Campaign optimization

Every time you launch a new campaign to test if an offer has the potential to be optimized or not, there are a few things you can expect from it:

• Most probably, your campaign won’t be profitable from day one
• In many cases, your campaign won’t have conversions
• Sometimes you won’t be able to spend as much as you thought
• And sometimes, you will spend all of your daily budgets in just a few minutes

This is normal and you shouldn’t freak out if one or more of those situations arise. You need to understand that campaigns need to be optimized to make money, and while sometimes they can be profitable right off the bat, it’s not something common.

The important thing so far is that you’re tracking everything correctly and you can use that data to make decisions and start working towards profit.

For pop traffic, there are several factors you can optimize to cut losses. Assuming your campaigns are focused on just one country and one device type as I recommended, you still have:

• Websites (called zones at PropellerAds or SiteIDs at PopAds)
• OS and OS version
• Browser and Browser version
• Landing pages
• Offers
• Connection type
• Categories
• And a few other smaller variables

And you can do this by going back to your campaign settings and just block or disable anything you want from your targeting filters.

Here’s a conservative approach I follow to optimize new campaigns. Keep in mind there is no 100% correct way to do this and each affiliate develops a system to optimize campaigns with their own experience, but this will help you as a base to get started.

• Block any websites (zones or website IDs) that spend more than 1x your offer payout without conversions
• Block any OS version that spends more than 5x your offer payout without conversions
• Block any browser version that spends more than 5x your offer payout without conversions
• Block any OS that spends more than 10x your offer payout without conversions
• Block any Browser that spends more than 10x your offer payout without conversions
• Block any landing page or offer that spends more than 10x its payout without conversions
• Block any categories, connection types that spend 10x your offer payout without conversions

As you can see, big variables such as OS or offers are left to spend at least 10x the offer payout, while smaller variables such as browser version are left to spend 5x the offer payout.

If your offer pays $1 per conversion, you will end up blocking the big variables such as browser, OS, categories, etc. after $5 or $10 spent.

Finally, the variable you will spend most of the time on while optimizing is the website you’re receiving traffic from. You need to aggressively cut out all websites not converting after 1x the payout, and since you’re going to receive traffic from hundreds or thousands of websites, you need to repeat this process constantly.

In the beginning, I recommend optimizing your websites once per day. Other variables may take more days (e.g. 3 or 5 days) until they spend the amount needed to make decisions.

Some trackers, such as Voluum, offer APIs to connect to the traffic source and do this automatically for you. If you have the budget for that, go ahead and use that feature if you’re seeing conversions or have a ton of campaigns to optimize. If you’re using Voluum, this feature is called “Automizer”.

However, in the beginning, I recommend doing this a few times yourself manually, as it’s the best way to learn how everything works.

As I said before, every affiliate has its own way to do optimization, but the websites are always the most important (and constant) variable to optimize because the rest of the variables don’t have hundreds or thousands of options to deal with.

Some affiliates with very tight budgets might take a more conservative approach, while affiliates with deep pockets might wait longer until they pause or block any variable. You will eventually develop your style, but for now, use this framework to understand how everything works and see how numbers improve over time.

In the beginning, your goal is to aim for campaigns that show conversions and the potential to be optimized. If you find a campaign with over -50% ROI, keep running it because you might have a profitable campaign after a few days of working on it.

Campaigns with lower initial ROI (e.g. -80%) are very difficult to optimize to profit, but not impossible. However, most of the time is just better to focus on different offers with better initial results than it is to focus on bad performing campaigns at -90% ROI.

Before moving to the next section, I want to mention that it is very normal to find a ton of campaigns performing below -50% ROI initially, so don’t get frustrated if your first 5 or 10 campaigns show ad results and can’t be optimized. This is a numbers game.

Also, the optimization process is an ongoing system that never stops. No matter if your campaign has been running for days, weeks, or months, you will need to keep optimizing the campaign every few days to keep the numbers healthy.

Once you have optimized some major variables such as OS, categories, or Browser, you won’t need to focus much on those again, but in terms of websites/zones, you might need to spend a few minutes every few days to block new websites that are being added to the network even if your campaign has been profitable for a while. This is called campaign maintenance.

Of course, if you use an automation tool such as the Automizer, you won’t need to spend time blocking websites down the road. You might still need to do the initial work with every campaign though.

You also need to keep testing variables under your control, such as new offers or new landing pages to see if you can maximize your profits at some point. That said, let’s see how to create a push notification campaign.