Hi! Welcome back!
“Back from where?” you say? Well, if you read the first part of the guide mere seconds ago, then from there.
If from anywhere else, then welcome to the party! This is where you watch me fail my way to success while attempting to show you how to run campaigns without getting bogged down in too many details.
Don't worry, you'll learn all the good stuff along the way, but I'm trying to make it as painless as possible. If you want to know more about me, or you ended up here on accident but now you're intrigued? Get your butt back to the first part of Affiliate Building Blocks here.
Alright, let's hop back in.
Last time, we started our first campaign using CPA Goal on Propeller Ads and made an amazing $0.03 US Dollar Moneys! What happened after I let it run for a bit?
More conversions! Sweet, that means it's working... but is it worth it? Well, it lost money, so not yet. And maybe not ever, but I'll share a few different things we can do with the data we just bought.
It looks like the majority of conversions are coming from two countries, South Sudan and Iraq. While there may not be weapons of mass destruction here, there may be some conversions to be had, so let's parse both of those geos out into separate campaigns and see what we can do.
"But Jaybot, what about all those other countries? Uganda, Sudan, Italy, and... United States?!"
Good question. Most likely answer is: bots. And I won't complain about bots giving me conversions from the United States at Iraqi traffic prices. But I won't intentionally target the US either. That traffic is way too expensive for an offer like this.
"But Jaybot! I don't want to pay for bots! How do I get rid of them? Do I use bot filters and traps and fraud detection and cloaking and stuff?"
Nah. Too complicated. You don't need to bother with that crap. Bots maybe even gave me those conversions! Anyway. Let's just test more stuff first. Remember, so far we've spent a total of $0.51!
One more thing before focusing on these geos, let's take a closer look at some stats to see if there is anything worthwhile...
Let's check the placements or 'zones' that are converting first. These should be in your Binom tracker under Tokens. If not, then you messed up somewhere and you need to ask Propeller and Binom support what you messed up
OK. We have some zones converting quite a lot. With a massive 1 cent payout that's not too surprising, but still a converting zone is a converting zone. Even at a loss. If this were a normal SOI offer with at least 10 cents or so, we could start making some preliminary whitelists with those zones that converted 3 or more times.
But.
With such a small payout it's a tough call if we can make useful whitelists... yet.
So. Now that we've seen the potential, let's make some new campaigns on Propeller with SmartCPM and CPA Goal.
"Why both?"
Why not? We're still testing the waters here. Sometimes CPA Goal will do better (but you can't make good Blacklists) and sometimes SmartCPM works better (but you'll have to manually cut a lot of placements).
We'll do Iraq, and South Sudan.
For both geos, we’ll set our CPA Goal camps with the same everything as last time, just focusing only on each geo separately. So two camps there. And two more:
Next, we’ll set up some SmartCPM camps.
IQ Smart CPM like so:
I chose the CPM (Cost Per Mile) based on an average of our CPC (Cost Per Click) from our top converting zones above and using Propeller’s little graph on the right. The main thing when starting a naked campaign (no whitelists, no blacklists) on SmartCPM is to make sure you bid above the first big bend in the graph. In our picture it’s around 0.224 but we’ll go a bit higher because we have some data about out converting zones from earlier.
SS bidding will be a bit different:
The reason for the much higher bid is because there simply isn’t as much traffic to buy, which makes it more expensive. But remember, we need to be at least at that first bend in the graph (otherwise we’re bidding well below average and it will be mostly junk traffic).
Targeting will be the same as last time:
I'll be honest, we're going to spend more money this time. Especially in Iraq. It has a lot of traffic, and our SmartCPM will open up the floodgates without the CPA Goal algorithm to save us.
We will make use of this auto-optimize thing, and keep a very close eye on the campaign and start cutting zones at 0.02 (about 1.5x payout)... and we'll stick with Wifi only to avoid paying for premium 3G traffic right now.
Also important, set the frequency to 1 visit every 24 hours. We don't need the same person seeing our ad over and over. I'll explain soon.
Okay, enough talk. Let's run for a day or two and see how it goes.
South Sudan did OK.
But... not a lot of traffic available. It's tough to see anything with this small payout and small amount of traffic. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it will take longer and be kinda boring. So I'm skipping it for now.
How about Iraq?
CPA Goal is junk. Not a lot of traffic or conversions at this payout.
“But Jaybot! It’s like 4k visits, that’s almost the same as South Sudan!”
You’re half right! But that’s 4k visits on South Sudan naked SmartCPM campaign vs. Iraq’s throttled algorithm-controlled CPA Goal camp.
So, what about our SmartCPM camp for Iraq?
Oh. Well. Red-ish.
Loads of traffic and lots of conversions though. Let's look closer!
Checking zones in the tokens section of Binom, we see this placement with 43 leads which lost a bit a money, and check its CPC, which is about 0.00031, we can multiply that by 1000x and we have a rough estimation of how it works at 0.31 CPM.
Next, we can do a couple things: we can start a straight, Pure CPM camp Whitelisted with just this zone and adjust its CPM to a bit lower and see how it performs on its own.
Or.
We can take several of these high converting zones, but slightly lossy or break-even and stick them in a cluster-like Whitelist in a SmartCPM campaign.
What's the difference between SmartCPM and CPM? First of all, as I alluded to above CPM simply means Cost Per Mile (or Mille? whatever), which means per 1000 clicks.
Simplified: SmartCPM is a 2nd bid auction model. It's basically how ebay works. I can bid super duper high, like $5 billion dollars, but if the 2nd highest bidder bids $1 dollar, then I would only pay $1.01, and the 2nd highest bidder would get my left over traffic at $1. (if someone pays $6 billion dollars though, I'm screwed into buying their left over traffic at $5 billion).
This is great for everyone as it overall lowers the cost of traffic, especially 2nd and 3rd visitors (people triggering an ad 2 or 3 times on the same day, which we don't usually want). However, it's really hard to find the top bid and volume is not as stable for a variety of reasons that people smarter than me understand.
CPM or Pure CPM or Vanilla CPM is a straight auction model. The 2nd highest bidder is not taken into account and you pay the full price for all the traffic you can get at your bid level, winner takes all of the 1st time visitors (we don't want those 2nd or 3rd visits by the same person on a pure CPM whitelist campaign). Whitelist campaigns, especially on Pure CPM are usually for Quality placements, not quantity of traffic. However, if you’re $5 above the 2nd highest bidder, you’re still paying the whole amount.
"Okay, okay, but why would we do Pure CPM for one Whitelist, but not the other?"
I don't have to, honestly. But I want to see how much volume this one zone has. Now. I could do that with SmartCPM, but if someone bids just 1 cent above me, they'll take the lion's share of the 1st visitor traffic and I won't see how much is actually available.
Okay, enough theory and speculation, the only way to see if something works is to test it.
I'm going to throw a few of these zones into solo Whitelists on Pure CPM, a cluster of other converting zones into a SmartCPM Whitelist and leave the regular SmartCPM campaign with its Blacklist going.
I'll even play around and make some extra camps with Propeller's brokered, and un-brokered, Webview and Non-Webview.
"Why so many camps?!"
Remember what I said about testing with those building blocks? Throwing them across the room? Stacking them in weird ways? That's what we're doing. Testing a bunch of combinations to see if anything works.
So, how did the tests go?
Well, like most building blocks experiments when we were small children...
Yikes!
(my campaign naming conventions? I went with ice cream flavors this time since I said Vanilla CPM I couldn’t stop thinking about ice cream. Don’t forget to have fun!)
Well... Some good, some bad.
The Bad/Good news is:
This offer is totally not worth it for me. But hold on, tiger! You know what we do have now?
Even more zones. Good ones and bad ones. And using the amazingly magical Binom feature of creating a report with multiple campaigns at the same time (did you know some of the major trackers out there that can’t do this?) we can get a great overall view of our data.
Green zones are few and far between:
Those top two look really nice. 4 conversions, ROI over 100% A whole 7 cents of profit! Definitely contenders for Whitelist campaigns.
Now the ugly part. Let's take a look at the bad zones.
Unfortunately, it's not only zones that simply lost 1 cent or more (in case the Propeller algorithm or I didn't catch it in time.), but it also includes some of our highest converting zones... but at pretty massive losses.
52 conversions! 29! 24! 20! These are good zones. Just not profitable. It's really hard to be at a 0.015 payout. But that doesn't mean we can't use them for other offers without higher payouts!
We can (and will) use this cheaply acquired data on an offer with a slightly higher payout.
But.
Let me point something out: This may be a good offer for others.
In fact, I personally know some affiliates who make some (small) profits on it. Many are doing push, and some pop traffic. But. This offer is just not worth my time with my traffic for anything other than finding some converting placements in a geo for cheap.
What do I mean, cheap? Well...
Cheap like this homemade bikini.
(Sorry, I’ve been looking for an excuse to use this image and couldn’t miss the opportunity)
I’ve pointed out a few times that we cut placements that don't convert up to 1x the payout (some do 2x some do 1/2x it all depends on the offer, geo, payout, number of coffees or beers you've had, what you ate for breakfast, etc.)
In our case, that was $0.01 to cut a crap zone. And we cut a lot of crap zones. Like 1000 zones. which cost us about $15. If this were a $1 offer, that would have cost us $1000 to cut all that. Obviously, there are more variables: e.g. I would cut at 1/2 or 1/3 payout in a geo with this much traffic, it could convert better/worse/etc... But you get the idea.
So now that we got some sweet IQ data, let's try some other offers in Iraq.
Remember, IQ is not the most popular geo, so our choices of offers is kinda limited on the bigger CPA networks (Clickdealer, Gotzha, Advidi, etc.), but let's see if Haka has anything…
As luck would have it, Iraq is the number 4 country in their top geos right now. That's nice. Let's give Haka a spin then!
Haka is another great CPA network with a bunch of of Click2SMS offers. Easy to convert, supports tons of geos, and again, their offers have landers built-in so we don't have to worry about landers.
Unfortunately, there is no template setup in Binom as of right now, but the tokens are pretty easy to setup:
The offer URL template should work like this:
{offer_url}?aid={trafficsource.id}&keyword={clickid}&keyword2={campaign.id}&keyword3={offer.id}
I'm not sure you even need all of those. So, definitely double-check your token settings with your Haka AM and Binom support.
Most of Haka's offers convert well, here's a small sample of what is available on my dashboard.
If one catches your eye but you don't have it, just ask your Haka AM, they'll add it for you pretty easily.
I would always suggest an iPhone offer to test, but Captcha offers usually convert well too.
(Are you wondering why? What sites do you normally run into pop-ups on? Have ever tried downloading something from a file sharing site? If not, you're not using the internet correctly
)Anyway, I'm going with Captcha for now. Most Haka offers payout is around $0.35. So roughly 35x higher than our last offer
Let's setup a SmartCPM Whitelist campaign with all of the zones that converted from our 1 cent test offer.
0.16 CPM would be the average of our converting zones, but remember: this is a SmartCPM campaign, so we can bid a little higher without worrying about bidding too much, and let's just take one of the more expensive CPM zones from the top of our 1 cent campaign. I'll go with 0.34 and set up the campaign like this.
You’ll see I’m opening up the targeting to Wifi and 3G this time, still getting rid of Android Webview, and limiting the Zones to only the ones that converted on our last offer.
You can use auto-optimize (or manually cut) and set it at 1x payout now. If a zone in your whitelist doesn’t convert at 1x, it’s probably not worth having.
I have a good feeling about this, and we're going to have to wait until next time to see how it does...
But here's a sneak-peek at a lottery conversion:
"Wait! What is a lottery conversion?"
It's usually what we call the lucky first conversion which can often be just a statistical anomaly (some smart people call it the Monte Carlo Effect, used to predict outcomes in gambling, and describes an inherent limitation while amplifying blah blah blah blah blah...).
You'll see these a lot when you start a new camp, but it's mostly luck. The first conversion rarely matters. But they're still fun to get
Anyway, I'll catch you next time.
Any questions? Let me know in the comments below or hit me up on telegram and I’ll do my best to answer them!
And just for fun, one more bikini, because… Building Blocks!
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