Some random pleb's media buying journey

Finished yesterday at $284 revenue and roughly $150 profit


Sadly other people jumped on the offer I was promoting. Today it took just 5 minutes to cap it out (I was still in bed before I was able to relaunch my campaigns for it) - so I consider the offer gone unless the gods decide that I'm allowed to promote it uncapped.

I'm running a few tests on other offers right now, but nothing is converting as great as the one from friday/saturday.

One of these new offers I managed to gather 4 conversions for, all of which from the same IP-range. So I will try to whitelist this range and see if it turns profitable

Key takeaways so far:

- the most important thing is the offer you're going to promote, you can optimize everything else later - if you optimize something that doesn't convert, you're wasting resources
- don't rely on a single offer, the ride can end at any time
- #1 priority for me right now is figuring out how to find good offers a) fast b) without spending too much money

Most of my profits are already gone, trying to find the next winner. I wanna be prepared and find at least 3 offers that can work and build up from there.

Another expensive lesson.

I restarted the campaigns of yesterday's offer because the cap was gone again... I had something set up for US, the idiot I was I'd targeted the whole country without any restrictions.

It worked out yesterday because the time I ran my campaign for this GEO, most of the country was asleep. This time however it took a mere minute until the whole campaign budget was used up with shitty returns (I already was on the network minimum bid but the sheer volume was just too much).

Lesson learned, optimize before blindly resuming campaigns.

And most importantly: JUST BECAUSE IT WORKED IN THE PAST DOESN'T MEAN IT WILL WORK TODAY

Have a nice weekend lads

Keep pushing

I really shouldn't post this much but I just reached another milestone.

Payout threshold on Crakrevenue reached



At least I know some of the money spent will actually come back instead of being stuck in accounts that reached half of the min payout level.

Just had a look at my credit card statement to accumulate every expense until getting there (for those who are interested in the numbers game):

hosting -> $100 (bought a yrly package)
domains -> $30 (bought 3)
adplexity -> $147 (monthly recurring)
bemob -> $47 (monthly recurring)
push.house -> $700 (got about $20 balance left)
richads -> $350 (still got $60 balance left)

For everyone thinking about starting out, It won't be cheap!

I reckon my spendings will stack up to the $2-4k range until that first payout even arrives in my bank. Be prepared in order not to hit a wall because of cash flow.

I was prepared to spend, yet I still underestimated how much it actually takes. Top priority for me will sure be to negotiate the payout terms from net 30 down to net 15.

Cashflow is king.


*note to self* - might cut adplexity for now as I'm nowhere near as ready to enter the CPM banner game

mirrorer said:

Hard to give an answer without more info.

How did you build the list?

Do they know and trust you, if yes, then 90% value, 10% sell but high ticket courses/webinars.

I do both but with different lists.

List 1. Organic seo leads, 90% vale, 10% sell,epc ~$8
List 2. Built with paid traffic, selling traffic, only promots, epc ~$0.4

Click to expand...

I get the leads via Reddit and have a "persona".. there that posts all the time useful stuff.. they get a free book that helps them and return they have to sub to my list.

Lol wtf, got an email from my aff manager saying traffic quality isn't great and I should stop promoting this offer, suggesting to try out other offers he suggested.

I did stop my campaigns immediately, was working on setting up campaigns for other offers, then one hour later when I tried to check my dashboard I came back to this:


$1300 down the drain, no email received yet.


Any suggestions for a decent adult CPA network?

Alright, I've just set up a few nutra campaigns. Might consider to switch vertical completely tbqf.

The new offers I'm promoting are PPS - so nothing to worry about traffic quality - if it doesn't sell they don't have to pay.

It's weird that they banned you because of 1 offer ...Have you checked the zone id's ? maybe some traffic source were sending you botted leads.

I had many times issues with SOI offers but worse I got was decreased payout or asked to pause the offer.

Alright, out of fairness I have to say I did get a reply from my manager at Crakrevenue now.

He says he's also surprised, asked for source of traffic etc. and they will look into it.

I've sent him a screen recording of my push campaigns - there might be a chance I'll get my account back.

Hope dies last

xploader said:

It's weird that they banned you because of 1 offer ...Have you checked the zone id's ? maybe some traffic source were sending you botted leads.

I had many times issues with SOI offers but worse I got was decreased payout or asked to pause the offer.

Click to expand...

Yeah I found it weird too because few mins before my ban I was just asked to stop sending traffic and suggested to switch offers - which I did.

Might stay away from SOI if I get my account back, simply not worth it and if the leads didn't convert at the other side at all, it means I didn't learn shit about proper marketing in the process.

Make sure you pass the zone id's to the advertiser so they know which sources are working for them so instead of pausing the offer or ban you they will just ask to block specific zone id. You can pass it masked in bemob so the advertiser won't know from where you getting traffic.

It also helps with optimization as well

xploader said:

Make sure you pass the zone id's to the advertiser so they know which sources are working for them so instead of pausing the offer or ban you they will just ask to block specific zone id. You can pass it masked in bemob so the advertiser won't know from where you getting traffic.

It also helps with optimization as well

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice Which tag is for zone ids? are those the IP subnets (small)?

SomeRandomPleb said:

Finished yesterday at $284 revenue and roughly $150 profit
View attachment 264864

Sadly other people jumped on the offer I was promoting. Today it took just 5 minutes to cap it out (I was still in bed before I was able to relaunch my campaigns for it) - so I consider the offer gone unless the gods decide that I'm allowed to promote it uncapped.

I'm running a few tests on other offers right now, but nothing is converting as great as the one from friday/saturday.

One of these new offers I managed to gather 4 conversions for, all of which from the same IP-range. So I will try to whitelist this range and see if it turns profitable

Click to expand...

Congratulations on your journey. Everything is going well for you, Good luck with your journey.

Chatorio said:

Congratulations on your journey. Everything is going well for you, Good luck with your journey.

Click to expand...

Lmao thanks, I appreciate it.

I guess you didn't read until the latest post yet

But I'm happy to have your support!

SomeRandomPleb said:

Thanks for the advice Which tag is for zone ids? are those the IP subnets (small)?

Click to expand...

usually is {custom1} but make sure you send them masked. Google how to mask zone id's in bemob

Never send the sources without being masked to CPAnetworks because all of them have internal media buying team and can steal your traffic sources

xploader said:

usually is {custom1} but make sure you send them masked. Google how to mask zone id's in bemob

Click to expand...

Legend! Thanks

SomeRandomPleb said:

I really shouldn't post this much but I just reached another milestone.

Payout threshold on Crakrevenue reached

View attachment 264939

At least I know some of the money spent will actually come back instead of being stuck in accounts that reached half of the min payout level.

Just had a look at my credit card statement to accumulate every expense until getting there (for those who are interested in the numbers game):

hosting -> $100 (bought a yrly package)
domains -> $30 (bought 3)
adplexity -> $147 (monthly recurring)
bemob -> $47 (monthly recurring)
push.house -> $700 (got about $20 balance left)
richads -> $350 (still got $60 balance left)

For everyone thinking about starting out, It won't be cheap!

I reckon my spendings will stack up to the $2-4k range until that first payout even arrives in my bank. Be prepared in order not to hit a wall because of cash flow.

I was prepared to spend, yet I still underestimated how much it actually takes. Top priority for me will sure be to negotiate the payout terms from net 30 down to net 15.

Cashflow is king.


*note to self* - might cut adplexity for now as I'm nowhere near as ready to enter the CPM banner game

Click to expand...

Also, don't waste money on .com domains it's just waste of money, buy 1-3$ domains. And for spy tools you can get them with GB and you will spend like 15$ max a month. Or you the free ones until you have some good cash flow...like spy . house there are few more if you do some research.

And adplexity is kinda bad for push not that many ads on it...anstrex is way better in my opinion

xploader said:

Also, don't waste money on .com domains it's just waste of money, buy 1-3$ domains. And for spy tools you can get them with GB and you will spend like 15$ max a month. Or you the free ones until you have some good cash flow...like spy . house there are few more if you do some research.

And adplexity is kinda bad for push not that many ads on it...anstrex is way better in my opinion

Click to expand...

Thanks mate, you're really helping me out there.



Okay you guys might be wondering, what's next?

I drafted a little emergency plan, as yesterday's events threw a wrench into my gears.

- cancelled adplexity, trying to get my expenses down
- get my LP game up ASAP (the whole thing probably wouldn't have happened if I just used landers instead of direct linking to SOI offers)
- I'm promoting nutra right now with push ads, not sure if I'll ever get my Crakrevenue account back but I can't waste any time atm - the traffic is cheaper too for those geos
- during my off-time I'll work on promoting some stuff on CPAbuild with free traffic (this is to improve on my landing page game and learning what converts without spending shitloads) my main goal still is media buying, I will still focus most of my time on it.

Also the stakes just increased. I decided I won't be looking for a job anymore after I get sacked. It's been years since I got that feeling of "this is it! this is what I wanna do", so I made the decision to stick with it. I'll be employed with a stable income for roughly 2-3 more months, so I'll have to make it work somehow.

Key takeaways from this weekend:

- if something looks like it's too good to be true, it probably is
- don't scale like crazy with your ad budget if you're starting out (even if you think you're winning)
- be grateful you fucked up in the beginning, it might discourage you but at least you learned a damn expensive lesson early on

Small update.

Made some PPS conversions on Nutra with push ads. ROI is negative atm but I'm still working on filtering traffic and improving the creatives. It looks promising if I can get the proper optimization in place. I also started a test run with native ads for nutra - maybe they will perform.

As for CPAbuild, I'd set up a content locker. Tested with a small push campaign but quickly ditched the idea of using push traffic for those.

I will branch out to free traffic methods for CPAbuild, good opportunity to get some experience that could translate over to the paid traffic venture.

Another long term project will be creating a job portal site. I'm planning to scrape job offers from the big portals for the content, maybe it can drive organic traffic.
The idea behind this is a) getting better at webdev stuff, learning some basics about automating tasks b) if it manages to drive organic traffic, I got a good idea how to monetize job seekers with either CPA offers or clickbank products.

Either way I will stop promoting anything other than PPS offers with push traffic, simply not worth the risk to me to get banned for low quality leads again.