Dino's Native Ads Journey

[Dinosawrex]

After a lot of trial and error in the different ways of money making online, Including FBA, Dropshipping, Clickbank, CPA Lockers etc. Mostly only breaking even.

After I Starting my own SMMA Business, I started to see how most of these things were done the right way.

As of right now, I've decided to join the big guys with Native Ads. I will share my journey here for both myself to keep track and hopefully reflect on how I did things at a later time. But also to inspire others that are looking at Native Ads.

Tools that are being Used:

RevContent - Traffic Source
MaxBounty - Affiliate Network/Offers
AdPlexity - Ad Spy Tool
LanderBolt - Landing Page Builder (Can Import LPs from AdPlexity)
FunnelFlux - Tracking (Has Integration With LanderBolt)
Brax - Campaign Overview & Optimization

Offer:

I've gotten this Offer from my Af Manager, he highly recommended it to me.

Offer converts on credit card submit. Completed on cc submit: $35.00 per lead


Current Funnel Setup:

LP 1+2 are LPs that I have gotten from AdPlexity and modified slightly to get them to look a bit better and not just copy them.

MB LP is an Advertorial Landing Page from Maxbounty, Af manager said that it converts well so wanted to add it into the testing.


Ad Setup:

I currently have 5 Ads, Different Titles and Pictures. That I will be testing, all of them are inspired or altered pictures from AdPlexity.

I will later make 5 different ads with the best performing to keep testing. For Example best performing image with 5 different titles or best title with 5 different pictures etc.


Starting Budget:

I currently have $1000, for testing. I plan to spend a minimum of $500 for testing and hopefully I can be optimized a bit after that point to start seeing a good CTR.


Current Status:

Everything is set up and tracking probably, tested and confirmed that Clicks and Conversions are getting registered.

I'm only waiting for RevContent to Approve my ads, looked through all the requirements and guidelines that they have and followed them carefully so all of them should get approved without any problems.

They were sent in about 2 days ago. Would be happy if they got approved before the weekend but I won't get my hopes up since they list 5-7 Approval Time.

Updates:

I'm going to update a few times a week, beginning whenever I get approved. Also, I will keep an eye out for any questions in my thread.

I'm very excited to see where this takes me, and hopefully, some of you will be following along.

Thanks for now.

Dino

 

[Dinosawrex]

Reserved for updates.

Update 1: Oct 14.

All my ads got approved on Revcontent. It's amazing to see how fast native ads work. Within just a couple of minutes, I was getting thousands of impressions and a few hundreds of clicks.

Support left me on "Seen" lol, was hoping to get access to the API during the weekend but seems that I will have to wait until the week starts tomorrow to get access to it if I don't get access during today.

As of right now, I have paused my Campaign, because I want to optimize it with Brax.io but I have yet to get access to my API Stats to connect RC to Brax.

Current Stats:
Impressions : 130,330
Clicks : 615
Conversions : 0
CTR : 0.471%
Avg CPC : $0.04
Cost : $25.92

Update 2: Oct 15.

After looking at my ads and talking to GrayBeard, which gave me some good suggestions. I tried to run my best performing ad for another $25 to see how it would perform.

Here are the stats:
Impressions: 73,698
Clicks: 703
CTR: 0.954%
Avg CPC: $0.04
Conversions: 1
Cost: $29.83
Return: $35.00
Profit: $5.15

Good to see that I'm doing something right, and the offer is still somewhat relevant. Next step will be optimized the campaign whenever I get my API stats.

As suggested by GrayBeard, I have setup up a popunder campaign to test the offer, for $10. Yet to be approved but I'll update on how that goes too.

Update 3: Oct 22.

Tools Update:

Removed Brax.io
Added TheOptimizer.io
Added Clickbank Offers

Haven't updated in a while so here we go. So for the past week, I have learned a lot and wasted a lot of money.

Biggest mistakes that I've learned from:

Set it and forget it before collecting data + Not having tracking set up correctly:

I wanted to use Brax.io to optimize my campaigns, turns out you needed access to the API from RevContent from your Rep which took some time to get.

And when I finally got access and got connected with RevContent, you needed to use Google Analytics to be able to optimize with Brax.io

Here is where I would say I fucked up the most because I had the campaign running in the meanwhile to "collect data" to which I couldn't use in Brax.io since Google Analytics hasn't collected anything on the Landing Pages.

I had my countries targeted but all topics to gather which widgets were the best for my ads.

At the time of getting Brax.io and Google Analytics set up and tracking, I was down about $250

Also, Conversions wasn't getting fired back to RevContent, which took some time to figure out how and why.

All problems have been fixed now.

2. Using Brax.IO... Changing to TheOptimizer.IO

Now you're probably wondering why I wanted to use Brax.io in the first place and then later not use it.

I was too excited to get started and fell for their trap of "Automatic Optimization", also the use of Google Analytics if complete garage from my experience with this. It's doesn't track probably and there's a lot of mixed data which makes the optimization rules execute on the wrong Widgets.

Maybe that's just me that had it set up wrong even though I followed their guide on it. It Simply didn't work, while I was still spending on Data.

Where im at now

Since switching to TheOptimizer.io, I have understood how optimizing works better. Also, it's directly connected to Funnelflux instead of Google Analytics which is much better and is able to use the previous data that I have already spent money on.

Did some research and have found a good method of how to find good widgets, which I now have a list of that I'm using for my campaigns.

Also, I have launched a few other campaigns to test more than one offer at a time. To hopefully increase the income per day.

I will continue to test and optimize my campaigns until I'm making a profit if the offer still is relevant and converting of course.

First Campaign 21 Oct (Best Day After Optimization)

Landing Page Stats (21 Oct):
Visits: 707
Clicks: 420
Conversions: 2
Revenue: $70
Cost: $28.22
Net: $41.78
Roi: 148%

Campaign Overall

Landing Page Stats Last 7 Days (15-21 Oct):
Visits: 17,579
Clicks: 1,885
Conversions: 8
Revenue: $248.01
Cost: $1,239.25
Net: -$991.24
Roi: -80%

Most of my new campaigns are in the same Vertical and will try out my new widgets and see how they do.

Tested it out on a Health Product From Click Bank which has had 1 Conversion + Upsell Conversion on launch day.

Will update again in the next few days hopefully with good news.

Update 4: Oct 27.

Thought I’d update the thread while I’m on here.

Currently still optimizing my widgets from RevContent, the switch from Brax to TheOptimizer really saved me here. It has been working great and doing its thing, filtering out all bad sites and traffic, also the “Method” that I figured out actually has brought me much higher quality traffic which has increased CTR on the landing pages.

Currently, the ad CTR is still really low, which I’m trying to figure out why. Still testing ads but giving them a few days between so that I can really see if they improve anything.

Even though with my new widgets traffic is kind of slow, but I’m getting around 100-300 clicks an hour when running them during the afternoons.

I’m only running my ads during the afternoon since that is when most people would be looking through the sites that I’m targeting. Also, more time to read the articles or watch the VSL for the products.

I seem to get around 1-2 conversion a “day” now since I changed the widgets.

Here are some stats from my best days this week.

Oct 26

Offer 1:

LP Visits: 1105

LP Clicks: 523

LP CTR: 47.3%

Conversions: 1

Revenue: $35

Spent: $19.22

Net: $15.78

ROI: 82.10%


Offer 2:

LP Visits: 300

LP Clicks: 42

LP CTR: 14%

Conversions: 1

Revenue: $35

Spent: $19.34

Net: $15.66

ROI: 80.97%

Total Spent: $38.56

Total Revenue: $70

Total Net: $31.44

Total ROI: 81.54%


Oct 27 (So far)

Offer 1

LP Visits: 281

LP Clicks: 2961??? (Don’t know what going on there)

LP CTR: 1053.7%?? (Same here, this is what the tracker is saying…)

Conversions: 1

Revenue: $35

Spent: $0.63

Net: $34.37

ROI: 5,455.56%

I know this is unrealistic but literally got a conversion 15 min after starting the campaign today.


As of right now, I will still try to do my best and figure out how to increase my CTR on the ads itself. I have tried different landing pages, some copied and later tweaked with my own text, pictures and different layout from the ones everyone is copying. So mine stand out very much at the moment which seems to have increased the CTR on all them, which I’m very happy about.


As far as affiliate marketing goes, I’m highly considering starting with email marketing since I know that it’s incredibly powerful (and cheaper in the long run). Might even look into a blog to fit with the email list.

That’s it for now. Hopefully, the new widgets can bring in some good leads during the weekend.


Update 5: Oct 28

So, it seems that my widget is bringing in some great traffic now, Optimizer is really doing its job getting rid of the bad widgets and bringing up the good ones. Seems that my rules are set up pretty good with the right parameters.

Complete Stats for Oct 27

LP Visit: 2,466

LP Clicks: 530

Conv: 2

Revenue: $70

Cost: $32.35

Net: $37.65

ROI: 116.38%


Since I only run them during the “night” (for me) aka US afternoon time. As I stated in the other update, that’s when the target demography is online and reading through the different sites that I’m targeting.

Got a pleasant surprise looking through my tracker this morning.

Stats for Oct 27-28 run (6PM-03AM)

LP Visit: 1,380

LP Clicks: 476

Conv: 4

Revenue: 140

Cost: 71.9

Net: 68.05

ROI: 95%


Really happy with this now, seems that I’ve figured out how widgets and the whole thing works a bit better.

Although ads still have pretty low CTR (around 0.2%), I’m trying out using some new pictures instead of tweaked versions of the ones everyone else is using. But since it’s the weekend they won’t get approved until Monday.

Will be tweaking and running it through the week and hopefully, results will be the same or even better.

 

[game333]

You opened a remarkable threads in your 2nd post!

Looking forward for your progress!

 

[game333]

Image in post doesnt work, so here is the picture of the FunnelFlux Funnel Setup

You can simply Right Click > Copy Image and paste it on the message box, it should work.

 

[Dinosawrex]

You opened a remarkable threads in your 2nd post!

Looking forward for your progress!

You can simply Right Click > Copy Image and paste it on the message box, it should work.

Thank you! Thought I'd give a good amount of insight for those that want to follow.

Also, that worked to fix the thread now

 

[BMFDigital]

Best of luck @Dinosawrex

 

[Dinosawrex]

Thread Updated, Updates are posted in the 2nd Thread post.

 

[Graybeard]

Reserved for updates.

Update 1: Oct 14.

...

Current Stats:
Impressions : 130,330
Clicks : 615
Conversions : 0
CTR : 0.471%
Avg CPC : $0.04
Cost : $25.92

I would want to see 1:120 to 1:240 actually concert (paid in in your case).
What vertical is that offer in? Is it a poor offer for a weekend maybe?



How many are getting past that landing page -- what is that CTR for: the LP or the offer?

2% CR is what you want to see
615*.02
12.30
1% would be
615*.01
6.15

Anyway it's just $26 so far ...

 

[Dinosawrex]

I would want to see 1:120 to 1:240 actually concert (paid in in your case).
What vertical is that offer in? Is it a poor offer for a weekend maybe?



How many are getting past that landing page -- what is that CTR for: the LP or the offer?

2% CR is what you want to see
615*.02
12.30
1% would be
615*.01
6.15

Anyway, it's just $26 so far ...

Yeah, something like that.

"Vertical" is in the Health Niche, performs best Wed-Sun according to AdPlexity.

RevContent CTR is to the Landing Pages.

Minimum 1% CTR is my goal when I have optimized a bit, hopefully, I will get access to my API Stats soon so I can begin to remove some of the bad widgets etc.


Current Funnel Stats:

Edit: I feel that it's "dumb" to spend more of the budget without doing any optimizing starting out. Right now I have a lot of bad widgets etc that are just doing impressions without any clicks.

 

[Dinosawrex]

I would let it run until i had 250 in the far right (drab green) --that is the seller's page?
That might cost you $50 - $60. If you don't get one conversion (approved sale) then the offer sucks.
On the front end: your ad is under-performing/weak IMHO -- that is a very mediocre CTR ... It may be that ad's placement too? How many sites/domains are the ads on now?

***added thought: I like to to buy a few thousand popunders that are direct to the offer/target page just to test the offer's affinity and validity FIRST. It costs $5-$6 -- not much.
If you get no conversion attempts with a few thousand direct hits -- where are you at really?
This way I can see if there is going to be an issue before I expend a lot of effort and spend more serious ad money.

Correct, the last Box (Light Green) Is the Final offer page/sales page.

I might try that out as you said, to at least see if I can get a conversion. Although there's a lot of approving data from Adplexity + Manage to say that it's good an good offer.

It might very well be the targeting and placements, Can't find anything on how many sites the ads are on inside RevContent. But Avg Placement is 2 if that says anything. 2/5 Ads are performing much better than the rest.

Total Widgets are 1,947 atm.

Health & Fitness Target:

Avg Pos: 2
Impressions: 20,339
Clicks: 363
CTR: 1,785%

Also, I think ill give your popunder idea a try. Since that is something that I want to get into aswell in the future, so I get to try out how to work that system.

I appreciate your comments and help.

 

[Graybeard]

I would let it run until i had 250 in the far right (drab green) --that is the seller's page?
That might cost you $50 - $60. If you don't get one conversion (approved sale) then the offer sucks.
On the front end: your ad is under-performing/weak IMHO -- that is a very mediocre CTR ... It may be that ad's placement too? How many sites/domains are the ads on now?

***added thought: I like to to buy a few thousand popunders that are direct to the offer/target page just to test the offer's affinity and validity FIRST. It costs $5-$6 -- not much.
If you get no conversion attempts with a few thousand direct hits -- where are you at really?
This way I can see if there is going to be an issue before I expend a lot of effort and spend more serious ad money.

 

[Dinosawrex]

Basically: throw some shit at the fan and see how it flies
https://www.affiliatefix.com/threads/testing-advertising-networks.151158/
I tried 80K popunders with all types of variations and bottom line I learned was: that the type of offer sucked. People just would not pay for an adult webcam site white label. I then got some better affinity with a twitter bot referring traffic --but still no conversions.
Cost me $120 and a lot of time to determine that the offer is a real tough sale.

A customer acquisition is worth $140 - $260 /yr (rev-share [35%]) with a 18 mo customer lifetime (median). So, the profit *could* be there. The problem was the offer was not that competitive and there was too much database saturation; Net result: 30 signup attempts and no approvals.

Very true, I usually say throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

I've updated my post, setup, and popunder to try the offer out. But turns out that I got a conversion when I ran the campaign further with only the best performing ad. A little reassurance that im doing something right is nice!

 

[baxxx]

Good luck. Im also getting my hands wet within native networks pm me if you wanna chat over skype
I

 

[Graybeard]

Basically: throw some shit at the fan and see how it flies
https://www.affiliatefix.com/threads/testing-advertising-networks.151158/
I tried 80K popunders with all types of variations and bottom line I learned was: that the type of offer sucked. People just would not pay for an adult webcam site white label. I then got some better affinity with a twitter bot referring traffic --but still no conversions.
Cost me $120 and a lot of time to determine that the offer is a real tough sale.

A customer acquisition is worth $140 - $260 /yr (rev-share [35%]) with a 18 mo customer lifetime (median). So, the profit *could* be there. The problem was the offer was not that competitive and there was too much database saturation; Net result: 30 signup attempts and no approvals.

 

[affmarketer101]

Nice one. Following your journey. Good luck, bro.

 

[tyoussef]

nice journey, am following this @Dinosawrex.

 

[Graybeard]

It's a numbers game too and some actions are real random -- congrats on that conversion -- I am sure it was a vindication of your work Another saying I am fond of: eventually if you walk in a barnyard you will step in cow-shit In other words: You got to play to win!

So now it is a matter of: How much goes into the next conversion?

 

[Dinosawrex]

Thread Updated 22 Oct.

 

[tyoussef]

by the way, you can use our platform PureLander and import Adplexity landing pages or any other landing pages and edit them and add features to them and all of that.

 

[Dinosawrex]

Dino maybe add you updates in sequence (too) so we don't have to scroll back ...

______
Landing Page Stats Last 7 Days (15-21 Oct): (1)
Visits: 17,579
Clicks: 1,885
Conversions: 8
Revenue: $248.01
Cost: $1,239.25
Net: -$991.24
Roi: -80%
_____
First Campaign 21 Oct (Best Day After Optimization) (2)

Landing Page Stats (21 Oct):
Visits: 707
Clicks: 420
Conversions: 2
Revenue: $70
Cost: $28.22
Net: $41.78
Roi: 148%
--------------------------------------------
1885/17579
.10723021787359918084 (1) CTR
420/707
.59405940594059405940 (2) CTR
8/1885
.00424403183023872679 (1) CR
2/420
.00476190476190476190 (2) CR
=========================

You have a problem with that offer's affinity?
Or, the offer's financing acceptance rate?
Why is the CR (conversion rate) remaining the same?

Sure, I'm updating the main update thread just because of it easier to read through it if you find it after a while with more updates. But sure I'll make a new post with the updates as well as update the thread.

As for the CR, I really don't know. It seems that people are still converting from my random widgets. Right now I have about 200 widgets that are top traffic, so hopefully, during the day I will see some better CTR/CR on the offer.

Other than that I really don't know, According to Adplexity there's still a lot of people running this offer and new ones have come in from both the longest running advertisers but also new ones.

I will update whenever i see some results with my new and better widgets.

Also, what is a good number of widgets to run at? I currently have 200 which I have found from high performing sites.

 

[Dinosawrex]

I cannot accept the reasoning that: "if everyone does it I should do it too." Lemmings all follow each other off the cliff too. That, said there is some logic --that were there is no competition there is *probably* no money.

420*1%=4.2 you show 2 I hope it does catch up for you ...

I see what you're saying, and I agree somewhat.

My logic is more like this: If someone is making money with it, I should be able to make money with it too.

Nowadays it's pretty easy to copy exactly what they are doing (Ads, Landing Page, Offers) So basically your just cloning their ads and everything and hopefully taking a small percentage of what they are making. If they are still running the ads and making money from it I don't see why I can't get a small cut from it right? If I have the exact same playing cards as them. Of course, it's not recommended to straight copy stuff.

The problem with doing new offers and trying to make new trends is "impossible" as a smaller affiliate since you don't have near the same budget as the bigger guys, they have much more budget to burn on something that might work.

I really hope that conversions start to catch up too in the next couple of days.

Also, I'm looking into starting to make an Email list. It hasn't really interested me but it seems from what I'm reading on about affiliate marketing that is a must nowadays. Also "cheaper and reliable" since you can warm people up more compared to a single landing page -> Offer.

 

[Dinosawrex]

Main update thread is updated too if you wish to read through the journey so far.


Update 4: Oct 27.

Thought I’d update the thread while I’m on here.

Currently still optimizing my widgets from RevContent, the switch from Brax to TheOptimizer really saved me here. It has been working great and doing its thing, filtering out all bad sites and traffic, also the “Method” that I figured out actually has brought me much higher quality traffic which has increased CTR on the landing pages.

Currently, the ad CTR is still really low, which I’m trying to figure out why. Still testing ads but giving them a few days between so that I can really see if they improve anything.

Even though with my new widgets traffic is kind of slow, but I’m getting around 100-300 clicks an hour when running them during the afternoons.

I’m only running my ads during the afternoon since that is when most people would be looking through the sites that I’m targeting. Also, more time to read the articles or watch the VSL for the products.

I seem to get around 1-2 conversion a “day” now since I changed the widgets.

Here are some stats from my best days this week.

Oct 26

Offer 1:

LP Visits: 1105

LP Clicks: 523

LP CTR: 47.3%

Conversions: 1

Revenue: $35

Spent: $19.22

Net: $15.78

ROI: 82.10%


Offer 2:

LP Visits: 300

LP Clicks: 42

LP CTR: 14%

Conversions: 1

Revenue: $35

Spent: $19.34

Net: $15.66

ROI: 80.97%

Total Spent: $38.56

Total Revenue: $70

Total Net: $31.44

Total ROI: 81.54%


Oct 27 (So far)

Offer 1

LP Visits: 281

LP Clicks: 2961??? (Don’t know what going on there)

LP CTR: 1053.7%?? (Same here, this is what the tracker is saying…)

Conversions: 1

Revenue: $35

Spent: $0.63

Net: $34.37

ROI: 5,455.56%

I know this is unrealistic but literally got a conversion 15 min after starting the campaign today.


As of right now, I will still try to do my best and figure out how to increase my CTR on the ads itself. I have tried different landing pages, some copied and later tweaked with my own text, pictures and different layout from the ones everyone is copying. So mine stand out very much at the moment which seems to have increased the CTR on all them, which I’m very happy about.


As far as affiliate marketing goes, I’m highly considering starting with email marketing since I know that it’s incredibly powerful (and cheaper in the long run). Might even look into a blog to fit with the email list.

That’s it for now. Hopefully, the new widgets can bring in some good leads during the weekend.

 

[Dinosawrex]

Look at the server log for that landing page as a control -- server logs are *generally* correct (when the server is working right)

1. tracker defect
2. server defect

That is some error. Is Offer 1 is using the same landing page and tracking parameters?

I got it fixed, don't know why it showed that. But I contacted support and he had looked at it, fixed it but not sure what it was.

Offer 1 and 2 do not use the same lander page since it's two different offer but from the same vendor. Everything is using the same parameters and set up the same way from traffic - tracker - vendor

 

[Graybeard]

Dino maybe add you updates in sequence (too) so we don't have to scroll back ...

______
Landing Page Stats Last 7 Days (15-21 Oct): (1)
Visits: 17,579
Clicks: 1,885
Conversions: 8
Revenue: $248.01
Cost: $1,239.25
Net: -$991.24
Roi: -80%
_____
First Campaign 21 Oct (Best Day After Optimization) (2)

Landing Page Stats (21 Oct):
Visits: 707
Clicks: 420
Conversions: 2
Revenue: $70
Cost: $28.22
Net: $41.78
Roi: 148%
--------------------------------------------
1885/17579
.10723021787359918084 (1) CTR
420/707
.59405940594059405940 (2) CTR
8/1885
.00424403183023872679 (1) CR
2/420
.00476190476190476190 (2) CR
=========================

You have a problem with that offer's affinity?
Or, the offer's financing acceptance rate?
Why is the CR (conversion rate) remaining the same?

 

[Dinosawrex]

Updated main thread to follow the journey easier.

really happy with the results that I'm getting now and I hope that I can improve from this to bring in more quality traffic.

Update 5: Oct 28

So, it seems that my widget is bringing in some great traffic now, Optimizer is really doing its job getting rid of the bad widgets and bringing up the good ones. Seems that my rules are set up pretty good with the right parameters.

Complete Stats for Oct 27

LP Visit: 2,466

LP Clicks: 530

Conv: 2

Revenue: $70

Cost: $32.35

Net: $37.65

ROI: 116.38%


Since I only run them during the “night” (for me) aka US afternoon time. As I stated in the other update, that’s when the target demography is online and reading through the different sites that I’m targeting.

Got a pleasant surprise looking through my tracker this morning.

Stats for Oct 27-28 run (6PM-03AM)

LP Visit: 1,380

LP Clicks: 476

Conv: 4

Revenue: 140

Cost: 71.9

Net: 68.05

ROI: 95%


Really happy with this now, seems that I’ve figured out how widgets and the whole thing works a bit better.

Although ads still have pretty low CTR (around 0.2%), I’m trying out using some new pictures instead of tweaked versions of the ones everyone else is using. But since it’s the weekend they won’t get approved until Monday.

Will be tweaking and running it through the week and hopefully, results will be the same or even better.