Home > Paid Traffic Sources > POP / PPV / Redirect

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Pop traffic in tier3 (24)

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Hey,

Been working as a mediabuyer for company projects, and now want to run traffic as an affiliate. What can you guys say about pop traffic in the autumn of 2021? Is it still worth running such a traffic from *public* traffic sources to *public* offers? The thing is I've run quite a few low payout offers, splitting aff.networks, offers, landers, and everything resulted in -80-90% ROI, and there was no segment that was profitable at all.

So, I'm wondering whether this setup would work for me. Right now I want to test virtually all offers available in such T3 geos like IN, ID, MY, and so on. Sweeps, app installs, stuff like that. The test round that I ran in 3 different pop traffic sources showed terrible results, that's why I'm asking.

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Yes still worth it but you need to test a lot.

Not sure how much your spend was with -80% result. In geos like IN and ID you have almost infinit traffic. This means you need to clean up quite a bit before you can actually run profitable. So -80% may be good enough to actually make money. When traffic is cheap -80% does not hurt so much. And when you get loads of conversions you may have a fair chance to turn it into green.

I wouldn't consider MY a t3 geo since traffic there is quite expensive and you will face quite some competition. Alternatively you could start getting your feet wet with some rather small but cheap geos where you could run many of the multi geo offers.

Guess best way is to start a follow along here on STM. Show people what you do and give them a chance to help you.

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POP traffic still works, but you really need the right offers. It's more about testing and testing and testing all the offers that you can find than anything else

But since you said this:

I'd say you have the right mindset to make it happen!

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Interesting - I just had this discussion with @twinaxe yesterday.

The old days where it was easy to make 4-5 figures/day from pop are long gone. But it's not very difficult to achieve 2-3 figure days.

The key is to test a TON of offers as has already been pointed out above, and have a stringent cutting criteria so you're not overspending on any one offer.

For the same amount of effort, there are definitely better ways to make money. But nothing beats pop when it comes to the short learning curve and the low budget required to start. These make pop one of the more newbie-friendly traffic types.



Amy

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Quoted for truth!

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Well, the traffic is cheap indeed, but the payout is also very low as well. So, yes, -80% in India doesn't hurt as much as -80% in the US, but it's still money spent. As for cleaning - well, if you mean bots here, most of the bots are cleaned on my landing page. But from my experience, you can't really make a campaing profitable when it's -80%, even from the very start. I've briefly looked at the landing/offer/targeting (devices, operating systems)/placements, and there was nothing that would be profitable if I cut the rest. It might be just a couple of placements, but it's just a random stuff, you know. I'm sad

For example, one of my campaigns: I've tested 4 offers with $0.10 payout, and paid around $4 (got around 24K of traffic).

How many offers do you think i should test? I do understand that it should be as many as possible, but up to date I've tested around 12 offers from 3 different networks. I'm aiming for sweeps and app installs,but the number of such offers is limited. I mean, I can test 40 sweep offers, but what to do when they are over? You know, I see offers converting, but the payout is way too low. If only my payout would be 3-4 times higher, everything would be great. But such a bump is just impossible. That's why i'm curious whether it's still possible to conquer POP nowadays.

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3 figures is OK for me. What other better ways to make money would you suggest? My biggest issue is lack of funds, so I can't spend much on native traffic for example. That's why I've chosen low payout offers and cheap geos. I'm not a complete newbie, so I'm open to new ways, dunno, maybe push? It's just the budget that is limiting me. Other than that - I'm open for everything.

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It's not just the bots, there are always better and worse placements or zones so you gotta filter the bad ones out too. It's quite common to see a few bad placements eat up a large part of your budget, which leaves no funds for the good ones.

This can also skew the overall numbers for the whole campaign. You're right that it's close to impossible to turn a -80% campaign green. BUT, if there are 2 or 3 large placements eating up most of your budget and not converting at all it's these few placements that are responsible for the poor -80% performance. Quite often, removing these from the stats would totally change the overall result.

With POPs, you need to test lots of offers but also aggressively cut the poor large placements that just spend your budget and bring no results. Take your example... you've spent $4 which is peanuts basically. Some larger placements likely spent most of it and you didn't even have a chance to buy some clicks from the 1000s other placements, where the traffic might be of higher quality.

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Yes, thanks for pointing that out. I prefer to cut early like 1-2payout per placement at the start, so this is not the case. You can see my screenshot with top publishers broken down by volume. I didn't spend too much I guess. And I tested offers in 4 different traffic networks, so you can multiply $4x4=$16. $16 bucks for a shitty $0.10 offer.

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Ok, I would turn this the other way around. You are testing several sources at once, with low spend on each and a limited amount of offers. The truth is, if the offer doesnt convert well enough, it will not perform on any traffic source.

Try to focus on mass testing offers on one sources instead. The first thing you need to do is to find a bunch of promising offers, then you can try to scale these to multiple traffic sources.

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True, the reason I tested them on 4 sources is my AM I have a good relationship with showed stats of a guy who drives popunder traffic to them with like 1K leads daily. I was curious why it doesn't work for me, that's why I tried multiple sources.

True, I'll try to do mass testing, but I'm quite sad I must say. Just wonder how many offers should I try? 20?40?60? Or shoud I probably go away from public pop sources and switch to something else? I don't know.

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In your opening post, you said this:

Now, $16 bucks later you're ready to give up and switch sources? Common

Choose a GEO, get all the offers you can find of it and test them ALL! Let's see if @jaybot feels generous enough to drop some GEO tips here, to point you to some that work well with POPs at the moment.

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No, it's not $16 bucks later, but like 10 offers later that I want to switch sources. For instance, my AM shows a landing page that has around 30% CTR according to his stats, while I have max. 10% on every source I can touch. Therefore I can't provide as much volume as his affiliate can. I can barely provide 100 conversions per days, while the guy can make around 2-3K.

I have finally found an offer that I could possible break even with, but for some reason it works only on a single source. I can't scale it to other othes, and I'm left with like 60 conversions per day (in India) with the $0.10 payout.
Thanks, I would really appreciate that. I would just like to know what kind of offers work nowadays in which geos.

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There are cheaper or even free ways to start making money. This for example I would definitely keep an eye on:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ou-kidding-me-!)

How much seed money are you working with here? And do you have money coming in still? As far as paid traffic affiliate marketing goes, I don't know anything cheaper than pop.

If you need to, I would suggest to focus on freelancing or getting a job and saving up for a while, and then starting again. When you're low on funds, "losing" every cent will hurt. This state of mind will be detrimental to your success, as you'd be prone to losing your cool when offer after offer doesn't work out (not trying to jinx you - it's just common to be in a bad streak when it comes to testing offers). The emotional stress will affect how you make campaign decisions.

You can of course try push as well. If you find an offer that converts well on pop, by all means take that opportunity to test it on push. There are also offers that can convert well on push, that won't work well on pop - push allows for more pre-selling because it uses an ad in additional to a landing page, whereas for pop the landing page IS the ad. So stuff like CC submits can convert way better on push than on pop.

You can also try Facebook. Typically, offers that work on FB have higher payouts than offers that work on pop, so expect to fork out a lot more test budget to test every offer. However, if you know what you're doing, you won't need to test nearly as many offers as for pop in order to find a winner. With FB, accounts is the main issue when running even the most white-hat affiliate offers - you'll need to either figure out how to get accounts, or rent an agency account (there are threads here where members offer accounts for rent - they are in no way endorsed or recommended by STM though; let me know if you can't find those threads).


Agree with you there. Unless there are a few big bad placements I can eliminate and instantaneously bring the ROI up in a drastic way, I wouldn't bother. Pop camps typically perform the best right out of the gate, i.e. the first hours or day. So your optimization efforts need to MORE THAN compensate for the natural decline in campaign performance, in order for the ROI to increase.


ALWAYS take what AMs tell you with a grain of salt (more like a LOAD of salt!)

A lot of stats from AMs are "artificially inflated". Their job is to try to get you all pumped up so you'd test their offers.

Not trying to accuse your particular AM, and not all AMs do that, but many do.

Also: They may be looking at stats from a different source or even different traffic type from what you're running. For example if the other affiliate is running on Facebook, then of course they get way better CTR and CR and lead quality and do higher volume.


Not finding a winner after testing 12 offers is, unfortunately, all too common for pop.

As for payout: Some affiliates will run high volumes at a slight loss just to get a pay bump, but 300-400% bumps are not possible like you said. So - back to testing more offers.

Definitely go through @twinaxe's threads to find offer recommendations. At least one affiliate I heard is cleaning up just based on his recommendations alone - same offer same landing page and everything.

When campaigns are "over" - and I'm assuming by that you mean when they stop being profitable - try to start a new campaign with the exact offer + targeting. Sometimes you can milk it for longer. Also, try waiting a few days or weeks and turning it back on again for another test. Sometimes the offer would "magically" start converting again.

If you feel inclined to, I would suggest to start a follow-along to get more tips. Best of luck and have fun!



Amy

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Yup, when your AM can only see their network stats without more profound insights than it only tells you that someone is running the offer with different performance than yours.

You could even clone the whole funnel of another affiliate 1:1 and still get different results.

Not only for pops

Yup, all these infos are available for everyone here, you just need to use it

When the time has come we will read about it here.

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Couldn't read the whole thing, but here are my thoughts:

Focus on one traffic source. If it's pops, just do propeller. Don't waste time trying to make propeller, ZeroPark, adcash, and clickadu work at the same time. Just focus on one of the best and get that working.

All the geos suck. Some just suck more. I wouldn't do IN ever. ID and MY I wouldn't touch for 6 months until you know what you're doing. All of those geos have too much traffic.

You need to focus on lower volume, higher quality-ish geos. Eastern EU like PL is always a good place to start for run-of-the-mill SOI offers.

Also, all the random Sub-saharan african geos work well with Traffic Company and Haka offers. Very easy to get started with pops on those two networks.

But no matter what you choose, Pops are tough, and you will have to slog through a lot of garbage placements before you get a good BL/WL working.

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Thanks, I'll definitely have a look. Well, cheaper doesn't mean faster, I also need to find a balance between those, as I can't wait for ages.

I have around $3-4K that I can spend for traffic. I'm paying around $150 monthly for tracker / hosting .

I have my daily job, but I want to get things running as fast as possible. You see, I'm not a complete novice, as I've been dealing with mediabuying since 2015. It's just that I wasn't very much lucky with affiliate marketing. And, yes, I'm being very much depressed now not because of not making profit, but because I don't see a way to do it all. I'm pretty much sure everything is squeezed by big guys and internal media buying teams (both at the traffic source's and offer's sides).

Yeah, that was my idea. But again, push adds another beast - the creative, and I'm pretty sure my testing budget would multiply by 4. I can't afford paying $60 for the $0.10 payout offer. I've had a very little experience with push traffic though, so maybe I'm wrong.

Hmm, you sure? I was thinking that FB is definitely a "no-no" for me with my low budgets.

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It´s not about if you can or not.

In first place you just shouldn´t spend $60 on a non converting 0.10 offer

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Yeah, that's what I think. If I don't have -80% from the start (considering that I'm agressively killing large pubs), then I move forward.


Sure, but that's not this particular case. Furthemore, I should say that I tested 5 landers, and I found that only a single had CTR of 15%, while others were 2-3%. Now I think - what if other guys are profitable just because they somehow cloak their landers, and maybe that's the case

Based on your experience, what is the average number of offers I should test to find a winning one? The thing is, well, for instance, sometimes a networks offers just 5 app installs for India country. I can't even find 12 offers to test

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OK, so which particular geos would you suggest? Eastern EU ones, and african ones? Which offers? Mobile pin submits are carrier sensitive, and bids could go up to $7.00 CPM for pops. That's huuuge

Yes, but it's much easier to kill garbage or large placements on IN/ID geos, as traffic is waaay cheaper. For example I myself had a sucess with IN with a very competitive app install offer, but it started converting virtually from scratch.

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Very hard to say what the average is - it would be dependent on way too many factors. Sometimes you'd have winning streaks or losing streaks as well.

All I can advise is to keep your head down and keep testing, and cutting losers early so you can test more offers on the same budget. Pop hasn't been my focus, but go through @twinaxe and @jaybot's recent posts to find suggestions on what types of offers and which geos are doing well these days. That can help you narrow down your scope.

BTW: India is such a hard geo to crack. I don't think I've had more than a hand-full of profitable campaigns in my entire pop career for India. But of course things could have changed since I last ran there - all it takes is one good offer that can convert the massive traffic. Hope you have better luck!



Amy

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PL. SOI (not pin submit) iPhone/S20 offers. Or grocery/mediamarkt/etc vouchers. On any respectable network like Clickdealer, Gotzha, Advidi.

For all the african ones, get on Traffic Company and start doing IVR offers. Also worth testing Haka click2sms offers.

Not usually. Not on any network with volume anyway. You'll get 1 visit from 10,000 different IN placements with not enough data to kill anything since they will all have 0.00001 spend each. ID can a bit more manageable with the right offer, lander, budget.

Sounds like you know what you're doing though, so I'll leave you to it.

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OK, thanks, will look through guys' posts.

To be honest, I was profitable with only a single offer in India, and most probably the advertiser was there for the market share, not for the profit. So maybe you an jaybot are right, and I shouldn't touch cheap and huge geos.

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No, unfortunately I don't know what I'm doing, otherwise I wouldn't post here, man Thanks a lot for your feedback, will try to look for other geos.

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