How a Browser Extension, Onclick Traffic, and CPA Goal Brought $517 Profit [Case Study]

You know that the US is a very expensive GEO, so you never dare to enter it? And what if we told you that it’s not just for the most experienced marketers with sky-high budgets?

Today, we will show you how our partner made more than $1,236 in revenue within 7 days with a plain browser extension offer – yes, targeting US users! 

What did it take?

In short – $718 to invest, PropellerAds Onclick (Popunder) and Direct Click traffic, and some nice analytical skills. Read on to learn it all in detail!

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About the case study

Our partner has pretty vast experience in running Monetizer offers, and he has been successful with them. When his friend recommended him the one for the US GEO, he wasn’t inspired at first, but then changed his mind:

Offer: Browser Extension CPA Network: Monetizer Offer payout: $0.64 (It has been increased to $0.76 now) Offer conversion flow: CPI (Browser extension install) GEO: US Device: Desktop Connection type: WiFi Language: English Browser: Edge Ad format: OnClick -> Direct Click Pricing Model: CPA Goal Tracking Tool: PropellerAds in-house tracking system Dates: January 18 – January 25

Offer landing pages:

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Behind the Choice: The Offer Research

As we already mentioned, the offer didn’t seem attractive to our partner at first. Look: a payout of only $0,64 for such an expensive GEO – is it possible to make it profitable at all? However, a second look brought the following insights:

1. The offer flow was very simple: landing page -> Microsoft Edge Add-on official page -> Install.

2. The landing page led directly to the official Microsoft Edge site, which inspires much more trust than any other creative, so our partner assumed it would convert nicely.

3. PropellerAds Traffic Chart—a special dashboard that shows the traffic volumes and CPM rates for a particular slice—showed that the Optimal and Maximum CPM rates were the same: $0,5. This meant there was no competition for this slice: OnClick -> US -> Desktop -> Windows -> Wifi.

4. The network data of Monetizer for the offer showed the eCPM was $5,19. It means you can earn $5,19 for every 1000 ad impressions. That’s obviously higher than the supposed CPM, and became a good indicator: the offer might be profitable.

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Campaign Settings and Testing

The partner decided to run the offer using Onclick. There were two reasons for this:

• The offer provided him with a very high-quality landing page. It perfectly showed a user what the offer was about and what to expect
• Using other formats, like Push, might require bigger budgets because it would imply testing several creatives

So, he decided to create an Onclick campaign, and mix it with Direct Click and CPA Goal bidding model.

Why?

‘The algorithm works like a charm and it helps to identify bad zones very early. The CPA Goal pricing model kept finding good zones for me and controlled the CPM of overall traffic. The combination of Direct Click + CPA Goal made sure that I’d keep receiving high-quality traffic consistently with broad targeting.’

As a result, there were two campaigns: one with Onclick and another one with Direct Click. 

He set the CPA bid price at 60% – 70% of the offer payout price, and here are the rest of the settings:

And, a little bit about tracking: our partner used PropellerAds in-house tracker. The reason was that a third-party tracker had issues with discrepancies for the first campaign, and the click loss was too big. 

The PropellerAds tracking capability was enough since the campaigns didn’t require extensive data tracking because of niche targeting. The second campaign, launched without any third-party tracker, became a major success, with a 314% ROI during the testing period.

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Campaign Optimization

The first 7 days of the testing period resulted in a 350%—400% ROI. This result provided the partner with a safety cushion and the courage to sustain the campaign even after the ROI began to drop. 

Besides, he got some insights and overall made the following changes:

What happened	What our partner changed
Most conversions came from Windows 10 and 11	Excluded all the previous OS versions
The 2nd campaign win rate was about 29%, but 2 days later many competitors arrived, and CPM became 3–4 times higher	Increased the CPA bid. It made the traffic volumes consistent, and the win rate jumped to 34% + CR increased, too. The ROI kept revolving around 80%-90%
The 2nd campaign win rate was about 29%, but 2 days later, many competitors arrived, and CPM became 3–4 times higher	Blocked the zones with 0 conversions that already spent 1x offer payout ($0,64) and zones with 0 conversions and CPM exceeding $4
The offer got paused for a while several times, while the PropellerAds campaign was live; it spent money and wasted traffic	Used a Google Apps Script created by Dood, the Afflift forum member; it automatically stopped the PropellerAds campaign every time the offer paused.

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Campaign Results and Takeaways

The campaign resulted in the following numbers:

Here are the general and day-by-day stats from the partner’s PropellerAds account:

And, the takeaways our partner made from this case study:

• Low payout offers can be successful even for Tier-1 GEOs: you just need the right offer with a simple conversion flow and target the right audience.
• Direct Click traffic does provide you with an engaged audience and this audience perfectly converts for browser extensions and Utilities.
• You don’t need to use 3rd party trackers if you don’t need to track parameters that are not included in in-house tracking. You might lose money on click loss in this case, without any use for campaign data.
• Increasing the bid is okay to beat the competitors on the same traffic slice: don’t be afraid to do this if you see the campaign is successful.
• Don’t overoptimize: it’s better to scale a nicely performing campaign that changes the settings. The PropellerAds CPA Goal algorithm will work for you to find converting zones, so there’s no need to optimize it unless it spends too much budget without success.

We think the figures speak for themselves, so our final word is to not be afraid to try something new — research, test, and win.