Journal of a affiliate chasing the sweepstakes green

[AGNiMA]

Does HideMyAss method actually works? do you go to a url that made you a conversion and see what pops up? I have my s4 with broken screen, might revive it for that purpose.

It works, I use another vpn...

Its way cheaper than paying $150+ on spy tool.

 

[jack45]

Pains me to say it, but today didn't go anywhere near as I had expected.

Pop campaign

I moved my zeropark sweeps campaign over to adcash and the result was bad. $50 spend $2 Revenue

I don't understand how it can do 100+% ROI on a $11CPM placement, and then you get other placements at half the price which don't perform at all, my landing page CTR was below 1%, and I know they wasn't faulty because they perform well with other placements. I understand quality will differ between publishers, but the difference is massive.

Banner campaign

Relaunched today on Smaato ad exchange and some of the previous campaigns from yesterday, Smaato was performing best and I also managed to run greyhat landing pages for today which is good.

My best campaign for Smaato is the one with the lowest ad ctr of 0.16% (lol), I am so confused about the results.

Summary of Today!!

 

[promes]

@johnny9
I am not currently subscribed to any competitive intelligence tools. I spy on adcash, propeller ads, zeropark on my Samsung Galaxy S4 + HideMyAss VPN. I also try spy on mDSP but can never find any affiliate ads.

Hey @jack45 I'm curious about how do you find Adcash, Propeller ads and ZP publisher... Custom scrapes with scrapebox looking for their JS codes? Or do you have some kind of list?
Cheers mate!

Does HideMyAss method actually works? do you go to a url that made you a conversion and see what pops up? I have my s4 with broken screen, might revive it for that purpose.

It works perfectly... I Also have an old S4 hith HMA Pro only for that purpose, but you need to know where to spy. A good place to start is "free movies/music" pages. Then check the popups redirects and will see some common URLs on the pops. I.e., the pops that first load onclickads .net and then redirect you to the landing/offer are from Propeller Ads.

 

[jack45]

@promes
Googled apk sites.
ZP I came across by accident when typing yotube.com

Since people are really interested in spying, I just subscribed to AdPlexity yesterday and am really impressed. I have used WRW, MobileAdScout in the past but unsubscribed as I desired more for the price I was paying.

AdPlexity it is easy to cut out the fluff (brand marketing), has all banner ads, pop/redirect landing page ads, and actually shows how long they have been running and on what traffic sources, etc. Bit pricey though at $149

 

[RobinWillson]

I also joined CMA for one month and unsubscribed because it is expensive for me.
But it's gold mine, I also suggest others to join that.

May I ask how do you think the landing page quality from MobilAdScout? I used that last month and grabbed many picture of landers. Now my design concept are all following what I see in MobileAdScout. But recently I feel they are more like offer's landing page, not affiliator's.

BTW, Can you suggest me which one is your photoshop-web course? I did see some PS/Muse video on youtube. But they all teach desktop webdesign, I think the coding they do are too heavy for mobile affiliator, and I can't find one.

 

[jack45]

@RobinWilson
What do you mean "you feel they are more like offer's landing page?" It shouldn't be hard to distinguish between an affiliate landing page and an offer landing page. It's like comparing Black and white.

Responsive Web Design Course - DesignCourse.com
The course was originally for desktop only, but now they are doing a responsive design

 

[RobinWillson]

@RobinWilson
What do you mean "you feel they are more like offer's landing page?" It shouldn't be hard to distinguish between an affiliate landing page and an offer landing page. It's like comparing Black and white.

Responsive Web Design Course - DesignCourse.com
The course was originally for desktop only, but now they are doing a responsive design

Maybe I don't do mobile for long time and can't tell clearly.
I just do offer searching work in this month, in sweeps. I see may offer's landing page (provide from AFF network) are exact the same with what I saw in spy tool. And I used to think that they are made by affiliators. lol..

 

[khaled909]

you mentioned that a certain OS was used to send bots , which tracker are you using to get that info . i was wondering if abridge has that feature

 

[jack45]

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, had to re-assess and also fell sick for a short period.

I came across a nice lander on AdPlexity promoting a certain voucher offer that had ran for 2-3 months on pop traffic. It goes the extra mile and I was surprised to see that no one had replicated it for other geos, so I decided I would put the work in.

Adcash - starting bid $3 cpm
Revenue: $25.52
Cost: $17.00
Profit: $8.52

I have upped the bid to $6.6 to take the top bid spot. Volume hasn't increased at all the past couple of hours.

Gunggo - starting bid $8 cpm
Revenue: $19.14
Cost: $40
Loss: $20.86

Really high starting bid due to lots of competition from a mix of branded gambling sites and super affiliates according to my manager. I have blacklisted one placement which spent around $11 with no conversion.

MDSP - Autobid
Revenue: $3.20
Cost: $1.50
Profit: $1.70

Tested different variations of my best banners from my last campaign, and a new eye-catching angle. My best banner started sky-high at 7% and eventually dropped to 3.4%, compared to the next best of 1.2% I think I have found a banner angle that will perform really well. The big problem is it got listed on a spytool immediately which made me pause. I guess I will have to accept reality that banners are going to be the weakest competitive advantage you can have, however I want to save them for a campaign I can scale to $xxx at least.

Summary

Campaigns started off really well but it is hard to get volume in my target GEO.
Have some promising banner angles but want save them for a $xxx campaign before everyone is allowed to swipe it
Volume > ROI - Most likely will have to choose a GEO with volume.

 

[johnny9]

good stuff man learning alot from you my brother

 

[jack45]

I decided to give Desktop traffic a run and it is performing a lot better.
My landing page CTR is <1% which is bad, and the offer CVR is 20%

Stats for the past two days:
Revenue: $520
Cost: $315
Profit: $205

Profitable, and there are still optimisations to be made, cutting non-performing OS, cutting bad placements. This should easily get to 70% ROI, my problem is the GEO is small and I already have a gut feeling that saturation is starting to kick in...

Will try and scale it to similar traffic sources, however I was thinking maybe banner traffic will perform better, does anyone have a good recommendation of where to begin testing desktop banner traffic? Ideally I'm looking for large volume and a low starting budget.

 

[Neo0707]

buysellads.com web.blogads.com

 

[jack45]

Above are the stats for this Mon-Fri.

Overall campaign profit is $268.20, when I deduct expenses such as translation, bank charges, ink and that today my butter fingers cost me $52 in one hour for putting in a wrong bid my actual profit is $159.20

Adcash has been an inconsistent headache, ever since the campaign launched it has been in decline, I was running at a loss on Thursday and chose to raise the bid which brought it back to a profit, Friday it is back to near break-even again . Traffic src #2 seems consistent, however I have only ran $80 traffic.

Cashflow has been a bitch, I have $1700 with Mundomedia which will be paid mid-december, I'm currently working with Clickdealer who I was $50 short for NET-15 payment last month and have just barely made enough revenue this week to ensure weekly payment (otherwise I wont get paid till January ). Not to mention the $x,xxx that are sitting with managed networks. When most of your money is is tied down in budgets and unrealized revenue, it is quite uncomfortable, but that is how it is when you're not established.

Profit is profit, my current goal is to try and scale to $150/day by the end of next week.

 

[johnny9]

Above are the stats for this Mon-Fri.

Overall campaign profit is $268.20, when I deduct expenses such as translation, bank charges, ink and that today my butter fingers cost me $52 in one hour for putting in a wrong bid my actual profit is $159.20

Adcash has been an inconsistent headache, ever since the campaign launched it has been in decline, I was running at a loss on Thursday and chose to raise the bid which brought it back to a profit, Friday it is back to near break-even again . Traffic src #2 seems consistent, however I have only ran $80 traffic.

Cashflow has been a bitch, I have $1700 with Mundomedia which will be paid mid-december, I'm currently working with Clickdealer who I was $50 short for NET-15 payment last month and have just barely made enough revenue this week to ensure weekly payment (otherwise I wont get paid till January ). Not to mention the $x,xxx that are sitting with managed networks. When most of your money is is tied down in budgets and unrealized revenue, it is quite uncomfortable, but that is how it is when you're not established.

Profit is profit, my current goal is to try and scale to $150/day by the end of next week.

whats the revenue u must hit to get weeklys for clickdealer ?

 

[jack45]

@johnny9 $1,000

Stats for 7/12

Revenue: $121.22
Cost: $66.98
Profit: $55.24 (81% ROI)

Campaign started off really well for the first 4 hours and then started becoming slightly unprofitable.
Spoke to Clickdealer AM who confirmed payment today

Will be soon starting up again on mDSP for sweeps. Everyone is running on pops at the moment, so whilst you can get profitable the margins will be slim.

Will also try and scale this current campaign, but I might have to wait for AWA to finish to test some ad networks.

 

[MrSmith]

@johnny9

Will also try and scale this current campaign, but I might have to wait for AWA to finish to test some ad networks.

Out of interest what are you plans on how you will scale this campaign. Will it just be a matter of buying more traffic from the same providers, different traffic sources with same demographics, etc ?

 

[ppcnewbie]

How's AdPlexity working for you? Still subscribed to it? Did it help you at all? I mean, yeah, you find some ideas, offers, angles, etc, but did it really help you make money?

Anyway, pretty nice results compared to when you started this thread last month. Keep it up!

 

[jack45]

@MrSmith
Increasing bids to get more volume/quality. Didn't work for me this time.
Scaling to other pop/redirect traffic sources. When running RON I don't worry about demographics.
Scaling to other geos. Starting with geos that are culturally similar.
Scaling to other types of traffic such as mDSP, FB, etc. This step would normally come last but I really feel like mDSP is the way forward.

@ppcnewbie
For me personally, Spytools are only useful to see what was run profitably, which means ran for XX days.
The landing page I use was found on AdPlexity by applying filters, then sorting it by "Running Longest" in the top tight.
I had also seen this landing page by manually spying, however I would need to spy manually everyday to be certain it was making profit for whoever was running it.

AdPlexity like most spytools will start of useful, then become less useful as time goes by.

 

[ppcnewbie]

AdPlexity like most spytools will start of useful, then become less useful as time goes by.

That's what I was also thinking. But still, at least for beginners, I think using such tool just only for one month would still help a lot, right?

I mean, if it really helps you see top offers promoted, top landers, top traffic sources, what could you want more?

I'm just starting with mobile and was thinking about using such tool.

Looks like there are 3 main players here: whatrunswhere, mobileadscount and adplexity. From what I saw, only WRW offers a 1$ trial which might make them my 1st choice for testing the 3-day trial, but from the videos I saw on youtube for both mobileadscount and adplexity, they're both similar, maybe with a small + for adplexity, I guess, their interface and filters looks better.

I'll decide which tool to use and as soon as I start my 1st campaigns, I'll start a follow-along here as well.

 

[Neo0707]

What is mDSP?