely different campaigns, these are also clones of profitable campaigns.

Then it can easily add up to few hundred active running campaigns.

And for such campaigns I only use 1 creative each because these are already proven campaigns.

I can only say it again, few Dollars optimization cost are no criteria to make or break a campaign.

But when you just can´t get anything running on Propeller then of course test other sources as well.

Not every source works for everyone equally.

There can be sources that are absolutely killing it for me but that suck completely for you and vice versa.

---

Sorry for the late reply,

I'm getting there, I'm testing faster and more effectively than I ever have. I think I might have to make a change though. I have been getting closer to breakeven in Tier 1 GEOs, especially DE and UK. I'm suffering a little bit on the amount of cashflow I need to test offers with higher payouts. I need to start thinking more long term, so that might mean a return to some lower payout offers for now, until I can get breakeven.

Don't get me wrong, the traffic quality on propeller seems great. I just have more difficulty working with it than other TS it seems. I can see that all TS have their quirks and annoying bits. There definitely isn't a perfect TS, not that I've found yet anyway!

Gav

---

When I was starting with paid traffic, I faced a similar problem... the source I chose somehow didn't work for me, I could reach profit here and there, but the final results were always negative. I had to switch sources to finally stabilize my campaigns and eventually I started to use the "first" source again too. So yes, it's pretty common and it's not a major problem if you can't crack a specific source straight away. You can always return to it later on.

Same with me, most of my tests end up negative. And as twinaxe mentioned, it's not a problem to fail, the key is to learn how to identify the failed ones quickly, so you don't waste too much time and $$$ on them... this way, you can progress fast and focus on the campaigns that show potential.

---

UPDATE

Finally, a breakthrough.

I've been concentrating on trying to discover the all faults in my method for a while now. As with any newbie--I'm full of them. The puzzle was why I couldn't find at least one I could improve on?

I've been overbidding. I don't even know why, possibly because my bidding strategy was non-existent.

I was making up my initial bid, sometimes high, sometimes low. Everyone is full of helpful advice on the matter, but unfortunately most of it is conflicting.

I started to bid the minimum and slowly bring up the spend to a tolerable level per day, blacklisting as I went.

This did a few subtle but altogether important things. It made sure I didn't miss the bidding "sweet spot" by overbidding. It also spread my spend over a larger timeframe making the data I gathered from each offer more consistent.

The results are as follows, I now have a camp with a $5 profit overall (excluding Monetizer), consistent in it's performance day-on-day. I'm also losing a lot less in testing by overpaying.

It's might only seem like a small improvement, but I am seeing other camps turn green far more consistently now, and losing far less.

I have a feeling this might be the start of something interesting for me and I think I've stemmed the rapid blood loss from my bank account.

fingers crossed

---

Good to read from you, keep us updated when how it goes

---

Excellent.

Now stats porn please

---

Not anywhere near the same level as you had recently, but for me it's a big difference from -70-80% every day for months.

These numbers are from just one camp and exclude monetizer:



At last, some consistency! haha

---

In Germany we say that the combined shit of small cows also makes a big dump :-) --> so no worries about smalll "shit"

Keep on piling up the green and make this FA a hero journey.

---

We do?

Or do you mean "Kleinvieh macht auch Mist"?
@manchester

It´s an important step to go from stable red to stable green.

When you found a way to run stable green days and when you then understand how to do it the next step shouldn´t be that hard anymore.

Probably the hardest time is to run on profit at all but when you have a good system to reach green it´s all about replicating what you did and scale then step by step.

---

--> that's exactly what I meant. Had a hard time to translate it

---

I know that feeling, sometimes I just translate sayings word by word and hope it still makes sense

---

UPDATE

I looked at my weekly results for last week and realised that I was actually $3.35 in profit including Monetizer revenue. I only spent about $170, so not a very big spend (but that was because I wanted to spend time optimising the 5-6 offers that I had working).

I learned a lot looking at those offers and looking at the data I was gathering in more detail which will hopefully help me in the GEO.

Definitely an improvement for me. I think that's the first week I've had in overall profit since I started.

Still not exactly sure how I can improve, but as before I'll just keep moving forward and see where it takes me, I must be learning something!

---

At least some small process

Give us more details and we can check together what you could improve

---

Currently working on these IVR offers. Trying to work out what kind of traffic will work for them. Had some small small success with CPA camps, but I'm thinking smartCPM camps might be a better longer term option as I can gather and use data easier.

Trying to look at the current ecpm and start and stop camps accordingly.

I need to start testing SOI offers again soon too.



Sent from my Mi 9T using Tapatalk

---

I don't know what a is, but I am intrigued.

IVR offers are difficult because the payouts vary wildly.

I find the only way to make them work is by running as many as possible to hedge the losses against the wins, also called a barbell approach.

You're correct in your assumption.

CPA camps work, but you can only make guesswork Whitelists from them, which won't last long-term.

SmartCPM camps will take longer, but you will be able to use the data more as you can build proper blacklists.

---

LOL I'd also like to know what a is as well haha!

Some networks have IVR offers with static payouts. For offers with variable payouts I'd suggest to take an average after say 50 conversions, then "assume" each conversion is worth the average payout (instead of the actual individual payouts which varies from call to call) and use that when cutting placements.



Amy

---

Yes, one problem with Rev-Share IVR offers is that the payouts can vary ALOT, even for the same offer in the same geo on same carrier.

I had campaigns where one conversion was only like $0.02 but another one for the same offer on same targeting was $4 or so.

In most cases the difference between the payouts is not that huge but it´s still possible.

A good way to run these offers is to first don´t focus too much on making profit.

At first you really need to collect enough data to get a good idea about how these offers convert with YOUR traffic.

Then you know more or less how high you can bid or what CPA you can aim for.

Next thing is that you always should be aware that you need to accept losses on some conversions, you need to run campaigns that way that the profit from the higher payour conversions outvalue the losses from the low payout conversions.

Unluckily the lower payout conversions are mostly the majority because the longer the call runs the lower are the chances that a user stays on the phone

Another way to run IVR on Rev-Share would be to collect data and then rather try to run it for the majority of the lower payout offers.

That way you don´t have to calculate that much with running on loss for some conversions on purpose but on the other hand you also miss some chances for higher payout conversions that way.

Usually I wanted to write a guide about running these offers but didn´t do it yet because it´s a bit more complicated compared to other offers.

One more factor to consider is that the performance can change pretty fast sometimes depending on the carrier, and this works in both directions

---

Home > Push Traffic >