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Can this nooblet make a penny or two? (31)

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Hi STM Peeps,

I started Vortex's guide about 3 weeks ago and am now about to start Day 26 - Optimizing Landers for Speed and I will continue documenting from this point onward

Bit of background:

• Currently waking up 3 hours before my 9-5 job to learn affiliate marketing in morn'. I thought waking up early would suck, but it's actually pretty cool feeling once you're up and quietly working away while everyone else is catching Zzz's I'm also much sharper in the A.M. which helps with things like fixing up landers (which I suck at!!).
• Budget is $6k USD, with about ~$500 USD extra per month saved from my job. I'm gonna move to a cheaper apartment when my lease runs out and I've stopped eating out and buying random crap, so in a few months I should be able to bump that to just under $1K USD extra / month hopefully.
• Previously I've freelanced as a sales page copywriter on Upwork, also created a semi-successful SEO niche site (which recently got crushed by Amazon commissions being sliced!).

Some details on my soon-to-be-launched camp

Using POP traffic, Sweeps in tier 3/4 geos.

I asked for a SOI sweeps offer from my AM, but they didn't have any for lower tier geos.

So my AM gave me an offer converting well for other affiliates which is a SMS Billing sweeps offer, payout is about 30 cents. Prize is a new iphone.

Based on the stats in Mobidea it looks like a few affiliates were mainly making the offer work in Bangledash...so I decided to try and pivot away from the competition by focusing on a different geo, which is Brazil.

In hindsight get the feeling I probably wasn't meant to do that lol.

• Ripped & fixed 5 landers. Initially I was going to rip Bangledash landers and translate to Portugese...but I couldn't find any for that geo. So I grabbed 3 landers from Brazil + top 2 ones from US and changed the prize to iphone where needed
• 3 landers are in Portugese.
• 2 are English landers that need translating. I considered One Hour Translation, but when compared to the service I chose (Mars Translation), OHT was about 70% more expensive for the same amount of words! Maybe OHT has better quality? Idk
• 2 landers I ripped were probably used by people cloaking(?)...they used Logos of popular telecomms companies and were basically pretending to be those brands. So I removed the logos and changed it to be less aggressive. One of them I put Brazil's flag instead of company logo.
• Really struggling to find SOI sweeps offers in both Brazil and other lower tier geos. Many AM's accept my application, talk to me on Skype, we have good rapport etc but then when I ask for a list of top sweeps offers for Brazil or other geos many just don't respond. I Think Manchester had this issue as well in his FA. Other Aff networks say the offer is capped (not sure what that means?) or say they don't have an SOI sweeps offers or say I should be targeting tier 1 geos or West Europe.

Summary - In the next few days I'll be launching 1 'proven' offer using 5 landers into Brazil on POP traffic. Hopefully I can get a few more offers to try out in BR Any recommendations on the best Sweeps network to join?

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Hi nitrousoxide!

Starting an FA was the best decision I've made so far, it's helped me more than I ever imagined

As for your questions, I'm sure someone with more experience will be along shortly to give you answers, but in the mean time I can try and help you with the easy ones.

Yep, I know the feeling exactly. I think it's just certain AMs. After having a few now, I realise that some are just more helpful than others. Some will bend over backwards to help you and others are very aloof and you have to work at just to get them to send you an offer list. We are tiny fish starting out in this industry and I get the feeling that unless you are making them money, some AMs aren't too helpful. Fair enough, I suppose they are super busy.

Once I had an offer that was making some revenue (but unfortunately very little profit on my side, but my AM didn't know that). My most difficult AM started to warm up to me a little more. Now they give me what I want sometimes. I suspect if you start making real money, the AMs will become your best friends. Just keep being friendly, keep asking nicely once a day, and you can wear them down with kindness and they just give in after a bit and do you a list of offers, that's my experience.

twinaxe did a presentation on sweeps on push the other day for AVS, I know it's push, but there are a lot of things that cross over with POPs. I think it's worth watching if you didn't see it. I ended up with 3 pages of notes. He gives a list of good sweeps networks which you might find useful. The video is still free to watch for the rest of today (3/05/20). Here's the link.

hope some of that helps

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Thanks for stopping by!

You've still got a truckload more experience than I do and I know you were in my spot not too long ago, so appreciate the help!

Yeah that's what I suspected, I guess I just need to be patient to prove myself to them.

I saw in your FA Twinaxe suggested also not being overly reliant on AMs to get top offers, and instead to try a few you think have potential yourself (based on Network stats) so I might gently go down that avenue while I wait.

How many affiliate networks do you work with? I'm conscious about not spreading my earnings between too many networks. One network I'm signed up to has €500 minimum threshold payment per Tier 1/2/3/4 etc which is pretty risky.



Thanks! Seeing my family for lunch and then I'll check that out tonight.

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Caps are limits on how many conversions an offer will accept in a certain period. Some offers are capped per day, some per affiliate. Some per month. It’s possible some BR offers hit their monthly cap a week or two ago. Happens with super hot offers in TH and BR. It’s May now, so any network-wide monthly caps on offers should be open.

Speaking of which, if you are on Clickdealer, ask your AM for the two BR supermarket SOI offers. They both convert really well. Payout is tiny, but it can be great for starting out and building a list of good placements.

If your AM is still a dick, I’ll check back in tomorrow and get you the offer details.


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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@jaybot, cool thanks I appreciate that. When I applied to the network, the Clickdealer AM reached out to me on email, asked me to add them on Skype but I never heard back. I've followed up just now.

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Here they are:

69709 - R$500,00 on grocery shopping BR
69760 - Online shops 500R$ BR

Payout is like $0.07 but I am told these convert like crazy, and if you reach the daily caps, you'll be in a good position to ask for more

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Thanks brother, appreciate it! When AM responds and accepts me into Clickdealer I'll give these a go.

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I was kinda stuck still on Day 19-25 (Fixing Landers), because BrowserStack's free plan does not let you test your websites on iOS/Android devices anymore (the boxes will be grayed out and unselectable.)




So I did some research and found a free online emulator called Responsinator: http://www.responsinator.com/


Unlike browser stack, you can only really test a few types of devices there. But on the plus side it's interactive. You can actually click through from
start to finish.


Day 26 - Optimizing Landers for Speed


Made adjustments to all 5 landers to boost speed.


Surprisingly, the last 2 got slower after I made changes. I tried to undo what the speed optimizations, but the page speed still didn't increase lol. All well. Can't win all of em

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For what exactly do you want to check the landers on all the different devices?

I can understand that you want to amke everything 110% correct but one really big beginners mistake is to try to make everything 110% correct

The problem is the more time you spend on such stuff the less effective you can work.

Open the LP in Chrome, press Shift+CTRL+i and you can check different responsive resolutions.

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It's in Amy's tutorial. That's why.

Browserstack is fine. The Nexus and Galaxy S7 devices will still work for what you need. Once everything looks close to OK. You can consider the step done and not worry about it anymore, as pretty much every lander you rip will already be responsive.

Browserstack's best feature is its geo ip feature which you can use to go a step farther than a VPN if you really, really need to check an offer page on a real device. But other than that, you won't need it.

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Twinaxe - thanks for stopping by m'good sir.

Jaybot is correct, its in Vortexs tutorial, but I do have a knack for perfectionism which I'm slowly finding out is not helpful at all in AM . I did the ctrl + shift + I trick on my lander...Im so surprised that exists. How is Browser Stack and rest going to compete ?! hahah, great tip thx

Todays update is only a short one...unfortunately I got stuck doing a data migration at work which went 3 hours overtime...so I was only able to do about an hour of AM today, so not much to report

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Hey @nitrousoxide, if you still didn't get in - let me know! If you DID get in, good luck and looking forward to following along!

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Shame on me, I guess I never read the whole 40 days tutorial myself

@nitro, listen to that guy and you will be in good hands

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Hey Henry - thanks for reaching out I've DM'd you and also added you on Skype.

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Sup M'Dawgs, here's today's update:

Day 27: Introduction to Offer + Lander Testing & Day 28: Bot Tests


I sailed through Day 27 and then skipped Day 28 – Bot Testing, because I read on the forum it's not a necessity and cannot afford Voluum's fraud testing kit.


Onto the good stuff…


I launched a campaign targeting Brazil with a few landers I paid to get translated:

Below are my stats…I got zero conversions:



I have a few guesses why I got zero conversions:

• I set something up incorrectly: To investigate, I double-checked my funnel, clicked through to the end and the final URL was my offer...but the page does not load at all and just goes blank (probably because I’m in Australia and the offer is not meant for this geo, with a VPN I expect the page would have loaded).
  
  My stats in Mobidea show I was getting hits on the page:
  
  

• The actual offer page on the aff network is broken: This is unlikely as my AM verified affiliates were converting this offer.

• This geo simply does not like this offer: This is likely as Brazil was not a geo affiliates were making money in with this offer.
• Bot Traffic: I did not take any precautions against bot traffic, so this could another reason.

I'm inclined to think it was reason #3 .


The silver lining to this zero-conversion cloud is we all get to LOL at my crappy stats!

Looking at the breakdown between my landers, the top lander interestingly I ripped from US and translated to PT and the CTR is crazy high…doesn’t count for much but still interesting




I’ve looked through Mobidea, Ad Combo, Ad-Centre, Big Bang Ads and none of them have any more sweeps offers for Brazil.


So my next action steps are:


1. Get a list of 2 or more of the above ad networks of top converting sweeps offers.
2. Pick the geo that contains the most ‘proven’ sweeps offers.
3. Rip and fix up some landers for those geos (and do it faster this time).

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Is this a carrier billing offer?

If yes the chances to see the actual offer page are low even with VPN.

Good possible

This alone doesn´t tell anything, the stats are only interesting when you have conversions

Otherwise these are just landers with different CTR.

Mostly when there aren´t many offers available because it doesn´t work that well.

Then it´s better to get something else.

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Yeah It's a mobile carrier offer...thanks makes sense then!

I had an inkling I was jumping the gun making statements about CTR :P

Roger that. I pivoted to Spain where my networks have more offers available.

Will keep you all posted.

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When you have a good offer available then Spain can be very good.

Good volume and low bids.

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Hey nitrousoxide this has been a good read so far, especially for me as I'm also new and struggling with similar issues. Namely, thinking something is broken because my CTR is so low haha. Think I just need to get testing more offers and landers.

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Glad to hear it's been a good read so far

And yeah, my LP's CTRs suck atm...

My strategy to boost CTR in my upcoming campaign is:

1) Try and get page load speed even faster. Other than the directions in Vortex's tutorial, I've also used CSS compressor which in some cases has decreased overall lander size by like 30%. Also read keeping landers under 100kb is a good idea for mobile pops. But not sure how attainable this is given landers involving spinners and games seem to require a lot of code and thus huge file size.

2) Launching my next camp in geos where affiliates are already succeeding. This kinda indicates there is demand in that geo. Also means I can (hopefully) send some conversions to my AM, so they don't think I'm a total noob

3) Making sure the sales message on each lander is more persuasive / eye-catching. Mainly this has involved increasing aggression while still remaining compliant. For example, ripped landers that are BH and impersonating large telecomms companies. Then replaced company logos with country flags and 'STOP' signs. Lets see what happens...



On a different note, I went from using MARS translation to hiring someone on Fiverr to do translations for me...it's so much cheaper. About 1000 words for ~$10 - $15USD

Anyways...I plan on launching my next camp tonight, will report back with stats tomorrow or the day after.

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Last night I launched a camp into ES, I've put some details below:

• Proven traffic source (Popads)
• 3x 'Proven' landing pages already running in ES, with another 3 unproven ripped / reused from tier 1 geos (I couldn't find anymore running landers for ES in adplexity)
• 1x Unproven Offer (but recommended by AM)

Offer payout was 1 Euro, and I spent about $10USD (~10x Offer Payout)



Pretty stoked I got a conversion

I still have a long way to go, but it's better than receiving zero conversions like the previous camp!

Action Taken: I've decided to ditch this offer because I spent 10x the Payout and only received 1x Conversion. To my understanding, an offer with potential is one where you get 2 or more conversions in 10x Payout spent on traffic.

Something I've wondered since starting paid traffic, is what if you launch a camp to test an offer, but you present your ads during a time that your geo receives traffic, but the traffic are way less likely to be in a buying state? For example, launching a campaign at 3:30am geo time zone, where there's substantial traffic, but they're all drunk or insomniacs mindlessly scrolling the internet.

Could this not result in us cutting offers that could have done well, if only we launched in a more appropriate time?

• Is there a general rule of thumb for when not to launch campaigns to test offers in your geo?
• Should I have enabled throttling for my Ad Delivery method? I noticed it blew through the budget in like 5 minutes all at once lol. I've read that initially, leaving throttling disabled is good if you want to quickly test offers to get a good initial idea.

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Let me congratulate you for logical thinking and understanding the game

That´s not only about conversions

Also good move, grab what´s working and give it an own twist.

Before you ditch it completely check your stats.

Don´t just rely on the overall campaign stats, dig deeper and drill down for more details.

Let´s imagine that one placement spent 95% of the budget and the remaining 5% got a conversion...

That´s why it´s better to let the tests run over a longer timeframe, 2 days is better than only 2 hours.
That way you can get a better impression about the somewhat longeterm perfomance.

And you are right that often offers convert better at specific times.

But mostly the traffic volume and adspend are directly connected to the performance.
In the hours where they don´t convert that good (3:30am) you mostly also have much lower volume and adspend.

So better don´t mess around with dayparting in that stage.
It´s better to run the campaigns 24/7.

When you have a campaign running for quite some time already and you have enough conversions and data that you can see clear patterns about the different hours you could day part.

But to be honest, I run by far most of my campaigns just 24/7.

No, see explanation above.

It´s true that you can test faster when you disable throttling.

But for a little bit better impression about longterm average performance it´s better to split the traffic more evenly across the day.

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Thank you!! Definitely makes me more confident taking this approach.



Looking through my stats I found that the one placement that got the conversion spent 0.29% of my budget.

The highest-costing placement spent about 35% of my budget without conversions...what a difference LOL!

My trained nooblet ears hear you hinting to run the campaign a little longer to get more data on this placement...would I be correct?

Is it not too premature to drill through stats during the testing phase?





Roger that. From now on when testing offers I am going to throttle spend to spread it out evenly over a whole day. Hopefully this will give me a more cohesive understanding each offers potential.

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Ladies and gents...time for an update. It's been a while

After my last iPhone 11 campaign in ES...I decided I needed to get more iPhone offers for the same geo.

Luckily I was approved by Clickdealer (thank you @HenryW!). My CD AM recommended 2x ES iPhone 11 offers, which I was able to test with my previously used iPhone landers.

So in total, for iPhone 11 offers to test, I had:

• 2 Clickdealer offers - no adult traffic allowed
• 1 x Big Bang offer - adult traffic allowed (tested offer previously - for explanation as to why I'm retesting, see below**)
• 1 x Mobidea offer - adult allowed, WIFI only with SMS Billing MO Flow (also used in previous campaign**)

Due to the variation in traffic allowed, I made each bullet-point above, a different campaign within Voluum. In hindsight, I could have put Big Bang in the same campaign as Mobidea offer (Adult Traffic) and then used rules within Voluum to split between WIFI and non-WIFI per offer.

**I decided to retest the Big Bang & Mobidea offers, because the last campaign I launched with those 2 offers, half the landers in my camp were getting a 400 - Bad Request error page when I opened them up on my iOS device.

Long story short, after a whole bunch of testing and talking to Voluum support, I figured out what was causing the above error. Basically if your lander has the following code in it:

AND your traffic are on iOS devices, the no-referrer code above blocks your tracker's ability to pass through referrer information to your click URL...

Which results in all iOS users being directed to a 400 bad request page after your lander, instead of being directed to the affiliate network offer.

TLDR: always remove no-referrer code from all your landers.

Anyways, here are my results:



Uh-oh. Only 1 conversion

All campaigns spent 10x each offer payout with < 2 conversions, so I'm scrapping them.

Reading through Manchester's follow along, I noticed Twinaxe you posted the below:

Is my understanding correct that if an offer has spent 50% of the 10x offer payout budget, with zero conversions and it's looking pretty hopeless...then it's okay to just pause it? I feel I should have done that during this campaign with 3 out of 4 offers.

Wrapping up this post, if you've read this far I want to thank you! I've got a few questions below if someone wouldn't mind pointing me in the right direction:

• What do you do if you have similar offers with same targeting in the same Voluum campaign but with different payouts? Eg: one offer payout is $0.60 and the other payout is $1.80. That's a ratio of 1:3. My test budget would be (0.60 + 1.80) x 10 = $24 total for both offers in the same camp...But how do you make sure the budget is distributed according to the payout ratio across the two offers? In this case only 1/3rd of the budget should be allocated to test the $0.60 offer. Is it just a matter of weighting the offers differently in Voluum?
  
  
  
• If your offer accepts both Mobile and Desktop traffic and has no other restrictions, is it best practice to send all available connection type traffic within the traffic source (eg Popads) to your offer? eg: WIFI, Carrier, Cable/DSL etc? The reason I ask is because I don't really see anything other than carrier traffic discussed in Vortex's guide.
  
  

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If I was testing an offer that spent 50% of its budget and had zero or only one conversion then I would pause the offer and move on. In my limited experience, if the payout is low then you need to start to see offers converting to have any hope them performing well.

Good question. I don't think I've ever seen that big of a difference between two offers that have the same flow. Normally when I find similar offers there might be a slight difference, so I just take the average of all the payouts and use that for my budget calculations. Are both the offers the same flow? SOI/DOI etc??

Normally the offer payout gives you and indication of how hard it is to get someone to convert for it. I was running an S20 offer in IN and the camp was converting like crazy! hundreds of conversions. But at only 8 cents payout, because apparently it isn't that hard.

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Yes, that´s correct.

First thing, you calculated the budget wrong.

The formula is NOT Offer payout + offer payout x 10 = Budget

The formula is Number of landing pages x Number of offers x Average offer payout x 10 = Budget

Next question: Do these offers have the same conversion flow?
Because this is really a rather high difference.

I would probbaly keep them just running together anyway.

The offer with lower payout will reach the 5x/10x payout faster but then you have basically two options:

1: The offer is not converting at 5x payout and you stop it
2: The offer is converting and you keep it running because it´s working

But again, please check if both offers have the same conversion flow.

For a quick and dirty test I sometimes run different connectionms together but usually I like to keep WiFi and 3G separated.

Some conversion flows don´t have such big difference in performance there but others have.
Volume and price can also be pretty different.

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Okay, well that's a relief to hear.

Next time, if it's looking hopeless at 5x offer payout, I'm going to pause the offer(s).

Also, as mentioned previously, I'll be running traffic through Distributed Setting (Throttled) instead of the Standard will also help with being able to pause offers throughout the day when they reach that limit.

Looks like I will have to go on my phone in the restroom at work and pause/adjust camp settings when needed haha.

My payout question in red was actually just an example I made up. I chose these values because they were even ratios ($0.60:$1.80 = 1:3) and hoped it would illustrate my point better.

In reality, both offers had actual payouts of: $1.60 and $1 (which still seems like quite a difference). Both flows were SOI.

If I was running different flow offers, should they be split into different campaigns? If so, why does it matter?

That makes sense Twinaxe! I went back and read through more of your responses in Manchester's FA and noted you actually stated average offer payout quite clearly, not summed total of all offers...my bad for overlooking that.

Last night I documented the different offer / lander testing 'rules' we've covered so far, into a word document so I can easily reference it to make more effective decisions during my campaigns.

Using paid traffic, I've come to realize just how slowly my brain processes data/numbers...it's a skillset I haven't really used since High School and is very rusty atm. My guess is as I launch more camps my brain will get used to it

Thanks both of you for helping out!

My next action steps: Applying to more affiliate networks to test more of the same offers in ES, to find a well-converting iPhone offer so I can move onto testing landers.

If I cannot find anymore of the same offers - or the ones I do find don't convert well, I'll be branching out to different offers in the same geo (Samsung, coupons, Amazon vouchers etc) and just swapping out images / prize names in landing pages.

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$1.60 for a ES SOI seems still pretty high.

Do you have the SOI only from the offer name or did you check description for the flow as well?

You only learn how to run campaigns from running campaigns

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Just checked again.

It describes flow 2 times in the offer:



I must've missed the first flow description. It looks like it's a CPL offer with SOI/email submit, instead of pure SOI.

Should I have done things differently based on this info?

That's good news! Practice makes perfect

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Quick update for today:

My AM recommended a Shopping Voucher offer for Spain.

I couldn't find any voucher landers on Adplexity for Spain, so decided to just reuse the ones I've been using for iPhone/Samsung offers in Spain which I originally ripped from Adplexity. Was that the correct thing to do?

On my 5 landers I swapped out the images and text so they reflected the offer (voucher).

Offer payout was 1 euro ($1.09usd). Using Twinaxe's testing formula, I calculated my campaign budget:

Maximum Testing Budget = Number of landing pages x Number of offers x Average offer payout x 10

Max Budget = 5 x 1 x 1.09 x 10
Max Budget = $54.5

I then loaded that into Popads and got the results below:



About 6 hours after launching I paused the campaign while at work. I decided to pause it, because it reached 5x offer payout in ad spend without receiving any conversions.

I've got 3 more recommended offers from Clickdealer to test...so will be setting those up in the next few days. Let's see if Nitrous can get a couple conversions in Spain

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It really depends, I had campaigns running in ES and IT that were profitable right away and were fool proof.

But it wasn´t sweeps where you have that hard competition as I described above.

Btw, with BR I also had no luck no matter what I tried.

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