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Starting with Pop Traffic (26)

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Hi STMers,

I went through the 40 day tutorial of @vortex and started implementing the stuff the past few days. I wanted to start a Follow Along to learn as much as possible from my first campaigns and beginner mistakes. Maybe someone else will find this journey interesting and helpful

My setup is as following:

Tracker: FunnelFlux Pro
Traffic Source: PropellerAds
Affiliate Network: HAKA
GEO: Peru
Carrier: Movistar
Payout $ 0.35

I have not setup PopAds since I have created a few test campaigns there following yet another tutorial from Amy, the $1 guide using SmartLinks from Mobipium.




I have just tested one Click2SMS offer from HAKA that was recommended by the AM for this particular GEO. I have been running the campaign for 2 days on a daily budget of $10. I guess the results look quite promising with an ROI of -13.5% and 48 conversions without any optimizations yet. My CPM bid for the first day was rather high with $ 3.33 which I obtained from the recommendation + 20%



I downloaded the csv file to cut some placements, but my problem is that none of the placements meet the criteria of a loss of 2x payout. Do you take other metrics like CR or impressions to cut placements earlier? Or should I spend un-distributed more money to get the data faster?

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Good work! All the best

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This is a quick update. I was able to cut 3 placements finally and I have increased the budget for today to $20 since it takes ages to collect data for optimization and the ROI is at -17% total.



I wonder if I should start testing more offers at the same time. I wanted to optimize this first campaign before diving into testing multiple offers.

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Wow @kaizen502
You are doing very well.
Can I ask you whether you are using landing pages for these offers or not?

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Moin moin aus dem Norden

Yep, resultst doesn´t look bad.

Do you run the campaign direct linked or with LP?

You can optimize based on patterns but to do so you need many conversions.

But the campaign looks promising and the offer is converting so i would probably already kill placements with 1 payout in loss.

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Moin Moin @abitaach @twinaxe

I am direct-linking because I was following Amy's tutorial strictly.

Do you think the conversion for the Click2SMS offer would be better with a LP? How would such a LP look like for those offers?

I took the 1x payout as the threshold to kill placements and was able to exclude 16 of em now.

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Oh my god!! I must say you are performing excellent with direct linking. Keep it up!! Although your ROI is in negative but also your ROI is very good. I have failed miserably during direct linking. Thus I asked you that question. I am still learning for preparing Landing pages, thus I cannot say what's difference it will make in conversions with or without LP, But I have read posts on STM which suggest to use LP for better conversions.

Thank you

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Maybe, maybe not.

The click2sms offers work often good with direct linking already but it´s always a good idea to test landers as well.

It´s not only about performance, when you use a LP you also can collect push subs on the LP.
That´s not possible with direct linking.

It depends on the offers you run.

When you run iPhone 12 offers for example you can use just normal sweep landers like spinwheel.

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@twinaxe

makes sense. At the moment I am not running sweeps and I think this particular offer would make no sense with an extra hurdle. I will definitely test LPs when running other offers like sweeps.



I noticed that PropellerAds wasn't able to spend the extra $20 I allocated to the campaign. Is this normal on Pop with smaller GEOs that have only around 2 million impressions available?

How do you scale such offers? Use other GEOS? Use other Pop traffic sources or switch to Push?

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It looks like we're in a similar position! Following to see if I can gain any wisdom from your journey

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It really depends, it´s not only the available volume.

It´s also the bid and competition that can make a difference.

Let´s say you have a geo with 2 Million impressions where an average bid is only $0.20 CPM and another geo where average bid is $5.00 CPM.

In the expensive geo you need only 4k impressions to spend the $20, in the cheap geo it would be 100k inmpressions.

I also just checked the volume for PE Movistar on Propeller.

I only targeted mobile, no specific OS and volume is about 600k impressions per day.



On the chart you can see that $0.776 is the last spot where volume is significant higher than on lower bids.
After $0.776 the volume doesn´t increase much anymore, it´s only the bid that increases.

This means that for the more expensive traffic there is probably some competition.

Now you shouldn´t forget that the estimated volume is the total available volume and not the volume that you will receive.

These 600k impressions will be split across all bidders.

You set your bid to $0.820 SmartCPM so you will mostly pay less than what you bid.
In your case it would be only about $0.37 CPM ($50 / 135)

You see, even when your bid seems to be competitive on the chart, the real bid is still pretty low so that you won´t receive that much volume.

This is what you can see at the win rate as well, it´s only 8%.

A good way to receive more volume is to set fixed bids at good converting placements.

That way you can bid higher and receive more volume from good performers that result in more conversions.

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Sorry if I missed something, but frowm where are those numbers?

$50 is his total budget?
135 is what?

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@twinaxe

thank you so much for the detailed explanation regarding the bids. I set fixed bids for 12 placements on PropellerAds now based on my break-even CPM to see if that works in winning more auctions and spending the full daily budget.



I was wondering if there is a way to bulk upload the bid changes to PropellerAds but couldn't find anything. I am just so used to Amazon PPC and how convenient that works.

In this case I guess it could also make sense to include some of the zones I cut earlier with the right bid?

I am playing around with this a bit more, but I am still hesitant to test more offers. In my mind I try to get this offer profitable, but I assume that is the wrong approach here?

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I got the numbers from his screenshot



Doesn´t look that bad

I also don´t know a way to upload in bulk so I guess it has to be done manually

Yes, not every zone that is running on loss is a failed zone.

Different zones just perform different and when a zone has conversions but is running on loss it could turn into a profitable zone at a lower bid.

Quick reply: Test, test, test.

To give you an example, in the last 7 days I created more than 200 campaigns on pops and push myself

I test different offers, same offer in different geos, different traffic, different activity/user freshness levels, different bids and whatever.

Also don´t forget, you are running an offer with $0.35 payout in one campaign in one geo and one carrier on one traffic type.

Do the maths yourself to check if that has potential to make real money.

Hint: A good indicator is how much money you can spend per day

You see, testing is mandatory.

When you don´t have a good offer you need to test more offers.
When you have a good offer and want to scale you need to test different bids, different tageting, different traffic, even different trafficsources.

Even when you have an offer that can make few hundred $ profit per day on pops or push it´s hardly possible to reach that numbers with only one running campaign.

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@twinaxe

thank you again for your wisdom! I was aware that I won't get rich with that tiny daily budget haha

I went ahead and launched 4 new campaigns on PropellerAds. A few new GEOs with the same offer and a new offer in new GEOs as well. I will report back as soon as I have more data on them. This time I chose the standard delivery instead of distributed to collect data faster.

I wanted to get started with Pop traffic before testing Push. I really would love to try Native or Adult, but I am still in the phase of finding my traffic source and vertical. Coming from Facebook it is so refreshing to work with traffic networks that work with you instead of against you

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Okay. So I have some results from my tests yesterday although they do not look as promising as the first campaign I started in Peru.



So I tested Spain and France for the same offer I ran in Peru which was a Captcha. I ran an iPhone sweep in Turkey and Egypt that shit the bed.

I have been excluding placements that accrued a loss of 1x payout which is $0.35 but based on the spend I would stop running the campaigns in Egypt and Turkey because I would expect to get more conversions for that ad spend in such cheap GEOs.

I am wondering if using standard delivery was the culprit here as to why they performed so miserably.

Going forward I would try to optimize the campaigns in FR, ES and PE to see if I can get them profitable. Not really sure what the best way is going forward. Do I focus on one GEO or do I test offers on multiple GEOs. I also noticed that the performance of the Peru campaign also dipped after a relatively good start although I cut a lot placements and adjusted the bids for converting placements.

At what point do you decide that a campaign just won't work?

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Don´t forget, although the offer payout is the same for all these geos the bids for ES and FR are much higher than for PE so performance will most probably be quite different.

This doesn´t mean that it doesn´t work, I also just have a click2sms campiagn running on FR 3G traffic.

It´s running for about 3 weeks or so on low volume but ROI is very good so that it still makes some nice profit although it doesn´t get that many conversions.

On top I also run it direct linked, I tested with LP and without but direct works better.

Both are not the easiest geos to crack.

I also test EG from time to time, last time was yesterday for an IVR offer.

And guess what, I never ever had success in EG

Turkey is hit or miss but mostly it´s miss.

TR has lots of cheap traffic but unluckily often not good converting offers.

Why don´t you use your PE stats and test other LATAM geos?

There you could have more success than testing random completely different geos.

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Okay, here is my update.

I tested the "working" offer 1685 from Peru on different LATAM GEOs like Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay.
Costa Rica is the only GEO that worked best with an ROI of -20% but there is just no volume and I am not even able to spend the low daily budget of $10.
I have also tested two smartphone prize Click2SMS offers in Peru that also failed.



Reading the follow along from @mantas I begin to question if those low-quality low-payout offers have a chance of working. I mean I have no idea what a good CR looks like for Click2SMS offers, but just for example with those avg. CPMs I would need a CR of 0.2% which in some GEOs would be 10x the current CR and that seems near impossible. I am not sure, but I assume thath PropellerAds traffic is in general good, but again for the small payout offers the min. daily budget is probably also too big because I always spend way more than the 10x payout on the tests.

When building a BL or WL are those always for the specific GEO or can they be applied to all future GEOs I run?

I read the free guide from Charles Ngo yesterday and taking into account what I have read on the @twinaxe Push Traffic Tutorial I was wondering if it would make more sense to focus on Push traffic with offers that have a slightly higher payout. In my mind I think that Push traffic works better in general because clickers have a higher intent then popunder traffic and there are more things I can test and optimize on the creatives.

I was thinking of running mobile games that don't need a LP, but maybe running offers with a LP would also help accelerate my journey to my first profitable campaign.

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Just because an offer has low payout it doesn´t mean that it´s low quality.

Feel free to check my thread about Haka offers HERE

I ran 1685 as well and when it wouldn´t work I wouldn´t get more than 4k conversions from this offer



Seriously, how many offers did you test and in how many geos/how many carriers?

Don´t get me wrong, in no way I want to say that you definitely should run these things but in most cases it´s lack of testing that leads to bad results.

I said it in another thread yesterday or so already, right now I am testing between 20-40 or so new campaigns per day and by far not everything is a winner.

For example these are only the IVR campaigns that I started yesterday.


Do I think that these offers are low quality?

No, because I know that they work.

That´s why such results are not that bad for me, it just happens.

In all fairness I have to say that I also tested quite a bunch new landers so that performance was very unpredictable anyway.

Additional to these IVR campaigns I also started 10 or so more campaigns for an offer that I run for some time where I want more traffic for scaling.

You don´t have to spend the whole budget, you can stop tests before the daily minimum is reached when the tests don´t need that much budget.

You can use stats from multiple geos for a rough global list but when you run more volume in a geo it´s better to create more specific lists for it.

Just test it.

Some people have more success with pops, others with push.

What works for one doesn´t necessarily also work for others.

I personally run both, pops and push.

Sooner or later there´s no way around working with landers.

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Just interested why do I not get any notifications on the STM site when being mentioned with @ ...? Just found out my name mentioned by luck

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@twinaxe
I meant low-quality offers in regards to the value they provide to the user not in terms of the payout.
I am not afraid of using landers, but I thought it would add another variable I need to test, so my conclusion was that I might see my first green campaign sooner by direct-linking suitable offers that convert well without a LP.

My tests took longer than expected because I saw that I had no costs in FunnelFlux for the first Push campaign, but then I found out that the CPM bidding model does not provide any costs and ran a few more offers in the 3 GEOs Ecuador, Chile and Colombia yesterday. I have chosen the new GEOs because after the promising results from my Peru Pop campaign I wanted to focus on LATAM and test more GEOs there.



I spent almost $30 and had only 1 conversion with a payout of $0.35. The highlighted campaign from 16-05-2021 is the one where I accidently started it with CPM-bidding
All the offers have been recommended by my AM for the specific GEOs and I tested them all using CPC bidding this time. Not sure if the funnel setup in FunnelFlux was correct to split-test the offers, but those are my settings:



Targeting for all GEOs was:
Classic Push without Brokers Traffic
User Activity: High
Mobile/Android
For the CPC bid I went with roughly 50% of the recommendation

I used the approach of starting with a general creative “(1) New Message” for all offers even though I had a few sweeps:



CTRs seem to be too low for a creative that is not revealing a lot, but I have no idea.

Not really sure what I missed here. To be honest I am a bit lost as to what I need to change or do better.

I think I should test other offers even if it means that I will not see any of the payout since the minimum at Haka is far from where I am at right now.

Can you recommend a good affiliate network for mobile games?

@mantas
There was a database error that came with an update a few days ago. Maybe that caused the hiccup with notifications as well.

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To be honest but about 99% of all CPA offers provide next to no value to the users, no matter how high or low the payout is

Run push always on CPC, exception is when you have a good converting creative with very high CTR so that CPC on CPM would be lower than running the campaign on CPC.

Apart from that it´s correct that you can´t track costs properly for CPM.
This only works for CPM on pops because there an impression is equal to a visitor in your tracker.

For user intent campaigns like banners or push you can´t track CPM good because the tracker can only track the incoming traffic and doesn´t know how many impressions were needed for each click and the trafficsources only send cost data for outgoing traffic = clicks and not for impressions on the trafficsource.

Just run with broker traffic included.
When it works you want to have as much volume as possible.

Don´t be cheap, don´t bid too low.

Always remember: "Wer am falschen Ende spart zahlt doppelt"

You don´t have to bid recommended bid each and every time.

I also bid lower when there is still enough volume available but in general it´s always better to set a competitive bid.

Hard to tell without any numbers.

What flow?
CPI, clickflow, pin submit?

But to be honest, I thing the times for easy profits with mobile games are over

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@twinaxe


Thank you for your help which clarifies a lot. I will make adjustments and try to implement it in my future tests.


I am currently going through the “What’s working in Affiliate Marketing 2021” guide to learn more about the trends and see all the recommendations for newbies.

Sorry, I forgot to attach the image:




I have no idea what the differences are and why so many different flows exist. I would guess CPI is what I am looking for.



I am not really looking for easy profits but something that suits me better. Coming from ecom and having a lot of experience with Amazon PPC and Facebook Ads I am just having a hard time making the switch. I try to learn the ropes with Pop/Push, but Lead Gen or ecom affiliate offers have a bigger appeal to me.


So the past days I have been running the STM exclusive Haka offers and used PopAds instead of PropellerAds to set my test budget of 10x payout, which is $3.50


I started 19 campaigns according to the hottest GEOs for that day that my AM recommended, but a lot of the GEOs are so small that there is just no volume and it has a hard time spending the tiny test budget. To be fair, I only targeted “Top 50% websites”, but I am going for all websites now and increased the bid. I started with the bid recommendation + 10-20%

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Okay, so I have some new results after the budget was finally spent on some low-traffic GEOs.


Attached my results of running the STM exclusive Click2SMS offers from Haka:



Based on the results I have created a general blacklist with 17 placements I am excluding going forward. I used the P&L of – 2 x payout to exclude placements. I continue to run PY, CY, HR and also AM and GY but those two GEOs have just no volume at PopAds. I will also create a campaign for PY on Propeller since it is the only GEO that has decent traffic there.
I think I should probably get a Spy tool soon to get a better overview on what offers are working especially going forward with Push traffic.

Edit: I also changed some of the weights for the offer rotation according to the stats of each GEO because I saw that out of the 2 offers it was most of the times 1 offer per GEO that outperformed

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Wow!
I must say this is very informative follow along.
I am also not performing well in neither pop or push traffic with Haka offers.

I am trying trying and trying

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That´s a problem with Popads, they don´t have that much volume.

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