The Man and the Traffic. Season 2. Episode 2

Hi everyone!

It’s been a few weeks since the last issue of our experiment The Man and the Traffic. Everyone is in quarantine now and is working from home. Many people dreamt of working remotely in the safety of their homes, but it’s not as easy as it seems. You have to improve your self-organization and time-management skills to avoid all the distractions and stay productive. You also have to adapt to changing surroundings: my house is now basically a kindergarten with a home office in the center of this chaos… I’d rather return to toiling in the office as soon as possible and hope that this self-isolation regime will be lifted by the end of April. 

Today, I’m going to discuss the offers I have picked up for my affiliate marketing efforts, creatives I have made and campaigns I have launched. I drove traffic to dating and nutra offers. The results of my campaigns are discussed below.  

What I started with 

Since my manager from affiliate network Everad recommended promoting their offer in Romania, I decided to spy on campaigns launched in this GEO. For this purpose, I used AdPlexity and set up the filters according to the following parameters: 

• campaign running for more than a week
• GEO Romania
• traffic source PropellerAds 

The results were as follows: 

Then, I started looking for creatives for my dating campaigns. I picked up the Chat Girls offer from Zeydoo with the payment for the first SMS being sent by the user. After that, I turned to AdPlexity once again. 

To find out what creatives are run, go to the Push notifications section: 

The creatives reflect those verticals that are present in the Mobile section for this GEO. 

I decided to take a look at creatives run in other locations. AdPlexity covers a wide range of GEOs, and creatives that are killing it in other countries can also perform well in the GEOs I’m targeting. The creatives I have picked up are given later in the article. 

Nutra

My choice fell on the Urotrin offer from affiliate network Everad. The payouts for Romania start from ₽1050 (≈$14) per confirmed lead. It was my manager who advised me to start with this GEO.

The user flow includes the main landing:

And also the transit page:

Traffic source: push subscriptions from PropellerAds.  

I had to pay special attention to creatives because there are some restrictions for the traffic source I chose concerning the use of medical terms in ad copies. The ad copies were the same for all campaigns.  

Below, you will find the top-performing creatives: 

Campaign results: 

Desktop 

• 1434 clicks 
• money spent: $7 
• 0 leads 

Mobile devices 

• 1258 clicks 
• money spent: $12 
• 2 leads 

Conclusions 

2 leads are simply not enough to carry out a comprehensive campaign analysis. I’ll try using different creative angles and consider launching campaigns in other GEOs.  

If you disagree with my decisions or can share some valuable advice, be sure to contact me on Telegram or leave your comment in the comment section below. 

Dating 

When it comes to this vertical, I picked up the Chat Girls offer from affiliate network Zeydoo. The offer can be promoted in multiple GEOs. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like (an example for Spain). The offer itself is a chat emulator: a girl sends the first message, and if you want to respond, you have to send a paid SMS.   

I chose Spain (push traffic from PropellerAds) and Ukraine (teaser network Kadam) for my test campaigns.  

Spain 

I used different creatives, both in English and Spanish, that featured an image and a text and looked similar to Instagram notifications. 

Test results: 

• 6128 clicks 
• 53 leads 
• money spent: $54 
• ROI: -60% 

Conclusions 

I don’t think my offer will be profitable in this GEO. I analyzed different traffic segments by city, IP, time slots, and so on, but ROI accounted for -50-60% across all the groups. So, I’m going to explore other locations. 

Ukraine 

For this GEO, I bought traffic from teaser network Kadam. I made five teaser ads, some of them were static, while some — dynamic. 

I had basic messages for this kind of offers with cute girls invinting for a chat and so I introduced minor changes and launched a variety of different yet similar campaigns.

Elena, 23 y.o., wanna chat?
Elena and Mary, wanna chat?
AnnSwing, wanna chat?
Ann_Love, wanna chat?

Test results:

• 1239 clicks 
• 0 leads 
• money spent: $17 

Mentors’ advice 

Alexander Shovkun 

Senior Account Strategist, PropellerAds 

Congratulations on your first campaigns!  

I strongly recommend you put promoting nutra offers on hold for a while. This is a very difficult niche to start with for beginners. Besides, a lot of call centers are closed now due to the pandemic, and delivery issues are also common nowadays. So, my advice is to focus on dating. Online dating services have always been popular and continue to flourish in the era of self-isolation. 

Now, I would like to highlight a few mistakes you made in your dating campaigns. 

3G targeting. I noticed that you didn’t set up 3G targeting in your campaigns, and 3G traffic performs very well with the Girls Chats offer. The results would have been completely different if you had set up 3G targeting, I’m sure of that. 

Creatives. The average CTR for this GEO/vertical is ~3.50%, but your KPIs were significantly lower. Consider testing different creative angles and changing both images and ad copies. Now we see the same copy in all the four ads. The same user can receive your push notification twice, and it is unlikely that they will convert if they were not impressed by your creative the first time. 

Also, only two of your creatives out of four were put to work, which is not enough for optimization. 

Conclusion: you have to make a lot of different creatives. After you determine the top-performing creatives, switch to CPM to get more clicks at a lower price. 

Language. If you make creatives in different languages, be sure to set up targeting by browser language. For example, push notification in English is unlikely to get a Spaniard interested. 

User activity targeting. Try targeting users based on different activity levels and don’t focus exclusively on the high activity cohort. This is especially important when it comes to the first test campaigns and can help you reduce the costs because the prices are usually lower for the medium and low activity cohorts and they sometimes convert better than high activity users. 

Good luck! 

Anastasia Loseva 

Head of Sales, Zeydoo 

We appreciate that you chose a Zeydoo offer for your first test.

Since Girls Chats accepts both 3G and Wi-Fi traffic, I would recommend launching two different campaigns in one location to compare the results. 3G traffic is more targeted and at the same time more expensive. 

Wi-Fi traffic comes in larger volumes and is cheaper. 

I can also recommend you add a private 475 Ugetlaid offer to a split test. The payout accounts for $2.176 and the offer is for Tier 1 English-speaking GEOs. By the way, it performs very well with push traffic from PropellerAds. The conversion type is SOI Registration (and not click2sms), but the payouts are higher, and so it will be easier to climb into the green. 

The average CTR for dating creatives is 6-8%, so you should focus on improving your images and ad copy. Use all the functions the ad platform has to offer, try adding up to 8 different creatives to your campaigns: 4 creatives displaying a logo and an ad copy, 4 creatives with a logo, ad copy, and a large banner. This will allow you to find out what performs the best. As for creatives and ad copy, we are always willing to lend a helping hand. 

As for the Girls Chats offer, I recommend testing out different locations, not only Spain. It makes sense to focus on less expensive GEOs and try to generate a profit there. Then, you can start adding other locations that are more expensive traffic-wise. At Zeydoo, we constantly update our tips on the top-performing countries for each particular offer. So, if you can’t pick-up an offer or GEO that converts, reach out to the support team or your manager for detailed information on each offer. 

Conclusions 

What I am going to do is launch more test campaigns in other GEOs such as RU and KZ. I will also need to make lots of creatives and run numerous split tests.