Follow-Along Contest Winner: $300 a Day Achieved ✅
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The biggest ever Follow-Along contest is now behind us, and we are full of impressions. My oh my, what a journey it was for some of our participants, especially for the follow-along contest winner.
In the next few weeks, we will share the very best success stories and entertaining cases you can learn from, all from the competition PropellerAds organized hand in hand with the affLIFT forum. So be ready for case study rain, and follow our blog for updates.
Today’s case will showcase all the ups and downs of an affiliate who actually won the whole thing, and got rewarded for his efforts (we will say, quite generously, given our prize pool was out of this world).
Case background info
| Traffic Source: | PropellerAds |
| Tracking Tool: | Clickflare |
| Type of Offer: | Surveys / MVAS |
| Affiliate Networks: | Zeydoo |
| Ad formats: | Popunder, Survey Exit, Direct Click |
| Bidding models: | CPA Goal, SmartCPM |
| Additional monetization: | ProPush.me |
The Follow-Along contest was the perfect opportunity for our affiliate to experiment with some new types of campaigns that he doesn’t usually endeavor into. So he started with Zeydoo Survey offers and ran them on Pop traffic. He tested the offers in a new GEO but with a proven landing page he used earlier in a similar GEO.
The affiliate entered the contest with a single goal – to make $50 profits a day. However, his expectations were overpassed, and he ended up hitting $300 a day at the end of the month.
Here’s how he got to that point →
September 6-15: Testing, testing, testing
On the very first day, the results were discouraging. He was gaining a very small portion of the traffic.
He tested a bunch of GEOs, and most of them were in the -40 to -60% ROI range. The follow-along contest winner also tested a few landings in this campaign, but they performed worse than the original one.
At the end of this period, his profits were still in red and the ROI was -12%:
BUT, he did notice how two of his campaigns were inching towards profitability with each passing day, as the CPA Goal algorithm did its magic and optimized them automatically. On another note, he incorporated ProPush.me Smart tag on his landing pages and generated some profit:
September 18-21: Breaking point
On the 18th of September, the affiliate was about to end his contest journey as he ran out of funds.
“To be honest, I felt like quitting this thing altogether on this day. But I composed myself in the next few days and decided to keep trying.”
He got a lot of support and advice from his followers. So he regrouped and entered the round #2.
He started testing a new offer that seemed to have some potential, and he relied on the SmartCPM bidding model. The initial move was to try it on CPA Goal, but he couldn’t get much volume there because of the low CPA, as he explained. And he was running a single landing page on it without using the tracker.
The first one above was a regular SmartCPM campaign with an average suggested bid, and the second one in the upper table had automatic bidding enabled. Now, the plan for the next period was for him to try and improve the ROI and bring it to profit with some blacklisting and bid adjustments.
He was also about to test a few more offers and see how it goes.
September 22-23: Lights turned green
This is when things finally turned around and when the affiliate’s efforts began to pay off. The follow-along contest winner started a brand new campaign on the 22nd, and here’s what happened:
“A new campaign that I launched popped off almost immediately, and we had our first $100 profit day!”
According to him, if a campaign gets profitable right off the start without any optimization, that’s the sign of a killer campaign.
“When you launch a campaign like this one, that’s where you recoup all your losses and actually go in the green zone pretty fast!”
And things just kept getting better and better. The next day he had $149 in profits – $125 from his campaign, and an extra $24 from ProPush.me tag he placed on his landing pages.
At this point, he wanted to test more campaigns because he didn’t want to rely on just one. So he decided to give it a go with Survey Exit – Propeller’s latest ad format, and Direct Click.
He took two campaigns that were promising at the earlier stage (we mentioned them at the very beginning), duplicated them, and ran them on these formats. And the results were pretty good.
| SURVEY EXIT | |||
| Revenue | Profit | ROI | |
| Campaign #1 | $2.080 | $0.813 | 64.17% |
| Campaign #2 | $4.080 | $0.926 | 29.34% |
| $6.16 | $1.739 |
| DIRECT CLICK | ||||||
| Cost | Bidding model | Win rate | Revenue | Profit | ROI | |
| Campaign #1 | $38.865 | CPA Goal | 3% | $41.470 | $2.605 | 6.70% |
| Campaign #2 | $17.416 | CPA Goal | 2% | $14.960 | -$2.456 | -14.10% |
| $56.281 | $56.430 | $0.149 | 0.26% |
“Definitely more volume on Direct Click. Maybe I should test some higher payout offers on this format, once I fix my cash flow problem”
September 24-28: Unfortunately, time out
During these days, the follow-along contest winner ran out of funds and was not able to continue with the campaigns. But ProPush.me kept him on the surface by generating a few dollars each day.
September 29-30: Jackpot
When the 29th of September came, our affiliate made a record profit – $191. The next day was even better, with $307. And he was over the moon about it.
Note: The table above presents his campaign earnings on the 30th. He had additional profits from ProPush.me.
Everything was green at this point – his best performing campaign he launched on the 22nd, as well as the campaigns he was running on Survey Exit and Direct Click.
Follow-Along Contest Winner’s Thoughts
It was a rocky road for this affiliate. We are certain someone else would give up at some point after all those days seeing nothing but red in his profit charts. But he kept pushing through, believing in success.
“CPA marketing is not a set-and-forget model. You have to continually keep testing new offers. And it’s hard to keep going when you keep on seeing all that red, but once you find a few killer campaigns – they can get you profits consistently for months.”
The thing is to find what works and then scale it to the moon.
On that note, even after the competition was over, he continued updating us on his results. On the 4th of October, his profits skyrocketed and landed on $816 in total.
We applaud our contestant. Well done, Sir!
And here’s what we have learned from this case:
- Don’t hurry up to stop your affiliate campaigns – sometimes they need time to show their full potential
- CPA Goal needs time to get data for efficient optimization
- Don’t stop testing new offers – you never know when you can hit that killer campaign
- You should try out Survey Exit – whether as a test for your offer or for scaling
- Using tools like ProPush.me is a perfect move to save some money spent on testing
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