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Hannah's Wild West Follow Along - We gonna get a stampede goin' on in 'ere (52)

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A stampede of money, that is! This ain't your momma's rodeo, so hang tight!

Hello and welcome to my follow along! Before I get down and dirty with the specifics (that's all the cowboy/western references I'll make, I promise) I'm going to give a bit of insight as to my inspiration for the campaign, and what I hope to gain from it.

I'm definitely one of those people that has a lot of little campaigns going on at once. I don't really like the mini $10/day campaigns, but generally if something makes me $50-$100 a day, I'm happy. I like having big numbers of small campaigns in that range going on at once. I've had campaigns doing thousands of dollars a day in profit, but it's just not my bread and butter.

However, I'm finding myself increasingly unhappy with the way I run campaigns. One of the major things I learned from this forum is the beauty of campaigns that do $x,xxx - $xx,xxx per day. Mr Green's posts in particular, where he mentions that he won't touch a campaign if he doesn't think he can scale to 5 figures a day in particular (source).

So now we get to my ultimate goal for this contest: I'm going to try and break completely out of my comfort zone and run a broad campaign that I hope to be able to scale to $x,xxx per day easily.

Now, I have my goal, and I need a traffic source where I can achieve that goal. Media Buying has become a personal favourite of mine recently. I've been tackling SiteScout, and it's been good to me. So I've decided to stick with SiteScout as my traffic source for this campaign. However, rather than focus on the English speaking markets, I've decided to go international.

This might fail miserably. I might come crawling back without a single conversion and change tactics completely, trying to tap in on that sweet, sweet English speaking population. But, I like international traffic. The competition is generally a lot lower and I find it so much easier to test.

I've narrowed this down to two countries, two targets and four offers. This is for a couple of reasons:

1) I'm assuming that trying to get a broad campaign to work well is going to be a lot harder than getting a targetted one, so I'm going to be splitting my traffic between different offers using the "throw shit at a the internet and see what sticks" method.

2) I don't really have experience in these countries, I don't know what to expect, and so splitting between two verticals doubles my chances of at least something getting conversions, and I can focus on whichever one is obviously doing better after I've got some data.

Spain:

I will be running my ads on the website cuantarazon.com

I will be running Celldorado ES with Adsimilis, with a payout of 6.40E, or around 7.85USD as of right now. They have a fair few different landing pages, so I'm going to be split testing a few to see what works and what doesn't.

I will be split testing with Travian ES, also with Adsimilis, with a payout of $1.28

Cuantarazon.com seems to be basically the Spanish equivalent of those internet meme sites like icanhazcheeseburger or failblog. They'll be browsing the internet looking for entertainment, so hopefully a game or the chance of winning a free iphone will be the sort of thing that appeals to this demographic. The site gets 7 million impressions daily, with an average CPM bid of $0.04, so I'll be bidding $0.20 to start with, and adjust accordingly.

Brazil:

I will be running my ads on the site ebuddy.com, which is a chat website. Ebuddy gets over 14 million impressions daily on SiteScout. The payouts on the offers are way lower, but the potential for huge volume is too big to pass up. According to SiteScout, the average CPM bid on this site in Brazil is $0.07. I'm going to start off by bidding at $0.25 and see if I get much traffic, then adjust accordingly.

I'm going to be running Travian BR, Adsimilis, payout of $0.41 per conversion.

I'll be split testing with Cartoon Yourself PIN Submit from EWA, with a payout of $0.83 per lead.

I like to do all of my tracking inside of the SiteScout platform, so that's how I'll be doing the tracking.

Here are screenshots of all of the offers:

Celldorado ES:



Travian ES:



Travian BR:



Cartoon Yourself BR:



Now for the ads!

The ads are probably going to be my first update. I've sent the text out for translation from onehourtranslation.com, but they're not going to be ready in time. So hopefully tomorrow morning I'll have my translations and I'll be able to upload my ads.

I'm also going to try and apply everything from this post.

I'm very, very guilty of ignoring angles, and I'm sure it's a detriment to my business.

I should also add that I'm going to start by direct linking, just to see if I get any conversions. If I do, I'm going to throw in a landing page or three to the mix and see if I can improve my overall EPC.

I have never run these verticals before, and never run anything in these countries either. I'm hoping to learn a lot from this, and hopefully get some campaigns generating some serious cash. It'll definitely be a big learning curve, I'm expecting that, but hopefully it will end up with some big rewards at the end too.

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Update #1

Well, I started getting traffic to ebuddy.com (Brazil) almost immediately after the ads got approved. All of my cuantarazon.com (Spain) ads have also been approved, but that seems to be one of the ones that needs additional whitelisting, as I haven't bid on any impressions yet. Traffic generally starts within a day on SiteScout when this happens so I'm not worried.

Anyways, I ended up with two completely different problems for both campaigns.

Travian:



As you can see, the major problem here is CTR. You might notice that this isn't even every ad I started running: this is all of the ads that got at least one click after 5000 impressions. The rest came up blank, so I've already archived them. With a campaign like this, a $0.33 CPC is just not sustainable, so I'm going to have to work on the ads.

I'll come up with a new set to run tomorrow.

I will also as per suggestions start a landing page. Merci beaucoup Julien for the offer, I think I've got the same template though from Justin Dupre so I will play with that as one of them!

Cartoon Yourself:



Here we have a completely different problem! I'm getting more than enough clicks, really cheap (some of the ads are costing me 3 cents/click) but zero conversions.

I'm going to start to tackle this problem by running a landing page, so I'm going to be working on that tonight. I'll split test two landing pages (thanks for the advice on doing this everyone) and I'm also going to hunt for some more similar offers in case this offer in general is just a piece of poo.

So in conclusion:

Travian BR needs better ads. CTR is terrible. Zero conversions. Will create new ads and split test landing pages.

Travian ES has no data so far.

Cartoon Yourself BR needs a landing page and/or better offer. Tons of clicks, no conversions.

Celldorado ES has no data so far.

Update for the Spain campaign July 11th: Apparently even though it's still showing up in their system, for whatever reason cuantarazon no longer is available on SiteScout, which is why I wasn't getting traffic. Bummer. I'll try and replace that part of the campaign with something else later today.

As a side note, I have created the landing pages for the Cartoon Yourself Brazil offer, they're further down the page if you want to see them (I'm not throwing the big files in my update post in the interest of keeping it readable)

Update #2: Houston, we have conversions

Unfortunately, this mission is a little bit like Apollo 13: we got into space, we came up near the moon, then a system failed and we had to come back to earth. The problem: conversion pixel didn't fire.

But, I have two conversions!!



So it seems the landing pages definitely made a difference. Nowhere near profit yet, but we'll see what tomorrow brings.

What I'm wondering is why the conversion pixel didn't fire. I've used them plenty of times before with EWA, and they've always been fine. Does anyone know if there's something different I have to do with the landing page to make the pixel fire? I have done landing pages with SiteScout before, but not in a couple of months, and I'm wondering if I forgot a step.

Anyways, my CTR to the landing page is awesome. Like really, really, almost-too-good-to-be-true awesome.



Here's the data for individual ads:



Things that are good:

- Conversions!

- Landing pages definitely seem to make a difference

Things that are bad:

- Pixel didn't fire

- Half the clicks from my landing page get lost before the network. EWA says I have 62 clicks, SiteScout says 128 clicks to the offer.

I think tomorrow I'm just going to run more traffic to the offer and see what happens. I'm going to wait for another conversion and see if the pixel fires if I can't figure out what I've fucked up tonight.

I'm also going to have to replace my Spanish campaigns, seeing as SS no longer have the domain I want available.

Nothing else really stood out to me in Spain that got good traffic, so today I emailed my AM at Adsimilis and asked for the best converting mobile PIN submits.

After going over the list, I decided to promote Il Premio Dei Desideri (IT), which is basically one of those win an iphone/ipad/macbook/random other stuff PIN submit offers. It pays out 7.20E, or $8.80USD.

I will be running traffic on the following URLS:

- youtube.com - video sharing site, people looking for entertainment. huge traffic (7MM impressions/day), very cheap (avg CPM $0.03) but will it just be terrible quality? Only one way to find out!

- mediafire.com - this is a file sharing site, it seems to have mostly young male traffic which I hope will want that free iphone/macbook/ipad. Traffic isn't huge (there's two different slots for Italy which total around 1.5MM impressions/day) but I hope it will be good quality.

I think I will also do a small test of my Spain campaigns on youtube.com. I don't really have anything to lose except like $50, which quite frankly is worth it when I'm looking for a campaign that can make thousands. With an average CPM of around $0.06 on youtube.com, I can definitely afford at least a test!

I'll also be away with family for two days, so my updates for the next couple days will be less frequent, but I'm definitely going to keep everyone updated with how this is going.

Update #3!!

So in short: this has been a miserable, miserable failure.

I ran Il Premio IT and Celldorado Spain direct linked to youtube.com and mediafire.com

Here were the results:



I probably killed this a liiiiitle bit too early for my payouts, but I really hate that CTR. Plus I spent a lot more than that testing with landing pages for the Il Premio IT, and I got such a terrible CTR on my landing pages that I'm pretty sure that the Italy campaign at least was not going to work out at all.

Here's my stats for the landing pages I was running:



The original plan had been to let each LP run to 2x the offer payout and then optimize from there, but I'm sure you can see why I killed them after only spending $20 total.

$20/click to the offer page is just not going to be profitable. The low CTR for the ads didn't help, either.

In total I spent $46.10 on these campaigns, and made $0.

So where to from here?

Well, I created some landing pages for the Spain offer, but didn't finish them until Friday night, so I'm going to upload them today so they get reviewed on Monday. I've got some basic LPs that are just copying the offer page with instructions on how to win the iphone:

"Win an iphone4

Step 1: Enter your cell phone number
Step 2: Enter the PIN number that will be sent to your phone via text message
Step 3: Win your new iphone

Win now"



"Look cool when you win a new iphone

Step 1: Enter your cell phone number
Step 2: Enter the PIN number that will be sent to your phone via text message
Step 3: Win your new iphone

Win now"



"Be the coolest of all your friends with your new iphone

Step 1: Enter your cell phone number
Step 2: Enter the PIN number that will be sent to your phone via text message
Step 3: Win your new iphone

Win now"



I've also created a whole new landing page that's very quiz style. It starts off with a landing page:

"Win an iphone!

Step 1: Complete the iphone test
Step 2: Enter your cell phone number
Step 3: Enter the PIN number that will be sent to your phone via text message
Step 4: Win your new iphone

Start the test"



Then I made a blank version of the landing page:



And made one page with each of the following questions in the middle:

"In what year was the iphone originally launched?"



"What is the latest model of the iphone?"



"How much money (In Euros) did Apple spend developing the iphone?"



They're just linked images, no matter what answer they click it goes to the next question, until they finally end up at the offer landing page which has the last question, "What country is Apple from?" (with UK and USA the two choices). The offer landing page is in the original post, so I'm not going to duplicate it here.

We will see how this goes. I'm hoping I get conversions from somewhere! I'm also going to go back to the drawing board and find some more high volume, international targets that have offers I think I can do well with.

Due to post size limitations, please click here to go to my next update post.

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Looking forward to it Hannah!!

Stampede in Calgary is a total shitshow, I never drank so much booze in my life, haha!

Did you make it down yet / making it down to Calgary to join in with the crazies?

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Awesome! Can't wait for your results!

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I'm doing a lot of work in a similar vein and am very interested in your results.

Feel free to PM me for my Skype if you'd like to bounce ideas around.

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Awesome Hannah, I was hoping you were taking part in this contest, your last follow along was very great

Best of luck with these campaigns, I admire your patience for handling such a large amount of "small" campaigns. My goal is to keep only the $100 a day campaigns but unfortunately, I just have... only one of these camps at this time lol.

One question for you: don't you afraid to lose your focus or your motivation running 3 camps at once? Or maybe your goal is to find a winner first then scale it the harder you can?

How do you plan to create all the angles needed for the 3 camps? Do you have some tips or tricks to keep your creativity when trying to find your ROI on 3 new different campaigns?

Which brings me to the most important question: "when you're on your bed or on under the shower, how do you handle the flow of idea which come up in your head about angles, landing page creation, ads design etc. with all these campaigns running?"

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Haha I haven't, no. I've never actually been to the Stampede, though I hear it's awesome! I don't get out to Alberta much, I've been to Calgary airport at least 2 dozen times in my life, and into the city itself once haha.

Thanks Julien!

I'm not worried about focus and motivation, at all. You're right that the goal is to find one campaign that can become a big one. I don't expect all of these campaigns to be winners. In fact, I won't be surprised if they all flop miserably. But the goal is to find one that can be huge, and to scale that one.

As for my tricks for angles, I basically go through campaigns one at a time to make ads and find angles. I will do everything for one campaign, then everything for a second campaign, then everything for a third campaign. I find that if I'm not organized like that then my creativity falters and my organizational skills go out the window. By organizing campaigns in small groups and focusing on one campaign at a time, it allows my brain to be much more organized.

On top of that, it can help with creativity. If I've spent 30 minutes or an hour working on an angle for a gaming campaign, then spending an hour doing a mobile PIN submit campaign is a great way to refresh the brain and keep it thinking.

What I do to keep the flow of ideas organized is write things down with a pen and paper. This is so important. Not a Word doc or a Notepad document on the desk top, but physically writing on paper. I have a notepad in a folder that I use to write down campaign ideas and everything that goes with that. It helps so much to have a list of things I want to test written down. It sounds like it wouldn't help too much, but it really, really does. Sometimes I get lazy and I won't use it for a while, and my business noticeably suffers.


Now, this morning I got my translations back, and so I've made my ads. I made some, and I am using the advertiser supplied creatives for some.

First of all, the Spanish Travian ads. I took two angles for the ads I created myself:

- Conquer the world
- Meet new friends

We'll see how we go with these two angles



You'll notice these are all animated. With SiteScout, I've found that animated ads almost always do so much better than non animated ones that I just never run them. It's a waste of money to me, plain and simple.

Now since they're practically the exact same thing just in a slightly different language, here are the ads I'm going to be running in Brazil for Travian:



So we'll see how the angles go, and we'll see how the advertiser supplied creatives work. Since this is such a big offer, I'm really hoping they've done their homework and that the advertiser ones do well. We'll see, I guess!

The angles I took for this campaign are as follows, this is what the ads I made translate to:

"Create an empire"
"Use your empire to conquer the world"
"Make new friends playing Travian"
"Play a fun game and make new friends"
"Create an empire - conquer the world - play now"
"Make new friends - play a fun game - play now"

We'll see how my two angles of "create an empire" and "make friends" will go. Hopefully well!

The next two series of ads will be in the next post, as it won't let me add more than 30 images in a post.

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Next, the ads for Celldorado Spain. I've decided to just test the iphone angle to start with.



Here's what they translate to, with the angles:

"Want one? Click here"
"Want a free iphone 4? Click here"
"Look cool with your new iphone. Click here"
"Impress your friends! Win an iphone 4S"

As you can see I went with two generic "win an iphone" type ads, and I'm trying a couple of angles: "look cool" and "impress your friends".


Finally, the Cartoon Yourself Brazil offer:



These ads translate to:
"Cartoon yourself (before/after)"
"Is the cartoon you sexy?"
"Turn your photo into a cartoon"

I have some more text to play with to make another ad with the angle "show your friends your cartoon" but I'm going to have to work with it because it's too wordy for now, so we'll see.

I'm going to be uploading these to SiteScout now, so hopefully they'll get approved before the end of the day!

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Really liking this follow along so far Hannah! - Unique, international, and is intriguing!
Thanks for the explanation on what cuantarazon.com + ebuddy.com is!

I've ran a lot of cartoon yourself stuff before, here are some recommendations:
1. Show before and after of the people (you can find people who have cartoonized themselves online)
2. Having people cartoon themselves into cooler characters, so instead of cartooning someone into a "cartoon", try a "cartoon vampire" or a "cartoon simpsons character" etc..
3. Celebs works well too

You plan on using landing pages for any/all of the offers?

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The campaigns are already up and running on SiteScout! I've given each of them a budget of $15 a day, set to spend evenly throughout. Basically the only targeting I did other than country was eliminating the non-computer devices (ipods, ipads, android, palm, etc). I've also set a frequency cap of 3/24 hours, which is my standard with SS.

Thanks stackman! I really, really appreciate the advice! Going to go find some more photos to make more cartoon ads now...

I'm going to start split testing some landing pages when/if I see conversions on the offers. I like to just test direct linking with offers like these (obviously I don't do this with things like rebills) before I throw landing pages into the mix. Do you think I should split test with landing pages straight away?

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I think if I were you, I'd test at least 2 landing pages vs direct linking for the iPhone offer.

One with a quizz angle and one with a "congratulations you just won..." angle.

I'm not an expert but I feel bad when I launch a campaign without LP in the mix.

I don't have a lot of ideas for travian and cartoonify yourself that could help at this point but if you want I can give you a landing page template for travian that I got from Justin Dupre's freebie fridays.

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I do the same thing as you, i direct link first a lot of the time just to get a feel for how it converts with no landing page. I would recommend split testing a landing page for Celldorado & Cartoon.

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Hannah, just checked some of your Spanish translations:
-On your first ad "Tu gente esta esperanto" : should be "esperando"
-"ten una imagen guay con su nuevo iphone": should be "tu nuevo iphone"

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Tuffffff!

Awesome presentation, looking forward to these results

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Rafael, thank you so much for that my man! I really appreciate you letting me know, I'm going to go change my creatives now.

The first one is actually one of the advertiser supplied creatives, so I'm going to have to let my AM at Adsimilis know about it, thank you for pointing it out

That second error is 100% my fault, I translated the second half of that sentence myself and totally fucked up su/tu, so well done to me.

And now for Update #1

Well, I started getting traffic to ebuddy.com (Brazil) almost immediately after the ads got approved. All of my cuantarazon.com (Spain) ads have also been approved, but that seems to be one of the ones that needs additional whitelisting, as I haven't bid on any impressions yet. Traffic generally starts within a day on SiteScout when this happens so I'm not worried.

Anyways, I ended up with two completely different problems for both campaigns.

Travian:



As you can see, the major problem here is CTR. You might notice that this isn't even every ad I started running: this is all of the ads that got at least one click after 5000 impressions. The rest came up blank, so I've already archived them. With a campaign like this, a $0.33 CPC is just not sustainable, so I'm going to have to work on the ads.

I'll come up with a new set to run tomorrow.

I will also as per suggestions start a landing page. Merci beaucoup Julien for the offer, I think I've got the same template though from Justin Dupre so I will play with that as one of them!

Cartoon Yourself:



Here we have a completely different problem! I'm getting more than enough clicks, really cheap (some of the ads are costing me 3 cents/click) but zero conversions.

I'm going to start to tackle this problem by running a landing page, so I'm going to be working on that tonight. I'll split test two landing pages (thanks for the advice on doing this everyone) and I'm also going to hunt for some more similar offers in case this offer in general is just a piece of poo.

So in conclusion:

Travian BR needs better ads. CTR is terrible. Zero conversions. Will create new ads and split test landing pages.

Travian ES has no data so far.

Cartoon Yourself BR needs a landing page and/or better offer. Tons of clicks, no conversions.

Celldorado ES has no data so far.

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Alright, I've created some landing pages and will be adding them to split test this afternoon! I based the landing page style off the page for mywebface, which I know is/was a HUGE converter. I haven't had the chance to make the new ads for Travian, before I do that I want to do a lot more research about gaming ads in general, what gets a good CTR, that sort of thing.

I also haven't gotten any impressions on cuantarazon yet, so I'm going to send Steve an email to make sure I haven't messed anything up on my end.

I know a good CTR on that specific site is possible, since I'm getting it with the Cartoon Yourself ads, I just need to find a way to make it work with gaming.

LP1: "Become a Sexy Cartoon"



LP2: "Share Your Cartoon With Your Friends"



LP3: "Become a Sexy Cartoon and Share With Your Friends"




edit: I got a reply with an Update for the Spain campaign: Apparently even though it's still showing up in their system, for whatever reason cuantarazon no longer is available on SiteScout, which is why I wasn't getting traffic. Bummer. I'll try and replace that part of the campaign with something else later today.

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Update #2: Houston, we have conversions

Unfortunately, this mission is a little bit like Apollo 13: we got into space, we came up near the moon, then a system failed and we had to come back to earth. The problem: conversion pixel didn't fire.

But, I have two conversions!!



So it seems the landing pages definitely made a difference. Nowhere near profit yet, but we'll see what tomorrow brings.

What I'm wondering is why the conversion pixel didn't fire. I've used them plenty of times before with EWA, and they've always been fine. Does anyone know if there's something different I have to do with the landing page to make the pixel fire? I have done landing pages with SiteScout before, but not in a couple of months, and I'm wondering if I forgot a step.

Anyways, my CTR to the landing page is awesome. Like really, really, almost-too-good-to-be-true awesome.



Here's the data for individual ads:



Things that are good:

- Conversions!

- Landing pages definitely seem to make a difference

Things that are bad:

- Pixel didn't fire

- Half the clicks from my landing page get lost before the network. EWA says I have 62 clicks, SiteScout says 128 clicks to the offer.

I think tomorrow I'm just going to run more traffic to the offer and see what happens. I'm going to wait for another conversion and see if the pixel fires if I can't figure out what I've fucked up tonight.

I'm also going to have to replace my Spanish campaigns, seeing as SS no longer have the domain I want available.

Nothing else really stood out to me in Spain that got good traffic, so today I emailed my AM at Adsimilis and asked for the best converting mobile PIN submits.

After going over the list, I decided to promote Il Premio Dei Desideri (IT), which is basically one of those win an iphone/ipad/macbook/random other stuff PIN submit offers. It pays out 7.20E, or $8.80USD.

I will be running traffic on the following URLS:

- youtube.com - video sharing site, people looking for entertainment. huge traffic (7MM impressions/day), very cheap (avg CPM $0.03) but will it just be terrible quality? Only one way to find out!

- mediafire.com - this is a file sharing site, it seems to have mostly young male traffic which I hope will want that free iphone/macbook/ipad. Traffic isn't huge (there's two different slots for Italy which total around 1.5MM impressions/day) but I hope it will be good quality.

I think I will also do a small test of my Spain campaigns on youtube.com. I don't really have anything to lose except like $50, which quite frankly is worth it when I'm looking for a campaign that can make thousands. With an average CPM of around $0.06 on youtube.com, I can definitely afford at least a test!

I'll also be away with family for two days, so my updates for the next couple days will be less frequent, but I'm definitely going to keep everyone updated with how this is going.

edit:

Here are one of each of my ads for the iphone angle that I'm going to start with. Since they're basically exactly the same as the Spanish version, I'm not going to post all of them. I used the same three photos as for the Spanish ones, and these ones translate pretty similarly. I'm pretty sure the person who translated didn't actually translate "look cool" properly (there's no verb in there for one thing) so that ad is missing until I can get a definitive answer about that translation.



In order they say:

Want one? Click here

Want a free iphone? Click here

Impress your friends. Win a free iphone

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Epic epic thread!

For the iphone campaign, it seems like the advertiser has been heavily inspired by Facebook. I would try follow suit with your creatives. The whole "(1) new message" angle would work well.

Nice work Hannah!

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O_O

looks really nice

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Thanks guys! I got another conversion this morning on the Brazil Cartoon Yourself offer, but the pixel didn't fire. I'm going to pause this campaign until I can figure out what the hell I've done wrong......

You're totally right Mr. Green, I'm going to try that. I know SiteScout don't really allow facebook-like creatives, so I'll have to get a little bit creative!

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Just a warning, I'm ridiculously exhausted, so who knows if any of this post will make sense...

I've created the landing pages for the Italy campaign. I've got a direct linked version (and one for Spain) both pending approval, they should be up and running tomorrow!

Here they are, with translations for the headlines:

Be the coolest of all your friends with your new iphone!


Look cool when you win a new iphone


Want a free iphone 4S?


Win an iphone 4S


Look cool with your new iphone 4S


Now I'm going to go upload these and set up the campaigns before I pass out at the computer.

edit: the rest of the text says this:

Step 1: Enter your mobile phone number.

Step 2: Enter the PIN number you will receive by text message

Step 3: Enter the competition & win your new iphone!

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Time for a quick rant: I hate computers and technology SO MUCH. Now my LP clicks aren't being recorded by SiteScout. I have double and triple checked EVERYTHING I can think of. I know the clicks are coming in because they're registering at the affiliate network. I've double and tripled checked that the links are set up right, for the right campaign and everything. But no, landing page clicks are still zero and that is the most frustrating, annoying thing.

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Probably you can have a close friend of yours that is good at this to help you take a quick look, sometimes we might just miss out 1-2 tiny little things.

It's been a great 'Follow along' so far, keep it up.

P/S: Perhaps take a small break away from the computer and that might just help you to figure it out.

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Hey Hannah, I tried many, many, many things... I've never been able to fire Sitescout's pixel properly.

I gave up with the pixel, now I track everything with the token.

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I believe site scout now supports a postback pixel

I would use that instead of an image pixel.....

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Well, it turns out I'm really, really dumb. I was getting clicks to the offer because I forgot I had one version of the campaign direct linking. I ended up getting one click to my landing page, giving me a rocking, amazing <2% CTR to the offer.

Julien, hit me up if you ever want a hand with the SiteScout pixel. I have never had a problem with it before, and I can totally help you figure it out if you want, since I really find it about 10000 times easier to run everything on SS... I've run dozens of campaigns on SiteScout using the pixel and the EWA campaign is honestly the first time I've ever had a problem with it. I'm starting to think the problem is on the EWA side of things, but I'm going to keep troubleshooting first.

Polarbacon, will do thanks! I'll have to learn what a postback pixel is. If I'm honest, when I started using SiteScout a few months ago I actually had to learn how pixels work for the first time, because I'm basically an 80 year old who's afraid of new technology in a 23 year old body.

Anyway, time for Update #3!!

So in short: this has been a miserable, miserable failure.

I ran Il Premio IT and Celldorado Spain direct linked to youtube.com and mediafire.com

Here were the results:



I probably killed this a liiiiitle bit too early for my payouts, but I really hate that CTR. Plus I spent a lot more than that testing with landing pages for the Il Premio IT, and I got such a terrible CTR on my landing pages that I'm pretty sure that the Italy campaign at least was not going to work out at all.

Here's my stats for the landing pages I was running:



The original plan had been to let each LP run to 2x the offer payout and then optimize from there, but I'm sure you can see why I killed them after only spending $20 total.

$20/click to the offer page is just not going to be profitable. The low CTR for the ads didn't help, either.

In total I spent $46.10 on these campaigns, and made $0.

So where to from here?

Well, I created some landing pages for the Spain offer, but didn't finish them until Friday night, so I'm going to upload them today so they get reviewed on Monday. I've got some basic LPs that are just copying the offer page with instructions on how to win the iphone:

"Win an iphone4

Step 1: Enter your cell phone number
Step 2: Enter the PIN number that will be sent to your phone via text message
Step 3: Win your new iphone

Win now"



"Look cool when you win a new iphone

Step 1: Enter your cell phone number
Step 2: Enter the PIN number that will be sent to your phone via text message
Step 3: Win your new iphone

Win now"



"Be the coolest of all your friends with your new iphone

Step 1: Enter your cell phone number
Step 2: Enter the PIN number that will be sent to your phone via text message
Step 3: Win your new iphone

Win now"



I've also created a whole new landing page that's very quiz style. It starts off with a landing page:

"Win an iphone!

Step 1: Complete the iphone test
Step 2: Enter your cell phone number
Step 3: Enter the PIN number that will be sent to your phone via text message
Step 4: Win your new iphone

Start the test"



Then I made a blank version of the landing page:



And made one page with each of the following questions in the middle:

"In what year was the iphone originally launched?"



"What is the latest model of the iphone?"



"How much money (In Euros) did Apple spend developing the iphone?"



They're just linked images, no matter what answer they click it goes to the next question, until they finally end up at the offer landing page which has the last question, "What country is Apple from?" (with UK and USA the two choices). The offer landing page is in the original post, so I'm not going to duplicate it here.

We will see how this goes. I'm hoping I get conversions from somewhere! I'm also going to go back to the drawing board and find some more high volume, international targets that have offers I think I can do well with.

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awesome follow along very detailed...honestly speaking I was checking out your thread every now and then to check out your updates haha. BTW just wanted to ask why have you added that "subscribete" column on the right side of your LP. I guess its something which lets user know for which services he is being subscribed for right ? Well is it necessary to show that ?

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Hey Hannah, your button's call to action says "Gagnes Ahora". It's meant to be "Ganes Ahora".

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^^ Thanks SO MUCH for that. I really, really appreciate it. In my last follow along I also had a problem with onehourtranslation.com. Their speed in awesome, but if I can't depend on the accuracy, well...

Yeah, that Subscribete column is just from the actual landing page. It's a bunch of advertisements for different PIN submits (love test, fortune (palm) reader, IQ test and friend finder). I kept it for two reasons:

1) It keeps it consistent with the offer landing page
2) If they click on it when they're at my landing page and it doesn't take them anywhere, they might not click on it on the actual offer page where it takes them to different PIN offers to complete that I don't get paid for.

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Pretty smart hun!!!

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^^^^^^ this. Hannah knows how to keep it legit!!!

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No worries. A wrongly worded (or spelt) CTA can kill a potentially profitable campaign.

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Actually it is "Gane Ahora". But that is the formal (usted) way. Hannah, I recommend you to use "Gana Ahora" instead. Both in the CTA and step 3/4.

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Yeah I agree Jorge. Also maybe a click here to win now would be good rather than just win now.

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Thanks a ton for the help guys! Mi espanol es tan terrible que no puedo hacer las traducciones solo. (I also know there should be accents in that sentence but I can never remember the alt codes)

I've changed to the imperative version "Gana Ahora" for my landing pages, thanks to nickster and Jorge for the awesome advice!

Next up: hopefully some data!

edit: that "hopefully" might be a bit too hopeful... I only had $5 left in my SS account so I went to recharge but it won't let the transaction go through. On the bright side, Steve is always really good at responding quickly so it'll probably be fixed soon!

edit 2: Also, I've created some more ads that are a little bit "facebook style" as per Mr. Green's advice. We'll see if they get approved, I know SS don't allow Facebook style creatives so I tried making them a little bit different.

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Hannah, awesome followalong. Whats the spend / ROI so far on all these efforts?

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Sorry I haven't updated in a couple days, I'm working on some non-AM stuff and some drama with that has taken up basically the entirety of the last two days. What I will say now before updating: this campaign is definitely not working for me either.

ROI is close to zero. I know I've made around $2.50. I've spent around $125 to get there.

I'm not actually bothered by this though. I'm in this to get a campaign that makes me $x,xxx per DAY. When I get there, I'll have made up my losses in the matter of hours. If I were focusing on every single cent that I spent, I'd never get a big campaign going. I'm definitely not being dumb and wasting my money, but I'm also not tracking to the penny. In fact, I didn't actually have a clue when you asked the question how much I'd spent, I had to go in and count. I had guessed somewhere around $150, so I wasn't too far off, but I didn't know for sure.

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^^ Sounds exactly like 98% of all the campaigns I try

Hang in there you will get there. Great job on the follow along.

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Hang in there, keep thinking, researching and testing and try different angles, and stats will eventually give you a clearer picture of which direction to go further in.

I have also in the past tested many offers/campaigns and gave up after burning a couple of hundreds, didn't give up on one that burnt the most and this campaign is now making decent income and fuel my other tests.

Good Luck !

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at least your avatar is really hot.

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I believe ROI is not 0 in that case, zero% ROI means you're breaking even.

Here's my formula for the ROI : ( ( ( revenue - cost ) / cost ) * 100 = -98% in your case, right ? (not sure about that so if someone correct or confirm this)



Mehdi

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Ugh, you're right, thanks for correcting that. I was thinking profit in my head when I typed it out.

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***** This is going to be my new update post, since my first one hit the 10,000 word limit *****

Well, here's my update #4!

In short, the last campaign was a big fat failure. I spent around $40 to find that my CTR was, once again, abysmal, and that really killed this campaign for me.



On every target, every single ad was terrible. I didn't have a single ad get above 0.1% CTR on any targets at all.

Oh well, lesson learned.

Anyway, onwards and upwards! I was going to start some new campaigns yesterday, but got a bad case of paralysis by analysis and didn't end up doing anything. It happens to even the best of us at times.

So this morning I got up and decided to actually run something. I was going through AdSimilis, looking at offers. I got to Binbit, and realized the landing page for the Cartoon Yourself offer was the same as the one on EWA that actually got conversions when I ran it in Brazil, but that didn't track properly.

Despite my AM saying it looked fine, I'm pretty sure the conversion pixel problem was on the EWA side of things.

Well Adsimilis doesn't have a Brazil version of Binbit, but they DO have a number of Spanish countries. I thought I would test them out, then I realized it was 11am here, which meant 2pm in Toronto, so I only had a few hours to get my ads up and running before the weekend.

Payout for Binbit AR: $1.00 per conversion (mobile PIN submit)
Payout for Binbit MX: $1.80 per conversion (mobile PIN submit)

Now normally I would just get the translations done and wait until Monday, but since our follow along is a little bit time sensitive, I opened up Google Translate (which I never, ever recommend as anything other than a single word translator), a Spanish verb conjugator and Photoshop.

Caveat: I don't recommend doing this at all, EVER, if you don't have any experience with the language you're translating to. I did four years of Spanish in high school, and I'm fluent in French which gives me a better understanding of the way Spanish should "flow" than English speakers.

So basically here are my (probably) error-ridden ads:



They all translate to the same thing the old Portuguese ones did:

"Turn your photo into a cartoon"
"Show your friends the cartoon you"
"Is your cartoon sexy?"

I also originally had just "cartoon yourself" in Portuguese, but I didn't have a clue what tense or verbs I'd be using in Spanish, so I just left that one alone. I decided to go with the same ads as before as I know they got a good CTR when I ran them in Brazil, so I want to see what the same thing will do in some Spanish speaking south American countries. Might as well go with a constant before trying out new variables.

I'm direct linking these ads for now, I will add a landing page, probably the same one as I used for the Portuguese ads, but I need to get it translated first.

This is what the offer page looks like for both Mexico and Argentina (the only difference is the name of the carriers and the format of the phone number):



Targets:
facetheme.com
youtube.com
facefetti.com
mediafire.com

Mediafire.com is file sharing, face theme and facefetti seem to stick ads on their user's computers and youtube is obviously video sharing.

I haven't realllly based this on much demographic information, I'm going for volume here. These are some of the sites that have the most volume on SiteScout for their countries. The goal is to make this campaign as huge as possible eventually. Sites that get under a million impressions a day simply won't cut it.

So all of this I submitted around 11:30, they haven't been approved yet but there's still half an hour to go until 5pm EST.

I've also decided that perhaps trying countries that are completely new to me with offers that are completely new to me on a traffic source I don't have huge amounts of experience with might be jumping too far into the deep end.

However, I do want to keep this as an international follow along. That was my goal this whole time, to go international, and outside of the English speaking countries. So, I'm also going to try some dating, which I have some experience with on SiteScout.

As for country? Well, I'd have loved to stick with South America, but I couldn't really find many, and what I did find were generally 30+ offers, which I don't like for media buys since it's harder to target ages.

So, I went with the other country where I didn't need to get ads translated before submitting them on a Friday afternoon: France.



These are my ads. The button translates to "chat now". I have no idea how they're going to do.

I have set up two campaigns. One of them is for BeCoquin 18+ FR (payout for single optin of $3.20), the other is for Mes Amis Sexy 18+ FR (payout for double optin of $4.00)

I'm going to be adding landing pages, I just haven't made them yet. So, for now, direct linking only.

Targets:
facebook.com/media-clic
facetheme.com
mediafire.com
facebook.com
youtube.com

Same premise as last time: I want some of that sweet, sweet traffic. I did somewhat focus on the social networking category on SiteScout though, as I do know it does well for dating ads in general.

We'll see if I get any conversions, and then we can work from there!

edit: looks like someone is going through just on 5pm and approving all my campaigns. Thanks SiteScout!!

Update #5!

I haven't had a chance to make the landing pages for this campaign, so I just ran them all direct linking for a couple days, and here was the result:



I had to change the numbers on the conversions for Amis Sexy FR, since I accidentally added the pixel twice. Luckily I noticed after two conversions and fixed it, and I wrote down the info of the duplicate conversions.

Here's my stats from AdSimilis:



As you can see, I made $27.60 for $111.88 spend. I've paused the Binbit MX ads, since they didn't convert well at all. I'm going to continue to run both French dating sites, since I don't have nearly enough data to know which one is the clear winner just yet.

This is the ads that converted for all campaigns:
(if you want this info you'll have to scroll down a couple posts, I'm over my image limit so I couldn't add the info to this update post, but it is written further down!)

Again, not a huge amount of data, but I'm noticing a pattern: the less obtrusive buttons, seem to have better conversion rates than the more flashy ones.

Next steps: tomorrow I'm going to add landing pages to the three campaigns I'm still running. I'm going to gather more data, and I plan on being profitable sometime in the next few days. Then it'll be time to scale, scale, scale to hundreds and then thousands of dollars a day. I know all of these sites get enough traffic to do it.

I can't guarantee I'll get another post in tomorrow, so I'm going to do this summary now.

Things I've learned doing this follow along:

- Don't bite off more than you can chew. I think I was a little bit too optimistic when it came to some of my campaigns. I was trying too many different new things at once: new verticals, new countries, etc. Once I focused myself a bit better, and went back to a vertical I somewhat know, then I started to see some success.

- Broad campaigns can work. This was something I obviously knew, but it was good to discover for myself. I know I can scale these campaigns and make them huge, which is totally different to how I usually run campaigns.

- Angles, angles, angles. I was definitely guilty of getting lazy with my angles, and forcing myself to work through that for this campaign was definitely a good thing.

All in all, this was a pretty awesome learning experience for me, and I think it has convinced me to fundamentally change the way I run campaigns in the future.

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Do you think testing a few different angles at some point, instead of so variations of the same ad would help find a winner faster? I love the green dot in the corner btw, ive seen that used in a few ads and its really eye-catching.

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Yes, and I definitely will be doing that for sure.

I just didn't have the time to get it done today before the weekend, I just wanted to get some ads out there for the sake of the follow along.

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I don't have the time to post a big update right now, but I just want to say that my new campaigns aren't quite profitable right off the bat, but they have got conversions, and definitely show promise! I should be able to get them profitable, hopefully before the end of this follow along. Stay tuned for a big update later this afternoon!

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Here it is, as promised! Update #5!

I haven't had a chance to make the landing pages for this campaign, so I just ran them all direct linking for a couple days, and here was the result:



I had to change the numbers on the conversions for Amis Sexy FR, since I accidentally added the pixel twice. Luckily I noticed after two conversions and fixed it, and I wrote down the info of the duplicate conversions.

Here's my stats from AdSimilis:



As you can see, I made $27.60 for $111.88 spend. I've paused the Binbit MX ads, since they didn't convert well at all. I'm going to continue to run both French dating sites, since I don't have nearly enough data to know which one is the clear winner just yet.

This is the ads that converted for all campaigns:

Binbit AR

2 conversions:



1 conversion:



As you can see, it looks like the simple text of "turn your photo into a cartoon" is converting best so far. Maybe the obvious choice was the right one!

Amis Sexy France

2 conversions:



1 conversion:



Not really enough data to know for sure that image is a winner, but it's a good start!

Be Coquin France:

1 conversion:



Again, not a huge amount of data, but I'm noticing a pattern: the less obtrusive buttons, seem to have better conversion rates than the more flashy ones.

Next steps: tomorrow I'm going to add landing pages to the three campaigns I'm still running. I'm going to gather more data, and I plan on being profitable sometime in the next few days. Then it'll be time to scale, scale, scale to hundreds and then thousands of dollars a day. I know all of these sites get enough traffic to do it.

I can't guarantee I'll get another post in tomorrow, so I'm going to do this summary now.

Things I've learned doing this follow along:

- Don't bite off more than you can chew. I think I was a little bit too optimistic when it came to some of my campaigns. I was trying too many different new things at once: new verticals, new countries, etc. Once I focused myself a bit better, and went back to a vertical I somewhat know, then I started to see some success.

- Broad campaigns can work. This was something I obviously knew, but it was good to discover for myself. I know I can scale these campaigns and make them huge, which is totally different to how I usually run campaigns.

- Angles, angles, angles. I was definitely guilty of getting lazy with my angles, and forcing myself to work through that for this campaign was definitely a good thing.

All in all, this was a pretty awesome learning experience for me, and I think it has convinced me to fundamentally change the way I run campaigns in the future.

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Thank you, this is awesome and motivational all these things you learned! I 100% agree with the angles angles angles, and I think Mr. Green is the master of drilling this into all of us. Best of luck in getting things working! I'm fairly certain you're *this* close to having a winning campaign.

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I just wanted to let you know that I want to click the living sh*t out of all those girls faces


aka very hot, good choices. funny too as I was scrolling reading this, I was like "that big lipped brunette is so hot" and then saw you think that ad is outperforming the others, haha

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Keep going with the FR dating.
Bid on file sharing site and social sites.
Find same offer on other networks to split test for EPC.
Try other banner sizes.

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Just maintaining this thread must have been a lot of work. Much obliged!

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Thats a bummer no more updates. Would have liked to have seen what happened in the end.

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