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Watch a newb get to his first profitable month (51)

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Hello everyone,

A little about myself:

I am a novice at affiliate marketing and I finished the 40 day tutorial last summer. I have been a member of this forum for about a year, but I didn't really take advantage of it until recently.

I am full time student majoring in accounting, so I am a very busy person though I still make time for AM, which is my side hustle. Since I am so crunched on time and have a relatively low budget (most of it was pissed down the drain as you will see later), I will start my AM career with direct linking following proven guides on this forum and after I master that aspect of pop traffic, I will master sweepstakes, which will involve landers, etc.

I spent the last half of 2020 and first of 2021 making really, REALLY stupid newbie mistakes:

• I didn't read the direct linking section of the 40 day tutorial carefully enough
• I would throw money at any offer that my AM would ask me to test
• I thought I could actually make money with direct linking without much of a strategy
• I kept putting off the rest of the 40 day tutorial, mostly because I felt I didn't have enough time but looking back that was a sorry excuse

What was the result? I finished up my accounting at the end of the summer and I found out that I lost hella money.

If you are a fellow newb, please learn from my silly mistakes. DO NOT be a bonehead like I was. Educate yourself first (thoroughly) before diving into AM, don't try to wing it like I did. You will regret it. I am fortunate that I had the savings to weather those losses and not become the stereotypical broke college student.

Now, the good news is I learned from that. I finished the 40 day tutorial last summer, now those direct linking guides that I was following actually make more sense regarding optimization, evaluating performance, etc.

Its a new day now, and I have been running a few direct linking campaigns with HAKA and so far I've found some green ones and a lot of them show promise. There was one week were I actually made $20 in profit before fixed costs from my campaigns, which is a nice first success. Though I stopped running them for some reason which I now forget.

If I can make $20 in a week, then I can make $20,000. But let's keep ourselves humble for now.

Here are my goals for this follow along:

A) Reach my first month of net income, whatever number that may be.

B) Soon after, get similar results to what the author got in those direct linking guides I was following. We'll call that number $2,000/month in pre-tax profit. This is a nice income for a student and I will be pretty happy with that.

These are the guides I will be implementing:


https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...direct-linking

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...e-with-a-twist

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ed-with-a-gift

The last one isn't really a direct linking, but seems pretty simple for a new like myself to follow. I am no stranger to setting up landing page.

I will update you all with what I did at the end of my day, and I should post something at least once every two days unless I am truly bombarded with school work. Wish me luck!

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Great stuff man!

Accounting Degree with some AM/paid media knowledge is about the best setup anyone could have for our modern economy in my opinion...

Are you hoping to work as an account for awhile? (and if so what field?) Or do you want to get into IM fulltime eventually?

Sounds like you have a great plan going forward man! Excited to see your progress!

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Thanks, that's good to know. To be completely honest with you, I have no idea what I really want to do for a living yet! If this business REALLY takes off I'm pretty sure I'd like to go all in on IM. If not, I am torn between pursuing a career in finance or becoming a tax attorney.

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Update:

I restarted some HAKA CPA campaigns and tested three offers on a new geo via SCPM.

Here's the result for the new geo:



One of the offers seem to show promise. Though I think I made a mistake here: I was under the impression that I was receiving little impressions so I changed the bid. Turns out, I was actually looking at the wrong date! Oh well, we'll see how that goes.

This old resurrected CPA campaign is doing well:



I will just let it run itself for a while and see if its possible to create a WL out of it. I checked the traffic source and it was actually at a small loss.

Today was also my first time trying out a WL on CPM. It was only three placements, the results were laughable:



I knew I wasn't going to receive a lot of traffic, but I thought I might get just enough to make a small profit.

FYI: I changed my bid to a higher amount (10-20% more than recommended rate), that still didn't help. Maybe I should just re-test this geo as SCPM and see if I can identify more placements.

There are more HAKA campaigns running, but at the moment they are still deep in the testing phase.

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Another thing I did was upload a bunch of push subscription offers from Zeydoo to my tracker and decided on some geos to target tomorrow. I will now make the $1 guide with a twist my first mission as HAKA is giving me cash flow issues that I can't afford with my limited budget. Don't get me wrong, I see the potential to make money with HAKA and I will run a few campaigns on the side, but I can't keep testing and testing only to wait a full month for the commissions I generated.

I'll give HAKA more attention once I have consistent success with the push subscription offers, as Zeydoo SEEMS to have a better payment schedule.

That is all for today. Thanks for following!

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You should consider getting into the crypto tax space man... there is a massive, massive shortage of accountants that understand crypto... I see some accountants on Twitter (with demonstrable knowledge of defi and all the cutting edge stuff) charging 1000$ for 60 minute consultation calls... its nuts...

Anyway though good work on the follow-along... keep it going... I don't know much about the particular traffic type you're running, but @vortex and @matuloo and others definitely do, so keep updating it and hopefully we'll watch you build up some nice big green campaigns

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Update: Tested a bunch of push subscription offers in UA, all but one are converting like crazy, though payout is low. The only issue is that I forgot to add cost parameter to the link, so I am not seeing the cost estimate for each offer. That will be fixed tonight.

The HAKA campaigns are doing well, (most are green and making less than $1 a day) and the WL from last time already generated a few conversions despite the dismal traffic, which turned the campaign green over the past few days. As I mentioned before, I am hesitant to invest more money into that network since they take so damn long to pay me.

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I honestly feel like I'm not doing enough here. I got exactly 6 active campaigns running which are still in the testing phase. I don't think this is enough to reach my goal. Its hard to dedicate more time to this stuff because of university obligations. Sometimes I got so much homework, projects, and readings, etc. that I got to do for the day that I don't think about AM at all! However, if I can't somehow make the time to get this business off the ground (without sacrificing grades), I see financial trouble in the future.

I got a lot of school work to do tomorrow, but luckily I have no classes. I think that's the perfect extra time to go all in with the push subscription offers and spend $100+ testing a bunch of geos. Hopefully that leads to some breakthroughs. Wish me luck!

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Thanks, I actually have a book on my desk about crypto tax planning, so it is something I am considering! I am so busy right now that I haven't really has the time to look through it though.

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Update:

The good news is those push subscription offers convert like cocaine, I definitely see potential. The bad news is that there were no breakthroughs because I had t pause my campaigns due to some confusion as to why I couldn't see the costs of my campaigns in my tracker. I talked with the ad network and they told me its because they are in the CPA testing phase were I am paying by CPM. I tried adding a CPM cost parameter to the tracking link to see if that helps, but otherwise I'll just let the campaigns run until the testing phase is over and work with the ad network to get this resolved.

So no breakthroughs yet due to technical issues. However, my Thanksgiving break is coming up next week, I will certainly use that free time to run a bunch of new campaigns and maybe even start the following the Finance Survey guide!

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Nice progress!

By "push subscription offers" are you referring to the type in the $1 guide?

Which traffic source are you running these, and which tracker? Let's figure out how to get costs to show in your tracker.


Can you please elaborate on this?

NEVER - I repeat - NEVER spend on AM, what you can't afford to lose.



Amy

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Thanks, yeah I am referring to the $1 guide. I am running those campaigns on CPA goal in Adsterra and my tracker is Binom.

My bad, I was exaggerating a little bit. By "financial trouble" I mean not having a really good source of income during my time in university. So a lot of my savings would be exhausted due to normal living expenses and having no source of income for a while.

So its nothing serious, the worst case scenario is that a big part of my savings will be gone and I'll have to work any job I can get next year. If I can make money with this business then I can picky and just look for a part time job that is related to what I am studying.

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Can you please follow these instructions to see whether you can implement cost postback?

https://adsterra.com/blog/cpm-cpc-cpa-pricing-tokens/

Please let me know if you can't get this to work - we'll figure it out together. (Please don't PM - post here - and THEN we can PM. I normally don't check those.)


Great to know you have a "worst case scenario". I'll leave you alone now regarding that topic.



Amy

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The instructions have been implemented, I will update you tomorrow after my campaigns are approved.

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added price=##COST_CPA## to my landing page link, the costs are still not showing up in my tracker. Maybe I should add price=##COST_CPM##? For the testing phase?

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If you want to have the cost from traffic source in your tracker then you need to include cost token in your traffic source setup.

Usually the flow is like this:

1. you put your Binom camp link into traffic source (this link has cost token)
2. traffic source sends traffic to Binom camp link
3. Binom records the incoming traffic with all tokens and some more parameters (e.g. IP address, browser, OS version etc).
4. Binom redirect the traffic to your landing page (in case you don't do direct link to offer)
5. When landing page is clicked, user will be send to tracker
6. tracker redirects the user to offer
7. when user converts, affiliate network sends conversion to tracker by using your tracker's postback url (that includes the clickID + payout)

I don't know which traffic source you are using.

Binom has several templates. Just setup popular traffic source like propeller and then have a look at all the tokens. That should help you with the setup in case you use a less popular traffic source that is not in the templates.

When you create a test campaign you can open the Binom camp link in your browser and put some actual cost/value for your cost token.

As for the payout from affiliate network you can do a conversion test. Most affiliate networks support that. They can send manually triggered dummy conversions. To do that they only need your campaign link and of course your Binom postback url.

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That's pretty much what I was doing by including the "price=##CPA##" token, but Adsterra (the traffic source) is a bit confusing because it has three cost tokens that you can pick depending on the bid type.

From what I'm told by Adsterra support, the CPA token will only work after the test period, and my campaign is still in the testing period. That's why I am not seeing the costs in my tracker. Only thing left to try now is to insert a CPM parameter and have support change the token in my url after the testing period. In fact, I wonder if I can insert both tokens at once? I'll probably ask them that.

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Just got off the chat with Adsterra support. The CPM token is not working for CPA campaigns so there's pretty much no way to see my campaign costs during the testing phase and my theory is invalid.

Does anyone know any other good traffic networks that accept push subscription offers for pops and have CPA goal?

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Probably you need a script that pulls cost from traffic source and updates Binom.

There is a post on Binom blog that might help you: https://blog.binom.org/en/?p=811

Haven't tried it myself and also dont know if the free version of postman will suffice for that.

You also have option to manually update cost in binom (right click on camp). Of course it is a pain but being totally "cost blind" probably hurts more. Other option is to set fixed cpm rate for start of camp and later switch it to cpa.

As for the traffic sources and pure push subscription offers... most sources don't like that. You can add push sub collection scripts to "normal" sweep landers tho.

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Thank you! I spent multiple hours trying to wrap my head around the instructions on that blog post but it paid off. My tracker now shows an all time ROI of -87% for my main push subscription campaign. I'm not cost blind anymore.

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Yup, unluckily that´s how it is with their cost token.

Sure it´s better than running completely without costs but one big disadvantage is that you only update the total costs that way and not the cost per placement.

For campaigns with fixed bid it´s not that much of a problem but with dynamic bids it´s not that good.

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Update:

Since all of the offers except 2 were converting well, I decided to start multi-geos CPA campaigns for each converting offer to see if I could indentify any profitable/near profitable geos.

I started three CPA campaigns in Adsterra, only one got approved but I'm glad that was the case becuse I ended up spending $60+ in one day!Most of the geos were money pits except one, FI, which had an ROI of -10%, however upon targeting this geo exclusively in the last few hours the ROI is -77%

Testing CPA goals on Adsterra is hella expensive. I'm wondering if it would make more sense to just use CPM campaigns targeting multiple geos to avoid those $50-$100 testing phases.

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As far as I remember Adsterra has only fixed CPM but running Smart/Dynamic CPM is often the better choice.

If you want to run CPA Goal/Smart CPA campaigns you could also check out Propeller, Adcash, Clickadu for example.

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You're right, Adsterra doesn't have SCPM. However, the problem I have with Adcash is that they have minimum CPA goal of $0.10, which is more than most of the payouts for these offers.

EDIT:

I previously wrote in this post that clickadu no longer had a CPA option. I was wrong, I just forgot that I had to click on the popunder option, LOL

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Be careful with smart cpa option from clickadu. It can be really nice for sure. But it also can burn your money pretty damn fast without you knowing.

Problem is that clickadu's front end reporting has quite some delay. Happened to me that everything was looking good and on second day I got a big surprise and saw that all my test budget was used up. Test cost weren't shown on first day, only the cpa cost.

Maybe do a test run with smart cpm first to get an idea how well your offer converts on that source.

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But that´s the problem of many/most platforms with Smart CPA or CPA Goal.

It´s not necessarily about delayed stats but often you spend more money on bad placements as needed because they don´t blacklist fast enough although.

Of course you can still blacklist manually but then you also don´t need to run Smart CPA.

That´s also why I definitely prefer to run tested and stable funnels on Smart CPA, then it doesn´t matter if it costs more in the beginning because longterm it´s worth it.

I have some CPA Goal campaigns running for 6 or 7 months.

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Very interesting, so let me get this straight: CPA Goal campaigns are for when you don't want to do the blacklisting yourself and you just sit back and watch the campaign optimize itself? I started 3 CPA campaigns over the last two days (was busy with exams so I didn't update y'all), they're all in a loss though. One is converting like crazy but the ROI is -88% today, should I just let it run until it fixes itself? (the test phase is done btw)

I can also see from the last two posts that perhaps its cheaper to just run the campaigns on SCPM and do the optimizing myself if I am on a budget. Is this correct?

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Update:



I have two green campaigns now, though they are making extremely small amounts of money. The secod green campaign is still in the CPA testing phase becuase I set the testing budget too low on Clickadu. It's gonna take a while and I'd rather not pause it and start the test all over again.

The last two on the bottom are actually two offers I found on Zeydoo that also happened to be my best performing ones on HAKA. I think I'll stick to Zeydoo now becuase its been a month since I sent my invoice to HAKA and still haven't been paid. Not sure if anyone else is having this problem.

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Lately I have been very busy with school since I am getting ready for final exams and projects, and my thanksgiving break was not as leisurely as I thought it would be. However, I feel like this is not a good amount of campaigns to have if I want to reach my goal. I've been reluctant to start new campaigns partly because of my school obligations, and also because I feel a bit uneasy about investing another significant sum of money.

HAKA really screwed me over in that regard. I was hoping to use the proceeds from them to test additional geos for their offers and get the ball rolling in regards to revenue. Now my only option is to take money out of my savings, and this would be probably be the last of my AM budget for the year, as I need the rest of my savings for my living expenses next year.

So here's what I'll do:

1. I will take out the money I need to make this work (withing the budget).
2. I will step up with my time management skills. I know there are people who have taken the same hard classes I have taken and still somehow made time to play sports, join clubs, go to parties, etc. Why can't I make more time for AM? I think I just gotta learn to always be "on".
3. I will stick to Zeydoo for now until I make about $250 in weekly profit from them to avoid cash flow problems.
4. I will stick to CPA campaigns while testing offers/geos. Just to keep things simple.

This is my last stand for the year, wish me luck.

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Yes, that´s basically correct.

Only issue is that it´s not a guaranteed money maker and that you still can lose quite some money there.

I recommend to use CPA Goal only for tested and converting funnels.

You can use it for testing as well, I do it myself, but then you have to be aware that it can become pretty pricey when you don´t have enough winners.

Hard to tell, it also depends on what and where you run the campaign.

-88% in a small geo with low volume can be very hard to compensate.
On the other hand -88% in a huge geo with high volume can work, especially when the campaign runs stable for long time.

Yes and no

Often it can be cheaper to test on SCPM and you also have much more control then for optimizing and scaling.

CPA Goal campaigns can also be very good so I wouldn´t stick with just one bid option.

Test on SCPM and when you have a winner use all options you have to get most out of your campaigns.

Did you contact your AM about it and did you reach the minimum revenue for payment?

That´s not good, it´s probably one of the things that every beginner has to deal with but you just have to get over it.

Fear of losing/investing money can produce such a pressure that it can lead to emotional driven decisions instead of pure data based decisions.

Every person is different and has its own ways to manage the time

I would worry about such stuff later, the beginning is the hardest part and there I would dedicate as much time as possible to learn everything.

When you run enough campaigns you will develope your own flow anyway, many time consuming tasks will become much easier and faster.

Important is to always keep an eye on breaks to stay healthy.

But keep in mind, although testing manually is more work it´s often also cheaper and you learn much more about optimizing and scaling campaigns when you do it manually.

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Makes sense. For the initial test though, I should just set the SCPM to the maximum bid to get exposed to the best zones right? Because I noticed in one of my offers I had higher conversions on CPA than when I set the SCPM bid to 20% above average CPM bid.

Yes, I reached the minimum threshold and the first time I bugged him about it, he said he had they were facing a payment delay from carrier side, so there was no payment schedule. I contacted him again a few days ago and I was told there still is no payment schedule. I don't if this is common with small affiliate networks, maybe I am overreacting but I know I can't afford those kinds of cash flow issues at this moment. I had no issue getting paid last time I sent an invoice.

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You are right that high bids open more and better zones but mostly you don´t need to set maximum bids, it´s enough to set the bid at this point where you would only pay more when you bid higher without getting more volume?

Sounds complicated? Here is a graphic that explains it better



You can see that after the red line it´s only the bid that increases but not the volume.

Yup, that happens.

When you run a SCPM campaign without a good whitelist you will buy traffic from all kind of placements, good ones and bad ones.

The CPA Goal campaigns run with a whitelist of good converting placements so that you can pretty fast spot if a campaign has potential or not.

This has the advantage that you receive high quality traffic directly in the beginning.

The downside however is that you often have very high bids in the beginning, sometimes that high that the campaign can´t even be profitable with such bids.

But that´s ok because in this stage it´s not about being profitable but rather to check if the campaign converts or not.

This is why CPA Goal campaigns can lead to quite some losses, when they only receive the expensive trafficboost in the beginning but don´t convert good enough to make good for it later.

They are no small affliate netwoek, they are direct advertisers = offer owners.

Unluckily it can always happen that something doesn´t go according to plan but I never had bad experience with Haka and also didn´t read about serious issues from anyone else.

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Ah, that clears things up. Thank you!

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Keep us updated how it goes

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UPDATE:
Sorry for the long wait, it is final exam season and I've barely been able to think about AM. Here are the stats for the past three days:

That first green campaign is a push subscription offer which finished the CPA testing phase a little while ago. I am trying to think about how to scale this, right now I have set up a CPM campaign targeting the same zones and I also wrote down which traffic segments seem to be converting so I can target them on other traffic networks which may not have a CPA option. Is this the right idea when it comes to scaling CPA campaigns?

As for the other green campaign, it is also a CPA goal campaign for a non-push subriction offer but I believe I set the budget too low and it still may be in the testing phase. So I'll just leave it alone for now. I might decide to start a proper CPA goal campaing for this offer on Adsterra if it keeps showing promise.

The other two converting campaings are SCPM and I am attempting to optimize them myself, though its a challange becuase I feel like its taking forever to reach a break even point. I'll take another another look at the optimization guides of the 40 day tutorial and see if I am following the right method.

Here's how I've been optimizing my SCPM campaigns:
- I cut out any zone in a loss of 2x payout, which takes forever to see because these are small geos which spend my budget slowly
- I have been using the kill-whitelist calculator to identify any other zones that should be blocked as well those wich could be whitelisted. So far I haven't found more than 3 whitelist recommendations per campaign, so I am not doing any whitelisting until I see at least 5 whitelist recommendations.
-I look for traffic segments which are profitable or simply have a high conversion rate and target those.

Let me know if I am doing something wrong please.

Thanks for following!

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Do you run the SCPM campaigns in same geos as the CPA Goal campaigns?

You don´t need a calculator for it, don´t make it harder than needed

Placement isn´t converting? -> Blacklist
Placement is converting and is profitable? -> Whitelist
Placement is converting but is not profitable? -> Run it with lower bid

In 99% of my campaigns I set the targeting and then only optimize by BL/WL placements.

I don´t target by browsers or OS versions or such stuff because in by far most cases the elements with highest volume are also profitable.

When a specific browser or OS version is in loss but is only receiving few % of the traffic I don´t care about it.
As long as the biggest elements are profitable I just keep it running.

See here for OS versions



As longs as the OS versions which bring the most volume are profitable I don´t care if versions with only a small fraction of the overall volume are not profitable.

For browsers you can see it even better



ChromeMobile and Chrome bring about 97% or so of all traffic, optimizing by blacklisting other browsers wouldn´t make a difference for overall performance.

It´s important to spend time on tasks that can make a difference, optimizing by such low impact elements doesn´t make a real difference for total performance.

Then it´s much better to spend the time with testing something else, more offers etc that can lead to a new winning campaign = high impact on oeverall performance.

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UPDATE:

Sorry for going AWOL, just finished up final exam season. I am happy to announce I've found my fist profitable campaign for push notifications! It's making anywhere between $3.50 - 6.00 a day. I'm waiting for my AM to approve my lead quality so my lead cap is lifted and I scale this SOB

I also ran a few quick tests between my long study sessions, unfortunately those didn't work out because that offer was apparantly violating the traffic source guidelines, and I found this out after spending $50 + trying to optimize my campaign.

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Nope, but those SCPM campaigns are in geos such as SV, CR, etc.

You know, the way you explain makes a lot more sense because that is pretty much what I did to find this green campaign. I just found a few placements that were consistently converting and profitable and targeted only those. I get little volume but its definately making money. I could probably test more placements but this seems like a good strategy to make a quicker, although smaller buck.

I'm curious at what point do you decide to give up on a placement that isn't converting? 0.5-1x payout in spending?

By setting the targeting, do you mean the targeting required by the AM network for the offer?

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Great, congrats

It´s always nice to read that the stuff I tell works

There is no strict rule for me, it depends on a lot of different factors for example

- Test campaign or scale campaign
- Available volume
- Offer payout

In a scale campaign for example I usually cut at latest 1x payout, in a test campaign it can run longer when I have to splittest LPs or offers.

When you have lots of volume available you can cut more aggressive and still have enough volume left.
When there´s only low volume available anyway it´s often better to don´t cut too aggressive, otherwise your campaign risks to only cripple because you have not enough traffic available anymore.

Yup, set a targeting depending on offer requirements but also for example mobile vs desktop.

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UPDATE:

Happy new year everyone. I got some bummer news: that profitable campaign had to end because the advertiser didn't like the lead quality. I attempted to test that same offer on PopAds but I haven't had the same luck making it profitable. That geo is just more expensive on PopAds for some strange reason.

I've realized that I actually just got lucky with that one campaign and there is still a lot more that I got to learn. To that end, I've decided to begin the new year working with push subscriptions only since the payouts are low and it doesn't take long to realize if the campaign is worth it or not. It also helps that I can test them on a very small budget on PopAds. I can afford to invest more money in this business, but at this point its probably best for me to refrain from investing large sums until I know what the hell I am doing.

Here are my stats as of this month (January):

Please ignore the unhighlighted campaign as that is bungled up with some smartlink stats

the BR - Mobile campaign is my attempt at re-creating that profitable campaign on PopAds and it failed massively. So far I haven't found any major placements that can be whitelisted but I did blacklist at least 100 placements that were in a loss of 2x payout. There were also some major placements that were converting well but they just couldn't turn a profit even with me lowering the bid by 50% two times. This was my first attempt ever at optimizing via different bids so maybe I did something stupid, who knows. I thought the payout of $0.01 was too low to try bidding higher.

the SG campaign seems to have a two placements that can be whitelisted and some others that are converting but in a loss. The main issue that I have with it is that I feel like it isn't converting well enough. Today I only saw 3 conversions, for example. It seems to only convert during the morning time for some reason.

It looks like these push subscription offers just come with heavy losses no matter what. It also seems that at some point I just HAVE to attempt to optimize via different bids because I am cutting so many placements and not finding enough green ones. Would you guys suggest to keep running these campaigns and cutting placements at 1x payout?

I also wonder if I am better off using these offers only to identify good placements and sending that traffic to a smartlink since the payouts are higher.

I know what my new years resolution is: to learn how to optimize campaings properly once and for all! I will keep you posted.

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It depends.

It´s definitely not easy to run them for high profit but it can work for some profits.

Check out my thread HERE

It´s some time ago already but there you can see a bit how to run such offers.

No, I would only use a smartlink for stuff like backbutton traffic, non-targeted traffic etc.

In by far most cases single ffers work better.

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I just re-read this and your previous explanation on this thread regarding CPA goal. I can now see how runnning these types of offers on CPA would make sense if you are split testing a bunch at a time and cutting the poorly performing ones in a single campaign. I think I was overthinking how to run these offers; I should have done exactly as you did on that campaign guide and ran these offers on CPA goal.

The way I was doing it was just setting me up to waste a bunch of time cutting placements manually with no good odds of turning a profit.

I think I should just make a bigger list of offers to test. I know I should apply to Clickdealer and Gotzha, are there any other networks you'd recommend that have push subcription offers? I wanted to stick to one network but screw it, finding profitable campaigns is more important.

Also, assuming one of these CPA campaigns was profitable, would you run these offers on CPM/CPC traffic sources for scaling? or would you just stick to CPA sources and test more geos instead of scaling to other traffic networks?

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Wasting time is one of the most common mistakes.

In the test stage it´s all about efficiency.

Don´t waste time on campaigns/offers that are not worth it.

Test fast, sort out fast and then focus and spend time on campaigns with potential.

For Push sub offers check out Clickdealer and Zeydoo.

Finding a winning campaign is the hardest part so when you find one you should milk it before you do something else.

First scale on the original source (different ad formats, different bid types, different targeting if offer allows is, maybe different bids).
Then you can run some quick tests to check for potential on other platforms.

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Just got approved on ClickDealer, the push subscription offers are converting well but I am having two problems:

1) My conversions aren't showing up on my tracker (Binom). I am setting up the offer links as so:

https://domain/?a=159675&o=87956&c=0&mt=18&s2={clickid}&s3={traff icsource}

2) My main traffic source is rejecting my campaigns due to malware issues. I contacted my AM and he says I need to use a cloaker. Is there any that you guys would recommend?

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Does your postback URL is setup correctly to send the converting click ID back to your tracker?

Do you know how a cloaker works?

If not I would recommend to first read a bit about that topic, otherwise it can do more harm than good

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In order to get conversions reported from AM network to your tracker, the network needs your global postback.

In Clickdealer click on Tools--> Global postback

There you put in your postback with the correct tokens. Should look like this YOURAWESOMETRACKERDOM/click.php?cnv_id=#s2#&payout=#price#

You can get the postback link from your traffic source settings in Binom. If you have used the clickdealer template tokens should be right.

It is way easier to chose a traffice source that supports such offers. Propeller will not but you can ask other sources if they support pure push sub collection offers.

I have no experience in cloaking but people say that for the setup you really need to know what you are doing. Also a cloaker does not come free of charge.

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Ah, there it is. I set the wrong token for cnv_id

Nope, this is the first time I look into what this is. You guys have convinced otherwise though. I will ask my other two cpa traffic sources if they support push subscription offers. I really wish I could get the deposit back from this traffic source though lol

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UPDATE:

**Following the $1 Guide With A Twist: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthread.php?47892-the-1-guide-with-a-twist


So far I have tested four geos, ID, IN, BR, and RU. I still haven't seen any offer make a profit. Some of them are in less of a loss than others and seem like they could be optimized to make a profit, but still, I'm seeing losses of -50%+

Here are some stats below from past 2-3 days. Keep in mind I am running these campaigns on CPA goal (on Adsterra), none of which are done with their testing phase and I haven't touched any placements manually.

I am cutting offers which don't convert after 10x payout

ID ( 2 days running, CPA testing phase is 44% done):

I paused all offers except the one you see on top, thinking it was the best one, but it barely converted today. Maybe I did this prematurely and should have kept it running with the other top performing offers.

RU (3 days running, CPA testing phase is 7% done):



This seems like the most hopeful geo so far and one of these offers was actually in the green today, but volume is very slow and the campaign isn't even 1/4 of the way done with its testing phase. No offer has been paused at all.

I won't show BR and IN becuase I mixed up the campagin urls and now the stats are all bungled up. BR was the lowest performing geo and IN converted pretty well but it was at massive loss. Both of those tests were canceled.


I got two n00b questions:

When running a CPA campaign split testing a bunch of push sub offers, do you run each offer until 10x payout before cutting them or do you cut them once they've receieved some traffic and they still haven't converted (for example 500 clicks)?

Should I wait until the test is finished before picking a winning offer?


Thanks for following!

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Just a quick update: I just cancelled the ID and RU tests because traffic dropped dramatically despite it being 15:00 - 18:00 in those countries. RU was showing a clear trend of receiving less and less traffic every day. Keep in mind I had all offers running though because none were past 10x payout in adspend. Maybe this just answered my first question.

Well, at least now I have a good idea of which offers convert.

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Have you created the postback in ClickDealer?

You need to go there:
https://partners.clickdealer.com/aff...obal-postback/

And fill the field "Global S2S postback URL" at the top with something like this:

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These geos have shitloads of traffic. It will take you ages or a lot of money to find the good zones. With a very good and broad converting offer it can be less of a pain.

I would not use a cpa or cpa goal campaign for testing if you are not absolutely familiar with how the respective algo behaves.

But coming back to your case....

For high volume geos like ID or IN 10x spend will by far not be sufficient. Let's say you have a 0.10 USD payout offer. So you would buy traffic for 1 USD which is literally nothing in such geos. You only will get traffic from very few placements/zones.

Next thing is that spending 10x on a 0.02 USD offer is quite different if the payout would be 2.00 USD. Of course it makes a difference when you buy more traffic. The more you buy the more representative your results will be. In the example shown the difference in test spend acc. to 10x payout rule would be factor 100.

When to cut a cpa goal campaign depends a lot on how it behaves. Some algos give you the very best traffic in the beginning. So if conversion do not come early in masses it is better to stop it. Other algos start with very low bids and then gradually increase. In that case it would make sense to let it run longer and having a close look on how it improves. And then there are algos which just give you RON traffic without stopping non converting zones quickly enough....

Reading this feels like you are too attached to your offers. What you need is an offer that converts really well and that doesn't need that much of optimization.

Such offers do really exists. But of course they are hard to find and you need to test many offers to finally find one of them.

You can increase your chances with testing in rather cheap geos that are not too big. LATAM and some African geos can work quite well in that regard. Aim for 0.10 to 1 USD payout offers and you have a fair chance that 10x test rule will work.

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Thank you but I already resolved that issue. I had set a wrong token and that's why my conversions weren't showing up at first.

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As larsometer said it depends on several factors.

In big geos with low payout offers the 10x payout is often too less so it´s better to spend more money there.

When you have lots of volume available just get quickly rid of non-converting placements (1 payout in loss for example) and run the campaign for a bit.

Even for push sub offers with only few cent payout I would keep the campaign running for at least few Dollar to get an idea if it works or not.

It also depends.

When all offers convert more or less similar then it makes sense to wait but when you see that a specific offer is outperforming the others by alot then you can just stop the test and focus on this offer.

When it keeps converting you can still send a small % of the traffic to the other offers to make sure you did the right choice

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Thank you gentlemen, you have cleared things up for me pretty well!

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UPDATE:

Ove the past few weeks I have been running push sub offers from Zeydoo, ClickDealer, and recently two offer from Mobidea. In total I have tested about 32 offers

The results are rather disappointing but here's a look:

These were all CPA campaigns were I was split testing pretty much all of ClickDealer's offers and whichever offer from Zeydoo were allowed for that geo.

Here's what I did in case anyone can spot a mistake I'm making:

• I ran every campaign at a CPA goal of 0.01-0.03, because payouts are low
• For a while I wasn't cutting placements, but once I found the best offer for that geo I cut at 2x payout. I now realize from reading other threads that I should have cut at 1x
• I let every offer run until about 500 clicks, if I didn't see a conversion then, I cut the offer. I did not do this, however, for the geos I have screenshoted below

There seemed to be a few opportunities, for example here's NZ (was accidentaly mixed up with AU campaign)


This was run for a short period of time before I paused it. These single conversions could just have been lottery conversions but the offer with 3 conversions looks like it could be optimized towards profitability. The second to last column lists the average payout btw.

Here's FI:



Very similar story. I was getting very little volume here and paused it fairly quickly. I was split testing pretty much all offers at once in every geo and I realize now that was probably a mistake since not every geo has as much volume as BR or IN and the test will take forever.

Why did pause these two campaigns? I was a bit demoralized to be honest and seeing all these losses I thought I should take a break for a few days and run the things I did by this thread.

Anyway, here's what I learned so far from my attempt at running push sub offers:

The offers I have suck. After looking at stats in this campaign, I have come up with a list of four top performing offers, which aren't great, but just decent to run and can consitenly produce minimal losses or a small profit at first. And they don't have a lead cap.

I am thinking of running really quick tests (pausing the campaing at $2 of adspend if it shows no promise) of these four offers across different geos and seeing if they can fit in anywhere. $2 x 10 geos should cost about $20 if every campaign fails, which isn't a terrible loss for me. What do you think of this idea?

Also, I ran some Haka offers since they paid what I was owed. Here are the results:



The profit/loss per day may be inacurrate because I didn't take into account the traffic source's timezone when updating the cost, but my tracker showed one day of loss, two green days, followed by two days of loss with zero conversions, which at this point made me pause the campaign. After updating the costs through postman, I only saw one day of profit.

Any guesses on why performance dropped off a cliff? I think it could have something to do with the fact that I was letting the algorithim do all the work instead of cutting placements myself. I also saw that the offer only yielded profit during certain hours of the day. I should have probably day parted but at this time I wanted to wait a few days for more stats to come in and let the CPA algorithim do the work.

That is all, let me know what you think.

Also, do let me know if I am not writing clearly enough.

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