First Attempt at Paid Traffic from an SEO/development guy (9)
Welcome welcome!
I started out following the $1 tutorial and by the end of it had optimized a campaign up to -31% ROI which I felt was pretty decent for PopAds traffic direct-linking to a Mobipium Smartlink. Once I got to that point I started looking to start on the next step, this 40-day guide.
So far I have taken the following steps:
- Applied to a handful of Affiliate Networks: so far I have approvals for Mobipium,
Mobidea , Glize and a few others. I have applications out to Gotzha and Haka Mobile as well. - Created accounts on various traffic providers. I have PopAds, RichPush and PropellorAds setup currently. Only have experience buying traffic on PopAds thus-far but anticipate that will change along the course of this FA.
- Created an account on
Binom and bought a domain for the tracker.
Over the next day or so I'm going to play around with Binom, do some reading on how query parameters pass through ad to tracker to offer and vice-versa work (this portion really confuses me, I'm sure I'll be able to grasp it after some reading), and start browsing offers to test on the networks that I currently have acceptance to.
I'll make sure that I keep a spreadsheet to track the offers that I end up choosing and will make sure that I focus on low payout offers so that I'm not blowing a ton of money testing while I'm still so new at this.
Will update this as I go along the process!
I think I've got a pretty good handle on Binom so far, went back into the Day 9 portion of the guide and read through the action and explanation steps and everything made sense to me.
I have a few offers on my spreadsheet that meet the criteria from the guide so am plugging ahead with the process.
This leads me into day 10 - launching a single campaign. I'm going to have my first offer be a Direct Billing, DOI offer from
I've got the affiliate network, traffic source, offer and campaign setup fully within Binom, and have my campaign in moderation with Propeller Ads.
Matter of fact, while writing this post my campaign was approved by Propeller and is now running!
This was a total breathe of fresh air compared to the process at PopAds, which took over 24 hours for an approval. I'm now realizing that patience is one of those things that I need to work on 
I will update this post either tonight or tomorrow with how this campaign goes prior to optimization!
EDIT (question):
Is there any good way to test and make sure, without a VPN, that a specific offer url that I'm grabbing out of Binom after setting up the campaign are legitimate. Just not sure whether or not my VPN has a server in this specific GEO.
I had about 1000 clicks through to the offer without anything registering within
Update:
Ran through my entire $10 budget on the first campaign with 0 conversions, not quite sure whether I had my tracking fully set up correct as I'm getting different information in Binom from
Binom:
PropellerAds:
I've decided to try two more offers to see if I get similar results.
One is a Carrier Billing 2 click CPA offer with a $0.30 payout targeting TIM carrier in Brazil. Daily cap is 250 and I'll be direct-linking it through Propeller Ads. I have my tracking set up, hopefully correctly, for this one. I've tested the url that I'm receiving from Binom and everything appears to be correct. I turned a Brazilian VPN on and when I visit the URL I'm definitely receiving the offer page, but getting a "This offer is not available for your device" screen.
The other offer is a Direct Billing, Single Optin offer from Mobidea (23430 - ZA - [MOB] - Skeem Saam - MTN - 1Click) that is definitely generating revenue for some people, so hopefully I'll be able to see at least one conversion for the $10 budget I put towards this. PropellerAds has already approved this camp so it is actively running.
The last offer I tested out I wasn't able to get this far as I didn't have a VPN with a server in Egypt.
Since I'm not running the previous campaign anymore, I'm posting my setup information below in case anyone can quickly glance and tell me either "Yup you had that setup correctly, it's just a bunk offer or not going to convert direct linking with pop" or "Nope you had X, Y, and Z setup incorrectly, try this instead!"
Offer:
Campaign:
My goal is to at least be able to nail down an offer that I can get at least one conversion on before I move to the part where I'm implementing landers in my process. If anyone things this isn't a realistic goal, just let me know and I'll skip right ahead to implementing landers.
Thanks!
EDIT:
So South African mobile pop traffic on PropellerAds is expensive AF. I ran through my budget for that camp in maybe 15 minutes at a 6-7x higher CPC than my previous campaign targeting Egypt.
One issue with this campaign that I didn't have on the previous camp:
My tracker shows 2364 clicks and 0 conversions. Mobidea shows just 381 clicks. Wonder what could be going on there 
Hey @jhooton!
A few ideas:
- Try to check with your affiliate manager if the post back link is properly configured so you get the conversion sent to the tracker.
- Have a look at the details of placements in
Binom , to see where you clicks come from. - Maybe test a SOI offer to start with as it does not require user confirmation and will convert faster
Hey @jeremie,
1) I'll ask my AM about the postback link. I went in and changed it from manually adding the query param's to
2) Here's a screenshot of placements from Day 11's guide on Testing and Optimization, looks like most traffic is Chrome Android. I did set this camp to Android only so that would make sense.
Attachment 23888
3) I'm going to look into it, most SOI offers that I'm seeing on
Thanks for your response!
Woke up this morning expecting one more of my camps to start on propellerads, but instead received an email about an account suspension.
Looks like they just wanted verification of the payment method that I used so I sent that over to them and hopefully will get my account suspension resolved soon!
Have also been approved for lemonads, so excited to see what they have to offer.
Finally started pulling some conversions.
Ended up trying out a couple offers on Lemonads. My tracker isn't counting the conversions so I probably have something setup wrong with it.
Currently running an Adult Mobile offer in Mexico.
16879 impressions, 3 conversions. $15 spent, $4.50 brought in. So I'm at about -70% ROI which I don't think is absolutely awful as far as direct-linking goes. It's definitely my first conversions outside of the $1 guide, so that feels kinda nice.
I'm thinking my plan for tomorrow will be to figure out why the hell my tracker isn't getting conversion data sent back and grabbing a couple adult mobile landing pages and changing them up. I don't anticipate the actual logistics of the landing page portion to be too difficult for me, I'm super comfortable changing code, optimizing for speed and handling hosting and domains and everything.
I'll probably stick with the tutorial and use S3 to host the site using Cloudfront in front of the bucket to handle CDN responsibilities.
Super stoked to see some conversions come in and excited for the next steps! I definitely know that I can make this work, just a matter of learning and testing and iterating.
So let that campaign run overnight, ended up with a -60% ROI. I think introducing a lander would help with the ROI. I am also planning on looking into why conversions are not ending up in my tracker.
I'm also testing a sweeps offer off of Glize so see if I can get my tracking fully working for that Aff Network.
I'm going to wait to run the adult camp again until I get confirmation from my AM that I have my conversion tracking setup correctly for their network. I really think that could be a profitable camp if I were able to collect the data and zones to optimize. I just don't think its worth the effort just yet to start testing LPs if I can't see what zones and devices and times that my conversions are coming from.
I've also decided that once I get to the LP stage, I'm going to stick to one vertical until I learn the ins and outs. These first few camps have been mostly just learning tracking and then different traffic sources for pop.
Another update
Issues
I've been unable to figure out
I've just been focused on figuring this out as the one offer that I've been able to generate conversions for thus far have been from Lemonads.
Next Steps
So if it looks like I can't figure that out for the Lemonads network, I'm going to move back to the networks that are in this guide. To be totally honest, probably should have done that from the get-go just to figure things out at the start.
I have hosting and a domain set up for hosting LPs and have purchased Adplexity's $1 pack of LPs. I've been able to get stuff up and hosted properly with a quick load-time.
I have also applied to ClickDealer. Had held off on that in the beginning due to seeing other people getting denied this year as newbies. Hopefully I hear back from them soon so that I have the ability to test out some offers on that network as well.
My step-by-step plan for today and tomorrow is:
1. Read through the guide on LPs
2. Figure out adding and using LPs inside Binom
3. Find a handful of offers that I can test out using sweeps LPs that I got from the Adplexity pack
4. Setup a handful of campaigns inside Binom and create the camps inside Propeller, Exoclick and Popads.
5. Run campaigns and hope that conversion tracking is working properly, I have a feeling that for
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