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The time has come. Maestro's FA (56)

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Hi everyone. I am Maestro, nice to meet you beautiful people. Let's cut to the chase right off the bat

1. Introduction and background

I have been doing ecommerce for 4 years if I am not mistaken. All good, but I grew tired of inventory and physical products in general. Feels like my mind always belonged to Affiliate Marketing. I have always been fascinated by AM and wanted to try it but never got the guts (or the money?). My first attempts at AM were in 2017 where I spent around $30, earned back $30 and called quits . Not sure why, but that is me in a nutshell:


Fast-forwarding to 2019, me and my friend decided to try "Charles Ngo LGE course". Not going to say anything about the course in public, but if you want my personal opinion on it - feel free to DM me. Anyway, took up the challenge of FB and Car Loans. The best result after 6 months of basically living in Facebook Business Manager was -6% ROI. And then FB rolled out an update regarding loans, credit cards and whatever which killed all the optimization I have ended up with because it forbid you to target ages and cities. FeelsBadMan, to say the least. -$4000 was the final result. I was sooo pissed that I translated my anger to ecommerce and absolutely killed it there. Good times, especially the year of 2020 when we were selling medical stuff already and YouKnowWhat happened and we just rode the wave. Fast-forwarding again, July 2021. I became an old lazy cat again and got bored of ecommerce again. I wanted to take up a new challenge. Something related to buying traffic, testing offers, but not dealing with physical products. Guess what my thoughts were. "Oh, I have an open chapter with Affiliate Marketing. Let's get back there again". So, I got there. Always wanted to try Pops and something with easy conversion flows. Did my homework and learned the best practices of running pop traffic from everywhere I could. This is how I learned about traffic loss, ZoneIDs, WLs and BLs. Everything seemed to be laid out and easy to dive into. Somehow I ended up with Haka offers because someone recommended it to me. Click2sms seemed OK to me with easy conversion flows. And then in September I wanted to try IVR offers because I read about them somewhere, did my homework again and learned that Traffic Company is one of the main players here with similar offers to Haka. So, as of 23.09.2021, I am at a loss of about -$1600 if not more. Super pissed with myself because it seems like I know what to do, but I do everything wrong. Or I am just so unlucky with offers. More about analysis down below

2. Goals and expectations
3 milestones: $10/day, $20/day, $33/day. That's it. I want to reach all 3 of these milestones gradually, step by step. I know I can, but for some reason I am not there. I want to focus solely on POP traffic and PropellerAds for now. Being realistic and down to earth is important, but I always forget this when I launch campaigns in FR, ES, IT hoping to bruteforce my way to $10/day

3. My results so far
As I said above - at least -$1600 as of today over the course of 2 months. Damn. Anyway, I tried Haka, Traffic Company (recently) and some SOI sweepstakes. I tried a lot of things and launched a lot of campaigns. By "a lot" I mean more than I was mentally ready to launch. 95% of my campaigns were launched on PropellerAds. I tried Cpa Goals, SmartCPM, pure CPM, WLs, BLs. I tried WLing 1 zone. I even had a profitable campaign on CPM whitelisting just only 1 zone. It worked for 3 weeks and averaged a whopping $2/day. Well...I believe Oscar Wilde wrote: "Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best". A green campaign is a green campaign. Still better than seeing red oceans everywhere. So far, this is the best result. A campaign that earned $41. Woot. I also tried ZeroPark but it was a big oopsie. I wish I spent that on Propeller instead.

Alright, getting back on track again: I tried everything, tested many combinations of Cpagoals, SmartCPMs, CPMs, etc. Here's an overall sneak peak of what I was attempting to do:


Let's get down to the analysis of the results

4. The analysis of the results

I have identified the following possible issues:

1. I am very unlucky with the offers, geos or the combination of them.
Solution: test more offers, choose geos that work for particular flows.
Possible problems: I want to zero in on Haka and Traffic company offers and I want to run them on PropellerAds. The choice of the offers is limited and I know these offers must work, which means that I am the very bottleneck. Let me describe my vision and current experience with Haka offers:

Click2SMS offers should work in Tier-3, Tier-4 geos. The problem is that these geos are so small that it will take you 10 years to test even 5 offers and get data. And the conversion rates are small because it is Pops and you must include Wi-Fi traffic to increase already miniscule traffic. I have fallen into trap of trying to work with obscure geos with no traffic. Some examples include Suriname, Guam, Tajikistan, etc. So, click2sms is not the best flow for W-Fi and we deal with pops which already have low conversion rates. It means that we are dealing with small traffic and conversion rates of as low as 0.05%-0.3%. It is impossible to gather data and I spent a few weeks dabbling with obscure geos before I decided that I should stop babysitting infinite number of small campaigns that will never get enough data.

We know that click2sms works best on 3G. PropellerAds has limited 3G traffic. There are not so many geos that have at least 80k+ of 3G traffic


Let's see recommended geos from HAKA themselves:


Over the course of 2 months I noticed that France and Spain are always #1 and #2 respectively. It means these geos are evergreen for Click2sms flow (right?). Italy and Indonesia enter the top from time to time and seem to be ok.

So, I should probably choose France and test carriers separately. This approach should work but man, it is so expensive. I don't want to blow off the money on 3g traffic in France. Yes, it works, but it so expensive and it feels like a one-two punch to your cashflow. I would rather choose something like Trininad and Tobago. But it doesn't have 3g traffic at all and Wi-Fi has incredibly low conversion rates. Not worth the time with Click2sms at least.

The question is: should I just forget about click2sms for now and move on? Say, SOI sweepstakes? At this point I want to put relief on my cashflow and test effectively at the same time. Anyway, getting back on track again:

This leads me to 2 conclusions:
a) If chosen traffic segment has low traffic (Say 3G, FR, sfr) - it has to convert decently (1.5-3% or more) to gather data to be able to draw any conclusions. But it is costly and I feel like if I dive into 3g traffic in FR I will end up crying and becoming a hermit
b) If chosen traffic segment has low CR - make sure there is a lot of traffic (say, 3g Indonesia, Telkomsel). This seems better and cost-friendly, but still low conversion rates take time and money to find and offer that works or doesn't

I have a good Whitelist (or at least I think it is good) with many converting zones that have enough traffic. As I mentioned before, I had the only success with whitelist 1 zone to limit the variables. I decided to take the same approach and test other converting zones for Indonesia. Let's take a look at a sample converting zone:


Targeting: Indonesia, 3G Telkomsel, Mobile, Androins, Google Chrome, Zone limitation - only 1 zone included. In this setup, if an offer doesn't convert - we can say that this offer is crap for this particular zone. We have isolated the varible and can make definite conclusion about the offer for this particular zone. Even though we isolated a lot of variables - there is still a lot of traffic for this zone. Judging from the picture - if we can find an offer that has an eCPM of 1,5+ - we will be at breakeven. This bid allows us to get high quality traffic for this very zone and the volume is good. Increasing the bid leads to diminishing returns. Let's crunch some numbers for Haka offers:

1.5 / 0.35 = 4.29. It means that if we want to breakeven with Haka offer - it has to convert 4.29 times per 1000 impressions. Which is 0.42% CR. Also, let's not forget about cost loss and traffic discrepancies. The latter refers to a situation where your tracker shows 1500 clicks for the campaign, but Propeller says there were 2100 clicks. We have to take this into account when calculating our CR in Binom. It is important to look at Propellers stats. For this zone I tested all Haka offers - both direct linking and using landing pages. Also test a few offers at Traffic Company for this zone. The best result was around 0.2% across all combinations, which doesn't satisfy me because I know there is a better offer out there that can have eCPM of 1.5+ easily for this zone. Maybe I should just test SOI offers at clickdealer and just throw every offer at the zone because I know it converts. There is a least 1 guy bidding $4 here. He must have a working funnel or he is just plain crazy.

I kinda predict that some of you may argue and say that traffic sources like Propeller don't like when you target 1 zone exclusively. However, I didn't notice any limitations or punishments for targeting 1 zone only. Pure CPM and high bid will allow you to buy up to 95% of the traffic for the settings you have set up in your campaign (they also call it "traffic slice"). Targeting 1 zone never seemed like a problem to me when I used pure CPM. SmartCPM? Sure, it is a bad choice when you target 1 zone. But it boils down to the very nature of SmartCPM - 2nd bid model. You will always have traffic volume issues on SmartCPM because the bid is adjusting every 1 hour approximately. Not very flexible, but effective for testing. Pure CPM is always better at securing volume and thus profits, hopefully. Not in my case, though You have to be absolutely sure that your data is representative. Otherwise you will lose a lot of money. So it is a good idea to switch so pure CPM when you had more than 50-100 conversions for the offer across 1 week, give or take.

2. Issue number 2: optimizing way too soon.

Feels like this has been true for my recent attempts at Traffic Company offers. They are tricky in a sense of variable payouts. You need a lot of conversions to make conclusions about average eCPA. Well...what can I say. I probably have to sit tight on my ass and just F wait for the data to come. Hard to do when you try geos like Ghana More on that in the next message


I also had some crazy thoughts about Cpa Goals, but CPAg never worked for me. Ever. Sadly

Anyway, thanks for reading this. Looking forward to your answers and getting to know you, beautiful people. Any pieces of advice are appreciated. If you want to mastermind with me on Pops and Propellerads - I am more than happy to do that. Let's make 2+2=5 and crack this AM stuff together. I speak Russian and English, if that helps

Now I am off to writing next post on my recent attempts at Traffic Company IVR offers. I should complete the post in about 1-2 hours. After that I will be devouring all the info on STM till I fall asleep on my keyboard at night. Stay tuned. At least for a good laugh

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Judging from your results it feels like you are running underperformers way too long (e.g. ID39, 1 conversion and losing almost 29 USD).

Maybe it is worth a try to run camps in steps with defined budget. Then after each step you decide if you want to go to the next level. Of course that makes only sense if there is a fair chance for better performance (e.g. blacklisting, concentrate on winning lander and so on).

For the "top performing geos"....

That is what HAKA see on their site. They have no idea what kind of traffic brought the conversions. Some people might use their offers as a content locker, other may run it on traffic sources and types you never heard of. Long story short --> these stats do not mean that they work for you. Just take them as an inspiration.

For Traffic Company IVR...

These offers sometimes have amazing payouts and conversions can come in flood waves. When they work they are pure dope.

However there are two things you have to take into consideration.

Stable geos are quite hard to turn into profits since you will face a lot of competition.

In less stable geos it is all about timing. When you hit a sweet spot you can make XX profits within minutes. Then it is time to cash in quickly because offer will die soon.

For beginners less stable geos can be a paradise. All you need to do is to get a feeling for the geo stats TC is having on their dash and to test which geos actually might work for you. No need to invest loads of money. Usually a quick test will show you within 1-2 hours if you have hit the sweet spot or not.

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Alright gentlemen, my recent attempts:

A few days ago (or was it 1 week ago? Time flies fast, man) I decided to try Traffic Company's IVR offers. Why not? Looks similar to what I have been doing so far with click2sms. And they have click2sms as well. Good. Let's approach it strategically. The outline:
1. What GEO to choose?
2. What offers to test?
3. Bids and campaign objectives

Let's go!

1. Let's see what is recommended by TC themselves.



Good. Even after rewinding their Telegram channel a few weeks back, I can't help but notice that Ghana - MTN is a top dog recently. Yes, it is a very expensive GEO, but I thought: "Well, at least I can put this up for a laugh on STM, right? At least I can lose some $$$ for the entertainment of the STM member". Just kidding I just decided to pivot away from obscure geos with low conversion rates and decided to give this bloodbath-GEO a try. Fast-forwarding, it doesn't look that bad. It is just very heavy on cashflow.

So, Ghana it is. Hmm. Okay. Let's move on

2. What offers should I test? Well, a good old "whatever man, let's just test them all" seemed to be the right choice. I had a crazy idea about Bitcoin offer. I chose a giftbox lander because it is easy to adjust and it is good for testing. I decided to slice up the "prize" on the BTC landers. That is, I tested 0.1-1 BTC prizes separately and snuck in 0.01 BTC prize just out of curiosity because I have a hunch that it is more plausible to test more "believable" prizes - Playstation 4, $500 cash, 0.01 BTC, etc. But it should also be enticing enough for the user to be motivated enough to stay on the call long enough to justify acquiring that user at expensive 3G Ghana prices That is, I don't believe in prizes like "A box of kitkat" because it seems not compelling enough. Who knows, maybe that is my mistake and KitKats are hotter than iPhones in Ghana

3. I decided to stick with SmartCPM WL. The WL consists of the zones that had more than 4 or 5 conversions, don't remember exactly. The bid was high enough to ensure quality traffic and enough volume, but not high enough to bankrupt me. I don't have a good WL for Ghana, so I had to bring up every converting zone that I had to make sure I get at least some traffic

Alright, the juicy part. The result of ~3 days of running the campaigns:


The costs are a bit off and in fact I spent around $160 as Propeller says. Monetizer smartlink relieved the damage a little bit and earned back around $15 if am not mistaken.

I am not very satisfied with the results because I wanted to have an offer that will almost break even with my WL. Anyway, I dove into ZoneIDs to fish for something interesting:



Some offers seemed to be promising for certain zones. Alrighty, I decided to parse them into their own "1 zone WL" campaigns on SmartCPM. How did it go? Well...


The first campaign looks okay-ish, since breaking even is OK for me because I have monetizer on the backend. But the traffic is miniscule for other zones as well. The CR and eCPA drop drastically which means I did everything prematurely and had to gather more data instead of clowning around single zone WLs that bring nothing but despair and the tidbits of traffic. Damn.

And this is when TC rolled out a new iPhone 13 offer. Good. It was at that time when I read jaybot's posts on Binom blog and decided that CPAg might be a good idea. Cool, let's take giftbox lander, iphone 13, Ghana and open up the targeting for these "machine-learning gizmos" to have a chance to optimize the campaign. Also created cpag campaigns for other geos as well that jaybot showed were doing well at the time of posting that. TT, TN, LB and some other as well. I mixed different cpag targets with 0.1 goal and 0.24 cpa goal. For some reason I really believed in CPAg and decided to sneak in other offers as well: ps4 and s10. I am almost embarrassed to show these pictures, but anyway...



gadzooks, man! This hit me hard for some reason. I was very sad about it and really wanted to quit. But what is the point of quitting after all the time and money spent? So I braced myself and decided to move on. However, Ghana is really effing expensive, man. I want to change my strategy, test more offers and relieve my cashflow a little bit. Ghana is not bad. In fact, it has some cool Monetizer earnings which do offset the costs, but again, this slice is extremely expensive and I am trying to bruteforce my way here too soon. There are cheaper geos that can have a potential of low $xx/daily. I am just not sure which way I have to go.

Thanks for taking your time to read this. Hopefully I didn't forget anything. Definitely not quitting now, just want to change my direction. Any pieces of advice are forever appreciated. Thank you for reading this

I am ready to go back to square one and start from scratch again, with fresh mind

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Good stuff man... great FA so far...

I don't know anything about the type of traffic you're running, but from seeing dozens of FA's here on STM over the last few years, I'd say you certainly seem to be on the right track...

I know on native at least we fail on like 98% of offers we try... so while you're doing a different traffic source I'd say just keep testing... keep spying... keep looking for better offers... better networks... etc... and eventually one will click and you'll be killing it...

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Dear larsometer,

Thank you for your kind reply.

1. ID39 is what I am ashamed of, because it was ZeroPark with 0 idea of what I was doing at all Not a good strategy, to say the least. After that bummer I decided to put all my efforts in PropellerAds and to forget about ZeroPark for a while. No need to jump around like a mantis

2. I absolutely agree with you. I am definitely overspending, but I don't know how to systemize it and make a framework for cutting bad offers/zones/whatever. I just don't have enough experience or brains to make a framework for cutting "x that doesn't seem promising". Sometimes I have a feeling that x10 offer payout is way too general. Probably that was the reason why I became blind and started bleeding money left and right. Definitely need to start from scratch and approach everything strategically. Especially the part about cutting offers. There is absolutely no need to spend this much money on these offers. But for some reason I keep doing this over and over again. Definitely need to review my attitude and discipline because my current situation will lead nowhere but to empty pockets if I don't buckle up and slap myself for being an idiot

Would you recommend pausing offers at x10 payout and throwing in other offers to x10 as well to compare them to each other? Do the day/time variables play any significant role in testing? That is, If 1 offer is tested on Saturday and it looks promising, but offer number 2 is tested on Monday and it looks dud - is it representative, counting in the fact the offers can perform drastically differently on days off and weekdays? Or finding a killer offer means that you can disregard basically anything, because the offer is absolutely crushing it?

3. About Haka offers - my manager in skype usually sends me slightly different stats and divides geos into "mainstream" and "incent/content-locking traffic". Does it matter in this regard?

4. Hm...didn't think of stable/evergreen geos from competition perspective. True, they are expensive for a reason and are costly, as I already noticed with my own $$ Cheaper geos should be a better choice, but the amount of traffic is so low that it takes forever to gather stats.

5. Interesting. Never thought about it. Basically, it is good idea to test a bizarre geo and within a 1-2 hours it should be enough to conclude whether or not it is worth running. Am I getting your point right?

Also, does it mean that for TC IVR offers some bizarre geos strike from time to time and you have to be quick to test them and reap some profits? Because TC doesn't have that many offers and they don't add that many, as far as I understand. Could be wrong though because I am talking about that "smartphone smartlink offer" for any geo where you can choose a prize on the offer page from the dropdown


Thanks again for your reply! I will sit down and test random tier-3, tier-4 geos now to try to apply your advice. You rock

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As far as I remember we already had some posts about it some time ago...

This is very good but I can imagine that it´s very frustrating when then nothing really sticks.

Not true, I had campaigns running with click2sms offers with few hundred profit in geos like Angola, Haiti and such.

Do we?

I strongly disagree, my best campaigns for these offers are either WiFi or mixed mobile.

Solution: Focus on less competitive geos.

But there also be careful, nowadays soem African countries have higher CPMs than Tier1 geos.

The problem is that there is not that good answer to your question.

Click2SMS offers work very good but so does SOI sweepstakes.

About click2sms it would also be good to know what kind of offers you tested.

For example for click2sms I prefer download/captcha offers whereas I prefer sweepstakes on click2call.

What makes you thinking it´s a good WL?

I don´t need to think that my whitelists are good or not, I know that they are good because the placements in it have proven it enough.

Hard to tell without more details.

Maybe the zone is crap and the offer is good.

You don´t know what the others are promoting.

For example they could run Olymp Trade with much higher payouts so that they can afford to bid higher.

You can also get the average CPA from the last 24 hours through their API.

But it´s correct, the more conversions you generate the better idea you get for the average payout for your traffic.

I definitely agree with @larsometer there.

Don´t get emotional attached to your campaigns.

When they lose you money stop them, even if they bring conversions.

Tip: Use TCs API.

It updates every 15 minutes and gives you lots of stats to work with.

Then I see that you are testing many of their prizes.

Focus on iPhone and Samsung, that can already help to keep losses lower, increase chances to succeed and you have to worry about less elements in your funnel.

Don´t do it, it´s mostly waste of time and absolutely not an effective workflow.

Especially not for campaigns that are losing money.

Summary:

- Stop campaigns earlier when they are bleeding money
- Focus on less prizes
- For TC IVR offers use their API
- Don´t make time consuming experiments with campaigns that are not worth it

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Thank you for your kind words I hope I can get to green pastures before I go bankrupt

I can only imagine how it is on native and what kind of budgets you need there. I would probably cry a river on my 1st day on native because of how expensive it is. And I am already whining here, on pops

Also, would you spy tools are absolutely necessary? Because I have to admit I haven't used them once in 2 months. I just fell in love with click2sms offers and decided that I wanted to make them work. it is always nice to hear different perspectives

Wish you a lot of green days and hope that you will scale the living **** out of it and take it not only to the moon, but to Mars

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Interesting. I will look them up for sure


100% frustrating. Even to a point where you want to punch your wall or laptop. Good news: none of these happened, which is probably a good thing and everything is not as bad as it seems


Woah. Haiti? I definitely tested that a little bit and quickly dismissed it for some reason. Could be because it would take a lot of time to run even 1 offer to x10 payout. Was it push or pop traffic? That's very interesting how the same things work differently for different people.

Duly noted. I am writing this down and will reconsider my thoughts about click2sms. This is eye-opening

Noted. Is it the only path for click2sms offers nowadays? Some random and expensive African countries that require a good cashflow. Because, for example, some newbie-friendly geos like Trinidad just don't convert well enough there to draw any conclusions. I have had this feeling that the key in click2sms lies somewhere on the African continent. Writing this down and will definitely put it to test now

That is what I definitely needed to hear: click2sms work. Sorry for being vague and dumb for asking stupid newbie questions like "should I do x or y?". Perhaps I should have asked directly - do click2sms work today? if yes - I will grind there and not jump around. Thanks for making that clear

I tested everything that Haka has to offer - captcha, download, sweeps and even adult offers on ZeroPark. Captcha seems to have more leeways for fine-tuning. That is, bringing in a landing page a collecting push subs and monetizing backbuttons, whereas direct download are just direct-linking offers

I think my WL is good because the placements in it converted for various offers - Click2sms, ivr, SOI, etc. So, the zones that just convert, disregarding ROI and EPC. Just the zones that converted for absolutely flows. Am I right on this one?


Right. You are absolutely right here. Maybe my converting zones are only good for such offers with ridiculous payouts and they don't convert for low-payout offers. Thank you for bringing this point up, I was wrong


Hm...I used to goof around with Python a year ago. Should probably brush up my knowledge and play around with their API. Thanks!


Lesson learned. No more reckless money bleeding. I will sit down now and consider my options for a better framework of testing and cutting offers


Noted. I have to start using their API and stick to iPhones and Samsungs

I will do no more of that starting now

1. As a rule of thumb, should I follow "x10 offer payout per LP-offer variation" to cut non-performers?
2. Noted
3. Will take a look at that now
4. Noted for sure. No more of these gimmicks


Thank you sooo much for your input and advice. Man, it is really eye-opening. So many smart people here on STM. Best investment ever. Not even that $2/day ID campaign


Alright, let's get down to work and apply everything you guys recommended


P.S: How do I tag someone to indicate that I replied to them?

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Pops, didn´t take long to get conversions.

Unluckily it didn´t last long but made about 3.6k conversions.

No, it´s just one path but not the only path.

There were just no offers available for Africa so the people there are not that used to our ads.

With click2call and click2sms we have offers to monetize the African geos as well.

No, you´re not

In the end it doesn´t matter if a zone converts in general or not.

A zone has to be profitable.

Also how many conversions do your zones need to be considered for a WL?

You don´t need Python or any other language for it.

From the offerwall you just click "API FEED" and then you grab your API link.



You can also visit the link in your browser to download the file with the API stats.

As a really rough rule of thumb you can use this formula:

Nr landing pages x Nr offers x Average offer payout x 10 = Test budget.

It can vary depending on offer payout and traffic available so it´s no cut in stone formula.

When you don´t see any signs of success after x 5 you can stop the test.

Thanks alot for your kind words

Just @ and then the username.

In your case it would be @maestro

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Alright, so far I created WL SmartCPM campaigns for almost every SubSaharan GEO. Simple "if the download didn't start - click ok" lander and 7 random captcha offers from Haka. Test budget for each campaign:
1 LP * 7 offers * 0.35 payout * 10 = $25 per campaign. I have created around 30 campaigns, so the budget is around 30*25=$750. I am saying "around" because if I don't see any conversions for an offer at x5 payout (read - $1.75) - I am pausing this offer, without overspending, which is my problem for now as my STM colleagues pointed out today. The results so far:


-97% ROI hurts, but it is still a very early stage of testing. I also turned off Nigeria already because it doesn't show any promise for these offers:


No point in testing similar offers for the GEO, because it is kinda meh. Right?

Anyway, patiently waiting for the data to arrive. I have got all the night ahead

I am also continuing to wolf down all the information available on STM. It is good to read other FA to see the thought-process of smart people.
@twinaxe

Hm...Seems like for click2sms and click2call random GEOs become hot for some time and then they lose the steam. The idea is to constantly test GEOs that are hot right now. We can see what's hot in TC's API. Correct?

I understand that a zone has to be profitable, but it is kinda hard to round up such WL when nothing really sticks and everything is just red all the time.

A zone should have at least 5-10 conversions. Ideally 10, but for some reason I decided to include the zones that have 5 conversions overall.

Doesn't it mean that my WL for the above screenshot is absolutely useless and I am better off just running RON campaign, excluding broker traffic and anti-adblock? Feels bad man...


I will take a look at TC's API now. After that - back to reading STM again. Stay tuned for the updates on Sub-saharan campaigns. Hopefully, I will survive

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Slow down a bit.

No need to create campaigns for the same offers in 30 geos when you don't even know if the offers convert.

In worst case you have 30 fails and much more money lost than needed.

Test 4-5 geos with some volume and not too high bids so that you can afford to run competitive bids there.

When you see that 1-2 or so offers are outperforming the remaining ones you can still try to scale these.

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@twinaxe

Got it. I left 4 geos now with average volume and not so money-bleeding bids. Nonetheless, I made sure I was bidding high enough to get access to fine quality traffic.

In your opinion - should I disregard my "WL" for now and just go for RON? I doubt that my WL makes any sense at all. I should probably round up a good WL after I build a winning campaign. Also, I would love to get data faster. Competing for 50k impressions with dubious WL doesn't seem like a smart choice

My thoughts were that the same offers can convert differently on different GEOs. Perhaps I should say thanks, because I would have woken up myself to a bloodbath tomorrow if you didn't tell me to slow down I am just way too excited about STM and affiliate marketing in general and I am willing to grind

P.S. 1 GEO seems interesting. Could be lucky conversions, but who knows. Anyway, waiting for data to arrive

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There´s nothing wrong with building a WL that early but I recommend to use only zones that converted 5 times or mor to make sure to not include zones with lottery conversions.

Additionally these zones should be profitable, it won´t help when you include zones that bring conversions but still loose you money.

That´s the problem with WL campaigns, you will never be able to scale them for more volume when you don´t add new zones to the WL.

Building a good WL that has enough good converting zones to also bring enough volume takes some time.

In the beginning you also don´t need to build a separate WL per geo, a global WL with stats from several good campaigns combined is absolutely ok.

That way you can build the WL faster.

Apart from that focus on BL campaigns first, there you can get more volume, run on lower bids and also discover new converting zones (this isn´t possible on WL campaigns).

Perhaps you are right

It´s great to see that you´re that eager to succeed but better spread your efforts across more offersor geos and only go full in when you have a winner.

Otherwise you risk to spend too much money on something that never will work whereas you could also spend a huge part of the time and money on testing something else that would increase your chances to find a winner alot.

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Good day to you, beautiful people. I am starting to worry that it is starting to get too much of me recently. Is it ok to post this frequently?

It was a sleepless night. I tried to consume as much info as I could. I think I did well on that one, but do not repeat this at home, the stunt was done by a professional it is always a good idea to put everything aside and get a good sleep. "an hour in the morning is worth 2 in the evening". Anyway, let's dive into red ocean:


Aside from reading STM forum, I obviously couldn't sit tight and launched a few campaigns. I was thinking about what @larsometer and @twinaxe said yesterday about IVR offers at Traffic Company. I concluded the following points:
1. GEOs and offers are sporadic. Good timing is everything with these IVR offers. If doesn't stick almost instantly - it is unlikely it will stick down the road
2. TC's API is a good source for fresh stats that update every 15 minutes. It fits well with the point above. Sporadic nature of GEOs/Offers and almost real-time stats about them. Good duo
3. I have to boil the offers down to iPhones and Samsungs. No need to test extravagant prizes like 0.1 BTC, Apple Homepod, etc.
4. I have to stop overspending on dud offers. Rule of thumb for now - Nr landing pages x Nr offers x Average offer payout x 10 = Test budget

So, at night I decided to jump right in the TC's API to see what it looks like. No plan, just to see a few top geos which were sorted by "performance" and just test waters. I decided to stick to CPAg campaigns because my WL is not perfect. Average volume and only 1 zone that was profitable for me. As twinaxe mentioned in this thread - a converting zone alone isn't enough. WL can only be justified when it either has low to average volume, but the zones in this WL are absolute killers and are historically profitable or when your WL has zones with at least 5-10 conversions each, but the volume is huge. So I thought it would be a better idea to launch CPAg campaigns to drive high quality right off the bat. Cpa goal price was set as 80% of average cpa for the slice in TC's API. The campaign budget is $10, 1 lander, 5 offers (iphones and samsungs only). Again, going back to what @larsometer suggested - a combination should be a winner right off the bat or else it doesn't make sense. So I tried to drive $1-3 worth of traffic for each offer over the course of 1-2 hours. Here are some screenshots of what I am dealing with now:



















I also grabbed a few SOI sweepstakes for Poland, because I remember that mr. @jaybot recommended this geo for SOI sweepstakes. Grabbed a couple of offers at Clickdealer, set up postback and just want to give it a try to see how it goes:



Meh. Cpag campaign at 80% payout, giftbox lander that I translated myself with the help of deepl translator. It is been an hour, so it is unlikely that there will be even a single conversion for this offer. I fired a test conversion before so the postback is fine. Anyway, I stopped it and should test other offers. However, $1.5 payout seems huge because I can't make $0.35 offers work.


Regarding Haka offers - I will throw in a couple other geos as well for cpag campaigns at 80% payout. I left 4 geos yesterday for tests on SmartCPM WL, but the traffic volume is just so small that I am really considering just rolling with cpag and apply the same rules of cutting offers. Small tests, no hurry, no money-bleeding adventures like yesterday. I will still be testing and thinking about TC's API practical applications. I guess a hot combination of geo+carrier consists of high average cpa (relative to competitive bids for quality traffic in the GEO) and high performance

Thank you for your help

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Your stats are looking good.

I see at least 2 camps that have 10 conversions and have ROI better than -70%.

Then you have some more camps with at lest 5 conversions and ROI better than -50%.

Since most of it is cpa goal you might want to let the promising camps run a little bit longer. The algo learns with every conversion. And when you are lucky things will improve.

Just make sure you set stop rules and STRICTLY follow them. Yes... you might stop too early. You can adjust your rules for next test round.

But only when you follow your rule several times you have material to learn from.

It is like with sports (e.g. tennis). Trainer shows you how to hold the racket and then let's you do a move again and again. When a move does not work after several attempts you do adjustments.

At a certain point you will have build up some "muscle memory". Then you can decide a bit more on your guts (because they are trained).

One more thing....

In Binom you have triggers that allow you to stop Propeller camps. This way you can easily avoid overspending. Just get API token from Propeller and put it into your traffic source settings in Binom. Is magic :-)

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I wrote it several times already but CPAg campaigns are no guaranteed moneymaker and more often you can lose more money there compared to CPM/CPC campaigns.

Even very good campaigns can lose quite some money in the beginning of a CPAg campaign.

You should either be confident and determined enough that your funnel is good that you keep the campaign running even when it´s losing money or you better don´t start them at all.

It´s important to understand how the CPAg campaigns work.

In the beginning you receive high quality but also expensive traffic.

It can happen that you set a CPA goal of $0.20 but you receive clicks at $0.50 CPC.

Of course this can´t work in the long run when you pay more for a click than your payout is but that not the goal of the campaigns.

In the beginning it´s not about running a profitable campaugn, in the beginning it´s just to check if a campaign is good enough or not to continue with it.

When you then just see that your test budget is reached but your campaign is still running on loss and you stop the campaign then you only wasted your money.

You need to keep the campaign running until the algo knows if the campaign is good enough or not.

When the campaign is good enough then the bids will decrease, more traffic comes in and the bids adjust step by step.

I have CPAg campaigns where I lose $30-$50 in the beginning but that´s ok because I know my funnel is worth it and will make the money back many times.

Some of my CPAg campaigns are running for 8 months or so.

When your funnel is not strong enough you will still receive the expensive traffic in the beginning but when your campaign then doesn´t convert good enough the traffic will just dry out and you are left with a failed campaign where you spend = lost much more than for the same traffic volume in a CPM/CPC campaigns.

Maybe a few $ here and few $ there doesn´t sound much but when you run many such campaigns it can add up really fast.

If you still decide to run CPAg campaign on non-proven funnels be prepared that they are not all winners.

About this campaign:



The geo itself can be very good, my IVR stats from few weeks ago:

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@larsometer
Thanks! I followed your advice and integrated my campaigns in Propeller

I left the only promising CPAg campaigns to avoid confusion and money-bleeding. However I am still doing dumb things. Hopefully this is me just being newbie and I will learn from my mistakes and become more experienced. Right now it seems that I am banging my head against the wall and nothing really sticks. Kinda upsetting, but whatever. Shake it off an move on. I believe in your thread you said "Accept the cost of tuition". I will think of it this way, like you did


I decided to pivot away from recklessly running CPAg and overpaying for traffic when I can get it cheaper on RON/WL campaigns with the same results. I am a little bit confused about WL. Right now I have an okay WhiteList ( @twinaxe, it is just my opinion that my WL is ok Objectively it is not perfect since it doesn't consist of profitable zones. Just the zones that had at least 5-6 conversions to avoid including zones with lottery conversions)


So, my strategy for the rest of the day and for tomorrow is as follows:
Look for opportunities in TC's API. Let me share my thought process regarding this API thingy and let's open it:



First, I want to look at "Carrier Performance". I am interested in average 24h CPA and increase in performance. This one seems interesting. Let's take a closer look at this slice:



Targeting: SmartCPM, Mobile, Android, exclude Android Webview, Frequency 1/24, no anti-adblock, no brokers traffic, Algeria, 3G Mobilis, zone limitation - WL consisting of zones with 10+ conversions, ad delivery - standard

my WL of zones with 10+ conversions doesn't have traffic for this slice, 40k is not enough. Let's expand this to include the zones with at least 5 conversions or more:




Much better. I started an identical campaign and will wait for data to arrive. Meanwhile, what I see is that the performance of carriers literally changes every 15-30 minutes. After 30 minutes Algeria/Mobilis will probably disappear from the API or will have a negative performance. Very sporadic. Not sure how to approach this. SmarCPM WL campaigns to quickly gauge the hoteness (hotteness? hottivity? the quality of being very hot?)? A different approach at looking at these things is to go down to "Country average":



Algeria seems hot right now but this data is definitely skewed by outliers. I also notice that Sri Lanka, Morocco and Sudan seem to be okay-ish. Again, not really sure how to approach the data set due to its chaotic nature: Geo+carrier rise to the top quickly and usually disappear with 30 minutes

Anyway, this didn't stop me from launching RON and WL campaigns. I am always experimenting and jumping right into action when something seems interesting to me. I also stopped almost of these nonsensical CPAg campaigns. Nonsensical because cpag campaigns should be approached differently. Only when you have a proven funnel. So, it is better to conduct experiments with WLs. If the WL doesn't provide enough volume for the target slice: run RON campaigns. Hopefully I am on the right track

@twinaxe thank you for your input regarding cpag campaigns! Your help is very valuable Thanks for spending your time on a dummy like me. I will get better, I promise


P.S. launched a few other campaigns for Haka offers. I will post the results tomorrow, including IVR campaigns

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By the way... you can download TC stats also in CSV format. Then a bit easier importing it to XLS and do all the filtering.

Can all work pretty well when you hit the sweetspot. Just watch the stats over several days to get a feeling. And then compare if TC stats correlate with your tracker stats.

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Hey! I am not dead yet which is probably a good thing Didn't post anything yesterday because there was and is nothing to show, to be honest. Nonetheless, let me share my current state of affairs:

1. As @twinaxe suggested - I slowed down on HAKA offers a little bit. I took a few Tier-3 geos that are doing well consistently, have cheap traffic and average volume. Simple RON SCPM campaigns. It is doing well: the conversions are slowly arriving, so I am just being patient here. The offers convert, the geos convert. Just need to spend x10 to identify losers and add another bunch of offers

2. Since I decided to slow down on Haka offers, I wanted to test something else. Yesterday I grabbed a FB clone spinner and launched a few campaigns for SOI offers in Indonesia and Malaysia. The lander itself had a BB redirect to offer and timeout redirect. The LP CTR was high, but non-representative at all. I wanted to see if it was able to beat a giftbox lander ROI-wise (the overall CR: leads / LP visits). I took a couple offers that I had some established stats for and didn't see any difference. Then I decided to test a generic spinner, not a FB clone. Same: I didn't see any difference between giftbox vs fb clone spinner vs generic spinner. Also, for Malaysia I also don't see any significant difference between Malay language and English. Malay seems to have a little bit of a higher LP CTR, but it doesn't matter when the offer is crap

3. So, waking up today I thought to myself: "twinaxe recommended to channel all of my energy into testing as many offers as possible. And I can clearly see that landers are somewhat the same and testing SOI sweepstakes on giftbox is OK. I know that this lander converts and it is not crap. Also, giftbox is way easier to test different prizes. Much easier than editing spinner landers. thus, let's just go all-in for testing SOI sweepstakes". This is how I ended up grabbing every single MY SOI sweepstakes offers on one prominent affiliate network. It was kinda tedious adding 20+ offers and changing the prizes on the landing pages, but this should be worth it. Again, as twinaxe suggested, I am only testing Samsungs and iPhones. I just launched a test for a lot of offers for Malaysia I am currently on my way to test a lot of offers for Poland, because this geo was recommended in a couple of threads by an amazing person - @jaybot. So, later today I will go through the same process of translating LP's, changing prizes where needed, applying for offers, adding them to Binom, etc. Not a problem at all - listening to favorite songs while doing this makes this process more enjoyable

3. adMobo approached me and suggested that I promote their SOI sweepstakes offers. I am very excited about it and look forward to starting to promote their offers. More offers - more tests - higher chances of finding something that works.

4. Still trying to crack these TC's IVR offers . Right now I am launching WL campaigns to quickly gauge if GEO has any promise at all. One geo seems interesting (a leftover CPAG campaign) and I just launched a WL campaign for it to quickly see if it has any potential at all. I am looking for promising GEOs in TC's API. I am seeing a couple of geos that are at the top for at least 2-3 days. One of them is Algeria. Launching different campaigns for this particular geo to better understand how I should approach IVR offers: RON, high-volume-WL, high-ROI-WL. Unfortunately, all of my tests for current "hot" geos fail badly. The conversions rates are there, but not the payouts. Maybe I am just unlucky, or I simply don't understand something crucial. No idea, but still testing

@larsometer Thanks! It is much easier this way

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I'm seeing my name dropped a lot here so just thought I'd chime in

Remember take anything anyone (especially me) says/said with a grain of salt. If I said something was working a few months ago, it may not be working today. Still, it seems like your testing a lot which is fucking great. You'll find your groove soon.

If history is any guide, you'll fucking surpass me within a few weeks

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Sounds good.

As I already wrote in one of my beginner series threads, it´s much easier to find smaller profitable campaigns than big ones.

Especially in the beginning it can help to for several of such campaigns, they can also add up to some nice profits.

What are your setablished stats?

Also what are the stats to decide thatyou didn´t see a difference between these landers?

Me too

What are hot geos for you?

What I like to do is to use the top 3 or so of performance in last 24 hours and then run campaigns with WiFi and 3G traffic for that geo, even when a single carrier is on top.

Yup, what works for one doesn´t necessarily work for someone else.

And mostly there are several ways to succeed, we all must find out what works best for us.

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Hey! A little update on what's going on right now:

Thanks to @larsometer I learned the importance of controlling the spend on the offers. Also huuuge thanks for the tip about triggers. Binom triggers are cheatcodes I have successfully incorporated them into my flushing-money-down-the-toilet.....ahem.... working routine My current workflow looks like this:

1. Apply for offers
2. Add offers to Binom
3. Translate landing pages and change prizes when needed
4. Double-check the landers to make sure they work. (If you are not doing this - start doing this now. Double-checking my landers before starting campaigns allowed me to spot non-working landers and prizes/text errors)
5. Run a trigger to check the availability of newly added offers. If the offer page returns errors and doesn't load - why spend money on it? Could be because it has GEO restrictions, but for a couple of offers that didn't work I turned on VPN and they didn't work either. I will PM my Affiliate Manager tomorrow and ask to see if this issue can be resolved
6. Create a campaign in the tracker, split offers by paths and add rules if necessary
7. Create a SCPM campaign in PropellerAds. Try the WL with highest ECPM zones. If there is less traffic - switch to a volume WL. Trim down the WL to achieve more volume. The lowest number of conversions per zone is no less than 5-6 conversions. So, "high-volume WL" consists of zones with 5+ conversions. If the estimated volume in traffic source is still too low (at this point I am just eyeballing it and judge from the type of offers and GEOs I am running) - I just launch a RON campaign. Sometimes even high-volume WL campaigns don't receive much traffic and when I see this - I simply switch to RON too. I then watch out for high-volume non-converting zones, so these bad guys don't skew the data. Luckily, I don't have such zones in my current RON campaigns
8. Targeting is always the same: 1/24h frequency, mobile, android, no brokers and anti-adblock, mobile, android, wifi+3g, no android webview, standard delivery.
9. Bidding strategy - before the 2nd big bend or somewhere around "diminishing return" points. Here is an example:


I will bid 2.622 here (where the vertical line is on the screenshot). 3.761 is just too much for this specific case in my opinion. The bid of 2.622 allows to access good quality traffic and not to overpay at the testing phase. This is how I typically bid in all my SCPM campaigns

10. Link the campaign in Binom and create trigger. 1 trigger is to send me a telegram notification when any offer in this campaign gets 0 conversions at x5 offer payout spent on traffic. The second trigger is set at x10 offer payout spent. Just sends me a notification as well. I like to name my triggers accordingly and include campaign ID. For example, "camp id:339, x5 notif". Whenever I receive a telegram message, it sends the ID of the trigger. So, I go to Binom, go to triggers, look for this trigger ID, look at the name of the trigger, look for the campaign ID and manually turn off these offers. When I create offers I always include the amount of payout in the name, so the whole process is very easy and effective @twinaxe will probably think this is an overkill and too much fuss ). Anyway, this workflow allows me to control how much exactly I am spending on offer tests


Also, I was testing a few offers today. Here are some stats:
























































and a random HAKA campaign as a side-project. The geo is very good. This one is RON campaign. Sadly, not much traffic volume. Anyway, I am very patient on this one






Yes, all of these rows are different offers. This is how many offers I started testing today (70+ I guess?) and still waiting for more data to come. Again, thanks to triggers I have an absolute control over spend. Still the same rules: if 0 conv at x5 offer payout - cut offer. Else, run to x10 offer payout and then pause. Almost all of them are sweepstakes, so I am only using 1 lander to split-test offers. The very lander is the one shared by @twinaxe. Man, you rock. Really. I could buy you a beer after 1st week in green . Until that happens, my plan is as follows:
1. Test more offers. I am not happy with the numbers of offers I put to test today. I can do at least twice as better than this
2. Apply for more networks that have SOI sweepstakes.
3. Fish for more offers, following twinaxe's recent guide on fishing for offers
4. Still try to hit that DAMN sweetspot for TC IVR offers @larsometer was talking about. Seriously. These IVR offers drive me nuts man Absolutely unpredictable and I am still puzzled by them
5. Probably try some african geos for HAKA offers

As of today, I am down around $2000 over 2 months. Not going well, obviously. Definitely should consider selling my kidney to mitigate the damage

But I am still breathing, still testing. Will it be a success or a big oof? We will see. Stay tuned for more red stats this week!


P.S. I hate Malaysia, man. No offense Is this geo that bad for SOI sweepstakes? I should definitely test more EU countries tomorrow: PL, FR, IT, etc.

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IVR is only unpredictable if you have small numbers. Run bigger numbers (when something looks promising) and get a feeling for your average payout. Then include the performance data you get from TC in your analysis and you will get an understanding about the dynamics of this offer type.

Above quoted example actually looks promising. 4 conversions plus high payouts is something. Of course with just 4 conversions you have no idea about the actual average payout... but you got an idea about your payout potential for that geo. Also the ROI allows you to let it run a little longer (if geo is still up).

Go slow when you are in a hurry. Throwing money at something you don't understand well enough yet, is maybe not so smart (tho you will even learn from that "mistake"). Read several FAs to get an idea how long it might actually take to successfully master AM. Yes some people master AM pretty fast. There are wizards everywhere. But truth also is that there are quite fewer wizards than "normal" people out there.

P.S. for the sake of conversions (and only for that)... you could try TC IVR in NG. It is a highly competitive geo. You most likely won't make any profits there. Expect a loss of -50% to -70%. But you should see conversion coming in regularly. Average payout on propeller pops should be around 8-12ct.

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Hey guys! Today was a calm day. Even though yesterday I said that I wanted to test more geos like FR, IT, etc. - I didn't start testing them. I decided to test more cheap geos for HAKA offers. No need to hurry, as @larsometer pointed out. For now I am zeroing in on:
1. Click2sms offers. Yes, still click2sms offers. Why? Because they convert and they are cheap to test. And because I read "Beginner's Series" by @twinaxe. It finally clicked for me. No need to dive into red oceans like some expensive African geos (not to say that they are bad. They work. But they are just very expensive. Newbies don't need to go here without prior experience, knowledge and cashflow.). You can say "well, duh. it is obvious, man", but I am that type of guy who sticks his fingers in sockets to make sure that you indeed can get electrocuted by doing this . Anyway, current state of affairs for click2sms offers:

1. I added more cheap, low to mid volume geos for tests. Planning to add another bunch tomorrow as well. Yes, it takes some time to wait until an offer spends even x5 of the payout, but who cares? I was in a rush these 2 months to test more and faster. Where did it lead me without any prior experience in pops? Correct - nowhere. The only ones who benefited from me itching to test everything quickly were PropellerAds guys So, patiently testing geos and offers. I have a feeling that these types of campaigns have a potential of $3-5/day on 1 traffic source. As we know, Propeller is not the only pop-traffic source. There are plenty more fish in the sea. Scale this campaign to a few other traffic sources. Try push, interstitials, etc. It can eventually (and ideally) become a $8-15/day campaign per 1 geo. Add a couple more good a cheap geos to this list and the goal of $15-20 daily becomes more feasible when you focus on smaller things which eventually add up to some green numbers.
2. IVR offers. Seems like the more I look at these API stats the more I understand I really do start to understand something about these IVR offers. I am excited to test my thoughts tomorrow on some geos. Would be amazing if I could share some positive results with these tests.
3. SOI sweepstakes. Asia is a deep forest, man. Massive volume which requires a good WL that has zones sorted by earnings/ecpm. If you don't have such WL - tough luck. Low payouts make it even worse. So I decided to switch to EU countries instead. Currently testing PL. Too soon to say anything about the offers or the geo. I know I should test France for SOI sweepstakes, but I feel like I am not ready for it yet. Expensive geo + in average you have to spend at least $8 cut bad offers at x5 payout with no conversions. If there is at least 1 conversion - well, gotta test it to x10 of offer payout to make reasonable conclusions. Which makes it $15 spent in average per offer. And there is what, like 100+ SOI sweeps offers for FR even in 1 network? . I will definitely get there at some point, but definitely not now. Better focus on Haka offers where the most you spend per offer is $3.5. And IVR offers are cheaper too. Average CPA for 24h in APO is somewhat accurate and usually doesn't deviate much from what your actual average cpa will be. So you can definitely use it as a ballpark when testing offers.


Also, I question for you guys. I drilled down into one of my click2sms campaigns and noticed this:



Does it make sense to go to this campaign on Propeller and select 'Wi-Fi" traffic only? Will it effectively exclude any cellular traffic coming from the geo?


And one more thing:
For some geos I noticed that even when you choose 3G traffic only and even specific carriers - Wi-Fi traffic is still tagging along. In fact, it can be even 50/50 distribution. And vice versa: when I chose Wi-Fi only for 1 geo, I was still getting some cellular traffic. Is it ok? Does it make sense to use "Exclude IPV4" option on Propeller? I am experimenting with it a little bit and it seems to somewhat work


That's all for today. Hopefully I can share my successful IVR offers test in a couple days


P.S. sorry, almost forgot to reply to the posts above
@jaybot thank you for your kind words Good luck in native!

I knew you would say this Honestly, I just eyeballed it and thought there was no difference. Anyway, I am not planning to run traffic to Malaysia anytime soon. Hopefully it is for the best

Yes, my approach is exactly as yours. This is how I define hot geos. However, I want to try a slightly different approach now.

Sure. But the basics are the same - the ones you took your time to describe in your Beginners Series: operate in safe environments, focus on smaller campaigns, etc. Took me some time (and dineros ) to understand the meaning of this, but I finally got it and scaled back to the basics
@larsometer I agree with what you said. And these IVR offers seem less chaotic for me as they did a few days ago. Even amidst chaos, there is still some clear trends and the law of big numbers. Thanks for being active in my thread, I really appreciate your help and always follow your advice


One more thing - Roman from Binom reached out to me yesterday, I think (time flies so fast, man) and did something outstanding for me. I am infinitely grateful for this deed and it is yet another thing that cements Binom as the best tracker out there with the best customer-oriented team. Such a great product from great people. Thank you again for doing this, @roman binom. You rock

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I know what you mean

Thousand people can tell you something but you only believe it when you experience it yourself.

For scaling I like to

1. Test on original source with original ad format on different bids because this ad format has proven with your funnel, that´s why you want to scale.
2. Test on original trafficsource with other ad formats
3. Test on other trafficsource with original ad format

Of course you can also run 2 and 3 at the same time but I only recommend it when your funnel is strong enough.

Otherwise you risk to don´t increase your profit by x times but rather increase your losses by x times

IVR offers can be a beast - In both directions



You remember this?

I am not surprised about the results from your campaign

Usually I mostly run all mobile together but in this case it makes sense to test WiFi only because the performance difference is so huge and there´s lots of carrier traffic in there.

It doesn´t really matter if it´s ok or not, in the end we can´t do anything about it anyway so we just have to deal with it.

I guess it´s not even the trafficsources fault because you can never target 100% correct.

That´s also a reason why I like to include WiFi in many/most of my click2sms and click2call campaigns.

I used IP targeting back in the days of 1clicks but nowadays I don´t use it.

You can eyeball later when you are experienced enough to do so but before it´s better to work with facts = stats

There is a reason why even top affiliates use trackers and stuff and don´t run campaigns just by gut feeling.

I also try many different approaches, have more than 40k or so conversions in the last few months and still didn´t find the best way to run these offers

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Hey guys! Today was a bad day because I was very busy and forgot to order pizza. Disappointing. I love pizza very much that I would kill for it. Also, I had this weird beer today with "grapefruit and orange" taste. Wouldn't recommend this to anyone

Ok, enough with yada yada


State of affairs as of today:

1. I decided to test a lot of random and the most obscure geos on Propeller for click2sms offers. I was so serious about it that Propeller said "Man, go finish your beer and have some rest ffs":



So, a lot of campaigns for small and cheap geos. I already have around 4-5 interesting and promising geos. Still gathering enough stats to avoid making preliminary conclusions. I am very excited about this because these geos definitely have a $5/day profit potential after cutting bad offers and non-converting placements. Also, bidding higher and including brokers traffic to fish for more placements is good. Man, even these small campaigns can pile up to some nice profits after optimization and scaling to other traffic sources and ad formats. A milestone of stable $10-15 profit per day seems closer every single day

I am also still trying these notorious IVR offers Fail after fail. Can't find the sweetspot that @larsometer was talking about. I feel like for IVR offers I experience the following:
1. I am not spending enough for geo/carrier tests
2. I am spending too much for tests
3. I could have had a promising campaign which I might have dismissed because it didn't look interesting to me because I never had a profitable IVR campaign and I have nothing to compare my stats to. Mostly my conversions rates wobble around 0.02-0.11% across all geos, carriers and other targeting settings. Rarely I see something like 0.2%+, which looks good for some geos, but eventually this CR goes back to the normal range of crap stats.

The closest I was to making IVRs work was launching Ghana campaign. The best result was negative 15-20% roi + some sweet monetizer earnings. So it was closer to negative 5-8% ROI, almost breaking even. But geos like Ghana are an absolute overkill because it is hella expensive

Also, lord @twinaxe mentioned in larsometer's thread that TC use IPRN and DPRN. This got me interested and I started digging a little bit. I signed to some IPRN providers. Looks intereresting. For some of them you can even upload your IVR for the numbers you request. I will look more into it tomorrow just out of sheer curiosity. Who knows, may be launching your own IVR sweepstakes isn't that hard after all? Right now the chain of payouts looks like this:

Affiliates collect money from Traffic Company, TC collects payments from IPRN/DPRN providers, the providers collect payments from Carriers

As you can see, the chain is quite long and it definitely affects our profits (or losses, if you are like me ) Anyway, nothing specific at the moment. Just some thoughts

Noted. Hopefully I can get to scaling phase some time


I know, man! I am glad that I immediately followed your advice and started wifi+3g campaigns right away. Listening to you and @larsometer was the best thing I did in 2 months of running pop traffic


I agree. We can't do anything about it. What can we do? Right - test more offers Sometimes in countries like Tunisia you can only get wifi traffic, even if your target 3g. The best we can do is to find a good offer and forget about this

I also try many different approaches, have more than 40k or so conversions in the last few months and still didn´t find

I know man, these damn IVR offers for me personally, the top 2 priorities right now are:

1. Deciding with the cost-effective tests framework without spending too much and too little
2. Spotting winners and not dismissing them

the first one is probably tied with something that larsometer talked about: if it is a winner - you will see it in 1-2 hours. There is probably no need to tests offers for couple days

As for the second one...Well, probably has something to do with experience and just launching IVR campaigns on a regular basis

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A beer is a beer, no strange flavors added

Looks good, I know this dreaded message myself too good.

Once you hit it you will know it.

Until then you just have to trust that there is that sweetspot.

Lord twinaxe, sounds nice

If it would be easy everyone would do it instead or pushing affiliate networks offers.

It's not just "Hey, gimme a number and lemme make moolah"

Seriously, forget such thoughts for now and better learn how to run the offers first.

How do you want to run such offers on your own when you can't even get them running for a network with a professional infrastructure for it yet?

Yes, you will see it almost right away.

And as fast as it comes it can also go so ride the wave as long as it lasts but when it stops working move on.

Correction: There is no need to test the IVR offers for couple days.

Other offers can absolutely be worth it to test them for days.

On the other hand we mostly can say that other offers that don't convert now also won't convert in future whereas IVR offers that don't convert now can convert like crazy next week.

The IVR offers can be quite different from other offers so don't treat all offers same.

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Hey guys! Hope you are doing well. I am still alive and still willing to grind. I am trying so hard to proudly rock an STM t-shirt some day Man, I love STM. Such a klondike of knowledge!


Alright, what about me? Everything is veeery boring in terms of posting it here in this thread Testing, optimizing, slowly getting somewhere


As usual, a brief summary of what's going right now:

1. I decided to pause some of my "extremely exotic geo" campaigns, because as our savior @twinaxe said before somewhere: the problem is that even the smallest campaigns take the same amount of time as big campaigns, unless you are using TheOptimizer or whatever. I haven't reached that point yet. However, I will definitely retest most of these geos some time later. Right now I don't want to scatter my attention around too much, because I have at lest 5-6 interesting campaigns with good ROIs of -30%, -50%. Keep in mind that these are RON campaigns and these ROIs are "mean temperature". Which is bloody good

2. I decided to pause my IVR campaigns at all for now, because, again, I don't want to scatter my attention too much since I already have a handful of campaigns to work with, which I can optimize to profits. I want to focus on these campaigns, these geos, these specific flows, find and throw in more offers with the same flows.

3. For some reason I got really excited about casino CPL offers and decided to do a quick dirty test on them. Man, I like these. However, as our dear friend twinaxe mentioned before somewhere: casino CPL offers that are running on POP/push are good for affiliates, but not for the advertisers. it means that you will be booted from such offers quite often. That's not what I want to do now, but I will definitely try to test gambling offers heavily some time later, if I survive of course


So, I pretty much paused everything and decided to laser focus on what I have right in front of my eyes: good campaigns that can be optimized by cutting placements, bad offers, throwing in other offers for test, etc. Let me share my thought process for 1 of those campaigns that I deem promising:

1. -48% ROI. I ran these offers to a little bit more than x10 payout because they perform roughly the same (direct-linked or with a lander). Today I finally gathered enough stats to cut some losers. Let's take a closer look:



I painted out the paths with red so they don't confuse you. Black X's mean the offers I cut today based on these stats using a calculator. Before we move on, I wanted to share my approach to statistical concepts. I use the current best offer to cut the current biggest loser. Let's take the offer with 4165 clicks and 13 conversions as our current best and use it to cut the worst offers step by step. Let's start with the offer that has 3280 clicks and 1 conversion:



Good. We are almost 100% certain that our current best offer beats this loser. However, we must correctly interpret the numbers: 99% confidence means that there is like 1 in 100 chance that the observed results are due to pure randomness. So, for this specific case we are pretty sure that there is indeed a difference in these 2 offers' performances.

Next, we want to make sure that our sample size is enough:



1. I always leave at default - "test for superiority" and we are interested in finding offers that convert better
2. I put the CR of the worst offer
3. Same as 'difference" from the previous screenshot (+933%)
4. I leave it at default - 95% confidence. Or, in other words, 1 in 20 chance that the results would be due to pure luck
5. Statistical power. I don't bother with it and leave at 80%, or, in other words, 4 to 1 chance to detect the specified magnitude (+933% relative increase in CR) of effect at the selected statistical significance level. To put it simply: we want to make sure we have a large enough sample size to have only a 1 in 20 chance of choosing the seemingly better performing offer which in fact could be the same or even worse than the current worse offer. And we want to a have a 4 to 1 chance to detect the desired improvement at 95% confidence interval
6. The number of offers +1. So, 12 variations + 1 control offer = 13 offers in total. I put 12 there because for this campaign I am definitely testing more than 13 combinations and 12 is the biggest number this website allows me to put in



yay! All of our offers/combinations have at least 2240 clicks and the total "sample size" is larger than the given number. This means that we can kiss the loser offer a goodbye .

Repeat the process as many times as you need/want. It is always better to run all offers at the same time, but we can't always make that happen because sometimes we find other offers that we want to test and throw them in in a campaign. The only real possible variables that could influence the results are the days of the week. I just make sure that I account for that possible difference in performance regarding the day of the week (if there is any difference at all)


The ROI after cutting bad offers is estimated to go up from -48% to -28% give or take. + some monetizer titbits + I like to set a very high traffic loss of 30% so that I always know that the actual costs are slightly lower So, I am pretty sure that the ROI after cutting bad offers should wobble around negative 25-28%. Which is good. Very good. Let's see if we can spot anything in "Connection types":



No difference. Next, I wanna look at something rather exotic - Uniqueness



The reason why I peeked at this is because I want to know if it makes any sense to set up rules for this campaign to redirect non-unique traffic to monetizer smarlink (Binom is cool, isn't it? ). In this case - it doesn't make much sense. Next, I look at browsers and OS versions. Nothing to show, kinda boring and no clear outliers. Everything seems pretty normal.

Now, we get to ZoneIDs. For now I want to see if there are any zones that suck up a lot off traffic and money but don't bring any conversions. Let's take a look:



Nope, no shit zones. All of the major zones convert, which is a good thing

Now, I will open up the targeting a bid by including brokers traffic. I want to fish for more zones at this point, because I cut the worst offers and for round 2 of testing brokers traffic seem to be ok

At this point the best decision is to find and test other offers for this geo with the same flow ideally. Or I will just run the remaining offers to identify the best ones for round 3 of testing. Ideally, I would like to end up with 1 or a couple offers. If I see that the stats for round 2 offers are the same - I will definitely pause them and will test other offers with the same flow from different affiliate networks

I appreciate any feedback on this thought process is there anything I am missing? Should I change my strategy at least for this specific campaign?

=======

P.S. damn, I almost forgot to reply again

yup, but these guys pride themselves for this weird beer with stupid flavors. They even put "HARDCORE" on the whole can

Not as good as "our savior twinaxe"



Yes, sir No irrelevant thoughts anymore



Yes, I meant that for IVR offers exclusively: there is no need to test them for a couple of days. Sorry for confusing you

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Not sure if I understood your last screenshot correctly. Is it for one offer or for several ones?

Having high traffic zones that convert is nice. If they have an ROI of -50% or worse on single offer level then picture looks a bit different. Of course there is still chance that they are green on specific carriers or wifi.

Fishing zones can be awesome when you have a swarm of good "fish" aka a good offer. So it might be better to first find good offer and then look for good zones.

There is no shortage of offers. With a budget of 70 USD you can test 20 offers with 35ct payout. The more offers you test the more differences you can see in their behavior.

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Gold nuggets everywhere, you just have to pick them up.

Seriously, I often wonder that many/most of our beginners don´t seem to really take advantage of some things here.

Basically copy/paste campaigns presented on a silver plate

Always take all things with a grain of salt.

When you´re in the beginning of your journey there´s nothing wrong when you work on small campaigns.

In the first stage you shouldn´t think that much about profits anyway, there you should first take care about learning the basics properly.

In this situation it´s better to operate in a safe environment with low volume and low payouts.

The technical aspects and the steps to create campaigns are also the same for small ones and big ones so you can also learn these things with campaigns where you don´t risk to lose much money in case something goes wrong.

Small campaigns are also often easier to find and especially in the beginning it can help alot to keep the motivation high when you have small but steady successes instead of only fails because you try to reach for the big campaigns.

Yup, especially casino leadgens can be very easy to run for affiliates, especially some of the brands are converting very good.

But it´s very annoying to get paused from offers again and again.

Don´t make it more complicated than needed.

Just use THIS wonderful statistical significance calculator.

There you can test up to 10 variants at once.

Then don´t go for the best one and wait until one variation reaches 95%+ probability to be best.

It´s better to do it other ay around and get rid f the worst elements, that way you improve your funnel step by step along the way and you don´t have to wait for that one winner.

I just took some of your offers to show you an example.





In this example you could stop all variations with 1.xx% and let the others continue.

To be honest, I also don´t have a strict set of rules for it because each campaign is different.

Important is to get rid of the worst elements so that your campaign improves step by step.

I also can´t really remember campaigns where I used the unique feature.

Good observed, even when the biggest zones are in red they do bring conversions and we shouldn´t forget that they not only send traffic to the good offers but to the bad ones as well.

Alright, when there´s "HARDCORE" on the can then it just has to be good

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It is for all offers, even the worst ones that I cut

Yes, that's true. I should probably stick to testing offers in batches to x10 payouts and deciding what to test next and what to cut from there

The problem is that a lot of them are very smol. 100-300 impressions daily. They also kinda distract me and they do require the same amount of time. Don't get me wrong - the other campaigns are small too, but a little bit bigger

The problem is that I don't see it as overcomplication, but rather as trying to do it right. I am reading some books on statistics, statistical significance, etc. It seems like we are not testing and cutting offers the right way, which underpins scientific approach. I am trying to make it right from the scientific point of view, if that makes sense. I am trying to learn more about underpowered tests (those that don't achieve the required sample size), sample ratio mismatch, superiority/non-inferiority tests, confidence intervals, etc.


Let me try to explain things with the help of the screenshots. Disclaimer: I am not a "statistics guru" and there is a very high chance that I don't fully understand the things I am talking about right now. I rather consider myself as an aspiring individual who wants to properly apply statistics principles to affiliate marketing, because we deal with them everyday.

Why even bother with statistics? Because we want to earn money. How do we earn money here? By choosing the best offers (or combinations of creative-LP-offer in bigger sense) that we think are doing better than other offers in terms of our bottom line. And we have to support our "I think offer A performs better than offer B" with sound scientific principles. Moreover, as we learn, sometimes it doesn't even matter when offer A converts better than offer B. Or when it converts worse! We still would want to choose the worse offer in some cases. Why? Going back to the previous core point - we want to choose an offer that is the most likely to generate the biggest profit for us over the lifespan of the very offer. Suppose we have 2 offers:

1. Offer A, payout $0.35
2. Offer B, payout $0.45

Let's think about it. In our ideal scenario - if these 2 offers have absolutely the same performance, we would go for offer B because it will bring us more moolah (assuming we have the same conditions, the same traffic costs, etc.). This also means that offer B is allowed to have a worse performance, but to a certain margin. How do we calculate it? it is simple:

1. 0.35/0.45 = 0.77
2. 1 - 0.77 = 0.23
3. 0.23 * 100 = 23%

23% would be our margin for non-inferiority. Let's suppose that the relative conversion rate of the offer B is 15% lower (15<23, so it is within our margin) that of the offer A. For example:

We evenly distributed 112 000 clicks among 2 paths:


1. Path 1, Offer A. 56 000 clicks, 2% CR, $0.35 payout. It means 1120 conversion and 1120*0.35 = $392 revenue
2. Path 2, Offer B. 56 000 clicks, 1.7% CR (because the relative CR is 15% lower than its counterpart, as mentioned above for this example). 952 conversions. 952*0.45 = $428.4 revenue.

Again, under the assumption that traffic costs and all other costs ate the same for both offers. What does the calculator say?




The result is statistically significant at 95% confidence interval. It means that there is 1 in 20 chance that the observed results are due to luck or other external factors. But making conclusions based on statistical significance alone is flawed and could be even straight up harmful, impacting our bottom lines. More on that later

For this case - we chose non-inferiority test with a set margin because superiority tests only allow us to make conclusions about whether or not our variants (in this example - offers) have higher conversion rates or there is no difference in conversion rates at all. And this is not our task as affiliate marketers. We have to choose the offers/combinations that are most likely to bring us more profits.

But what if we can be pretty damn confident that offer B has 5-15% lower CR compared to offer A? Of course we would choose this offer 10 times out of 10, because it will make us more money down the road. So, if you are testing offers that have different payouts - make sure that your software allows you to choose between test setups: here you absolutely must choose non-inferiority test and set the calculated margin. What about testing the offers with the same payouts? Than superiority test is your to-go choice. Because of the same payouts, the offer that performs worse will bring you less moolah. That's why we are only looking for the offers that have better relative conversion rates

Also, we should ask ourselves the question: is our sample size large enough? it matters because as I said before - relying on statistical significance alone can be detrimental.

We should familiarize ourselves with the concept of statistical power. Statistical power means how likely it is that the test will pick up an improvement as large as specified at the specified significance level. I would love to explain this concept deeper, but I am still learning it as well For now I just set it at 80% - the standard value

Going back to our example - is our sample size large enough for the observed results? Let's see:



yay, we can say that our sample size is large enough for our setup: test type, confidence interval, etc. We can safely cut offer A and continue with offer B


About relying on statistical significance alone in superiority tests:



Yay, we reached statistical significance! But.. notice the blue numbers. This is the 95% confidence interval for these stats. Notice negative numbers. It means that variant A could be in fact converting 10, 50, 80% lower than offer A as well as it can have a chance of converting better. It is no better than a coin toss at this point. For a properly conducted test (superiority, 80% power, 95% confidence interval, 2 offers) we would need around 400 clicks for both offers to make sound conclusions about relative conversion rates



With these stats we can be pretty damn sure that we must cut offer A because judging from confidence interval offer B can have at least the same conversion rate as offer A. We don't incur any costs associated with preliminary choosing "the better converting offer" which in fact could be a complete loser compared to offer A in the long run


Also, we will never have an equal distribution between paths/offers. That's why we have to learn about the concept of Sample Ratio Mismatch. It shows us whether or not the difference in samples (read - clicks) did or could affect the conversion rates. If the mismatch is insignificant when we put the numbers - it means all good

Regarding @twinaxe 's screenshot above:



Suppose that we want to cut offers with red arrows using the offer with the green arrow and the question mark. Well, let's choose any offer with red flag and compare it to the current best:



The results are not enough for 95% confidence interval, but I am also fine with choosing 90% confidence interval. 90% interval mean that there is 1 in 10 chance that these observed results are due to luck/other external factors. I am down for it just for the sake of testing things quicker. I don't blindly follow "95% rule". I can adjust these things according to my objectives. For this case I am OK with trading the accuracy of the results down the road with the speed of conducting the tests. At the end of the day, 1 in 10 chance is not a coin toss. So, I will stick to 90% for this campaign. Let's see if the sample size is large enough to cut bad offers:



Number of variants is 9 because I am left with like 10 offers after cutting in round 1, which I am running at the same time now

It shows that in order to cut these "bad" offers right now I need to run at least around 6400 clicks to each offer, because the tables may turn for these losers and they can become winners.

So it means that it is too soon to cut these offers. At this point I am still deciding about what is the best course of actions:

1. Run more traffic to these offers and look at the picture later
2. Start testing completely new offers

number 2 seems much better. But we have to take into account the only drawback here - running these batches on different days of the week/ time of the day, which can influence the conversions rates of these offers

So, I am still trying to create my own approach to affiliate marketing and statistics in general. Creating an effective workflow for testing offers and supporting the tests with sound scientific principles. Sounds good, but it is also important to find a justified trade-off between "accuracy" and "the speed of running the tests" which I am working on right now


Also, what if the winning offers don't turn to shit overnight? What if it is just the law of big numbers and the offers are just sliding back to their normal, state-of-the-world stats?



Suppose that the red arrow reflects the conversion rate/performance of a winner offer.

Alright, I am definitely overthinking the last part. But other than that - I think I could be right. The key is to trade off accuracy, but still run tests quickly and gather significant data from which we can somewhat extrapolate the results without making bad decisions

Ok, I think that's enough for today. Big kudos to you if you read all of this nonsense and still alive

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Which books are you reading??
I would love to read some as I'm a newbie lol

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Sure, but there is not just one way to make it right.

It´s great to see that you think about what you´re doing and in the end it´s up to you how you run your stuff.

But from my experience that I gained from 16 years running affiliate campaigns I can tell you something: It´s not that important to get everything right from the beginning, it´s much more important to get things done.

In this regard it doesn´t even matter if your approach is right or not, it´s much more important what your approach is not: It´s not effective.

Yes, it is probably a much more detailed approach than mine.
Yes, it is probably much more scientific than mine.
And probably it´s also much more correct from a scientific perspective.

But again, it´s not effective.

It will work better when you only have to deal with a small number of elements/variations.

When you test many offers, landers, geos and combinations of all these you should rather try to work effective instead of trying to be perfect in every detail.

I guarantee you, my quick and dirty approach finds winners faster than your clean scientific approach.

You need the 90% or 95% when you want to find a clear winner, when you do it other way round you can get rid of the worst elements before one variation reaches 90%-95% confidence.

When you try to get everything perfect from the beginning you waste lots of time, by far not every campaign is worth it to give it that much attention.

Let´s say 80%-90% of the offers you test are crap, you shouldn´t give them the same attention that you would give good offers.

Get rid of the crap fast and spend your time and energy on the good ones.

The early test stage is not there to find a winner that´s profitable right away.

It´s just there to find something that´s good enough or has enough potential to spend more time, energy and money on it.

And to run rough tests you don´t need big science, you just need a rough idea.

When you test few offers with your scientific approach, use specific variations as reference to compare with others one by one, calculate performances and whatever you can be sure that in the same time I test 10 times the amount of your offers and find a potential winner faster.

And that´s the point, to get similar results than me you would waste much energy and time on things that are just not worth it.

In the same time where you test something I test much.

Don´t get me wrong, it´s absolutely ok to put lots of effort in good campaigns but not in each and every campaign you run.

When you are still analyzing and comparing your first test results then I am already giving that detailed attention to potential winners that I found through my quick and dirty tests.

Don´t get me wrong, I don´t want to talk you out of your approach.

If you want to go that way do it but again: It doesn´t matter how accurate it is, it´s not effective.

Of course it could happen that I miss an opportunity with my approach but because of the high quantity I will find 3 new winners for every opportunity that I miss, it´s worth it.

Similar situation is when you want to test and check every offer that you run.

You can do it and maybe you find some offers/offer pages then that are not working but same as before, it´s not effective.

When you only test 1-2 offers per day you can do it, check the redirects, maybe you need a VPN to get an IP from a different geo, for carrier offers you probably have to spoof the carrier to see the offer page.

And even when you do everything right you still can´t be 100% sure to see the real offer page that the normal user from your campaigns would see.

Of course that approach could save you from running a dead offer but it just takes lots of time.

In the same time I just grab offers, set up campaigns, run traffic and have exactly two outcomes: Either the offer is good or not.

Maybe I pay then for a dead offer here and there but therefor I can test much more offers much faster.

To bring the post to an end, when you feel that this is the approach you want to run then it´s perfectly fine and then you should do it but in my opinion it´s: Fast and effective > scientific profound

Long story short: Do whatever works best for you but take care to don't waste time on things that are not worth it.

This time will be missing for more important things later

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I don't have anything specific, I am just reading/watching whatever I feel like reading/watching at any given moment. It is random. But if you are interested in statistics - I remember taking "descriptive statistics" and "inferential statistics" courses at udacity for free. But it is been many years since I took them, so I am not sure if it a good recommendation. At the end of the day - it doesn't have that much of a practical application to affiliate marketing.

@twinaxe Man, thanks for your input. I infinitely appreciate it. Your points are 100% valid

I think that's the key. Operating under the assumption of 80-90%+ of offers being crap. "Guilty of being a shitty offer unless proven otherwise"

in the same time I test 10 times the amount of your offers and find a potential winner faster.

Right. Both scientific approach and rough approach converge at the same point - testing more offers. A good offer doesn't need a lot of data to declare it as a winner.


I changed my opinion. You are absolutely correct about everything. Scientific approach is amazing when you maybe work with a few offers, variables, etc. But this is likely not the best approach specifically for affiliate marketing. The most productive way is to test more offers, because we operate under the assumption of "the majority of the offers are shit unless proven otherwise". And this is what SA is missing

I choose to listen to you and trust your experience. To hell with this "right" scientific approach. Let's test more offers

To get the things right: you don't have a strict approach to running things, but the general approach would be to run offers to x10 (x5 in case of 0 conversions) and then cut offers that are in 0-1.xx% range?


Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and experience. I appreciate it big time

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That´s good to hear, was already a bit worried that my post could come around a bit demotivating although it should be exactly the opposite

Yep, it´s just that you shouldn´t waste time on things that are not worth it.

You can also sit down and spend 7 days to prepare a campaign right down to the last detail so that everything is perfect when you finally start the campaign just to find out that all the offers that you tested were total duds.

I can imagine that it´s hard for a beginner to find the balance.

On one hand you want to do the right thing and better do a bit more than less, on the other hand you need to get stuff done and this is hard enough because setting up campaigns and stuff still takes some time.

See it that way, give highest priority to the tasks that can have the biggest impact on your campaigns.

Splittesting few variations and calculating winners one by one just to get 10% higher ROI for each round = Low impact and lots of lost/wasted time.

Testing new offers with the chance to find a winner that gives 100% additional ROI = High impact and well spent time

Unluckily I have to disappoint you, I don´t have that general approach for it because in the end each campaign can be different from the next one depending on vertical, offer, flow, geo, payout, numbers of elements and whatever.

Of course I also have my rules and approaches for different situations but it´s more dynamic and no "one size fits all" approach.

In the beginning I still recommend to stick to a rather fixed rule or rule set even when it can mean to have slightly more losses.

But when you don´t know the whole game that good yet and don´t have the experience for such dynamic approaches you have a much higher risk to create a huge mess when you don´t have follow a more strict path for your campaigns.

Analyzing the stats will also be much harder when you don´t run your campaigns all the same, after some time you will automatically start to see patterns when you test enough things.

The more you test the better you will understand what works and much more important how and why things work or not.

Then you will notice patterns and you can start to develop your own workstyle.

In my opinion that´s a natural process anyway so there´s no need to rush with it.

It seems that you are a smart dude so I am confident that you will understand the whole machinery pretty fast

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Hey guys! Did you miss me? Probably not, because my posts are longer than "War and Peace"


For the last 2 days everything started to click for me. I ran many campaigns with a lot of different offers, geos and verticals. It really feels like I am getting more experienced exponentially. I have a lot of data in my tracker: payouts, geos, conversion rates. It it starting to make sense to me, because I also feel like I can identify offers where advertisers lowball hard. I am still giving a chance for these offers though, but I am also getting more flexible at my tests. If I don't have any data for the geo/vertical - I feel confident spending a little bit more than n of LPS * N of offers * payout * 10 because I want to establish a sort of baseline for the geo-vertical-flow combo. It sounds a little bit dumb, but it could also make some sense For example, if I see a $0.3 SOI sweepstakes offer for Malaysia - I am very skeptical about it, based on my experience with Malaysia. Tier-2 geo with somewhat expensive bids, huge volume that requires a good WL (the best WL for such geos would be the one with highest earning/highest EPC zones because there's just way too much volume). I would place Malaysia, Poland and France in the same Tier basket in terms of bid prices. For FR and PL the average payout is around $1.2-1.5 and that's why I am skeptical about Malaysian SOI sweepstakes with low payouts. At this point I would still test them, but the tests are very dirty - if doesn't convert right away, I'd rather move on fast. No reason to spend x10 on this offer.

The same applies in other way - Haka and TC offers are very good for cheap geos. They also accept traffic worldwide, which means that a $0.35 payout is bloody huge for some geos with cheap traffic. The traffic is cheap there because some geos are not very much demanded by advertisers: leadgen offers are basically non-existent there. And if you do find something for these geos - the payouts will be miserable. And usually it is not worth your time, unless the conversion rates are fine (zeydoo surveys off top of my head, but I don't do them for now).

I have also started testing Push traffic. I like it, man. It naturally complements whatever I am doing right now. It really expands the range of my tests now and doesn't intervene with pop tests. I will also start testing cpl casino offers. Yes, I said I don't want to de them now, but I change my opinion faster than my socks I think it is bad if you are stubborn as a rock. That's why I keep my mind open to new ideas. When I feel like firing up a test because it excites me and I think it makes sense - I will fire up a test for sure. Getting more flexible and confident with my tests

I have no idea why I am so excited about losing the money, but it feels much better when things started clicking for me. Experience and practice do wonders. So far I can say the following:

- I can easily edit, clean and upload almost any lander without any help
- I understand how to set up tracking, postbacks, etc. I can easily add new traffic sources, affiliate networks and offers. I understand how tokens work and how to make everything right
- I understand how to do cost-effective tests without the need of overspending
- I got better at cutting bad offers with the help of our dear friend @twinaxe. Still improving it though, but it s definitely better than it was before
- I got better at reading data. When not to cut placements, where to cut them at x1, where at x2, where to leave wi-fi traffic only and where to split 3g and wifi, etc. Still improving

What needs improvement, more practice and experience:
-Identifying the winner. Or simply a good offer for optimization
-Optimizing the funnels
-Scaling

So far I have tested a good number of offers and I have a feeling that I could overlooked good offers (especially for SOI sweepstakes). I mean, SOI sweepstakes are not supposed to be breaking even right out of the gate, right? -40%, -50% are pretty workable and optimizable, I think. I should have better definition of a "winning" and "good" offer. Because it feels like I keep testing a lot and I am looking for something I will never be able to achieve. -40% ROI for SOI sweepstakes for, say, Indonesia shouldn't be treated the same as click2sms offer for a random caribbean geo where with a good offer you can be breaking even right off the bat. That's why I am thinking I have to look at my stats and reconsider the definition of a good offer for each vertical and geo. I have to look back at my stats because I have a handful of good offers if I stop looking for a unicorn (which may never appear). I can start optimizing the funnel for good offers and keep testing new ones for the optimized funnel

Man, all this blabbering probably sounds like something obvious to experienced guys. I feel dumb for being a slow-learner

By the way, I also think that I started to understand IVR offers better. Yes, I said that I paused them, but it is me taking a short break from IVR allowed me to reflect on my approach to these offers. I think that I might be up to something. By "something" I mean cost-effective tests. Here is something for you:



It is IVR (less than 24 hrs performance). This looks good and I will try to scale it to a few other traffic sources. I need more traffic for this campaign

Some other stats:



1 offer that I declared as a winner from previous tests (the timeframe for the screen - approx. 24 hours as well). Had to weed out a lot of losers. I will create a separate campaign with brokers traffic and anti-adblock. I will also create separate campaigns with higher bids to fish for quality placements.


Apart from that - still testing. I have a few other campaigns that don't look that good but with proper optimization (or with the tests of other offers) should end up on green pastures


Also, a few questions about push traffic:
1. How do you guys optimize push campaigns? I mean, how do you bring the costs down for them? Is the only way to cut bad zones here?
2. What does it mean? Does it mean I will not receive any traffic for this campaign today?

Thanks, man. I really cherish these words coming from you I think the experience factor is overlooked by newbies. Me 1 month ago and me today are 2 different people. Same stats, but I treat them differently as opposed to 2 months ago. I guess I am slowly starting to soak up the 'Affiliate Marketing mentality" by creating more efficient workflows

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Exactly, $0.35 in very cheap geos with high CR can be just as good as a $10 payout in high competitive and expensive geos.

Also correct, leadgen offers don´t make the advertisers money at the moment of the conversin, they make them money from the backend flow.

That´s why good leadgen offers are avilable for geos where info about users are valuable.

A user in a very low income country just doesn´t provide much monetary value for an advertiser.

When people just don´t have money to spend anyway they also won´t make advertisers money.

That´s why best leadgens are in geos with high income.

Some do, some don´t.

It´s important to not only look for this or that.

Important is to learn how to spot potential and this is a combination of things like CR, ROI, payout, available traffic, bid, scalabilty and so on.

When everything plays together fine then it´s a good sign, all such metrics on theiw own often don´t tell much about the real potential.

Great, green numbers always loook good

Cut zones, improve creatives (find sweetspot between CTR and CR), open targeting.

Did you by chance run it on CPM?

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@twinaxe

I understand what you are talking about. -50% ROI RON campaign in Malaysia with multiple offers is not the same as -50% ROI RON campaign with multiple offers in Tajikistan Bids, volume, the performance of high-volume zones, etc. This took me a while to understand that SOI sweepstakes for, say, Indonesia are not supposed to be breaking even in RON campaigns (unlike smaller geos and click2sms offers). Anyway, with regard to the above - I will be fishing for more offers in the geos that I have some stats for

Great, green numbers always loook good

Sadly, it was Push and the traffic completely dried out the next day after the new-push-campaign-boost wore off. I received like 30 clicks the next day. Feels bad man. Lack of experience with push kicks in Not to worry, I will still try to wrap my head around it

However, there is something more exciting:



This a CPA goal campaign, which has been running for around 20 hours. So, the campaign is not even yet optimized. Which is a good sign and this campaign is probably a total winner. I will try to scale it to other traffic sources that have CPA goal. The whole process for this particular campaign was simple:
1. Launched SmartCPM RON campaign
2. Waited for data
3. Cut complete losers
4. Trimmed down to 10 offers
5. Trimmed down to 3-4 offers
6. Identified the winner

Total "loss" during testing phase: -$50-60. 1 Month ago I would stop there because due to lack of experience I thought the "loss" is too big and I am better off finding unicorns that work right away. Now, without any scaling, on day 1 - the best offer earned back almost 20% of the "loss". I think this concept is very important for my newbies (myself included). As long as you are doing everything right in terms of testing (you are testing multiple offers, you use statistics to cut bad offers, your test are cost-effective and cost-efficient, etc.) - forget about the losses during the testing phase.

At the end of the day, I do believe in smart campaigns because this is how I have been running Google Ads for a long time: feed a good funnel into smart campaigns and sit back. I have had more success with this approach rather than living in google ads forever and excluding keywords, etc. I will be trying to translate the same approach to pop and push. I think I am very close to identifying the best strategy for myself that suits me and my style. Trying to get the best of both worlds, combining my approach and twinaxe's

No, it was CPC. Weird


P.S. I will test my approach using twinaxe's guide. If it works - I promise to post a case study. If I don't succeed - let's pretend I didn't say anything

Also, I have a very wild idea. Really wild. If it works - I am a genius if it doesn't work - I am a dingus

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Your ROI was above 200%. So you have many choices to really make that work.

When you already know that new push camps has a boost in the beginning... then you can just start another new one or do some other crazy shit like increasing the bid

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Just clone the campaign

If you tested different creatives in the original campaign you can also clone and then run with only the best creatives.

Trust me, there are much higher losses possible, even daily.

Especially when you mess your campaign creation up

You can run campaigns similar to Smart CPA or CPA Goal on Google Ads?

To be honest, I can´t tell if it´s weird or not.

I just can´t remember that I have seen the message before, on the other hand I also don´t check the status of running campaigns often - when they run they run

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@twinaxe @larsometer

Alright, alright. Done


Happens even to the best of us

No, I mean Smart Shopping campaigns. They work insanely well for my geo. But you gotta be patient. Very patient. To give you an example:




I am running this campaign since May 2021. I just uploaded all of my products, set a comfortable daily budget and waited for 5 months (I wonder where my patience disappeared when I started doing pops and push). This campaign has been absolutely insane for the last 1-2 months. We are receiving a lot of phone calls and the average cost per conversion dropped 4 times. The initial cost per conversion (the peak value on the screen) was around $15 per conversion. In September it was $4. Not including phone calls, emails and messages. This cost per conversion is insane because we own a couple of offers with the payout of $100. And for those products we receive a lot of cheap and quality conversions. But, again, it is important to have a killer funnel for smart campaigns: our product is one of the best on the market with a low, competitive price. Google gives us a lot of traffic because with our margins he can bid high and give us a lot of volume. We have a very large impression share for the product and it is an absolute killer, even in a poor geo

However, we almost lost $15 000 trying to source from China for the first time I am not sure if my experience is valuable here on STM since ecommerce is not very popular here, but that was a good lesson to always keep your head cool. Anyway, if you guys need a guide on how to choose a supplier on Alibaba - I can do that

Meanwhile, this campaign looks fun:



Holy cow, this CPA g campaign is killing it. Almost 24 hours since I launched it. I decided to pause my other tests and focus on trying to scale this campaign hard. Meanwhile, I will take this opportunity to get familiar with other traffic sources where I can test other things I can't test on Propeller


Off to scaling this little campaign

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I see, not my stuff

Already got excited but I guess I will skip then.

Sure, when you have something interesting to tell please post.

I would love to read more about ecommerce and I am confident many others as well.

Fingers crossed, keep us updated

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Hi. Remember this one?




Now it is getting worse every single day. It is a CPA goal campaign



it was supposed to get better after receiving around 400 conversion, but is slowly and steadily turning into shit

What else? I thought I discovered a good campaign yesterday. Turns out I didn't. The performance dropped 4 times. Like a f*****g rock. And if it ever comes back - well, duh. My AM said "hey, can you push carrier X instead of carrier Y? it is not easy to collect the payment from carrier Y". Or something along these lines. (I don't blame the AN. In fact, I love working with them). Which means that even if this campaign comes back (doubt it) - I will have to cut the volume in half and the carrier I was asked to cut/heavily reduce volume is converting much better.



It is not the first I find a promising campaign and the performance drops like a rock the next day or over the course of couple of days. I don't understand what is going on. It is been like this multiple times (or should I sat that it happens every single time I find a promising campaign?). Nothing seems to stick for at least a bloody week. These profits are not anywhere near enough to pay back for the tests . Nothing seems to stick. I don't understand - either I am doing something wrong or I am spending too much on tests. Cutting sooner than x5 offer's payout (assuming I have 1 lander) doesn't make sense. It is simply not enough data.

Also not seeing any success with sweepstakes. I have probably tested almost every single sweeps offer for a couple of geos on clickdealer for iphone/samsung


Either I should completely revamp my testing approach (regarding choosing offers and deciding how much to spend on them) or I don't know.. Probably utilize more WL's and re-think test budgets


Anyway, I will take a break for the rest of this day. I am just too mad to work right now. If I keep working today - I will end up punching a hole in my wall. Not the best idea

Step back, re-think, revamp, come back smarter. This is not the end. Just need to go outside for a walk

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On a second thought, I should probably relax and take it easier. I see that these offers tend to perform better at night. If there is a correlation between time of the day and performance - we can definitely say that different days of the week will have different performance. In the last campaign I left 1 offer based on scientific approach. I will continue to monitor the performance on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Perhaps this offer can absolutely smash it again over these 3 days. Thursday could be the worst day out all days for this specific offer. I should trust myself, my data and scientific approach. I cut offers the right way. I need more patience

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A little update:

I obviously didn't take a break after I said I would. In fact, I doubled down on grinding. It is 2 AM now and I turned off my laptop 30 minutes ago. Got some food, protein shake and took a shower

A few hours before doing that I decided to launch an interesting campaign. A classical high volume, low payout , high CVR case. Identified the best offer and cut the losers. I started seeing conversions every 20 seconds. This was the moment when I said "screw being right, testing long enough to identify low-performing days, times, blah-blah-blah. Let's just try being aggressive and cut the zones at 0.5-1x payout". I spent more than an hour manually excluding the zones that either didn't convert at 0.5-1x or converted, but the CVR wasn't good enough for that bid. I immediately saw an improved performance and this campaign looks fun now. This was my "aha" moment. I have a lot of converting zones, but they are not profitable. This was when I realized: "dude, these zones are fine. They could be profitable at lower bids". Yes, lower bids open up crappier zones, but remember aggressive cutting ag 0.5-1x payout? It is absolutely justified. I also have zones that are very profitable for my bid. What does it mean? I don't need this high ROI. I need volume. That's why I will also bid higher as well in separate campaign to get more volume for the zones that are too profitable and to open up the targeting for quality placements.

Also, trying to scale profitable campaigns to different ad formats and traffic sources. Different bid baskets for pop traffic, stopping the campaign early if it doesn't show any promise

Regarding push traffic - I am currently cutting the zones aggressively, testing different activities for a very good campaign. The only thing that I don't yet understand - what should I do about the zones that have a low CTR but convert well? (or seem to convert well). Do they drag the overall CTR of the campaign down so that you end up not receiving much traffic because of low CTR? @larsometer @twinaxe what do you think?

Finishing the thought: while showering everything clicked. I finally understand what my problem is and has been all this time: I am trying to be smart in pops. Dude, it so *beep* simple! I am running pop traffic. Why the hell am I trying to be smart while doing it? It is pops! Freaking pops man. Zones come and go, offers come and go. Today everything is fine, tomorrow is a disaster. Which means that when you found a good offer that is working today - optimize it and scale the living shit out of it today. Treat campaigns as if there is no tomorrow. If they live to see another day - good, but don't count on it too much

My problem definitely stems from my background: whitehat e-commerce and FB leadgen. I am programmed in such way to create funnels, optimize them and build long-term campaigns. It makes sense for me because in e-commerce I am the offer owner of, well, my offers. I know that my offer is not going anywhere anytime soon, which means that I have plenty of time to conduct long and tedious tests. It also makes sense from my business perspective: Imagine I prematurely decide that 1 landing page is better that another. If in the long-run it tuns out that in reality it is performing worse than the original - it means that I lost money. Or rather left a lot of money on the table due to a poor decision. That's why in my e-commerce project I want to make sure that every decision that I make is sound and is supported by data and statistics. This is the same reason why I have been running smart campaigns in google for like 6 months - the key is that I know that my offer is not going anywhere soon and the quality of traffic is supreme because it has search intent. Decreased performance is only related to seasonality, temporary societal shifts and current competition on the market. All 3 things can be identified easily and the business is ready to face them



Let's go back to pops. While cutting placements for the campaign a few hours ago, I decided to start thinking about the core principles of pop traffic, since I was receiving a lot of conversions every minute, which didn't need any brain work, but rather the sleight of the hand. I asked myself: "Can I be sure that this offer will not go anywhere tomorrow?". The answer was no. Tomorrow the offer could be stopped, the payout could be reduced, the advertiser could start doing split-tests on his LP behind our backs and many other reasons. The reasonable conclusion was: "so then why the **** are you trying to be smart about running pop traffic? Why are you surprised that "right" approaches don't work? Why are you surprised about cpa goals not quite working as they should be?". The quality of traffic fluctuates every day, zones come ang, zones have traffic and quality fluctuations. CPA goal could be great sometimes in certain cases that I didn't encounter. Anyway, if you are running pops - test, identify a winner quickly, cut the zones aggressively, test different bids, test other ad formats, test other traffic sources. Do that ASAP

My motto for pop traffic: "treat every offer and zone like shit, unless they have proven otherwise". Expecting something to "come back/bounce back" is a dangerous thing on pops which I experienced myself. The nature of pop traffic is in this motto. Yes, out of 15 zones that you cut at 0.5-1x - 3-4 of them could actually be good and you didn't give them a proper chance, but guess what? It doesn't ******* matter. 10 out 15 zones could be shit and you did yourself a favor of not spending much more money on shit than neccessary. Because it is pops.


I am not sure if anyone is reading this, but to whoever does: hopefully that wasn't too boring. The reason why I am posting of all this is because I want to show other people my growth as an affiliate marketer: from a guy who learned how to set up campaigns and didn't know shit to a guy who starts making some progress and starts thinking in the right direction. Writing everything down also helps organize whatever mess I have in my head. In my opinion - thought-process evolution is important for success and you can see it here. Anyway, my only 2 readers are larsometer and twinaxe I realize that my FA is utterly boring, but if it helps at least 1 person to get better - it is not pointless

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In the end your position in the auction is based on your cpm for each zone.

You can have a high cpm with a low cpc bid but a very high creative ctr. It also works the other way around. High bid and low ctr also can result in a high cpm.

I would not worry too much. Just get the hole package green and try to stabilize it.

The more traffic a campaign gets the more stable it usually runs (law of big numbers).

That being said I wouldn't cut zone that is at least slightly negative or better at all, even when it has a very low ctr.

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Hey

I just realized it could have been a $15 profit day for me (excluding red, of course), which I didn't notice:



But it wasn't because I am still testing a lot of stuff:




Regarding 1 screen - I scaled good campaigns as much as I could and don't see how I can scale them further without diminishing returns. I will also hit a cap for my best offer. Hopefully the quality will be fine (fingers crossed) and my cap will be increased. I think my funnel has a chance of giving ok-quality leads for the advertiser since I am not misleading and I am telling the user what he can expect on the offer page. If I get a higher cap on my best offer - oh man. I will try to scale the living shit out of it while it lasts


Other than that - I feel like I am really getting better at this. My testing strategy improved a lot and I am finally at peace with what I am doing

Also, I stopped testing all the shit at the same time - geo, vericals, flows, etc. I am taking it step by step and I see much better and controlled results.

Testing SOI sweeps as well. I think I finally have a good understanding on how to run tests, especially for SOI sweeps since the time of the day matters. I understand better how and why I should cut placements in different scenarios, taking into account multiple factors. Overall, I am getting really comfortable with pops and push. Everything is improving step by step. Hopefully it gets even better.

Still fine-tuning my testing strategy for SOI sweeps. @twinaxe @jaybot @larsometer - in your experience, is there any difference between weekend and working days? Is there a chance that I can miss a good offer because I tested it on the worst day (in terms of conversion rates) for SOI sweeps? Or do you just test for 1-2 days at any given days and it is fine?

I also need more experience in identifying what can be a good offer. I feel like I don't yet understand (based on tests and stats) what a good offer is. Probably I have dismissed a few due to lack of experience. Nonetheless, as I said, everything is finally getting better and better

See you later

P.S. does anyone know a traffic source that has a minimum daily budget of less than $10? and more importantly the ability to distribute the daily budget evenly across the day

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In most cases I also don't know if it is a good offer. Does not happen often that something is green from the start.
It already helps a lot to stop bad offers as soon as possible. Every dollar saved there is a free dollar for testing more offers.
The more you test the better your senses for recognizing patterns/potentials will become.

Weekends can be different. In some geos I have seen that local morning time converts not so well on weekends. Conversions just come a few hours later.
I guess it also is a matter of numbers. For camps that delivered a conversion every few seconds the performance was stable throughout the whole week. However for much smaller camps I saw patterns that probably have not been real (like faces in clouds).

If you are worried about missing a good day then just test the offer for several days and then make decision.

PopAds and PopCash allow you lower daily budget. But... you can also do on propeller with a little "trick". Choose distributed traffic and set daily budget to 10 USD. It will spend 10/24 USD each hour. All you then need to do is to stop either manually or with a trigger in your tracker.

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About what campaigns are we talking there?

CPA campaigns or CPM/CPC?

For sweep leadgens it depends alot on the geo you run.

Bingo, not all zones perform equally.

You can have zones that bring steady conversions but still run on losses, such zones could be profitable when you run them on lower bids.

This is also a reason why it´s good to work with bid baskets.

Collect similar performing placements in separate campaigns for different bids.

Or on platforms like Propeller you can just set specific bids per each zone.

They won´t necessarily drag down the overall CTR, in most cases they just won´t receive (much) traffic anymore because the most volume will go to the creatives with higher CTR.

Solution: Run the low CTR/high CR creatives in a separate campaign where they don´t have to compete with high CTR creatives.

Yup, that´s pretty much all there is to say about Pops

100% understandable but also 100% different situation

I did and it was not boring.

You have a pretty good understanding and solid observation skills hot these things work.

Can be different, can be same.

As @larsometer says, when you run on high volume you mostly won´t see big differences but when you only get handful conversions per day it can eb very different but then it can also be just normal fluctuations.

It also depends on the vertical if you really see differences, for sweep leadgens it´s mostly not the case

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Hey man, thanks for this one, very useful. May I ask which is your best choice for VPN?

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I only have the PureVPN extension for Chrome with very limited countries but that´s enough for me.

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Hi folks


Doing well, I guess. A summary of what is going on after 1 month of being on STM:

1. I feel super comfortable running both pops and push. I fully understand what I am doing on both ad formats and how they work. Regarding push: need to do a few test on CPM and CPA model to get more hands-on experience on these bid types
2. Learned how to properly test offers: targeting, bids, etc.
3. Today I completely revamped my choice of which offers to test. So far I have been doing bullshit and was testing a lot of stupid, ROM offers. Today I understood that I have to test either the recommended offers by my AM and completely new, fresh offers. No need to test some random shit that we I have no idea about whether or not it converts. Why spend money on something that has a chance of being an absolute non-converter? Fresh offers are an exception, but I would still run some quick and dirty tests on them to see if it could be a gem or not.
4. I have a decent understanding of scaling now, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Different bid types, different networks, ad formats, etc. Still need more practice on this matters, but I look forward to it


I have definitely achieved my milestone: $10~ gross profit a day. I also need to do some accounting when I can do $20+ a day, because these top-up fees add up, you know. I want to know exactly what are the actual numbies for costs and profits.

As for today, It could have been a $25-30 profit day if I was running the stuff that matters. To be honest, I will slow down on unnecessary tests tomorrow and will focus on scaling the living shit out of what's working now. Sadly, a very good offer that has been consistent for me has a low cap and my AM told me that it would take 1-2 months to assess the quality of the leads and to increase the cap. Sucks, but I can still make some money with that offer on auto-pilot. I just need to refresh the creatives to get an initial boost and that's it

Today I also stumbled upon a very strong WW offer. Oh man, this is an absolute killer and I will be scaling the living shit out of it for sure. I will definitely test many more geos for it. Crossing my fingers that this offer doesn't die/my AM tells me to stop/traffic source bans me for 12 hours (like it happened with a similar offer last time, because the offer had malware redirects unbeknownst to me)

The stats for today (and they keep climbing up every 5 mins) if I was running only what's working:




+ $1-2 from monetizer for today. I do hope that I will be allowed to scale my last offer, because it would be a very good case study.

Though the actual profit for today is lower because I was testing a lot of stupid shit (like I usually do), but that's no more starting tomorrow

Still bothers me that my earnings are coming from 3 offers only. Need to test new offers slowly, like a turtle

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At first, thanks for the update.

Sounds good so far.

Right now I am only online on my phone so I'm not in mood to write much but...

Check the $120k thread from my sig, it was only one offer.

You don't need to run dozens of offers on 20 trafficsources simultaneous to make good money.

1 good offer and 1-2 good trafficsources are enough to run campaigns with few hundred Dollars profit per day on push and pops.

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UPD: I just checked my actual costs for all my campaigns on my other traffic source and learned that my pre-set click loss is in fact too high which means that my actual profit for today would be $40+, instead of $30.

What the hell man. How did I end up with a $40+ profit in a single day? Hopefully I can get more of these days. If I get kicked from my current best offer - I will jump off a cliff


Definitely stopping my other tests right now and focusing on this big boy that could theoretically be an easy $xx/day. Again, if this offer lasts. Fingers crossed

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It is actually good to have some buffer. On new traffic sources I check stats for the previous day since there sometimes can be quite a delay in reporting. Also the traffic loss is dependent on geo, traffic type and sometimes even on the bid model (cpa goal, smart, cpm).

In some cases it can be the other way around. Just happened to me that I had no cost reporting for one zone in a single camp. Just found out because ROI was a bit too good.

When you have found something that is working stable it is indeed time to scale the sh*t out of it. Is also a good opportunity to test new traffic sources since you already know that the offer is working.

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I always set the % of trafficloss a bit higher.

It´s better to have it too high than other way around

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I've been doing this for a long time. I can tell you that the money making campaigns will show promise from day #1 . Meaning they will be close to break even. IF You follow a proven system (test 5 different images, 1 proven headline on native for example)

This campaign of yours looks like a lot of work, where if you optimize away 80% you will have no traffic left that's profitable.

I'd test higher payout offers that match this traffic type.

That's my 2 cents

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