My first profits with POP traffic. (16)
Hello guys,
I am learning AM through Vortex 40 days Tutorial right now. I will be posting my progress here and will be asking some questions as well.Will be happy if receive some guidance from more experienced members of the forum. But first a little about myself and my experience.
I am working a regular job 9 to 5 , actually 9 to 5:30 . That being said on weekdays I don't have much time to devote to AM, so most of the time i will spend learning and working on AM will be on the weekends and in the night of weekdays.
Back in 2012/2013 when i was in University I tried AM but stopped it due to lack of money to invest. I even have had 2 lucky conversions with a payout of $4.50 so total $9 of revenue using 7search as traffic source and the offer was from Peerfly. I don't even know if these two are still in the business nowadays.
These days I had a few Haka campaigns running on ProppelerAds and actually had my first 2 conversions. Unfortunately the tracker didn't show any stats because I didn't change the tokens in Haka offer link. I stopped the campaign because I spend in traffic costs 10x the payout of the offer.
My goal with this Follow along is not to make big bucks, but to learn the basics of AM with hopefully not spending all my savings. For now I plan to invest only $2k, and after spending that amount will decide if it is worth to invest more.
Until now I have spend $40 on traffic and got 2 conversions with payout of $0,35 and total profit of $0,7. This weekend i launched 3 campaigns but stopped them after 1 hour because the stats were crazy. Haka's stats showed around 1k clicks and propellerAds showed more than 9k for the 3 campaigns.
Today I will launch new campaign. The offer will be form HAKA and the traffic source will be PropellerAds.
GEO: China /It's a developing country, and is ranked №2 of top Geo report in HAKA/
LP: NO, I will direct link.
Offer: I chose the offer that previously made me 2 conversions which were in FR geo. The payout is 0,35. Here i have only one concern. When i check the offer page it's in english. How will the chinese respond to that?!
BID: Recommended bid is $1.29 so adding 20% my actual bid will be $1.548
That's for now. Will give an update how the campaign is going later.
Hello ivelin29!
Looking forward to your progress! And don't forget to ask questions, we love to help!
Cheers,
Matej.
Hello Guys,
Here is an update of the last campaign I launched.
1. The campaign reached 10x payout /10x$0.35 = $3.50/ and I stopped it. For that amount of traffic i made one conversion.
2. I noticed there is a big difference in impressions stats in traffic source, aff. network and tracker.
- PropellerAds shows that the campaign received 5257 impressions/clicks
- Haka shows 2058 clicks.
-
Is this is normal, or i messed up tracking or something else? Somewhere in the forum was stated that 20% clickloss is normal but this is way more.
3. Next steps: This offer actually converts for the third time for me, so I will give it a try with different geos because this is the only offer that converted. I have tried 4 more, all from Haka but with no conversions.
Usually this problem happens when you don't have exactly same time zones on tracker and propeller.
Select stats for 7 days both on tracker and on propeller. If the difference stays same then it was not time zone.
If you run a camp in China then the traffic loss actually could be way above average. Similar thing happened to me with CN on propeller once.
If you don't see such high clickloss for propeller traffic in other geo then it seems to be a geo problem.
If you see high clickloss also in other geos for propeller traffic then check your DNS settings. There should not be double A record.
Some clickloss is normal but there might be some setup problem too, please check this thread to see if it might be related: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...not-correspond
The A record problem that @larsometer mentioned is being discussed there.
Hi Guys,
It's been a while since the last update but i decided to take some time learning how to use landing pages because direct linking doesn't seem to work for me with click2sms i am running. I am not completely new to programing and have basic knowledge with html, css, javascript, bootstrap and jquery. I also constantly read various threads in this forum to speed up the process of learning AM.
Anyways, yesterday I decided to launch a new campaign to test the concept that the highest bidder receives the best quality traffic. I chose as a geo Portugal which i try for the first time with click2sms offer that has converted for me a few times in different geos.
On PropellerAds with Automatic bidding enabled on SmartCPM pricing model the suggested bid was $5.063. When i disable automatic bidding to manually enter bid it shows a window with highest winning bid that is $8,70.
Here comes the interesting part, I decided that I need the best quality traffic so i set my bid to $10 which is twice the suggested bid and even higher than the highest winning bid. Then i generated 7,349 impressions without a single conversion 
.
But the mysterious part for me is that even though i set my bid so high my win rate is only 28% 
So i guess my plan didn't work and i didn't receive the best quality traffic. 
Any ideas what i did wrong?
Here is a screenshot:
On average you paid 1.33 cpm. When you look into your zone stats you will see different bids.
Probably Propeller gave you a bit of everything from what was available at given time.
In general the better a zone converts the more are people willing to pay for it. Of course the earning per click need to be higher than the cost per click. Otherwise it is no fun.
You can buy traffic from the most expensive zones and get no conversions when your offer is not good.
Is a bit like buying high octane fuel. Porsche drivers will be very happy with it and thus willing to pay a lot. But if you put same fuel in an old Volkswagen Beatle you won't see any magic.
About win rate:
Propeller does not necessarily give you 100% of traffic for a zone even if you are the max bidder. However the higher you bid the higher your share will be.
Also it can make a difference whether you bid with smart cpm or cpm. Once you have found a strong zone you can test for yourself and get an idea how things work.
As for the bidding... might be good to have a look at the 40 day tutorial. Many things are explained there.
On top of what larsometer posted above, let me add a few more notes regarding the price estimates in propeller, or any other traffic network.
You always need to take the numbers with a grain of salt, especially when looking at the maximums.
Not everyone uses the same settings, always keep this in mind.
Some people run dayparted, some have small budgets, some target a specific segments and on top of that, some only target specific placements.
So there might be some buyer that only wants Orange carrier traffic in the UK and his campaign is set to run during the prime time and only on a bunch of placements that they know converts well for them. For this specific and very targeted visits, they are willing to pay an extremely high bid and Propellers estimator will use this number when calculating the max big.
While in reality, only a small fraction of the overall volume get's sold at this price point. This is why your overall CPM will always be lower than your bid even though you bid very high.
Another problem, while setting a high bid will open the top placements for you and that's what you want, you will also instantly become one of the top bidders on the placements that nobody wants and most already have them blocked.
So by setting a high big, you will not only get part of the top traffic, your volumes of poor placements traffic will increase too.
This is why it's a good idea to only go for the highest bids once you have a well optimized campaigns, even better when you already have the worst placements blocked too (which is hard since new ones are added all the time).
First of all: Doing this type of experimentation can help you understand how the platform works! This can give you a serious advantage over the competition. So please never ever stop testing!
Regarding bidding - here are some points that may help:
-Propellerads' traffic has pretty good quality in general. They don't really have junk traffic, so there's less of a need to worry about bidding too low and ending up with "bottom of the barrel" junk traffic that nobody wants.
Therefore: Don't be afraid to start with really low bids! If the offer converts, you can always play with bids further. Sure, the traffic volume you get can be slow, but you can really save on test budget by bidding low if you're willing to wait longer for testing to finish. And you can start new campaigns while waiting for data to come in.
-Yes bidding high will get you better traffic in general, because your competition will bid higher on zones/placements that convert better for them, in hopes of getting more volume from those zones. So if you're bidding lower you may not get traffic from the best zones.
However, beware of which zones you're targeting. It's one thing to KNOW which zones are converting well and bid high for those. It's another thing if you're targeting all zones and have no idea which ones convert well.
When you target all zones with a high bid, you inevitably overbid for lower-quality zones that aren't worth the money.
So one of the bidding strategies I explained in the 40-day tutorial is to start at low or average bid, wait for data, then cut some zones. Then increase the bid, wait for data, cut some more zones and so on.
Feel free to skip ahead to the lesson on bidding. If you have further questions then, feel free to ask!
Hope that helps! Happy testing!
Amy
Hello,
I am having an offer that gave me 2 conversions within the first hour of the campaign running. My first thought were that i finally found a winner and that I will have my first green campaign. However, now the situation is a bit different and I need your help to decide what to do: to stop the campaign or to try to optimize it.
I am direct linking this offer because i want to have at least a few profitable campaigns direct linking before adding landing page as an additional variable to test.
The campaign was green in the beginning but now looks like this:
Do you thing it has potential to end up profitable after some optimization. So far i blacklisted some zones that have a lot of impressions and no conversions.
I blacklisted those zones yesterday but now i see there are more zones with more than 200 impressions which I may blacklist.
Another thing I did is to increase the bids of the converting zones.
Any suggestions how to proceed next? I will appreciate any advice.
You have two options:
Option 1:
Let the camp run for a few days. You could sustain a loss of -50% for some days. With a bit of luck you have some zones that have several conversions and can be used for WL. Also it is possible that you just need to weed out some bad zones to improve your results.
In my option you cut zones a bit too early. Your offer payout it 0.64 USD. Also it seems that there is not too much volume in the geo you run. So it might be better to not cut too aggressively.
Option 2:
Stop the test and start a new camp (both on tracker and traffic source) including landers and split test with direct linking.
Depending on the offer adding a landing page can make a HUGE difference. In the best case you will be promptly green without any optimization.
In the worst case it is not better than direct linking. Then you could just go back to your initial direct linking only camp.
I would take larsometer's advice and go with option 2 :
Stop the test and start a new camp (both on tracker and traffic source) including landers and split test with direct linking.
Depending on the offer adding a landing page can make a HUGE difference. In the best case you will be promptly green without any optimization.
In the worst case it is not better than direct linking. Then you could just go back to your initial direct linking only camp.
Early conversions happen rather often, the art is to find and run campaigns that keep converting over time.
Can you please tell your targeting settings for the campaign (geo, OS, connection and such stuff)?
That way it´s easier to see how much room there is for optimization before you optimize it do death
Apart from that I agree with the other replies that using landing pages can often work much better so it´s a good idea to test with LPs as well.
Thank you guys for the advice. I really appreciate it. You guys suggest that I should use a LP, but honestly I am still not technically prepared for LP. I need to read and learn Vortex tutorial about setting up hosting and CDN. Then I am planning to make adplexity account and during the free trial to rip some landers, because at this time I prefer to invest those $150 for traffic, instead of Adpelxity subscription.
I now realize more and more that without LP you are losing a big deal. If i have to confess i really was exited creating campaigns and was avoiding learning about landing pages. Now I will definitely devote my time on learning that stuff. At the same time I plan to launch 1 campaign every two days with 1 click flow direct linking to the offer. Just for testing. Will stop the campaign if i get 2k impressions without conversions or reach $5 spend.
About my campaign: I stopped the campaign for now because ROI got worse. Here are the stats:
Cost: $19.21;
Revenue: $5.12
ROI: -73.34%
Since I got 8 conversions from 8 different zones, I launched a new campaign with whitelist of those 8 zones and set the bid to $25. Just curious what will happen..
OS: All;
Connection: 3G/LTE
Carrier: Telcel
Offer Flow: 1 Click
Plan to test 3-5 offers every day.
That way you get much faster used to the process and it also helps to find a winner faster.
1 conversion can also be just a lottery conversion, that´s why I prefer to use only placements with more conversions in a WL.
In case you didn´t see it, HERE I share a WL for Propeller Ads push traffic.
Maybe you can use it as well
As for which offers would be more suited for direct-linking - @twinaxe can probably give you better advice as he's the push expert.
For example, a lot of the click2sms offers I've seen can be run direct-linked - the "download now" type of offers.Worth mentioning though is that knowing how to prepare landing pages can open up a lot more options for you in terms of what types of offers you can promote. So it would be worth spending time to learn.
Amy
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