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Testing Pushground Quality: $XXX Revenue with US SOI (23)

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Hi, my name is Jaybot and I’m an affiliate marketer.

I am so successful that Pushground contacted me to write this case study. Just kidding, I’m not that successful.

Why the fuck anyone wants a case study from me is probably because I swear a LOT. Or because I give perspective that super affiliates don't: I still suck (a little). So, if I can get a traffic source or offer to work, then it's probably a solid source.

So, Pushground.

I'll be honest, it has flaws. We all do. My wife tells me every day. We'll get to that in a bit.

But their traffic is excellent quality.

All affiliates with a pulse will run into quality issues at some point. Especially when you start running with Direct Advertisers. They're sticklers for quality. If your leads don't back out, you'll get kicked from an offer pretty quickly, and they will straight up tell you, "Your leads suck, stop sending us shitty quality, thanks."

I really like this Advertiser, and they're pretty much the biggest of the bunch for US SOI offers, so it's a good idea to not piss them off regularly. So, my goal was to not get kicked from the offer by finding high quality traffic for their leads.

Maybe a low bar for super affiliates. But super affiliates aren't reading my humble case study, you are. And you're curious as hell to find out what happened, so keep reading

To make sure I didn't get confused with any other traffic, I only sent traffic from Pushground to this offer. Nothing else.

In typical Jaybot fashion, the case study got off to a shitty start.

My Account Manager for the advertiser was kind of busy and didn't have time to fish out the best new offers for me. So. I just grabbed one that had performed well in the past.

That didn't work out too well. After blowing some cash and seeing bad numbers, I paused it and knew something was off.

Flooding my Account Manager with traffic got their attention though, so he finally got back to me. And agreed to give me an offer I was requesting; since I knew it was theirs and I had it working well on regular networks (not direct) already.

'What offer' you say? Sweeps, man. Sweeps! SOI (that's single opt-in to my friends).

People love free stuff. This offer gives visitors a chance for free stuff. Free money to be specific. Free virtual money to use in their favorite virtual world to be even more specific. A game where the absolute best characters are Skull Trooper and Tomato Head** to be insanely specific.

Payout is a whopping $3.50 which means the geo is US. Which means high bids.


It also typically means I'm going to bleed money all over the place with a Run On Network or RON campaign, giving me all the traffic they have (and they have a fucking lot).

The great news is: Pushground already has two separate Whitelists waiting for you:


So you can start out with their 'To Start' Whitelist right away, which is tailored to testing new offers and campaigns. Less bleeding is good.

Also.

Get this:


You can specify push subscriber age as low as 0-1 hour! 1-2 hours? 2-6 hours? What is this sorcery?

The newer the subscriber, the higher chance the user is active, can be engaged, and results in better quality traffic.

Granted, the volume will be lower, but we're talking about quality here for testing. Not scaling yet.

Okay, so I won't bleed too much money in testing, that's great. So back to the offer.

Very simple offer, using a very simple lander.

This one, in fact:


I always start my creatives with the most generic shit possible. Seriously. It works.

When you're testing lots of offers, you need stuff that will work with anything.

Really, I don't even bother with images related to the product. Or running aggressive. I don't have time to mess around with rejected creatives or text.

Here is one of my best performing creatives, ever. Feel free to steal:

(1) [OfferSponsor] Message! ��
Enter today for a [OfferPrize]!✅

With a generic red/white giftbox for the icon.

Once you find a good offer, you can tweak and try to squeeze out better performance, but this will work for 90% of offers out there.

When you do find a good offer, and it's time to optimize (or if you simply don't trust me, and you shouldn't) testing a bunch of creatives on Pushground is so easy, that I wish every other source did the same.


Upload your creative(s), add some text, done. Want to split test with the same text but some different image? Sooooo easy, click “Add Variation” and then change the image. Done.


Wanna keep the image but different text? Same thing, click “Add Variation”, then change the text. Image is already there waiting for you. Nice.


Pushground automatically adjusts traffic to go to creatives which convert better (you can turn this off too, if you're masochistic). It does a pretty good job too. As opposed to some other push sources which only seem to optimize for CTR to line their pockets, not yours. I still had to keep an eye on it, but it does a way better job than many other sources in my opinion.

Super cool thing: The nearly instant approval times. Faster than any source I have tried. Also, way more lenient. If you're into that.

In addition, adding or editing creatives to an existing campaign will not pause the whole campaign. Everything seems to keep running until anything new gets approved.

Okay, so I run my camp and got some conversions, let's take a look at the damage and see what we can optimize.

Optimization is so damn easy to use on Pushground. Click on your camp and hit report. Set the date and then you can show the Supply ID (Feeds), Site ID (Placements within Feeds), Creatives, User Freshness, and a bunch of other stuff if you like... I won't dig that deep, but let's have a look:


Unlike some other sources, adjusting bids on running camps is totally OK on Pushground. It won't fuck up any algorithms and tank the campaign if you tweak bids. In fact, it's probably encouraged, which is why they have the handy bid adjustment boxes on the Supply and Site ID sections.

Supply ID is a fancy word for Feeds. And as we can see, almost all of the conversions are coming from one Supply ID. I'll definitely bump up the bid for that Supply ID as it's doing better than the rest. This overrides the campaign bid and is a good idea if you see a Supply ID doing better than the others. You can also blacklist Supply IDs from here with the big red button so you can concentrate on the converting Supply IDs.

Alright, let's take a look at the Site IDs (the placements within the Supply IDs) and see what's going on.


Not a ton of conversions yet, but these Site IDs already have pretty healthy ROI, and with a $3.50 Payout there is definitely room to scale. From here, you can also start micro-bidding on Site IDs that are doing well without fucking up the bids for any other Site IDs or Supply IDs. In fact, you can override any special bids you set for the Supply IDs here too (confused yet? Don't be, it’s easier than it sounds). Notice that you can also blacklist any Site ID from here directly by clicking on the red button.

But before doing that, let's see how fresh these users are...


Holy shit! 10 conversions came from 12 hours - 1 day freshness! And 4 from 0-1 hours? I could target those on any new campaign and save a ton of money! (hint, hint)

Okay, I'm definitely liking what I'm seeing here. How did the creatives do?


Wow, that top one definitely converts better, the second one has less conversions but… the CPA is a lot closer, I'll have to keep that running. Notice again, you can directly pause and resume your creatives here.

So let's see, initial SOI test in US, $56 in revenue without any optimization is already a win in my book.

After some minor optimizations, I was able to squeeze over $130 in revenue from almost 40 conversions, before I ran out of my test budget

Now to the important part: I asked my direct advertiser if there were any issues with quality to see if I should continue with the offer and...

No complaints. They want more.

That's quality. Mission accomplished for my case study.

Not quite time to scale yet, but let's see what Pushground has available...


615 million impressions sounds impressive. I just checked another big push source and they have about 1/6 of that.

And it's there. Trust me. Learn from my mistakes:

Remember how you can target subscriber ages?


Do not select this unless you have the most amazing offer and the most Perfect funnel ever created.

You will be flooded with a massive amount of traffic. How massive? Roughly 500 clicks (not impressions!) an hour. If you're not careful, that'll set you back $XX or more an hour. But when it's time to scale, and you have a nice Whitelist or Blacklist setup? Damn.

Speaking of Whitelists and Blacklists, I have to mention something because it's awesome and not many (any?) sources have this:


You can Blacklist and Whitelist at the same time. On Supply and Site IDs.

Why would you want to do this? Aside from being a lazy affiliate and not bothering to look through all your lists, you can use this to your advantage by Whitelisting a Supply ID while Blacklisting the separate placements inside of it. The question is, can you do the opposite? Blacklist an entire Supply ID but then Whitelist one Site ID inside? I have no idea. Ask your account manager!

Did I mention that everyone who signs up gets their own personal account manager? Without blowing $XXXX first? That's some nice service there. And they're actually knowledgeable and super helpful (Hi Irina!)

Okay, this sounds a bit too glowing of Pushground, and I did mention flaws, so let's go over what needs improvement.


Their auto-optimization thing works great now, but it used to be that you couldn't reverse any sources it paused with your rules (this drove me batty). So, if you had a late conversion on a source and want to un-pause it... you have to start a whole new campaign. But, if you used the API it worked fine (and theOptimizer now supports Pushground! Yay!)


Big However: they changed that little quirk, and it works swimmingly now. It even shows you visually which sources were paused by your rule, like so, and inform you ‘click to unpause’. And it actually works faster than waiting for theOptimizer to queue up every 10 minutes. I would definitely recommend using it.

But! It only checks stats for the past 72h so… if you run marathon campaigns like me (that means really, really slowly optimizing and being a stingy bastard) you’ll want to keep an eye on your tracker stats and/or use theOptimizer as well.


When setting up a new campaign, Frequency Capping defaults to 3 ads per 24 hours. Most solo affiliates like me think this is a waste of money and always set it to 1 per 24. Many sources do 3/24 by default, so it’s not a major crime, it’s just something I personally don’t like

There are a few weird things with their reporting: sometimes, posted back conversions don't show up in Supply ID + Source correctly. It does tend to sort itself out eventually, so it's mostly a small annoyance.

When viewing reports, the dates get messed up when viewing stats (many traffic sources have issues with this), especially if your timezone is behind theirs. This causes a weird thing where the default date doesn't count today/tomorrow, so you have to set a custom date to tomorrow just to see today's stats.

Other than that, since they fixed the not-being-able-to-unpause Site IDs from automatic rules, I have very little to complain about.

Pushground.

Solid traffic source.

Quality.

A fuck-ton of room to scale.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some more camps to try out

**No, Bunny Brawler sucks. I don't want to hear it.

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Great case study in typical jaybot style.

You should get more chances, always nice to read your stuff.

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Awesome case study and I enjoyed reading it!

Good.

This is a nice proposal for running effective

Thanks

Yep. Take Propeller for example.

I wonder what is that connected to and why some other sources mess up the algorithm if you adjust (or even raise, lol) a bid in a running campaign?

Good advice At the end ad buying is all about balancing volume available, quality, price, targeting, offer, funnel, creatives.

So you optimized by the amount of conversions here and not ROI, seems like you paused the 2nd creative.

Ok

Ok, I also tend to do 3/24, it probably results in better volume (80% more volume according to @pushground), but maybe less quality traffic and lower CTR? I know @twinaxe does 3/24 usually as well.

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Thanks for the case study Jaybot, a couple questions from a noob:

When you showed us the data within the context of user freshness, you said, "Holy shit! 10 conversions came from 12 hours - 1 day freshness! And 4 from 0-1 hours? I could target those on any new campaign and save a ton of money! (hint, hint)".

To my understanding, the 10 conversions from 862 clicks and 4 conversions from 330 give pretty much the same conversion rate (1.16% vs 1.21%). Then the ROI is better from the 0-1 hour users (-14% vs -22%), which takes into account the spending difference ($16 vs $44), not to miss out on the win rate of 32% vs 14%.

What am I missing? Why would you want to target the 12 hours to 1 day users instead?

Similarly for the second question, when looking at creatives you said, "Wow, that top one definitely converts better, the second one has less conversions but… the CPA is a lot closer, I'll have to keep that running." .

The top has a conversion rate of 1.13% whereas the second creative has a CV of 1.32% (not a distinguishable difference I suspect after such a small sample). The top's ROI is at -23.75% whereas the second is at -10.92%. The CTRs are also pretty much the same.

What am I missing here? To me, the top has had more traffic and therefore more opportunity to convert, and until the second one has an equal spend I don't know how to distinguish them.

Thanks again for your case study, learnt quite a bit from seeing your stats and what's to be expected when starting a new campaign on PUSH.

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Your style definitely makes case studies like this easy to read.

Thanks @jaybot!

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Your case-studies are always soo entertaining Love that

Also I cannot agree more with what you pointed in this one.

Great targeting options, changing bids not screwing your campaigns up, super-easy adding new creatives, automatic rules.

I didn't use many traffic sources in my "career" - it was maybe 5 or so but Pushground is definitely the best of them.

My AM is also super-helpful and she's just great person (hi 5 Gina). Exactly the opposite when on other traffic sources your AM talks to you only when you spend like 1k per day.. I know that for experienced affiliates who spend like 5k per day it's not the issue but it shows how traffic sources treat every person, not only big guys.

Actually the only thing I miss is winning rates and opportunities for sources. In raport we see info that "To improve speed and performance, we have removed bids and winrate from the source dimension.
I get it but maybe we could see it at least by API? Or in report downloaded in CSV? It could be help to spot the biggest placements which are under-bided. Any chance for that @pushground?

But anyway, I can full agree with all thing which jaybot said. Awesome features, awesome people, great traffic.

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Good questions.

My point is focusing on only the 0-1 hour and 12 hour-1 day can save you a lot of money when testing as opposed to 1-2 days or longer. On a lot of platforms you have targeting of Hi, Med, and Low. Which means... I have no idea! 1-3 days, 3-14 days, 15+? It's quite vague. With Pushground, you can save a ton by going as low as you want and save a lot of money on testing with the highest quality / newest subscribers.

In this case, I'm only looking at the CPA. The algorithm is definitely trying to get the creatives with the best CPA working for me, so I don't have much control over many of the other factors. So, the second one does have a better CPA, but it's hard to tell at this point since the 1st one has been getting more traffic, I can only tell by running them longer

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Thanks! As for the screenshot where I paused the second creative, lol. I was playing with the buttons when taking the screenshot

Push may be different than Pops. Maybe @twinaxe can chime in. Pops, you'll definitely get more volume, but you'll be wasting it, especially if you are running several camps with different bids at the same time. I know I've heard him write about that before. For push... it actually seems worse to me, too spammy, but maybe it works better? I know it definitely affects quality. I know some who actually set it to less than 1/24 like 1 every 3 days for various reasons.

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Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense.

Yep, running them longer will give more clarity.

Thanks for the reply.

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Thank you for this. I definitely realize I am overthinking things.

One question about your initial creatives. When you say [OfferSponsor], would that be the game name and [OfferPrize] their in game currency?

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(1) Samsung Message!
Enter today for a Galaxy S20!

(1) Apple Message!
Enter today for an iPhone 11 Pro!

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Awesome. What I thought it was. I'm surprised you got so much response for that game and that so many were old enough to be desirable to the offer owner. Amazing what works some days, I would have thought that too nichey.

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Well, about 250 million accounts worldwide, a large % of them in the US, 2/3 of which are 18-24, still leaves a couple million interested target audience.

Plus, the offer has a shit-ton of co-registration. Meaning, even if they came for the game, they may end up signing up for something else, which still can count as a conversion

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Amazing Man. As always, Keep it up!

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Awesome stuff @jaybot - and I really admire your self-depricating-yet-I-still-know-youre-still-a-badass style of humor. Highly enjoyable to read with that alone

Since I'm new to exploring Push traffic, would you say Pushground is a good traffic source to start as a noob and to test on...or just stick with Propellerads starting off as @twinaxe suggests in his Push tutorial?

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I am definitely not a bad ass. My Follow Along attests to me constantly losing money.

Anyway, you know what? That's an excellent question.

Honestly, if you're new to Push traffic I would probably stick with Propeller for a bit to get your feet wet. It's easier to use and has better quality off the bat by just choosing 'High' Quality without getting slammed with volume.

Pushground is doable if you're new, but since they focus on push and have a LOT of supply feeds, it's like having 10 extra traffic sources to deal with.

But once you've got the hang of propeller's push, moving to Pushground is the next logical step, and it's definitely one of my favorite traffic sources.

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Fair enough! Well I'm certainly learning a lot reading over your comments and such. Definitely hoping you will start making money at some point with all you are contributing here.

Got it, that makes sense. I know I need to start learning another traffic source other than FB...and trying to decide between pops and push. Looking at push because it seems like the gateway drug to native...which is an ultimate goal for me to learn, but obviously much harder and more expensive than either of those.

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I might just use pushground for my next campaign, the targeting options are great. Vastly superior to most networks I have worked with. Do you think I should use pushground to start then maybe move to source like Zeropark to scale? or just stick with pushground? Great case study btw!

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I love pushground, but if it's your first time dipping into push, be careful as they have tons of volume, just like ZP (but with way better targeting).

If you haven't tried push yet, much safer to start with propeller. Then graduate to pushground.

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Thanks for the reply jaybot! Yeah I have experience with push, been running propeller and ZP for about 6 months with mostly negative campaigns. Just wanted to put your methods into practice and see if they work for me with some slight changes. I just have a few questions if you don’t mind answering
1. Did you use a spy tool to get the lander?

2. Are there any promo codes for ftd on push ground? The more testing budget the better

Thanks in advance, you’re case studies and follow alongs have really been showing me where I have been going wrong and what I need to do to improve.


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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1. Nope. That's simply the ultimate @twinaxe lander from here: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-sweeps-lander

All I added was the prize and text.

2. That's an excellent question. Perhaps we should ping @pushground and ask them?

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Thanks for the lander it looks great just need to make a few adjustments. How much bot traffic do you think there is on pushground? More than 30% because those were the sort of results I was getting for tier 1 geos on propeller. I'm hoping with these targeting options and the solid lander I can build my first profitable campaign starting tomorrow. I understand the cpc may be a few cents higher but the conversion rate should also rise.

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Did someone say promo codes?? Yeah, we offer all STM members a 20% deposit bonus for their first time. Contact your account managers and tell them you are coming from STM, and they will activate the promo for you. They will also be able to help you with getting started. As for the bot traffic, we use opticks security to filter out all suspicious or bot traffic.

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