My Foray Into Adwords For Gaming CPI

[PalmaGhost]

Hey Everyone

Today I set up a popular Android gaming app targeting a tier 1 country. The CPI offer pays $1.96.

I’ve split the test into 2 campaigns (each set to $25/day) with 1 ad group containing 2 ads in each. The 2 campaigns are exactly the same except one pays adwords on a CPA basis $1.25 and the other is set to $0.04 CPC.

Each ad group contains 2 video ads that use different copy and different videos. The ads are direct linked (because Voluum’s default domain is blacklisted on Adwords).

The tokens I’m tracking are &aff_sub={placement}&aff_sub2={creative}&aff_sub3={campaignid}&aff_sub4={devicemodel}&aff_sub5={adposition}

My plan is to run the ads until I reach 3x payout (like @cashmoneyaffiliate suggests in his guide) on each angle and then figure out how to optimize based on placements.

My questions:

• Does anyone have any experience with Adwords and gaming CPI offers?
• Do my bids look reasonable for a tier 1 country?
• Are those the tracking tokens you would use?
• Should I wait to see how this tier 1 campaign plays out or should I jump into a tier 2/3 to test in parallel?

 

[cashmoneyaffiliate]

Does anyone have any experience with Adwords and gaming CPI offers?

Not with adwords but I have promoted a few CPI gaming offers in the past

Do my bids look reasonable for a tier 1 country?

In order to asses whether or not your bids are reasonable you'll need to find what the average conversion rate is on the offer.

Are those the tracking tokens you would use?

Yes those are adwords tracking tokens

Should I wait to see how this tier 1 campaign plays out or should I jump into a tier 2/3 to test in parallel?

Tier 1 countries can be expensive and competitive but if you have the budget then its fine. I would not recommend testing to many GEO's in parallel as you are new to this vertical.

 

[PalmaGhost]

Thanks @cashmoneyaffiliate. Do you have another traffic source that converted decently for you in the past on gaming offers?

The tracking tokens question was more geared toward if those are the specific tokens you would use as opposed to some of the others available for Adwords.

The campaign has been live for 24 hours now and not even 1 impression on either campaign (CPA/CPC). I think I'll pause the tier 1 and get it set up on a tier 3 country to figure out if Adwords has cheap enough traffic to bother with for these offers. The main reason I wanted to try it is because of the way their interstitial ads have in-app autoplay videos and force the visitor to watch at least 5 seconds before skipping past it.

If I get any movement, I'll update here. If not then I'll forget Adwords and focus in on utility apps running on cheaper networks which seems to be most people's best introduction to getting mobile to work at first (from what I've read here and other places).

 

[PalmaGhost]

UPDATE

CPC campaign:
Max Bid: $0.10 CPC
Clicks: 14
Impressions: 1,637
CTR: 0.86%
Avg. CPC: $0.07
Cost: $1.02
Avg. Pos.: 1
Conversions: 0

I’m surprised, but so far Google doesn’t let me get a placement drill down report, so I can’t really begin to look for patterns or optimize. Seeing that I am #1 and still not getting very many impressions (the campaign has been running for 4 days and even ran over a weekend) shows me that Adwords doesn’t have much in-app volume in this country.

CPA campaign:
Target CPA: $1.46
Clicks: 38
Impressions: 7,147
CTR: 0.53%
Avg. CPC: $0.11
Cost: $4.36
Avg. Pos.: 1
Conversions: 0

I’d imagine that this is me competing against myself on the CPC campaign since it has about 5x the traffic. But still relatively low volume compared to what I was expecting. This campaign does have some placement reports, so I’ve gone in and excluded the apps that had at least 100 impressions and 0 clicks.

I know those numbers are low and wouldn’t normally be the right way to do things, but the app names include things like golf and others which are completely different than the offer I’m promoting. I’ve kept all of the high CTRs and I’m going to let the offer run for a full week to see if it can be salvaged.

The other thing that surprised me here was the fact that I was expecting a “CPA” campaign to only cost me money if I got a conversion. That’s why I put my target CPA so high, figuring I could afford to only make about 25% ROI on every install and still be happy. But it works more like OCPM on Facebook where they are still charging for impressions.

Any advice on how to proceed, when to cut or what to do?

 

[PalmaGhost]

Digging deeper (logging into my offer network) I found out that I actually did get a conversion on the CPA campaign yesterday. But Adwords didn't track it somehow. I've taken steps to enable a Google Click ID so I'll be able to upload conversions manually from now on, but does anyone have a clue as to why Adwords wouldn't automatically receive the conversion data?

 

[PalmaGhost]

Still not able to track conversions automatically, but no big deal. I just have to upload them manually and analyze the old fashioned way.

So far I’ve gotten 2 conversions for a payout of $3.84 and I’ve spent $7.28 for around -52.7% ROI which is just fine in this beginning optimization phase from what I understand.

Traffic volumes are still pretty low for most of the placements only 13,441 across both campaigns, but I’ve gone ahead and pulled out the 2 placements with conversions to see if I can increase their traffic and see if the conversions were flukes (1 of the sources got a conversion on less than 2 impressions).

They probably were, but I’d like to speed up the data collection on those sources so I can make an informed decision. Right now for whatever reason that specific placement isn’t getting much volume when lumped with the others so this is the best way I know how to speed up the process.

Anybody around in the Dojo anymore? Or should I take this over to the main forum?

 

[cashmoneyaffiliate]

Yes those are the tokens you would use.

You're not getting conversions posted back, what tracking software are you using. It could be that you have set up your postback up wrong.

The lack of volume is an issue, have you copy and pasted the campaign multiple times while increasing the bid on each copy by 0.01 or 0.02?

Also does this offer allow you to send traffic from their GEO's? If so you could trying setting up campaigns in those other countries and see if you get more volume.

 

[PalmaGhost]

Hey @cashmoneyaffiliate. I'm not using tracking software on the Adword campaigns for 2 reasons:

1) Adwords blacklisted Voluum's domain (I'm making the switch to AdsBridge at the moment so I'll be switching to that since I get vanity URLs even at the basic plan).

2) For the life of me I can't figure out how to get Adwords to postback. I've successfully done the setup on Exoclick for 2 different Aff networks, so I know the theory. But, Adwords doesn't seem to offer anywhere to get/input the proper snippets. If you happen to know your way around their interface for apps that would be awesome.

I've also tried your suggestion about multiple campaigns and I originally targeted Germany (now I'm targeting another Euro) country so the app impression estimates are in the millions. That leads me to believe that the problem is really having a lack of inventory for interstitial video ads more than anything else. I may need to switch to banners and just duplicate that interstitial as a landing page.

Does anyone happen to know of a traffic network with good volume for interstitials like Google offers with autoplay videos and 5 second forced views (YouTube style)?