Seeing as I mainly run push traffic as well as build out push subscriber lists, I thought people may be interested in my views (conceited I know) on this traffic source for 2021 and so I thought I’d share my thoughts below (also writing things out help me think and crystallize my plans):
Around to Stay and More Like Email
Despite the naysayers I expect push to be around and stay. This is because I think push can be very useful. For instance it serves as a great outreach for businesses that want to reach their customers/prospects regarding their latest sale but not have to deal with the hassle of building out a full fledged app.
And so instead of drawing the analogy to push vs pop I would say it is more alike to email. And just like email used to be, push is also flooded with spam and abuse.
Clamping Down On Spam + Harder to Get Subscribers
Biggest difference between email back in the day and push nowadays is that push is pretty much controlled by one company, Google. Hence they have much more control in controlling things like spam/abuse and you are already seeing this in 2020 with the changes like a quiet UI.
I expect this theme to continue in 2021 where they will introduce client side changes (i.e. in Google Chrome) that make it harder for you to get push subscribers as well as harder for you to reach your push subscribers.
Eventually they will also clamp down on the sending side. Just like how email servers have a reputation score I expect this to eventually get introduced to push sending servers as well.
Improvements To Push Management Softwares (Hopefully)
2020 saw a host of new push software come out and expect that we’ve probably hit the point where we need better software and not more. The biggest issue I expect (or hope) will get addressed is the ability to build funnels for push notifications just like you would for email.
Not sure if anyone has tried but building out a sequential funnel for push on a software like Truepush (this is the one I use most) is very very painful. As far as I know, OneSignal should be fairly similar too.
Hence I expect that we’ll get software that aligns closer to how we manage emails.
In-Page Push Carve Out
I think people will realize in-page push is not push (most do already by now). It is much closer to display ads or interstitial than classic push. Just think of how you see in-page push, so far I’ve been seeing them a lot on streaming sites (which historically is filled with pops/display ads) whereas classic push shows up in the notification section of phones and computers.
The quality of in-page push is usually much worse, hence traffic sources really should be carving out in-page push (I’d rather see them grouped with display or interstitial).
Uncertain: Will It Come To Apple/Safari?
Given Apple’s focus on privacy and what not, I can’t imagine them allowing push unless they decide to build their own version of it (since they pretty much have their own version of everything). However whether this is even worth their time really depends upon how Google handles the governance of push traffic as a whole. So yea I think this one is a bit of a stretch and we will probably need to just stick to in-page push to reach Apple users.
In Conclusion
If it isn’t clear already my view of push is that it will continue its evolution to become more like email.
Spamming people will still work from time to time but not ideal long term. More and more people will begin managing their own push list and there will be more emphasis on creating value with your content as well as sanitising your list properly (just like how you need to manage email bounce and complaint rates).
Similarly my focus in 2021 is still primarily in push but with a longer term view in mind. There will be more effort in managing our own push lists to cater to our audience so as to build “moats” around my business. Hopefully I can find a way to share more of this information with everyone, though honestly just tracking the LTV of a push subscriber makes me do this:
So there are times where I work with extremely low payout offers. When I say “extreme” I mean things that have a payout of less than 1 cent. Typical these offers are push collection offers whereby we get paid based upon a visitor subbing onto the advertiser’s push list.
For example, looking at my Evadav CPA rate for India:
$0.0025 for mobile in India… As I said, extremely low payout.
As a result when you work with extremely low payout you want scale, since 1,000 conversions will only get you less than $10. As such you’ll want to make sure you get a lot, a lot of traffic. To do that you can either bid high and get a lot of traffic or create a lot of campaigns across different traffic sources. Given that we can’t really bid very high with such a low payout, I went with the latter:
(Proof that I actually created these campaigns)
Okay, so creating a lot of campaigns is painful but what is worse is managing a lot of campaigns especially when each of you campaign is tiny i.e. spend $1 a day. I mean, just look at this:
(A portion of my camps on a random day)
A camp that spends $1 a day is not worth your time to look at. However if the campaigns can make you on average $1 a day on autopilot then if you duplicate it 100 times, that is already $100 in profit.
As such we need a very efficient way to work and autopilot each campaign.
Enter: Auto Optimization
Nowadays most traffic sources come with auto optimization. They ask you for your CPA and then they will auto-optimize it for you. Problem is all of them have a minimum CPA number, take PropellerAds for example:
Remember our payout for India is only $0.0025 so targeting the suggested $0.01 is out of the question. So what do we do?
Binom’s Postback % Feature
To deal with this issue you’ll need Binom’s “Postback %” feature. Not sure if you know where it is as its hidden underneath “Create Campaign” → “Advance Settings”:
I’m assuming most affiliates won’t have used it. But it is actually a pretty useful feature in this case. By controlling the postback % you can effectively control the CPA. So for our case here: India’s Payout = $0.0025
Let’s say we want ROI of 30%
So our Target CPA = $0.0025 / 1.3 = $0.0019
But because Propeller’s minimum CPA is $0.01 and we can’t change that we need this formula:
Minimum CPA x Postback % = Target CPA Rearranging to figure out how to set postback %:
Postback % = Target CPA / Minimum CPA Putting in the numbers:
Postback % = $0.0019 / $0.01 = 19% You then just put the number in like this:
And then just set up your campaign as you would normally do. Presto!
The Magic: Explanation of What Happens
So what actually happens is that instead of sending every single conversion back like you would normally do Binom will only send back a portion of the conversions (in this case 19%).
This is by no means as accurate as working with sending back the exact values to the optimizer, but given that you don’t have an option (because traffic sources force you to work with their minimum bids) I’d gladly use this option instead of manually optimizing myself.
The inaccuracy is also less of an issue when you’re working with 1000+ conversions daily (for people that studied stats: remember “law of large numbers”). So I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Results
Everyone loves seeing results so I thought I’d just pull up whatever I had in my tracker that still uses this method (it is currently managed by one of my virtual assistants):
Lo and behold, it seems there are some diamonds in the rough if you test enough (we have a few bigger spending campaigns, and I can assure you we are using the same method described above – it just took a ton of testing).
Additional Point You’ll notice that I have a lot of events (since I mostly run pop traffic) – 2.5 million clicks. These costs can add up if you use a hosted tracking solution that charges per event; as such, I would recommend a self hosted tracking solution such as Binom.
For any curious, I use Hetzner’s PX92 that was recommended by Binom support and have had moments where I’ve run 10,000 clicks/minute (for a brief period of 1-2 hours) and things were still functioning.
Hope you found this helpful and if you want more of my tips and posts feel free to check out my blog at: http://sushiparlour.com/.
Every time someone clicks on your ad you have an opportunity to monetize them. But as the famous adage goes, “there is more than one way to skin a cat click”. As such I am going to go through a few of the popular ideas as well as some of the off-the-beaten-path ideas we know about. Because heck, in the ever-competitive world of media buying, knowing a few extra tricks up your sleeves can be the difference between positive ROI or negative ROI.
#1 Get them to buy something
Probably the most traditional way to monetize your click. Using amazing copy to allure your clicker to part with their hard earned cash, because who wouldn’t want another tactical flashlight, right?
#2 Get them to view ads
“You won’t believe what happened to these 14 celebrities” or “32 dirty secret that airlines don’t tell you”…
Seen one of these clickbait titles and then proceed to scroll through a never-ending barrage of slideshows that are littered with ads? Well, that is “traffic arbitrage” in which they’re trying to spoon-feed you as many ads as possible, so that the revenue you generate from viewing ads is greater than their cost of your click.
#3 Collect Their Emails
You entice your clickers with the promise of a “free ebook” or a sweepstakes competition so they will give you their email addresses.
Afterwards you can:
Get paid because the page is an offer page from another advertiser
Sell the email to a 3rd party (because that long disclaimer that people rarely read says you can)
Send them emails over the course of 30 days in which you try to sell them stuff or get them to view ads…
Heck, I could probably start an article on “more than one way to skin an email” so let’s not start. But anyhow, you get the idea.
#4 Collect Their Push Subscription
If you don’t know about this already you might be living under a rock as it is one of the fastest growing segments of media buying in 2019.
Similar to the email collection process above, except you collect push subs and can monetize it in a similar way. Only caveat is that it only works for Android phones at the moment (or any desktop).
#5 Collect Their Phone Numbers + Physical Address
Phone numbers, physical addresses? Oldschool eh?
But actually phone numbers can be used for SMS and callbacks. Whilst physical address can be used for snail mail (yes, these still exists). There’s definitely a demand for this type of information (assuming you can resell them).
Anyways same concept of collecting email/push subs but just a different back-end monetization.
#7 Retargeting Pixel
Any good marketer will know about retargeting and using pixels to build these campaigns. What isn’t as common is the idea of actually reselling this information.
So, say you’re running an ad to collect emails with a weight loss lead magnet. What you can do is place a pixel on your page so that you can retarget them with an ad on Facebook if you wanted to. But what you can also do is then rent this out to a 3rd party, such as someone selling a weight loss diet, so that they can run targeted ads to your audience or create lookalike.
Not the most cookie cutter way and also requires more work, but if you’re driving a lot of volume, every ROI increment helps.
#8 Monetize the click to the bones
So the click came in and did what you want, such as leave their email, but what now? Are you going to just say “thank you for subscribing” and let them ride off into the sunset? Hell no.
You should try to send them to another offer, or sell the traffic off to someone else, or to a remnant traffic source which leads me into…
#9 Monetize Remnant Traffic
You set up an ad for US and somehow a click from Mexico came in – it happens. You can either send them to your standard funnel (where you’re trying to collect emails of US people) or you send them to a service that monetizes remnant traffic. That way, the one click that was originally -100% ROI might just become -90% ROI (it adds up).
Same concept goes for repeat visitors as well (since you don’t need the same email twice).
Final 2 Cents
As cats have nine lives I thought nine ideas would be a good place to end this on (also I’m submitting it this for the Binom contest as well which is limiting to 5000 characters which I am also reaching).
My final two cents would be to try and get a good tracker that can help you track all these methods. Pretty sure there isn’t a single tracker that can track everything, but a good one can definitely make life a lot easier (and there are plenty of creative hacks you can deploy to work around these issues).
So this is a cleaned up version of my follow along that I posted on Afflift that details my journey using Zeropark’s Native traffic to run a weight loss offer in Turkey. I thought I would reshare it here for anyone that didn't see it on Afflift.
I knew what I was working with Zeropark Native so the best plan was to research and understand the traffic source. Therefore I started by asking my Zeropark account manager for some basic information on their native traffic.
She revealed that currently all their native traffic essentially comes from an app called “letgo” (https://www.letgo.com/). Ads are shown like this:
Source: Presentation I got from Zeropark
Naturally the next thing I did was Google this app since I had no idea what it does. The first result I got when I Google them was:
Okay looking at the title and glancing through reviews it is clearly a site for people to buy and sell used items (duh!). So we are slowly building out a profile of our potential visitors.
Next I wanted to know what type of traffic they have. So I cheated a bit here by looking at Voluum DSP (which is of course associated with Zeropark) and saw that they have Letgo on there too and filtered out by geo:
Clearly most of their traffic comes from Turkey and the US. Given that this is a mobile app the traffic should be 100% mobile. And a bit more digging revealed that there were more Android than iOS users.
Traffic comes from Letgo and so is In App Native Traffic
Users mostly looking to buy/sell second hand things
Turkey and US traffic
100% Mobile
Step #2 - Finding An Offer
So we know a bit about our potential visitors at this point. Hence I started brainstorming potential offers that could match the traffic since we know that if...
They were a seller they:
Could be in need of money
Don’t want to waste things
Will have some money (assuming they successfully sell things)
They were a buyer they:
Could be looking to buy things
Are looking for bargains (second hand)
I also asked my ZP account manager what verticals they see people run and she said that people run “ecomm, diet, gaming, antivirus, dating” (sounds like pretty much anything). So with all the above in mind I put together verticals I wanted to work on and felt made sense with the traffic:
Ecommerce
Nutra
Finance
Next I messaged a few of my affiliate managers to see what offers they got in Turkey and the US in these verticals and whether there was anything that was interesting i.e. popular. This took a while as there were tons of offers for the US but none for Turkey in most places.
In the end I chose an offer for Nutra in Turkey to start off with because:
Turkey is the #1 geo for this traffic source
Traffic for Turkey was a lot cheaper than US, I could get a lot of data for less money
The nutra offer was the only thing I could find for Turkey that made sense and was within Zeropark’s ad guidelines.
So with the geo + offer decided, I will now take a break before I update for the next installment where I talk about creatives (I also need to renew my spy tools).
Post #2 - May 13, 2020
Step #3 - Creative Creation
Okay so I’ve renewed my license at Anstrex (which if you can you can get here with my referral link). Reason why I use Anstrex is:
Cheaper than Adplexity
Has native + push which is primarily what I work on
Finding Banners with Anstrex
Normally when I spin up spy tools I start by filtering it out for the geo I want (in this case Turkey) afterwards I will have a browse and look at what the most popular ads are in the last year. You can do this by filtering:
5 - 365 Days (I don’t want anything running less than 5 days since those are just new ads)
Decreasing ad strength (this is Anstrex’ term for historical popularity, so I want the most popular first)
I usually have a look to see what people are running here. In this case it is the usual stuff: nutra, dating, ecommerce, getting rich (guessing crypto).
Afterwards I also want to check what is “trending” which in Anstrex translates to their “ad gravity” so I usually sort by decreasing ad gravity. Currently the most popular ads seem to be dating + ecomm (with some nutra).
Whilst I’m doing all this I pick out around 10 weight loss ads I can find and download them with their tool which gives me an organized folder and I can now review it like this:
Okay so we got banners but now we need landers.
Side Note: I sometimes also check the most popular global ads in the vertical I’m running just to get a sense of what is working globally. I didn’t do this here because I’ve run weight loss before.
Spying on Landers
Going back to the list just now I click through some of the ads to see what people are running. Keep in mind that some of these landers are cloaked and since I’m too lazy to turn on my VPN at this point I just browse through screenshots within Anstrex just to get a sense of what people are running. For example I saw this:
This is a pretty standard nutra page that I’ve seen around in other languages so am not surprised it is in Turkish as well. Anyways I continue browsing and confirm that pretty much everyone is running advertorials and just to be sure I turn my VPN on to check a few (so that I’m not just seeing the cloaked versions) but by the end I’m convinced that I need to get an advertorial style lander.
Normally at this point I would have compiled a list of all the landers I like. Generally I try to get different style of landers such as:
Male vs Female
Authority Experts (people in lab coats etc.) vs Average Person Blog Type
So that you have a variety. Then I would get this cleaned up myself (though admittedly nowadays I just send it off to my “web guy”) and add some of my own custom snippets to the page to improve it slightly or track it better.
However because I need to start running traffic soon for this follow along (since it is already mid May) I will use the ready made landers (they have a few) that were provided by the offer which I know are pretty similar to what other people are running. Anyways on to set up.
Side Note: I always recommend building out your own landers (unless you are running direct linking) because you have more control. At minimum you can put your own push collection code on the lander because a lot of the time networks will put their own code in the lander they provide you and not pay you for the push subscriptions.
Step #4 - Setting It All Up
I’m going to skip the boring steps of setting it up into the tracker etc. since I’m sure someone else has covered it on this forum. But I would note this is a COD offer which means that there are at minimum 2 stages we want to track:
When someone leaves their phone number on the offer page aka HOLD
When someone actually confirms their order via phone aka LEAD
I have run COD before so my Voluum tracker is set up to track this already. If people really want to know how to do this I can probably discuss it in a separate post. Anyways I've set it all up and it is ready to go:
But as I am on Zeropark setting it up I run into this issue:
Bit of an odd dimension size so what I’ll do is get my VA to make the changes and I'll update again once I have it all set up with traffic running.
Post #3 -- May 17, 2020
So since I didn’t update for a few days I had enough data to do 2 rounds of updates, here is what I did:
Step #5 - Running Camp + First Look
Okay so my VA sent me back the ads and I set them up in Zeropark. Honestly there isn’t much to set since most of the features were not available at this point. For example:
You can see in the above most of it is greyed out (because they only have 1 source and it doesn’t allow a lot of these options). So I went ahead and set up fairly broad settings with frequency at 12 hour, a daily budget of $30 and used their recommended bid as I wanted to make sure everything was correct first before increasing spend.
After running traffic on my first 2 days I learnt:
Zeropark’s Native platform does not integrate with Voluum (like how its pop and push does). My solution was to treat it like another traffic source and integrate the tokens manually. This meant the first day’s data was slightly off.
Their daily budget spend was not evenly distributed, so what I got was a very lumpy spend (i.e. I’d spend all my money in the first few hours once budgets reset)
I got quite a few hold conversions which meant that at least things were working but I’ll need to wait a few days to see whether these actually end up becoming real conversions (lead).
I’m paying CPV. It meant that my ads needed to have high iCTR (impression CTR).
There is no widget/placement targeting on their platform at the moment.
Cost updating needed to be done mainly (because CPV platforms can’t integrate with trackers most of the time)
First Look on 13/14 May:
Revenue: $10
Cost: $38
ROI: -75%
Hold: 26
Lead: 2
Approval Rate: 7.7% (this is the number of lead vs hold)
So after getting results for 2 days (think it was mainly one until my camp stopped due to the daily limit), I’m confident everything is working properly, results may feel uninspiring (-75% ROI) but actually there are positives and actionable observations:
Conversion Rates For Holds Are Decent
Given that I haven’t optimized anything (lander or banners), this means people are leaving their numbers so the funnel is working. So I expect optimization on lander/banners would see a noticeable improvement.
Approval Rate Below Average
Issue here is that approval rates are much lower than the network average (which is 20-25%). I suspect that we could see delayed conversions (which is typical for COD) later on and in which case even if we can hit 15% that would be a significant improvement already.
In addition the time you run COD offers is important because call centers don’t work 24 hours. Hence my current issue with lumpy spend could be affecting this (as well as which day of the week etc.). This can be improved once I get more data and increase my daily spend.
Sufficient Traffic
So at the current recommended bid I was already using up my whole budget within a few hours. So it proves there is sufficient traffic in this source which means that there is room to scale if I can figure out the best funnel + targeting.
Based upon all the observations above I made the following improvements:
Cut out the bottom 50% iCTR creatives and added new ones similar to the top performers (since I’m bidding CPV, so this is important)
Increased my daily budget gradually and dropped my bid in order to try and utilize 100% of my budget spread across all hours of the day.
Cut out the bottom 33% of the landers I was using (based upon hold conversion rate and lander CTR) since I don’t have enough lead conversion data.
Step #6 - Second Glance
Okay so based upon my initial changes, performance saw an uptick:
Since Inception:
Revenue: $160
Cost: $191
ROI: -16%
Hold: 173
Lead: 32
Approval Rate: 18%
Given results are as of 17th May, I expect more conversions to come in for the 16th May once call centers are able to make those phone calls (also a Saturday/Sunday probably means there are more delays in conversions). I was also finally able to get 1 full day (24 hour) of ad spend without any hiccups though I’ve still gone ahead to increase my budget to $150 just to make sure I don’t get throttled anywhere.
For now there isn't any quick changes I can make for further improvements. Instead I want to layout my action plan for this campaign:
Replicate the pre-landing pages I’m running so I can track it in more detail (remember I’m just using my network’s pre-landing pages) and make minor adjustments.
Build out a working pipeline with my team to continually update banner/creatives (to avoid banner blindness).
Figure out which hours are the best to target
Start split testing OS and OS versions in different campaigns.
The goal would ideally be to reach profitability by end of the month once I've done all the above steps and then look to expand outside zeropark (since I can't scale this much more on just Zeropark and I don't think it can do much better than high double digit to low triple digits a day).
Also I think I need to set a hard loss on this (so I don't over commit) and given that each payout is $5 and I'm already seeing conversions I think a $200 loss (40x payout) would be a good place to pause traffic and re-evaluate whether to continue or not.
Anyways given that there isn’t much more I can do in the meanwhile I probably won’t update until I have sufficient data to make meaningful changes.
Post #4 -- May 24, 2020
Okay so due to the end of Ramadan the call centers will not be working on 23 - 26 May so I’ve had to pause my campaigns so I thought it would be a good time to provide an update on things.
Latest results 13 - 24 May:
Revenue: $829
Cost: $813.73
Profit: +$15.27
ROI:+1.88%
Hold: 581
Lead: 152
Approval Rate: 26% (this is the number of lead vs hold)
Day by day breakdown:
As you can see my results have seen a dip after the success I had initially. Think this is a common problem that everyone has and I am no exception. I mean we all hope that we can just scale things to $xxx a day with consistent ROI and profits but things never work out as hoped. Normally newer affiliates would be frustrated at this point (which is normal) but given that this has happened countless times to me by now then I’m a bit more immune to it and instead try to focus on how to fix the issue. So let us dive into the diagnostics.
Step #7 - Diagnostics Of The Campaign
Note: I’m writing this as I go it is literally a step by step of my thoughts hence it can be a bit convoluted at times.
So looking at the data I see two glaring issues:
CPV is the same throughout
CV is dropping over time
Let us tackle the easy one first:
Why is CPV the same throughout?
This is likely attributed to the fact that I had to do a manual cost update (because ZP Native does not integrate with Voluum yet) and being the lazy person that I am, I just added the overall cost since inception in everytime to do the cost update (instead of day by day update). As a result the overall cost was divided by the views which meant the number was always the same.
However this means my CPV data is inaccurate because I am paying for impressions not views and looking at the formula:
CPV in Voluum = Cost Per Impression (this is my bid) x Ad CTR
Okay so that explains the weird numbers but I still need to have an idea of what my CPV is or at least whether it has been going up or down so what I did was compare the first half of my spend’s data with the second half my spend’s data on Zeropark (because it is a difficult to pull the data day by day for some reason):
13 - 18 May:
19 - 24 May:
Ah… so my CTR dropped from 0.87% to 0.59% which means I’m actually paying more for my CPV (assuming my bid hasn’t changed). Some of the reasons that I think could have caused this:
Banner blindness
Day of the week impact (it is only a 5 day period for each)
Holiday impact (Remember it was reaching the end of Ramadan and I am not sure what kind of impact this has)
But out of the above I can only really control one thing which is banner blindness. So it means that I need to:
Add new creatives
Why is CV Dropping Over Time?
This is probably the million dollar question at this point. Since it is clear that my CV has been dropping over time and honestly most of the time you can only guess as to what is the cause of it and try to implement improvements to see if it helps. So far my guesses are:
Offer Saturation
Self explanatory; only so many people will buy the product. But given that there are 30M impressions daily on this app I don’t think it should hit this point yet that early (I’ve run around 7-8M impressions).
Ripping/Copying My Ads
People running the same ads/offer as me. I mean I did show my results on Afflift and it isn’t hard to backward engineer what I am doing. However given that this is the nature of the business I won’t spend time thinking about this.
Holiday Impact
Again not sure how this impacts exactly but I assume call center workers won’t be as motivated to work ahead of a long holiday or maybe people they are calling or not as readily available. So results could be a bit skewed. Also need to note that delayed conversions are now less likely to convert (because sometimes you have people trying to
Again my focus is on what I can control and at this moment in time I can only try to avoid offer saturation by building more landing pages or running different offer pages (but same offer). As a result what I will do is:
Build my own landing pages and look for different offer pages (but same offer)
Few More Observations
Okay so I’m getting lazy explaining everything at this point but there are a few more things I noticed as I continued through:
Approval rates are back to the network average of around 25% or so. Which could have meant that I was just running hot on my first few days.
Day parting probably makes sense given that call centers only work certain hours of the day. Though I prefer to make this decision at the final optimization stage so as not to limit my traffic.
No real action plan based upon the above (since I intend to do day parting at the end) so lets skip along to what I need to do.
My To Do List
Okay so to summarize I will:
Create new banners for this ad
Put together new landing pages based upon what I know works
Find new offer pages to cycle through
After completing the above, I will then restart my traffic again (as call centers reopen) to see if there is improvement and then provide my final update for this follow along which will fit nicely with the end of the month (and end of the contest). I intend to provide my closing thoughts, some insight into scaling this campaign (on Zeropark and outside of Zeropark).
Post #5 -- May 31, 2020
Step #FINAL - Last Update
Seeing as today is the last day of the month I thought it would be the perfect time to wrap things up. Firstly let us look at the overall stats so far since inception:
Latest results 13 - 31 May:
Revenue: $1,188.78
Cost: $1,099.39
Profit: $19.39
ROI:+1.76%
Hold: 798
Lead: 199
Approval Rate: 25%
I will start off with an update based upon my to do list last time:
I found out different ad images can have very different CTRs which means if you are paying for CPV you need to be on top of running the best ads for sure. A snapshot of data (I've been optimizing it based upon CTR and eCPA):
I am still working on optimizing the best landers at the moment but so far there is no noticeable difference in my bottom line.
I didn’t implement different offer pages because I was already cycling through landing pages so I did not want to further increase the variables I was testing for.
Okay, so with over $1,000 spend (which is 150x the offer payout) I need to ask myself: Will I continue running this campaign?
Given that I am already profitable (barely), then yes, of course I will!
In which case my current plan of action for this campaign on Zeropark is digging into the details and seeing whether:
I can improve landing page and ad creatives
Day parting or weekday parting can work
OS version targeting
If you look carefully at the screenshot I shared, 1-2 of the new ads show promise as they are hitting a CTR of 2%+ (compared to an average of 0.7%). This could be an anomaly but if not this could be significant to my bottomline.
More importantly I think this campaign shows a lot of promise because I am only running this on 1 traffic source (which only has 1 placement) and with minimal optimization done initially and it was able to do slightly better than break even.
Hence I think if I give it another month or two and test it across different traffic sources, I would expect this campaign to bring in a healthy return. But as with testing new things we would need to expect to sustain short term losses, which I am okay to do.
For now I don’t have too much to share beyond this as I have been busy setting up infrastructure to run native traffic (as this will be a new focus of mine).
Extra Insight: Zeropark Native vs Voluum DSP
For those of you that have a Voluum DSP account. You will realize that you can actually bid for traffic on “Letgo” which is the source that Zeropark Native offers.
Being the self proclaimed savvy affiliate that I am, I duplicated my campaiang to run on Voluum DSP because they operated using CPM pricing whereas Zeropark used CPV pricing. What this meant was that I could place a bid of $0.11 CPM on Voluum which was equivalent to $0.00011 on Zeropark (this isn’t possible on Zeropark because minimum increment was $0.0001) and so should in theory outbid everyone bidding $0.0001.
But before you get excited, what happened was that I actually got very little traffic on Voluum DSP compared to Zeropark Native even though my bid was effectively higher (I even used $0.13 CPM to be safe).
My guess is because Voluum DSP buys their traffic from Zeropark and since they are effectively different services, I assume there are probably rebrokering or tech factors that go on which affect the amount of traffic you can get from “Letgo”.
Final Closing Remark
Overall I am happy with the result of my follow along as it hopefully showed a realistic outcome (though probably one of the better examples) of how affiliate marketing campaigns can look. All too often people are fixated on the great examples of how someone started a campaign and it quickly made them $xxx/day when in fact that is the exception and not the norm. Even if you search around the follow alongs on this forum you’ll more likely find neglected follow alongs than the amazing success stories. Often it takes a lot of trial and error before your campaign can reach that consistent $xxx/day dollar mark.
Also I started the follow along with the intention to share the thought behind each step I took for running and optimizing my campaign as all too often I was seeing newer affiliates look for the holy grail answer of “test offer for 3x payout on each placement then keep optimizing for 7 days and you will reach $xxx/day” when I think you need to understand the reason behind these “rule of thumbs”. Hopefully I have managed to do this and given people some food for thought.
Happy to answer any questions or engage in a friendly discussion in the following comments or feel free to provide any feedback you have for my follow along (or even my writing). For now this will be my final official update for the follow along.
Edited from my post on Afflift titled - "What is the $$$ possibility of Evadav's CPA? Click to find out" -- If you want access, sign up to afflift here.
As everyone is stuck at home trying to find new ways to make money I thought I’d share a little success I’ve had lately...
As some of you may already know from my previous case study "How I Built a Push List That Makes Me $xxx/day as a Small Time Affiliate" collecting push sub is my forte so when the Evadav CPA discussion came about in Afflift I was already testing this at a very small scale. At first I didn’t think it would amount to much since payouts were mostly less than 1 cent and the numbers people were doing on follow alongs were on the low side. However to my surprise I was able to achieve this in the end:
(Not sure if you can see the numbers but I included my day by day stat breakdown at the end)
My highest revenue day was $656 on Evadav but of course revenue doesn't mean anything if there aren't any profits. So checking my tracker I got...
Last 7 days in my tracker: Revenue: $3,255 Cost: $2,444 Profit: +$811 ROI: +33%
This meant I was averaging $100+ profit a day with over 10,000+ conversions and quickly became one of Evadav’s top CPA pub.
Also at this point I didn't even run the campaigns anymore as I taught a VA to do all the work and they’ve been running it for the last 2 weeks already which is why things exploded since I got someone to dedicate all their time to it.
Hopefully this would inspire others that even if the offer pays $0.01 there are ways to get it to make $100+ a day!
Unlike typical case studies I wanted to keep this authentic. So I thought I’d start with the story behind the case study and then show a follow along-esque case study to illustrate that this really can be done. If that doesn’t interest you just skip to:
Part 1 - Set Up
Part 2 - Initial Results Before I Pause Traffic
Part 3 - Results & Final Thoughts
Note: This case study is written with affiliates that have had minor successes in affiliate but struggling to be making $xxx consistently. So I will gloss over certain details.
Part 0 - The Backdrop
So I’ve been a long time user of Monetizer (back when it was called Afflow) and I stumbled across their new push collection offering as I was browsing my account.
What it offers is the ability to make money off of owning a push list without managing it. They provide 80% revshare for any money they make on your push subscribers which, at the time of writing, is the best public deal I’m aware of.
At first I didn’t think much of it until I noticed that I was consistently getting $10 a day from it without really doing any work, which to a struggling small time affiliate like myself was meaningful. So I decided to set up proper campaigns and test it.
Lo and behold this was what happened next:
Not an amazing number but as a small time affiliate I could see the potential added to which this was akin to building an asset which not many affiliates do.
So I worked hard and before I knew it, I was consistently doing $xxx in revenue a day on push list alone:
(Of course there can be a cost to acquiring subscribers but you’ll see later that most of the money I generate from push list is actually largely profit.)
Still Part 0 - Case Study Challenge
As a result, one of the founders from Monetizer reached out to me to see if I could do a case study for them and I happily obliged. But decided that I would:
Set up a new monetizer account to keep my stats separate and clean.
Pay and run traffic through it over the course of 2 weeks and afterwards let it sit for a further 2 weeks to see how much passive income it generated.
Share all my results (and hope it is good results).
This I thought would prove that this method works even if I started from scratch. But the risk being that if results turned out bad then it wouldn’t be a very appealing case study... Anyhow they agreed with the arrangement and thus I began the case study.
Anyhow they agreed with the arrangement and being the confident individual that I am, I thought I’d get good results anyways so here the journey began...
Part 1 - The Set Up
Every good journey begins with good preparation and here are the things I did:
#1 - Open a fresh monetizer account:
Ahhh the smell of a fresh account. Keep in mind you will need to set your account up such as buying a domain for it (I usually get mine from Namecheap - here), integrating it with your tracker etc. Some of this can get a bit complex for non-tech whizzes but you can always chat to someone from Monetizer.
My new Monetizer account as mentioned (interesting random avatar I got):
#2 - Set up all the other basics affiliate related stuff like tracker, affiliate network, landing page hosting...
I won’t go into details as there are guides that talk about this stuff on Google and you probably should have all this already. But this is my setup:
Affiliate network with offers such as Gotzha, Wewe Media and Clickdealer (message me and I can refer your for approval)
Landing page - I use a PHP server setup (but CDN should work as well since no PHP code is required).
#3 - Find an existing affiliate campaign that is ideally breakeven or at least one where you’re not bleeding out of your eyeballs running it.
And if you don’t have one then you better start testing actual campaigns because really you should have some basic idea of what is going on). In my case I chose the following campaign that I’ve been running for a while (I switched trackers so this isn’t the full set of data but largely the same results):
Although not relevant, I suspect people would ask details on this campaign so here it is:
Offer Type: SOI Vouchers
Payout: $0.3-0.4 (Reason this is a range is because my offer got paused mid way so I had to switch between a few)
Geo: Malaysia
Funnel/Lander used: Prize type landers that you can find on any typical spy tools, honestly any of the standard landers can work such as surveys, spinning wheels etc.
As I said any breakeven or close to breakeven campaign you have can typically work.
#4 - Setting up the funnel
Now with all the basic stuff set up you’ll have to either:
Put Monetizer’s push collection code into your landing page header or
Run their smartlink that will collect push subscribers for you
But for my case study I am going with this funnel:
So I will be using both options 1 and 2. If you need help setting this up you can reach out to Monetizer support or maybe I’ll do a write up at a later date if there are demands for this (let me know in replies).
Anyways as you can see I set it up on my tracker:
#5 - Set up your campaigns on traffic sources
Now you’re ready to set up your campaigns and buy some traffic. For this case study I ran it on other push traffic but other traffic sources can work too such as pops, natives, facebook etc. Just depends where that original campaign you chose was running on.
So I went ahead and did just that, just a few examples of things I set up on (you might recognise these UI if you buy pop/push traffic):
Next we just need to sit and wait to collect push subscribers...
Part 2 - Initial Results Before I Pause Traffic
Here are my results at the 2 week mark (16 - 30 Oct):
Push List Revenue From Monetizer: Revenue: $211.3 Subscribers Acquired: 26.1k Cost per Subscriber: $0 Average Revenue per Day (15 days): $14
Summary: Total Revenue: $1757.35 Total Cost: $1422.55 Total Profit: +$334.8
As you can see I got lucky with my campaign as I turned an unexpected profit which meant that my acquisition cost per subscribers was zero. As a result I was able to get 26.1k subscribers for free which was netting me around $15-20 a day at the current EPC.
More importantly, even after I stop my campaign now, the revenue I generate from my push list will be pure profit. Kaching $$$!
Screenshots to support my numbers:
Part 3 - Results & Final Thoughts
After another 2 weeks I tallied up my total results for the period of this case study (16 Oct - 12 Nov):
Push List Revenue From Monetizer: Revenue: $329.6 Subscribers Acquired: 26.5k Cost per Subscriber: $0 Average Revenue per Day (28 days): $12
Final Summary: Total Revenue: $1875.60 Total Cost: $1422.55 Total Profit: $453.1 ROI: +31.9%
31.9% ROI over 28 days probably isn’t an amazing results in the affiliate space but personally as an ex-finance guy I am happy with it especially when we keep in mind that this method was:
Low maintenance - I spent more time writing this case study than I did on the campaigns for it (assuming you already have a breakeven or close to breakeven campaign).
Consistent returns - I generated $10+ in push revenue a day for the most part and could probably maintain around a $20 profit if I didn’t pause my campaign. I’ve included a day to day breakdown in the appendix for those that want to take a look at how results look like.
And if you keep at it you can reach numbers such as this:
And if you keep at it you can definitely reach $xxx per day and reach the top of Monetizer's push revenue leaderboard (I'm currently within top 5, sorry humble brag 😋) and see numbers such as this:
Again not big numbers in the affiliate space but good enough to get you started I reckon. Anyways back to the grind so that hopefully I can write about how to get to $x,xxx a day soon.
Add new creatives 
Build my own landing pages and look for different offer pages (but same offer) 
