Offshore's Native Follow Along🌴 (35)
Offshore's Native Follow Along:
Hello everyone been a few months since my push follow along. I am back! 
I have taken this time to save up $25,000 to use to get going on Native since this is always what I have wanted to run as a traffic source. tbh I dont know why just have always been drawn to it. Facebook account bans sound like a nightmare and I dont even have a personal facebook account lol. I have been running Native for about a week now and so far its off to a real struggle of a start. I have had domains flagged, tons of campaign moderation rejections, and spent my first week mostly flinging shit at the wall.
I have already noticed luckily though a few things I have done very wrong.. and there are somethings I am a little confused about still but I know in time everything will go in the right direction.
First Week Errors:
1. Spying: I kept running offers that were sorted by received most traffic and longest running however I never paid attention to WHEN. Many of these campaigns I was spying were paused 2+ months ago nearly and if their paused their is probably a reason why.
2. Not letting offers run their proper test budget. I ran everything from $6 payouts to $110 payouts so far and with the $110 payout offers I am for sure not ready for the test budgets needed to run these I have the money but psychologically I'm not there yet I get cold feet and killed these campaigns in 1 day of no conversions. Not enough to get any kind of relevant data on a offer of this payout which I already know so not sure why I made these mistakes I suppose I just like to learn everything the hard way.
Will elaborate below in more detail on something that has me very confused about MGIDs bidding system and native in general. Push I ran on propeller and the chart provided with bids made it very simple for me to understand if I was bidding high or low. So far on native I'm a bit lost.
Setup:
Tracker: BeMob
Spytool: Anstrex
Traffic Source: MGID
So far I have mostly ran Nutra offers. I see on MGID a LOT of nutra and dating being ran across most GEOs so I figure I am going to be pretty much focusing in on Nutra, specifically COD offers to start with. I will in future try out rebills and straight sales again but for now thanks to the lower payout and more availability in tier 2, COD it is.
Week 1 Stats: Hope you like the color red because I sure dont.
as you can see pretty rough.. I did about as poorly ROI wise on push also my first week so I cant beat myself up too much. I know I will improve over time at least. I deposited $5000 on to MGID and got a deposit bonus of $1250 so the cool think is I havent actually lost anything yet. plenty left to find a decent campaign before I even get into my own deposited money. Lets hope for better stats this next week fingers crossed.
Bid Confusion: If anyone can explain how to bid I will love you forever.
Teaser Reach: "Very High"
Teaser Reach: "Very Low"
When launching a campaign and adding in my teasers(ads) the teaser reach tool is how I am gauging what I bid. In this example a very high bid on MGID is a 12 cent CPC and a very low bid is 1 cent CPC. When this campaign actually goes live and is running however when I go to check my stats in MGID's dashboard often times my teasers that were bid on as very high will come back as medium or low even. My understanding is their is really no ceiling to what I can bid on native. I could bid 60 cents CPC on this campaign and the teaser reach in this case when adding teasers will simply say "unable to calculate reach". This exact campaign when live returned a 12 cpc as medium and recommended a 24 cent CPC to obtain a very high reach. I want to be bidding high when I launch my campaigns so I can be testing actual quality placements and not junk traffic. I am unsure on MGID how to know if I am bidding high, low, or average compared to others running in the same GEOs and Device Targeting.
My understanding is Native traffic sources will take the ads that the system likes and boost them compared to others this is also why in some cases I will have 1 ad with a 12 cent CPC come back when live as very high and another on a 12 cent CPC come back as low. Is my understanding of this correct? If I am understanding this correctly how do I still know where I even am in the bid position compared to other advertisers/affiliates. This is what has had me the most confused my first week without a doubt.
Testing Strategy:
I'm using the mad letters from madsociety to base my campaign strategy off of where I will launch 3 campaigns at once with 1x payout daily budget for 3 days to test them and then pick which one is doing best and kill the others all makes perfect sense only real question is if I am testing offers with a payout of say $15 I have to launch with a minimum daily spend of $50/day on MGID so should I just pause these campaigns each day once they have spent the amount or could I even accelerate testing by launching campaigns and running the 3x payout in a single day rather than over 3 since these lower payout offers then be tested at still 3x the adspend and then pick my winner and go from there.
Final Thoughts:
I've noticed on native on MGID at least that unlike push where most the time my budget would be spent in one placement blowing out all the daily spend and not converting native is a little different my daily spend will be made up of 1 or 2 widgets with a few dollars and spend and TONS with cents of spend. How do I deal with this and optimizing in general since the cent spend placements ad up but have no statistical significance to cut them. My first week on native has been rough but I will not give up and will update this follow along daily pretty much, some days I may not update the FA but in that case ill update it the following day with the prior and current day etc.
Fellow Affiliates:
I'd love to talk with some guys running native on MGID specifically if you are feel free to reach out to me on Skype or Discord. I'm looking for like 2 other guys to have a little skype or discord group with where we can help each other out. If your serious about native send me a PM on here or add me on skype/discord.
Skype: live:trevornewmandesigns
Discord: Offshore#9996
Here is a link to my Push Follow Along from earlier in the year if anyone wants to give it a look and some of you may remember me if you read this. https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...26%23127796%3B
Will post the first day stats for this follow along later on today got 3 campaigns sitting in moderation. Usually MGID approves in a few hours its the weekend though so assuming thats why it has been a bit slower.
Nice post man I’m pumped to see how your campaigns do!
I think for the 3x payout question, either way works, collect the data in one day or over 3 days. If you decide to pause the camps at 1x payout each day, I think the data is slightly more reliable since your spreading your campaign out over 3 days.
Also with the teasers, your understanding is correct. If your teaser CTR is high, mgid makes more money on your ads because they pay on a CPM basis to websites and your ad gets more clicks (hence more money for mgid) per 1000 impressions than low ctr teasers. Hope that makes sense, basically high ctr means more traffic for you and you can get away with lower bids as well.
Best of luck with your campaigns!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Great stuff @offshore!
Very perceptive re: $110 offers and what a bear they are... even now I do the exact same thing you are - I just try them, spend a couple hundred, and if they don't immediately pop I pause them. I figure either they are gonna do great immediately with minimal optimization or else its going to be too expensive to optimize anyway.
But yeah - are you gonna try any other networks? MGID has some definite positives and super friendly staff, but I would absolutely urge you to try out some combination of Taboola/Outbrain/Revcontent. While technically they are all 'natives' I think Taboola and MGID for instance are as different as either is to Facebook, so definitely worth trying more than one network (preferably try all four of them just to see which one you like the best).
My top choice would be Taboola because I think their SmartBid is the easiest thing to find profits with in native, however another great one is Revcontent because you can still do whitelists, so you can literally just take a couple good sites (try RoutineJournal and NationalWeatherAgency) and use just those sites to test tons of offers, get comfortable with everything, etc. Outbrain is good too though in that they have really high quality traffic and a good 'SmartBid' type thing of their own, but also allow some VSL type stuff that Taboola doesn't.
Look forward to seeing your progress man!
Originally Posted by jack_l
Originally Posted by bhal07
Following your new journey my friend
Excited to follow your Native adventure mate! Good Luck
Originally Posted by twinaxe
- - - Updated - - -
Originally Posted by manchester
Day 1 of the follow along is off to a fairly good start.. I wont post stats until the day is over as who knows where it will ultimately end up. I launched 3 campaigns across a few different geos, Eastern Europe and Asia specifically. One of my campaigns is in the green already and I see real potential with it. I launched with a cpc at very high of 12 now when this campaign is live its ads are at high to low across the 3 I launched with. I am wondering what I should do next with this campaign.
1. Raise my bid on all my ads to the very high reach limit from 12 cpc to the "very high" range of 30cpc-50cpc. Currently ROI is at over 85% if once more conversion rolls in it'll be near the 200%s so there is a room to raise my bid.
2. Dont touch anything and let it run its budget of $50 for the day since it's profitable anyway rather than pausing it at 1x payout and continuing tomorrow (leaning towards doing this)
I asked my traffic rep for information on what I should be bidding to be bidding high in the geo on desktop so I will wait to see what she says before I do anything. this week is starting MUCH better than the prior. I hope this campaign is something I can optimize and scale well see. The other 2 campaigns I will post in detail about with the stats at the end of the day I turned both off after about $6 of spend the payouts on these are $20 BUT the LPs were getting a 0% CTR these were the asian campaigns so im assuming it's because of the huge volume of traffic available in those geos because when I checked the widgets it was TONS of widgets spending a cent with 1 click and no LP CTR. Wondering how to deal with this would've easily spent the whole 1x payout with a crap load of widgets with 1 click and had no data to really go off of.
Good luck! Excited to see the results. Which vertical will you be running? Skin care or nutra? I'd be happy to help understand bidding, but I use 
Day 1: Red Red Red
I launched 3 campaigns today 2 in Asia and 1 in Eastern Europe. The Eastern Europe campaign may have some potential I am going to let it run for the next 2 days and see how it does. My other 2 campaigns I paused after about $6 in spend the payouts on these were $20ish however I was for sure just going to have -100% ROI on them by the time they hit 1x payout for the day, I will show why and maybe some of you can tell me how to deal with this in these asian geos with very large volumes available.
Here is a look at the 3 campaigns for the day. Take a look at the LP CTR rates on the 2 asian campaigns. 2% and 0%. This would lead me to believe that either my landing page is that shitty(straight from spy tools so this is unlikely) or the issue is something to do with just how many widgets their are.
The other asian campaign looks pretty much the same but literally a 0% CTR. It's tons of widgets with 1 to 2 clicks spending a few cents. How do I optimize in a GEO like this? Since 1 click and no CTR = 0% CTR... doesn't really actually mean anything same as the widget with 50% CTR from 2 clicks and 1 visit.
The Eastern European campaign converted within minutes and then not again for the remainder of the day. Maybe it was a lottery conversion we will see how it goes tomorrow
The problem is that the total CTR alone doesn´t tell much when the traffic is split across hundreds of placements/widgets sending just few clicks each.
You just need to wait for more traffic for each widget to make real decisions or you could try to get a good WL from your AM to find a good funnel and get back to RON/BL then with a working funnel.
I don´t run native myself but this is how I would do it
Day 2: -100% ROI and 0% Chance of giving up
Not much to update today I am letting the same 3 campaigns run and got some holds today but no confirmations. The holds came in outside of call center hours so maybe they will convert but probably not and in which case the days stats wouldn't turn out as bad. I also setup a rebill offer to try out which I will be launching tomorrow morning since it is an AM recommended offer and I am seeing it on spy tools.
Question for anyone running on MGID when you start out your campaigns for testing how many ads do you like to start with? 3? 5? 10? I have been using all images and ad headlines from spy tools so far but am curious about beginning to use some of my own specifically ad headlines based off what I have learned from reading Ca$hvertising. So for my rebill campaign I just setup i have started with 9 images all from spytools and 6 headlines from spytools and 3 of my own to see how they compare. The headlines I write myself score much higher on https://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.html than the headlines from spytools in a lot of cases guess I will have to see how they compare tomorrow in ad ctr.
I've also noticed on some landers on native I have seen push notification opt-in's would you guys recommend throwing a push sub opt-in on to my landing pages and using monetizer to grow a push list and gain some extra revenue this way? I know this is very common when running push traffic. Wondering if this is commonly done on native also I'm sure it would bring my LP CTR down and may not be worth doing, really not sure
With COD offers is it best to run only during call center hours or 24/7?? Running 24/7 gives you the ability to pick up more holds but ultimately what matters is conversions and common sense would tell me that say if someone orders at 11PM and the call center closed at 10PM and they do not recieve a call until the following morning at 9AM they are probably less likely to convert. 1. They may just miss the call due to still being in bed 2. Impulse buyers will have spent more time thinking about their purchase 3. They go to work and miss the call, etc etc.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
You just need to wait for more traffic for each widget to make real decisions or you could try to get a good WL from your AM to find a good funnel and get back to RON/BL then with a working funnel.
I don´t run native myself but this is how I would do it
Loving your follow-along man - great stuff (especially the gif's!).
I wish I could be more help but I've never been able to get MGID to work for whatever reason... will chime in more once you're running on one of the other ones.
Perhaps there's someone on the forum who does well with MGID who can give their take...
In regards to adding the push opt-in... there definitely seem to be folks doing that... I might hold off right now though just to make sure that you're not testing too many variables at once... then once you get a campaign that's profitable or close to it, test an identical version of the landing page but with a push opt-in on it, and see how it affects lp ctr and conversion rate
Originally Posted by offshore
Originally Posted by jack_l
I wish I could be more help but I've never been able to get MGID to work for whatever reason... will chime in more once you're running on one of the other ones.
Perhaps there's someone on the forum who does well with MGID who can give their take...
In regards to adding the push opt-in... there definitely seem to be folks doing that... I might hold off right now though just to make sure that you're not testing too many variables at once... then once you get a campaign that's profitable or close to it, test an identical version of the landing page but with a push opt-in on it, and see how it affects lp ctr and conversion rate
I figure once I’ve spent all my money through MGID I will likely then move on to Taboola. If I have things working well on MGID then of course I will also continue to run campaigns on MGID. I know when I make the move to Taboola I will probably have to run more Ecom or leadgen and less nutra since my understanding is Taboola is a lot stricter than MGID or RevContent as for the type of verticals that they will accept. Is my understanding of this correct or is it possible to run nutra rebills on Taboola even?What kind of minimum spend per day could I do on Taboola? MGID has cheaper traffic I know and that was another reason as a native noob that I chose it aside from the sign up bonus. I turned things to green in about 2 weeks on push so if I do as well on native I’ll be running $xxxx/week revenue at least within weeks not sure though how much I need to efficiently be able to test on Taboola.
Originally Posted by jeremie
Day 3: I'm really bad at this lol
Another day of -100%... for day 3 of the follow along and my 12th day of running native. I can't seem to get anything to work. AM recommended offers, Offers I see on spy tools, Random offers I've tested you name it. If I'm lucky I get 1 conversion the offer is green and I think great I may have finally found something and then nope it'll stop converting and be a blood bath for the rest of the budget. A campaign that was 150% ROI turned into -76% because of this(this is my best campaign so far lol) I should probably narrow in on something and stick to that offer type. I have had the most actually all but one of my conversions have came from COD offers but I have also been trying nutra rebills. COD Holds are kind of annoying since then im dealing with approval rates and its a bit trickier to to optimize or know how good a offer will really turn out. The rebills I have tried have either not converted at all even though I see them on spy tools. I did have one convert once but then like all my campaigns so far it stops. I let that one run for 3 days and got 1 conversion day 1 and that was it remaining days -100%.
Here is a look at my stats for the first 12 days on native. I've ran offers ranging from $2 payouts to a $100 payout. Most campaigns have been $10-$40 payouts. -92% Pretty rough.... My Amex payment is gonna hurt at the going rate lol
would love to hear everyone's feedback as far as what I should be doing. Keep trying COD offers and Rebills until one pops or focus in on one specifically that being COD or Rebills?
COD Pros:
Lower Payout so I can test more
Unique GEOs with cheap traffic
COD Cons:
Call Center Hours
Dealing with Approval Rates
Rebills Pros:
GEOs with high volume(Canada, France, Germany, etc)
No Approval Rate to deal with
Upsells Potential
Rebills Cons:
Requires higher test budget
Higher Tier Geos where traffic costs more
Here is a look at some of the ads I have been using for a Rebill offer as you can see all three are ads clearly from spy tools. I paused this campaign since its -100% ROI at 4x payout nearly.
I can also show the landing page I've been using but its just the apple cider vinegar landinge page I got from spytools and I'm sure many of you who have run nutra are familiar with it.
Here is all this campagins stats for the day. LP CTR looks decent? Not sure tbh what is considered low or high on Native.
On Native what is a good rule of thumb for a test budget when launching campaigns? 3x offer payout for 3 days? 1x offer payout for 3 days? 10x offer payout for a day? etc.
Hope everyone here likes the color red because its all I've been seeing as of lately. I will continue on though so dont worry this follow along isnt going anywhere until im deported from Europe back to the US and bankrupt or am a super affiliate lol. This month is off to a fun start -92% ROI and the IRS is on my ass
Any and all advice is appreciated! I will continue on until I figure this out haha goodnight everyone!
Really excited to see this thread @offshore! Your start is almost identical to mine... same traffic network, tracker, COD offer types... everything!
PS - I shot you a message on Skype!
Originally Posted by onticstein
PS - I shot you a message on Skype!
Day 4: No Stats For Today
No Stats to show for today! I cleaned some landers today for stuff im going to launch tomorrow but I spend the day assembling furniture and dealing with some tax issues that I needed to get out of the way, will be back to launching campaigns tomorrow morning now that all of that is handled so expect to see stats then
Posting days 5 and 6 for you guys later today
Day 5: Moderation
So all I spent day 5 doing was cleaning some landing pages and setting up my campaigns which I got sent into moderation about halfway through the day and weren't moderated until late that evening so no stats to show for day 5 due to this.
Day 6: Questioning my approach
So I've been testing nutra rebill offers however for whatever reason I cannot get these to convert at all, to this point most my losses have been from nutra trial offers. I see them on spy tools, their AM recommended, i rip the landers, and have been split testing LPs and even have a lander with a nearly 50% LP CTR rate but I cant seem to get any conversions on these offers. I've been letting them run to 3x payout which I did today. I have been testing all my campaigns on desktop to start with but today decided to try launching a mobile campaign which also did not convert. I have decided for now I am gonna totally abandon nutra trials since for whatever reason I cant get any conversions on them.
I am just gonna focus in on COD offers since I can in fact actually get these to convert and feel I have a better shot of finding a winner with these campaigns, I will try nutra trials later on I see a lot more COD offers being ran on MGID anyways. I am also now officially out of the deposit bonus I got for depositing $5k on to MGID. So now the losses will actually start to hurt haha native is off to a really rough start for me for sure but I'm sure I will figure it out in time. I have tested so far 16 offers I do not remember how many I tested on push before finding a winner I know it was quite a few though.
Originally Posted by offshore
So all I spent day 5 doing was cleaning some landing pages and setting up my campaigns which I got sent into moderation about halfway through the day and weren't moderated until late that evening so no stats to show for day 5 due to this.
Day 6: Questioning my approach
So I've been testing nutra rebill offers however for whatever reason I cannot get these to convert at all, to this point most my losses have been from nutra trial offers. I see them on spy tools, their AM recommended, i rip the landers, and have been split testing LPs and even have a lander with a nearly 50% LP CTR rate but I cant seem to get any conversions on these offers. I've been letting them run to 3x payout which I did today. I have been testing all my campaigns on desktop to start with but today decided to try launching a mobile campaign which also did not convert. I have decided for now I am gonna totally abandon nutra trials since for whatever reason I cant get any conversions on them.
I am just gonna focus in on COD offers since I can in fact actually get these to convert and feel I have a better shot of finding a winner with these campaigns, I will try nutra trials later on I see a lot more COD offers being ran on MGID anyways. I am also now officially out of the deposit bonus I got for depositing $5k on to MGID. So now the losses will actually start to hurt haha native is off to a really rough start for me for sure but I'm sure I will figure it out in time. I have tested so far 16 offers I do not remember how many I tested on push before finding a winner I know it was quite a few though.
Hey brother -
I don't mean to be a broken record, but I would absolutely unequivocally try another network before you spend that whole 5k...
I like MGID, I like everyone I've met there, nothing bad to say about them at all... but I don't know anyone who is currently running on it successfully... indeed it's the only network I couldn't make work of the 5 that I've now tried...
It's technically 'Native ads' just like the other networks, but it's really, really different than them... you don't know what sites the traffic is coming from... you get a small number of clicks from a very large number of widgets, making it difficult to optimize... they have their own internal team that runs on it that you're competing against... etc...
Nothing wrong with just leaving the 5k in your account there while you try Revcontent, Outbrain, Taboola... then you can decide what to do from there...
And again - I am taking pains to point out that this is not a criticism of MGID... perhaps there's other forums with lots of people on it who are killing it on there... but it just seems as though the main people here on STM talking natives and the STM courses on natives do not contain the proper wisdom to help one run successfully on it... maybe its because a lot of us built our approach off the James Van Elswyck course and TheDudeAbides's wisdom and they are both more Taboola-focused...
Originally Posted by jack_l
Man I love your posts, especially the gifs
I've always been interested in trying native one day so this FA is awesome, hoping you get hella success
Originally Posted by fastaj
I've always been interested in trying native one day so this FA is awesome, hoping you get hella success
will have an update tomorrow for you guys
Originally Posted by offshore
love the progress so far, keep us updated!
Looking good. Keep up with those $xxx days. I'd like to see $xxxx soon
Thanks for the update.
Never make decisions based on emotions
But you´re on a good way, you will succeed
It has been almost a month. Any updates?
What's cooking offshore?
Home > Native >