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Bizio's Follow-Along - The beginning on my journey on Affiliate Marketing (16)

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Hi everyone,


finally I start my active adventure in Affiliate Marketing and my Follow Along.


I have chosen my vertical to start: Sweepstakes


At the moment I am registered in 3 affiliate networks: Mobidea, Haka and Mobipium
And 2 traffic networks: PropellerAds and PopAds


My tracker is Voluum and I am going to sign up for Adplexity Mobile as my spytool.


My first objective is to have the green numbers everyday and then would be great to reach a daily stable profit of at least 40 - 50 $ per day. :-)




Today I will search for at least 5 offers and 5-10 landers, then I will try to clean them and begin to launch the first campaign to start collecting data.


Any advice and comment will always be welcomed.


Thanks in advance

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That's great to see bizio!

You can start with @twinaxe ULTIMATE giftbox lander for sweepstakes - https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-Sweeps-Lander

I've tested this beast recently and have to say - twinaxe delivers.

Overall if it comes to sweepstakes you will see Adplexity mobile overflowed with following variants:
1. giftboxes
2. spinning wheels
3. surveys

Good way to approach this is to get at least one of each type fixed up and working for testing in campaigns.

Since you have proven giftbox variant already you would have to look for decent spinning wheel and survey variants.

Of course you shouldn't limit yourself to that one giftbox lander later on and you should try diffrent variants of giftboxes itself found on spytools.

I pointed twinaxe lander out because it requires close to no adjustments to set it up and running and I saw many people struggling here with the initial setup.

If it comes to Voluum - don't get baited into annual plan yet, try testing it in the following month or two before deciding if you want to work with them longer.

This way you lose about 20$/month (69$/month instead of 49$/month in annual) so 40$ after 2 months compared to 400$+ in case if you decide to switch tracker later on when Voluum wouldn't work out for you.

Keep us updated - I'm also running sweeps on Propeller/PopAds so I'll try to help you as much as I can with the basics

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@plutus with his very on-point advice - thanks as always!

Further to @plutus' suggestion to not sign up to Voluum's annual plan just yet. I would suggest to test Binom and Funnelflux once you've run some campaigns and start to ramp up in volume. Both let you try them for free (first month). Be sure to sign up using discounts you can find in the "Discounts" subforum!

Voluum is a GREAT tracker - but it can get really expensive when you ramp up traffic volume.

Just in case you haven't seen it - here's a comparison of all 3 trackers:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...sing-a-Tracker

Looking forward to your next update!



Amy

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Thank you very much.

@bizio73 plutus is absolutely right with his suggestion.

You don´t need 5-10 landers for testing, that only increases your costs.

Important is to test few different landing page styles, for sweeps this would be spinwheel, gift boxes and surveys.

There are not that many different good working styles out there so that the 3 mentioned above are a good choice.

When you then found a good working style and when you have a good converting funnel you can also test variations of the winning style to try to increase the ROI.

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Yes, thank you for the advice, I had already downloaded it and I am happy to read that also you suggest it!

I have the monthly plan, thanks.

I am already following your adventure in your FA!

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Let me know if you need help with MOBIPIUM! I can give you a few tips on how to use the Market to identify the offers that are actually performing well!

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I agree with this!

HOWEVER - the reason I suggest for newbies to test 5-10 landers - is because most people aren't coders and may not be able to optimize each lander to their fullest potential.

Examples: Some landers may not be working, loading speed may be slow, there may be sneaky scripts that are siphoning a percentage of the traffic to one of the previous coders...

As I suck at coding, I tend to overcompensate by testing more landers.

But as I've mentioned - I do agree with testing only one per each style of lander initially to save on budget.

Another alternative: Test 2 of the most popular variations of each style from the beginning (i.e. the middle road).

In the end, you'll need to test more than 3 landers for sure. It's a matter of whether you want to test them in the beginning, or when you've found a decent offer. But in the beginning when you don't have ANY benchmark - unproven traffic unproven landers unproven offers - it would be to your advantage to include more landers and offers to increase your chances.

There are no rights/wrongs - just personal style and preference.



Amy

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Hi, here I am with my first update.


This week I spent my time searching for some offers in the sweepstakes vertical. I selected five of them , well they weren't the bests as suggested by Vortex, in fact the were "SMS Billing, MO Flow with Click2SMS", but I was able to find only those. The payout was 0,25-0,27$ for them.
I fixed 5 landing pages and I translated them in... arabic. Ok, I did this choice because I found 9 countries that fitted al the 5 offers, so I tried.


I prepared the campaign on Voluum with 5 offers and 5 landers, setted the campaign on PropellerAds with a smartCPM of 1,75$ (suggested was 1,70$), launched it and stopped it after one of the offers got 2 conversions. This was the situation:





Then I duplicate the campaign setting only the "winner" offer and maintaining the 5 landers to find the best. I launched the campaign with CPM lowered at 1,36$ because in the graph the extimation was good, and a budget of (5Landers x 1 Offer x 0,27$ x 10) = 13,5$.


At the end the situation was this one:





Hmm... not very good for my first attempt.
I know I made some mistakes, for example I forgot to block the Apple traffic, and maybe the choice to use a difficult language like Arabic was not the best. Also I know there were some things to optimize in the landers code. But what do you think about all this?

Fabrizio


P.S.: Today imgur.com has problems for me, so I attached images in this way, pardon Twinaxe

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Awesome so we have some stats to look at!

Click2SMS - many such offers actually convert better without using landing pages. Have you tried direct-linking?

Another question: Those 6 conversions you've made in total - which landers did they come from?

The idea is to use an offer that converts reasonably well, to cut landers down to a winner (using statistics). However, since the ROI is very low, it would be too expensive to continue using this offer to cut landers. I would suggest these options:

1)Get more AM-recommended offers from another network (because I'm assuming the 5 offers you were running were the best for that geo on that network), for the same geo, and start the testing from scratch again

2)Test another geo from scratch using the same method (using offers from any network).

3)There are 2 other offers you tested that made one conversion each - you can try using one of them to test the 5 landers, to see whether the conversion rate is good enough that you won't lose too much money to cut the landers down to a winner.


Other questions:

-Did you check lander speed? Did you actually check the functionality of the landers to make sure everything was working?
-What are the restrictions of the offers? i.e. What types of traffic (device/OS/browser/etc.) do they allow?
-Which geo were you targeting? And how did you decide on this geo?
-Did you come up with the Arabic translations yourself? Or did you use google translate? Or did you rip landers and left the text as it was?



Amy

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Dear Amy, thank you for your comment to my campaign.
Well, I think I made a bad decision to choose that target, specifically using Arabic language, and results didn't reward me.

I tried also direct-linking, but same results, maybe a few less conversions

I had 5 landers, 3 conversions came from 1 lander with a little survey and the choice of the only iPhone available, 1 conversion from anothet lander with a survey, and the other 2 conversions from a lander with a wheel.
I took them from the landers that Anstrex posted here on STM, plus I used the Twinaxe lander.

The speed was not very high, but the functionalities were working well. In my plan, I thought I'd have optimized them in the next days.
There weren't particular restrictions, they were just Mobile.
I decided to target 9 countries that speak the Arabic language, because those offers had this countries in common. So, I was just searching for more easy traffic to reach.
Well, I came up with the translations using the Google Translator, and then checked them counter-translating in english and italian. But I am sure Arabic people could understand that they weren't written by an Arabic person

So... a bad campaign because of my decisions, but at least useful to practice and not too expensive.

Let's go with the next.

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Today I want to let you see my new campaign I launched yesterday.


Ok, I launched it 2 days ago, but I had to stop it after a few hours because I made some mistakes with CloudFront.


I chose 5 offers from Mobidea (at the end I used 4 of them). They are some Voucher offers with CPL - Signup Form Submit, and I target only Mobile - Android.
The country is Italy, at the moment with a survey lander in italian (well, at least this time I souldn't have problems with the language :-D)
The payout is 0,66$, so I launched the campaign with a budget of 4x1x0,66x10 ~= 27$, and on PropellerAds I chose a smartCPM with a CPM of 1,61$.


So, after 23 hours, this is the situation:



As a noob, I'd say the CTR is ok, but conversion are... 0! :-(


There are some strange things I noticed with the link to these offers, one of them showed me this page




and I stopped the offer before to launch the campaign.


Other offers page showed something like this, a popup before the user would have completed the form compilation.



Anyway... 0 conversion. What do you suggest me to do?

Thanks



P.S.: I smile, but I am a little sad :-P

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Well, unluckily it happens that tests are not successful at all.

Grab the next offers and run the next test.

For the next ones you could check the offer links before you start sending traffic to make sure that the domain isn´t flagged.

And one more thing about using the formula

# LPs x # Offers x Average payout x10

When you don´t see any conversions after 50% of the test budget you can already stop the test, then chances that the tables turn are pretty low.

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Thank you Twinaxe for your reply.

It is ok, I was thinking there were some problems with the offers' pages. A round Zero is so a bad number

Yes, fortunately I checked the offer links before to start sending traffic. Now I understand how much important is to have a useful VPN.

About this formula I'd like to ask you something. This is a general formula, but using it is there a range of values of the cost of CPM to consider? I mean that more high is the cost of CPM, less visits I will have to my landers for the same budget.

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I don't think it was a bad decision. Testing lots of offers is a must. You never know which ones will be winners unless you test.

So - just because a campaign doesn't get good results, doesn't necessarily mean your original decision is bad.


That means you have some room for further optimization!

-Can cut landers down to a winner.
-If you're currently targeting wifi and carrier, android and ios, then perhaps one or more of these traffic segments may have high enough ROI to turn green after more optimization (e.g. cutting placements/zones).


If you're suspecting that translations may be the problem, get them done manually by someone on Fiverr!

Since you're planning on testing offers in 9 countries using one set of landers, the translations costs can be worth it. Landers don't go out of style very quickly - you'll be able to use the same landers for at least a few months.

Completely up to you though whether you want to continue - it's hard for me to make suggestions without seeing detailed stats for OSs, connection, mobile carriers etc.




Amy

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I'm sure @twinaxe will tell us his thoughts. For me, I would bid average to make sure the traffic quality won't be too low.

The GENERAL trend (not always true though) is that when you bid higher you can get better conversion rate, and when you bid lower you get worse conversion rate, so things would "balance out". Although this trend isn't always true, it can be assumed when we're using the general formula, AND bidding around average.

As for what CPM is average: Some traffic sources will tell you. If they don't and you're absolutely lost as to what you should bid, here's a very rough guide: Around $1 for tier 1-2, and $0.7 for tier 3-4.



Amy

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Don´t use Google Translate for landing pages.

It´s good for short phrases like title and description for push creatives but for longer text it´s not the best choice.

Better get it professional translated or invest in Adplexity and grab your landers from there.

About the bids, Amy is absolutely right about the bids and the quality.

Different bids can have a direct impact on the traffic quality and your goal shouldn´t be to get as much traffic as possible for as less money as possible.

It wouldn´t help you at all when you receive 10 million visits that don´t convert at all

Your goal should rather be to receive traffic that converts.

So when you bid too low you risk to only receive lower quality traffic that doesn´t convert good or doesn´t convert at all.
In worst case you miss good campaigns then just because the traffic is not good enough to show you the real potential of your funnel.

It´s a pretty common mistake among beginners to think that you can bid low so that you receive more traffic for the same money.

But again, it´s not about just getting traffic; it´s about getting traffic that converts.

And this is where the average bid enters the game.

Now we know that too low bids can result in too low traffic quality, let´s check the other direction as well

Higher bids open higher quality placements so that such traffic often converts better but of course you can also overpay.
You are also right about higher bids and less visits to your lander.

Especially when you are in the test stage it´s good to find the best combination of bid, volume and quality.

Yoiu need to bid high enough to receive better quality traffic that converts but don´t bid too high so that you would receive too low volume.

Exactly this is what you can achieve with a good average bid.

Problem is "how high is the average bid"?

On many platforms you have a traffic estimator where you can see the bids or when you create a campaign you get a bid recommended.

Try to orient yourself on these recommendations, when the trafficsource doesn´t have such estimators or so ask their support.

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