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ACTION & EXPLANATION
No campaign will remain profitable forever. Pop campaigns tend to be especially short-lived compared to camps that are run on most other types of traffic.
A green pop campaign would usually stay green for up to a few days or a few weeks. (Once in a while you may see one that stays profitable for a few months, but that would be an exception, not the norm.) Then it would usually experience a sudden and drastic dive in performance, i.e. you'd see considerably fewer conversions (or even none) for the same amount of spend/traffic as before.
For pop camps, when a profitable campaign suddenly stops being profitable, it's can be due to any one or combination of the 3 pillars: Offer, Lander, or Traffic.
When conversions stop coming in, or the conversion rate (CR) drops suddenly, try some of the suggestions below.
1)First of all, you should rule out your OFFER being the cause of the problem. Check the stats on your affiliate network dashboard to make sure that the traffic is still ending up at the right offer. If the offer has ended, or has reached offer cap, or is otherwise not available, the affiliate network would normally direct your traffic to another offer instead.
Also, the owner of the offer may be experiencing technical issues with the offer website, or the affiliate network may be having issues with their website/software/database.
No matter what the case may be - when campaign performance dives, it would be good to check with your AM to ask if they knew of any issues with the offer you're promoting.
To further rule out the offer being the cause of your campaign's demise: If there are other offers you were running before for the same geo/carrier/etc., that were making conversions but got cut because they were inferior to your best (current) offer, add them back into rotation and compare performance. If the old offer(s) seems to convert just as well as it was before, then there may be an issue with your "best" (current) offer.
2)Secondly, check to see if your LANDERS are accessible. Browse to the campaign url multiple times to make sure all your landers are still online.
(BTW - I also want to point out that "lander blindness" - or the phenomenon of decreasing conversion rate over time due to your audience getting used / growing tired of your lander - will not cause a suddenly and drastic decline in campaign performance. Rather, the decline would be gradual.)
3)Next, check to see if either your lander and/or tracker domain have been flagged by google or antivirus applications. This is where you can check if a url has been flagged by google:
https://transparencyreport.google.co...rowsing/search
Also run your links through virustotal to make sure it hasn't been flagged by the major antivirus scanners:
https://www.virustotal.com/
Check your lander domain(s) plus your tracker domain. If any of them are flagged, obviously you'd want to replace it before resuming traffic.
4)Set up a new camp (both on your tracker and at the traffic source) with the same settings as your current camp. Sometimes that will "reset" the camp, and previous performance would come back.
Also, if you've been seeing a gradual loss of traffic volume, this trick may get you back some of it. When you run ads, they will show on placement sites, and sometimes site owners won't like your ad and opt to stop them from appearing. Duplicating a campaign from time to time like this can "start you on a clean slate" so to speak.
Also: Try to create a new campaign on the traffic source from scratch, instead of using a "clone" or "duplicate" function. This way you can be sure the "bans" from placement owners won't carry over to the new camp.
5)Increase your bid. If neither your offer nor your lander are the issue, then it must be a TRAFFIC issue - the rest of the tips will address this.
Sometimes, increasing your bid would give the campaign a "jolt", plus trigger traffic from better-converting placements to improve performance. Try increasing the bid by $1-2 for example.
Also: Check your placement stats, and compare them from before and after the dive in performance. See which placements were giving you most of the conversions before the dive, and see whether you're still getting similar traffic volume from those placements after the dive. If you're no longer getting the same amount of traffic from those good placements, chances are you've been outbid - which would make increasing your bid an especially good tactic to try.
6)Do 4)+5), i.e. set up an identical camp AND increase the bid on the new camp.
7)Pause the camp for 1-2 days or more, then resume. Again, this could give the camp a "reset", and sometimes the camp's performance would recover.
8)Observe tracker stats for signs of increased fraud traffic, specifically for placements that were converting well before.
If after the dive in performance, you're still getting the same traffic volume from the best placement(s) that were converting well before the dive, one possibility would be that the same placements are no longer sending genuine human traffic. If you're using Voluum's Anti-Fraud Kit feature, or Binom with MagicChecker integration, you can compare the level of bot traffic before and after the drop in performance.
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It's never fun when a profitable campaign dies. But hopefully the above methods will extend the life of some of your green campaigns.
Due to the short profitability period, the key to making profits from pop campaigns is SPEED. Only optimize campaigns that look promising, that you feel you can make green in a short time. Always be testing new offers, new geos, etc. so you'll have new profitable camps to replace dying ones. Scale profitable campaigns to as many traffic sources as quickly as possible - we'll be covering scaling in the remaining lessons.
Amy
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