My first PPC journey. POPads + CPALead

[krass]

Hi, I'm new here. I started out doing SEO and blogging, but after years of chasing after "free" traffic, I've finally decided to master PPC and have control over my income.

I've spent the better part of last week trying to get the tracking set up (shoutout to Irina from adsbridge and her infinite patience in dealing with my noob questions).

So now I can spare you the gory details and it's just ad spend vs revenue.

So far
spent: $1.89
earned: $0.57

I think that's -69% ROI.. which is depressing..

The campaign has run for 2 days

The 2nd day no conversions at all

My tracking is still out of whack and I'm still tweaking it.

It's not showing amount spent for some reason.

I'm bidding really low, for only one country so the traffic isn't that much. But I'm hoping that I can get a few more conversions before the end of day 3.

 

[Acura]

Nice keep on testing untell you find a winner and scale it up. Best of luck

 

[krass]

I'm bidding the absolute minimum, as a result the traffic is just barely trickling in. I've doubled my bid to get the data faster. From 0.00051 to 0.00151. We'll see what happens in the next few days.

I got the first three conversions on the first day itself. I suspect that the placements were good for this offer. But it's not good to jump to conclusions too early so I'll let the data gather the next several days.

 

[JH1nz]

Credit to you for taking action. I've checked out pop ads myself, but haven't given it a go yet.

 

[juzlee]

Probably need a more HQ LPs. just keep working and youll soon get the right conversions

 

[krass]

Just a quick update:

I had issues setting up postback url for cpaleads on adsbridge, but for some reason just ran with it anyways. So the first 3 conversions i got weren't recorded in adsbridge. Finally got the damn thing to work, so I have 2 conversions now from Friday, the blessed day when I solved the tracking riddle:

So that's the EPV for the offer. According to PopAds, the min bid for this geo is 0.0005, so that's not good. I need to really step up the conversion rates to get this thing to be green. I'll let the campaign finish my budget of $50 before adjusting anything.

 

[krass]

So I've spent $27 so far and have only gotten back like $2 total. But conversions are steadily coming in everyday. Just not enough to cover the costs. I'm not sure what to do with this campaign. Should I kill it? Or should I let it gather more data?

So far I've blacklisted two placements that ate up 2000 views each without producing a conversion. Looking back maybe I should not have waited too long to kill those placements.

From now on if a placement goes through 300 clicks without converting I'll kill it. So I'll build a blacklist for popads that way. I don't know I'm such a noob.

 

[JH1nz]

So I've spent $27 so far and have only gotten back like $2 total. But conversions are steadily coming in everyday. Just not enough to cover the costs. I'm not sure what to do with this campaign. Should I kill it? Or should I let it gather more data?

So far I've blacklisted two placements that ate up 2000 views each without producing a conversion. Looking back maybe I should not have waited too long to kill those placements.

From now on if a placement goes through 300 clicks without converting I'll kill it. So I'll build a blacklist for popads that way. I don't know I'm such a noob.

The good thing is that you are learning. As far as your campaign, Maybe you shouldn't scrap it right yet. It may be wise to try to collect more data, but at the same time keeping an eye on your budget.

 

[newlxx]

If a target has spent around 2-3x offer payout and failed to generate a conversion. Kill it.
Doesn't matter how much impressions/clicks it takes.

 

[servandosilva]

Nice start. Definitely not depressing at all.

Keep spending and gathering data.

 

[krass]

This are my latest stats. The campaign was all over the place at the start, but now it's at a stable -80% ROI. I'm split testing stuff like colors and headlines hoping to reduce the deficit.

I've been spying on the competition by clicking ads on pop traffic sources but I don't see the offer being promoted anywhere. Maybe I should promote the more popular offers? I need to get more landing pages to test but I can't find any. This landing page I'm using I got from a blog I don't remember where. It's a survey type LP.

Where do I go to learn how to optimise landing pages?

 

[Dario]

What kinds of offers are you promoting? I have missed that part of your journey.

 

[krass]

What kinds of offers are you promoting? I have missed that part of your journey.

Hi, I'm promoting pin submit offers. Or maybe they're called sweepstakes. I don't know. It's the one where you can "choose" your $1000 vouchers but you have to submit phone number etc.

 

[krass]

My stats so far:

ROI:
1/2/2016: -95.28%
2/2/2016: -88.88%
3/2/2016: -88.93%

I tried a different landing page on 2/2 and planned to change a new one I had lined up but fell asleep. Shit. So I've uploaded the new one for 4/2 and will let it collect data. I'm hoping to get another ROI boost from here.

I've searched on Google on what the best practices are to increase clickthrough and ROI but I can't find any specific details. So I'm just going by gut feel.

The increase from -95% to -88% came from using a red background in the header. I'm now using the colour from the offer LP as my LP background to increase CTR and CVR. I'll let this run for a day or two and go from there.

 

[krass]

I tweaked the landing page and the conversions dropped again.

It's now down to -97% for the landing page that used to get -88%.

What I did:
- changed the background colour of the page to match of of the offers landing page.
- took out one of the offers to focus the testing on just offer

So now I'm putting both offers back. I'll let it run some more and see how it does.

 

[john snow]

1.27 for 7 conversions seems pretty low

 

[krass]

Ok so just an update:

ROI:
4/2/2016: -97.05% - tested normal lp against lp with background matching offer lp background, didn't work
5/2/2016: -97.05% - same results because same LP's - I wanted to gather data for 2 days
6/2/2016: -85.34% - went back to original LP (let's call this LPa) and tested against LP with cute girl holding vouchers
LPA got -79.75% ROI, LP with cute chick 90.93%
7/2/2016: -100% - Not sure what happened on this particular day. Maybe because it's the holidays. LPA was tested against a slight variation in the image and an upgrade in the end. Decided to let both LPs run again
8/2/2016: -89.79% - Back to the baseline ROI. The conversions all came from LPA -79.18%. The other LP -100%
9/2/2016: -92.83% - Ran the same LPs again since I'm not getting enough traffic to the offer. LPA -85.58%, other LP -100%
10/2/2016: -93.19% - Ran LPA with upgrade in the end against the previous LP with upgrade. Tracking software a bit erratic with conversion reports, maybe because I changed landers halfway through. So LP data not reliable.
11/2/2016: -91.65% - Ran LPA upgrade against LPA original, and this time LPA upgrade performed better -83.30%. LPA -100%
12/2/2016: -77.29% - Ran same test as day before, but I'm not getting much traffic from Popads. Only ~500 visits. Only LPA upgrade converted -54.85%, LPA did not convert -100%. Weird that I'm not getting the same level of traffic, it's usually ~ 3000 visits/day.

So I'm trying and testing different angles but I'm struggling to even get to -50% ROI. But at least I know that the offer does convert. I've set a goal to hit -50% ROI just by tweaking the LP.

I also came across the same offer in CPAlead that has it's own LP in english. Tried direct linking to that offer since english is the second official language where I'm from. Sent 6000 clicks but no conversions so it's safe to rule out language as the problem here.

That's all for now.

 

[Annabella101]

I hate the feeling of being so lost even after reading and reading. I thought I would join you here and as interesting as it is, I still find it really confusing. Seems to me your background in SEO and blogging helped you to get you going? I hope I can continue to watch your progress. Sadly, the only advice I can offer is not to give up.

 

[krass]

I hate the feeling of being so lost even after reading and reading. I thought I would join you here and as interesting as it is, I still find it really confusing. Seems to me your background in SEO and blogging helped you to get you going? I hope I can continue to watch your progress. Sadly, the only advice I can offer is not to give up.

Why not set aside $100 and launch a campaign? If you're worried about losing money, rest assured: you WILL lose money. Better take the first step and learn faster than you lose cash. If you need help setting up landers or trackers, pm me. I know how to set up adsbridge only. No knowledge on voluum.

UPDATE:
I've tested a few more variations of LPA, and let those run for a few xxxx impressions for each variant, and I think the LPA has reached a ceiling at -80% ROI. So I've come up with an entirely different LP that I'll call LPB and it's now live, being split tested against LPA.

My blacklist is also growing, since there are some days where there are no conversions at all, so I just blacklist any placements that get more that 100 impressions without generating any clicks.

I'm considering building a whitelist where I target all placements that have converted in the past or at least generated enough clicks. Maybe I'll gather more data before I do that.

 

[krass]

UPDATE:

The sweeps offer I was running was converting steadily, but the best I could get it to do was -70% ROI. The sweeps offer pays $0.17 per lead. It's a desktop pin submit offer.

I have since moved on to mobile, since the payout is higher at $2++. But I have a hard time finding any offers that convert.

I ripped a lander I found in the wild, made 4 angle variations of it, and I'm running traffic to 7 different offers. No conversions so far.

Clickthrough from LP to offers average from 7-9%.

So what I have so far:
1- The desktop sweeps offer converts at a steady rate but I can't get it to profit.
2- The mobile pin submits (whatsapp wallpapers, antivirus, etc) have no conversions yet.

So far I've only spent $400 in total for my education, so a long way to go still. I am only using Popads for traffic. Any input is very much welcome!