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Is Premium Bids The Only Way To Go? (13)

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Hello Fam!

Silly Question Alert - Can cheap ass bids work on Native in Tier 1?

I have spent about $100K, maybe lot more on Native ads in last three years. (Shhh... Greyhat campaigns)

Now, I have switched to CPA entirely. Wrong tense, I am switching to CPA entirely!

My recent bids on Native were about 8 to 15 cents in US, we adjust manually on basis the live traffic requirement we have.

Now, I could easily spend $300 to $500 a day with such bids (On a single network & each account) , yes it took a special campaign structure and a little bit of bait tricks here and there.

But, it blows me over when I read the recommended bids the suggested bids in the forum for quality placements.

My question is - If I can get traffic on those bids, and still spend about $500 a day on let's say Mainstream Dating SOI in US. Let's not forget, there are so many networks to run too. (Also might consider using a multi account strategy). Running multiple networks on low bids, Will I get shitty placements and terrible conversions? Should I do what I do or do an AB test with an account on high bids too? I know there's only one way to know, but it's good to anticipate and be aware of the other way around.

Sorry, Another Question popped up - A popular mainstream dating offer giving $168 payout for a spend > $2.99, should I test it alongside SOI & DOI mainstream offers with payout of $6.5 to $8 on Native Ads?

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Based on my personal experience, the traffic quality is tied to the bid level in MOST cases. But it's not a 100% rule... there are placements not targeted by many, from whatever reason and those might still convert very well, even with a low bid. But it's usually low scale, to really up the game, it's kinda necessary to drive the bids up.

The payout is very high for a trial offer, there will likely be quite heavy scrubbing going on... which doesn't mean it can't work of course. Personally, I don't like to work with offers that scrub too much, as it makes optimization more complicated as you don't get credited for every lead so some of the optimizations would be done based on false data. On top of that, with that high payout, you will need to dedicate much higher budget to test this offer properly. Then again, these payment-based offers usually do not kick so frequently due to low lead quality.

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I understand, So if I am able to buy just about enough traffic that I intend to by in a 12 hour window for 4 times lesser CPC and if it converts 3 times lower than a premium CPC traffic, which would probably eat up my budget in a couple of hours anyway, it's still a win for me right? If that happens!

I understand, it may not work out for scale up but I would not like to scale up on a traffic source beyond $300 to $500 a day initially. And, if a format + geo + offer combo works on one source, I will scale up across networks first instead of being more aggressive on the bid wars.

The greyhat offer I used to run earlier worked well with a multi account strategy, so I usually ran about 5 accounts simultaneously. I have dozens of accounts with good spend. Not sure if it would help here though.

Thank you for pointing that out too. I am feeling skeptical about the $168 offer as well. It's d a t i n g dot c o m offer. I thought it's a strong player and they are offering a PPS of $125+ across multiple CPA networks. I did not pick it for the safety net of low minimum deposit, but for the brand name, strong validation on spy tools and ofcourse the so very generous payout. But you are right, I am very concerned now. I would rather prefer half the payout but 10X the minimum deposit, that would be a safety net, not this.

About the other offers with $6.5 to $8, is that high too?
Could it be because it's a mixed bag of Niche based mainstream dating and they have a small audience in US Geo like - 50+ Seniors / Christian Dating / Russian Dating / Asian Dating / Latina Dating / 35+ Dating

You are so right about scrubbing though, I am certainly trying to send leads to diversified networks from diversified sources to diversified offers and in capped volumes so that I scale up only post first quality checks. A rush is no good if it ends with a cardiac arrest.

Anything that you would like to suggest to refrain from here?

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Yup, it can work that way. It will come down to what kind of traffic is available at that low bid, which will be different from one network to the next and will also fluctuate from one day to the next one. With very low bids, you're basically fishing for leftovers and traffic that the others didnt pick up from several reasons.

If you happen to get traffic that was not bought by others because their budgets ran out, targeting options made them miss it, the daily cap has hit in... etc, that's good and the traffic can be of high quality.
If you happen to get traffic from placements/widgets that almost everyone blocked due to their poor quality, well that's not what you want.

But I'm sure you understand this... you will see quickly whether it makes sense to go after these cheap clicks or not.

$125 is coming closer to the real world, but in case of going direct and probably on full joins, not trials. You can get such high payouts on PPS, but it usually takes some time for them to see how well your traffic retains. Nobody will give you such high payouts just like that, they need to scrub. In the end, it could still work for sure, I've been running PPS dating with solid results... it's just harder to optimize due to the higher scrub rate and the lower conversion rates... the budget needs to be pretty high.

These are ok rates for DOI offers, I'm running some with even higher payouts. In some GEOS, you can get even more than $20 per DOI lead... Denmark or Norway for example. There will be some scrubbing too, but that's the way it is. It's hard to set some general levels, but $5+ is the norm for DOI in any tier-1 GEO, sometimes way more than that as I mentioned above. Otherwise it's hard to make it profitable. Or they must not scrub at all, then it can work with lower payouts.

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If you are talking about T1 ad networks like Taboola, Yahoo Gemini and Outbrain, then the suggested high bids to get to premium placements are real (if not slightly lower than they actually are).

Just keep present that everyone is looking to get as much traffic as possible from the handful list of these premium site inventory - from lone affiliates that spend a few $20k-$40k a moth, to agencies and hardcore native affiliates that spend $2M+ a month. So the higher the demand the higher the bids as a result of the competition.

Besides the above, which is pretty obvious, most native ad networks nowadays should have well-segmented traffic inventory pools allocated based on the offer/vertical promoted on their network. This happens mainly because some publishers (especially the premium ones) don't like certain offers to be seen on their sites, and therefore the traffic source will take care of routing specific offer/verticals to a 2nd if not 3rd tier inventory pool by default.

As a result of the allocated traffic pool, your bids may be noticeably lower than those you see on forums, because vertical X and Y were usually delivered on 2nd/3rd tier inventory pools. Thing which normally will make you question the traffic and lead/conversion quality.

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@platinum

Thank you, that fills the missing pieces of the puzzle.

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Thank you so much for such elaborate and insightful response.

I am going to share my progress soon.

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@matuloo @platinum

Update -

I tried setting up some campaigns on MGID native for some supposedly mainstream offers.

The Latin Dating & Senior Dating offers were approved but with 'R' rating and 'NSFW' rating.

Two got disapproved -
Russian Dating & Asian Dating

They all had a pretty clean mainstream landers. It did not require a Prelander because the lander had it inbuilt with about 12 steps including all questions that a mainstream prelander has before signup conveyor belt.

But the MGID guys disapproved them for following reason -

Rejection reason: Explicit content The landing page contains erotic/pornographic materials, which is a prohibited practice

Explicit chat invitations https://prnt.sc/tzrety

Does it help adding an extra Prelander to get these approved? I have quality prelanders for Asian and Russian dating, even network has an option of adding an extra prelander before the offer, but I skipped it because they already had about 12 steps each.

I have seen these running on the same network with top notch ad strength and ad gravity.

Could that be because of cloaking or have things changed about which of these offers get approved?

Or maybe, I need to find other mainstream offers in these niches which don't have such explicit chat invitations?

Any suggested networks or advertisers with super clean mainstream dating offers for Native? Preferably SOI & DOI.

Any tips on things to check before picking niche based dating offers for pure mainstream native traffic for Tier 1 countries? Is it worth all the time I am giving to it?

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I tried to run what I believed was mainstream dating with MGID too, but most of the campaigns got rejected. The approval guys even joined some of the sites I was promoting and since there was some adult content in the members areas, they rejected it. So to be fully compliant, you need to run very clean dating offers that do not contain any adult stuff from the lander all the way to the inside of the members areas. Since I didn't want to cloak, I gave up and returned to adult dating and adult sources

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It surprises me so much, all these years so much of cloaking on MGID and the guys didn't sniff a thing, thousands of dollars of monthly spends, pure BH campaigns and they did not give a shit about it. And here, we have prelander over an existing prelander based offer page and the MGID is all so baffled up.

Yeah, they did the same, went as far as signing up even on offers that are for iOS devices in Australia. They had so much time to capture dozens of screenshots of what was happening on the site. I wonder if they give so much time to each sites, how the hell they never sniff cloaking.

Looks like this is no world for nice people. I bet my ass, they won't care a tad bit if I cloak. All these compliance audits are to mess up with the good peeps only it seems.

Anyways, one of my accounts has decent spend and the current account manager was nice enough to offer dedicated account manager to help me optimize better.

One offer that got approved is 30% in negative in the first $200 without any optimization, so I am smelling some hope there.

About the original topic of this thread -

I figured out why I am able to generate insane amount of traffic at such low bids on my old campaigns. Apparently for CPA, they assign specific tags and make us compete with the advertisers of that pool in the bid landscape. It was also evident from a reference statement by the AM who could site very specific bids for Tier 1 dating.

Running generic arbitrage like content blogs, allows a wider reach across almost all categories and there's more traffic volume allocation available. There low bids do the job if CTR is decent. That's my current analysis. Ofcourse, I will get a better idea when I run more verticals.

I am going to stick to mainstream dating or adult dating with mainstream faking for Native sources for a few thousand dollars. Will now test some other networks. Trying to stay clean and stay away from cloaking, need to learn to win while playing by the rules without cheatcodes.

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I'm pretty sure they have some automatic system in place that does the screens, I seriously doubt they do it by hand. And those who figure out the system and how to fool it, can probably run the cloaked campaigns

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@matuloo

I second you on that!

However, the dating campaigns I made.

They reviewed 35 teasers for various campaigns / geos / devices and about 15 disapprovals had 2 to 8 cropped screenshots of the content of DOI dating sites.

Sooooo weird!

These guys are being a proper Sherlock on Dating campaigns when it's so easy to sneak away with cloaking on their platforms.

I say this about all Native platforms. Barely any suspensions in a month or so that too on very heavy spends.

I was feeling so invincible about CPA. LMAO

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Well, I guess dating is a more policed vertical in general... there is a very fine line between SFW and NSFW content and pretty much all the big pubs who run native ads do not want NSFW offers to be promoted on their web properties. And at the same time, affiliates know that the sexy creatives pull more clicks... so it's a constant battle

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