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Reaching Financial Freedom Through Sheer Durability (29)

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Hi Team,

So I've been on the forum for a while getting my ducks in a row while following along with Vortex's newbie guide. I would have posted here earlier but I didn't think a stop-start while I tried to get my head around the basics would be much good to anyone.

I've not got my first campaign with a lander running.......it was rejected in sub 4 hours, so as you can tell strong starter over here! It's also taken me 2 months of tinkering to get the just this point. The only reason I give all this background is so you know just how stiff the clay you're molding is ahaha that said I appreciate all you guys to come for taking part in the journey.

So first campaign up, woop woop!





First we have tracker then propeller ads data.

So 5% CTR, not the worst start!

but one thing i don't understand is why is my tracker registering like twice as many visitors as propeller ads thinks it's sending?

Is it normal to have that many click throughs and not a single conversion? or does it suggest that I've done something wrong linking wise? or am i just buying bot traffic ahaha.

Well I think that's about all the questions i have enough data to ask, so much obliged thus far and cheers again for taking the time out of your dat.

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For the above stats issues, I think its likely just the reporting mismatches.

In the tracker you have last 7 days as the range, but in Propeller you have "Today". In my experience the Propeller stats are also quite slow to update and don't seem to be done in real-time. So if you change from today to last 7 days to this month, sometimes it will show different data even though the campaign has only been running for e.g. 6 hours.

Secondly, the time zone is UTC in the tracker but UTC-5 in Propeller, so make sure you align these.

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You chose 7 days time frame on tracker and for propeller just one day. --> could be reason

There are no costs shown in your tracker. Seems like something is wrong with your setup. Best is to turn to support team of your tracker.

In some countries people like to click more than they do in others. Clicking can be just like a form of "window shopping" / take a look but not "buy".

Of course without any clicks you cannot have conversions. On some zones you need many clicks for a conversion on others you just need a few. Also depends on the bid.

In the 40 day tutorial you find information about cutting zones.

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@zeno Thanks for this bud, and also cracking bit of kit you've got. Really enjoyed my transition to funnel flux, it's intuitive and great to look at! Yeh i thought i was safe with the different reporting periods as it was the only campaign i had been running, however seems you were spot on with the reporting delay because most the missing reults appeared like 8 hours later. Not ideal but not the worst.

I'll get to sorting my timezone issue now.

Lars - Thanks bud, im still getting used to reading traffic behaviour so i think just how many fruitless clicks you can have caught me off guard. I need to reread the cutting zones section actually! i read somewhere that in an 80-20 split the right offer is the 80 and cutting it to streamline should be the 20, so im still in the hunting phase atm, but this would be pretty key knowledge for about 96 hours time.

Speaking of offer testing, i've run into a slight snag...........i can't find them. We'll i've not done a great job of looking to be fair. My initial niche has been SOI Thai Sweepstakes offers, and i can't find many of them. I'm gonna go fill out the application tool now and see if i can bolster my affiliate network membership numbers. I saw it mentioned that there are less SOI Sweep offerings for lowered tiered geo's these days, does anybody have any Tier 2/3/4 geo recommends if those are the type of offers i want to run with some decent offer volume? Prefferably for iphone 12 but that's a pretty minor detail.

Also one of the things that limits the countries i try is i have been getting the text translated and then altering it in the code which can be a lengthy process for multiple landers. I know its lazy, but has anybody tried just letting google translate do the heavy lifting and running non translated landers? Was it a shitshow? Long term i would still get them translated, but i thought maybe it would be feasible to use this for offer testing and then translate once i found a decent offer....i can alreay hear the words "Split test it!" ringing in my ears.

Right well that's enough questions for me, im gonna go read more stuff and smort up befort i get back to paying propeller ads mortgage, much love people.

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Google translate can do a pretty good job in case of simple copy and in GEOs where their AI is advanced enough. It's not gonna be as good as human translated copy, but in some GEOs it's usable. I'm not sure about Thai though, the language is a pretty complicated one, especially the letters and how they separate words. I assume the final result could be quite a mess. You can split test it for sure, weird things can happen and it's a known fact that ugly or messed up copy CAN win sometimes

Truth to be told, quite a big part of the LPs that you can see in the spytools are very poorly translated and that goes for all the GEOs out there. It's funny to look at landers in my native language, since it's not a very popular one (we're a small country) when I find some... the grammar is usually all fucked up, slang is used in a wrong way, but still, they apparently work at least to some extent anyways

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It IS true that you need to hunt down a good offer first before investing in optimizing it. This is why it's important to test lots of offers, instead of testing one offer at a time AND trying to optimize every single one to green.

The better the offer converts, the less money you'd need to invest into cutting unprofitable traffic segments (e.g. placements) and the more traffic you'd have left after the cutting to give you more profits.

Learning to tell which campaigns are good enough to be worth optimizing further and which to ditch will require experience - this is where testing lots of offers comes in!


https://www.offervault.com/iphone+12...yout&order=asc

When you're really new, avoid ZA and tier 1 English-speaking geos (US, CA, UK, AU, NZ), but other than that, there's no need to limit yourself to just one geo. If you have trouble finding good offers in tier 3/4, can also run tier 1/2, but yes please also apply to more networks as well - try to include Zeydoo - they have offers that fit your bill.

Also, try to test low-payout offers because those will allow you to collect more data for less money - in other words will require less budget to test and optimize. Try offers that are below $1 or even below $0.50. There are offers that have really low payouts that can convert really well - you won't know until you test! And your AM would be able to recommend good offers.


Google translate is OK, but before using it, first rewrite the text into short sentences/phrases, and avoid figures of speech / slang.

Alternatively, just rip landers from spy tools - ones that have received lots of traffic over at least a few days. Chances are such landers are good converters or else the affiliates probably wouldn't have sent traffic for so long.

And yes - "split test it!" will always be a good idea!




Amy

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@matuloo it's really encouraging to know perfection isn't the bar needed for sucess, obviously i'd edge nearer too it over time but it's nice to know you can still be sorta shabby and play the game profitably.
@vortex, thanks for this! im working at the moment on increasing the number of offers i can test. But reading the data is definitely an area i can feel my limitations. The guide rules in the 40 walk through are a very helpful scaffold! I am sticking to low pay out offers as religiously as i can, thank for you for the direction to zeydoo, that's really helpful i'll go apply to them tonight.

My LP's area pretty much exclusively short phrase copy, but i'll give it all a once over and she what can be shrunk.

This might be a difficult question to awnser, but currently im getting conversions on click dealer that don't appear in funnel flux.

This is the funnel flux postback url - https://dontwastemoney.club/pb/?hit=...CE&rev=REPLACE

This is what i've pasted into click dealer - https://dontwastemoney.club/pb/?hit=...d#&rev=#price# does that look correct?

Below are the stats for my two campaigns, the TH one uses a translated lander and the MY untranslated. Would you say that the CTR is close enough that it's worth initially saving the time. Or should i fight for that extra 4%? Completely understand if you can't say without conversions.



And in the next image you have the stats when i look at the offer source, but now i can't see i CTR for different offers, has that data dissapeared because my post back is malfunctioning? seems wierd i have the data in summary but gone in offers. Assuming it's because i don't understand the tool.



I was naieve enough to think i was past getting tied up with the basics but turns out i was getting ahead of myself ahaha thanks again for all your help gang!

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Ironically, questions on tracking are among the easiest to answer.

Paste this postback into clickdealer: https://dontwastemoney.club/pb/?hit=#s2#&rev=#price#

And make sure the base offer url you inserted into funnelflux looks something like this: https://cldrck.com/?a=12345&c=567890&mt=8&s2={hit}

Alternatively, you can do this:



Remember to regenerate your campaign url again and replace the campaign url at the traffic source with this possibly-revised url.

Run just enough traffic to make one conversion (from the aff network stats), wait a little bit to see if that gets posted to the tracker. If not, let me know and I'll take another look!


First of all - you're trying to compare CTR between two very different geos, so the 4% difference has no meaning.

By "untranslated" do you mean English? If so, English prevalence in the two countries are different. In TH approximately 1/4 knows English whereas in MY the number is twice as much at 1/2.

Lastly - you're right - we can only tell so much from CTR. CR would be the worthwhile metric. I've seen way too many lower-CTR landers beat out higher-CTR landers in ROI.


Postback will only affect whether conversions are being sent properly from the affiliate network to your tracker. It won't affect lander CTR.

It's natural for lander CTR data to be "missing" from offer stats - because lander CTR are only tied to landers, not offers. Note that the number of lander clicks equals the number of offer views, which makes sense. This is the relationship between lander and offer stats.


You're learning a ton! And even veterans would sometimes still make really basic mistakes. You're doing great!



Amy

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Ok so after tinkering as suggested we have lift off, conversions now appear in Funnel flux! Absolute win. However as i have a sneaking suspicion is going to become a running theme on this journey, resolving one glitch revealed another. I now can see gains which is cracking but not losses and thus no ROI. I was busy being deliriously happy that i had some conversions appearing, till i wandered my way into Day 34 and realised the entire next section hinges on me seeing costs, foresight is your friend.

So i tried to do as the guide suggests and manually update costs using Funnel flux's tool, it said costs were updated but nothing has changed in the summary. Does the below picture look correct?

https://i.imgur.com/M3xDM0E.png

In addition, i think i've posted it before but we have Campaign link - https://dontwastemoney.club/fts/0oXpDtSABlXv-0oRRPC2QRViP?campaign={campaignid}&external=${SUBI D}&zone={zoneid}

and S2S post back http://ad.propellerads.com/conversion.php?aid=##REPLACE##&pid=&tid={txid}&vis itor_id={external}&payout={payout}

i just want to make sure these are all set up properly so im able to see cost's and differentiate placements in the optimisation phase.

Right back to the schooling you were giving me..oh shit that's a great point. Hadn't even thought of all the ways that correlation could be based on completely different things. I gave the MY campaign a go to 10x payout with 0 conversions, which i guess reinforces your point, actually the key difference between the translated approach and the relying on google translate approach is only one gives me any fecking conversions, for these offers at least.

Just for my own personal understanding if offer view are the equivilent of lander clicks what does the offer clicks refference? or is it just somethig i've not added tokens for in one of my links?

That i definitely am! things are finally starting to slot into place a little bit now, so it's all like 10-15% less foreign a languge/skillset and that alone is a nice feeling. Plus theres a sense of accomplishment from being into the last 8 days of the guide, but after that it's armbands off.....im not ready

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Aces!


Let me ask the great zeno about this.


PropellerAds postback will only help the tracker to post conversions to PropellerAds, so that conversion will appear in stats within PropellerAds. Has nothing to do with cost.

To get PropellerAds costs to show in funnelflux, try this:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...t-of-campaigns

However, clickloss will make the cost inaccurate, so you may still need to adjust tracker stats manually. I don't tend to do too much there - all I do is mentally figure out the approximate percentage the costs are off by, and when browsing costs in the tracker I'd just mentally increase the costs by that percentage (for example when deciding whether or not to cut a zone/placement).

Do remember to generate a new campaign link after adding the cost token in funnelflux, and of course replacing the campaign link in PropellerAds with the new one.


Good question! I haven't used funnelflux enough to know what offer clicks are. I'm guessing it may be for offers that have multiple steps in the funnel - which isn't relevant for the typical CPA offers we affiliates promote.

Let me ask zeno!


That's what this follow-along is for - a place to ask more questions and get more guidance!



Amy

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1. In your image I see you have put {zoneid} in the segment box. Remove that, is you're telling the update to only process all clicks where zoneid={zoneid}. I think this confusion comes because the placeholder in this box is not correct, it has {tokenhere} -- will get this updated to "Optional value here".

2. Your postback needs to be updated to have your unique account data in place of ##REPLACE ##. So you need to go to Propeller Ads > tracking and find what this value is. The other values look fine.

3. In FF we have two types of pages, landers and offers. A view is a view to the node, as expected. A click is the loading of an action link connected to that node. Since lander clicks often connect you to an offer node, its logical that lander clicks = offer views, in a simple linear situation. But for other funnels, you might have landers that have actions connecting to external URLs, other landers, or offers that connect to other offers, etc. So in these situations lander views/clicks and offer views/clicks would become quite distinctly different (as is lander and offer CTR).

We separate the lander/offers in metrics instead of having just generic "page" views/clicks/CTR. We tried this in the past (and may bring it back as an optional column) -- its just lander + offer metrics in one column. However it becomes problematic when you break down data as the lander and offer data gets blended unless you group by them first, becomes a bit messy. It's one of the reporting aspects we have to do a bit differently since we let you build and connect whatever you want in almost any configuration.

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Friends, Romans, Countrymen!

Apologies for going MIA for a bit, i was still working on this but it was mostly with just run of the mill stuff i didn't think was worth updating. Hit a what i thought was a bit of a bottleneck in terms of offers i had to try after everything i'd compiled stopped working. But actually after a few more affiliate network applications a whole new wide horizon was open, win number 1!

So next was going back to the testing phase, because i have no adplexity there is a fairly limited number of landers i have available and my coding abilities are still very much a work in progress, so altering lander aesthetics definitely isn't a strong suite. From those i have, every time i run a test on them wether it's in a new Geo or for a different prize, the same one keeps winning out so i figure for the minute untill i can expand the library, i'll just have to focus on offer testing an optimisation. However a lacking lander library definitely does not feel all that sustainable, so im weighing up my options on how to fix that.

As for the testing lets take a look. I got about 10 new sweeps offers and ran them in two batches of five.



Now i know my budget looks pretty paltry in comparison to others, i have set them each a budget of about 10x their pay out to give them good room for conversion. But im also never sure if there are points where i should be pushing more traffic and im holding back too much. I've definitely noticed that i feel pretty short of data when it comes to considering optimisation options.

From this batch i figured everything was dead except the second offer. So that one alone i plucked out and ran with.



In the second batch 4 out of the 5 managed to make a conversion, which seems like an absolute result! so from there i trimmed the one that flopped, and put the other 4 in another campaign with a bit more budget to stretch their legs to see if they could do it again and hopefully get some more data on how to optimize them.

Mostly out of curiosity i had set the bid for this second batch at double the bid for the first batch, since that's alot of differing variables, its tough to say thats the reason they converted much better, but none the less i then ran the next tests at the higher bid price.



Ok so heres what happened when i pushed all the traffic to the single converting offer from the first batch, as far as i can tell it shit the bed. Would something like this even be worth optimising?



And when i looked at the four converting offers from the second batch pretty much all of them shit the bed except one of them which was pretty banging.

This stuff is probs fairly mundane but i mostly wanted to find out if there was some critique to be given on my process. Am i giving these offers enough of a chance before dropping them? Am i handicapping myself with how much im limiting their budget. Is my lander conversion rate too shit to get me anywhere? That kind of stuff. Any and all constructive criticism welcome.

Also should i be recycling these offers at all? i kinda feel like if i can try 10 offers and drop 9 across 48 hours, im in to pour through offers at an incredibly high rate over time. is that even sustainable? like i've applied to a fair few networks at this point but i don't think i can find myself 20-30 new sweeps offers per week, or is that something i should be able to do?

Much obliged as always champs, i spent about $60 dollars this week, hats off to the likes of jaybot and all the rest of you low-key moguls out there blowing through a grand a month minimum. I'll have no choice but to get there, however that intestinal fortitude is impressive.

P.s I blacked out what i thought was irrelevant information, but if i'd done too much anywhere just let a brother know and i'll fix in future.

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Bruuuuuuhhh this first win gotta be in here somewhere maayyyyn

So i ended up getting adplexity under the assumtion that lander was my current bottleneck, although i don't know that it's done much to improve my outlook.





At first i thought my landers were just doing shocking....then i realised its wierd that nothing converted and maybe my bid had caused loads of bot traffic..and then i realised actually i think its just because i was a dumbass and left broker traffic on. I'm assuming that's why it looks shitty but open to alternative reasons

In an effort to streamline lander test time, i stopped translating for the test period till i had whittled down, so test all of them in english, as previously i found the proportions for conversion were about the same english and thai even though the actual conversion number was higher for translated. Then once i have a winner or 2-3 get that/those translated. But if that sounds like faulty logic, feel free to let a brother know.

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With no broker traffic theres some progress. Very high click through rate on a lander in particular but pretty garbage conversions. well fuck it, lets see how it plays out on a few more offers. Not sure if im seeing potential or just some sort of glitchy numbers.

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Wow speaking of being MIA - don't know how I managed to miss these updates!

I'm going to go back to your post here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post412377

You mentioned not having enough landers - which geo are you looking for? And how many landers did you test for your 10 sweeps offers?

I agree with your decision to only test one of the offers further - the one with -57% ROI - because it seems to be the best-performing out of the 10.

Speaking of which: Next time, just put all 10 offers into the same campaign. When you split-test anything, you want to subject them to the same conditions, i.e. by running them at the same time in the same campaign. No need to split into 2 campaigns.

That was why I underlined the words "seems to be" in the sentence above. To make a definite conclusion, ideally all 10 offers needed to be run in the same campaign over the same period of time, until a statistical calculator helped you to cut inferior offers to arrive at a winning offer (i.e. the last offer standing).

Note that the last offer standing may or may not be a good-enough offer to continue running and optimizing. An offer can be the best out of a bunch of shitty offers and still be shitty. But in your case of -57% ROI it may be worth optimizing.

Also: When you decide to cut/pause an offer, just exclude it from your tracker's campaign settings. No need to set up a new campaign just to run the rest of the offers. Doing so will split up your test data across 2 campaigns. You'd want test data to all be together so you can make decisions based on more data rather than less.

Hard to say without knowing how many landers you were testing, but in this particular case all's well that ends well as you were able to uncover a semi-decent offer (of course we can't really be sure with only 3 conversions but there's potential there!)

Lander conversion rate is not half as important as ROI, which in turn is not half as important as the daily profit you make (or can stand to make) from a campaign.


If you join enough networks you'll find enough offers.

Also, you won't always JUST be testing new offers - there will be campaigns that are being optimized, campaigns being scaled to other networks, and campaigns that are stable and profitable that you'll want to keep monitoring and making tweaks.

And if you have more time to test more offers, sweeps isn't the only vertical!

I wouldn't suggest to "recycle" offers unless you have a good reason to. For example, say you've tested a batch of new landers and found something that converts considerably better than your old landers. Offers aren't so scarce that you need to make double triple sure something's a dud before you give up on it. If anything it should be the opposite: If an offer doesn't show promise right away, ditch it - especially if you already have a blacklist/whitelist and a proven lander.

The more offers you test, the better you can tell a promising offer from a dud. When you have experience running in a specific vertical in a specific geo on a specific traffic network, you'll have an idea what type of CTR/CR to expect. And once you've paused the bad placements/zones and have a proven lander, you won't need to spend a lot on testing new offers - because you're already using the best traffic and the best lander so if the offer doesn't get decent ROI right away, you'll know to ditch it.

Of course there are exceptions to the "ditch offers quickly" approach: If you're trying to crack a new vertical you don't have previous experience in, or if you're running an offer you KNOW has a lot of potential (e.g. intel from other affiliates), by all means spend more time and money on testing different targeting and different landers to see if you get better results.

But for the "same old same old" sweeps offers for example - if you're using popular and well-optimized landers (functions well loads fast) and using a decent bid and the offer doesn't convert within10x payout in spend, the offer is most likely a dud.


It's GREAT that you're limiting your spending at the start. This way you can work out some of the most common kinks first.
Gotta walk before you run.

Once you have the whole testing process down you can mass-test stuff. But trying to juggle too much right now will just result in you overspending on various split-tests and not spending enough time on analyzing/learning from your stats.


Having access to enough landers is almost a requirement, but of course won't guarantee success.

And once you find a decent offer, it would be a good idea to test variations of your best lander. Here are some tips:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...n-Spying-Tools

As for leaving broker traffic selected - minor "mistake". Even veterans make them, let alone relatively new affiliates.


Gotta ask: Why not just rip landers that are already in the language you need?

And - unless you REALLY know what you're doing - always use landers in the local language.

Once you have a winning offer, and testing lander variations, some of those variations can be translations by different translators.

But for initial testing, ripping landers that have "received most traffic" should be good enough.


Wait - are you testing a single offer?

What's the payout and what's your bid?

I'm also wondering why the heaven and earth difference between that one lander and the others. It's not unheard of, but it's always good to explore reasons why.

For example there may be something faulty with the other landers - have you tried to browse to your tracker campaign link multiple times to check out each lander to make sure they're all functioning as intended? And load fast?

Good progress is being made - thanks for showing stats - looking forward to seeing more!



Amy

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Hi Vortex,

This is all invaluable. Also i can't thank you enough for taking this much time out of your day to comment on this stuff. I recently realised my belief that click dealer had so few offers was actually a result of how i was using the search function. So that opened up my horizons.

I had been using landers out of the free adplexity bundle so i could only use what was in there and translate to what was needed. I recently decided to pay for a month of adplexity, but i found for smaller geo's like say thailand i was really struggling to find good lander examples with decent traffic, is that normal or would you expect to be able to find good landers in just about any geo if you used the search settings properly?

I think now that i have a bit more experience testing these landers it looks like its something to do with how few clicks it takes to get through the lander, so it's really easy for traffic to add to the click through rate but it actually has seemingly no impact on visitors which translates to sod all conversions.

Perserverance is slowly but surely educating me in the nuances of this craft, plus you guys all are all so responsive and giving with your time that it's steadily sharpening up the edges of what im doing.

After finding out how to open up the library of sweeps offers on clickdealer i went for the very lowest pay out in the hopes i'd get the simplest conversions, and started testing new landers from adplexity.



Having read your awnsers i completely see the logic of keeping everything in one campaign as you go, makes so much more sense than what i have been doing so thats something else to add to my process.

However in this instance, once i found the lander that works "google survey it was time to try it on a few offers which got me to here.



And now im a little stuck as if im reading it right step one of black and white listing is to add up profitable segments, but what about when there are none. It seems like -70's% ROI is bad but maybe something can be done with it, however im not sure if i should be alarmed all my segments are read.

Here's a few examples of drill downs.







Anyways it's the largest volume of conversions i've managed to generate to date, and one of the last funadmentals i need to tick off is learning optimisation so i figure this is probably a good time for that, even if the actual profits available are somewhat meagre. But it's late for tonight so im out for the night! Much love homies.

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Thank you for your comment - your appreciation is definitely reciprocated! It takes a lot of time to update a follow-along with new stats and progress - thank you for taking the time to do this as well!

"Decent traffic" is relative - basically all you need to do is sort results by "received most traffic", then scroll down and pick out say 1-2 versions of each popular lander style - which for sweeps are mainly 1)survey, 2)gift boxes, and 3)spinning wheel. I went to Adplexity Mobile just now and specified Thailand in the filters, and kept scrolling until I found examples of each style:







Also saw the good old "select your prize" lander that's worth a test:



And then of course, if you want more landers to test, you can always rip landers in other languages and have them translated. But it isn't looking like you're having trouble finding landers based on the number of landers you've tested?


Sorry I'm not understanding this - care to elaborate?


Did you ask your affiliate manager for offer recommendations?

That's where I would start. Asking for recommendations will usually get better results than picking offers randomly from the network's offers database. Yes I've found some gems by testing offers that "look interesting" that weren't recommended by AMs, but usually - and especially when running in a geo+vertical for the first time - sticking with offers that have a solid track record may be best.

You need offers that have decent performance in order to cut placements. Once you've identified good and bad placements, you can test any offer including random offers, without having to spent too much money. E.g. If I'm using the best traffic (placement whitelist/blacklist) and an offer doesn't convert within 5x payout in spend, I would ditch it.

And even if you do want to test random offers, you'd do well to ask your AM whether the offer would even be WORTH testing. An offer could be inactive and the network just hasn't gotten around to removing it from the database. Or the offer performance has been really bad. Or something else could be wrong with it. Always good to make sure first.


Nice! I love how many landers you've tested!

One crucial question: I'm not able to see the full names of the offers, but the first one seems to be a Starbucks giftcard offer and the 3rd one seems to be a supermarket voucher offer? How could you be using a single lander to test offers that have different sweeps prizes?


Question: How many impressions are you able to get in a day, on average bid? The more traffic you can get, the more cutting you can afford to do and have enough traffic left to make money from, and the more negative your starting ROI can be and still be worth optimizing.

Right now it appears that all your major traffic segments (at least the ones you're showing) are at around -70% to -90%. Not looking very hopeful based on just these stats, but we'd need to see placement data to get a better idea. Also OS version data if you have them.

Another important question: Are these stats for your best offer+lander ONLY? Please make sure.


Can't agree with you more on that!

Let's look at more stats (as requested above) and go from there. My question regarding the lander you're using is also a very important factor.



Amy

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Some times things just make more sense when they're presented by an outside source. The whole time i was trying to use adplexity for thai landers i thought those squares meant they were broken, but im only now realising that's just my browser saying it doesn't have the characters downloaded.

I had a particular lander that required very few clicks to get from lander to offer, something like 2 where a survey lander might take 6-8, the CTR was skyhigh but the conversion rate was non-existant. And i was basically thinking aloud that this was probably what caused the high CTR, the fact you could almost accidently click your way through the lander, rather than it actually building peoples desire to click through and moving them towards a conversion. Fairly useless anecdotal information, but a good reminder that theres no point just trying to shortcut to a bunch of people seeing the offer if your not building towards the final goal of a conversion.

Right you are, i got a bit nervous that i was going to be unable to see enough conversions to optimize with my limited budget, so i started running these offers that could convert with very limited budget without asking my AM. Rookie error really. Since then i have spoken to my AM and she has given me a list of a few high converting offers in tier 3 and 4 geo's. Im gonna have one last go at practicising optimisation on one of these junk offers while i get my top performing lander translated and angled at the different geo's and prizes she has recommended.

So it's the same lander but tweaked slightly for the different combos, so the P10,000 version talked about vouchers of that value, P5000 vouchers of that value and the other two i believe were also vouchers but completely translated into indonesian if i remember right. Should i have been keeping all of these pairings seperate?

At the moment i am running distributed/throttled traffic on propeller adds, so i think i run about 19,000 impressions over a 24hour period. This is my best lander currently after the previous batch of lander testing, the offer im running with it isn't being done with profit in mind, it's being used purely to improve how i optimize this campaign. It generates enough conversions that hopefully even with a limited budget we'll get a reasonably vivid enough picture to work on optimising. The goal of this next week or so is just to build a step by step process that will let me improve the ROI on this campaign as much as it can be even if that still leaves it below 0. And then i'll have a solid system to use after the next round of offer testing.

So the rules im setting for myself preliminarily are to cut any zones that don't convert by 2x Payout or more across the first 4 days, and only start optimising by larger catagories like Device, browser and OS from 4 days onward once we've accumulated a fair amount of data. I found previously that trying to change that factors that affected larger portions of traffic early was causing their effects to be less predictable.

Of course if the purpose of this wasn't just to work on optimisation i'd be looking more at Estimated Daily profits to ensure it's even worth running (spoiler alert, in the real world, with my skills it's probs not), but since im not necessarily gunning for green on this one i'll give that a miss for now.



Ok so here's where it begins, -85% ROI, very much like the last screen shot i posted, however this time i have a bit more of a plan than just hacking away bits of traffic asap and hoping i had used the excel spread sheet well enough.



Even on a scale like this there are some wins in there somewhere, just enough to hint there could be some version of light at the end of a tunnel.



So this is where the trimming starts. the Pay out is 0.03 and i'll cut any placements that don't have a conversion by 0.06. Tbf half the reason this campaign would struggle to get anywhere is the sheer volume of conversions i would need per 1000 impressions to actually make some money and what i'd need to be paying for it. However, as long as i can start learning to make the right deicisions in what to cut away and when to cut it, i'll be happy.

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Thanks for all the detailed info and stats!

Ah OK - if you're running a very low payout offer to learn optimization, then test away! A few comments:

-Another goal of this exercise can be to identify all the good and bad placements, so that you can test higher-payout offers next.

-For a $0.03 offer, you may as well set the cut-off for blacklisting placements at 3x or even 4x the payout. This way you can identify all the placements that are not total losers, for testing higher-payout offers on in the future. Remember your current offer isn't very good - a better-converting offer may turn some of the red placements into green later.

-Don't try to optimize tiny placements. Don't count on them to turn a losing campaign into a winner. Set a cut-off point - say the top 100 placements by volume - and focus on them.

-Start at a low bid - even the minimum bid allowed on the network. Once you've finished blacklisting the losers among major placements (e.g. top 100), clone the campaign and set a higher bid (with the same blacklist) and repeat the cutting. Then clone at a higher bid etc.

-This way you'll have identified the best placements at every bid. When you test higher-payout offers later, you won't be wasting money on loser placements.


Regarding high-CTR landers: Thanks for the explanation! I've pointed that out many times in past posts as well so I know what you're talking about.

This is why I always cringe when a newbie wants to cut landers based on CTR alone. This is rarely a good idea unless the CTR is so low that the math can't possibly work out to green.

The more of the RIGHT sort of preselling the lander can do, the more likely it would be for the visitors that DO proceed to the offer, to convert.

More preselling, more hoops for the visitor to jump through, means fewer people will click to the offer - but it would be the RIGHT sort of people that are truly interested in the offer.

And in the case of survey landers, and any other lander that is designed to interact with the visitor: The more effort the visitor has to make, the more entitled they would feel to winning the prize.

"OK I've helped by filling out your survey, now I deserve a prize!"


Regarding landers for different sweeps prizes: As long as the prize on the lander (words+images) are the same as what's on the offer page, you're good.



Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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Thanks for all this! Unfortunately i was a chunk of the way through the week so a fair few placements got cut at 2x, however im gonna run with this plan from here on, so a 3x cut and we'll bump the bid.

By all accounts this offer is pretty trash, but you're definitely right in that we should be able to weed out the trashiest tier palcements. And hopefully like you say i can get a passable list of blacklisted zones that translates to other campaigns.

As an aside when it comes to creating a blacklist of placements can that then be used for other campaigns within the same vertical within the same geo? Or is it usable for any type of offer within the same geo? I'm guessing you can't use it outside that geo, as i feel like sources are likely to be location specific but im still learning so that might be a faulty assumption.

Monday:


Tuesday:


Wednesday:


Thursday:


So as you can see i havn't managed to build a consistant improvement in ROI, which is a bit shit however we're not doing. I'll keep trimming the list at a $2 CPM and see if that creates something, with a little sprinkling of bid tweaking in there too.

Its annoying im not moving in the direction of the goal here yet but im having fun with all the experimenting so i can't complain!

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It's easy really: Just unpause those and run them for another few cents.

Seeing all those stats over several days - I'm starting to feel you're spending more than you need to in order to generate a blacklist.

Perhaps try other low-payout offers. And not limited to the same geo. But first make sure there are LOTS of higher-payout offers you'll be able to test for the new geo BEFORE investing in placement-cutting using the low-payout offer.

As for whether you can use the blacklist for other verticals or geos: For verticals, of course each vertical is different and CAN perform differently for placements of different nature (torrent sites vs. image sites vs. file storage sites vs. whatever else), for example VPN offers may convert better on torrent sites. But most offers that can be run on pop are so broad appeal, they should convert similarly for all site categories. At least I haven't observed enough difference to stop assuming as such.

Another thing worth mentioning: Just because a placement is giving you conversions on a $0.03 payout offer, doesn't mean you'll get conversions when you later present the same placement with a $1 offer. The low payout offer is only a mine-sweep to get rid of the worst placements. When you run higher payout offers, further optimization will be necessary.

As for geos: I HAVE seen placements that perform badly across all geos, but in general I wouldn't suggest to "inherit" a blacklist from another geo for a new geo.

I'm glad you're having fun! Running low payout offers can offer massive learning opportunities. You can conduct all kinds of tests for cheap and observe how the traffic works, or build blacklists/whitelists. There's not as much pressure to get profitable right away. You learn optimization for cheaper because you can collect lots of conversion date for pennies on the dollar.

One last thing I want to point out: When trying to identify good/bad placements for a geo, set a cutoff on which placements are giving you enough traffic for them to be worth testing, and which ones are too small to bother. Let me explain.

For every geo (+other targeting) and at every bid, there will be a bunch of really small placements that won't reach 1x payout spend in days. They may get lottery conversions but don't play into their little game by holding out hope that if you continue to cut these placements you'll increase ROI.

Focus on testing the bigger placements. Set a cutoff - e.g. placements that spend at least $0.10/day or more. Then once you've collected enough data to test these bigger placements - by cutting ones that are in loss by 2x or 3x payout or whatever your criterion is - stop sending traffic to test the remaining (very small) placements.



Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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I am really suprised by this, i thought because with my budget being limited there was no chance of this happening. Is there any chance you could go into a bit more detail here and tell me what you would have done differently so i can avoid overspending?

I felt like this was a really good point, and since this and two other 0.03 payouts were the only phillipino offers available to me, it became immediately apparent i was going to have to scrap this geo for now. After looking at T3 options that have low payout offers and higher payout offers i settled on thailand that ranges from $0.24 to around $1 hopefully giving us a better gradient to work with.

The cut off point was pretty great aswell, i'd not thought about giving myself a cut off there!

So the next step is to steadily build a Thai black list, this is a summary of my weeks efforts, it looks pretty bleak!



First thing i did was try the cheapest Thai offer with the lander that was working for the previous offer, after translating it to thai. It converts which is alright, and the number of conversions is actually pretty high out of those who click through, it's just that barely anyone clicks through it. So the next step was to find a better lander.

Luckily i had some i had previously ripped and cleaned, and i needed to test them but didn't want to translate them all, so i tested them on a british offer. All hail the queen, RIP grampa Phil.



Clearly i got no conversions anywhere which is cool. One thing i don't understand are a couple of lines in the description

"Advertiser reserves the right to validate leads during 15 days after the end of the month

Only validated leads are counted"

Does that mean any conversions have to be reviewed before they will be counted via my tracker? or does my tracker still see conversions when they happen and i just get paid after validation?

Off the back of this i have chose 1 gift box, 1 spinner and 1 survey lander, excluding the 53% CTR option, as it takes about 3 clicks to get through and i think that's skewing the data. After translating them i can now see how they perform against the google survey lander and hopefully find a combination that works half decently!

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What I mean is that your offer isn't converting well enough - generating this blacklist is getting expensive for you.

I JUST finished writing this post on how to cut placements - it may shed some light:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ing-Placements

Basically, set the bar higher when deciding which campaigns to even optimize. Think: How much money have you invested so far into cutting placements? And how many offers would you have been able to test using that money?

Using an offer that converts well to cut placements would have saved you money. Using an offer that converts well AND has a low payout would have saved you even more.


Yup - all goes back to the need to set the bar high, and using low payout offers to cut placements.


Amen. They got to spend many decades together though - longer than most couples. I wish the same for myself and my partner.



Most advertisers and/or affiliate networks scrub leads. Some will also shave leads. Every network does it differently.

Meaning: Some networks has an automatic setting that will only make a percentage of leads show up on your affiliate dashboard and tracker - but no network would EVER admit that to your face. I know this happens for a fact because I'm personal friends with some affiliate managers.

And then there's scrubbing that goes on AFTER the leads are collected. Basically anything that the advertiser can't monetize for some reason - low-quality leads, duplicates, fraudulent leads, whatever else - they would refuse to pay for. Sometimes the network will absorb this and still pay the affiliate, but would ask the affiliate to stop promoting the offer. Or, the network would just not pay the affiliate.

There are other ways of handling the situation as well. To find out for sure, please ask your AM for clarification. Everyone (network, advertiser) does things a bit differently.



Amy

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Yeh man i definitely feel like im probably not using this test budget all that well.

I decided to go back to the drawing board and try to build a funnel from the ground up that was worth testing some offers on.



So first i chose a british offer so i didn't have to worry about translation and i tested all the landers i had ripped while i had axplexity. Or at least all those that were still functioning after my ham handed cleaning.



I should really take more notes, trying to repiece this together 2 weeks later is not the easiest. But i believe this was day 1 of trying to test the best out of each type of lander, giftbox, spinner and survey. Against the lander i had been using previously.
Didn't set the weighting up properly and just ended up sending the original all the traffic.




I think something about the time windows i have used for these snapshots has left it looking wonky as at one point i paused some and left giftbox 4 running. But as i could tell that was the best performer so we ran with it.



No we have paused everything but giftbox 4 and we're just pushing traffic to that because it's our best lander. (we think we're using an AM reccomended offer but realize at the end of the week it the wrong one but thats a story for later.)




this is the story of cutting placements, each day anything that spent 1x payout and didnt convert is gone.



But for the life of me i can't create consistant improvement in ROI



Ok so no improvement on ROI and we've spent more than we should and this wasn't the right offer, buuuut we have a bit of a blacklist now right?



So i tested the TH offer i meant to originally, it's a low pay-out one that my AM says is converting. But i basically spend 10x the payout with 0 conversions and have to pause it. I think this 1 conversion dropped in late or i just missed it till the last. And thus far all my test proved was that my blacklist is better at inhibiting progress.

There are also a couple of other offers my AM recommended me



The problem I'm running into is that I've done a couple rounds of lander testing now, but even when I'm running these offers with AM recommended options my ROI is starting at sub -60%, at which point as i understand it they're not really worth running. But if my funnel is producing such poor results with multiple AM recommended then surely it has to be the fault of the funnel not the offer right? But if after two rounds of lander testing i can't find an option that works well enough with offers to get a conversion rate above -50% then this journey is going to be incredibly long winded for very little payoff.

So that is my current quandary, half my brain says just keep testing offers, the other half says that you don't have a lander good enough to make an offer work so I was hoping some outside perspective on the journey that got me here could give me a bit of guidance on the right direction. Hopefully there's something in here I'm not seeing. Anyways the singular promise of this journey was durability so can't go whinging too much just yet!

Currently this Brazilian offer seems like my best bet, so I'll have a fiddle with that and see if I can make this testing process any better.

I was so busy griping I forgot to add the one ray of sunshine here. My funnel finally functioned internationally. Last time it just about collapsed when I tried a different geo, this time two other geo's and both produce a very similar CTR and passable CR although not passable if I ever want to make any profit....but that's another conversation ahahaha

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Ok team, time for the results of another round of testing. This time the aim of the game was to test as many offers as possible in the hopes that sotmething would come out good.

So first step, take all of the leadgen offers for brazil and get them stuck into my tracker. Also turn my lander into a generic version of itself so that it can cater for lots of offers, to avoid having to edit all the time. Then run all those offers at once and see what happens.



So for the first time in a while, things were looking positive. I have several ROIs that were over -60% which is probably some of the highest ever. One of which was even -22% which looked super promising.




This is where things start to go downhill. So these are the stats for day 2, slightly less promising than day 1 but not the worst in the world. still some above -60% 's but already much weaker than we saw on the first day.



Looks slightly better with the stats for both days but still not the best in the world.



By day 3 its pretty pointless to look at stats beside cumulative because they have gone to shit. which is not great since we started with 14 offers. Is it normal to test 14 offers and come out with results like this?



So i edited my lander with a bunch of those tricky scripts to make it more sticky and it seems to have worked a bit.



THe singular upside to all this testing is it appears i was able to improve the lander with the scripts, beuno! however my quest for profit is still floundering and beyond that i still need to get my ROI to like a consistant -40% ish so it's worth optimising. Any and all tips on how to improve this funnel im gagging for. think im squirting money down the drain atm.

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Kudos on the mass-testing of offers!

However - what do you mean by "generic version" of lander?

It may be true that you don't need to use the best lander in the world to get conversions from a good offer - but it would still need to be good enough.

Otherwise you'd just be pissing money into the wind.

Also - and I'm assuming you're not using a good lander here: At this point I would take all the offers that have achieved -60% ROI or better, and test some good landers for them (that are specific to the respective sweeps prizes). You MAY be able to find some green after some optimization!



Amy

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Yeh that may be poor wording on my part. The lander was still the winning lander from all the previous rounds of lander testing, by generic i just meant that it was focused on "you will potentially win a premium voucher" rather than "you will potentially win x brand's voucher".

as a follow up once i had a winning offer out of that round i then really focused the text on the specific offer and made it a bit more emotive in the hopes that this would improve ROI, which it did as you can see below but it's not night and day.



This is after i added some bits of nifty code to do stuff like back button redirecting.



and then next is the improved lander with and without the brand specific text.

I'm at a bit of an impass because im not sure what my limiting factor is. I could do with a bit of direction on wether it would be best to continue testing offers with the same landers, or wether the lander is more likely to be the issue. Having tested all 14 available lead gen offers for brazil and even my winner not coming close to profit makes me think it must be something else about my funnel because surely theres a better win rate out there than 1 in 14+

On the other hand my brain says theres only 3 lander types out there anyway for this vertical how much difference can that really make?

But in the mean time till a better suggestion comes i'll keep looking at offers, and hope if i cast my net wide enough i'll find something worth catching.

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Far too long between these posts, work rate is definitely something that needs working on. So i decided to commit to testing offers at volume, however the first round of testing is looking a bit precarious.

There is a mix of offers in there, at $.23 $.4 $1.15 payouts. and i have run the .23 to about $2 before cutting those that didn't convert. the $.4 offers i've run to about $3 before cutting.

Not the ideal 10x but seems silly to bleed money on something that's will be a struggle, when the goal of testing on this scale was to find an offer that converted particularly well, and even if they started converting there they wouldn't fit that bill. Overall nothing seems enough of a front runner to signal "this offer will do well!!!!"Oddly my AM has come back to say im testing too many offers and that i need to stop applying for so much. Which makes me think i might need to refine my process before click dealer tell me to stop being a bellend.

I read a post by twinaxe that mentioned a bad offer wont convert on a good lander but a good over will convert on a bad one. So i was hoping to have a bit of faith in the one i was using that there would be an offer that could pull i through, but i think it might be just about irrideemable. Gonna keep running traffic to the offers that have converted and see what they look down the line. In the mean time i'll see if i can design something with some sort of converting power via Pure lander!

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Kudos on the large-scale testing!

It's not uncommon to need to test 30+ offers to find a promising one on pop.

I have a couple of questions for you though:

1)Are all those offers recommended by your AM? I would strongly recommend to test AM-recommended offers instead of just blindly applying to all available offers on a network that fit a certain geo+vertical.

And if your AM has a problem with you applying to too many offers, try to apply to a couple more networks so you can "spread things out".

2)Why is it that you ran so little spend to some of the offers? For example there are a couple of offers with $1.15 payout that you only run a little over $3 to, each.

That may be true, but WHY settle for a "bad" lander in the first place?

Why not just grab the most popular landers, that have received a lot of traffic, from a spy tool, clean them up and optimize them for fast loading, so you can be confident of their performance?

As a next step, I would take all the offers that have -60-70% ROI and run them with a few different landers to see if they have any potential. It's really hard to say when they've only made a single conversion on less than 3x payout in spend.

At any rate, testing many offers is miles better than testing one offer at a time! Great progress!



Amy

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