Building a profitable campaign (CPA - Mobile- Dating)

[zeweb]

Hi all,

Here is one of the projects I'm actually working on, I'd appreciate your help and advice about this case.

About one year ago, I have made my first test with exactly the same traffic source and niche than in this project, after a while I gave up because I never could make a profitable campaign.

I decided to restart this campaign from scratch because I'm convinced that there is some money to make.

I hope that I will find here valuable information in order to help me achieving my goal: build a profitable campaign.

• Vertical: Adult dating, mostly because I have been a successful affiliate marketer in adult domain some years ago.
  
• Traffic type: Adult mobile blind skimmed from only one geo.
  
• Landing page: One mobile optimised page with single eye catching picture and multiple steps/questions inspired from working ones (spied on big adult sites).
  
• Offers: 12 creatives from 3 different Dating CPA offers (prices from 1.75 to 2.50 $) chosen in one single network.
  
• Tracking: AdsBridge starter package.

I created 3 campaigns in AdsBridge, one for each mobile traffic type (Android, Iphone and others). I have added my single landing page and my 12 offers.

I have identified 2 of my mistakes (maybe there are others):

1. I lost about 12 hours clicks and conversion because for an unknown reason the CTA button on my single landing page was not working anymore (fixed by pasting complete HTML code in AdsBridge interface from backup).
2. At least for 24hours my traffic distribution on offers was wrong (100% for one offer and nothing for the 11 others).

I am loosing money, but I know that's the price to pay for getting data: 112$ spent in traffic for 52$ earnings (37490 traffic, 490 clicks, 25 conversions).

The first thing I want to do is disabling all the less profitable offers, I just do not know if I have already enough data to decide or if I should wait longer ?

Here are statistics about offer+clics+conversions+earnings:

I think my previous tests did never succeed because I did not wait long enough before removing campaigns, it's possible that I removed the wrong ones. This time I will try to do it better by asking you for advice.

I have assisted to a webinar this week, the person talking was answering Q&A about his success in mediabuying, and one point was that someone new to CPA/Mediabuy should start with at least $2000-$3000. Do you think there is really nothing to do with less money ?

Thanks for reading and thanks for your help.

 

[newlxx]

Data is not enough yet. Keep running traffic 2-3 days and look at the data.

You are already at -50% ROI which is a good sign

Also, instead of testing each landing page for each offer.
Stick to testing the 3 CPA offers first. Once you have the best converting offer then test for best offer page variation.

I have assisted to a webinar this week, the person talking was answering Q&A about his success in mediabuying, and one point was that someone new to CPA/Mediabuy should start with at least $2000-$3000. Do you think there is really nothing to do with less money ?

$2000 is a good budget to get started. I'd recommend $1000.
You can get started with lesser budget its no rule.

 

[zeweb]

Thanks for your answer lrs1995.
I will let it run 2 or 3 days more.

I did not think about just testing the offers, thanks for that info.
But in this case how should I have choosen the offer page to test ? I have often at least 5 available for each offer.
Should I choose the best looking, the first released, the most acurate with my traffic type ?

Meanwhile I grouped my offer pages in AdsBridge in one group per offer, this gives a good information about best converting offers (click to conversion ratio).

 

[newlxx]

But in this case how should I have choosen the offer page to test ? I have often at least 5 available for each offer.
Should I choose the best looking, the first released, the most acurate with my traffic type ?

Pick any page like the main offer page instead of alternate offer pages or the one you think would be most suitable for your offer.
Test one thing at a time for now.
At this stage, you looking for the best converting offer.
If the offer itself is a dud, no matter what you do it will hard to get profitable.
So the first step is establish a converting offer that you have to chance with optimize into profits.

 

[zeweb]

lrs1995, again thank you for your answer.

Ok, so I made another mistake in this campaign because I tested alternate offer pages instead of only one per offer.
Maybe having 3 different mobile traffic types is also a mistake in this case ?

After 5 days, I earned $105 for $212 traffic bought.

When I compare my 3 offers it looks like offer B has the best convertion rate.

What should I do now ?

Start a new campaign with only one mobile traffic at once, 3 offers with only one page for each ? In order to get data in the correct way.

Or maybe I can consider that I already have interresting data so that I can create a new campaign with one mobile traffic type (android) and the 2 or 3 best converting offer pages from offer B ?

I'd prefer android because the conversion rate is better (7.76% for all pages from offer B) than iphone (3,57%). And also I have less data for Iphone campaign.

I did not add any info about the 3rd mobile traffic type (not android and not iphone) because there is few traffic and zero conversion, I have lost $10 to discover that.

Thanks for your help.

 

[newlxx]

What is the spend for each?

I would just cut offer C as a whole.
Since payout is much less compared to others and CR is not impressive so I am assuming thats one with worst ROI.
Continue gathering more data.

I wouldn't recommend cutting OSes at this stage, it will greatly affect the volume.

 

[zeweb]

I will calculate the cost for each offer, right now I just have the cost for each traffic buy campaign.
I was not able to configure the costs correctly in AdsBridge, maybe this is not possible with my package.

Should I calculate for each offer page also ?

 

[newlxx]

I will calculate the cost for each offer, right now I just have the cost for each traffic buy campaign.
I was not able to configure the costs correctly in AdsBridge, maybe this is not possible with my package.

Should I calculate for each offer page also ?

Yes its necessarily to calculate cost and EPC for everything your running.

On AdsBridge I think you can update click costs.

Maybe @Nick AdsBridge @Alex_O99 can help here.

 

[crysper]

@zeweb I see that you are testing a lot, in many cases is good but at your traffic levels you won't get confident data. You don't even know which offer is better with the data I see on the screenshots, not even talking about landers.
Regarding landers, don't go over max 3 landers/offer, at this level more landing pages will only confuse you.

Like Irs said, I would also cut the offer C just because of the lower payout, but it doesn't mean it can't be better than the others, you just need to make assumptions now.

 

[zeweb]

Hi all,

Thanks a lot for your help and advice. I have not updated this thread for a wile but I was not inactive and did not give up.

I had no more money to invest in traffic for this project, meanwhile I switched on another activity (converting Twitter traffic into leads). This starts working pretty well for me, maybe I'll write a journey about this later if I am able to scale it up.

During this time :

• My affiliate network paused 2 of the offers I was running.
• My traffic source allows me now to segment traffic more precisely than before.
• I have spend 350$ more in traffic to get more data.

All this looks very positive for me, I'm sure I will soon reach my goal (ROI over 100%).
Now that I only have one offer left, things should be more clear to analyze.

In the beginning of this follow along I have spent 200$ and earned 105$, this is a ROI of 52,50 % (please correct me if my calculation is wrong). This month I could invest 350$ and I earned 247,50$ : ROI = 70,71 %. It's not enough but it's better than before.

It looks like the 2 paused offers helped me to increase my ROI, but not only : I have discovered that I can disable some traffic sources by domain. I have checked my stats and removed the biggest ones without any conversion.

In order to get a better ROI, I plan to do the following :

• Cleaning up my traffic source by keeping only the domains with conversions.
• Pausing my traffic buy campaigns during the hours where I never had any conversion.
• Spend maybe 200-300% to verify if my ROI becomes better or not.

Maybe I should not look at conversions but better at clicks at this time ? I'm unsure about this point.

Thanks for reading me.

Have a nice day