comegetbravo
Well-Known Member
Okay, here we go.
After lurking around this forum for a long time, it's now time for me to give back, and here I will post a case study of a campaign that I've been running for a little more than 2 weeks now (I won't post the campaign as long as it's live, but it'll come soon
)
I'll guide you through the ups and downs of the campaign, because believe me, if you haven't had a difficult campaign yet, you're in for a surprise.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that I, as many on this forum is not a native English speaker, so typos will occur.
Now the campaign I'll be writing this about is an Antivirus campaign for a low tier country, I won't be giving away too many details as I don't really want to create competition but I'll give some scenarios and obstacles that you might face, and how to overcome them.
Campaign planning
This is probably the most important part.
1. Identify your goal
Is your goal a $10k/day campaign, a campaign for learning, or a $10/day campaign?
2. How will you achieve your goal?
Which traffic source are you going to use? What's your campaign budget, i.e how much are you comfortable losing if things turn south?
3. Do some reconnaissance
If you don't have a spy tool, I highly recommend adplexity, as you can actually see exactly which landers your compeitions is using for that exakt offer you're planning to promote!
If you can't afford or don't want to, do some manual spying with your favorite VPN provider and smartphone, or with Opera Mobile Classic Emulator | Opera
4. Select your landing pages that you want to split test, I'd advise that you also split test the same or a similar offer on another network.
For the campaign I'll be writing about, I tried around 12 offers in total before I found the best converter, then when I had found the best offer I saw that there were other networks running it aswell.
Network A: had a good CR for me and was giving me steady profits each day.
Network B: had a 20% higher payout than Network A, but was shaving/scrubbing my conversions.
Network C: had a 10% higher payout than Network A and 0 shaving/scrubbing (personal contact with network owner)
5. Become emotionally detached
I get it, it really sucks wathing the stats at the end of the day and seeing a big fat RED number on the ROI/Profit tab in your tracker, but acting with your gut instinct and panicking when you're not getting any conversions isn't going to help, it'll actually aggravate the situation and you'll end up shutting down the campaign or lose unnecessary money.
Campaign setup
How're you going to set up your campaign?
What targeting should you use? How many different campaigns should you set up?
Personal tip: Better too many campaigns, than too few.
You should set up your campaign to account for different variables so you can identify the winning variables and cut the losing variables, this can in some cases mean that you'll have to set up a lot of campaigns.
This was my initial setup (I'm using Adsbridge for tracking if the UI is unfamiliar with you)
As you can see, I've got 16 different campaigns set up, the campaigns account for different variables, such as OS, Carrier, Bid, etc. It's a pain in the ass and takes a lot of time to set it up, but it's worth it, you'll thank yourself later if you take the time and set everything up correctly.
After a day or two of running a setup with this many variables you'll see some results on what's converting and what's not - now you can begin optimizing (I'll get to optimization later).
Some tips on what you can split test from the beginning:
1: Bids
Set up stagnated bids, i.e set up the same campaign with different bids, higher bids will result in getting more quality placements, but will cost you more, lower bids will receive worse traffic quality but is usually Much cheaper, but you will have to split test this to see what kind of traffic works best for your landing pages and offers.
2: Carriers
If your offer is a PIN submit (like mine is) there will usually be guidelines on what carriers are accepted, set up one campaign for each carrier, and if you want to - set these up with different bids NOTE: It's very important that you don't change these bids throughout the day as that will heavily impact the performance and statistics, remember "Become emotionally detached"? Even if you clearly see that a bid is doing bad, keep it running til the end of the day - the hours you're running will affect the results, so pausing a placement or a campaign because it's been performing badly during 1 hour is not very smart and could result in you missing out on money.
3: OS
If your offer accepts different OS (Android + iOS, Windows, etc) Set up different campaigns for these different operating systems.
4: Categories
I'm running my campaign on PopAds, which allows me to test different categories
I don't recommend that you split test any categories except Adult and non-adult as the others can be quite skewed when it comes to which sites are which category..
But set up two campaigns, one with adult and one without.
5: Smartphone vs Tablets
Normally tablets don't perform at all and most of the time it does terribly, but eventually you might find an offer that converts well for tablets, and you'll have a lot of traffic with next to zero competition, since nobody's targeting tablets.
There you go, now you can set up a campagin and start running it, I'll update thread sometime next week, in the meantime you should start a campaign and test the waters.
Go ahead and hit the "Subscribe" button to get a notification when I update this thread!
After lurking around this forum for a long time, it's now time for me to give back, and here I will post a case study of a campaign that I've been running for a little more than 2 weeks now (I won't post the campaign as long as it's live, but it'll come soon
)I'll guide you through the ups and downs of the campaign, because believe me, if you haven't had a difficult campaign yet, you're in for a surprise.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that I, as many on this forum is not a native English speaker, so typos will occur.
Now the campaign I'll be writing this about is an Antivirus campaign for a low tier country, I won't be giving away too many details as I don't really want to create competition but I'll give some scenarios and obstacles that you might face, and how to overcome them.
Campaign planning
This is probably the most important part.
1. Identify your goal
Is your goal a $10k/day campaign, a campaign for learning, or a $10/day campaign?
2. How will you achieve your goal?
Which traffic source are you going to use? What's your campaign budget, i.e how much are you comfortable losing if things turn south?
3. Do some reconnaissance
If you don't have a spy tool, I highly recommend adplexity, as you can actually see exactly which landers your compeitions is using for that exakt offer you're planning to promote!
If you can't afford or don't want to, do some manual spying with your favorite VPN provider and smartphone, or with Opera Mobile Classic Emulator | Opera
4. Select your landing pages that you want to split test, I'd advise that you also split test the same or a similar offer on another network.
For the campaign I'll be writing about, I tried around 12 offers in total before I found the best converter, then when I had found the best offer I saw that there were other networks running it aswell.
Network A: had a good CR for me and was giving me steady profits each day.
Network B: had a 20% higher payout than Network A, but was shaving/scrubbing my conversions.
Network C: had a 10% higher payout than Network A and 0 shaving/scrubbing (personal contact with network owner)
5. Become emotionally detached
I get it, it really sucks wathing the stats at the end of the day and seeing a big fat RED number on the ROI/Profit tab in your tracker, but acting with your gut instinct and panicking when you're not getting any conversions isn't going to help, it'll actually aggravate the situation and you'll end up shutting down the campaign or lose unnecessary money.
Campaign setup
How're you going to set up your campaign?
What targeting should you use? How many different campaigns should you set up?
Personal tip: Better too many campaigns, than too few.
You should set up your campaign to account for different variables so you can identify the winning variables and cut the losing variables, this can in some cases mean that you'll have to set up a lot of campaigns.
This was my initial setup (I'm using Adsbridge for tracking if the UI is unfamiliar with you)
As you can see, I've got 16 different campaigns set up, the campaigns account for different variables, such as OS, Carrier, Bid, etc. It's a pain in the ass and takes a lot of time to set it up, but it's worth it, you'll thank yourself later if you take the time and set everything up correctly.
After a day or two of running a setup with this many variables you'll see some results on what's converting and what's not - now you can begin optimizing (I'll get to optimization later).
Some tips on what you can split test from the beginning:
1: Bids
Set up stagnated bids, i.e set up the same campaign with different bids, higher bids will result in getting more quality placements, but will cost you more, lower bids will receive worse traffic quality but is usually Much cheaper, but you will have to split test this to see what kind of traffic works best for your landing pages and offers.
2: Carriers
If your offer is a PIN submit (like mine is) there will usually be guidelines on what carriers are accepted, set up one campaign for each carrier, and if you want to - set these up with different bids NOTE: It's very important that you don't change these bids throughout the day as that will heavily impact the performance and statistics, remember "Become emotionally detached"? Even if you clearly see that a bid is doing bad, keep it running til the end of the day - the hours you're running will affect the results, so pausing a placement or a campaign because it's been performing badly during 1 hour is not very smart and could result in you missing out on money.
3: OS
If your offer accepts different OS (Android + iOS, Windows, etc) Set up different campaigns for these different operating systems.
4: Categories
I'm running my campaign on PopAds, which allows me to test different categories
I don't recommend that you split test any categories except Adult and non-adult as the others can be quite skewed when it comes to which sites are which category..
But set up two campaigns, one with adult and one without.
5: Smartphone vs Tablets
Normally tablets don't perform at all and most of the time it does terribly, but eventually you might find an offer that converts well for tablets, and you'll have a lot of traffic with next to zero competition, since nobody's targeting tablets.
There you go, now you can set up a campagin and start running it, I'll update thread sometime next week, in the meantime you should start a campaign and test the waters.
Go ahead and hit the "Subscribe" button to get a notification when I update this thread!
