Follow Along PPV vs Mobipium PNSL (Rematch)

[Jimmy]

Hi Afflifters,

At the end of June I stumbled across the Mobipium Push Smartlink (PNSL) and since joining AffLIFT I’ve noticed a lot of members have been cracking away at those offers as well. When I first started trying to learn I was grinding away and ended up with 1 x conversion for $0.10 in about 2 months and it was getting discouraging. Thanks to push offers I've been able to shake off that feeling and get excited about what might be possible. The way I see it, if I can learn to make a profit (even a few bucks a day) from promoting $0.05 offers, when I inevitably find my first good converting $1.00 offer, I'll know what to do with it and after that, the sky’s the limit.

Since July I've pretty much been cutting my affiliate marketing teeth on push offers and at the end of September I was green in about 20 GEOs and almost got to being ROI positive overall (including covering the initial money I put into just mucking around testing every thought that popped into my head).

Then I took a break and went away with my family for a few weeks and thought a lot about what I was doing.

What I’m going to do with this follow along is have a rematch with the Mobipium PNSL. I'm going to go back to the start and repeat the process setting up and optimising a bunch of campaigns for different GEOs. Primarily I’m doing this to reinforce what I’ve already learned, but I also want to learn some new traffic sources (I’ve only run these campaigns on Popads so far).

Traffic Source: PPV (Popads to start...)
Tracking Tool: Funnelflux
Affiliate Network: Mobipium
Type of Offer: PNSL
Offer Payout: "SmartCPS" **
I believe this campaign will be successful because: I've been down this road before
I am unsure about: How "SmartCPS" payouts will impact things and how I'll go adding new PPV traffic sources

** One thing that's recently changed with these offers is that Mobipium have removed the direct offers from their marketplace. They now only have the option to run a Smartlink and the payouts are based on “SmartCPS”, which means they're apparently dynamic and based on traffic quality (whatever that means – we’ll see).

They still have a few different landing pages, including the original ‘Push Watch’ lander, but the rest are football related:

(The lander on the left comes in looping and non-looping)

So Step 1 in the process will be to see how these different landers convert.

With this in mind, I’ve set up a campaign like this:

…which I’m running at Popads, bidding $0.0005 for 20 x GEOs I had green in the last couple of months:

CO, ZA, DE, NL, EG, EC, PE, MA, SG, KW, GR, PT, KR, AR, AT, TR, SP, IR, TW, MX

(I've also blacklisted about 500 publishers that didn't convert at least once while I was running these offers over the last couple of months)

And the initial results are starting to look interesting!!!

As I’m writing this, I’ve only started testing, but two of the landers are starting to creep ahead in terms of CVR (see blue box below)…, and they’re not the landers I would have thought would convert the best (i.e. the generic football lander and the non-looping lander). I think it’s also potentially interesting that EPV seems to be the same for all 4 x landers (see green box below). It’s still early days, but I’m getting interested to see how this progresses.

In other news, after the first $5 I dropped IR from the campaign because I’m getting conversions and no revenue, which could mean some kind of block or cap on that GEO. Otherwise, I'm green in 6 x GEOs, including CA, UK and IQ, where I haven’t bought any traffic directly!

I'll keep testing a bit more tonight, pausing after each $5 spend to blacklist more publishers. At this stage I’m not trying to make a profit because I just want to know which landers to focus on going forward when I create GEO specific campaigns, but I don’t want to throw money away unnecessarily either.

I’ll try and update again tomorrow…

 

[Nick]

Good luck with this. Push offers is a really really good way to master media buying.

Definitely be careful with the Mobipium SmartCPS. When they added this in it kind of turned me off, as the payouts change without any notice (no email, no message from your AM), which in my opinion makes it a bit harder to optimize your campaign.

 

[Luke]

Love the process. Love the attention to detail. Hoping to see you get this green, but either way, you're cruising down the right path in my opinion.

 

[szajka]

I really like your well-prepared posts I think the same as Nick that you must be careful with smartlink. I had better results with direct offers. They were easier to optimize. On smartlink, my payout varied from 0.01 to 0.09 if I remember correctly. Good luck!

 

[iiab8]

NICE

 

[L_Chee]

It's easy to get conversions targeting EG & TK, but hard to make it profitable as the payout is about 0.007. Interested to see how this goes for you.

 

[MOBIPIUM]

Hey jimmyvanilla,

Nice to meet you. Very interesting post!

Feel free to contact your Account Manager if you have any question or need help to keep increasing numbers.

Regards,

MOBIPIUM Affiliates Team.

 

[Jimmy]

DAY 2

OK, time for the first update!

I’m pretty happy with the way Day 2 has gone. My #1 motivation for this campaign is to continue learning and I've learned a lot. Since setting up the campaign 24 hours ago I’ve been able to run a decent amount of traffic, racked up a good little bundle of conversions, tested a bit of this and that and the traffic I’m running has been green for a while and clawing back my initial testing. I’m still unsure how the SmartCPS is going to pan out, but my average payout for a conversion was about 0.015 at the start and now it’s 0.022 (the highest payout I’ve seen is 0.04).

Here’s a snapshot of the whole campaign so far:

When I ran this campaign a couple of months ago I set up new campaigns or funnels every time I wanted to test something new so that I could compare the pre & post-change results, but this was time consuming and hard to manage and keep track of. With this in mind, I wanted to use this campaign to try out the visitor tagging feature in FunnelFlux and I think it’s going to be really useful.

I don’t know if other trackers have a feature like this, but in FFlux, you can easily add a rule to assign a tag to a visitor as they pass between any two nodes, which looks like this in my funnel:

At the moment I’m adding two custom tags to each visitor ID, but during the campaign I’ve used different tags at different times so that I can segment my data from one “touch point” to the next (i.e. whenever I touched the campaign in a significant way I changed the tags so I could compare what it looked like after I touched it to how it looked before I touched it). I really didn’t know how this was going to go, but I’m really happy because it's been helping me decide whether a change I made was beneficial or not.

To explain what I’m talking about, here’s a drilldown report showing Campaign > Visitor Tag:

1. Visitor Tag: N/A

I didn’t apply any tags for the first stage when I wasn’t optimising (I was progressively blacklisting some segments, but didn’t tag this period). By the end of this test period I was red with -49.14% ROI.

2. Visitor Tag: G0 Mobipium PNSL 2.0 GEN

I applied this tag for the first time when I switched from blacklisting to whitelisting and I’ve applied this tag ever since in addition to any new tags, so it’s like the parent tag to the rest of the tags on the list. I actually ran this tag on its own at first, but next time I’d use an initial tag so that I can see the history better (i.e. I could see it at the time, but it’s not visible now - the campaign instantly turned green when I changed to a whitelist and the ROI was about 60% with a CVR of about 3.5%)

3. Visitor Tag: RAW 0.00075

I wanted to see if I could boost the traffic rate so I changed to raw traffic and bumped my bid to 0.00075, but this dropped my CVR and upped my CPV and sent me back into red territory.

4. Visitor Tag: 1 Hour 0.00075

To try to get the CVR back up but maintain some decent traffic I switched from raw traffic to 1 view/hour and this instantly brought it back into the green.

5. Visitor Tag: Cut placements 1

I had a bit of traffic to the whitelist campaign now so I checked the data and cut some placements, which boosted the CVR right up to 5.58% and raised the ROI to 54.97%, but the traffic dried up a bit.

6. Visitor Tag: Go WW

I still wanted more traffic and seeing the campaign was using a highly targeted whitelist, I decided to take it worldwide and added all countries. Traffic jumped significantly, but the CVR dropped and it started losing money again. ☹

7. Visitor Tag: WW1

I cut 10 countries that weren’t converting or were converting but weren’t getting paid (maybe blocked or capped?) and the campaign went green again and initially had an ROI of about 100%, but this has slowly come down to just under 40%, but with about triple the traffic rate it had before.



And that’s where it’s currently sitting. I’ve just dropped two more placements and it’s ready to be switched back on, although somehow I don’t think I’m about to get 13M impressions today:

Even so, I should still get a decent trickle of traffic now and hopefully it'll stay green and claw back the full test budget in the next 24 hours to put the campaign in profit!

I'm going to try not to tweak the settings much now for the next 24 hours and see if the ROI goes up and down much (unless it goes deep red, then I'll have to step in and adjust).

Here we go…

 

[Luke]

 

[Jimmy]

Day 3

So things have been really steady today and I just hit $10 for the day on Popads so I'm stoked!

I was determined not to touch the campaign today and I only made one slight change because I noticed it was set at 1 view/6 hours and I thought I’d set it to 1/1; so I changed that, but otherwise it's just been churning along. I have a couple countries/publishers that I could cut because they’re not profitable, but overall I’m happy with the ROI, so I’m leaving them in and seeing where things go over the next couple of days.

Today I also added some campaigns on Zeropark (my first ever ZP pop and domain campaigns) and the results were a lot worse than I expected!

I expected to be pretty red, but a CVR of 0.03% in the T1 countries?! Hmmm.

I’ve definitely got a lot to learn about ZP so I’m going to take it slowly over there for now. In the meantime any and all tips you’ve got about ZP traffic would be SERIOUSLY appreciated!

Next steps:
1. I’ll just keep watching the Popads campaign and see how it goes over time. Hopefully it keeps ticking along at $10/day for a while
2. I’ve got some money at Propellerads and PopCash, so I’ll start some campaigns there
3. I’m going to have a look at Evadav pops

 

[Luke]

I’ve definitely got a lot to learn about ZP so I’m going to take it slowly over there for now. In the meantime any and all tips you’ve got about ZP traffic would be SERIOUSLY appreciated!

Did you check the browsers/devices you are getting traffic from?

 

[Jimmy]

Did you check the browsers/devices you are getting traffic from?

Haha. Nope, not until just now, anyway. Took me a while, but I worked out how to find the browsers and all I can say is, "Thanks for nothing Android webview!"

When I set up the campaign I thought it was really weird that I couldn't choose a browser, but figured I'd just run $5 and see what happens. Then I really got a shock from the initial results, including how fast ZP spent my daily budget, so I decided to wait until I had more time on the weekend to review the results and work out what happened...

Unfoooooortunately... I forgot that the campaign was only 'paused' because it spent the daily budget... so it happily ran again the next day and doubled down on my bad results and now I'm about $50 behind where I would have like to have been today.

ZP 1 : Jimmy 0

On the bright side, my Popads campaign has been ticking along nicely on autopilot for the last few days:

And my Propellerads Pop campaign improved nicely between my first and second test, so that's really promising:

Meanwhile I tested PopCash, but that's been pretty disappointing, so I'll probably drop it, at least for now while I focus on Propellerads.

Overall, I'm really happy with how this is going so far because it's telling me that the PNSL is still converting consistently and could still be a steady moneymaker to keep running even with the change to SmartCPM.

 

[Jimmy]

Whoohoo - PropellerAds is green today!!

 

[Luke]

all I can say is, "Thanks for nothing Android webview!"

This is something I say on a weekly basis lol

Unfoooooortunately... I forgot that the campaign was only 'paused' because it spent the daily budget... so it happily ran again the next day and doubled down on my bad results and now I'm about $50 behind where I would have like to have been today.

This is a common mistake. Don't beat yourself up too bad.

Whoohoo - PropellerAds is green today!!

View attachment 6352

NICE

Any updates?

 

[Jimmy]

Any updates?

Hey @Luke - absolutely!

It's Day 12 and a lot’s been a lot going on with this campaign and I’ve only been putting off updating this FA because I’ve been really confused about some crazy things the Smartlink has been doing and I wanted some time to try to understand the data and also get some answers from my AM.

In the meantime I've been going back and forth between this:

And this:

Thankfully I’m feeling a lot calmer today because I think I might I have a grasp of what I’m dealing with and what I need to do to get this campaign firing on all cylinders…

Anyway, here are some summary stats:
• Impressions: 981,705
• Conversions: 19,404
• Revenue: $413.98
• Cost: $396.97
• Profit: $17.01
• ROI: 4.29%

So the good news is that it's green! The bad news is that if it wasn’t for some crazy goings-on with this Smartlink with it’s Smart(ass)CPS I'd probably be much better off... but that's fun of this game I reckon.

Warning: The rest of this post is a pretty long explanation, which I’m writing mostly for myself because I'm treating this campaign as a massive learning experience and I want to do everything I can to make sure I really have my head around what's been going on, but if you're interested, read on…

Here’s a visual of the campaign so far:

So I was starting to feel pretty good about things on 26/10. I was still testing PropellerAds so that was eating up a lot of the profits I was making on Popads where the traffic was pumping, the CVR was rockin’ and the SmartCPS seemed to be giving me some good payouts. And at one stage I really had the Popads traffic running really nicely:

Even though I was still testing and optimizing, I was getting pumped by what seemed to be possible. I mean, if I could keep that kind of hourly results going then was looking at $30+ days (at least on Popads).

But a few hours later the Smartlink completely crashed and conversions just evaporated:

Luckily I checked in about 2 hours after the crash, so I was able to pause it and after giving it a bit of a break on 27/10 I switched the traffic back on and conversions started rolling in again, culminating in a $27.28 day on 28/10.

I know that $27 isn't setting any records in this business, but it's a record for me. This was my best ever day since starting this business and I swear I was more excited than this guy:

And the next day it just kept growing so that when I went to bed it was looking like I was on track for something close to a $50 day:

But when I went to bed, the #&$(@# Smartlink crashed again:

Which made me really stop and think and looking back I can see that it also happened a few nights earlier, but I didn’t notice it then because I was still in the early days and was expecting to be losing money on testing.

Anyway, turns out this has happened on all three occasions at 2500 daily conversions so I started chatting with my AM on Skype but she kept saying there was no cap on the Smartlink itself and the geo caps are 3000 each per day, so apparently I wasn’t being capped, but then the data clearly says I was (including the fact that as soon as the day clocked over on the Mobipium dashboard I could restart traffic and the conversions would restart)…

So I decided to run it one more night to do another test and after hitting 2500 conversions again, wouldn't you know it:

Except this time before I paused it I jumped into the campaign settings and redirected the traffic to rotate between all the different Smartlink landers (I did this in the beginning and after finding a winner I’d been sending traffic exclusively to just one lander since about day 3):

And BOOM – the one Smartlink lander I’ve been using drops Dead-A-F at 2500 while the other Smartlink landers are still running nicely!

So, no, it’s not a cap on the Smartlink itself and not a cap on my account, but there is something that’s impacting one of the landers (which I suspect is related to this lander being the original lander – which DID have a 2500 daily cap before SmartCPS was introduced) so I’ll send some data to Mobipium and let them look into it.

Meanwhile, my strategy going forward from here is going to be to create two identical campaigns and I’ll switch between the first and the second campaign when daily conversions hit 2400 or otherwise when I got to bed:
1. The primary campaign will run the original lander
2. The second campaign will run the next best lander

I’ll have to optimise the two campaigns differently because of different CVR, but that’s OK.

Otherwise, I’m discovering a lot of interesting things that seem to be revealing themselves about the SmartCPS function, including:

1. It seems to have a test phase with new traffic where it starts off with a low payout and then gradually increases the payout if the traffic “proves itself” according to whatever algo they’ve set up (which you can see playing out in the graph below for US traffic on Popads on one publisher over the course of a day):

This means that you have to run for at least 24 hours and then only start optimizing based on the next day’s data to really get a sense of what you’ve got, otherwise short tests won’t give you an accurate picture of what’s happening and lead to over optimisation.

2. It seems to react ruthlessly to unusual spikes in traffic or conversions, like this zone in Propellerads where the views and conversions started spiking out of nowhere:

…which results in the payout getting slashed:

…which means that I’m going to have to keep an eye on zones that suddenly stop being profitable and see it was some kind of reaction by the SmartCPS rather than the zone itself going cold…

Anyway, I reckon that’s more than enough for this update. I’ve cut everything back to a small highly optimized segment of traffic running on Popads that seems to be happily doing about $10/day and I’m going to sit back for a bit this weekend and let it run while I work through all the data I’ve got and get a third iteration of this campaign ready to launch on Monday.

Fingers crossed I can get this back on track! I'm still really keen on this campaign and want to know if I can hit some of the potential $30+ or even $50+ days I started to see developing early on.

 

[Luke]

this is one of the more in-depth and beautiful follow along updates we've had in this forum, @jimmyvanilla. There is no way you're not going to be success with this type of analysis. I hope the results don't prove me wrong, but I would imagine the past few days have gone a lot better for you

 

[Jimmy]

Thanks @Luke - the encouragement here on AffLIFT really helps!

Bit of a weird day yesterday. I struggled to get much traffic because there was a Monday Popads bidding war going on (I’m starting to notice this seems to be a bit of a thing, like people hitting the gym with a vengeance after the weekend).

The good news is that my Mobipium AM has done some investigation into the cap problem and confirmed there was an issue with my account (apparently all new affiliates had a 2500 daily cap before the SmartCPS was put in place and this cap didnt come off for me). Apparently this is fixed now, so I feel a lot less anxious about turning things back up.

 

[Yang]

hey guy i think u need to change a traffic do more test

 

[Luke]

Bit of a weird day yesterday. I struggled to get much traffic because there was a Monday Popads bidding war going on (I’m starting to notice this seems to be a bit of a thing, like people hitting the gym with a vengeance after the weekend).

You'll probably see an influx of competition once the mega guide/course I just released takes off

The good news is that my Mobipium AM has done some investigation into the cap problem and confirmed there was an issue with my account (apparently all new affiliates had a 2500 daily cap before the SmartCPS was put in place and this cap didnt come off for me). Apparently this is fixed now, so I feel a lot less anxious about turning things back up.

That's good

 

[Jimmy]

You'll probably see an influx of competition once the mega guide/course I just released takes off

Just joking. It's all good. That thought did cross my mind for a second, but I reckon that the more of us newbies are working through it together - to get as much experience as we can with as much help as we can from the veterans on here and from each other - the better off we're all going to be.

My Popads campaign turned around again on Tuesday, seemingly for no other reason than whatever was driving the price of the traffic up calmed down with just as little reason as why it began. I also managed to get some nice action happening on ZP with domain redirects:

Check out the CVR and ROI I managed to stir up on ZP at the end of the day when I decided to double my bid for no other reason except I just wanted to see what would happen:

I turned it off after a couple hours because things were dying down and I was getting tired, but I just restarted it so I'm excited to see how it goes today. It definitely looked promising last night, but we'll see...