DoubleU's Sweepstakes Follow Along (16)
Hi guys
First off, super glad I discovered this Forum. For an industry that’s so competitive, it’s refreshing to see STM take such an open approach to helping us beginners out!
So far, I’ve worked through Vortex’s 40 Day Tutorial, which is an incredible contribution so thanks for that (I still check back quite often to re-read sections).
Focus has been on the below:
- Vertical: Sweepstakes (iPhone/Samsung & tried a few vouchers)
- Traffic Source: PropellerAds mostly, recently dabbled in PopAds whose traffic seems good but I couldn’t find much volume within the targeting I had converting on PropellerAds, opened it up & it didn’t convert well! Will test offers in both going forward.
(I’m thinking these two are great for testing but more sources are needed for aggressively scaling, let’s see, what do I know 
)
- Networks: Clickdealer, Mobipium, Advidi for now.
- Flow: Sticking with lower payout SOI / 1click offers
- GEOs: ZA, PH, TH, tested so far. Most conversions have come from ZA & PH.
Where I’m at:
- 5 main landers, cut down to one that performed much better using Stats calculator – (Spinning Wheel) which I’ve been testing new offers on & playing around with colour, copy etc.
- Most profitable campaign so far was $43 profit in a day. Which proved to me this Affiliate Marketing thing is actually real!
- A lot of red as expected. Lots of mistakes, making sure I learn from them!
Slowly putting together where the best placements are within these GEO’s. So far in ZA it seems there’s 2 or 3 big ones & if my lander / offer combo can make these profitable it’s happy days & I won’t haemorrhage cash. But maybe I’m still missing out on more good placements.
Plan is to uncover as many campaigns in the mid xx-profit figure as possible, whilst shooting for some volume & scaling up when ROI is good.
I can read every guide in the world, but I learn from doing. Reading the basics, taking action, coming to a conclusion & adjusting accordingly. This is pretty much how I plan to proceed (also why STM has been so helpful, you all give amazing, actionable advice).
To Do (still):
- Register as a business – seeing VAT add up on PropellerAds is beginning to drag…
- Get SSL certificates sorted on
- Test multiple traffic sources
- Test angles & get creative, not just “win xyz”
- Test way more offers – Aim is to go from testing ~10 offers per week to 20+.
Hope to post once a week to go through stats, major cockups, any wins etc.
Enjoying the ride so far, thanks for having me.
DoubleU
Nice plan, DoubleU. I'm going to start a follow along tomorrow; I can't wait to see how we progress together. Keep us posted!
welcome to MOBIPIUM! Ping me if you need any help with the platform!
Thanks for starting this follow-along! Good luck buddy 
Starting is hard enough and the longer you run that stuff the easier it gets (usually) so helping some eager beginners is the least we can do
Many beginners make the mistake to read too much, to prepare too much and to try to get everything perfect before they start.
But in the end there is no way to avoid it, you just have to start running campaigns to learn it.
And no matter how good prepared you are, in 99% you will face situations anyway that you never thought of.
Testing 1 or 2 offers here or there won´t get you anywhere.
Hey all, glad to have you following along.
Florsa - very positive experience so far with MOBIPIUM!
Twinaxe - good to have you pitching in, I'm realising as I write this how much more organised I need to be to get the most out of this follow along, so having your experience here will keep me in check!
Chilldude - I'll be following your progress aswell.
Affpayinggao - Your site looks like it will come in handy, thanks for dropping in.
End of week update:
Main 2 offers are still converting, ran a bunch of new offers against these with the same targeting, prize etc. and they are still the better offers, even if largely unprofitable this week.
Realised looking back at the stats now I've gotten into a habit of cutting losses, probably too soon. The hardest part is letting everything run it's course whilst busy with career tasks in the day. If something isn't looking strong right out the gate it's mighty tempting just to kill it and have one less area to focus on!
Also spent a load of time on LP speed optimisations again, they were okay but still room for improvement, now main landers are ~.7s
Put these into templates & got translations done into a massive swipefile which should speed things up going forward.
Moving forward - focus for the week will be testing + how to optimise a campaign again. I've really only had success with one whitelist in ZA where any further optimisation would mean very little traffic, so I'll put a weeks focus into other GEO's and just try and squeeze more profit / ROI and relearn the process whilst collecting some Blacklists.
Other:
- Signed up with some new networks over the weekend so should have more offers to test, also opening up to a few more GEO's.
- Made a bunch of angles - mostly around celeb / pop culture & local events / themes in each GEO. So far the basic "Win a Free iPhone" has performed better but I'll know more after this week.
Question:
- GTmetrix on more than one occasion has recommended I use a CDN when all my landers are going through CloudFront. Anyone else seen this, maybe just a glitch as setup seems fine but I'd be worried if it was going down. Most of the time it's fine and it also sometimes recommends me to "enable compression" when I have gzip enabled.
Working on rather small optimizations like LP speed can be done later when you already have good converting funnels.
Priority should be tasks with high impact first, everything else later.
Always keep in your mind, there is exactly one reason why we see the same landing pages over and over again on spytools: Because they are proven to work.
Okay gotcha, so it's clear now I'm gonna have to open up the amount of offers I can get my hands on.
Going through the application process with a few new networks now, but I can't see any major downside to opening up the amount of GEO's I cover.
Budget should be fine whilst I work out the new placements & get translations done. I figure I'll have to open up at some point anyway. Quick search on Clickdealer & I can cover almost all of Europe in my ads and still stick to less than $4 payout offers.
Quick update - Started yesterday with 2 iPhone 12 offers in Thailand, ran traffic untill1offer was 90% chance of being the winner, paused the other. Blacklisted mainunprofitable placements.
AM recommended 1 new offer, added that and ran again. Ran until original best performing offer cameout as 90% chance of being the best. Checked stats again, very few profitable variables(placement or non placement), total profitable sections very low. Paused campaign, will come back if I can get any more iPhone 12 TH offers. stats as below.
Setting up new offers to test.
How many landers did you test for these offers?
Ran until original best performing offer cameout as 90% chance of being the best
) but don´t forget that you should only keep offers or landers running until they reach statistical significance when they are worth it.The calculators basically only know how much traffic the offers received and how much conversions they generated but they don´t know how much money you spent for the tests.
When offers don´t convert you could let them run forever and they never reach statistical significance.
Don´t get me wrong, I don´t say this is the case with your offers but especially with low payout offers it´s good to keep an eye on it so that we don´t overspend there.
Thank you for choosing PropellerAds as your traffic source! We hope that you’ll make profit very soon. Here is some articles and a webinar that can help you:
- webinar about sweepstakes
- case studies
To get useful advice from our team, you can also send a message to our support team or join our Telegram chat.
Just the 1 lander for those offers Twinaxe, good point, I definitely overspent on these! I’ve also probably underspent a few times in the past, hopefully my bank balance will appreciate it when I find that sweet spot.
I've just gone through all my networks searching for offers so will try and get a better feel for when an offer is worth letting it run with these. If not it's gonna be an expensive week!
Forgot to mention, I’ve been using Peakconversions & CampaignPlanner v3.
Update for the week – tested 13 different offers, which I'll need to increase, ended up $86.48 in the red. Testing AU and NZ for the first time aswell, whilst the time difference sucks, English speaking landers is nice + lots of offers to test going forward.
Monday update.
Okay so in amongst a few dead offers, one campaign today showed some potential.
Stats so far as below:
I’ve also duplicated this and tested at a lower bid, let it run for a few thousand views before pausing with 0 conversions.
Looking at
Will duplicate and test a higher bid aswell, I’m currently bidding just under $3 with max at $5.
Also I’m thinking testing on a 2nd traffic source makes sense at this point?
Originally Posted by doubleu
Okay so in amongst a few dead offers, one campaign today showed some potential.
Stats so far as below:
I’ve also duplicated this and tested at a lower bid, let it run for a few thousand views before pausing with 0 conversions.
Looking at
Will duplicate and test a higher bid aswell, I’m currently bidding just under $3 with max at $5.
Also I’m thinking testing on a 2nd traffic source makes sense at this point?
As for exploring a new traffic source at this point... you might want to wait some more, new source means different interface, different approval rules... it might confuse you a bit. But it's not like you MUST NOT do this... if you feel confident enough, go for it. It's very well possible that you will have better results with a different source or even a different type of traffic.
When starting out, the point is to NOT overload yourself with information and stuff to learn... but as soon as you're certain you can handle it, go for it
Tuesday Morning
Good to have you here Matuloo!
Okay so higher bid worked, ended up profitable almost immediately, let it run to 5 conversions & used PeakConversions to check which was working best – came out 91%, paused original / lower bid.
Ended up hitting the cap last night which was probably a dumb idea of mine to just let it run, wasn't expecting 9 conversions in an hour late last night.
Question - Should I have set up a new campaign in
Cap is now 4x bigger for me, so lets see how this goes.
Blacklist - 1 city which was in a $10 loss, removed IOS and one zone blacklisted. Still 200k traffic available, will see if I can get this profitable first before looking at other sources. Have changed bid by $.10 to keep it away from my other campaign, will run both and compare, then take the best performing & test a few bids as the bids have changed quite a bit since yesterday.
Or would you guys say just test different bids for both Blacklist and Original from the start?
Seems like changing the bid has a much larger impact than BL/WL with me (in this GEO at least). Then hopefully these small changes increase ROI & I can still scale.
It doesn´t really make sense to "scale" a losing campaign to other sources.
It´s much better to first find a good converting funnel on source A and then use this funnel to test additional sources.
That way you keep test costs lower and testing is faster.
Different bids can perform different, even on the same placements.
You can have placements that are profitable on a specific bid but not profitable on other bids.
When you keep different bids separated you can see much better which bids work for which placements.
Home > POP / PPV / Redirect > Follow-along Campaigns