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My first green campaign. How not to screw it ! (10)

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Hi guys. This is my first green campaign after two months wrestling with the superior Vortex 40-day tutorial and I really don't want to mess it up when starting to optimize it. So please let me know your valuable comments how should I start optimizing it.

This is the campaign overall performance in the last 2 days.
Direct link in Haka network. I tried multiple offers in Clickdealer network using 4 different popular landers but they all failed. So I switch to Haka, tried multiple their direct link offers and get this one green. So I will stick to their network for now.


The offer payout is 0.35$. I'm using Smart CPM at 0.2$


Please don't laugh at the tiny profit. This is the best I can achieve after about 20 red campaigns and nearly 500$ traffic expense. So it makes me very excited.
This performance is achieved after I narrow down to mobile platform, android OS, and WL one ISP which received all conversions.

- This is the zone statistic info with conversions sorting in the descending order


Totally there are about 400 zones, most of them receive less than 100 visits.

There isn't any placement with more than 2xpayout, so how should I cut placements in this situation. Should I let all of them run further.

- This is the region statistic info


- This is the browser statistic info


- The citi stas info


I'm very looking forward to your valuable insights.

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Congrats on the campaign, it doesn´t matter of the numbers are low or not

First thing, forget about stuff like region, city and mostly even browser stats.

These things won´t make or break a campaign.

I never check for cities or regions and browsers are only important for me when the offer only allows specific browsers.

In 99% you will see that Chrome has by far most volume anyway followed by Samsung browser and then the rest.

When we check your screenshot we can see that Chrome has about 90% of the campaigns traffic so that´s basically the only browser you should take care of.

You already narrowed the targeting down, when you overoptimize a campaign by things like region or city you mosly risk to be left with only too less volume to make it worth it.

There are also only 12 conversions yet, too early to make any final statements.

For now just keep the campaign running and cut all placements with 1x offer payout in loss.

You can also test with a higher bid to increase volume and quality.

But one thing to remember, be prepared to have a drop in performance when you start to scale, that´s just normal.

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Thanks @twinaxe. Today is a sad day, I got no conversion while yesterday I got 11 ones.


While waiting for that campaign recovering its performance (hopefully). Can you guys have a look at my other offer test below



Some info about the offer
GEO: TH
Payout: 0.65
Platform: Mobile
OS: Android
Bid: Currently I set it at 1.5$ smartCPM. At the beginning I use 0.7$ but didn't get enough traffic, so I increased to 1.5$. After that increasing I achieved 8 conversions so far.
BL: I used my BL which I collected in previous tests.

I ran the offer for 3 days already.
Below is the placement statistic info

I'm thinking about cutting placements but it seems the traffic is spread out across multiple zones. Therefore there is no zone cost more than 2xpayout to cut yes. However I have a very uncomfortable feeling that this spreading trend will keep bleeding my budget everyday but I have no zones to cut due to the spreading of cost in multiple zones.
So the question here is how should I continue with this offer, should I keep it running further so that multiple zones will have time to "collect" enough lost so that I can cut or should I stop it now to avoid loss.
One more question, I noticed there are many zones with CTR higher than 100%. Is that the indicator of bot traffic
For example

and this

and this

and why the CTR can be higher than 100%. I think the max CTR can have is 100% which is also unrealistic.

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First of all - congrats on your first green!!

That offer that stopped performing - first thing to do is to check with your AM to see if the offer is experiencing any technical difficulties. Also check ALL your links to make sure everything is working.

Check your aff network stats to make sure traffic is reaching the right offer. Check for conversion data on the aff network dashboard - if they're there and not being posted back to the tracker then the postback hasn't been firing for some reason - which would be an example of a "technical difficulty".

Regarding the second offer: When traffic is spread out across many placements you'll just have to suck it up and gather enough data. It would help to test multiple offers at the same time because then you'd have a better chance of finding an offer that will convert better than just the one - and the better the offer, the less you'll bleed.

Also: What's the offer payout? It looks like an offer with variable payout. What's the average payout? (You can get this from your AM - and also by looking at your own stats.)

I would leave the bid at $0.70 - that way you probably won't bleed as much. Yes the traffic will come in slower, but there's nothing to stop you from setting up more campaigns!

As for the 100%+ CTR: Do you have backbutton scripts on your landers? If so then that's normal.



Amy

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Hi @twinaxe and @vortex, I'm back.

My first green offer above died just after one day. I kept trying to run it for another few days but received almost no conversions. I checked with my AM as suggested by Vortex and he said that GEO just stopped converting, they tried hard to bring it back but it not worked.

So first lesson learned: Don't get too excited when seeing a green campaign. It can die anytime.

Now after burning about another 300$ testing offers, yesterday another offer turned green. Below is it's performance after 2 days


For this offer, I already narrowed down to one particular carrier on Mobile/Android and using some previous BL zones which I collected before.

Now I have several questions about how to optimize this campaign

- First, below is the creative performance



Do you think I have enough statistic info to start cutting creatives and how should I cut creatives. Is it the same method as banner cutting method using this tool which is recommended by Vortex ?

- Second, I guess the the logical next step is increasing the bid to get more traffic. Below is traffic chart


My current bid is 0.005. So what is your suggestion for the next higher bid value ? Do you have any suggestions on this bid increasing strategy
- Thirdly, a question regarding BL and WL in push. I noticed that in the same GEO, a zone can perform poorly enough in one carrier to be BL using 2xpayout rule of thumb. But that same zone does have some conversions when I run that same offer on another carrier. Is it normal ? Is it still safe to build one BL from low payout campaign and apply that BL to all other campaigns running in the same GEO ?

- Final question, I kept questioning myself if the way we are applying the same BL to other campaigns in the same GEO is correct. As you know, the offer is the king, so one reason many zones performing so badly may be due to the very bad offer, not because of poor zone performance. If we build a BL based on those zones, we can miss a chance if we encounter a good offer. Is my thinking correct or do I miss smth here ?

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Unluckily that´s a sad truth, it happens all the time that offers stop working.

Sometimes it takes longer, sometimes they don´t last long.

You can use a statistical significance calculator like THIS ONE to compare the creatives.

Yes, you should definitely increase the bid.

I would go to $0.012-$0.014 to reach the next plateau.



It can happen but it´s still a good idea to build a BL on lower payouts and use it later for other campaigns.

But also make sure to have enough stats about the placement, 1-2 conversions are not enough.

The only way to build real good blacklists and whitelists is when you have a good converting funnel.

So when you build a blacklist with a so/so offer it´s better to retest some placements when you have a better funnel.

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Thanks @twinaxe for your quick feedback. I have some more questions

1. When duplicating the campaign at multiple higher bids, do I need to pause the lower bid campaign or I can let them run in parallel. I'm worrying those campaigns can compete with each other.

2. Besides opening up many new placements, does the higher bid campaign cover all placements which already appeared in the lower bid campaign ? .
- If the answer is yes, then I think there is no point to keep running the lower bid campaign because the zones in that campaign will also be served from the high bid campaign with much higher traffic. Is that right ?
- If the answer is know, that means some placements in the low bid campaign will not appear in the high bid campaign. In this case do you think is it worth the effort to only block the placements in the lower bid campaigns if those ones also appear in the higher bid campaign. By doing that we can avoid internal competition between the same zone in different campaigns and also don't pause the zone which generate profit in the lower bid campaign and don't appear in the high one.

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It can happen that you compete with each other, to stay on the safe side better run one bid at time to don´t double or triple bid on the same placement.

Mostly yes.

Different placements can perform different and sometimes need different bids.

Let´s say you have a placement with 50 conversions at 100% ROI and a placement with 50 conversions at -10% ROI.

For the first placement you could bid even higher, the second placement is already in loss with the current bid.

Nonetheless the second placement is converting so when you run it on a lower bid it could become profitable.

This is what we use WL for, to run different placements at different bids that work for their performance

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What about the biggest countries where their regions are bigger then some countries in the world? For example, each state in USA is quite unique. Countries where different regions speak different languages. I think Canada has parts where French is the dominant language. Western Switzerland speaks French, Northern - German, Southern - Italian. It is just a few examples of many. I heard some regions in India has a lot more wealthier citizens thus converts better.

If you get to the profitable campaign and have lot of data, isn't it worth to dig through data to see if the optimization by regions/city would boost the ROI and profits? Thus dominating the GEO.

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Thanks @twinaxe, after increasing the bid to 0.012 (that means almost double my initial bids), below is the comparison between 2 campaigns
- 0.012 bid campaign

- 0.005 bid campaign before I clone it to the high bid campaign

Apparently, the higher bid campaign get almost more than double the traffic, the number of conversions is also increased from 27 to 42 but the profit drop from 7.7$ to 4.7$. By looking deeper at the zone level (image below) I can see the reason is that one particular zone 3751992 get the highest traffic for both campaigns but achieve the same conversions. Which results in higher profit for the low bid campaign.

Based on this observations, I have following questions
1. Do you think should I blacklist that zone 3751992 in the high bid campaign and let it runs in the lower bid campaign or should I create a separate campaign for this particular zone.

2. I'm very reluctant to create a WL campaign only because in the past whenever I do that, the traffic drop and I don't receive any conversion at all. However at that time the WL zone only haS 4 conversion but now it has 16 conversions, do you think this number is high enough to put WL a zone. What is the general strategy to build WL for different bid level ?

3. When I remove a zone which receives most traffic in one campaign, does that increase the traffic to the remaining zones in the same campaign or those traffic just gone with the removed-zone.

4. I see that for my high bid campaign, there are many many zones only receiving 1 visit (figure below) and wonder how I can increase the traffic to those zones to see if they can perform besides the obvious increasing bid approach.


It's all for now, I still have many questions running around my head but just want to go slowly so that I can absorb all your advices.

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