Hi there!
Did you miss me?
I told you I would use Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year as an excuse to slack off-- err, I mean work harder on writing articles!
I swear, I've written and re-written this article like 7 times and I keep losing the file. Don't ask me how that happens, it just does.
Okay, so last time, we ran into a bit of a pickle, right? We got some domain flags.
But why did that happen? What were we running?
Well, it had to be one of those sweet SOI offers.
Remember, we picked up these nice offers from Clickdealer to dip our toes into some SOI.
The good news is, they converted.
The Bad news is, they lost some money.
The terrible news is, one of them flagged my landing page domain and also my tracker domain, yikes!
After a bit of detective work, it looks like it was this BR offer.
Small payouts that convert like crazy will do this sometimes. It simply comes with the territory.
But we won't let that bring us down. We have our fresh domains and we're ready to rock again with some more SOI offers.
Since our sweeps offers converted so well last time, we'll look for more of those.
But to give you something new, and to show you a neat trick for SOI offers, I'm going to teach you how to use Push Traffic.
“But wait! That sounds really complicated!”
Don't worry, it's not. It's super easy. And now that you're comfortable with pops, you already have the landers.
Also.
Once you get comfortable with Push traffic and creatives... you can branch out into Natives, Display, or even Facebook as many of the concepts are very similar.
"That all sounds fine and dandy, but you said pop was easiest and best and yada yada..."
All true. And for our first offers, like IVR and click2sms, the payouts were so low and the CR% was so high, that pops was, and to be honest, is easier than push. And cheaper.
Since most of the SOI offers we will be doing have a higher payout, close to $1 or more, push is easier to test with and can be much cheaper to get our first conversions.
Okay, so first of all, let's grab some offers.
I asked one of the top 3 AMs of all time on Clickdealer what's doing awesome, what's cheap to run, and converts well on push, and won't bankrupt me (or you)....
And he gave me a list of 100 freaking offers.
So, I asked him to remove DE since that would probably bankrupt most of us since most DE offers are $3-4 per conversion.
That pared the list down to like 50 offers (seriously, DE has tons), and I crossed out ES, IT (we just got fresh domains, and these two geos always give flags and nasty notices from 'IT security companies', not worth it imo), dropped LIDL (same reason)… There must be something good… Ah--
FR Carrefour seems to be a consistent offer, I've seen it around for at least a year. Possibly easy to convert, but difficult to scale. And that's a good match for a push test. I also have a couple of landers for this. One slightly 'aggressive' and one vanilla:
Aggressive?
Vanilla?
See the difference?
It's that tiny gift card thingy at the top. For some reason, certain traffic sources (Propeller) find that aggressive because it looks like it's officially from Carrefour or something. Honestly, I think that's ridiculous as it has no Carrefour logo nor text, and the 'bon d'achat' font isn't even close, but whatever.
Keep. Propeller. Happy. They have quality traffic because they are so strict.
For everywhere else, feel free to use the 'aggressive' lander. Generic giftbox works as well, but I find this color scheme works best.
What's that? Could you submit your campaign with the compliant lander, and then once approved, change it to the aggressive one using the rotation in Binom?
Well, I guess you could. I can't suggest you do that. But feel free to try it.
That's typically called bait-and-switch
And it highly depends on the traffic type and source.
You can honestly get away with that for weeks/months on certain Native sources.
But Propeller (especially on Pops) will find that out within a few minutes/hours and will suspend your camp, so keep that in mind.
Anyway, let's run some push traffic!
You've seen the lander. But what on earth do we do for a creative?! (creative is fancy-speak for: Ad)
Relax. Easy peasy. We check push.cpa.rip for some inspiration and find ads like these:
Perfect. 4 to choose from. One has already been used on Propeller. 1000 instead of 2000 euros, but that's easy enough to fix. And even easier because we're not going to bother with a big picture. Just use the icon.
So: copy and paste that text and you're good to go. Eyeballing the other ads, you'll need to adjust the text of 'vous gagnez' and 'est a vous' as we can't say you won/win anything on Propeller. Also, don't show the picture of the shipping box, or anything to do with shipping companies. Those usually won't get approved.
"But Jaybot! I don't speak French! How do I fix these?"
Duh. Just learn French!
Kidding
Copy and paste into google translate or deepl. A/B a few times and test out some new phrases in both your native tongue, English and the target language. For short phrases google/deepl works great.
And while you can't say, 'you won a $2000 giftcard!' you can ask 'Did you win a $2000 giftcard?!'
You can't say 'A $2000 giftcard is yours!' but you can say 'A $2000 giftcard can be yours!' or 'Claim this $2000 giftcard by...'
You'll get the hang of it.
It's best to start a push camp with at least 4 creatives and let the traffic source figure out which one is best.
These four icons are all good (and should get approved). But some others which may also work:
Anything with generic looking message notifications or emojis can work.
And this frickin' one:
Works well for everything and has baffled all affiliate marketers for years.
Not the one like this with a different color, or better resolution, or in 3D, or with a notification number on it. It must be this crappy, pixelated low-res gif from 1998 in red and white. No one knows why.
Anyway. Let's make a camp on propeller.
First get our offer, lander, and rotation setup in binom.
Then the juicy parts (pay attention):
We choose Push, we choose CPC (not CPA Goal), we turn OFF in-page push, which is another beast. We only want Classic Push.
We can unselect brokered for now, since FR has tons of traffic on propeller already. 1 click per day.
Hi Quality only. Do not waste your time with Medium or Low when testing offers. Unless it is a geo with very, very, very small volume. France is not one of those geos.
Auto optimize at 1/2 payout because I'm cheap and lazy (if the offer converts really well, we can run another test at 1x payout).
This auto-optimize thing can work really well to save you money, but it has two major, completely opposite, problems:
1) it tests every creative on each zone up to your CPA goal before cutting a zone, which is inefficient and can spend more than necessary.
2) it will limit traffic by not spending on a lot of zones which seem similar to the algorithms AI, so volume will be artificially limited if you leave it on for too long.
Neither of these matter right now, I just wanted to point it out.
Ok. Back to... Targeting: Mobile. Android. We'll start with Wifi only to save some dough.
Creatives? Mostly copy and paste with some minor edits.
I'm also going to add some emojis. Always sprinkle emojis in push ads.
The bid?
Recommended bid is always higher than necessary for push.
If we get no traffic, we can always raise it later.
0.05 is wayyyy too high for FR with no Blacklist or Whitelist. I'll do 0.03, but even that seems a bit high. That's almost equal to decent US traffic bid prices.
For budget we'll set to 10x payout, so about $15 daily.
And now we let it rip!
Err…
Right after we fix those.
Ah.
Much better.
Now we let it run…
And we didn't even spend it all. And we got 2 nice conversions.
And look at that CTR, holy cow! Is my lander that good?
Well, yeah, of course it is. But also:
Push traffic is higher quality and already has user intent before they get to the lander.
What's user intent? The person sees the ad and then clicks on it, expecting to see the lander. Unlike Pop ads which is 'interrupt marketing' and usually annoys the user, resulting in much lower CTR.
In addition...
The higher the quality traffic, the higher the LP CTR.
However. One other thing you may notice: the higher the quality, the longer the timeframe for everything.
That is:
Approval times (your pop camps took what? 2 minutes? Push takes a whole 5-10 minutes!). Cutting times (higher payouts, means more waiting for stats to reach those numbers).
Creatives (making, getting approved, and cutting).
Visits (I had 202 people reach my lander vs. 20,000 on pops). The higher up the chain you go, the longer you will be waiting (Native is average 1-2 days to be approved, FB can take 3-5 days or longer, not to mention account issues, fanpages, company 'info', posts, like campaigns and warm up times which can add weeks before you even run an offer).
So we need to adjust our pace a bit. Optimizing will take longer than usual as well.
Your first push camp also burns a dollar or two for each creative using CPM to figure out your average CTR. Once that is found, the traffic will have a bit of a lull.
Then you can see how your ads/lander do on pure CPC for a day or two before making decisions.
So. We could see after one more day to see if we still get traffic.
Or.... we could just start another camp and raise the bid.
Or both ?
Okay, so let's also check which creatives did well... of course the Ugly Giftbox icon worked:
Yeah, I’m impatient.
So, I split tested bid levels at 0.03 0.035 0.04 0.05 to get a good spread (and save you time)
Blue messenger: 4 conversions High CTR between 1%-0.8%
Ugly Giftbox: 3 conversions (I told you) Average CTR between 0.2-0.66%
White envelope: 2 conversions Good CTR between 0.4%-0.07%
Red giftbox: 1 conversions Low CTR 0.1-0.4%
Eyeballing it, I would cut the red giftbox and white envelope and let the other two keep running. We can't really go by CPA right now because we're still cutting zones and it was fighting the other creatives.
We could stick all of my creatives states into a fancy stats calculator like this
But, not only would it be wrong, it would give the entirely opposite result:
Unless I only did my two top creatives:
And then Ugly Giftbox wins, of course.
In any case, we're going to need more data.
So let's run all of them a bit longer and see how it shakes out.
Oh. Also. If you run this many camps at the same time, the auto-optimize thingy will obviously not catch everything, as it's only checking per camp. Doing a combined report on Binom and checking the zones can help you find blood-suckers quicker by adding all the zones' costs together.
And even after several days... it looks like this conundrum:
That top one has really high CTR but lower CR causing us to lose money, maybe if we swapped the text?
Well, that kinda worked. CPA is lower on both but still too high for the blue icon.
And if I switch to only the Ugly Box icon, CTR doesn’t stay high enough and… the traffic source dries up and doesn't want to give us more traffic.
What to do?
Good creative CTR, Good LP CTR, OK offer CR.
Well. I guess we could check for other offers, same prize?
There were no other €2000 Carrefour offers on Clickdealer, but maybe other networks... like Advidi
Advidi is another great network full of tons of SOIs as well, but often has slightly higher/lower payouts.
I asked my beautiful Advidi AM and she suggested this one:
Same offer, but slightly lower payout (about $1.15). But if it converts better, it's worth a shot.
And how did we do?
Bidding $0.05 with our Blacklist from all previous camps with these creatives:
Of the bat, 8 conversions, -10% ROI That's NICE.
Some slight optimization and we can make this green.
Can I get this green? Let's find out!
Next time ?
Oh yeah, just to show I'm not completely failing all the time, I promised I would share some stats from the first few posts as they chugged along, as long as they were still running and not losing money.
Those Traffic Company camps since the previous time I mentioned them?
Well, here are the stats since then:
Yes, it's only the green camps. Yes, that's only on Propeller. Yes, I added a few more geos.
And yes, I blurred out some minor text (just bid levels and traffic types) there. I can't tell y'all everything all the time.
Besides needing to figure out somethings on your own, it's entirely possible some of these things won't work anymore, so as always: do your own testing!
Now, can I get these same stats with some Push camp SOI?
Let's see!
Till next time... later!
