[Case Study] Propellerads advertising for CPA offers

I know it’s titled case study, but it feels more suited to journeys forum.

Thread moved.
 
[Update]

Propellerads approves my CPA bid campaign after one conversion. Piror to conversion, I was getting around 10k+ visitors to my landing page before conversion happens. Which means a conversion rate of less than 0.01%. Hmm... does not look impressive to me but I cannot complain much since I am on CPA bidding mode which means I would only pay for conversion after this approval of campaign.

For the test campaign my test budget of $250 was eaten up in less than 4 hours. This shows me that the so call premium zone that propellerads sales team was boasting about carries a very high CPM cost. If I were to based upon this type of high CPM cost, I will not be profitable at all.

Nevertheless I left my CPA bidding campaign running over the weekend. And much to my horror, I only receive 7 visitors on average each day. Needless to say, there is zero conversion. Current bid price that I have set is about 90% of my potential CPA earning. I have change it to 95% now to see if traffic volume improves.

It seems to me that the whole pay only for conversion is only a marketing gimmick and works only if you have products that offer very high earnings. This is just my personal opinion and not a fact.

I tried to speak to Propellerads about this situation and if they can help me improve the performance of my campaign. However according to their support staff, they are down sizing their personal account manager team to focus on self serve by advertiser.

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For the second campaign that I ran using data collected from the above campaign, I was able to focus on those so call premium zones and bid using smartCPM. While running the campaign I remove zones that are not showing clicks for every 100 visitors. Basically I assume that the audience are not interested in my offer for these zones.

My initial click through rate was around 5% but was improved to 33% after constant removing of zones that are not showing clicks.

Spent around $60 for this purpose and receive zero conversion. Received a total of around 40,000 visitors.

On the part of retargeting cookies placed, this portion is a bit strange to me. With so many visitors, propellerads show me that I have only successfully placed 3,680 cookies. I shall monitor further on this, current sample size is too small to run an individual campaign upon.

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My action plan, I intend to start a third campaign for testing purpose and focus on the single zone that gave me that one and only conversion. Let us see if profitability can improve.

Based upon Bemob sixth sense recommendation, I will also incorporate further filters.

Current ROI:
Initial investment - $500
Spending - ($280)
Balance: $220
Loss of $280...
 
Great thread OP. What type of advertising do you use with propellerads ? Native ads ? Mobile web? ...
 
Great thread OP. What type of advertising do you use with propellerads ? Native ads ? Mobile web? ...

I am using POP. For CPA and smartCPM, only pop traffics are available for these two bidding mode. For native ads, I prefer MGID, they do offer popup box advertising nowadays similar to propellerads.
 
I am using POP. For CPA and smartCPM, only pop traffics are available for these two bidding mode. For native ads, I prefer MGID, they do offer popup box advertising nowadays similar to propellerads.
Hello friend, I recommend you use pop traffic to win through CPM, since you do not need conversions to generate money, this is what I have been doing since last year and I am doing very well
 
Hello friend, I recommend you use pop traffic to win through CPM, since you do not need conversions to generate money, this is what I have been doing since last year and I am doing very well

I am promoting cpa offer here so conversion do matters to me. I am an advertiser and not publisher.
 
Here is the problem with CPA mode. If you do find a good campaign you will get lots of traffic the first day or couple of days. Then their in house team will steal your campaign and you will see clicks dry up to nothing.
 
The only way CPA can work good is if you have an offer they can’t get. But they work with most offer owners already. Or if you have a deal with your affiliate network on a direct offer that you get a bigger bump on payout to beat them.
 
Here is the problem with CPA mode. If you do find a good campaign you will get lots of traffic the first day or couple of days. Then their in house team will steal your campaign and you will see clicks dry up to nothing.

This ist true. This game is rigged. However if you don't direct link but instead send the traffic first to your landing page and then to the cpa offer then they won't know where your original traffic is coming from.
 
This is true. This game is rigged. However if you don't direct link but instead send the traffic first to your landing page and then to the cpa offer then they won't know where your original traffic is coming from.


They will steal your landing page too. Once you find a good campaign they will investigate. There internal team runs reports on EPC and copies the top ones. So if you want to make a low amount sure you could slide under there radar. But as soon as you scale they will steal it and even though the campaign was doing great you will be left scratching your head as to why traffic dried up.

YoungArt I’m talking about the traffic source propeller ads stealing the campaign not the affiliate network.
 
To win with propeller ads you should use black hat techniques like manipulating there API and under bidding there recommended bid by a lot to pick up reminent traffic or cloaking your lander and running something really aggressive.

If you try to play fair you might as well just burn your money.
 
To win with propeller ads you should use black hat techniques like manipulating there API and under bidding there recommended bid by a lot to pick up reminent traffic or cloaking your lander and running something really aggressive.

If you try to play fair you might as well just burn your money.

Seems like a shady network to work with...
 
More Updates:

I have finished spending $500 test budget with only one conversion.

Total loss of $460 excluding cost of tracker, hosting,etc.

One point of observation, POP traffic is not suitable for newbie since you are spamming to people who might or might not be interested in your offering. And who knows how these traffic arrive at the publisher sites too.

Based upon my setup, I should at least be able to identify people who are interested in my offering. However this is far from the truth. I managed to get 30%-60% CTR on some zone ID but this only resulted in one conversion. My retargeting cookies placing were not that successful as well. Out of 10k traffic, I only managed to drop around 800-900 cookies. My thought on this is that people are closing the pop up too fast for the cookies to even be dropped and I am actually being charged by propellerads for unviewed pop up. As long as there is a pop, I will be charged regardless if visitors actually see any ads.

In conclusion, my test ends up with a big FAIL.

I will not advise anyone to jump into pop traffic advertising unless you are very sure or have past history of success.

I will be closing this case study and moving on to another case with MGID. I shall leave this thread open for any potential questions that you might have and try my best to answer them in my free time.

With MGID, things are a bit interesting as I will be using their account manager service to manage the campaign. I have set aside a test budget of $2k. So do keep a lookout for this thread when it is out.
 
POP traffic is not suitable for newbie since you are spamming to people who might or might not be interested in your offering.

Seems like email marketing with bought lists is more interesting :D

Nice case study btw, too bad it failed. Looking forward to your next one with MGID
 
Is there any good reason for using propellerads traffic?
 
Don't burn money on propeller. Poorest traffic I have ever seen.. on some source you will get 10 conversation in 1000 traffic and in propeller - 100000 and no conversion. Stay away..
 
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