The Summary and Thinking of A 3 Years Old Campaign

Last year, we wrote a post “The Summary and Thinking of A 2 Years Old Campaign” (click here to visit), although the title is similar to this one, the content is slightly different.
Firstly, the GEO is different, one is a single country, the other one is global; secondly, the whitelist size is different, one has only 1 whitelist, the other one has almost 2000 whitelists; lastly, the stability is different, one is slightly worse, the other one is slightly better.

Both of them are small campaigns with very little profit, so don’t laugh at them, let’s get to the point.

This is a small campaign that has been running for more than 3 years, said it is small because: the average daily traffic is less than 3,000, the average daily cost is less than $1, the average daily profit is less than 1 USD, the bid given is not high. The good thing is that the maintenance cost is low, basically in fully automatic operation, and has profit, so let it keep running.

1. Overview
Offer: Smartlink (Push Subscription Collection enabled)
Payout: Dynamic
Affiliate network: Monetizer
Traffic Source: PopAds
GEO: World Wide (T3 based)
Revenue: $846.79
Spend: $409.48
Profit: $437.31
ROI: 106.80%
Date Range: 2020.9-2023.9 (still running)
Tracker: None (traffic goes straight from PopAds into Monetizer)
Lander: None (promote direct link smartlink)
AOH: PopAdsHelper

2. Stages of the Campaign
1). Origin stage
This campaign is a whitelist campaign that originated from a blacklist campaign that ran for over 2 years and cost over $1000. The two campaigns were a black and white campaign pair. The blacklist campaign had a negative ROI in the initial stage and turned profitable after optimization. However, as the running time gets longer and longer, more and more sites were blacklisted, and eventually reached the limitation of PopAds’ black and white list capacity (2500), so it was impossible to continue to add blacklist, resulting in a worse and worse ROI, and then losses, so the blacklist campaign was stopped.

2). Initial stage
Because the whitelist is extracted from the whitelist database and blacklist campaigns, the whitelist campaign performed well after being added to the whitelist, and it was profitable at first.

3). Optimization stage
Optimization starts when the campaign is launched and is performed using PopAdsHelper. The main operation is on the website, and it doesn’t stop for a moment. Constantly extracting websites with good ROI performance from the blacklist campaign, and at the same time moving the poorly performing websites out of the whitelist in this campaign. This ensures the ROI and profit of the campaign.

4). Maintenance stage
Because the ROI is still OK, and the profit is enough to cover the cost of the test, so in addition to adjusting the bid once, the other basically did not make adjustments.PopAdsHelper enables the automatic addition of the budget, as long as there is enough balance in the account, you can automatically add a small amount of additional on-demand, eliminating the need to manually add the budget, but also reduce the backlog of funds.
Now campaign is in this stage.

5). Decline stage
Has not yet reached this stage.

3.Data
1). Overall data

The first part of the traffic source end data, the middle is the coalition end data (omit some fields), the last part of the overall data.
As you can see, fluctuations are the norm, the flow has fluctuations, the offer also has fluctuations (reflected through the conversions). Conversions number has more or less, ROI has high or low, pull through to see more meaningful.

2).The best month
November 2021:

Traffic prices were not very high and ROI reached 200%, which is initially inferred to be the reason by the good offers.

3). The worst month
August 2022:

Because traffic became very low, then tried to get more traffic by raising bid. After raising the bid (cpm=0.1 USD before, cpm=0.2 USD after), there was a significant increase in traffic, but the CR didn’t increase with it, and even went backwards, resulting in a loss. Offers do not work is the main reason for this month’s performance is not good, if the offers are strong, after raising the bid, gets more traffic, conversions should also become a little better, however, the actual did not. The traffic is expensive, plus the offers pull across, double blow, so the overall performance will not come up.

4). The month with the most traffic
September 2020:
New campaign, lots of initial whitelist, naturally high traffic.

5). The month with the least amount of traffic
June 2022:

Running too long, excluding a large number of websites. There is also the bid is not very high, then there are website owners leave PopAds, all of these lead to the reason for the traffic to become less. Raise bid is imperative.

6). The month of bid raise
August 2022

As shown in the above figure, after raising the bid, the traffic obviously became more. Higher bid is really a tool to grab the volume.

7). Offer

Because it is smartlink, so the offer is not fixed, there will be changes. This also shows that the ROI has gotten worse, mostly because of the offers, as the whitelist site traffic quality for this campaign is relatively stable.

8). Bid
At the very beginning of the campaign is out of the lowest bid, in the 0.1 USD, bidding mode is intelligent bidding. Because the campaign later did not have enough volume, in order to get more traffic, raised the bid to 0.2 USD. After raising the bid, the ROI was reduced, but after AOH’s continuous optimization and pulling black of poorly performing websites, the overall ROI slowly improved.
If the campaign does not get enough traffic, we will continue to raise the bid to get more traffic to keep the campaign running until it reaches T2 and T1 countries. This process will continue for a long time.

9). Quantities of Whitelists
We added about 2000 whitelists, and after adding and removing them, there are 1500 whitelists left (some of them have 0 traffic), 1500 active whitelists (some of them have been blacked due to the poor ROI), and about 1000 active whitelists with traffic.

10). Website data

The above chart is part of the time, part of the website data, you can see that there are good and bad, the overall quality of the whitelist is still good.

4. Summarize
1). Whitelist is powerful
Whitelist is whitelist, is verified, the probability of being able to profit. Although is under current lp and offer, but it is OK. Therefore, it is necessary to establish black and white campaign pairs and constantly collect and replenish whitelists.

2). Don’t care about the gain or loss of one city or one pool
Although the campaign touched 2000+ websites, it didn’t focus on a single website. The initial whitelist is generated by PopAdsHelper in the blacklist campaign according to the setted rules, and then extracted by PopAdsHelper in the whitelist campaign, and finally according to the setted rules, ROI meets the expectations left, ROI can not be moved out of the whitelist, to get the final whitelist.
During the 3 years of running the campaign, websites come in and out, although not so fine, there will be a misjudgment, but it greatly saves time and energy.

3). The depth of traffic utilization
In figure 1, it can be clearly seen that the ROI of the source end of the traffic is only 20%, while the overall ROI of the back is 100%, with a difference of 80%. Excluding miscommunication, duplication and missed passes, the difference should be 50%. This 50% basically comes from the Push Subscription Collection and the subsequent conversion, which belongs to the deep utilization part of the traffic. So, the multiple and deep utilization of traffic is a very good open source measure, even if it can improve the ROI by 20% is excellent.

5. Thinking
1). Refinement or sloppy?
Refinement of the operation of each traffic slice can be valued, ROI can be higher, but need to invest more energy. Loose style may ignore the potential of some traffic slices, and even misjudged some website, but the energy invested will be less, plus the standard is more uniform, more conducive to the amount of store. Although the ROI will be worse, if the volume comes up, the overall profit style can also erase the defects of the lack of ROI.
So, which model is better? Choose the better one.

2). Independent offer or SmartLink?
Independent offer Payout is high, but need to spend more energy, such as application, make LP, make banner, launch campaign, keep an eye on it, etc. Smartlink is more trouble-free, that is, low payout, not fixed. If there is a good offer then promote the independent offer, the remaining traffic can be directed to the smartlink, slightly increase ROI.

3). Test costs
Too high, if the offer does not work or the quality of traffic is too poor, it will waste a lot of budget. If is too low, it will kill a lot of websites that can actually perform well. In this campaign and most other campaigns, AOH sets the test budget for each website as 0.4 times of the payout, or the same value of the display impressions.
The total test cost for each campaign is anywhere from 10x payout to 20x payout.

4). Click loss
Click loss is not an absolute standard to judge whether a website is a brush or not. There are a lot of click loss of 30%-40%, ROI performance is still good, and some click loss of 10%-20% of the website’s ROI is still -100%. So, in the case of click loss is not too outrageous, just look at the ROI, keep if can make a profit, cann’t then black it.

5). Automation rules

Automation rules are not set in stone, according to historical experience and the current data obtained to set an initial rule, run out of a certain amount of data, and then according to the performance of the ROI appropriately relax or tighten the standard. Everything depends on ROI!

The above are some summaries and thinking on this campaign, aiming to throw a brick to attract jade, the inadequacy and errors please criticize and correct!

PS: The data and conclusions are for a specific period of time and under the circumstances of the campaign data and conclusions, does not represent the general situation, for reference only.