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The diary of two hustlers - Mobile

Wassup wassup my friends, as we took a day off we had to work twice as hard today. Got a lot of things done, and overall a really positive attidude. Mostly because we got a sick conversion boost. We dont know why, but we had a longass conversion lag from the advertiser/cpa network, which gave us almost 100 more conversion on the paused campaign. Obviously ROI and stuff changed, and looking really good now. Time to put in more volume and try to scale that shit up!

What we did today:
  • Expanded to another GEO with the working landers + made 1 new lander for 2 geos
  • Finished the 2 Landders for the new offer and setup all the serverstuff
  • Run the old campaign for $150 spent/day now
  • Run the campaign for expanded geo for $30
  • Run the new offer for $30 spent
Gameplan for tomorrow:
  • Cut siteids if possible
  • Setup a own trackingdomain, since we still use the same from voluum (How much difference does it make tho?)
  • Work on our website
  • Find winning landers for new offer and change angle/images
  • Learn a bit how to organize and use the server, since one of us as not as great in the techinical stuff, haha
Heading off to bed now, here are some stats with the new updated conversions! Hopefully the new lander with new angle wont fuck the stats for the siteIDs.

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Yo, quick update since I am super tired but want to stick to the daily updates. We didnt really do anything today, since data rolled in slower as we thought to. 2 of the new campaigns got approved really really late, so we cant really do anything with the data yet, except cutting one placement at campaign 2. It had 1500 impressions and no conversion, so we blacklisted that traffic. Also blocked 4 more placements in campaign 1.

Campaign 3 seems to be doable, if we gather enough data. SPlittested 3 landers, 2 seem to do way better than the other, but we will let it run till tomorrow and make decission from there.

Stats from today doesnt seem to be too bad, but kidna gambling on a conversiondelay on campaign 1. Also we didnt reach the spent of >$100 at all. should we bid higher and take a ROI drop or how do we scale this?

Thought about optimizing to the max and expand to other trafficsources, were we can spend $50 everyday with the same bid. Any advice on bidding strategies? We are aware of a hybrid approach, where we create a new whitelist campaign and move all the positive targets there and just let the initial campaign run to find new profitable targets, but that doesnt seem like the best idea, isnt it?

Stats of the day so far, talk to you tomorrow guys!

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Yo lads and ladies, its been some busy days, thats why there werent that many updates anymore. The lack of feedback in this thread was also somekind a reason not to update that frequently anymore. But I guess this might be a really good motivation for beginner, so we keep on going.

What we were doing the last days? Basically gathering more and more data and try to increase the spend from day to day. WE tweaked a bit around the landers, but I think keypart in optimizing the campaign was just to cut out more and more placements. Finally blacklisted 25 targets for the first campaign and we decided to try to scale it a bit more, since it gave us steady $10-$30/day. First we tried to scale to another trafficsource, but bids wwere jsut too high and roi was a little bit over breakeven.

Yesterday we decided to go hardcore and tried the same offer in 3 more different geos. So far it looks like an good idea, but costs are unfortunately not totally correct.

The real costs + revnue from Month to date are:
Costs:
$675
Revenue: $820
Profit: $145
ROI: 21%

We know that the roi is not killer, but at least we dont really lose much money so far. Obviously we are down in costs from translations, Voluum subscription and some other costs like the dojo and stuff, but we really learned a lot from that money spend and are really hungry to improve more.

What we will do now is to monitor the fresh started campaigns and try to tweak some stuff around. AB splittest the landers a bit more, then try to scale it to another trafficsource for each different geo. Another thing we want to do is duplicate the campaigns and decrease the bid. Maybe we still get the same traffic for much cheaper! If we drive more volume, we will ask for a paybump. How much daily conversions should we target before asking?

Any suggestions how to scale, splittest while scaling and improving would be really awesome.

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Man, you are making progress way to fast. Good to see that happening, its motivating.

Btw, the lack of feedback could be because you are doing everything right. When you are learning to drive, if you are doing everything right, your instructor will be pretty much silent right?

Look at your posts, you have a clear cut vision of what you did and what is your gameplan for the next day. 80% of the people don't know what they are doing. Its amazing the progress you have made in just a few weeks.

I think this followalong should be a case study for newbies out there to learn how to launch successful campaigns.
 
Thanks for the feedback @captain47 and @hypefree . There are some true words, but its still nice if people just comment what they like, dont like or have specific questions - just to bring more life into the thread. Its quite boring if there are only your own posts inside, haha
 
Its sunday, almost the half of the month is done and I have some spare time to keep you guys updated, since I wait for some translations. Unfortunately Paypal doesnt let me deposit via bankwire from Thailand, so I have to wait till my partner gets up and does the payments. Kinda pain in the ass, but hopefully we will get our revenue soon and we have some decent moneys in the paypal, so the problem wont accure anymore.

What we did:
  • Unforotunately not too much over the weekend. We just created the lowbid campaigns, where we bid like $0.10 less, we still get some volume but the roi is quite low compared to the Initial campaigns with the higher bid. Kinda curious to try bidding higher, since it seems placements convert better. High bid campaign has a CV of almost 0,6% (6 conversions over 1000 impressions), the low bid campaigns have like 0,35%. Should we just increase the bid of the initial campaign or duplicate it in a new separate campaign? How much higher should we bid?
  • We also watched out for new similar offers with more geos, made some calculations for 10 more, which only 3 seem to be a good idea. 2 of them seem to be a gamble with an estimated roi of 30%, the other one with decent 60%. So we really look forward to try them out, as soon as the translations are done.
  • Also we updated all the costs in voluum manually, which is pretty nice. Finally dont need to export all the data into excel and make the math youself. The numbers are still a little bit sketchy, but shouldnt really fall in weight.
Gameplan for today:
  • Translate into new languages
  • Setup a new trafficsource and copy the 3 best campaigns for aroudn $30 spent each. First we want to get known better to the source and monitor if all the tracking etc. is setup correctly
  • Create another lowbid campaign of a good performing campaign
  • Maybe create a highbid campaign. Depends how fast we get advice of you guys! hehe
  • Finally finish company website
Gameplan for tomorrow:
  • Copy all campaigns to new trafficsource, if setup and tracking work fine for the initial test
  • Spy 1 hour to find new offers/landingpage ideas
So this are the stats month to date. All costs are correctly, revenue is a bit more than shown, since we always have a small conversionlag for the last 2 days. By the way, on friday and saturday we reached more than $100 profit in a row. Time to put another zero on that motherfucker!

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Thanks for sharing. This is a great follow along.
Subscribed.
May I know how do you update cost in voluum? Does it manually update?
 
Hey @Isaac611 , thanks a lot for following.

You can simlply adjust costs manually by doing this:
  1. Go to campaigns
  2. Choose a campaign you want to readjust the costs
  3. Rightclick > choose "Update cost"
  4. Select the timeframe for the update (unfortunately only doable for the last 30 days)
We just get the spent for the campaign from the report in the trafficsource. This seems to be the most easy way, but from now on we will just update the data from the previous day.
 
Hey @Vitamin A, I'm watching your follow along for a while and really impressed, well done! It seems you have a very clear guidelines for campaign launching and optimization, and you actually set your path on the right course to success by choosing the right traffic source for the offer you promote - a scalable traffic volume, converting well and (VERY) cheap traffic.

Let us know your next step for making this campaign big, more geos, more traffic sources or improving bidding strategy etc.

Definitely going to watch you succeed and scale up to the skies and beyond ;)

See you around :)
 
Alright, its time to shootout some updates again. This were very busy days again, since we continually faced new problems we had to figure out how to deal with. One of them was a problem with our VPS. SInce we dont have a managed one, we had to figure out that problem ourself, which took up half a day.

Another thing was Paypal restricted our bank account, so we need to wire first to paypal, which takes a couple days. Things get a bit slowed down, since we dont really have a good cashflow till the money hits the Paypal. In addition to that, we didnt get paid by the adnetwork since 3 weeks, we have more than $2500 in revenue. We really dont want to scale it big, until we get the first payment. Talked to the AM and got confirmed, that we will get paid this week, so looking forward to that and then try to scale it.

What we did the last days:
  • Tried lowbid campaigns, which were a little bit proftable with 20% roi, so definitely something we could do more often. I just dont know how much it affects the initial campaign. Dont we bid against ourself and increase the price for traffic?
  • Tried highbid campaigns while running the initial campaign. ROI on high bid was mostly breakeven, slightly positive, but the initial campaigns were perfoming really bad, so we really think there is an influence because of the highbid campaign. They also bid for the same site IDs, so we stop doing that.
  • Scaled to 3more countries, which were all a flop. 2 dont really get enough traffic, but a lot of room for improvement, Split tested offers and landers, so we weed them out and wait to cut some site IDs.
  • Asked for a paybump, since we have more than 1000 conversiosn daily. The AM said that she will ask the advertiser if they are happy with the quality of the traffic, if they give us a go, we will get an increase. Didnt talk about numbers tho, should I suggest something or negotiate? How do you guys handle it?
Plans for the next days:
  • As soon as we get the payment ( Wednesday - Friday), we will register on more trafficsources and try to scale with the same bid. Ofcourse we will prepare all the sources and make some low budget testing so tracking or stuff like that shouldnt be a problem and we can ride the moneywave smoothly, haha.
  • We should spent ore time with testing. From now on we will prepare a variation of the lander and let it splittest 1-2 days. So far we just kept on going with the best performing without changing much more, definitely a mistake and a lot of money left on the table!
 
@ChestOfCash Sure man, we try to be as transparent as possible with our actions, so people can acutally learn something from it. We also found it really helpful to read blogs of other people like CMA, where you could really follow a nice progress.

@aharvey101 Thanks a lot man, feels absolutely awesome to hear feedback like that!

@captain47 As we stated in the post above, some things were holding us back from doing it, but thats for sure the plan for this week!

@cashmoneyaffiliate Really awesome to have you in this thread. Actually your follow along made us registring here at the forum and we learned a lot from it. Also from all the posts you give away here for free helped us a lot to progress that fast. Any advice of you seems to be gold, really appreciate it!
 
Okay, our try to scale failed massively. We tried to scale on 3 new DSP trafficsources, setup campaigns and deposit till we realized the bid on this sources is sometimes ridicolous for some geos and volume seems shit. Especially zeropark disappointed us a lot, since we thought its a good trafficsource, but doesnt really have any volume, altough we are top2 bid, lol. This resulted in no spend at all and the math just doesnt allow us to bid way higher.

If we calculate 5 conversions on 1000 pops, we will earn 5 x $0.27 = $1.35
So we simply cant bid higher than that. We tried that already and it failed massively on the initial trafficsource, so I guess we just let it run on the initial trafficsource and try to raise the bid 5 or 10% more. 30% was way too much last time and resulted in breakeven and negative shit.

Another thing we could try is scaling via banner traffic. Is it cheaper than pop traffic? We thought about creating high CTR banners so we can get more visitors for cheaper spend. Any suggestions on usual trafficsources? We dont have any experience at all with that.

I guess its time to move a level up and try out some higher payout offers, most likely pin submits. The payout seems reasonable and then we also have the possibility to bid higher and scale. So we just let the initial campaigns run and invest all the profit into learning how to convert mobile subscription offers!

Any suggestions or feedback on tihis plan are highly appreciated. Maybe we just leave a lot of money on the table with moving on, but I think we learned A LOT with this mobile CPI campaigns and are ready to try something new.
 
MI
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