1K Profit From Mobile – Case Study
As we all know, mobile has taken the world by storm and mobile CPA is set to take off… ahem… actually, it already has, but its going to be even bigger in years to come. In this blog post, I’m going to show how I took a little gaming offer and brought in just over 1K profit.
It’s not a lot of money, but its nice pocket change for me when I was away on holidays.
CPA network: Neverblue
Vertical: Gaming
Total Spend: $468
Revenue: $1461
Gaming is all about speed… when a new gaming offer comes out, its fresh, hot… and certainly needs a lot of exposure. The fact that it has the highest volume in the network gives it extra “credibility”, ie, If others can make it work, then the only “variable” is me, not the offer.
It’s also easy to promote because in most cases, you don’t need a landing page especially if its listed in Google Play or the Apple App store. These 2 platforms give enough credibility for the game or app to be legit.
So, I choose to direct link in this case.
I picked a self serve mobile traffic source and created 5 x 3 banners, aka, 5 angles X 3 variation each.
I use CPVlab as my tracking platform.
Stage 1, its all about testing and buying data. I want to know which are the phones that are converting and the versions that comes along with it. I also want to test if wifi vs carrier vs app vs wap traffic.
In other words, I set up 4 different campaigns to test each of their performance:
Wifi > WAP
Wifi > App
Carrier > WAP
Carrier > App
After testing the 4 campaigns, I kind of narrow it down to WIFI traffic. I would suppose that because its a gaming offer, the download size is extremely big, ie, 100MB, or 127MB or 68MB etc.
“Tip >> Most people… unless their data plan is unlimited, will hesitate to commit to such ‘big downloads’.
One also needs to take note… when promoting gaming offer, you would want to wait a few days before you’ll see the actual conversion. ie, time of lead acquisition and time of conversion can be vastly different. Sometimes, people will just download your app and not play until tomorrow or 2 days later.
*Tip >> So, if you are promoting gaming offers, remember to let it sit for a while before cutting your targets.
After buying certain amount of data, I realize that certain versions converted very well for the offer while some versions tanks. I also realize that certain placements converted particularly well for the offer while some just eats up the budget without any conversion.
So, I blacklisted aka excluded the placements that are not converting and concentrated my targeting on that certain version of the phone, ie, Android 3.2 – Android 4.4 etc
Just by cutting all the fats and focusing on what platforms and traffic type the offer converts, I am now profitable.
And since I am direct linking, I can’t optimize the landing page to improve the ROI. Instead however, I can always dabble with the banners and angles to achieve a higher ctr or more importantly, EPC > it doesn’t mean shit if CTR is 100% but there’s no conversion to the offer.
A good banner with high ctr, coupled with a relevant angle + offer combo, will make you more money… because now that you are paying less per click… and converting more.
Tip >> Angle matters ! 2 of my angles got almost the same CTR but one brought in close to 100% ROI while the other only about 20% – same placement, same traffic type, same phone version.
The thing is, I didn’t scale this campaign in time. Maybe because I was in Cairns busy diving or in Tasmania mountains where there’s no Internet connection. No excuse there… still, its a nice little change to take home =)