The media buyers of the Adsbalance agency have come a long way in the struggle for high conversion rates. Their stories are sometimes more interesting than action-packed detective stories. Today, Victor, the Head of the Onclick Ads Department of the Adsbalance team, shares with us how he spotted and took advantage of a loophole in the PropellerAds Push traffic network and made a working campaign, which brought him profits throughout the year.
Disclaimer: Multi-accounting in PropellerAds is prohibited. We do not recommend trying to repeat this case, it turned out due to ignorance of the site rules. Read carefully the terms of service of your traffic sources before testing this campaign format.
Push notifications as a traffic source began to take off in 2018. I did not immediately pay attention to this, but I realized it in 2019 when I started working closely with Propellerads, buying PopUnder.
To be honest, my first attempt at pushing didn't have that much success. I ran traffic from the US to a dating app and got negative results. After some time, I returned to push notifications again and launched a multi-geo campaign with a dating SmartLink from Lospollos. The results were better but still negative.
All of this inspired me to take a closer look at campaign statistics. As a result, I selected the strongest geos and restarted the campaign. Added dating smartlinks from Clickdealer, Profitsocial, and Cpamatica to the split test. The results turned out to be an order of magnitude better, with clear leaders in geos. However, the adspend turned out to be quite high, because I set the CPC bid price a little higher than average in order to take more traffic.
A further iteration of the tests was as follows:
- Separated the campaigns into regions of the world, as they are given by Propellerads: Africa, Asia, North America, and so on. There are 7 regions in total.
- Split 4 dating smartlinks: Lospollos, Clickdealer, Profitsocial, and Cpamatica.
- Target: Android Push and minimum bid price for CPC $0.005 (at that time Propellerads still allowed launching multi-geo campaigns without limits for the minimum bid price for CPC $0.005).
- The total budget limit is $50 per campaign.
There were 7 campaigns in total, each for its own region. Inwardly wishing myself good luck, I pressed the "Start campaigns" button.
What Happened Next?
The test campaigns started running, and with bated breath, I began to look at the results. They turned out to be impressive: the SmartLink from Profitsocial turned out to be the top one, the rest were a little lower, but they also performed well. I studied the data in detail and understood which geo and OS targets were negative.
Then I restarted campaigns with already cleaned targets and got a profit. The profit was around $150 per day, and I realized that I needed to start scaling.
Zennoposter
I read on the Internet that this software helps to automate routine processes, and I just had a daily routine. I bought myself a license, watched the tutorials on creating templates in Zennoposter on Youtube, and started making my first template.
Of course, the first version of my template was simple. It performed only elementary functions of cloning an existing campaign and replacing creatives and texts in it. Periodically, the template was buggy and slowed down, but nevertheless, it really unloaded me.
And at that moment, I thought that I could order the template I needed on a freelance website. It will be made for me by a person who specializes in Zennoposter. And he will do things that I would never do myself.
Well, the decision made was to go to a freelance site and find a person there who ended up making me a great template. The archive for it can be downloaded from the link, it will come in handy for someone: however, it is not quite up-to-date now. Because Propellerads once again changed the design inside the creation of the campaign and added, removed some blocks, and swapped them. But as a guideline for those interested, it will do, there is nothing complicated there, you can remake it to suit your tasks.
The new template turned out to be just a cannon, and it did all the routine work for me. All I had to do was add new creatives to the folder and update the texts. Work has begun. Hundreds of campaigns were created per day, sometimes thousands, with the same target and bid, only creatives and texts changed inside.
This went on for a week or two, and then the account manager wrote to me and asked why I was doing this and creating hundreds of campaigns. I replied that in this way I test approaches, creatives, and so on. The account manager said this could not be done since I was blocking the auction and other advertisers could not buy traffic. I realized that things were getting hot, and reduced the number of campaigns per day. My income, of course, fell, and I began to think about what to do next.
Creatives
For push notifications, I needed 2 images: 192x192 and 360x240. I automatically downloaded thousands of photos of beautiful girls from various sources. I edited them in bulk through a photo editor and adjusted them to the desired size in pixels.
Push texts
Of course, it was logical for each geo to write texts in the local language. I took the path of least resistance and ordered hundreds of short phrases in English from freelance copywriters, for example:
- How are you getting on?
- Call me. I need you.
- My heart calls out for you.
- miss you so much.
And so on. That is, the semantic load was elementary, and I didn’t really think about the meaning of the texts. The main thing is that it should be a girl's appeal to a man. To increase the CTR, I used and added emoji to each phrase in the Title and Description:
This is how I had the folder structure for each account:
192х192 — icons for notifications with girls:
360x240 — large rectangular photos for the second banner in the push message (in fact, I rarely used them because I didn’t notice much difference in an envelope with one photo or two):
Description — the bottom of the text in the push message:
GEO — countries that were specified in the account:
Title — the top part of the text in the push message:
Since only 1 creative could be added to one campaign in Propellerads, it was necessary to create dozens of campaigns per day. Then they added the ability to upload 8 creatives to 1 campaign, and things went uphill.
The essence of the traffic bay was as follows. After the start of the campaign, Propellerads gives the best traffic so that the system understands how competitive the campaign is and what position it will take in the auction. And since I ran a lot of campaigns with a minimum bid price of $0.005, there was a lot of traffic, and it converted very well. I made $350 — $450 profit per day on dating smartlinks.
Way Out of the Current Situation
I developed a new scheme: I came up with the idea of creating new accounts and deploying them on a VPS — guess what, it worked. Here are the steps I followed:
- Purchased several virtual computers
- The required number of proxies was taken additionally.
- The accounts were verified by the phone number that I took in the SMS activation services.
- When there was a problem with funding accounts (I topped up the main account via WMZ from my Webmoney wallet). I went through the list of available deposit methods and registered Skrill accounts.
After I created and launched several new accounts, there was a wave of bans from Propellerads. First, my first main account, on which the money remained, flew off. To the credit of the network, they returned the balance to me and said that the account was banned for life.
Well, then, the rest of the accounts began to fly off. I registered new ones and launched them, but I didn’t keep a lot of money in my accounts. As a result, at the peak, I had 7-8 accounts in operation at the same time, I even tried anti-detect browsers but eventually abandoned them.
The problem with account bans persisted, and I began to think about my VPS operator, from whom I bought virtual computers.
Since money allowed, I bought 7 used laptops hoping that different hardware and proxies would allow my accounts to last longer. But no, it didn't work. I managed to recapture the cost of laptops and earn some money, but the accounts ended up being banned too.
A major blow for me was the innovation when individual minimum bids were set for each geo. That is, I could no longer buy a lot of GEOs at the same price and not worry. These minimum bids were seriously raised, and I generally stopped paying off some of the top GEOs. I tried to group them by the minimum bid, but it already became clear that everything was going downhill.
It all ended when I ran out of available ways to top up my accounts. New accounts began to live for 1-2 days and flew to the ban. And in general, I'm tired of sitting on a powder keg constantly expecting another failure.
Of course, I tried this scheme in other sources: Push house, Daopush, Evadav, and Pusground. There, the results were completely different: both the conversion rate per lead and the cost per click were expensive. For each source, I also made templates on Zennoposter and worked. The results were worse, but there were positive targets that could be developed, so the scheme is working. But I'm already tired. I lost motivation to continue working according to this scheme, so I turned everything off and went on looking for new bundles.
Statistics and Results
Based on the above, I conclude:
- Propellerads has the best push traffic in terms of quality and advertiser KPI fulfillment. I received just such feedback from my managers in affiliate programs.
- Propellerads has huge amounts of traffic.
- Perhaps, with my actions, I helped Propellerads to finish the system of dealing with such cunning people like me.
- No need to be greedy. It is better to earn less, but steadily than more, but the bundle quickly burns out. This is exactly what happened to me - I was greedy and got what I deserved.
- This scheme is working and generally applicable to any source, no matter what type of traffic it is: popunder, push, in-page, banner, etc. After all, the essence of the bundle is to buy the maximum traffic at the minimum rate and distribute it in the tracker to different smart links or offers.
- Profitsocial has the top dating smartlink, most of the traffic went there, and it converted just fine. I periodically updated smartlinks, as the envelope fell.
Although I had to constantly look for new approaches, I managed to work out a bunch that fed me for a year. As a result, I got $30 000-$40 000 in revenue. You can see the results in the screenshots from Cpamatica, Lospollos, and Clickdealer below.
Cpamatica:
Screenshot of Clickdealer payouts:
Screenshot with payouts in Lospollos:
