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ngirardin's $1 guide follow along (14)

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Hi everyone!

This is my follow-along for the $1 guide.

If you’re interested about my background, please take a look at my introduction.

For my first campaign, I’m following Amy’s instructions: I’m promoting Mobipium’s “PN All Landings”, using PopAds as my traffic source.

This offer is probably worn out due to its age and the number of newbies that promoted it . Still, I hope to gain valuables lessons by trying to make it profitable.

So, let’s get starteeeeed!

As instructed by the guide, I asked my Mobipium’s AM for the best geo to run this offer and she sent me this list of 47 geos.

I started a campaign (c0001) with a $0.20 CPM ($0.0002 bid) and a $1.50 budget targeting those geos. Here is the report by countries:




I then removed the 3 countries that had more than 3 conversions and a negative profit: Indonesia, India, and Brazil.

I then re-ran the campaign without those countries, this time cutting 4 more countries with conversions and a negative profit: Morocco, Ecuador, Mexico, and Guatemala.




The report of this first campaign (c0001) shows some profitability in only one geo: Poland (PL).

However, there was only one conversion there, which makes it hard to draw any conclusion.

In her tutorial, Amy recommends running the campaign only on the profitable geos, and then optimize the zones later.

I had only one profitable geo, so I ran two campaigns: one targetting only Poland, and one in the six geos that had at least one conversion and where the negative profit was the lowest.

To select those countries, I’ve imported the PopAds report by countries into Google Sheets, sorted the data by descending profit, and chose the first six countries that had at least one conversion.




In her guide, Amy recommends running the campaign with double the initial bid.

I didn't knew yet how the bid impacts the performance of the campaign: does a higher budget yields better zones with a higher conversion rate?

To test that, I ran two variations of each campaign: one with a $0.0002 bid ($0.20 CPM), and one with a $0.0004 bid ($0.40 CPM), all of them with a $2.50 budget.

I then started the campaign after waiting a few hours for PopAds to validate them.

I quickly realized that the campaigns running only in Poland (c0002 and c0003) didn’t have enough volume. It took several hours for the $0.40 CPM campaign to burn trought the $2.50 budget.

I had to stop the $0.20 CPM campaign after 24 hours, it didn't bring enough traffic and wasn't able to reach the $2.50 budget target. It seems that PopAds wasn’t able to find a lot of placements with this CPM, making it impossible to scale this campaign.





Increasing the budget seems to lead to better placements: the profit and conversions scaled linearly with the cost (roughly x3), for only 1.5x the impressions.

-86% ROI doesn’t seem that bad, and it’s a good increase from the -89% ROI that we had in the initial multi-geo campaign.

Let’s see if this effect is the same between the campaign running only in Poland and the one running on the top 6 geos:



This time, I’ve let the campaign consume all its budget. When doubling the CPM, we got half the impressions, but a nice boost of the conversions (0.7x) and especially of the profits (x1.25) and of the ROI (x1.20).

It seems that increasing the bid mattered more on this top 6 geos campaign than on the previous one running only Poland. One explanation could be that we get access to more zones with less competition? I don’t really know, but what’s sure is that starting now I’ll bid at a $0.40 CPM, to continue to benefit from this profit and ROI boost.

Now, let’s compare the two $0.40 CPM campaigns:


We see that the top 6 geos campaign gave us a nearly 25 points boost from only running in Poland, so we’ll use this campaign (c0005) as the base for our later tests.

Tomorrow, I’ll probably run more tests by increasing the CPM cent by cent to see what the profit curve looks like according to the bid.

From -89% ROI to -62% ROI just by some basic country optimizations: not bad for a start!

Anyway, the tutorial is a fantastic resource, thanks a million time Amy @vortex!

Tomorrow, I'll integrate Voluum with PopAds and Mobipium, see what happens at several CPM, then optimize the zones.

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Will be following, good luck!

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I’m quite happy that today I was able to setup and track my first campaign in Voluum without too much trouble!

I wanted to try a range of bids, from $0.20 to $0.50, and see how it impacted the campaign performance.

For that, I used the same campaign as yesterday: mobile popunder from PopAds redirecting to the Mobipium PN All Landings offer.

The campaign with the $0.20 CPM had a lot of trouble to scale, it took all the evening to use the $2.50 budget.

Here are the results:

Those are some unexpected results!

Strangely, the campaign with the $0.20 bid is the one performing the better in regard of profit and ROI: increasing the bid reduces the profit and the ROI.

I would have expected those metrics to grow linearly, I don’t understand why they are exhibiting this weird pattern.

If one of you has any idea, please let me know!

Tomorrow I'll work on blacklisting the unprofitable zones.

Thanks for following me along

Nicolas

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I realized today that 10% of my traffic is iOS devices, but that the offer is Android only!



I’ll blacklist the ios devices on my next campaign, that could give it a nice boost!

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Keep it up.

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Desktop campaigns

I’ve only run this offer (direct linking Mobipium mainstream smartlink) on mobile traffic, and I was curious about the performance of desktop traffic.

I’ve cloned the mobile campaign running in my top 6 countries, allowing only desktop traffic, with a range of bids from $0.20 CPM to $0.60 CPM.

Here are the results:

Those numbers are in line with my non-blacklisted mobile campaigns.

After blacklisting the worst performing websites, the numbers are a bit better.

In the meantime, I’ve read Charles Ngo's Affiliate Marketing Course where he advises learning the ins and outs of one traffic source instead of jumping from one to another. I’m gonna follow his advice and stick to mobile popunder traffic from PopAds for now, and stop running desktop campaigns.

Mobile campaigns

I’ve cut the iOS traffic, and I’ve confirmed in Voluum that PopAds is sending me 100% iOS traffic.

I’ve blacklisted the websites with a loss of more than 3 times the payout (blacklist 1), then repeated the operation (blacklist 1 + 2).

CPM 0.20



CPM 0.40


I won’t bother testing two CPMs anymore: the campaigns at 0.4 CPM always perform worse than the one at 0.2, and it’s twice the work setting them up.

I’ll probably play with adjusting the CPM in the future, when I’ll find a profitable campaign to scale.

I have the feeling that the smart links are more “toys” offers than “real” offers, and with such a low payout ($0.01), I think that it will be hard to turn a profit, even on cheap tiers 2 / 3 traffic.

Before closing this $1 guide follow along, I want to try one last thing: running my first split test with the Mobipium and Mobidea smart links to compare how they perform.

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I wanted to test the Voluum path feature by splitting my traffic between two mainstream smartlinks: the one from Mobipium and the one from Mobidea.

I’ve created a list of the 10 countries that may have the most potential by looking at the traffic stats published by PopAds and PropellerAds.

I took the top 10 countries by volume, removed the ones from tiers 1 or with a high CPM (> $1), and ran a campaign (c0022) with my standard budget of $2.50.

I had an issue with Mobidea not reporting the conversions to Voluum, even though the postback domain was configured in the settings. I’ll investigate and contact their support if the problem reappears on another campaign. I was still able to gather some data from their reporting dashboard.


Mobipium was a clear winner, with nearly 6x the revenue.

I was quite surprised by the good ROI in India and Indonesia, I never had numbers that were that good! India and Indonesia had good volumes, the others had waaaay less volume.

Credit is due to Charles Ngo’s article How to Launch a Mobile Pops Campaign w/ PopAds.net that recommended enabling the “prime traffic” setting and selecting websites with a high quality score (I chose “Top 50% of websites 6+”). The same $0.0002 bid seems to yield much better traffic.

I was about to quit trying making any profit with the smartlinks, but those encouraging stats made me want to dig further.

For tomorrow, I’ll segment the campaigns by countries and give each of them an equal budget.

I’ll try another trick from his article which is to segment the traffic by vertical (adult / mainstream).

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Hey man, seems I missed the thread somehow

Generally we can say that often/mostly smartlinks work better on mobile.

There you just have more offers to show to users, for example carrier billing.
Push subs also work better on mobile.

It´s definitely better to run single offers instead of smartlinks.

Exception is when you have a specified smartlink, best with fixed payouts.

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Thanks @twinaxe for the tips!

I’ve met Valeriia, my Mobidea AM who was very kind and helpful.

She approved me on Mobidea, I’ll be able to run some “real” offers now, instead of just the smartlinks. I don’t want to badmouth them too much, they were really helpful in learning how to set up a campaign and get a first feel of how the traffic sources behave.

She told me that my conversions didn’t showed-up in Voluum because I’ve set tag={clickid} instead of tag={click_id} in my offer URL. I’ve made the changes, and ran a new campaign, but the conversions were still not showing in Voluum. It’s no big deal, I’m sure that I’ll find the correct params in the 40 days guide.

I’ve set-up 2 last campaigns with the smartlinks, to compare the conversion rate between the adult and mainstream traffic, and the results were quite surprising: it converted way better with Adult traffic and nearly broke even.

I’m ending this follow along on a positive note, -3% is my best ROI so far!

Time to start the 40 day tutorial now, thanks for following along!

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I still recommend to test few different networks and then stick with the one that shows best results for you.

Can you post a screenshot of your offer URL in Voluum as wella s the postback you use in Mobidea?

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Thanks for the help!

In Voluum my offer URL was

https://www.mobcmp.live/?sl=5341613-b4438?tag={clickid}

amd Valeriia, my AM told me "the only change you have to do is to replace the token with is written after macros 'tag' in the URL tag={click_id}", so for the second campaign I was using:

https://www.mobcmp.live/?sl=5341613-b4438?tag={click_id}

The postback domain matches my tracking domain:



And here are my Voluum settings:

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Hi, may I ask you please how you connected the offer with Voluum and PopAds?

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Hi there, how you divided the divided the traffic for Mainstraam and Adult inside PopAds? U just created to campaigns one tarhet adults and one mainstream?

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When you create a campaign you can just target adult categories for adult and non-adult categories for mainstream.

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