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FA Pop beginner (36)

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Here we are @vortex and @twinaxe and all the other amazing people!

I hope this time I'm doing thing correctly so I'm starting this FA:

Traffic Source: PopAds
Ad Network: Haka (offers suggested by AM)
Payout: 0,35

So I run the first campaign with 4 offers (7$ budget for testing)
0,0002 bid

From what I learnt i should kill the offers which are not at least giving me 5 conversions.



Since I'm having less than 5 conversions, should I stop this one or it's worth to optimize the first row?

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Are you testing mainstream offers or adult offers from haka? Because adult offers have different CRs throughout the day and it it better to spread the test evenly across 24 hours


It is really hard to say anything about the screenshot. Did you spend all the test budget within an hour? your bid is also not very helpful, because it is impossible to tell whether or not it is a high enough bid for your targeting. Are you targeting both wifi+carrier? In some countries wifi is absolutely killing it instead of 3g

As I understand - the offers were suggested by your AM, right? If it is so - good. If it is captcha offers - test them both with a lander and direct link. you only need to spend like $3 for each to see if it has any potential at all


Also, your first offer received 2 conversions. Run it to $3.5 and see how it goes. If the geo is large enough - it could be worth trying to do something with it.

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Hi Maestro, thanks for your answer. Not it's not adult, it's captcha offers.

I spent the test budget within few hours. I think 2 hours. It was not super fast.
Yes I'm testing mobile phones both with 3G and wifi, o set no restrictions on that.

Yes the offers were suggested by my AM 2 days ago.
I'm still not running landers, it's direct link. Still learning so keeping it simple with as little variants as possible.

When u suggest to run it untill $3.5 do u mean add budget to the whole campaign so it goes 10x or duplicate it and leave only that offer and run is a separate campaign?


Thanks again.

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Are you running these four offers in one campaign with multiple geos?

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Yes, multiple Geos suggested by the AM.
Single campaign, four offers. Trying to follow what you were teaching me yesterday.

For example should I cut Italy which is eating a lot of budget with no conversions or it's to early?

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Different people run campaigns different but as I said before, one geo per campaign and nonetheless you run 12 geos or so in that campaign.

I definitely didn't teach this.

You make it harder for you than needed.

Additionally you have one more metric to consider when you run multiple geos.

The rule Nr of offers x offer payout x 10
Would become Nr of offers x offer payout x Nr of Geos x 10

Your test budget for such a campaign then should be 4 offers x $0.35 payout x 12 Geos x 10 = $168

Your bid is also only $0.2CPM, probably too low for quality traffic in all geos.

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Ok so I missed this one.
So the rule you explained yesterday is 5x (also Vortex was suggesting the first round on 5x) per offer per geo. I missed the Geo part. From what I understood the 10x is involved in the second round.

I'm confused here. How Im I supposed to choose only one Geo if I have no clue which Geo could perform well? Any advice on this please?
And regarding my actual situation, since I see two "good" Geos, should I cut all the others ones and continue the test as you suggested here?

Also how many offers you suggest to test at once for a newbie?

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Nope, the rule that I posted is x factor 10, it's only x factor 5 when you receive no conversions at all.

The rule basically just calculates with all involved elements and doesn't include geos because usually you run one geo per campaign.

Multiple geos = one more element in the calculation.

It's same principle as landing pages, you don't need to add them to the calculation when you run direct linked.

When you also splittest LPs you have to add them to the calculation as well.

That's why you run tests so that you don't just "choose" a geo but continue with a geo that performs well.

Of course you can make some quick checks if a campaign has potential or not before you run tests so that you don't waste time and money on things that have no chance to succeed anyway but in the end you evaluate your campaigns after you run tests, not in advance so you can't know what performs good before you test it.

Based on your screenshot there are 10 geos with traffic.

These 10 geos spent a total of about $6.50.

On average that's just $0.65 per geo and only $0.16 per offer per geo.

I would just cut the test and setup separate campaigns for the geos you want to test.

As I said before, different geos have different volume, different bids, different performance etc.

When you run them all together you make it harder to read the results because they won't run under equal conditions.

You have much more control when you run them separated.

You can see it very good on the screenshot, the geos all received different amount of traffic and you can't really control it so it's hard or impossible to run such campaigns with equal conditions for all geo/offer combinations.

What you can control is the traffic distribution between the offers.

When you run one geo per campaign you can easily distribute equal amount of traffic to each offer = equal conditions per campaign = easier to read the stats and understand what's working and what's not.

In the end it's the more the better but take care of 2 things:

1. Only run as many as your budget allows.
Better run fewer but good executed tests than masstests with too low budget.

2. Don't run too many offers in one campaign.
When you have many different offers to test better run several campaigns, for example in different geos.

I can imagine that some of the stuff can be pretty confusing but truth is that there's not only that correct one way to run these things.

This is also why you often receive different answers and tips from different people.

Every one works different and developes a workstyle that works best for that person.

So when A says This and B says That it can both be perfectly fine.

Doesn't make it easier for a beginner but the good thing is, when you run more campaigns and gain more experience you will start developing your own style as well.

Until then just try to understand not only how
you make something, you need to understand why you make something so that you can apply mechanisms to many different campaigns.

Additionally try to keep your setup as simple as possible so that it's easier to read and understand the campaigns/stats.

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Thanks man!! U helping a lot.

So please allow me to do a quick recap so most of all I'll be sure I understood well.

Let's say I'm running 2 offers.

First round of campaign I'm looking for the Geo.
So it will be let's say 5 Geos.

This will be: 2 offers x Payout x Geos x5 (only 5 because it's the first round and we want to see which Geo performs well and if there are any conversions)

Or you suggest to run like this:
5 campaigns (5 Geos) split testing 2 offers in each campaign so I know which offer performs best in each Geo?

After I found the best Geo, make a new campaign with that Geo and run it 10x in order to see conversions.
If less than 5, kill it, if more than 5, proceed.

Is this correct?

As example, let's say the screenshot i posted was run correctly with the needed budget in order to have enough data, and I found France and Costa Rica with these conversions, would you kill those until you see at least 5 conversions or would you give a chance to France with 2?

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Why it´s now only 2 offers and not the 4 anymore?

Please don´t say it´s because of this



No, one geo per campaign and also x factor 10.
Factor x 5 only when there are no conversions at all.
When there are conversions keep it running.

Yes

You can do it like this, you can also just continue with the original campaign.

There´s no need to kill them when they are profitable.

They only have 1 and 2 conversions in the screenshot but they also spent only $0.18 and $0.60.

Run the tests for at least 5 x payout and decide then based on the results.

0 conversion = Stop it
Conversions = Continue

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Just for sake of the example.

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Thanks man, I know I'm a pain. U helping a lot.

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Ok boss so I did as u suggested. I just used France as possible Geo since it was interesting in my opinion form the first (wrong) test.
And ladies and gentlemans...PROFIT!

For what is worth it's nothing for most of you but it means a lot to me!





Thanks Amy, Twinaxe, Matuloo, Maestro and all the others who were helping me in this journey.

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I found my first profitable offers folks. Special thanks to @vortex and @twinaxe for their support.



Now I should cut the placements, right?

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I went over 169% ROI. It's 23.37 in the targeted Geo so even If I'm still in profit, I'm pausing the campaign in order to resume it tomorrow morning.
All of u suggested to run the, in the day time so let's see if it's a wise choice. Not sure if I'm doing good or not.



The ROI was over 169% than around 23.20 it started to lower down so I think the performance started to drop.

I have not cut any placement for now. I red one article that was talking about small placement and big placement groups. Not sure how to manage the data I shared about the placement. Hope you guys can guide me.

By the way, hell yeah, my first profitable campaign.

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@martinbe Hats off, this is a fantastic update.

Please give some more info about the campaign so that we can check how to best move on.

For example it could help to know how many offers do you test in that campaign and how much traffic is available in the geo.

It would also help alot when you could post stats about placements and not just general stats.

Of course you can just blur the placements names so that you don´t give way too much but it would help alot to see how the traffic is distributed.

Not all of us suggested it, I suggested to keep them running 24/7 until you have enough stats that tell otherwise

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Damn that was fast! One day you started this FA and the next day, in profit by 169% ROI!

As @twinaxe suggested, please show placements stats and stats of any other relevant traffic segments (OS, devices, connection, etc.) that looks interesting.

You need to keep optimizing to (hopefully) slow down the drop in performance.

Now would be the time to double-down on the 40-day tutorial - reading all the lessons on optimization, and look through your stats to figure out where the optimization opportunities are.

As well, consider testing bids - again, that's in the 40-day tutorial as well.

When testing a new offer, it would be better to test during the day, to take advantage of the better conversion rates and higher traffic volume. This way, you can get the testing done more quickly, and lose the least amount of money.

When you know the offer you're running has profits potential, run throughout the day to figure out which hours are profitable and which ones not. This way, you can take advantage of ALL the available traffic, to squeeze as much profits out of the campaign as possible.

Hope that makes sense!



Amy

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Hi folks, I stopped the campaign for the night. I resumed few hours ago.

I'll share the stats with you of course. Thanks for telling me which one to focus on.

It's only one offer, one Geo, one Camapaign.
Most of the conversions were coming trough one specific placement.

It's focused on mobile, Android. No other restrictions.
Forgive in advance if I'm sharing something wrong, I'm still a newbie but I try to do my best. I'm just more creative than logical and a little bit dyslexic so it takes me more time to make the things click.

Traffic available in the Geo: 660.000
Raw traffic: 3.600.000
Avg Bid: 0,00082
I'm bidding: 0.00032 (should i I rise my bid)



This is the stats from the tracker:



These are the Placements from PopAds:


Maybe this one is interesting, should I cut all the red ones just for the sake of cleaning them even if they are not spending?



Thanks for any suggestion you can give! And thanks for all the help you gave me during my journey!

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Judging from your 2nd screenshot your camp is nicely green.

Keep it like it is and let it make money. Focus on testing more offers in other geos (at least not same geo on popads).

If after a few days it is still making money you can try to scale it on more traffic sources or maybe even open up the targeting on popads a bit to get more traffic.

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Today the "magic" placement which was performing amazing yesterday is not sending much traffic, just one conversion from it.
I think it's normal but does anyone know why this happen?

Yesterday that placement was sending 120 conversions and today only one. I'd like to understand possible reasons for that.
@vortex @twinaxe can you please give me your opinion? it would help a lot.

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Hi there, you say to test in the meanwhile other offers in other Geos? Ok I'll try that.
Do you think I should run the same offer i'm running now on let's say other 5 geos and see how it goes?

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Well... I think you should just test (more). Sooner or later you need to find out what works for you. Could be same offer could be other offers...

My point was merely that it can be a good idea to not touch a green camp and not giving it competition with your own campaigns.

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Hi folks, I'm trying to revive the placement which was killing it yesterday. That specific placement says that the avarage bid is 0,00065 and my bid is 0,00045. Should I get as much as closer to the avarage bid suggested? I'm getting so less traffic from that placement than yesterday.

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Is there any difference in order to optimize the campaign in looking at the total running dates of the campaign or just analising what happend today?
If I look to what happened yesterday, it was total red. If to look at the total time, it's still in profit.
But I know the profit was done the first day, yesterday it went down and it's not spending the budget.

How can u explain this? The first day it was spending quite fast, Yesterday it took the whole day to spend 10$ and I still have 3 available.

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Yesterdays data:


Todays Data:


The total 3 days data:


As you can see the huge ROI from the firsts day just dropped. Very small amount of conversions these last days. No profit by the way.

The is the placements report from the last 3 days (i scrolled down to show you the red ones):


The campaign is still one Geo. No special optimization done because there are really not placements who are around or more than 1x the payout without conversions.

I'm stuck. Is this the end of this Campaign or do you see any room for make it shine?

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I noticed that the high converting placement is not in the list of todays placements, why is that? Is there any way to force a placement to activate it self on my traffic?

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You may have gotten outbid. Have you read the lesson in the 40-day tutorial on how to testing bids? I've suggested that several times now in at least a couple of your threads.

Also: As soon as a campaign shows promise, test it on other sources. Have you set up a campaign for it on PropellerAds?

And have you been cutting placements according to the lesson on cutting placements? I know you've read it.

As for cutting browsers that are in red even though they're not losing much money: I would not suggest to do that unless a browser is losing some major money. In general, the wider you target, the more importance the algorithm will assign to your campaign, which means you can stand to get better quality traffic and higher volumes, all else being equal. I don't have solid proof of this, but have observed it time and again.

The main thing though is try to see if you could get that traffic back from the good placement. It may have been newly added to the platform and you got lucky, and then competition all saw that it was converting well and started bidding high for it. On PopAds unfortunately you can't place different bids on each placement (only one bid for the entire campaign). So here's what you do:

-Set up a new campaign. Do not copy. Create a new campaign in the tracker and then on popads create a new campaign and specify all the targeting. Try to bid significantly higher - try 0.0011/impression. Remember to set a low budget just in case - lowest budget you can set is $2.50. Go through your old campaign's stats to see if any placement is in the negative by 2x amount of payout - identify those and blacklist them in the new campaign from the very start.

-Once the campaign is approved, watch it like a hawk and cut placements that reach a loss of 2x payout. Because you're bidding higher, you'll be "overpaying" for traffic from the lower-quality placements and some of those may have a LOT of traffic, so you'll want to nip them in the bud before they drain your budget. You can change the low budget to a higher one once the campaign is live and you're checking frequently to make sure to cut bad placements before they drain too much budget.

Another thing you can try: Set up a 3rd new campaign (again, don't copy), target ONLY the profitable placements from your original campaign that have made at least 2 conversions or more, and assign a higher bid like 0.003 or 0.005 to see if you start getting traffic from that good placement. Again, set a low budget at first just in case, and then you can change it to a higher amount once the campaign is approved and you're checking stats frequently and cutting stuff.

If bidding high doesn't get you that traffic back, I'm not sure what else you can try. Bidding any higher than what I suggested would likely make your campaign unprofitable even if you DO manage to get that traffic back. Maybe there are competitors that are running more lucrative offers, that can afford to bid a lot higher, and they're hogging all the traffic from that placement. Or maybe that placement removed itself from the PopAds platform because someone bought out that inventory via some sort of private arrangement. There are other possibilities.

At any rate, testing the same campaign on other platforms would be a good idea.



Amy

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Yeah, I was trying that but not much results.

Yes, I set the campaign also in Propeller Ads, it took +24 hours to deplete 10$ and still depleting. Nightmare. It did 8 conversions, -61% Roi.

There are not much placements to cut. Almost none is equal or more 1x the payout with no conversions. The ones who were, I cut them but it's like 2 ids.
Red browsers are not spending nothing, the green ones are the ones who are performing good. I saw the MIUI Browser which was doing 579 visits with a cost of 0,24 cents but I left it there.

Question: should I optimize looking at the 3 days campaign (all the duration) or the stats given day by day?

Now I continue to read your answer about the action plan. Thanks Amy! @vortex

P.s. Sorry if sometimes it feels like i'm not listening to what you say I just have some kind of mental dyslexia so I have to read more times and than try, repeat and ask.

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When you say:"It may have been newly added to the platform and you got lucky, and then competition all saw that it was converting well and started bidding high for it. "

Does that mean that if I see again some magic placement as that one I should start to bid more than the average bid in order to push it to the max?

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Thanks for your tips, I see strategy there and I understand what really testing means. I thought that target just like 6 placements would be not good but I see the point: test everything.

Another question come to my mind these days: Since it's possible to change the bid while the campaign is running, I understand this would be a BAD choice in terms of statistics and analysis. But could it be a good idea in order to not wait for the new campaign approval? Let's say the campaign is performing great and you feel like to rise the bid...

Am I saying something nonsense or there can be some sense?

Final thoughts, since you know a little bit my progress here, do you think I'm progressing good? Do you see some advancement?

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As you said yourself, everyone has a different approach.

Some people prefer to run pops, others prefer push, others prefer FB, others prefer native and so on.

It could help to think about what you want to do and what you want to achieve.

For low tier geos and lower payouts it´s better to run pops and push.
For high payouts, e-comm offers or huge volume/profits it will be better to run FB or Google ads.

Just because something works for others it doesn´t necessarily work for you as well.

Maybe the other affiliates who push that offers hard run completely different traffic.

That´s why we still need to test and why it´s good to understand what works where for us.

Not necessarily.

For example I ran FB from 2008-2010, started with pops in 2017 and push in 2019.

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Thanks man, Danke!!! I see the point.
So as example, maybe those offers I'm running really works well but not in POP, maybe they work better in PUSH and so on.

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@twinaxe has said pretty much everything I could have said.

Two things I want to stress:

1)The importance of TESTING. If you read through follow-alongs of every member that has found success in the end, you'll know they all have one thing in common: They test EVERYTHING! They don't give up after 10/20/30/40 offers. They test a ton of landing pages and ads. They test different bids and target options.

2)Choose a traffic type you feel is suited to you. You may not know which platform you like until you've given it a good try. So try different ones. But only one at a time and give it some solid effort first.

If you're not happy with pop, move onto something else. Yes native can be expensive, but if you pick a tier 3/4 geo and/or run lower payout lead gen offers, it may not take 5 figures to test your first few offers.

Social platforms are still battling IOS14 issues, but affiliates are still making money. It has become harder, but no impossible. The suggestion here is try to run on agency accounts - that would give you the best fighting chance.

And then there are PPC ads. Expensive and volume may be limited depending on niche, but doable still.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to make quick and easy money from paid traffic anymore, unless you can find a loophole somewhere yourself, because nobody will share these loopholes.

And to be honest, no loophole will exist forever. It's only through continuous testing and adapting that affiliates (and most other businesses for that matter) will survive...which leads me back to point 1.

Maybe read a few successful follow-alongs? Then you'll get a better idea and more inspiration on what it takes to make consistent profits.



Amy

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Exactly! EPCs from AMs, even assuming they are accurate, are either average EPCs across the network (from affiliates running on all different types of traffic platforms), or EPCs from their top affiliate(s) only (i.e. putting their best foot forward so you'd run their offers).



Amy

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Thanks a lot. So back to the FA...

I'm taking another 3 offers which the AM suggested with 3 GEOS
0,35 x 3 x 3 x 5 as first run test.

I'll keep you posted. In the meanwhile I'm waiting for the approval of an offer from AdMobo, the Affiliate Manager helped in setting up the tracker, he is very kind and professional.

I'll keep you posted. I thought I need to try some offers also from other networks.

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Yes, it´s true that some offers can convert pretty different depending on the ad format/traffic type.

But that´s not all, for example I also test the same offers on different ad formats depending on where I run it.

You can have geos with extremely high bids on pops but comparative low bids on push so that it´s better to test the offer on push.
You can also have situations where user intended traffic (click traffic) is better for testing than interruption traffic (pops), then I often prefer in-page push over classic push.
You can also have offers that convert good and you just need to get some quick and dirty tests running, then pops can be the best choice.

You see, different ad formats can be good for different situations.

My winning trio at the moment is pops + push + in-page because most offers I run work on all these formats.

I just decide dependung on my targeting and inventory what ad format I use for testing, for scaling I then use all of them.

What format is best to use in which campaigns is something you can´t know right from the start but it will come with experience when you get a better feeling for it.

Probably different people also have different preferences there as well so the more you run the easier you will find out what works best for you.

Nonetheless it´s (in my opinion) best to first learn pops because it´s the easiest format to learn from the technical aspect.

Once you really know how to run pops it should be pretty easy to move on to push/in-page and then you have a pretty powerful team already.

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