I Quit My Job. Need to make this work! Follow along $100 and more per day.

[craig88]

Hey all, I thought it would be a good idea to document my journey to force myself to test, analyse and optimise various campaigns and get help and advice along the way.

I recently just quit my job so I'm needing to make this work... I got sick and tired of having to be in the office from 8-5 every day with no flexibility so I wanted to CPA out properly.

I spent a few weeks reading/watching so I think I know the basics but now it's all about the practical...

The $100 a day(profit) is that all important number where I'll be earning similarly what I did in a proper 8-5 job BUT having the freedom and flexibility of life. Obviously my goals are much bigger than $100 a day but it is the first goal that will let me know this is real and possible.

 

[craig88]

I'm not too worried about giving information away as my ROI's are -100% so probably wouldn't be a good idea for other newbies to try copy me

Campaign 1:

I wrote a thread about this in the newbie section but just to go over it again I'll include it here.

Offer: Lazada shopping iOS app (CPI)

Flowownload and open (free)

Payout: $1

Geo:Singapore

Traffic: Go2mobi - Smaato exchange

Tracker: Funnel Flux

I created a number of banners with photoshop and uploaded them all to the go2mobi campaign. This is the summary of that first campaign. $25 spend, 34 clicks.

Of which the 34 clicks were sent to my funnel which the sent 25% to Lander 1, 2, 3 and direct to the offer.

30 Clicks ended up on my landers of which only 2 went on to the offer. The other 4 went to directly to the offer.

No conversions, which is expected seeing as only 6 ended up at the offer page. But after a $25 spend this wasn't good.

These were my creative banners and landers below along with the CTR's and CPM's.

At this stage the maths was way off. My average CPC was $,72 and my average lander CTR was 7%.

I then created a second campaign optimising the first.

 

[craig88]

Campaign 2:

I downloaded all the data from Go2mobi and tried to optimise, but I clearly over optimised.

Instead of just using the 2/3 highest CTR banners I looked at it differently. I did an excel pivot looking at carrier with banner click through to see which banner-carrier had the lowest cpc. In hindsight this was probably not a good idea.

I then pivoted the placements to see which gave me the lowest cpc and whitelisted them.

I then pivoted placements with lower cpc banners to see which ones to whitelist.

The problem was after all the "optimising" I struggled to get traffic on this new campaign.

Even at $500 budget a day I struggled to get more than $10 spend over quite a few hours.

My cpc went down by about half compared to the first campaign being $,72 and now $,36.

The funny thing is my best banner in the second campaign with a ctr of 0,75% was much lower in the first at 0,14%. CPC changed from $1,117 down to $0,198..

I decided to direct link all these thus 26 all went straight to the offer and no conversions.

Thus I have had 26 + 6(4+2) = 32 go to the offer. Of which only 21 was recognised by Maxbounty.

No conversions. I couldn't see any light in continuing with this offer.

Total spend $35, conversions 0.

Lessons learnt.
1. Don't over optimise.
2. Go2mobi traffic seems too pricey to profit from on these low payout offers.

At my best CPC of $0,198, assuming I send direct to the offer I would need 20% to convert just to break even.

If I sent to a lander which had a CTR of 20%(optimistic) I would then need 100% of those reaching the offer page to convert just to break even. This doesn't seem possible to me?

 

[craig88]

Campaign 3:

Network: Mobidea
Offer: Mobile subscription
Geo:Egypt
Payout:<$.5
Traffic: Go2mobi/smaato
Tracker: Funnel Flux

Spend: $18,66; Average CPM = $1,08; CPC=$0,1481

8 Banners send traffic to my funnel which allocates it to 6 different landers. No direct linking. I probably should have split up campaigns instead of just doing one mass "experiment".

The 126 clicks to my landers generated 26 CT's with some doing much better CTR's than others ranging from 10% to 40%. The population is obviously small so hard to comment which lander is best at this stage.

Mobidea is reporting that there were 17 clicks so there is a difference of about 10.

The data is confusing me for the carriers as Go2mobi says it is only Vodafone and Vodafone Egypt but Funnel flux has quite a few different carriers.

The offer was only for Orange and Vodafone which I thought I had whitelisted in the campaign set up. But now I'm not too sure if it was only for the Wifi side of things. I think I need to run it with all carriers and the white list the ones that show up, i.e. vodafone and orange.

Summary: After 26, or 17 clicks landing on my offer according to Mobidea (some might not be unique), I have had no conversions and $18 later.
I think for newbies different languages can pose quite a challenge. Just setting up a normal campaign for the first/second/third time is enough of a struggle for someone starting out and now having to translate headlines into arabic was a real nightmare. The language looks so foreign and browsers/adobe end up changing the order so that it's backwards a lot of the time. I ended up putting an ! or ? a lot of the time so when I saw it at the front of the sentence I knew the order was correct.

Maths: If I look at my best banner giving me a CPC of $0,1062 and my best lander giving me a CTR of 40% then I would need the offer to convert at just under 50%, which would be extremely high. This is obviously before optimising other placements.

This is one of the landers below. Basically talks about defeating the ice king, saving the princess and making new friends, I think..

 

[abdellahi]

Hi good luck with your journey.
For your EG campaign the lander are wrote in arabic but it's unread so try to edit it or see someone who can translate it

 

[peter5487]

your cpc is very very high

you are choosing very wrong ad network for this traffic source, this way you never will be profitable

 

[craig88]

Hi good luck with your journey.
For your EG campaign the lander are wrote in arabic but it's unread so try to edit it or see someone who can translate it

Thanks. Haha so you're saying the Arabic doesn't make sense? I'm not surprised I used google translate. I seem to be getting a 30% CTR on the 3 "best" landers which I have now sent all the traffic too.

 

[craig88]

your cpc is very very high

you are choosing very wrong ad network for this traffic source, this way you never will be profitable

I do agree and think my traffic costs are far too high...

The CPC has come down about half since choosing the 3 "best" banners from $0,1481 to $,0714 but it is still going to be very unrealistic to break even on those CPC's.

With my LP's at 30% and my CPC at $,071(granted these numbers are still not based on much sample population so will probably change a lot) I need 50% offer conversion to break even...Not likely for a daily mobile services subscription...

 

[Luke_14]

For these low payout offers. Perhaps going to PPV/Popup or redirect traffic to get a campaign into break even before going elsewhere for traffic to scale when you know what works. Testing campaigns with cheap traffic sources will save your pocket a little bit even if it is just for testing and finding what works.

 

[Evan Forsyth]

Yes I think you are targeting offers with too low of payouts. It takes a lot of traffic and conversions to make such low payout offers worth your time.

 

[craig88]

I think you guys are right. I was trying not to change traffic sources as everything I've read says stick to one source and stop jumping around in the beginning stage but Go2mobi just doesn't seem possible, at least not with my current skill set.

The conversion rate per Mobidea is around 1% meaning I would need 100 visitors to the offer to convert, on average. The CPC to my lander is around $,10 and at an optimistic 25% CTR It would cost around $,40 just to get one visitor to the actual offer. Assuming 1 in 100 convert, I would end up spending $40 to make $,50 . I know the 1% conversion rate is based on all traffic so not perfectly accurate, but this offer would be very difficult to make profitable.

 

[linlove]

follow

 

[Bashy]

If i may interject with my limited experience but its something i found important and took me a while to see on my own campaigns.

The banners you used while different all contained pretty much the same angle, in a sense you skipped the angle testing stage and are optimizing 1 angle for best banner CTR.

If you can think of more angles to run then you may see different results.

I dont know something like "Get up to 70% off products you love", "Ebay alternative for rock bottom prices", "Want Amazon? Try Lazada instead"

Just something off the top of my head, not saying these are any good lol.

 

[craig88]

If i may interject with my limited experience but its something i found important and took me a while to see on my own campaigns.

The banners you used while different all contained pretty much the same angle, in a sense you skipped the angle testing stage and are optimizing 1 angle for best banner CTR.

If you can think of more angles to run then you may see different results.

I dont know something like "Get up to 70% off products you love", "Ebay alternative for rock bottom prices", "Want Amazon? Try Lazada instead"

Just something off the top of my head, not saying these are any good lol.

Thanks Bashy I know exactly what you mean. I "know" about angles but have not been putting them into proper practice. I did the whole exercise of angles for Lazada below but never split them out into various campaigns with different angles. It was more of the throwing mud at the wall and hoping something stuck.

 

[craig88]

So I decided to give the mobile game subscription one last go, just for testing/learning/optimisation sake.

After choosing my 3 best banners and landers above, I then reversed the maths to see what CPC at Go2mobi needed to be to break even.

Using a 25% LP CTR and a 1.5% Banner CTR and 1% offer conversion means ($,46(payout)*,25*,015= $0,0017).

I could see none of my top placements were even close to that CPC. I whitelisted the the below ones. The problem then was that I had very little traffic after that. Even changing my budget to $500 a day I couldn't get over a dollar spend in a few hours... My CPC ended on $0,0126 compared to the $0,0714 which was after the first round of lander and banner whitelisting BUT the traffic was non-existent so it's a meaningless "achievement" in this case.

So far no conversions yet... Granted I've only had 67 CTR's from the landers to the actual offer.

 

[dogankurye]

I was in your situation dude . but still you are in a wrong way u need to more focus what people need right know ı do a courier company and ı do 500 dolar minumum a day. Search market more well.

 

[craig88]

I've been a bit quiet lately due to moving apartments so haven't been focusing on this as much as I would have liked.

After the last few campaigns, I realised Go2mobi is a bad idea for these low-cost payouts. I actually read something saying the days of using Go2mobi to make money on mobile is gone. It was about how the demand has increased on Smaato exchange way above profitable costs which makes sense to me considering I paid about $30 to get 63 visitors to the offer page...

I have since signed up with a few of the different pop networks and those costs seem much better.

My current campaign was a bit of a fail. I didn't set up tracking properly so I cannot see conversions on my traffic source nor can I see targets on my funnel so the data is pretty useless. Reason being is that targets mean nothing without knowing the ctr of my lander and the traffic source doesn't show this. I'm still not sure how to get both my traffic source and tracker to get postbacks from my network.

On the plus side, I received my first conversion, 14 of them actually, which was really good. The payout is about $,5 due to the nature of the conversion being SOI.

The only data I got was that the landers I ripped and played with had varying levels of success.

The one with 149% was due to an error on the website. It was an alert box that took them to the offer so it made it seem as if each click was actually two clicks. So it would be half of that which is 3,845 resulting in a ctr of 75% which was nearly double the second winner at 42% and ten times more than the loser. The problem is that the conversion rate of the second best lander is twice that of the best one so they both got 6 conversions.

I'm definitely going to drop the last lander but not sure if I should focus just on the winner or carry on testing with number 1 and 2?

I need to try see if I can get the data from traffic and the data from tracker and try to combine them to make more sense.

Lessons learnt:
Make sure to pass through all tokens that you will need to analyse data.
Set up postbacks properly so you can analyse both traffic data and tracker data to get and clearer picture.

I'm not sure how to try improve profitability other than dropping the loser lander and passing target tokens through to see which ones are the best for conversions/lander ctr's?

 

[comegetbravo]

One thing with banners that's always worked for me has been using generic banners + direct link to mobile subscription offers. Give it a go, and also, as you've already done, run in tier 3,4 geos.

 

[charlez]

Let me know if you need help. I know someone in person who optimizes campaigns and has managed a $1 million budget per quarter for Microsoft and is a marketing genius in general. Reach me on Skype: charlesgmullen0

 

[craig88]

Blew through over $100 the past 3 days which was quite heavy for me...

Was testing out a new campaign and spent $60 to get one $2.5 conversion. Not sure how I would continue testing it without blowing through serious cash...?

The other offer I have been running is now over 30 conversions. I almost get excited every time an email comes in to check if it's another conversion haha.

At first I thought I was really cool with my high lander ctr's then realised it must be bots at 60%. Not possible to get such high ctr's.

Another thing you always hear is not to worry about ctr but rather conversion rates. Naturally being a beginner this concept takes some time to get used too as we generally don't get too many conversion in the early stages.

This image demonstrates the theory. If I just looked at ctr I would go with lander 2 at more than twice the percentage but lander 1 was the one that had more than 3 times the conversions... Strange.

The campaign is still at a large negative ROI. I attempted to optimise it today by the following:
1. Cut lander 2, I had already cut lander 3 a few days ago.
2. Cut the offers, I tested out 4 similar ones and the one seemed to be converting best, granted my population was probably too small.
3. Black list targets with high CTR's. My assumption was these must be bots to be achieving lander ctr's of 60% and over, and little to no conversions.

The issue now is traffic has slowed down a lot... I haven't even started optimising devices, carriers etc as I know that usually kills volume completely.