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I am a maths teacher. This is my follow along. (39)

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Hey guys

Love the forum so far. It's totally opened my eyes to making money online. It's truly like a veil has been lifted and I now understand what's going on with what happens online, like why I get loads of popups when I go on a streaming site or why there's weird news stories at the bottom of some websites.

Anyway, I'm creating this thread for accountability. In my experience, nothing is more motivating than having to report your results to other people. So hopefully this will keep me working hard.

I've done the $1 guide and have to say I found it a lot of fun.

Here's my results from yesterday:



Not too bad for a first attempt so I've added another $10 and gonna try and optimise by cutting placements like in the "Bonus" section.

Meanwhile, I've been working through the 40-day guide and hope to have some results to show everyone in the next day or two.

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Good stuff man!

I could not agree more about the "veil being lifted"... I remember once I got to the point where I started to notice the architecture of the "internet economy" that was when the idea of making money online really started to make sense and I was able to really see myself doing it...

It's so massive when you really think about it, like literally every single click and impression on the internet has dozens of little streams of monetization running through it... Now when I'm just randomly reading stuff online it's like the first thing I notice on each site, is how they are monetizing it, etc lol.

Anyway good work starting a follow-along and I hope you have great success!

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Is being a "math teacher" the STM/IM counterpart of being "Walter White"?

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Not very common we see a math teacher over here. Must be a headstart when it comes to analytics and stats I think! Good luck.

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Welcome to STM!

Good luck with your journey,

Wish I was good at math.

Has to help in this game surely

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Cool background!

Marketing has definitely become much more quantitative in the past 10 years, and having a math background certainly helps.

To be sure, it is not really because modern affiliate marketing requires advanced math. There is no real analysis, calculus or even any algebra involved. It is mostly arithmetic and some basic statistics and probability (for almost 99% of the cases).

However, it is more a way of thinking, being able to think rationally and based on data that really helps.

I think of it more like how you need such a similar mindset in poker. Understanding how to calculate a definite integral using Riemann sums doesn't really help much when playing poker, but the ability to analyse probabilities, expected values, quantified risk management and to think statistically definitely does. This is also why there is a decent number of professional poker players in affiliate marketing like one of the coauthors of this book https://www.amazon.com/Education-Mod...dp/1909457116/

Best of luck to you!

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I agree with much of what's been said here. I was doing SEO / Amazon affiliates for a few years before this and never took to it the way I seem to have taken to spending hours poring over campaign reports.

Hopefully I can achieve a similar level of success to ol' Heisenburg!

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Still racing through the guides, losing money and learning loads.

I must say, I'm enjoying how quickly I'm learning. As I mentioned, I used to do SEO/Amazon websites and you'd wait 9-12 months before knowing whether what you were doing was working or not. This is a total breath of fresh air, by comparison.

Here's the total of 2-3 days worth playing around with the offer on the $1 guide.



And here's the first Direct Billing DOI campaign from the 40-day guide.



Re: the 40-day guide. I must say it's something of a masterpiece. I'm bingeing it the same way my ex used to binge godawful reality tv shows.

Off to learn about landing pages now. Hopefully have some more good stuff to show you guys tomorrow.

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Now up to the section where you rip and edit the landing pages from Adplexity. Whew this is a lot to take in! And this is coming from someone who knows html/css fairly well. I especially enjoyed the part where you find out some AMers will hide their tracking link in hexadecimal!

Meanwhile, I've been playing around the the $1 offer trying to learn what I can and have run into a couple of issues.

My first roadblock is this:



It seems that my payout dropped like a lead balloon. I've tried asking the network but no reply yet. I'm wondering what causes this, bad leads maybe? From what I can gather, I am just sending them to a page that asks them if they want notifications with no other information so that would make sense to me.

Next up is this:



I got some reasonable numbers on the first day (-11%) and thought by increasing the bid and removing the worst placements (3x payout with no conversions) I might be able to see a profit. Instead, conversions dropped. This was repeated for 3-4 different campaigns and makes my first attempts at optimisation something of an unmitigated failure haha

Can anyone offer any insight?

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This is tricky. Did you get any response on why your payouts dropped?

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@cmdeal I tried asking AM but he moved me to a different AM. Maybe he didn't like the question haha! I've asked the new one. Either way, I got what I needed to from that little experiment.

Not updated in a few days, partly because of "life" stuff, partly because I've been attempting to fix up and clean malicious code from landers from Adplexity. Note the use of the word "attempt" there, this stuff is like hacking into the Pentagon. The amount of sneaky redirects and red herrings in some of these landers is unbelievable.

I actually was unable to completely clean any single lander, thankfully I was able to use the clean lander example from the 40 day guide. I'll just copy what's going on from the landers on Adplexity using that and others here on STM as a base.

So here's what happened yesterday. Up to Day 27 on the guide, my first real campaign.



Not unexpected. I just wanted to get something out there to make sure it's all working.

Next up, testing offers and landers.

P.S How do I know the getURLParameter function is working for people who see my ad? It doesn't show up for me unless I manually add ?countryName=xxx or whatever and the ad looks loads worse without it, I'd just like to be sure that people are seeing the lander as it is supposed to be shown. Is there a test you can run or anything?

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Another day, another few hours spent noobing around. I've learnt so much in such a short space of time, yet I still feel like I haven't got the faintest clue what I'm doing.

Here's yesterday, approximately on Day 27 of the guide when you try different offers and landers.


upload pic

These stats seem particularly bad so I paused the campaign with a only a couple of dollars spent. I did have an issue with the Voluum click not working and I've just received a long email from them so time to dive into that and hopefully tomorrow's results will be better.

P.S. Got a response from AM on previous campaign, the payouts did drop because of quality of traffic.

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Hey man- if you're not digging doing that ripping/looking for malicious code manually, why not check out Landerlab? It's free right now. Not shilling for it as actually I've been too lazy to get going with it yet despite signing up, but your post reminded me of it as it seems like it could save you a lot of time and hassle.

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When you create a campaign link, all of those parameters will be in the tokens at the end of the url, like: https://youawesometracker.com/abcdefhijklmnop?zoneid={zoneid}&device={device}&br owser={browser}&os={os}&country={country}&region={ region}&isp={isp}&useragent={useragent}&language={ language}&connectiontype={connectiontype}&cost={co st}&visitor_id=${SUBID}

Those will automatically be populated when a user visits your campaign link.

Easiest way to test it out is to create a random campaign with your lander, and then visit that link to make sure all the tokens are getting populated.

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@jack_j - just checked out their website, that looks very interesting. Thanks for the tip.
@jaybot - I just figured out yesterday that your ad network gives each campaign a link you can use to check out what's going on - which I think is what you're talking about.

Yesterday was another day of firefighting the problems caused by all my noob mistakes. The biggest issue was that having discovered the wonder of a campaign link from Popads (as mentioned above) it seemd to select from a random smattering of the different version of my lander I'd uploaded. I figured out that apparently Cloudfront keeps a cache of all your old files for 24 hours so it must have been randomly choosing different ones each time I updated it. Anyway, I did an invalidation thing and got on my way.

Yesterday's results:



So obviously I still have problems. Time for another day firefighting!

P.S. Even though I am running into loads of technical issues with seemingly endless deadends, this is way more fun than smashing out 2000 words of content about washing machines every day back when I was doing SEO.

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Lol...

Glad your liking media buying better I imagine washing machines was indeed a tough one to get motivated for!

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Great follow along @Powerxat!

Getting started with landing pages is a great move! Besides warming up your visitors, it will also help you a ton when it comes to optimizing your campaigns.

This Vortex's guide here, will walk you through pretty much everything you need about cleaning landing pages:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ripped-landers


In addition to the above, you might find the blow video helpful when it comes to cleaning up ripped landers.



Once you've sorted out all the landing page cleaning process, you might as well start testing other offers like sweepstakes.

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@platinum thanks for that video I'll check it out later. For now, I'm just using the clean landers I got here on STM as I want to get up and running ASAP.

Yesterday's results:



Again, barely anything at all. I'm getting a 1.1% CTR on the landers I'm using which seems abnormally low. I read someone say that typical landers on sweeps should get 10-30% CTR. I'm wondering if something is wrong somewhere.

The last offers I was looking at were in a different geo and I kept getting hit with a 400 error which Voluum told me was due to an unsecure redirect (their customer service has been fantastic). I'm wondering if this suffered the same issue?

I'll try a different network for today and see if it changes anything.

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New affiliate network, three new offers, three different geos. Here's what I get when I try to click the Voluum link to the offers.









I'm absolutely baffled. What am I missing? I find it hard to believe that so many offers from two different affiliate networks all have the same problem.

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Doesn’t look like anything to do with Voluum.

This happens when visiting the offer link directly?

Most likely: You’re not the target traffic. Not even a VPN and UA switcher will fix that. You’ll need to be on an actual device in the target geo for the offer to trigger.

I wouldn’t stress it.

As for your CTR... in those geos, with your traffic source, totally normal. 2-3% on pop in Tier 1-2 geos is pretty good.

30% is never going to happen on pops. Push, yes. Pops no. Mayyyybe in tier 3-4 with a killer lander.

On that note, you might want to try some easier geo when starting out. Eastern Europe, Latam, will have way cheaper clicks and easier offers to convert.

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Ok that makes sense. So I guess we're all just going in blind hoping there's no issue with the offers?

The three new geos are TW, MY and TH which as I understand it are more Tier 2-3.

Either way, thanks for your help. I guess I'll just run these new campaigns and see what I wake up to tomorrow haha.

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Really struggling. This was yesterday.



I thought about trying a different domain name as I was using Voluum's default one and thought it might be banned or something. Here's the results.



Interestingly, out of those 12 clicks, two of them were conversions haha (I didn't set the postback)! So maybe I've got a killer offer if I can just figure out why my clicks are so low.

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It would be best to double check the conversion tracking configuration not having conversions reported in your tracker can easily lead you to wrong decisions.

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Ok time for an update. Here's a chronological record of the numerous brief campaigns I've been trying out.

First up I used a new domain name for the tracker rather than the default Voluum one. CTR = 0.26%



Then I tried replacing the Voluum tracker with Binom. CTR = 0.24%




Next up I tried a different traffic source. CT = 0.48%



After a bit of back and forth with the (very helpful) Voluum rep who pointed out an error with my Taiwan lander + offer. CTR = 0.44%



Lastly, after fixing another issue that my Binom rep pointed out, I got this. CTR = 0.99%



I've homed in on CTR as I keep seeing other people, even newbies, hitting 10%+ CTR without much sweat. And reading that 10-30% is considered a normal CTR whereas I'm struggling to get even 1%.

Either way, I've replaced literally everything in the funnel and still getting the same reults. I guess I'm now thinking that there is no hidden technical error that will shoot up my CTR and conversions. But I still have very poor performance. Why is this?

Here's a couple of possibilities I'm exploring:

1. I'm choosing poor landers, offers or lander+offer combos and I need to test more.
2. Sweepstakes and/or pops are dying and CTR/conversions are not what they used to be. (Highly doubt this)

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@Powerxat don't get disappointed by the ctr level you are getting on your landers. Such lp ctr levels are quite common in pops and can potentially turn a campaign into profitable.


Not sure I properly understood why you switch trackers from one to another and the domain names. Usually changing trackers and/or domain names will bring little to no improvements at all. I'd say it's best to focus on the optimization process of the campaign itself, then worry about small details like these.

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I thought something was wrong so was experimenting. Seems pointless in hindsight but I'm glad I did it as I learnt a fair bit along the way.

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Offer and geo will affect CTR more than anything. What are you running?

Try a different geo first.


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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I've tried 5+ offers in 5 geos. But maybe I need to try more.

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New experiment. I know enough Thai to realise my lander had some pretty glaring Google translate errors on it, so I fixed the ones I could see and got this. Top is not fixed, bottom is fixed. Postback isn't working but it's 2 conversions on each. No real improvement.



Next I decided to try direct linking to an offer that had a decent looking lp. The payout was very low though but thought it might be an interesting test. Unfortunately, I seem to be the master of not setting the postback correctly so the following stats are missing 2 conversions.



Next up, I want to start broadening my net and applying to more offers and use more landers. I feel I've learnt a lot from the small, cheap experiments so far. I've applied to lots of offers on Yep ads and will hopefully report back with some good results soon.

Incidentally, I've noticed that for most geos on Adplexity (that I've looked at, at least), it seems there are very few sweepstakes offers. For pops, I mostly see antivirus or video content stuff. Is this a sign that that's where the money is...?

And yet another thing, with sweepstakes you are simply trying to get someone to click through your lander to the offer and then to sign up. They don't know what the payout is and I'm fairly sure they don't check the chances of winning. So it makes sense to go for higher payout offers surely? It's not like they're ten times more likely to click on an otherwise identical $0.4 iphone offer to a $4 iphone offer. Unless I'm missing something, of course.

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At the risk of sounding dumb...

I recalled Jaybot mentioning in manchesters' FA that TH can be particularly hard to crack -- https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...e!-haha)/page6 Just wanted to flag that for you.

It's my understanding that higher payout usually means harder to convert, which usually means a more complicated flow. If it's the same flow, I have no idea, unless there's something that's making it hard to convert. Is the EPC similar?

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I'm as new as you pasabas, so just making mistakes all over the place haha. I'm not really sure how to use EPC to be honest yet.

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My next experiment was to look for the highest performing sweeps lander in any given geo and match it with an offer.



I didn't mean to spend so much on the IT and MY camps but Propeller Ads got me with their $10 minimum budget. The LK one is still going which is why it's so low.

Either way, not great results although I'm encouraged to see a near 5% CTR for the MY lander. Feel like I am making progress, however glacial.

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Another day, another confusing set of stats.

Despite not having found a proven offer yet, I thought it would be good for my own learning to try split testing a few landers. This is a new sweeps offer in HU.



The first four landers were abject failures with none breaking much more than 1% CTR let alone getting any conversions.

The fifth lander seems to have an incredibly high CTR but I'm kind of suspicious that it's the real data has the unique visits and clicks are almost the same. In any case, zero conversions means it's not worth pursuing. And yes, the postback is working and the network are showing zero conversions too.

So what next? I'm kind of at a loss with how things have gone so far.

I still sort of think at the back of my mind that I'm missing some kind of trick or technical issue that will at least drive my stats above a near constant -100% ROI. Other than that, I'm tempted to try a different vertical as based on what I see on Adplexity, not many people are doing sweeps in comparison to antivirus stuff, video content, dating or adult.

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Actually just figured out why there were no conversions... the offer link doesn't work. That'll teach me for not checking the campaign myself first.

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In the beginning, everything sucks. Lots of moving parts. Many things to work against you. While trying to learn.

Let's try to clear your mind.

A few points.

You're definitely missing something. CPA payouts are weighted based on the price of traffic + how difficult it is to convert an offer. Otherwise we would all be running traffic in DE and US all day for the higher payouts. Same is true for CC submits. Even when the funnel is essentially the same, the reason why the payout for a CC Submit is $8-40 vs. $0.08-$4 is because it is 10x harder to convert, hence the payout is 10x higher.

HU is tough a tough geo most of the time. Normal iPhone/S10 offers don't convert very well there. That shit has been spammed onto their phones for years and CTR is just as bad as DE but even worse payouts. Just eyeballing it, in addition to running aggressive off-the-bat, I don't know what's going on with those landers, but I would say Magyar Post has something very wrong with it. Giftbox looks good. The rest I would trash.

Honestly, you had some conversions in MY, I would keep testing there to get some more experience. MY is cheap-is traffic and shit-ton of volume. Payouts are lower, but once you weed through all the shit traffic and getting more conversions, you can get closer to break even, and eventually see some green... with a lot of volume to spare. So much volume, that you could even block placements at 1/3 or even 1/4 payout and still have traffic leftover.

Or. Pick a nice, quiet geo like PL and slowly build up a BL with some easy supermarket or iPhone/S10 offers. Not a ton of volume, but they are not so click-averse and traffic is still cheaper.

Or. Go crazy and try ZA. They click on everything. They speak English. They have tons of volume. But it is highly competitive and traffic is not so cheap.

Feel free to change verticals, but I think you're looking at adplexity in a odd way.

While you may see tons of mobile display ads (usually not actually pops) for AV/VPN offers globally, it's because it's being flooded with cheap traffic *somewhere* by *someone*. Could be a big ad agency. Could be a solo affiliate. It could possibly be the offer owner (expressVPN?) Anyway, that's not what you're looking for. Just doing a search for iPhone, or S10 -even globally- should bring up millions of landers. If not, something is very wrong.

I know this shit is tough. But you may be looking for a 'fake because' to switch verticals because it hasn't been working for 2 weeks.

This has been the case for me less than %1 of the time. I sincerely doubt it. I can't reach most of my offer links either. As I said earlier, they are targeted by geo IP, user agent, mobile carrier, and even GPS location. Hard to fake that in a browser with a VPN.

If the clicks are going from your lander to the network, then they are most likely going to the offer. Even if the offer is dead, most of the time the advertiser and/or network would know very quickly and would have a fallback smartlink for the targeted user to go to.

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Wow that was such a useful reply jaybot. Seriously thanks so, so much. You've really helped me clear up a few things that have been bugging me.

What you said about the different geos is very interesting. I really know nothing in this area, so I went into it with no idea what HU was like or what they had been exposed to in the past. I will look into PL and ZA, and maybe try some new landers in MY too.

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I feel like you're one of the people, @jaybot

Hopefully you comment on my posts more

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Hey @Powerxat, I'm sorry I found your thread this late. If you have any questions in the future, I'm here!


Karolina

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Hey Powerxat, sorry for the late reply but are you still getting this error message when opening the same landers using your tracker campaign URLs on iOS?

If so look through the lander code and CTRL + F these 2 pieces of code:

and

Remove them, then try clicking through the landers again and it should redirect to the offer page correctly.

The above code causes 400 error after clicking on lander click urls on iOS only.

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