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Push - Take 2! (22)

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Hi all

I have just reactivated my STM account after being away for about 2-ish years and I'd like to firstly say great job to the team because there is a lot more valuable content now on the forum compared to 2 years ago, especially for push. Big thanks to @twinaxe for his push tutorial and I really wish I had something like that back then.

Bit of history about myself: I've been in the affiliate space for about 5-ish years where I started out with pop traffic. Tried and tried but never really could gain any traction on it and I tried push about 2 year ago for a little bit. Got it working for a bit but I struggled with maintaining any form of consistency with my campaigns where basically, my camps would start off really well but would eventually die either due to lack of volume or losses.

So I moved over to FB where I was running sweeps for about a year and did pretty decent, making between $XX - $XXX/days. I was running it pretty well with no bans and just when I thought I was finally on FB's good side..the bans came pouring in over the last few months and it got even worse lately (hopefully until the US elections are over). So while I wait for the FB ban-frenzy to die down, I figured I need to diversify my risk and thought that push would be a good idea to start again.

I've started running casino offers about a month ago but this time, I'm running into issues with keeping up with quality (e.g. I went from having 5 deposits in the first week to zero in the last 4 weeks), and also inconsistent conversion rates (very good CR one day and zero the next) which could be the advertiser scrubbing me to make up for the lack of deposits.

But anyway, I've decided to move over to sweeps CC so that I wouldn't have to worry too much about quality but figured that I would summon the help of STM to help make sure that I'm doing everything right 😁

So to start off here are the details of my campaigns that I just launched today:
Traffic source: PropellerAds and Pushground
Geo: FR
Offer: 3 different iPhone 11 CC Submit offers
Landers: Amazon styled questionnaire/gift box lander and the La Post questionnaire lander (both found on Adplexity)
Creatives: 3 creatives where I am split testing the headline (everything else is the same)

The campaigns literally went live 3 hours ago so will update the post tomorrow with results.

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Welcome back impian!

So many people are having problems with the FB bans, it's really getting insane. Hopefully it will calm down after the election!

Thanks for the kind words about our content, we're trying hard to make it worth your time

Looking forward to your initial results, keep us posted and we will try to help you out along the way.

Cheers,
Matej

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Thanks Matej. Any tips/advice would be much appreciated ��

Quick update so far on the camp

Pushground Stats:
Revenue: $0
Spent: $37.42
Profit: -$37.42



I followed @twinaxe's advice and bid lower than recommended and I also looked at the placements and nothing stood out that needed cutting. I am also testing user freshness up to 1 day.

The win rate looks decent (I think?) with 30% but the CTR looks a bit low as I was aiming at least 0.5%.

I also followed @twinaxe's tutorial to try to minimise the number of variables on the creatives so I only ran them without the big image.



I will add the big image to the creatives after this to see if it makes any difference.

PropellerAds Stats:
Revenue: $0
Spent: $7.118
Profit: -$7.118

This is a weird one because my camp hasn't spent as much as I thought it would with only $7 spend.



Again, I followed the same strategy of bidding lower at first but eventually I increased the bid to the recommended bid. I'm only testing with HQ traffic so quite surprised that the traffic is so low. I've checked my targeting and everything seems right so a bit unsure of what's going on with it.

CTR seems to be consistent with Pushground with 0.3% CTR so will do the same and add the big image to the creatives and re-launch as a new camp to see if I can get more traffic to it.

Question:
1. What is the recommended strategy for placement cutting? Since the PO for the offer is around $30, I was thinking of cutting anything that has spent half-PO with no conversion.
2. Is the CTR of 0.3% considered low and what sort of CTR would you be aiming for?
3. When @twinaxe talked about bidding below the recommended bid, how much lower should I start my bid?
4. For Pushground, would it be recommended to run both mainstream and adult traffic? At the moment, I am only running mainstream but wasn't sure if I should enable adult too.

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Hey impain, on Pushground it can help alot when you ask your AM for a good supply ID whitelist.

That way you can often cut the cost for testing down a good bit.

Well, as far as I can see from your openng post you test 2 landing pages and 3 offers, right?

When you cut placements at 1/2 payout = $15 it would mean that each LP/offer combination received traffic for only $2.50, this could be too low.

The problem is that you can´t really cut placements for bad quality yet as long as you are still splittesting elements.

To cut placements because of bad quality you first need a converting funnel so that you can be sure that it´s the placement that doesn´t work.

What you should do is to cut placements that receive much higher volume compared to the other placements.

That way you make sure that you don´t spend most of the money for only 1-3 placements or so.

Would be great when you could also post screenshots from the supplies and from the placements, you can blur the details, it´s just to see if there are any high volume spenders.

What subscription age are you targeting?

Generally we can say that targeting fresher users result in higher CTR but in the end 0.3% CTR on mobile traffic isn´t that unusual.

High enough to still receive enough traffic on high quality targeting to make it worth it.

There are no cut in stone numbers as it can change from campaign to campaign.

Just play around a bit, important is that you receive enough traffic so that you don´t have to wait for a week or so to finish your tests.

For the sweep offers just start with mainstream and when you have a working funnel test adult as well.

Adult traffic often works on mainstream offers as well but as long as you don´t have a working funnel it´s better to control the budget a bit more

Btw, yesterday I posted an interview with Gina from Pushground you can find it HERE

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You're starting with the high payout CC submits, which might not be the best idea as you will have to spend a lot to be able to optimize anythning.

One method I used in the past, was to start with low payout SOI sweeps and once I blocked the poor placements, I introduced the CC submit offers to the pre-filtered audience. Might be worth a try to get some meaningful data faster.

One note regarding adult traffic: not every advertiser accepts such clicks to their mainstream offers, so it's always a good idea to ask. Even though in case of push, adult traffic is not such a big problem, since the ads actually do not show on adult websites... it's an audience collected during adult browsing sessions, but the notification are launched randomly, so there are no clear ties to adult content that the advertisers could actually detect. Unless you're talking about in-page push, which is basically a banner ad not standard push notification.

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Thanks @matuloo and @twinaxe

For the low payout SOI sweeps, does it have to be an iPhone SOI also or just any sweep SOI offer like vouchers?

Also, let's say if I run a SOI sweep offer in a tier 3 geo, can I use the same blacklist for FR? I think I read somewhere in @twinaxe's tutorial that it is possible but I can't recall 100%.

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It doesn´t have to be iPhone but often bigger and more popular brands work better.

But other products and gift cards can also work very good with the right offer.

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Thanks @twinaxe for your advice. I've read the interview that you did with Pushground and as a result, I've decided to pause the CC submit offer and focus on tier 3 iPhone offers instead.

Same strategy as before where I am testing on both PropellerAds and Pushground and these are the results at the end of day 1. I am also testing 1 lander (the giftbox lander) and 4 creatives.

PropellerAds
Traffic type: HQ
Conversions: 92
Rev: $4.51
Cost: $16.70
Profit:-$16.77 (ROI -73%)

Here are the stats for my creative.



I've used a statistical significance calculator and based on the results, I've cut the last 2 creatives.

I've also had a look at my placements and not sure if I'm doing this right, but I've cut all placements that have spent more than 5x the payout even if they had a conversion or those that have a CPA more than $0.2. With a 5 cent payout, I think it would be hard for those placements to turn green. Please do let me know if this is the right strategy



Pushground
Traffic type: 0 - 1 day
Conversions: 64
Rev: $3.14
Cost: $6.08
Profit:-$2.93 (ROI -48%)





Same as before, I used the calculator and cut the worst performing creative and the highest spending placement. However, I did notice that not all conversions were posted back to Pushground as it only recorded 46 conversions while

Question:

• With such a low payout, what would be the best optimisation strategy in terms of placements?
• With PropellerAds, the min bid I can put in is $0.005 CPC and with a payout of only $0.05, I need my CR to be 10% to breakeven (currently my CR is only 3.6%) so is it even worth testing on PropellerAds or should I try to find a cheaper traffic source?
• Also, would it be worth testing more landers? When spying, I am seeing the giftbox lander being most commonly used so obviously that one works best.

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Hi all

Just a quick update on my current status since my last update. What's been going on:
- I did a bit of profit/loss calculation and almost had a heart attack when I saw how much money I've actually bled out after including my overhead costs (e.g. tools and subscriptions) so now I'm looking for some quick wins to at least offset some of the costs. Lesson learnt boys, don't just look at the tracker stats and remember to include your overheads! Also, learn to know when to cut off a non-profitable offer. I had one of my casino offers at a -$830 loss which I should have cut way earlier. The only reason I didn't cut it sooner was because it was at -30% ROI and I kept telling myself that if I keep optimising it, eventually it would be profitable. That's not a good mindset to have.
- As a result of the above, I switched out my tracker from Voluum to Binom since they're cheaper in the long run and they have a one month free promo courtesy of STM.

With regards to my campaigns, I've paused the campaign in my last post since I couldn't get it past the -50% ROI mark after 3 days but since then, my AM recommended me another casino offer that has been doing pretty decent for me. It's not profitable yet but I think I am getting there after a few rounds of testing and optimising.

This are the stats of the offer since I started running it:
Voluum:


Binom:


Taking both of the stats together, I'm at -12% ROI so I think I'm close to getting it to breakeven/profitable. I've been optimising it by cutting out settings that aren't profitable but the problem I'm having is consistency. One day it can do really well and the next couple days, it would be shit red.

I found my winning ad headline and I'm just about to start split testing the ad descriptions. But other than that, what should I do?

1. I have one placement that contributes to half of the conversions but is slightly unprofitable - do I keep it or blacklist it?
2. Do I start creating a WL or continue blacklisting?

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With such low payouts I also cut aggressive, in the end such offers just have to convert very good to make it worth it.

Cut early enough to avoid overspending, can happen rather fast on very low payouts.

Then check if there is enough volume left.

It is worth to test it but again, such low payout offers just have to convert very good.
For an offer with only $0.05 payout the max possible profit margin is <$0.05, you just don´t have much room there so when the offer is not converting good enough stop it and better test more offers.

Good thing is that low payout offers often convert better than high payout offers because they either have an easier flow or are available in less competitive geos or so.

Yup, profit is not same as profit.

You don´t need to be only be profitable with your campaigns alone, you also need to make enough profit to pay for your other monthly expenses.

I would say this lesson was learned the hard way.

Let´s hope that it will stick in your mind so that it doesn´t repeats.

About your tracker stats, make sure to also compare the revenue with the trafficcost from the trafficsources itself when you want to know the real numbers.

Because of trafficloss you will never have 100% accurate numbers in your tracker.

I like to set the trafficloss in Binom a bit higher so that mostly my real numbers are better than my tracker numbers.

When you don´t set a trafficloss you often have worse real numbers than what you see in the tracker.

When it stays unprofitable there is no reason to keep it running.
But you could try to improve the funnel to a point where that placement is profitable.

Can be worth it when it sends high volume and brings in many conversions.

Both, run good and proven placements in WL campaigns and continue runnin BL campaigns for more volume.

When I target lower activity levels I also prefer running WL campaigns there.

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Thanks @twinaxe for your advice.

Quick update time:
I've paused the offer I mentioned in my previous post because with a payout of 5 cents, I think the margins too low to get it profitable since the CR wasn't that great either.

I've launched two new offers in the mean time, one is a casino offer in a tier 1 geo and a sweep offer in a tier 3 geo. As usual, I split tested both offers on PropellerAds and Pushground but the results on Pushground were pretty bad for both offers so I paused it there to focus on PropellerAds.

Quick question about Pushground: Is anyone getting good results on there? From my personal experience, the results are either pretty bad or when it's doing decent, there isn't a lot of volume to run on there. I don't know if I'm doing it wrong but I have spoken to my rep and every time I ask, she would say my targeting is too narrow or would tell me to try running my campaigns on both 'to start' and 'to scale' setting.

Here are my results for the casino offer on PropellerAds since I started:



And here are my results from the new sweep offer I started testing:



As you can see on both campaigns, I am struggling to find consistency in my campaigns. In both camps, I would get pretty promising results on the first couple of days and would optimise them by cutting bad placements and creatives..only for them to shit themselves after that.

The casino one is finally doing better today and I've started to create a WL for it but other than, is this normal for campaigns to be inconsistent? What am I doing wrong or what else can I do?

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Yes, Pushground can work very good.

A big difference between Propeller and Pushground is that on Propeller you only have zones whereas on Pushground you have sites and supplies.

The sites on Pushground can be seen as the zones on Propeller, the supplies however can be seen like sub-trafficsources inside the trafficsource.

You can have "good" and "bad" subsources (supplies) on Pushground, a good trick to lower the risk of losing too much money is to ask your AM for a good supply whitelist for your campaigns and then run BL campaigns on these sources.

I hope it makes sense for you, if not let me know

About your casino offer, please check the zones on 11/14.

Your LP CTR is very low on this day so maybe there was one new zone that didn´t work good and took most of the traffic.

Same for the swep campaign on 11/16, check the zones if you see something there.

It´s hard to give more tips from just the screenshots but first thing you should always do is not only check the general stats but also go deeper in it to see if you find some elements that cause the worse performance.

In fresh campaigns it´s normal because you first need to run tme a bit to filter out the bad stuff and continue with the good elements so of course there can be rather hefty swings.

Campaigns are also more inconsistent when you run them on lower volume.

When you run campaigns at few hundred conversions per day then it won´t make a difference if you have +/-20 or so conversions.

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Thanks again @twinaxe for the advice.

Another quick update for today:

For the casino offer, I've created two WL campaigns (one at $50/day budget and another at $100/day budget) to see if I can get more volume to the offers but it doesn't look like that is the case.



As you can see from the screenshot, most of the traffic and conversions are going to the first WL campaign (which is the $100/day budget) but even then, it only spent $57 instead of the full budget.



I'm already bidding above the recommended bid of 0.27 so should I bid even higher? And should I pause the $50/day budget WL camp?

I believe I read somewhere that one method of getting more traffic is to duplicate the same campaigns..is that correct or am I competing against myself?

Also, how else should I scale this camp? I have just launched the same WL camp but with Medium quality and will look to scale this to other traffic sources.

I also have a question about one placement that I am not sure what to do since it is quite inconsistent. One day it performed really well but today, it was pretty shit and took up most of my daily budget for my BL camp. Would you keep it running or pause it?



For the sweeps camp on the other hand, the performance is getting worse by the day.



As you can see, my spend yesterday was quite low but that was because my campaign was rejected by Propeller because apparently I was infringing on trademarks by using the {device_brand} parameter (I am using twinaxe's spin the wheel lander). So I had to remove the parameter and I'm not too sure if that affected the CR.

I am still cutting out bad placements and have started to create a WL that I will test today.

I will try to relaunch the camp with some new creatives to see if that makes any difference but do you think I should continue running this campaign or cut my losses and move on to another? I am split testing between 2 offers but they are pretty much equal in terms of the results. Same for the creatives as well as there is nothing stands out to be particular bad. I think the campaign has potential since it did pretty well the first 2 days but I may be wrong?

Here is a screenshot of the bad placements that I have cut since payout is only $0.37 and I cut anything that spends more than that.

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The ROI you have with this campaign should allow for a slightly higher bid, I would definitely try to up it, to see whether it helps with the volume. And yes, duplicating a campaign is a common method to get more volume. Some networks are configured to rotate a certain amount of campaigns in order to not saturate their audience by showing the same ads over and over. So even though you're technically competing with yourself, when running the same cloned campaigns with the same settings, it can still work out because of that setting.

However, sometimes there is only so much traffic to be had, it's not always possible to scale further due to the targeting limitations. If that's the case, simply accept it and enjoy the profit, even when it's limited and try to launch more campaigns with different targeting or using different traffic sources.

Based on my experience, when running a campaign where the offers show potential, but the performance dies after a few days... it's usually a problem of weak creatives, the Ads or LPs are simply not strong enough. So by introducing better ones, you can definitely improve the final results.

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Thanks @matuloo. So in this case, you'd duplicate the same exact campaign? With the same budgets and bids? And how many duplicate campaigns would you recommend that I create?

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Yup, I would create a full clone to see what happens. Start with 1 to see whether it has any effect and what the impact on the original campaign would be.

As for how many to create... at times, I had even 10 clones running with the same targeting, but that's probably to much. Start with 1 clone, if the results are ok, add one more, if it's still improving your results try to add another one. In the end, it's about doing things that work for a particular campaign of yours, not some general advice which is always hard to give anyways

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Really man, when the campaign works just clone it again and again.

When I have something good running I clone it every 2 days or so and for me there is no limit how many of the same campaigns I have running.

As long as it works I rather want to get more traffic to these exact campaigns instead of messing around with new tests trying to get additional 5% ROI.

Sometimes I have dozens of exactly the same campaigns running.

I had push campaigns running for several months with exactly the same icon, image, title, description, landing page and offer.

You know, never change a running system

One tip, when you don´t get enough traffic boost when you just clone the campaign on the trafficsource but use the same tracker link it can help to clone the campaign in the tracker as well.

That way you can be sure that your campaign will be treated as a new campaign in the trafficsource

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Thanks @matuloo and @twinaxe.

I still have a question though which I want to confirm if I'm doing it right. When testing the different creatives variables, would you test them into a new dupe camp or in the same camp?

The reason I ask is because I followed twinaxe's tutorial and I started off split testing titles (all other variables the same) and after finding a winning title, I moved on to split testing the descriptions in a new camp. But yesterday, when I tried to split test the big images using my WL (dupe camp but with new campaign link), I received much higher traffic volume with really bad results while my original WL camps only spent about half of my daily budget.

New campaigns using WL - all variables the same except big images and new campaign links.



First line is on HQ while second line is on MQ.

Meanwhile, my original WL camps haven't been doing well. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I noticed that in my campaigns, I tend to do well the first day but then the results tend to die off after that. I've checked my ad CTR and LP CTR and they have been pretty consistent throughout the period so I don't think it is a problem with the creatives/landers. Could it be an issue with the placements and the quality of traffic I'm getting?

HQ WL


MQ WL


I'm very surprised and frustrated at how it went from 85-95% ROI on the first day to breakeven/red the next day so I'm not sure what to do next. The only thing I can do now is cut placements within my WL if they've spent 1x without a conversion, but I know that it'll impact my volume eventually...

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Another update on my campaigns.

So I followed @matuloo's and @twinaxe's advice and tried to duplicate my campaign and the results actually got worse.



I duplicated my campaign on the 24th of November and since then, my campaign has performed much worse so I'm not sure what's going on. I've decided I'll pause my current campaigns and relaunch it again - hopefully, it will give it a traffic boost and my CR will go back up.

I also tried testing sweep offers in TH and ES but both didn't work out well.

ES was -80% with only 2 conversions after $10 spend



While for TH, I tested both iPhone 11 and a voucher offer

iPhone:


Voucher:


I read on another follow-along where it was mentioned that TH is actually a very hard geo (and it looks like ES is another hard geo too) so I was wondering what are more suitable tier 3 geos should I try to test? I would like to go crazy and test a lot but my budget is getting pretty tight at the moment so any recommendations would be welcomed

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Don't worry too much about easy/hard geos, people only comment based on a handful of experience. If you talk to a couple affiliate network managers they'll tell you affiliates are having success in every geo under the sun. It's a trap I got sucked into too, but any advice you're going to get is subjective. Only geo I would call hard is USA - but then again I know a guy making xxxx/day doing super simple stuff in the USA

Easiest way to get some success:

• Search any geo on a spytool - maybe T2 or T3 if you want, but T1 can be fine too if you've got more cash
• Make a list of which offers you see
• Find which are on the ANs they are on, if none then join some more ANs
• Pick the lowest payout one and rip + tweak the creatives of the current spied camp and run it on the same traffic source

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This was one of the possible outcomes, sometimes duplicating helps, sometimes it doesn't. Now you can try to re-launch the original campaign, either as is or as a new duplicate to benefit from the initial traffic burst. Another option would be to try different creatives and launch new campaigns with these.

It's really hard to say something like "this GEO is easy or hard", because as fastaj mentioned, all this advice is based on our personal experience. And even though I'd say I have a lot of experience with plenty of GEOs, it's still just my personal experience and where I failed, many others made a lot of money.

When people ask about what GEOs to try, I sometimes tell them to simply look around on the networks to see what GEOs there is a good selection of offers for. I prefer to start testing GEOs where I know I can get let's say 20 offers, over those where I'm having trouble to find more than 5 offers. You might want to try this approach too.

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Hi Fellow STM Members,

I am happy to have found your Follow-Allong as I have a learned a lot from yours @impian!

I am running into the same issue in general. I have a ( somewhat ) good beginning, to see it die off after a few days.

This has apparently more variables that causes this. However I didn't knew where to look fitst.

So I am very happy with @matoloo 's answer to this:

So I will work on my creatives. And split Test them. I will build some new Campaigns or edit some of my best performing Campaigns ( still in the Red ).

How is your progress @impian now? Hope you have some in the Green, as it seems you are on the right track.

Anyways I will show some creatives asap, would love all the feedback. I welcome you all!

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ampaign!/page2

Greets, Algierotje

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