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Secret Multi-GEO Sweepstakes Case Study ($10,000 Profit) (14)

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STMers,

I finally got around drafting up another case study. Hopefully some of you will find it useful. Let me know if you have any questions.
It's still a "work in progress", just wanted to get it out before my STM membership expires. So I apologize for "roughness" and lack of editing. Will try to polish it and add some missing pieces in the next few days.

Original Blog Post: https://www.affiliatecase.com/sweepstakes-case-study/

Offer Vertical: Sweepstakes
Payout: $20
GEO: Multiple
Affiliate Network: Clickdealer
Traffic Network: PropellerAds, Adsterra, AdCash
Traffic Type: POP/PPV

INTRODUCTION

This is going to be probably my biggest affiliate marketing case study ever. I will explain in great detail how I managed to generate over $10,000 USD of profit last year (2019) in a campaign that is still generating amazing ROI today! This case study may be used as a FREE guide describing “ins and outs” of running sweepstakes vertical on POP/PPV traffic.

Here’s to all the haters that say POP traffic is dead.




Pure volume of traffic available from the GEOs for this campaign will ensure that there is a sure way for everyone to get the slice of this sweet and delicious ROI pie. But, depending on when you are reading this, the exact offer outlined in this case study might not be longer available.

Without further ado, let’s start.

Below you will find all details about the campaign(s): exact offer, landing page as well as exact traffic source and tracker settings used.

GEO

I’ve always looked at offers that have /INTERNATIONAL in their title with quite a bit of skepticism. It wasn’t until late last year that while being bored one day I’ve decided to give one of them the good old college try. That offer wasn’t suggested by my affiliate network (ClickDealer) nor did it appear on any of the top performers newsletter. It was literally just me randomly browsing all available offers on the network to see if anything stands out. This further emphasizes the point of always testing everything! You never know what kind of golden nugget you may come across.




OFFER


This offer was a CC-Submit Sweepstake that accepted over 150 countries, most of them being Tier 2 and 3 GEOs. It was available in multiple landing page variations (Samsung, iPhone and their variations), but to be frank, I’ve only grabbed the very first tracking link, that I later combined with an iPhone landing page, without even checking if that’s what the claimed prize was for that particular link variation. This is how confident I was that most likely this campaign will tank and make no money. Boy, was I wrong!




A very interesting part about this campaign is that zones that have a huge volume of traffic on PropellerAds, but very low CTR/Conversion Rate and would normally do poorly in most GEOs, have generated the most profits! Yes, zones that I’ve written off and considered duds were now responsible for a huge chunk of my success with that campaign.

LANDING PAGE

As PropellerAds has become more and more strict with the creatives they allow, it took a bit of headache and testing to get the landing page their compliance team would be happy with approved.

After a number of tries, playing a tug of war with the compliance team had a “Prize Box Style” lander approved. There was a zero chance I was going to take my time to translate the landing page into campaign’s native languages, such as Swahili. (Imagine the ROI boost if I did? Later on that towards the end of the case study). So, I just ran the English version of same. Now that I’m writing this, it would have been probably smart to localize the landing page even more, or at the very least include a country dynamic token.




TRAFFIC SOURCE AND TRACKER SETTINGS

TRACKER SETTINGS

Here are my exact tracker settings for this campaign. Binom automatically tracks PropellerAds costs, but make sure to set your cost to CPC and check off “Auto”.




TRAFFIC SOURCE SETTINGS


The campaign setup is rather intuitive. After choosing a campaign name, select OnClick (Popudner) for Advertising Format and choose SmartCPM as your pricing model.




With CPM you will pay a set bid price, regardless of what the other bids are. With SmartCPM you will only pay slightly higher the amount of a second highest bidder if you win the auction, even if you set your SmartCPM to something astonishingly high.



Note: Last year PropellerAds introduced the CPA Goal 2.0 bidding model that some affiliates claim to have good results with. This is something that might be worthwhile testing as well.

So you may be wondering, how did I choose the GEO’s for this campaign? Well, I didn’t really, I just ran them all, separating them randomly into three different batches of GEOs.

I took my time to copy and paste each allowed GEO in offer description in PropellerAds Campaign Creation window. (Unfortunately their interface currently does not allow for an easy way to do this). Once the first campaign is created, you can easily duplicate it, creating additional ones to test more zones and remove under-performing countries.

Frequency was set to 1 per 24 hours. Automatic bidding disabled.

Due to running RON and knowing that I will most likely get flooded with traffic, since nobody else normally runs these GEOs (At least until now ) I chose a rather conservative CPM of $1.8.




TESTING & OPTIMIZATION

Now, for the fun part. The one that separates the men from the boys. I’ve split my testing process into three distinct stages.

Stage 1: Run a RON campaign for a few days

Stage 2: Copy it over to whitelist version with all collected zones.

Stage 3: Cut non-performing GEOs.


STAGE 1

First, I’ve created a RON campaign, each for mobile and desktop devices. Due to the amount of GEO’s that were allowed in this campaigns I separated it into two batches, with countries selected at random.

Keeping an eye out on it like a hawk after the launch, I aggressively cut every zone that received over 1500 impressions and less than 2% CTR. Even with a low CPM bid, the high amount traffic flooded campaigns almost immediately. It will be fairly obvious which zones are complete duds, they would get the most traffic in the least amount of time with the least amount of clicks. So be careful, you don’t want to waste your budget on those. The duds will have around 3000-5000 impressions and a CTR of 0.50 or less. Cut those immediately!

Here’s another trick. Every day or so I would up the bid by 25% or so to ensure that I’m getting traffic from the higher quality zones that the original bid wasn’t high enough to receive traffic from. This way I get a reasonably legitimate white list of zones without missing any of the golden ones.

Since the offer is a CC-Submit, with a more complicated conversion flow when compared to SOI (Single Opt-In), I did not follow the standard rule of cutting zones that exceeded 1.5x of the offer payout without a single conversion. I cut zones based on their CTR.

Yes, it’s possible that some zones would have a huge CTR but receive absolutely no conversions. I opted to wait for Stage 2 of the process, when running my whitelist campaigns to cut those out.

STAGE 2

After 7 days of running the RON campaign, it was time to create duplicate whitelist versions of it. Normally, I would stop the RON campaign and concentrate on the Whitelist ones, but instead, for whatever reason (greed and lack of patience for the most part) I’ve decided to turn RON campaigns into a whitelist campaign, cutting the number of geos to only those that converted. Hence, if you’re looking at campaign screenshots bekiw, the data might not be 100% accurate in terms of ROI for each campaign variation.

I ran both, the former RON campaigns (that now became whitelist campaigns with top geos) and new whitelist campaigns (all available geos) simultaneously for about another week.

STAGE 3

Stage 3 was zeroing in on only top countries from the whitelist campaigns. I’ve removed countries that did not show signs of life from currently running campaigns and created new separate campaigns with only top geos and top zones. The results of this are shown here:



SCALING

Two weeks after launching the campaign on PropellerAds it was time to start scaling to other traffic sources.

I did not run any RON campaigns on Adsterra, and only used my existing whitelists that I’ve acquired over the past year, as described in these two case studies: Sneaky Strategy Using a CPA model & Easy Profits on AdCash

For AdCash I ran both whitelist and RON versions.

The setup was virtually identical to PropellerAds for both networks. I even used a similar bid of 1.8 on both Adsterra networks for the initial batch of campaigns. For Adcash I created a CPA Goal campaign setting a goal of 15 USD. You can read more about it in the AdCash case study I mentioned above. If you’re still having issues or questions, please let me know in the comments.

Adsterra Results:



AdCash Results:



BONUS

Not being lazy and willingness to go just one step further, almost always pays off in the world of performance advertising (and life in general).

After running this campaign for a while, I’ve noticed that there was a significant amount of traffic and conversions coming from the French speaking GEOs.

So I created separate campaigns for those, translating the landing page to the French language.

To no surprise, after a split test, the landing page adapted to the native language of the traffic performed significantly better.

I’ve tried doing the same for the Spanish demographic, but did not have as good of results as I did with the French.

CONCLUSION

Hopefully you found this case study helpful. Depending on when you read this, the offer might not be longer available on the network, but one thing for sure, there is going to be other, similar offers that you can apply exactly the same techniques to and make some money. Tier 3 countries are perfect for those with a smaller budget, not willing to fight for traffic against the big dogs.

Until next time.


Cheers.

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I don't run pops but damn that ROI makes me want to lol. That's an awesome case study thanks man. Did you consider expanding the campaign in to push on propeller too?

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I also ran this offer for some time

I just smile when I hear that pops are dead

I also have quite a few zones with very high volume and extremely low bids that have pretty low CR but generated thousands of conversions and make very good profit.

On the other hand there are also zones that generated xx-xxx conversions with very good ROI but the total profit is lower.

Shows once more that ROI isn´t everything, low conversion rate and ROI can be worth it more when you have enough volume for cheap price.

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I've considered it, but never cared enough to do it. I'm sure there's someone who can make it work! Something tells me @twinaxe might have tried it?

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It definitely converted way better a few months ago. It still works, but only on a select number of GEOs. At least for me.

I should mention to anyone reading this, don't just try to duplicate this case study exactly.
Use it as a guide to create your own campaigns and find your own offers.

There are plenty of other Tier 3 (I call them "obscure GEOs" offers available that will yield similar if not better results. I might share some soon enough.

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Isn't it the second price auction model?

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Yes. I think he meant the second highest bidder after you if you win the auction.

See PropellerAd definition of their algorithm:
https://propellerads.com/blog/pay-le...rtcpm-bidding/

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How much did you spend during stage 1?

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so it is a different thing than I have thought! What happens if there are two advertisers using SmartCPM? Won't it skyrocket the bids as they both are competing for the number one spot? Could it also cause bid wars?

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No, each one sets its max bid. The higher one wins the auction and pays a final price corresponding to the 2nd best bidder + a small spread.

This is the basic model. Google uses a similar system, but includes the quality score to adjust the max bid of each bidder before the auction takes place.

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Around 1k for initial testing.

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If anyone is looking for exclusive CC submits, mostly in the US - PM me with your skype

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$1 for each time I read that sentence

The bid war would only run as long as both competitors are below their max bid.

Once a max bid is reached the competitor is out of the race and the winners bid is slightly above the competitors bid.

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@affiliatecase this is an AMAZING case study! It's so inspiring for a beginner like me to learn the ins and outs of successful campaigns. While I do push and not pops, this has been incredibly helpful. Thank you so much!

I just have one question: Do you think your CTR-based zone exclusion rules apply equally well for CPC-based SOI push ads campaigns? I'm struggling to get my campaigns to run successfully; I'm waiting to get enough conversions to cut landers, but I'm clearly doing something wrong, so bidding on bad zones may be the cause.

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