The Man and the traffic: green light at the end of the tunnel

Hello, dear readers! This is the editorial team speaking. Here is the sixth volume of our story about the Man who has embarked on the path of becoming a top affiliate. We are following how Oleg masters affiliate marketing and how he is trying to succeed in this difficult endeavor: his campaigns pass moderation, he is getting a return on his investment and the ROI line in the tracker is turning green. Five weeks after the launch of our experiment, the Man is about to start running his first profitable campaigns.

Don’t forget that by sharing your knowledge and experience you help the real person and change his life for the better. Together, we can help Oleg become a top affiliate — through hard work, perseverance and mistakes. If Oleg manages to accomplish it, a grown-up man with a regular job and 5 daughters, then anyone who has enough dedication, courage and work ethic will be able to do the same.

Don’t forget that you have access to Oleg’s tracker. You can monitor his progress and learn together with the Man.

A link to the tracker

Login: zorbasuser

Password: ZorbasMedia

We hope that Oleg’s experience will be useful for you and you will be able to start launching profitable campaigns and earn money in affiliate marketing. Now, let’s have a look at our hero’s results.

Oleg, we give the floor to you!

• Offers
• New spy tool
• Pre-landers
• Ad campaigns
• Results
• Strategic plan for working with push traffic for a month or two ahead
• Conclusions and plans for next week

Good time of day, dear readers! I’m not going to bore you with some wearisome long read today, I will be brief and up-to-the-point. So, I’ve managed to secure positive results.

Offers

I decided to choose offers more carefully this time. The hit-or-miss principle proved to be ineffective: until now, I’ve simply set the filter in the affiliate network to sort out the GEOs according to payouts without taking into account the type of an offer: casual or mainstream dating.

My Clickdealer manager suggested I should drive traffic to casual dating offers, as they are significantly more popular than mainstream ones (I won’t insist on it, as I don’t know whether it’s true or not for sure, so I’m just going to accept it as a given for now).

The list of offers I was recommended to work with is given below:

• (72128) [WEB+MOB] SUCCESFULDATING /AU [PUSH & DISPLAY] – CPA – $4.80
• (71759) [MOB] IGetNaughty /MY SOI 25+ – CPA – $0.60
• (68577) [MOB] FLIRTHITS /UK SOI – CPA – $2.35
• (70301) [WEB+MOB] Facebook for Hookups /US/UK/AU/NZ/CA [SOI] – CPA – $2.50
• (64279) [MOB] SPDATE – JOIN THE PARTY /US/UK/AU/CA SOI *NO POP* – CPA – $3.20

As regards pre-landers, the manager told me that affiliates take different approaches to running campaigns: some drive traffic directly to offers, while others use pre-landers. Nevertheless, the latter option is more preferable. As far as I understand, if a landing page has a registration form only, then a pre-lander is a must. In all other cases, you should carefully go through an offer’s landing page.

So, I chose the offers to work with: they’re active and accept push traffic (last time I failed to take that into account). Let’s move on.

New spy tool

On a trial basis, I decided to test a new spy service – Anstrex.

The tool allows for convenient filtering by GEO, affiliate network, tracker and push traffic source. The complete list of filter parameters is given below:

When analyzing push traffic, you can have a look at the site that users get redirected to after clicking on an ad, find out what the number of redirects is and get access to lots of other useful data:

Why I found it useful: first of all, I saw what my competitors were running, what GEOs they were driving traffic to and from what affiliate network. I’m not going to disclose this information now, although it’s easily accessible. Also, I measured the degree of competition between those who drive push traffic to dating offers. It’s not that bad. By the way, the statistics on traffic sources reveal the specifics of the moderation process in each source. By studying what campaigns are run, you can find out what gets accepted in a certain traffic source and what gets rejected.

The price for the service is $79.99 a month, which is quite affordable. If you’re starting your career as an affiliate marketer, you have to save every penny.

Pre-landers

As a matter of fact, I used this spy tool to search for pre-landers. I copied six different pre-landers: three for mainstream and three for casual dating. I didn’t bother with installing software for downloading pre-landers, I just saved them through Ctrl-S and cleaned up the code. I didn’t run into problems when adding pre-landers to the tracker, I just followed the simple step-by-step instruction. All the pre-landers I added to the tracker were in English. I didn’t translate them into Malay and just replaced the background images. The screenshots of some pre-landers are given below:

What questions arose at this step: as you can’t target a particular age group if you drive push traffic, then where should I redirect the traffic that is too young for the offer? This concerns pre-landers that have a form (where a user states their age). It would be reasonable to drive this traffic to an age-appropriate offer or to SmartLink (it can help generate at least some conversions). I would also like to get a grasp of various types of pre-landers, sort them out somehow and find out what parameters (the number of questions, images: static or animated) affect the conversion rate. If you can help me find answers to these questions, please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Ad campaigns

Initially, I planned to launch five campaigns in PropellerAds and five in MegaPush. However, it’s not that simple. Each network has its own specifics when it comes to the moderation process. Some of my campaigns didn’t pass moderation.

Nota bene: pay the utmost attention to creatives — images (big and small), title and text. Don’t forget about emoji and different languages.

Some use the creatives given below. I tried to make them even more diverse. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this article, I wasn’t able to take a screenshot with the statistics on the CTR of creatives (Propeller Ads didn’t show the statistics on creatives for some reason).

I launched a campaign in Propeller Ads and opted for half of the recommended CPC bid. For future reference, it will be reasonable to start with the lowest bid possible and increase it in the process of driving traffic (if you have some other ideas on campaign optimization, please share your thoughts).

As regards ad campaigns, I had the following plan: add all landings to the tracker (in general, from one to three landing pages for each offer), add all pre-landers, as well as drive traffic directly to the offer and identify the most well-performing combinations. Optimize the creatives at the traffic source level.

So, here are the screenshots from traffic sources:

PropellerAds

MegaPush

Results

Of all the campaigns I launched, two started generating profit: an MY campaign yesterday and a UK campaign today.

I didn’t optimize the MY campaign, and today it plunged into the red.

The statistics as of yesterday:

As regards the UK campaign, I carried out some optimization, disabled the landings and creatives with a low CTR, and the campaign turned green:

I compared the data from the tracker with the data from the network: the numbers add up. Only two conversions from the 70119 SmartLink were absent (it got activated automatically, but the conversions are not particularly impressive: 0.02 each).

Here are the statistics from the affiliate network:

Strategic plan for working with push traffic for a month or two ahead

This is how I see the overall direction of my work:

1. Traffic sources. Carefully analyze the features of each source. Wrap my head around analyzing and optimizing ad campaigns and cutting traffic costs. Work with cheap traffic (Asia and so on). It’s important to learn how to work with minimum traffic expenses.
2. Offers. Get to know how to run campaigns with various pricing models (SOI, DOI, RevShare). Ideally, test several options and several GEOs. Test SmartLink.
3. Pre-landers. Prepare and test various pre-landers. Analyze how different types of pre-landers affect the conversion rate. Learn how to distribute traffic from pages with a form where a user states their age to various offers.
4. Tracker. Learn how to optimize ad campaigns at the tracker level: the combination of a landing and an offer, GEOs, feeds and so on. I don’t have much experience in it yet.
5. Scaling up. Figure out how to scale up push campaigns.

If I have missed something or if you have your own ideas on the strategy I should follow, leave your comment in the section below.

Conclusions and plans for next week

The results I got were quite encouraging. Of course, it’s too early to talk about generating huge profits with such traffic volumes, but the very fact that some of the campaigns have climbed into positive territory makes me very happy.

Here are my plans for next week:

1. Talk to traffic source managers, analyze and take into account the features of each source: what creatives got rejected and why, when it’s better to launch a campaign and so on.
2. Talk with affiliate network managers about offers and inexpensive GEOs (NZ, CA and the UK are lucrative regions, but traffic there is rather costly; if you have a low budget, you won’t be able to drive substantial traffic volumes and won’t have much data to analyze). I’m interested in offers for Tier 2 countries.
3. Pay more attention to creatives, not only to the images but also to titles and texts taking into account the features of each GEO and traffic source, as well as the moderation procedure in push networks.
4. Prepare new landings (5-10 new pages). Analyze the conversion rate and disable landing pages that show poor results.
5. Launch ad campaigns.

The resources spent so far:

Money spent:

• ad campaigns in push networks: $229
• the Anstrex spy service: $79.99

Money earned: the account balance in the affiliate network Clickdealer (hasn’t been paid out yet): $50.

• Balance: $1741
• Time: 47 hours

Yours faithfully,

the Man