deondup's Wild Wild West Mobile Follow Along! (19)
Jordan managed to twist my arm to do a follow-along, so here it goes. (For the record Jordan, I expect and invite when you rent this pad)
No "Wild West" contest will be complete without Thumbplay, right? Its been one of the hottest mobile offers for over a year now. Recent changes to their landing pages/policies has seen the offer take a bit of a dive with certain carriers taking a big dip in payouts. Nevertheless, its still a great offer because its so versatile and allows you to build an unlimited amount of campaigns.
When I first started running the offer doing a simple direct link from banner to offer was good enough to yield some great returns. The problem is that EVERYBODY was doing that – including Thumbplay themselves buying a lot of the JumpTap inventory.
To make this as hard as possible I'll be running this on JumpTap to start with and then scale out.
The secret sauce is in coming up with a great angle...which is what I love about AM. Most people scratch their heads but its really quite simple. Here's a nice Photoshopped diagram from the brainstorming I usually do in my notebook...
Here you can see just how easy it is to come up with dozens of potentially lethal campaigns. I've left out quite a few of the “best” ones – don't want to spoon feed anyone.
Obviously with running these angles its a bit of a stretch of the imagination to direct link. You really need a landing page to relate the idea to the offer. Users have a very limited imagination and you really have to show then what's possible with the offer. Most people think “ringtones, wtf! I'm not going to pay for that shit.” If you offer them something that they never thought of as a ringtone it starts opening the possibilities. Mobile phones are very personal and people LOVE personalising their phones.
The angle I'm going to run as an initial test is built around a specific demographic. I'm going for funny ringtones that appeal to younger males. I know that this is a strong demo that converts very well.
One thing I will say is that you MUST get your landing pages approved. They will charge you back and are very serious about it. Because they do carrier billing they can lose their business if you run non-compliant shit so just don't do it.
I made very sure that everything I use on my creatives and landing pages are available in their catalogue. I also said that when sending in my creatives and landing pages for approval – just so they know that I know 
[PS – if you try to use my landing page I will know who you are and I will send Mr. Lavish's girlfriend to come and get you]
The important thing is have continuity from Creative >> Landing Page >> Offer
I'll set this up in JumpTap and let it start running on Monday. Because you a need a rep to start block crappy sites I never start campaigns over weekend.
The goal of this campaign? Hard to say. It can be HUGE but from experience 1/10 of these sorts of campaigns come off if you're lucky. At least there's some method to the madness and I dont mind tests like this not working out. Its really more about finding out what does not work than what it is to find what is working. I've got a lot on my plate at the moment and will do my best to update regularly. I will run a $250 test to start with and then decide what to do with it.
Campaign Setup
This is pretty basic...running on Jumptap with a very simple strategy.
- Target Android and Tmobile. Will use this as the benchmark test and then start testing on AT&T and maybe Verizon as well. Not many ringtone offers available for other carriers anymore.
- Bid CPC. Start quite high and get a good look at the inventory. Eventually I'll start running it CPM.
- Starting budget will be low for day 1 just in case they send me a load of traffic from 1 crap site/pub.
- Run both 300x50 and 216x36 - some nice Android handsets that run the smaller ad format.
- Tracking: Prosper202 (yes, it works great for mobile - especially Jumptap)
- Track SiteID's and Handsets with Jumptap's tokens.
>>> UPDATE <<<
I had a BIG problem on Jumptap over the weekend - especially yesterday. They sent me millions of bogus impressions which affected all my CPM campaigns in a BAD way. This happened before so I had to pause all my campaigns while I wait for them to sort it out and refund me. Last time it too a week so I decided to fire this up on another traffic source while I wait for JT.
I decided to run on TapIT. I tested a few campaigns when they where still in beta but back then it was very buggy and they had very limited inventory. They have since made some major improvements and I've been meaning to test them again. This seems like a good excuse.
One of the things I LOVE is their new campaign planner. It shows you exactly what inventory is available and saves you the trouble of stabbing in the dark hoping you'll get traffic.
At least now I know that there is "enough" traffic available for the 3 carriers I can target for the campaign.
The campaign set-up is very simple and their interface is as good as it gets.
One of the BEST things about TapIt is the ability to track a lot of different variables and the ability to block sites yourself.
So I've got 1 days traffic on Tapit and I'm quite disappointed in the volume...nowhere near the 1.1 million impressions I saw in the campaign planner. I copied the campaign and set a higher CPC to see if I can get more traffic and I'll let that run for a bit.
It sucks when traffic is this slow. As a last resort I'll just run it CPM and bid super high to see if there is any volume. I've reached out to my account manager for some bidding advice which might also help.
With that being said, the little traffic I did get did not too too flash.
>>> UPDATE <<<
So, Tapit's traffic's been quite slow. Here's the traffic so far
The ironic thing is that even the copy at a higher bid got less traffic. I think that their ad delivery is still not quite there yet. It does not even come close to spending the daily budget I've set and I'm struggling to spend $50/day. I've asked my AM to look at it but still no response.
The problem with traffic sources like this is that even if the campaign works I don't see it making more than $50/day because of the lack of volume.
If you look at the breakdown of the different SiteID's it confirms my fears...lots of publishers with little traffic each - this usually means that its much harder to find winning publishers or cut losing ones.
This campaign is not going anywhere...at least not on Tapit. Here's why:
If I had a lot more traffic to work with then I might have gone one more round by trying to improve the landing page.
I'll draw the line under this exercise. As soon as I get things sorted with JumpTap I'll try and get it up there and see how it does.
Nice lander - just ripped it. No one takes my baby girl from me!
Just curious - are you targeting carriers/handsets that you know most young guys have in the US, or are you doing a broad test and letting the LP/ads sort that out for you? 
Deon! This is superb!
Appreciate your generosity, I need this kinda stuff since I'm full force with mobile now. I've been having some success solely with direct linking, now you've just given me another opportunity to crack this mobile beast better. Thanks a lot dude
I owe you 10000000 times from now on!
@ Lavish - the offer only allows Tmobile, Verizon and AT&T traffic so in that sense it makes it much easier. The problem is that Tmobile and AT&T traffic is very competitive/expensive. Tmobile is gold for these types of offers and the payouts are by far the best.
@ wyffgoal - bring in the gold dude!
Hey deon,
How do you define those "generic android devices"? Do you have a list of them or some resources that's helpful toward this?
Thanks
@ wyffgoal - I start by making sure I don't get any tablets or e-readers. There are a lot of crappy Android devices with 7'' screens that will serve your 300x50's and from experience they suck up a lot of traffic and they almost never work. There are also a number of Netbook computers that run on Android and many of them can play android games and they will serve your ads there. Asus eeePC is one example.
I twisted your arm because i knew i was going to see the creative mind in action, this is fantastic! + that concept map is a beauty
Thumbplay doesn't want any AT&T traffic at all these days, they are having similar issues coreg is having so just a headsup incase you didn;t know. Make sure theyre willing to pay you for AT&T traffic.
We're you targeting tmob + att + verizon?
Ran several campaigns with TapIt from Jan-April;there was good volume but it came from just two separate SiteIDs. However, around the end of April volume dropped significantly. Turns out the publisher of the SiteIDs that were providing volume did not want any affiliate offers. In addition, it appears a lot of the volume was brought up by brand advertisers according to my AM at TapIt.
According to my AM they got a lot more inventory, but from your recent test maybe not for USA.
Nice write up deon! Btw TapIt webinar next week will post about it soon.
OMG that video...
Originally Posted by stackman
With that being said, there are still networks that carry the Verizon and At&T carriers but most require that you block certain handsets.
According to my AM they got a lot more inventory, but from your recent test maybe not for USA.
So many pubs block certain veritcals which kills a lot of the volume and lets brands come in and swoop up the mass traffic. You have to act, walk and talk like a brand and buy in the form of a media buy to go big.
*btw you will receive your invite to the gold coast river penthouse soon, it wasn't affected by the brisbane floods, i lived by that river last year.
With it being weekend and all and most ad networks not working I thought I'd post the next step for this campaign...and hope to have it approved this weekend.
Ringtones can work anywhere but I want to see if I can do something a little different.
I've been hearing a lot about Leadbolt's interstitial placements and publishers love it because the CTR's are so high and the eCPM's are in double digits. For us buying the traffic it can be great too even though it may be bit more expensive. I've never run these ad sizes and because the ad sizes are a bit odd for mobile most people never try it.
Its basically "full screen" ads and we've all seen it when playing games. The bigger real estate allows you to do a lot more pre-selling and its effectively a landing page that you are "popping". Sticking with the angle that I've been running I knocked up a few creatives and tried to keep it much tighter in terms of the angle.
I've also decided to go back to the tried and tested landing page for the offer.
Leadbolt can be a bit tight with logo's ec. in creatives but I hope they will approve these. If not I'll test some other interstitial traffic sources
leadbolt has barely any traffic for image ads it seems though, i tried the same, but am not receiving much traffic at all
Are those 300x250, 320x480 etc.. banner ads?
or are they actual interstitial ads which popup before the content the user is trying to access?
There are 95% of traffic on leadbolt comes from text ads so I don't think you are going to receive any traffic on this.
I started out on leadbolt with image ads and it took me ONE WHOLE week to find out that it's a text based as network!
@ stackman - not really, they are almost full screen ads that are mostly on Apps. and they are banners that "pop" - they can be closed unlike interstitials which will remain on the screen for a set amount of time and cannot be closed
From my Rep. at Leadbolt: "It seems that we currently don’t have that much traffic in these sizes. Can you please upload some 320x50 and 120x120 banners ?"
The stats confirm this...
Mopub has a lot of inventory for these bigger ad sizes...only problem is that they banned premium SMS offers and all offers with carrier billing.
Not to worry. There's a lot more interstitial inventory out there
Final Update...(for now)
Never really got enough traffic to really say how this is going. In the meantime I have it up on JumpTap...and I found a good traffic source for interstials
Since there are so many angles to test with so many combinations its an ongoing campaign that will probably only end when they pull the offer.
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