Optimization 101: How to Build a Profitable Mobile Pops Campaign

Introduction

Hello, my fellow affiliates!

Once again, I have the privilege of sharing a few tips and advice with you.

I believe this advice will help you build more profitable campaigns (or your first one!)

Today, I want to explore a crucial part of building a profitable mobile pops campaign.

What is that, you ask?

Optimization.

And yes, you heard me right.

Most of the time, profitable campaigns have to be BUILT!

There are times where you’ll randomly stumble upon a good campaign on AdPlexity.

Then, when you set it up on PopAds, you’ll find that you’re instantly profiting.

Learn More: PopAds: The Complete Guide

But guess what?

You can’t get a steady income based on random luck.

Ready for my optimization master class?

Let’s start!

You Need an Optimization Process

All successful businesses have a process.

This allows them to follow specific steps that have already been proven to work.

Intelligent people are then able to follow those specific steps in a regular way and drive predictable results.

Your affiliate business is no different.

You need an optimization process to build profitable campaigns.

This will allow you to consistently test and find those winning campaigns.

At one point, I was thinking exactly what you’re thinking right now:

“How do I create a process when I don’t even know how to optimize a campaign?”

We have all faced this challenge.

Fear not, though!

I’m going to help you get started and understand the most important points.

First, Write It Down

One tip I can share is that – when you’re just starting out – you should go ahead and write down a basic process that you intend to follow.

Launch some campaigns.

Follow a simple step 1, step 2, etc.

Then, what?

Adjust your method as you manage to get more experience.

Document your results, what you’ve tested, how they performed, and your overall approach.

This process will help you learn from your mistakes or any new insights you discover along the way.

This is more important than you realize.

Focus on the 80/20 Principle

There are many different elements that can be optimized within a campaign but there are a few that have the biggest impacts.

These are the spots you want to explore first.

You don’t wanna start with those optimization tasks that have little potential impact.

By focusing on the most influential items, you’ll be able to quickly understand whether or not a campaign has the potential to be a winner.

The Most Influential Factors to Optimize

Where exactly should you focus your efforts?

There are several main parts!

Great Offer

A great converting offer is the primary foundation and a key piece of the puzzle.

The better the offer you can find, the easier it’ll be for you to actually build a profitable campaign.

If the offer is mediocre, it may be able to work but it’ll be more of a challenge to get profitable.

It’s VITAL to test many offers that are similar from several different affiliate networks until you find a good fit for your campaign, and continue testing any new offers that come out.

Traffic Source & Countries

Your traffic source and the countries you’re testing are super relevant.

Why is this part so important?

Because your affiliate manager at Mobidea may recommend a good offer to you but when you set it up and test it on Traffic Source A, you lose money and it doesn’t convert well, so you decide to quit and move on.

WRONG!

You should test on a different traffic source before calling it quits.

Here’s a tip:

In some cases, you’ll find that a traffic source offers a few different delivery methods for mobile pop traffic.

The most common being popunder traffic, which typically has the most traffic volume.

This delivery method will generate a new browser tab underneath the website the user is currently visiting.

The other method is popup traffic.

Even though it’s less common, it can showcase very good conversion rates.

The difference with this method of delivery is that your landing page is served on top of the website the user is visiting.

Meaning?

Your landing page shows up first!

It can be a good idea to consider testing all delivery methods if your traffic source supports them.

Marketing Creatives

Your marketing creatives are fundamental, indeed.

While finding the best-converting offer with a traffic source and country that works well together are the biggest factors, your landing pages can sometimes be the reason why you’re unable to find a winning campaign.

It’s important to test many different landing pages that are unique in design in order to find one that works for you.

As a side note, you need to ensure that your landing page is loading quickly by not having any code issues.

More?

Be sure to use a good CDN or server to host the files.

Related: 5 Best Web Hosting Services for Affiliate Marketers

Another side note to consider:

Things seem to move in waves when dealing with pop traffic.

At times, Traffic Source A is doing well for sweepstakes in Australia but if you start testing it after the offer has been out for a while, you may find it hard to see good results.

This could mean that the offers are not performing as well as they once were, or that competition has increased the cost of traffic to a point where it’s more difficult to make a profit, or some other factor.

In case you switch gears from the sweepstakes vertical to a different vertical for that traffic source and country, you may be able to make it work.

Or you may just need to switch countries altogether.

At the end of the day, you need to understand this concept:

A great Offer + the right Traffic + the right Country + a good Landing Page = Winning Campaign

The Beginner’s Strategy

To help illustrate a process that you can relate to and put into action right away, I’m going to share some key tips.

Tools You Need to Use

Tracker

A proper tracker like Voluum, FunnelFlux or the built-in tracker on Mobidea.

Statistical Significance Tools

Peak Conversion

A/B Testing

Collect Data in Order to Optimize

Spending an adequate amount of money on your test campaigns is important.

Why?

Because you want all the variables within a campaign to have a reasonable chance of performing well.

I like to follow a simple formula along these lines in order to start collecting data.

Once this budget has been completed on the first test, I will use the collected data to determine if the campaign is worth continuing the testing phase.

Initial Test Budget to Collect Data

(Number of Offers) x (Number of Landers) x (Average Offer Payout) x 10 = Test Budget

Of course, this is a basic formula.

It can vary.

Even so, this is a good rule of thumb to follow.

Reaching Statistical Significance

Remember the two tools I listed above?

Both your offer testing and landing page testing need to use those tools.

During your optimization process, you should focus on collecting enough data to reach a profitability level of 90% or greater in order to find your best-performing items.

Peak Conversion is great for comparing offers that have the same payout or landing pages.

If each of the offers you’re testing have a different payout, it’s best to use the other A/B Testing Tool I provided a link to.

Start With Finding the Best Offer

When starting out, I like to test 3-8 offers at a time.

Just bear in mind that – the more offers you test – the more you’ll need to spend on the testing budget.

After you’ve sent a reasonable amount of traffic to your campaign, following the testing budget I outlined above, you should now begin to take a look at the performance of your offers.

What you are primarily looking for is one or more offers that are converting.

In some cases, you may see an offer converting very well right off the bat.

If none of your offers is converting, then you may want to consider moving on to a new campaign or consider testing on a different traffic source.

Moving along, you’d go ahead and plug the offer results into the statistical significance tool and compare two offers at a time.

Take the winner of those two and compare it with the next offer.

Then, repeat the process until you’ve gone through all your offers.

For each offer that reaches 10% or below in profitability, remove it from your testing campaign.

Why?

Because this offer isn’t performing well enough.

Otherwise, keep all other offers and continue running more traffic.

Check and compare the results periodically until you have narrowed it down to the best one or two offers.

Then, proceed to the next step.

Find the Best Landing Page

At this point, you have identified one or two really good offers.

It’s time to move on to the landing page phase of the optimization.

Initially, your focus should be on the offers.

I suggest not starting your test campaigns with more than 2-3 landing pages.

The same note I mentioned above will apply here:

The more offers and landings you’re testing at one time, the bigger testing budget you’ll need.

I like to focus on more offers at the beginning.

I find whatever offer is working best – even if the ROI is still negative at the end of testing.

Then, I move on to landing pages and test as many unique ones as I can.

Simply repeat the same process you went through for the offers.

Send a reasonable amount of data using only your best offer and run to your landing pages.

Review the results and compare, using the statistical significance tool.

Remove any landing pages that fall to 10% or below profitability, or keep running more traffic, periodically comparing the results until you have found the best landing page.

Stop, and Let’s Review Things Real Quick

By this stage, you have identified the best-performing offer and the best-performing landing page.

The ideal situation is that you’d be breaking even or profiting by now.

In most cases, though, you’d still be losing money.

I like to set a minimum threshold at this point.

Let’s say I’ve tested all of the offers and landing pages I could find.

I’ve narrowed it down to the best ones.

But let’s pretend that my campaign is not -35% ROI or better.

What to do?

One of two things.

First Option

I may take the best offer and landing page that I found and go setup another test on a new traffic source, using only that offer and lander.

I’ll perform a short test to see if that traffic source performs better than the original one I used.

Second Option

The second option?

I move on to testing a new campaign altogether.

What to Optimize Next

After determining that I should continue optimizing the campaign, the next major elements I look at are the following, in this order:

• Operating System
• Mobile Carrier/Wifi
• Placements

For example, if I notice that Android traffic is breaking even but iOS is -40% ROI, I will remove iOS targeting from my campaign in order to help my campaign become profitable more quickly.

In theory, I should see an overall improvement when removing the worst-performing items at each step of the optimization.

In this example of removing iOS, I will improve the campaign but also reduce the amount of traffic I can get because that is a major traffic segment to remove.

Next, since I’m now only running Android traffic, I’d take a look at how the Mobile Carriers and Wifi are performing.

Then, I’d decide whether or not to keep any, based on their performance.

Finally!

I’m at the stage where I take a look at the placements and remove the ones that are still showcasing a negative ROI.

When Do You Reach Profitability?

It’s possible to optimize and be profitable after finding the best offer and landing page.

Then, the rest of your efforts in optimizing just improve the ROI.

In most cases, you won’t be profitable right at the beginning.

As you collect data and optimize the segments one step at a time, you’ll see improvements at each step of the optimization until you reach a profitable campaign.

Tips & Final Thoughts

One thing I want you to remember is that the optimization process is all about collecting data and making decisions based on it.

You may lack experience in optimizing a campaign.

Even so, if you collect the data and look at one major variable at a time, the data will tell you what decisions you need to make in order to improve the campaign.

Check what I’ve written in this optimization walk-through very carefully.

I have detailed an effective approach for newbie affiliates to start optimizing campaigns.

And I’m going to wrap this up with a few awesome tips!

Tip Number One

Only focus on testing and improving one major variable at a time.

What are the major variables?

• Offer
• Landing Page
• Operating System segments
• Mobile carriers
• Wifi
• Segments
• Placements

Tip Number Two

When you have optimized a major variable, reset the clock on the data you’re looking at for the next test.

For example, if on days 1 and 2 you optimize and find the best offer, then on day 3 you begin testing to find the best landing pages.

DO NOT look at all of your data from day 1 to 3!

Only look at the data from day 3 and onward.

Once you’ve identified the best landing page and have started moving to the next major variable to optimize, only look at the data from that point onward.

Repeat for each other variable you plan to optimize.

Tip Number Three

Write down each action you take for every campaign.

You’ll learn how to optimize at a much faster rate.

It’s hard to visualize and remember every change you make.

If you make a change and the campaign improves, then you know what action caused that.

Likewise, if you make a change and it hurt your performance, you can also know what was the cause.

Tip Number Four

One of the biggest tips I can give you is not focusing on getting profit on day 1.

It may require you to have a negative loss every day for the first few days until you have fully optimized the campaign.

Do not make decisions based on emotion.

Let the data tell you if you should stop the campaign, keep optimizing it, or any other decision the data compels you to make.

That was a lot of words to type!

I hope that you now have a new perspective on building profitable campaigns and the type of mindset you need when approaching this process.

When I coached others, I noticed that there seemed to be two major struggles everyone went through.

The first one?

Finding a well-performing offer.

Second?

How they should optimize a campaign once they found a good offer.

Practice makes perfect.

Taking action is the only path to progress.

If you’d like to catch more great advice on building your affiliate business with pop traffic, join my Free Insider Tips newsletter or apply to my coaching program.

See you next time!

Cheers!