From Red to Green Numbers or the Importance of Testing [Afflift Contest]
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Dear readers, we are glad to present another head-spinning story from our Follow Along Contest! Just to remind you, if you didn’t read the previous pieces – our partners from Afflift and we arranged a contest: advertisers share their campaigns, we choose the most exciting ones, reward them, and publish the materials for you.
And today, our main hero is Abdoshaik, an affiliate marketer who worked with a Mobile content offer and then switched to a Finance offer. He has a really exciting case to share! This is the story of booms and busts, red and green numbers, smart analysis, and finally – profit. We want to present this material as educational – read how Abdoshaik managed his campaign, changed it, and found new solutions.
Let’s dive into it.
Basic offer details:
| Traffic source: PropellerAds Tracking tool: Bemob Affiliate network: Secondprofit, Golden Goose Offers: Mobile Content, Fin Survey Ad format: Popunder ads Pricing model: CPA Goal |
May 28, 2022
As Abdoshaik claims, he believed that this campaign would bring success because he has vast experience with Mobile content offers as well as PropellerAds traffic as a whole. He chose two offers, prepared two pre-landers, and submitted his campaign to Secondprofit:
The campaign was accepted, and Abdoshaik started waiting for the first results.
The beginning: insightful data for future optimization
Sometimes, when you only start a campaign, your first moves might not lead to mountains of profit, which is completely normal.
What is more, even if you don’t get profit at once, you still get information to analyze and, therefore – optimize your campaign. Where there is smart optimization, there are also higher chances of getting more money. This is exactly the story of Abdoshaik.
May 30, 2022
After two days, he got the following picture:
Yeah, everything started with red numbers – not cool. Still, there was a beam of light and it was a small but pleasant profit from ProPush Tag:
What do we see in terms of money?
- Campaign profit: -$17.36
- ProPush Profit: $8.8
- Total: -$8.56
Without ProPush, our affiliate would lose two times more money, but the Tag served as a safety bag. That is why we always recommend it for better results.
After getting the numbers that didn’t really inspire him, Abdoshaik decided to check if he can optimize his campaign a bit. The current results were enough to make some conclusions. He started with platforms:
Obviously, after seeing this, our partner made a new whitelist for the Samsung browser only to see what happens.
The same was with languages:
Language 1 was pulling the campaign down, so our partner decided to get rid of it.
Also, another important point from the very first days of the campaign: Abdoshaik noticed that the offer stopped converting, so he decided to look for another one. Fair enough!
Time to change the offer
May 31, 2022
The problem with no conversions became clear – it was actually stopped by the owner due to some unrevealed issues, so the campaign has been paused. Our partner decided to test a new offer for a new GEO (EG – Egypt), but with the same landing page. The first results were promising:
Also, take a look at the ProPush stats:
- Campaign: -$0.157
- Propush: $0.705
- Backfix: $0.312
- Total:– $0.86
These first results convinced Abdoshaik to continue and to set up more campaigns later. Let’s see how he proceeded.
…And time to change the GEO
June 2, 2022
However, EG didn’t bring the expected results, and our affiliate started thinking of changing it. After reviewing the EG stats, he realized that the landing page performed really well, so he decided to start another campaign with the same landing page, but for another GEO.
With the help of his manager, Abdoshaik found more offers to test and decided to switch to his favorite GEO – SA (Saudi Arabia).
Here are the stats for a single day:
Our partner was generally satisfied with the results – he received a “special pump” for this offer, as he says, and the payout was increased for all the conversions of the previous day.
- Cost: $46.6
- Revenue: – 35.5 + 3.5 (previous day payout increase) = $39
- ProPush: $3.148
- BackButton: $0.32
- Total: -$4.13
Also, Abdoshaik created two more landing pages for this campaign and decided to test them the next day. Being patient, he continued optimizing, experimenting, and analyzing his results to see the green numbers soon. His very first objective was to receive the information and figure out his further steps.
As Abdoshaik wrote in one of his posts on the Afflift forum: “I usually bid 90% of my offer payout, so that I can collect as much data as possible and use this data to create new WL campaigns.”
The new landing pages included appealing visuals and text that precisely described what a user will actually get. Due to confidentiality reasons, we cannot show the exact screenshots, but the point is that new landing pages changed the entire story and this was a twisting moment when the results started getting better and better.
Numbers turn greener
June 5, 2022
Behold, this day has come! Our partner finally saw the green numbers in his statistics tab:
Plus, some extra money from ProPush Tag:
- Profit: – $0.53
- ProPush: $1.9
- BackButton: $0.1
- Total: $2.53
As Abdoshaik mentioned, he had a low traffic volume and the win rate was 4% only. He decided to create a whitelist considering all the data collected before. He was convinced that further optimization will turn a losing campaign into a profitable one, which was not a mistake.
Here is the SA campaign status:
And the mobile carrier status:
Abdoshaik’s targeting included mobile carriers only, but he noticed that there was a lot of wi-fi traffic, as well. Considering that the mobile carrier 1 brought more conversions, he decided to include it into the whitelist and see the result.
June 8, 2022
This day, our partner checked the Mobile content offer stats again and saw the following numbers:
And again, ProPush helped to make the loss a bit smaller:
Also, the BackButton saved $6, so the total number was -$153.8.
As our partner claims, the instability of conversion rates for most of his tested offers was the main reason why these campaigns didn’t bring profit so far.
This day, Abdoshaik also launched a new campaign, and it was a Finance Survey offer from Zeydoo. He targeted one GEO and used two already-tested landing pages. Here are the first stats:
Hooray, they are green!
- Profit: $10.8
- ProPush: $1.23
- BackButton: $0.16
- Total: $12.2
Looks like the Finance Survey offer was a smart choice. By the way, this one is a really winning one, as we know from the Zeydoo team and their customers. One of the forum users and Abdoshaik himself also affirm that.
June 9, 2022
The next day, Abdoshaik could boast of updates, and they were pretty inspiring. The numbers were turning green like leaves in spring:
And ProPush never stopped bringing extra profit:
The overall picture became significantly better:
- Profit: $22.4
- Propush: $2.17
- BackButton: $0.5
- Total: $25.1
The same day, our partner tested five landing pages and here are the results:
After reviewing the stats, Abdoshaik decided to stop the fifth landing page and add more of them for testing. Also, he thought that testing a new GEO is also a great idea, so he added one, as well.
June 10, 2022
New day – more green!
And ProPush:
- Profit: $31.5
- Propush: $3.5
- BackButton: $0.8
- Total: $35.8
It has been 13 days since Abdoshaik started, and general statistics looked this way:
And here is ProPush:
- Profit: -$88.5
- Propush: $31.7
- Backfix: $7
- Total: -$49.8
But the next day, the campaign was stopped because of the 81% volume drop. Abdoshaik said that the warning note claimed that the reason for the drop was narrow targeting, which actually limited the traffic volume.
However, again, our partner perceived everything that was happening to his campaigns as a chance to gather data, even though they didn’t bring desired profit yet. Abdoshaik reviewed all the stats he managed to collect and realized that he could create a new whitelist campaign.
Our affiliate analyzed the performance of four landing pages to choose the most efficient ones:
Obviously, these were numbers 4 and 3, so they were added to a new whitelist campaign.
This is how OS versions performed:
Android 7.0 and 8.0 were excluded as the least relevant.
So here is the full whitelist of zones:
How do you like those CTR and CR? They are really huge! Indeed, our partner gathered all the required data for such a juicy whitelist creation, since he was testing and analyzing all the time. Now, with such a promising list, he could expect much better results for sure.
But…
The campaign was stopped for a couple of days, since the domain was flagged by Google. Still, Abdoshaik never thought about surrendering, so he changed the domain and started it all over again in five days. Still, the results were not very pleasing so far:
June 20, 2022
It was 23 days of campaign rolling, and here is what our partner had:
Plus, ProPush income:
The general spend was $487 and ROI was as low as -35%. However, due to ProPush Tag, BackButton feature, some white lists, and the right offers, Abdoshaik got much better results.
- Profit: -$174
- Propush: $51
- Backfix: $21
- Total: -$102
And the landing pages for the Survey, as well as a couple of Mobile content offers:
Now, Abdoshaik had two new campaigns. One of them was already efficient, while the second needed some optimization:
This is the positive ending note of the story! Abdoshaik is still rolling his campaigns and continues seeing more and more green in his stats. He will continue rolling the campaigns and improving them all the time. And by the way, we asked him for a small comment and here it is:
PropellerAds is one of the first traffic sources I’ve worked with since 2017.
I’ve tried many traffic sources, but what I like about PropellerAds is the constant updates on their platform. With all this development, PropellerAds is the easiest to create campaigns and the quickest to accept them.
Since the beginning of this year, I have been focusing on working with Native Ads, and I have almost stopped working with other traffic types, but when I heard about a contest from PropellerAds and Αfflift I decided to join it.
It was a very cool contest, I learned a lot from it, and I am passionate about going back to working in Pop and Push traffic. – Abdoshaik
And we are so glad to hear that, Abdoshaik! We bet your Pop and Push campaigns will be no less exciting than the case you shared.
Conclusion
Some takeaways for you:
- Testing is everything – follow Abdoshaik’s example and use all the information you get to make your campaign better. Even if you don’t see the cash raining over your head from the beginning, you still get lumps of information to analyze. With data at hand, you can improve your targeting, try new GEOs, experiment with creatives and finally boost the results.
- Use BackButton and Smart Tag for extra profit – as you can see, with the help of BackButton and ProPush, our partner could return almost half of investments. Such tools make your testing safer and reduce the risks of losing too much money in the early days.
- Exclude unprofitable targeting settings and zones (but with no hurry) – Abdoshaik did the right thing by excluding browsers and platforms that performed poorly. In his case, it was efficient. In general, sometimes it makes sense to give some settings a second chance, especially if you are thinking of excluding something as widespread as Google Chrome or Android mobile. Exclude, but don’t rush.
- Bid a sufficient percentage of your offer payout – Abdoshaik says that he usually bids 90% of the offer payout, which is a very high percentage. Still, he does this for a purpose – high bids give you a competitive advantage and accurate data for analysis and further optimization.
So, Follow Along, grasp the best practices, and earn even more! Hope to see your case study in the next contest!
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