Home > >

---

Day 9: a)Setting Up a Campaign on PropellerAds - ACTION (35)

---

***********************************

ACTION

Today we'll be setting up the campaign on PropellerAds to buy actual traffic from visitors!

Once your PropellerAds account is approved, proceed to make your first deposit - just add the minimum amount of $100 - you can always add more funds later.

To make your deposit, log into PropellerAds, click on the "Add Funds" icon in the left menu, and the rest is self-explanatory.



Once you've made the deposit, set up the campaign as follows:

1)Log into PropellerAds, click "Campaigns" from the left menu, click the "Create Campaign" button.



By the way, if you only see icons in the left menu but not the names, just click on the sandwich at the top:



2)For the "Campaign Name" field: Copy and paste the name of the PropellerAds campaign you set up in the tracker yesterday.



3)For "Choose Advertising Format" select "Onclick (Popunder)".



4)For "Pricing Model" specify "SmartCPM".



5)For the "Target URL" field: Grab the tracker campaign url you've generated for this PropellerAds campaign - we covered how to do this in the previous lesson. Paste that url into this field.



(Please don't worry if your link doesn't look like the one in the screenshot - it will vary depending on which tracker you're using.)

6)Leave "Frequency / Capping by Impressions" at enabled (by default). Set frequency to "One visitor will see your ad 1 times per 24 hours".



7)For "Traffic Options" select "Propeller Ads", de-select "Brokers traffic" and de-select "Include AntiAd Block".



8)Toggle "Automatic bidding" to enabled - for now - we'll be changing that later. For "Countries *": Start typing your target country, then select it from the dropdown that appears. Leave the "Cities" options alone.



9)Do this only if you're using Binom or Voluum: Put the bid at the end of your campaign name - both in PropellerAds and in the campaign name in your tracker. In our example the campaign name would be "100520 ID Telkomsel 0.88".

To edit the campaign name on PropellerAds, just scroll back to the top.

To edit the campaign name in the tracker, go to the "Campaigns" tab > click on the campaign you're wanting to change the name of > click "Edit" > modify the name and save.

If you're using Funnelflux Pro, just modify the campaign name in PropellerAds (scroll back up to the top).

10)For "Enable Auto-Optimization" leave at the default "disabled".



11)For "Advertising Budget (USD)", set both "Daily Campaign Budget, $" and "Total Campaign Budget, $" to $10. (These are the minimum amounts allowed.) Ignore the "budgets below $30 might be exceeded" warning.



12)For "Platform" select "Mobile".



13)For "OS" just leave blank to select all (Haka offers accept all OSs.) Do the same for "Device", "Browser", and "Browser language".

For "Connection type" choose "3G/LTE" (my Haka AM told me the offers convert best on 3G traffic).

For "Mobile ISP" choose the mobile carrier you decided to target earlier.

Leave "Zone limitation" and "Audiences" alone.



14)Scroll back up to the "CPM" field to see what the amount is - remember this amount. Then toggle the "Automatic bidding" to disabled. Then put the bid amount you remember from before, back into the "CPM" field - but add 20% to it.



15)Scroll down to the section "Collect an audience for retargeting" - leave at the default "Do not collect".



16)Expand the "Campaign Schedule" section, leave the "Select Timezone" at default. For "Ad delivery method" select "Distributed".



17)Checkmark "I declare and guarantee that my campaign meets the Quality Guidelines" and click "Start Campaign".




You've set up your very first campaign! Congratulations on reaching this milestone!

I should tell you right now that your campaign may not result in profits (although it wouldn't be impossible!) Focus on learning and not earning in the beginning, and one day soon you'll hit on your first profits.

This campaign will not receive traffic (i.e. PropellerAds won't start sending visitors to your tracker link) until a reviewer at PropellerAds has reviewed your campaign to make sure everything meets their guidelines, and approves it. PropellerAds tells us that it can take up to 24 hours for a campaign to be reviewed:



However, it rarely takes that long. More often than not, it will be reviewed and set live in minutes.

By tomorrow, your camp will have been approved and some traffic will have been sent, so we'll have stats to look at together.



***********************************

In this lesson, we've done the ACTION of setting up a campaign from start to finish. However, we haven't gone into what each campaign option means and why we chose the settings we did - this will be the focus of a future lesson.



Amy

---

@vortex I am struggling with tracking. I am using FunnelFlux as my tracker and ClickDealer as my affiliate network. I have gone through the process and applied the same structure/concepts that are used for the other networks + trackers to this combo. I'm just not 100% that I've set it up correctly.

One of the main things I'm struggling with is the Target URL that I'm sending the traffic to (from PropellerAds). I set up the funnel in FunnelFlux and clicked "Send Traffic Here" to the TRAFFIC module. The link that it provided after I selected PropellerAds contains this query: &external=${SUBID}

Do I need to change that to something else?

---

Throughout this post, in any/all urls, please ignore any spacing that is displayed - they should NOT be there. This is a vbulletin glitch which we can't do anything about.

The &external=${SUBID} is a PARAMETER=TOKEN set that belongs to PropellerAds. To understand how tracking parameters and tokens work, please see:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...nding-Tracking

Basically when you put the Funnelflux Target URL (aka the Campaign URL) into PropellerAds, PropellerAds will call this URL each time it sends a visitor to this URL. And in doing so, PropellerAds will replace ${SUBID} with a character string - or "unique ID" - that represents this visitor impression. And since this is a Funnelflux URL, when this URL is called, Funnelflux will be prompted to save this unique ID into its database under the parameter "external".

So what purpose would this serve? If you have conversion postback set up for Funnelflux to send conversions to PropellerAds - so that you can see conversion data on PropellerAds' dashboard - the unique ID saved under "external" will be crucial. The PropellerAds' postback looks something like this:

http://ad.propellerads.com/conversion.php?aid=11111&tid=22222&visitor_id={ext ernal}&payout={payout}

When a conversion is made, Clickdealer (or whatever aff network you're using) will post it back to Funnelflux. Funnelflux would then run the postback above to post the conversion to PropellerAds - and when it does it will retrieve the unique ID from its database under "external" and replace "{external}" in the postback url with it.

I know this all sounds incredibly complicated and confusing - please read the "Understanding Tracking" lesson linked to above, a few times if necessary. It will REALLY help you to handle tracking better. Not trying to boast, but that lesson gives the best explanation I've seen on tracking anywhere.

In addition to &external=${SUBID}, you should add more PropellerAds parameters+tokens in order to collect more data for Funnelflux. This is what MY funnelflux Target URLs look like:

https://funnelfluxurl.com/fts/1aAi1AaAAf7m-0aMQX6hTGnTd?campaign={campaignid}&external=${SUBI D}&c={cost}&zone={zoneid}&country={country}&region ={region}&isp={isp}&carrier={carrier}

You don't need to append these manually - simply go to "Pages & Sources" > "Traffic Sources" and edit settings for PropellerAds, then make the settings look like this:



Remember to save these settings!

If you'd like for Funnelflux to post conversion data to PropellerAds, so that you'll see conversions when you log into PropellerAds and view the data there, go back to Funnelflux to further edit settings for PropellerAds, scroll to the bottom, and add the PropellerAds postback url:




The base postback is this:

http://ad.propellerads.com/conversion.php?aid=##REPLACE ##&tid=##REPLACE ##&visitor_id={external}&payout={payout}

You'll need to replace the two instances of ##REPLACE ## with actual values - go into PropellerAds > Tracking and you should see an S2S postback that looks something like this (you can select any tracker):

http://ad.propellerads.com/conversion.php?aid=11111&pid=&tid=22222&visitor_id={externalid}&payout={payout}

Your values for aid and tid will be different. Whatever they may be, copy them and replace the ##REPLACE ## in the postback url in Funnelflux with them:



And don't forget to save!

Hope that helps!



Amy

---

Hello @vortex
Although, I had setup my daily budget to 10 $ and total budget to 20$, Why my traffic are very slow? They are taking more than 24 hours to reach 2k impression.. I am using propellerads and funnel flux

---

Is your $10 budget getting spent completely for the day?

(i.e. Is your $10 budget being reached?)

If so, then you can increase the daily budget to get more traffic.

If not, it means either:

1)There's not a lot of traffic for your targeting (geo + carrier + browser + whatever other restrictions in your campaign settings).

OR

2)Your bid is too low.

OR both 1) and 2).

If you'd like more specific advice than this, please feel free to give more specific information.



Amy

---

Question: I get you might have written this tutorial prior to Covid-19. Given that most people are staying home now. Wouldn't it be more ideal to choose wifi as "Connection Type" instead of 3G/LTE?

What developments have you seen in the past 2-5 months?

---

I personally didn´t see any Covid related changes.

Choose WiFi or 3G depending on what connections the offer accepts.

---

May be the traffic targeting was too narrow, so I cancelled that campaign.. Now that I had changed to different geo and got more than 15 k impressions, still there are 0 conversion. Why is that.? Could it be possible that I had set up offer links incorrectly??

---

You can easily check if you set up the offer link correctly.

Do you see the traffic in the CPA network?

If yes: Offer link seems to be working
If no: Offer link doesn´t seem to be working

Apart from this it´s next to impossible to give a definite answer why you don´t see conversions because it can have many reasons.

Most probable reason would be that the offer is just not converting.

---

In addition to what @twinaxe said:

In addition to seeing impressions/clicks at the affiliate network, are you seeing at least one conversion?

If so, and if you're not seeing that conversion appear in the tracker, it means your postback wasn't set up correctly.

Assuming your tracking was correct, I have another question: What was your bid? What was the geo? How much did you spend in total to test this offer? Were you direct-linking or using landing pages? What was the offer payout?

I just want to make sure you didn't spend too much on testing an offer. Typically you'll need to test lots of offers before finding one that is good enough for you to even optimize the campaign. The less-well your offer converts, the more money you need to spend to reach profits (IF you reach profits at all).

So testing lots of offers is necessary, and it's important to avoid spending too much on testing one offer - otherwise the money you waste can really add up after testing 20, 30, 50, 100+ offers.




Amy

---

Yes, I have been seeing traffic on my CPA network. I am glad that my link is working.
Thank you for guidence.

---

No, I have seen one conversion on Haka, but there is no conversion on my CPA network nor tracker.


My bid was 2.8 for PK and I have spend 5+5+29 $ on A, B, C Campaigns. The offer was click 2 sms Haka offer and offer payout was 0.35 for all campaigns.

---

Please clarify - where did you see the conversion? Haka = CPA network.


What are A, B, C campaigns? $2.80 CPM for PK? That's WAY too high. Definitely test bids below $1. For an offer with $0.35 payout, assuming you're direct-linking and not using landers, I wouldn't suggest running more than $3.50's worth of traffic (10x payout) without a single conversion.



Amy

---

I have seen conversion on HAKA.
A,B,C means 3 different campaigns. The automatic bidding in propeller ads showed 2.8 thus, I ran in that CPM.
I will keep in mind to bid below 1$ and not to invest more than 3.5 $ without single conversion.

Thank you Amy for guidance.

I will definitely be looking forward for your suggestions in future.

---

You're welcome! Thank you for your support of STM!

3 campaigns meaning 3 different geos? Are you split-testing the multiple "offer pages" Haka has available?

If you're split-testing different offer pages, then the $3.50 may not apply. I would run $10 to different offer pages, then see if any of those pages has promise, and whether the geo has promise in general.

As for bidding: If in doubt, start with $1 for tier 1/2 geos, or $0.70 for tier 3/4 geos. You could actually start even lower than that - but then the traffic quality would be worse - just be aware of that and factor it into your testing and optimization approach and you'll be fine.



Amy

---

Out of 3 campaigns, I ran 2 in PK whereas 1 in IN.

As for bidding, the automatic bidding in Propeller ads shows more than 1.5 $ per CPM in tier 3,4 geos where I had tried running campaigns. I usually bid according to automatic bidding suggestion. Can you inform me how can I bid low?

---

For bidding, I've suggested a very rough guideline above:

What I actually like to do: Once I find an offer that converts OK/well, I would start by bidding very low, cut a bunch of placements; then clone the camp and test a higher bid (with the same placements blacklisted), cut another bunch of placements; then repeat. That way I can identify the best placements without spending a lot of money.

When you bid low, you won't get traffic from the in-demand placements (which is probably because they convert well so everybody's bidding high for traffic from them). When you bid higher, you may be paying too much for low-quality placements. My approach above will allow you to identify the best placements without unnecessary spend.

Hope that helps!



Amy

---

Hi Amy @vortex

thank you for the detailed tutorial so far.

I went through all the responses and was wondering if my GEO (Peru) was a bad choice for a HAKA offer with a payout of only $ 0.35.

In this part of the tutorial you mentioned to add 20% on the recommended CPM by PropellerAds, so now I am bidding $ 3.033

Would you start also with a bid lower than $1 instead?

You mentioned this setting for the Postback URL, but shouldn't it be {external} for the parameter visitor_id

---

$3 cpm for peru is quite steep imo, maybe lower it to $1 or less. This is what my propeller postback looks like
http://ad.propellerads.com/conversion.php?aid=3440744&pid=&tid=87769&visitor_ id=${SUBID}&payout={payout}---Traffic source side
http://ad.propellerads.com/conversion.php?aid=3440744&pid=&tid=87769&visitor_ id={externalid}&payout={payout}---Voluum side.

---

@aiden l is correct (thank you!)

$3 CPM for Peru is quite steep. PropellerAds' suggested bids can be inaccurate. They were pretty good with suggested bids at the time I wrote/updated this part of the tutorial, but if they're suggesting $3+ then I should revise the tutorial again. Thank you for bringing this up!

As a general guide when bidding on Propellerads: For tier 1/2 (i.e. developed) countries, bid around $1. For tier 3/4 (i.e. developing) countries, bid $0.70. Disclaimer: I've bid WAY lower than these numbers with success. I just don't want new affiliates to bid too low at first, because they don't really know what they're doing yet. When you bid low, traffic quality can be worse. So if you're going to test low bids, understand that you may not be getting quality traffic.

What I would do is take a low-payout offer (like Haka's or even lower), start with a really low payout, cut placements. Then clone the campaign at a higher bid, cut placements. And repeat.

That way, you cut placements/zones for as cheaply as possible, to avoid overpaying for traffic.

As for postback: As @aiden l has pointed out, your link (in the quotes) is correct. But that's for Voluum. Which tracker are you using?

Hope that helps!




Amy

---

@vortex,

gotcha. I can see that the effective CPM on PropellerAds I am paying for yesterday and today was $0.668. Seems like the higher bid works in terms of traffic quality since my results for today look really promising. Would you touch the bid and lower it although it is profitable? The real question I am aksing is if that will send the campaign into moderation again

I signed up fro FunnelFlux Pro, which seemed to have a fair price to get started.

---

Ah right you're using Funnelflux! Then yes the parameter would be {external}. {externalid} is the equivalent for Voluum.

Glad to hear you're seeing good results! Feel free to test bids, but I'd suggest to clone your campaign at a different bid instead of changing the bid of the original camp. "When something ain't broke, don't touch it" is my motto. Sometimes we can make one seemingly innocent change and cause a plunge in campaign performance.



Amy

---

I just set funnelflux to 3-8, is this supposed to be next? The 4?

---

Could you please explain this further? I'm not understanding what you're asking - apologies!



Amy

---

Sorry, I mean I can't find the guide for days 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.

---

Ah OK I understand now!

Sorry for the confusion - there are 3 versions of the tutorial. If you go here you will see all versions:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...l-2021-Version

If you click on the Funnelflux section you will see the Funnelflux version:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...l-Flux-Version

If you click on the index post you'll see ALL links to the funnelflux lessons:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...nelflux)-Index

If you have more questions please ask!



Amy

---

I am setting up campaign for KZ and my AM tells me that the ISP is Tele2 but in PropellerAds it does not appear. It is normal? GEO change right?

---

Hmm...I looked up this carrier and found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tele2#Kazakhstan

"Kazakhstan
51% of Mobile Telecom-Service LLP was purchased by Tele2 in early 2010 to serve as a base for the company's mobile services in Kazakhstan. Tele2 has an option to buy the remaining 49% of Mobile Telecom-Service LLP within 5 years after the contract was closed. Tele2 is the smallest of three mobile operators in Kazakhstan with about 4.3 million customers. In December 2018 Tele2 was announced to be closed, leaving Beeline to be the only government-independent carrier."

So - may check with your AM again to make sure they've got the correct carrier?

Other possibilities in general when it comes to mobile carrier targeting:

-Some of the smaller ones may not be targetable directly on certain traffic networks. The only way I know of would be to target ALL carrier traffic (from all carriers) and set up tracker rules to direct each carrier to the right offer(s). Of course, if you choose to go this way, you'll need to have suitable offers that collectively cover all carriers, or offers that accept all carrier traffic, or a smartlink that accepts all traffic (e.g. monetizer).

-Mobile carriers often undergo name changes - e.g. when they're bought and sold, are merged with or taken away from another corporation, so the name shown at the affiliate network can be different from the name shown at the traffic source. You can google the mobile carrier and read through some history to see if it had other names previously.

Hope that helps!



Amy

---

Hi Amy @vortex I'm setting up the campaign for Brazil and the CPM seems to be very different from your tutorial, Am I doing something wrong?

---

When automatic bidding is disabled, the price doesn't update when you put a new geo. You can remove the geo, enable automatic bidding and put Brazil back. It should update the price. But by default, Propeller put the max bid to get 100% of conversions. To start testing, you do not necesarily want that. Look at the graph on the right, and choose a lower bid that would still give you conversions. Then bid manually with that value.

Also, i wanted to suggest you to start a Followalong. That might help you to centralize your questions and all the tips people give you in one place. Because in 3 weeks, you are going to be "in which thread did @vortex reply to my question... :-/" and spend 20 minutes to find it back. It also help people who want to follow along and give tips.

---

@jeremie has answered the question 200%. Lots of traffic sources will "recommend" a bid for you, but as you can imagine, in order to maximize their profits, it would make sense for them to suggest the highest bid that would get you the maximum amount of traffic. PropellerAds has changed their approach to recommended bidding at least a couple of times in the past. Sometimes the recommended bids would be reasonable, sometimes not.

When testing an offer you don't know will convert well or not (i.e. an unproven offer), I would suggest to bid just high enough to neither be scraping the bottom of the barrel by bidding so low that you're getting all the unwanted traffic (bad quality traffic from bad placements that most people have blacklisted), nor so high that you're probably paying too much for most placements. It's hard to determine what this bid is without experience, but the rule of thumb I use is around $1 for tier 1 and 2 geos and $0.5-0.7 for tier 3 and 4 geos.

A lot of people are really hung up on finding out which geos are tier 1/2/3/4. I simply clump tier 1+2 together as "developed countries" and tier 3+4 together as "less-developed countries". That has served me well.

And of course, ultimately you'll need to test different bids - I go into how to do that towards the end of the 40-day tutorial.



Amy

---

So I use bemob and my timezone is gmt1 there, shouldn't I change the time zone in the campaign settings to be in sync with my tracker?

---

For campaign settings, to specify which hours to send traffic, you can use ANY timezone - just make sure you set it up to send traffic during the desired hours.

For example - I'm Canadian so let me use Canadian timezones as an example. Let's say I want to run traffic during 8am-12am Toronto time. When creating the campaign at the traffic source I would set up the time targeting in either of the following:

1)Set timezone to Toronto time, and set hours to 8am-12am.

2)Set timezone to Vancouver time (which is 3 hours behind Toronto time), and target the hours 5am-9pm.

Hope that makes sense!

However - if you're trying to compare traffic stats from the traffic network, to the stats on your tracker, then it would be good to sync the timezones, to make sure you're looking at stats from the same period.

Hope that helps clear things up! Feel free to ask further questions.


Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

---

Hi Amy,
Happy to report that I launched this campaign today (Per day 9 instructions) with PropellerAds and Zeydoo offer. I'm using BeMob for tracking (a mini me of Voluum I guess but free with 5 domains and SSL!). Just had one conversion! This is a malaysian offer. Pays 1.20. Attached is Zeydoo stats and PropellerAds stats.

-James

---

Marvelous James! Was this your first-ever conversion? Must have been exciting!

This will be the first of many, many more! Onwards and upwards!

And please feel free to make a post here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...-Conversion(s)



Amy

---

Home > >