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Guide Tips & Tricks šŸ’” to Get the Most šŸš€ Out of Your šŸ„ Golden Goose šŸ„ Account

MGID Contest

Jimmy

šŸ‘ ILLUMINATUS šŸ‘
Staff Member
Community Leader
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Oct 15, 2019
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The July contest with @MrGoose is underway (with some awesome prizes!) and while I'm waiting for a couple of campaigns to run their course before I check out the results, I thought Iā€™d write up a few tips and tricks to getting the most out of your Golden Goose account. If youā€™re already using GG, then I might show you a couple of things you havenā€™t noticed, otherwise, if you still havenā€™t tried their network, this might give you some food for thought about whether or not to take the plunge and test them out (I reckon you should).



First, letā€™s talk about payouts šŸ’°šŸ¤‘

Golden Goose makes payments daily, with a minimum of only $20 (for PayPal payments), which is great news for anyone who wants to keep their cash flow going. They also have a long list of other payment options, including Payoneer (min $50) & Paxum (min $100).

When youā€™ve set up a payment method and had it approved by your AM, you can request a payment with a couple of clicks. But if you want payments to just flow into your account everyday like clockwork, you can also set up an automatic payment. This can be done in 2 ways ā€“ request a specific amount to be paid (if your balance exceeds that amount) or select ā€˜All balanceā€™ to have your whole balance paid out each day (if your balance exceeds the minimum for your payment method).



And now that weā€™ve got the money out of the way, letā€™s have a look at a few of the nifty features that you can use when youā€™re picking an offer to promote.

Your account manager​

Every affiliate at GG getā€™s a personal account manager assigned to help out and Iā€™ve found my AM is really responsive and helpful. If youā€™re after some tips for offers to promote or have a question about anything to do with your account, your AM can help out. Golden Goose have some private offers and ā€˜by requestā€™ offers that youā€™ll also have to talk to your account manager about if you want to promote any of these.


Your offers dashboard​

The first place to look for a new offer (note that GG also refers to offers as landing pages) to promote is your dashboard. This is where you can see the Top offers and access the OfferWall and a list of all the newest offers on the platform.

Iā€™ve had a few good campaigns promoting offers from the Top Offers list!



If youā€™re looking for the complete list of offers available in the network, then use the OfferWall. Here you can filter the results by vertical, topic, country, carrier, flow, conversion type, and allowed traffic. You can also search for an offer with the Landing ID if you know it.

The OfferWall also shows you the eEPC (earnings per 1000 clicks) of all the offers, so you can get a sense of how different offers compare in terms of performance.



The New offers page is pretty much the same as the OfferWall, except there are no filters available and you'll only see the most recent offers added to the network.

Finding detailed information about an offer​

Each offer (landing page) on the GG network has some quick stats showing on the dashboard, including geo, carrier, flow, vertical and payout. If you want more information about a specific offer, you can also check out the offerā€™s ā€˜LP cardā€™.

You can access this card directly from the dashboard by clicking the image if the offer is a Top offer.



If youā€™re looking on the OfferWall or New offers page, you can also access the LP card by clicking the yellow information icon (which shows a preview picture of the offer when you hover over it) or LP#.



An offerā€™s card has all the information you need to know about the offer at the top, including how much of the cap is left, whether the offer is subject to holds and the system prelanding pages you can use with the offer (remember GG calls their offers ā€˜landing pagesā€™ and the presell pages ā€˜prelanding pagesā€™).



If you want a better look at the offerā€™s landing page, you can right click (control click on Mac) and open the image in a new tab. You can also preview GG's in-house prelanding pages by hovering over them or open them in a new tab by clicking on their links. And when you open them, theyā€™re fully functional.



Below the settings section at the top, you can also check out the offerā€™s restrictions.



And you can check out a list of ā€˜opportunitiesā€™, which is a useful section that shows you the top traffic sources where the offer is running, the prelanding pages being used on those sources, the conversion rate on each source and the percentage of conversions for each source. And if you want to set up a campaign with the same settings (LP + Pre-LP combo) as a particular opportunity, then you can just click the ā€˜createā€™ button and GG will autopopulate those options into your campaign settings.



You can also access a summary version of the offerā€™s card from within your campaign settings, then you can access the LP Card from that summary screen.



When youā€™ve chosen an offer you want to promote, youā€™ll need to set up the promotional URL. I thought this was a bit tricky the first couple of times, so Iā€™ll walk through the process and explain whatā€™s going on.

Setting up a new campaign​

There are 3 steps to setting up a campaign to promote a Golden Goose offer:
  1. Campaign URL settings
  2. Landing page settings
  3. Prelander settings
I didnā€™t understand how to make the most of these steps when I first started running campaigns on GG, so Iā€™ll go through them in the hope that they help you avoid the mistakes I made.

Step 3 ā€“ Campaign URL settings
When you click on a button to create a new campaign, you land on the campaign settings screen, which, strangely, is actually Step 3 of the campaign creation process (GG has automatically made selections for Stage 1 & 2 based on whatever screen you were on when you clicked to create a campaign). Iā€™ll show you Step 1 & Step 2 next, but for now, letā€™s just look at what the campaign settings are on the Step 3 screen..



There are 10 things to be aware of on this page:
  1. The domain name for the promo link (you can choose 2 options usually)
  2. The promo URL with the parameters
  3. Turn the Smartlink fallback on or off (this can send traffic to another offer if it isnā€™t targeted for the offer youā€™ve selected)
  4. You can select your traffic source for this campaign (optional) and itā€™ll automatically update the relevant parameters in the promotion URL
  5. URL constructor (optional) where you can add the values you want to be updated in the promo URL
  6. Postback URL (if you want to override your global postback for this specific campaign)
  7. Event selector (if you want the postback to be limited to specific events for this campaign)
  8. Trafficback URL (if you want to override your global trafficback URL for this specific campaign)
  9. Moderation mode (cloak your URL)
  10. IP ranges that will convert on the offer
Golden Gooseā€™s trafficback URL feature is cool and @Nick has written a whole guide on this feature and how to set it up:

In terms of the postback URL creation tools on this screen, I prefer to use the tools in my tracker to set this up, but if youā€™re not using a tracker and just direct linking to the offer from your traffic source, then this could be helpful.

@Luke has written a nice guide on that too:

Once youā€™ve set up your campaign URL settings (you can always come back and do these later if you prefer to do your steps in numerical order), you should check and edit your landing page settings.

Step 1 ā€“ Landing page settings
(Remember, GG refers to their offers as landing pages.)

To configure the landing page settings in your campaign, click on the Step 1 ā€“ Select Landing Page section of the campaign settings process.



In Step 1, there are 5 things to pay attention to:
  1. Filters to change the parameters for selecting relevant landing pages
  2. The Landing Page ID for the available LPs for your filter settings
  3. A star icon that indicates whether youā€™ve selected a particular landing page o target with your promotion link
  4. A selector for switching between random and custom rotation of your landing pages. With random rotation, traffic is distributed randomly and each landing page usually receives approximately the same number of clicks. Custom rotation means that the traffic is spread according to the queue of the selected landing pages.
  5. Here you can see how many landing pages youā€™ve selected for each carrier
In the screenshot above, I have 1 of the 2 available landing pages selected (i.e. 4946 on the left, with the orange star). This is the offer I clicked to create a campaign. But GG is also showing me another relevant landing page because it's also targeted to the carrier (MTN) selected in my filters (note: my filters are automatically set by GG at this stage, based on the allowed targeting for the landing page I selected when I created the campaign). The crossover between the two offers is that they both allow the same 3G carriers. However, only 4946 allows Wifi, so if I update my filters to select 3G/Wifi, the second offer will vanish. Likewise, if I update my other filters, the available landing pages will change.



To show you some of the options available at Stage 2, Iā€™m going to select both identical landing pages for each of the 3G carriers for my campaign... but thereā€™s a trick here that I didnā€™t get the first few times I created campaigns and ended up pretty confused. The trick is that when you initially created your campaign by picking an offer, GG automatically selected the relevant landing page for all the available carriers. BUT, if you want to add more offers, then you must select the landing page multiple times, for each available carrier.



Now I have both landing pages selected for my campaign, for all the available carriers, so I can click the Next button and proceed to Stage 2.

Step 2 ā€“ Prelanding pages settings
Step 2 is a good opportunity to review and potentially select some of Golden Gooseā€™s in-house prelanding pages.

In the example campaign Iā€™ve been creating, you can see that at Step 2 I can see both landing pages (offers) Iā€™ve selected and the approved prelanding pages I can select. I can also select 'no prelanding page' and create a direct link to the offer.



In this case, both offers have the same approved prelanding pages (and both allow no prelanding page). And I can select either or both options. (If I want to preview the prelanding page, then I can hover over the link, or click it to view the working prelanding page in a new tab.)

But itā€™s important to note that different offers have different prelanding page options, as you can see from the screengrab below, where Iā€™ve set up a campaign with 4 different offers.



In this selection of offers, there are 4 different types of conditions:
  1. No prelanding page and/or one relevant prelanding page
  2. No prelanding page and/or a selection of prelanding pages (these are approved prelanding pages, but theyā€™re not really that relevant)
  3. No prelanding page and/or multiple relevant prelanding pages
  4. No prelanding page only (i.e. there are no approved in-house prelanding pages for this offer)
When youā€™re setting things up in Step 2, you can select any or all of the available prelanding pages (or no prelanding page). If you select only one option, then all your traffic will flow to your selection. Otherwise, if you select multiple options, then your traffic will rotate between your selections.

Iā€™ve experimented with some different selections of prelanding pages for a few campaigns and what I prefer to do if I want to test multiple prelanding pages is create multiple campaigns, each targeting just one selection. Then I rotate the different campaigns as different offers in my tracker to compare their performance. Otherwise, you can use Golden Goose's stats options to compare the landing pages and prelanding pages, performance wise.



Note that if you want to use your own prelanding pages, then select 'No prelanding' and link to your own prelander. Just check with your AM in case the advertiser has restrictions and to find out if you need pre-approval for your prelanding pages before running your campaign.

And I reckon thatā€™s about it.

The only other thing I wanted to show you is the Widgetā€™s dashboard. I havenā€™t really used this much, but it's growing on me.

Setting up custom Widgets
When you first land on this page itā€™ll be blank, but to get started, just select ā€˜Add widgetā€™.



Then pick the widget you want to load and customise its settings.



Iā€™ll let you play around with this on your own if youā€™re interested, but hereā€™s an example of my Widget dashboard for the current month.



If youā€™ve got any other tips and tricks, hit reply and share them. Or if youā€™ve taken any of the ideas Iā€™ve shared to the next level, let us all know (seriously, spill it).

Good luck with the contest and if you have any questions, donā€™t hesitate.
 
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MGID Contest
Great recommendations. Golden Goose has some great info for publishers in terms of landers, traffic sources and even site IDs that can help you kickstart your campaigns skipping the testing phase a bit.
 
I enjoy working with them for some offers. easy flow and easy to convert ( as long as you wait for data and analyze ).
 
@Nick Are you already making use of APIs of other affiliate networks? If so, how do you incorporate its use to improve your affiliate campaigns?
Yeah. It depends on their API features, but mostly pull offers/stats faster than navigating around the clunky and slow UI.
 
Yeah. It depends on their API features, but mostly pull offers/stats faster than navigating around the clunky and slow UI.
Nice, Iā€™m not quite the techie but I enjoyed your post about using Propellerā€™s API to make global blacklists/whitelists and have been using it ever since. Been truly a game changer. šŸ˜ƒ
 
API from golden goose would be interesting as they seem to have updated EPC stats per offer, Not sure of the time frame they update but you could use it start and stop your campaigns based on your target EPC, similar to how traffic company does it.

Even though mobile content offers aren't as volatile as IVRs, they do have their down periods and could be worth it.
 
Nice guide.

One thing that confuses me about GG is their "Download" vertical. It doesn't really specify anywhere what exactly is being downloaded. Sometimes it's an antivirus, other times it's wallpapers. It's not intuitive and you can't translate landers to English since they're images
 
One thing that confuses me about GG is their "Download" vertical. It doesn't really specify anywhere what exactly is being downloaded. Sometimes it's an antivirus, other times it's wallpapers.
Many times the "download" can be whatever you want. You make up whatever the user should download on the offer page, and of course, they will never receive it, but that's the nature of those offers.

With careful wording you can have a flow that's not exactly misleading, but makes sense to the user. For example, they're on a torrent website and click a button to download a video. They receive a popup. Your lander can be to "download the video" or just simply "download content" and the user will click because they just want to view their content and/or watch their video.

If you think about it you may have clicked through affiliate ads just like this in the past without even really knowing it.

It's not intuitive and you can't translate landers to English since they're images
Translating images is easy. See here:

 
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Thanks for the guide.@Jimmy
Unfortunately, the images are not available. I have two questions for you:
1. In step 2: If I add Golden Goose system prelanders, do I still need to host LPs on my side? If I use one of the LPs, I still need to add my own CLICK URL to the CTA button.
2. How to set up conditions?

Thanks for your time!
 

Attachments

If I add Golden Goose system prelanders, do I still need to host LPs on my side?
No. If you use GG's prelanders then they take care of hosting them (they're just part of the flow after someone clicks your campaign URL).

How to set up conditions?
I've never used their conditions, so I'm not really sure šŸ¤·ā€ā™‚ļø
 
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