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Newbie here for the long game. (29)

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Hey all,

Absolute newbie here from New Zealand.

Currently jumping into the awesome 40 day tutorial from @vortex. (gonna go through as much of the 2020/2021 version as I can)

After that I'll be moving onto either a Push tutorial or branch out to FB. Either way I'm here for the long game and not just looking for a way to get rich quick.

I'm here to give this a proper go and really try my absolute best to learn and succeed.

If anyone here has a 'must read' or anything that really helped you when you were starting out then please send it my way.

I'll be starting a follow along with regular updates here if anyone is interested!

Cheers!

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Day 1:


Signed up to all the recommended Traffic Sources and Networks.
Just pending acceptance now...

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Good work!

If you keep a regular follow-along going on here I think its next to impossible to not eventually succeed...

Look forward to seeing your progress!

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If you aim for the long run, and you have time and patience for it, I would focus on something like FB, Google or Native. I am not saying push is not worth the long term run, but imho the others have more volume/more stability, with less time/energy consumption.

Push a is a good (quick) start to learn the basics of AM, tracking, optimizing etc, without having to worry about account bans etc.

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Appreciate the encouragement. I feel like at least half the game is the belief you can do it and the other is putting in the time and effort consistently. Anyway we'll see haha

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Ok cheers for that. I almost went in to FB straight off the bat but then felt I needed to have a bit more experience with it all first. I also have some solid video creation/editing skills that I may be able to leverage on the FB platform too. Anyway for now its all about the 40 day Tutorial. Appreciate your advice!

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Day 2:

Got approved by all except Haka. (still waiting)

Have decided to run with Voluum as my tracker too.

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So its been a few days since I posted but I have been making progress.

So far:

• Accepted to all 3 Affiliate Networks. (Haka, Mobipium and Zeydoo).
• Set up Voluum tracker with links to PropellerAds and PopAds.
• Started a campaign on PropellerAds (1 click carrier offer from Mobipium) Set up the links to Voluum and Mobipium correctly and seem to be working. (pure wizardry)
• Ran through the courses on basic HTML, JS and CSS.

Now in regards to the offer I chose to run: it was quite a small GEO with only 300,000 inventory on PropellerAds and so the traffic was pretty slow. However it did make 3 conversions which was good to see that the tracker and link was working.

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Good decision to star with smaller geos to make sure that the tracking is working.

Especially in the beginning it´s good to keep the risk low in case something goes wrong (and that happens more than often )

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So I have started testing out 3 offers over about 6 GEO's (newbie mistake probs haha)
Any way I have found a GEO that is pretty close to being profitable with good traffic volume. Currently -4% ROI which is pretty good.

I want to test 2 other offers with the same GEO (and same optimized targeting) but my question is: Can I run multiple offers on the same GEO at the same time? Or will I be competing with myself too much and need to test them one at a time?

Also my AN is not tracking my conversions correctly. It currently has 4 conversions but I have at least 25 conversions on PropellerAds and Voluum. I checked my post back and seems fine but I'm just a newbie what do I know haha. (I've messaged my AM to see if they can suss it too) Any advice would be great.

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Great cheers for that. Good to know for future campaign testing!

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Yes, and maintaining that belief, as you will have up and down. And some days, it can be hard. That's also why a follow up helps!

Good luck!

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The network is the one to go by, they are the ones that pay you. I would stop and check everything. If they don't think it converted, you won't get paid.

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That doesn´t make sense.

The conversions can only appear in the tracker and trafficsource when they get info about the conversion through postback from the affiliate network.

In other words, when the affiliate network doesn´t register a conversion it also doesn´t post the info to the tracker and the conversions wouldn´t appear neither in the tracker nor in the trafficsource.

It´s more normal when you have less conversions in the tracker than in the affiliate network but when you have more conversions there it´s strange.

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Hey, cool idea to post about your experience here.

I'd like to recommend you to read as much cases as you can, to talk with the managers what they recommend and with shich kind of traffic\creatives, to make some plan.

Btw, i use Binom tracker - better for me than Voluum, but up to you.

As for push traffic, try to collect black\white lists.
When you run the offer, ask the manager to share the stats by carriers\os\etc with you.

I use different spy-tools to make the good creatives (for push), for example, adplexity, spy-push.. Better to have them all.

Good Luck

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Really, as for the new player, push\pop is easier than everything. To work with FB, I think, you should save up a big revenue to lose it for the tests there

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Very strange but after I messaged my AM the data caught up. Perhaps there was a delay or something. Anyway problem is now solved (I just dont know how... haha)

I now have a profitable GEO and offer that is returning 40% ROI after optimizing (direct linking).

What is the best process for scaling? Should I:

A) Try run the same offer on other Traffic Sources with similar targeting options?
B) Start increasing the bid?
C) Or split test other offers to see if they perform better?
D) Not waste my time on such a small campaign?

What would you do?

- - - Updated - - -

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Thanks appreciate that! How do you store your BL/WL? and also how do you input that into your traffic source?

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Hey!
BL (black lists) - the sources or placements which were not profitable for me, and I've cut them.
WL (white lists) - vice versa.

In general, you can get such a list just after the tests.
WL\BL depends on the traffic-source, so you create your own lists in every traffic source you test.
You can use the option (most of traffic sources have it) to add some placements to BL or to WL. Usually its better to choose what you want to collect - BL or WL. I recommend BL, because if you make WL, the new sources that were added to the traffic-network won't be available for you.

Hope it will help

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Hi @calipso What parameters do you take to create your BL and WL, for example 1x payout of the offer without conversion to put a Zone ID in BL, X amount of clicks lost from that Zone ID, X amount of bots or how do you do it? for both the BL and the WL.

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Hi @jmor21

I compare all the sources I have, and the worst ones I add to BL.
My parameters are ctr and roi.
For example, if I see that one source has very bad ctr (on the prelander, because I always send push traffic with the prelander), I understand that it can be bot-traffic or some another kind of empty traffic, if you know what I mean. Good traffic will go through the prelander without any problem and bring the leads to me
And, of course if it doesnt convert at all - this sourse also will go to BL.

WL I dont use in general, but situation should be vice versa.

So, nothing special

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Perfect, thank you

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Haven't posted in a while so thought I'd update with where I'm at.

I've been Day trading a bit in the Crypto Market so have split my time between that and AM.

Currently getting my head around cleaning up landers which has been a minor struggle as I do not have much coding background but I am getting there.

I've been running my direct linking campaigns and using those to learn more about optimization.

I would love some advice on how to scale this campaign.



Details:
Payout 0.35
CPA at 80% payout
no BL/WL
split the campaigns separately into WIFI and CARRIER.
I've optimized things like OS, Browsers.

As you can see the it is running at good ROI on CPA but it is very slow. (its been running for about 3 weeks)
I have a good amount of conversions to create a WL or BL too.

Some of the zones have great CR and CPA but low volume and a high CPM...







My question is:

Now that I have good amount of zones to create a WL/BL, should I create a Smart CPM Campaign with a high enough CPM (around 4.5) to win more bids on the higher CPM zones with good CR?

And is WL or BL better for this?

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Very nice!

Try to stick with blacklisting if possible. On some traffic sources, when you're whitelisting and targeting too few placements, you may not get any/much traffic at all (even if you're targeting placements that normally DID give you traffic while they were in the original campaign where you were targeting many placements).

What I would do is pause all placements that are in loss by 1x payout or 2x payout (by $0.35 or $0.70). If a placement is in loss by 2x payout it would be difficult for the conversions to "catch up" to make it profitable. You can also cut at 1x payout if you want to cut more aggressively.

Then, clone the campaign (on both the traffic source AND the tracker and don't forget to replace the destination url!) and increase the bid by $0.50. Then keep monitoring and cutting placements as they reach a loss of 2x payout (again, you can cut at 1x loss too if you want to adopt a more aggressive approach - you stand to reach green sooner but risk cutting good placements - your call).

After cutting another batch of placements, clone and repeat. Pause campaigns you can't make green and keep the ones running that you do.

Also can try to scale this to other traffic sources.



Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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Nice, 10 years or so ago I also thought about getting a bit into day trading.

Bought some books, read them but somehow never really started something there.

Seems you´re running CPA Goal campaigns, there´s not much you can do besides opening the targeting.

You can also test CPA Goal with different bids, sometimes lower bids achieved better results for me.

No BW/WL is good for CPA Goal campaigns, when you start them with BL/WL you often receive way less traffic.
I wouldn´t optimize the OS or browser as long as the offer doesn´t accept only specific brands or versions.

Maybe the geo is small and total available traffic volume is rather low.

Running WL is better when you have good zones and want to get maximum volume from these zones.

BL are needed to discover new zones, in a WL campaign you will never find new zones.

Long story short, it´s best to run both.

BL to gather stats and identify good placements, WL to get most value from the good placements.

A huge difference between BL and WL is also the bid.

Running BL you will receive traffic from all kinds of placements, good converting ones as well as bad ones so in a BL campaign you usually bid lower.

In a WL campaign you already know that the placements are good so there you can mostly bid (much) higher because you don´t have to worry to receive traffic from crap placements at high cost then.

@luciddream But don´t do this in your running CPA Goal campaigns.

Just keep them running and let the algorithm do the work.
Better don´t mess around there with manual "optimizations" as it can lead to worse results.

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Thanks Amy. Are you referring to Smart CPM or the 'fixed' CPM for this method?

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Brilliant thanks @twinaxe. I'll let you know how I go with this.

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You can use either depending on your optimization approach.

Try both (maybe not simultaneously).

EDIT: Sorry I just realized you were running a CPA campaign. My suggestions on bid testing won't apply then. Please refer to @twinaxe's suggestions. Apologies for that oversight!


Amy

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Ok well I've been quiet for a while but I'm still at it! (Just like the thread name promised haha)

So I've been mainly using Haka offers on POP traffic direct linking. I tried with landers but I actually noticed conversions were lower so went back to direct linking.

I only run with CPA as this is the only thing that has worked for me.

Also recently started on Push traffic which has been promising too. (Will post some figures soon)

Something that has been bugging me with these SMS Haka offers is that conversions turn off completely and unexpectedly. Like same traffic but conversion drop to 0. I'm assuming that the specific carrier blocks users sending SMS's or something? Can someone explain how that works? My Affiliate Manager says the 'Access has dropped' but I have no idea what that means or how that happens... please enlighten me if you know!

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