Push Notifications Journey on Zeropark to $10,000 per month

[servandosilva]

Hey guys. Servando here.
It's been a while since I wrote a follow along and I figured this was a good time to write about a traffic source that just implemented a new ads format a month ago.

Push notifications are a new type of traffic that kinda resurrected from the old days and now it comes in form of web push instead of in-app push notifications. A few companies started adding push notifications since 2017 but most of them have been really adding them during this year (2018). I won't bother you much with this info but you can read more about push notifications in my blog.

Now back to the topic, I'm going to do a follow along testing the new push notifications in Zeropark as I've got a great manager there and I've made more than 6 figures in the past with them running Pop and Redirect/Domain traffic.

Here's the plan:

• Analyze the available traffic volume for each geo and select 1 or 2 with hot offers for test
• Setup everything to track the campaigns. I'll use Voluum (get 30% discount here) in this case as it integrates seamlessly with Zeropark and the events aren't charged there. Plus, I always wanted to test the new AI features that were introduced a few months ago.
• Prepare 2-3 landers and 2-3 offers initially to get some data
• Do some research and think of a few headlines/images for the push notifications. Zeropark allows you to split test 5 creatives at the same time with your push traffic, which is way better than cloning a lot of campaigns just to set different creatives as I do in other networks. I'll do my research in native ad networks mostly as the traffic is very similar there.
• Ideally I'll start with a budget of $20-40 per day and increase it as the campaign gets conversions and we optimize them if we can.

I'm not sure if I'm missing anything else for the start, but that should do it for now.
I've got most things ready and setup to send the campaigns for approval, but I'll explain more in a follow up post later.

P.S. I'll try to update this follow-along every single day if I can with the data I gather for a week or so while I blow my budget there. So stay tuned!

 

[servandosilva]

OK, so this is day 1 and here's what happened:

I talked to some of my managers to see what's hot and told them I want to run some traffic to CPL offers if possible. So I got a top list from 3 networks and ended up selecting a couple offers that were performing well from different networks to split test.

I already had some good landers for the type of offer I wanted to test, so that helped me make the decision and quickly uploaded them to Vultr VPS as I've explained in the past. The only thing I did different here is I also implemented SSL as I've been using it since 2017 and Zeropark now actually requires your landers and redirect links to be on SSL.

Keep in mind Push traffic only works on Android as of now. Apple seems to be working in their own tech to do push notifications with Safari but they're not ready yet. this only applies for mobile though.

Other than that here's how the setup for the campaign looks in the tracker:

As you can see, i blocked the offers as I don't want them to be copied but I marked within red boxes a few key things:

1. I'm using paths in Voluum as I like it better that way. I used Voluum for almost 4 years before switching to other tracker for different reasons and I never liked the flows but it's good to know they still allow you to use flows or even direct URLs.
2. I enabled the traffic distribution AI in Voluum as I always wanted to test it and we'll see how it optimizes based on the conversions (if I get conversions). The calculation method was left on Auto and I added on of my best landers for that vertical and 2 offers from different networks with payouts between $6 and $12

Other than that, I ended up choosing a tier 1 country due to the offers I selected (top offers from some of my recommended networks). Choosing a tier 1 geo means I will have some good competition but at the same times it usually means there's good volume to work and optimize.

As for setting up the campaign in Zeropark here's how it looks like:

I also blurred the tracking URL and geo here (although you know it's a tier 1 geo so there aren't many options) but if you look at the rest of the campaign you can see I started with a $20 per day budget and a bid of 0.08 per click.

0.08 is the recommended minimum bid for Zeropark to run in some tier 1 countries, while other tier 2 recommend lower bids like 5 cents or even 2-3 cents in tier 3 countries.

I also added 5 different creatives with different titles to split test. I decided to go for different variations including pictures with a woman and some simple ones like icons as the picture has to be small and it loads in a 192x192px resolution. We'll see how they perform after we get some data.

Zeropark shows the visibility is high, but until the traffic starts coming I won't be able to know if this is enough to receive decent volume to test. As I mentioned before, the offers pay between $6 and $12, so usually I'd have started with $30 or more but being the first time I test push traffic on ZP I'll first see if they have volume for this geo or not.

The campaign is now pending so hopefully it will be approved overnight and we get some traffic tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.

 

[Wapearn]

Min. Deposit is very high in zeroark

 

[Katya]

@servandosilva A bit off topic I guess, but I've checked the blog - great job

 

[LeadReaktor]

Hey Servando,

Thank you for your follow-along, it really benefts a lot! I've also read your Megapush review and liked the story about your grandmother with a ton of nutra offers in push notifications

 

[tyoussef]

@servandosilva , this is really great bro.
thanks for sharing this.
am following.

- are you using landing pages in all of your push notification campaigns ?.

 

[servandosilva]

Min. Deposit is very high in zeroark

$200 is the minimum I think.
I had more than $1,000 in my account but usually $200 is in the mid range and not really high in my opinion. Some networks ask for $500-$1,000 in the first deposit.

 

[servandosilva]

@servandosilva A bit off topic I guess, but I've checked the blog - great job

Thanks! I'm glad you like it.

 

[servandosilva]

Hey Servando,

Thank you for your follow-along, it really benefts a lot! I've also read your Megapush review and liked the story about your grandmother with a ton of nutra offers in push notifications

That was quite funny TBH. Sometimes i've seen friends thinking they've got a virus or won a TV while visiting a website. We all have been there once I guess.

 

[servandosilva]

@servandosilva , this is really great bro.
thanks for sharing this.
am following.

- are you using landing pages in all of your push notification campaigns ?.

I ALWAYS use landing pages in my campaigns bro.
Not using landers is just leaving money in the table 99% of the times.

 

[servandosilva]

Alright so first update on day 2.
Campaigns were disapproved this morning because I was using a rotator for the traffic that wasn't coming from the country I selected. I always do this in my campaigns although sometimes it can lead to disapprovals when the mods think you're using a rotator or cloaking.

Anyways, I disabled the rotator and resubmitted the campaign and 20 minutes later it was up and running!

After the first hour I decide to check the stats and I I noticed my first conversions coming in!

Notice that I created the bid to $0.099 because when the traffic started with my 0.08 bid Zeropark said my visibility was ranked in 4 of the 5 spots the show. I wanted max visibility and increasing the bid another 20% helped to reach the top spot it seems.

It's great to have spent 20 cents and already made a few conversions valued at $10. But obviously this is the first hour and it's probably not how it's going to be later or the ROI would be insane.

Also, conversions came from just 1 creative (number 2) while the rest of the creatives haven't received clicks at all. The CTR in that creative is 0.33% which isn't so bad but the rest have 0% CTR so far so I guess I'll just have to wait a few more hours and see how it goes.

Let's see if ZP can spend my whole $20 budget as well as traffic seems to be slow for now.
I'll keep you posted later.

 

[servandosilva]

Alright, Day 2 is almost over but wanted to give a quick update.
The campaign is converting well but obviously the ROI is not as high as before.

However ROI is still super good at like 600%.
This is how it looks like before the day ends here:

I've got several conversions for a total of $70 while the campaign has spent only $10. I'm not sure if the reason why the campaign only spent $10 was because it got approved around half day but we'll see tomorrow as I'll increase the budget.

Also, you can see all of my creatives received conversions except the number 3. I might pause it in a couple days if it doesn't perform but I don't want to rush any decisions. The cost per action is pretty good considering I'm getting paid $5-12 per conversion based on the offers tested.

Also I noted the CTR of my creatives went down to less than 0.1% and that might be something I'll check out later. Initially it was 0.3% so that was fine but 0.1% is probably on the lower side. I'll check with my manager.

What I noticed though is Voluum decided to send most of the traffic to the offer which got the first conversion earlier today. While there's no statistic significance pretty much 90% of the traffic went to that offer automatically based on their AI. It looks rushed but maybe tomorrow it will start sending traffic to the other offer as well.

Since the campaign seems to be profitable I'll try to increase the budget to $50 or more and see what happens with the current bid. I'll report results tomorrow. Stay tuned.

 

[servandosilva]

Hey guys. This is day 3 of this follow along and to be honest i don't have much to report.
I forgot to increase the daily budget (already did it now but it seems like it's too late already) so the campaign performed similar to yesterday.

We got $17 spent (the budget was $20 per day) and got back $76 in revenue, which is not bad but we want to scale this more.

As you can see I already blocked the worst creative (#3) which had only 1 conversion after 2 days while other creatives had 3-6 conversions so far.

I just changed the budget to $100 per day and increased the bid to 13 cents to see if we can get more spend tomorrow. We'll see how it goes but for now that's all I have to say. Almost $60 USD in profit on day 3.

 

[Tariq Ben]

I didn't know push is working dis good. Will test it with a pay per call offer.

 

[wes888]

Nice follow along Servando! I have never tried push yet. Just curious what type of offers are working in push right now? Is it the same as pop traffic like sweepstakes, dating, etc?

 

[servandosilva]

Nice follow along Servando! I have never tried push yet. Just curious what type of offers are working in push right now? Is it the same as pop traffic like sweepstakes, dating, etc?

Apps, Dating, Sweeps, Gambling and some games seem to be working better in push than other verticals. It's a mix between what works on pops and what works on Native.

 

[servandosilva]

Time for an update

Day 4 is gone and we had some interesting changes to analyze.
Here's how the campaign looks until now after almost $98 ad spend (I increased the budget to $100 yesterday):

Money Spent: $97.2
Money Earned: $144
ROI: 45%

As you can see Zeropark did have the volume to spend $100 per day in this campaign. I was afraid it wouldn't happen but it's good to know we can leverage volume and scale.

Other things to notice is Creative 3 is still paused (yesterday's decision) and the CTR of my creatives seems to be a bit better with the higher bid. Creative 5 seems to be performing much worse today so I might pause that one.

However the ROI is now much lower than the first couple days where ROI was like 300-600%.
This is probably due to the bid increase and volume, so is it time to start optimizing? let's dive into further data.

Zeropark is a DSP and manages a ton of sources from where they resell traffic. So first thing I did was to analyze the sources tab to see if there was any particular source eating budget that wouldn't be performing well. Keep in mind I decided to analyze the numbers of the 3 days this campaign has been running so I had more data instead of just the $97 spent today.

However I couldn't really find a source that was performing bad yet. In fact most of the traffic was received from the first 2 sources and less than $5 has been spent fro the rest of the sources.

Let's move to targets now:

Targets are individual websites sending traffic to your campaign. While most of the traffic was coming from 2 sources we have more targets sending traffic from each source, but not as much as I'd like.

With pops/PPV you can get traffic from hundreds or thousands of targets just by spending a few dollars. While that helps you diversify it also makes more difficult to optimize the campaign. In this case we've received traffic from push websites but just a dozen or so. The creatives have impressions in more websites but without clicks so I can't count them.

There's only 1 target with an eCPA of $13.57 but even that has received a conversion so I'll leave it to spend at least $20 before deciding. The rest of the targets look fine so I'll be patient and gather more data.

What's next?

I'll increase the budget to $200 per day and see if tomorrow they can spend it all. I'll also probably pause creative 5 tomorrow if it performs worse than the rest of the creatives. Hopefully it won't result into a negative profit campaign tomorrow.

 

[Tariq Ben]

Are you using tracker?

 

[azgold]

Are you using tracker?

Yes, he is. He's using Voluum.

I'll use Voluum

 

[jonte]

Good stuff mate! Have you compared direct linking vs going through a landing page for your push campaigns? I've heard mixed reports about landers vs direct linking for push campaigns. I've had a couple of profitable push campaigns in which I used basic landers (LPs that don't take much time to navigate through). Good luck!