Thread: Day 12: Setting Up a Campaign on PopAds

Today we'll be setting up a camp on PopAds together - as you will see, there are a lot of similarities between PropellerAds and PopAds. Most other pop networks have similar settings - although some networks provide more options than others.

PopAds doesn't have a lot of volume, but what they do have, converts. Until you test more traffic sources and find your "secret" source that converts better, PropellerAds and PopAds should be your go-to sources for testing landers and offers - because they have the best quality out of some of the best-known pop networks.

I like to start my testing on PopAds, because it automatically approves campaigns immediately - once your account gets upgraded to VIP, which doesn't take much (I think around $10-12k in total spend). If they don't approach you first, you can always contact them to request to be upgraded once you've hit the spend above.

However, if I didn't have VIP status on PopAds, I would start all my testing on PropellerAds - because its traffic converts and traffic volume is higher than PopAds, so I could get my testing done faster.

Because I've done a TON of explaining for PropellerAds, I'll try not to repeat myself for PopAds.

Let's get started!



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ACTION

Log into PopAds, click on "New Campaign" under "Advertiser's Panel".[/B] Then set up the campaign as follows.




Name: Copy and paste your campaign name (which you've assigned to the campaign in the tracker).

URL: Grab the tracker campaign url you've generated for this PopAds campaign - we covered how to do this in a previous lesson. Paste it in this field.

Leave "Single URL" selected as default. (We do all the offer and lander rotations using the tracker - probably no need to ever use "Multiple URLs".)

Prefetching: Leave "Enable landing page prefetching" unchecked.

Quality: Leave at the default "All websites".

Frequency Cap: Leave at the default "1 view / 24 hours". What I said about frequency capping in the PropellerAds lessons also apply here.

After approval: Leave at the default "Start".

PrimeSpot: Leave at the default "All traffic".

Adult content: Leave "The landing page contains adult content" unchecked (because we're running a mainstream offer; in future if you run adult landers and offers, remember to checkmark this setting, so that your ads won't show up on placement sites that don't allow them).

Referrer: Leave at the default "Standard".

Adblock: Set to "Non-adblock only".

Adv. type: Leave at the default "Popunder". And uncheck "Allow other methods when the chosen one is not available".




Bid Type: Leave at the default "Smart Bid".

Max Bid: Leave this blank for now - will come back to it later.

Daily budget: Set this to your offer's payout times ten. So if your offer payout is $1, set the daily budget to $10. If you're testing more than one offer, take the sum of the offer payouts and multiply THAT by ten.

The minimum value allowed here is $2.50, so if the value you calculated is lower than that, enter $2.50.

Budget: Set this to the same value as the daily budget.




Throttling: Leave at the default "Disabled". It's similar to PropellerAds' Standard vs. Distributed ad delivery methods - only, PopAds gives you even finer control. (If you're wondering why we're not throttling traffic here like we did on PropellerAds - I'll explain this later.)




Categories: Scroll down to "253. General" and click to select it, make sure "Automatically include descendant (children) categories" is checked, then click on "Add" to add all "General" categories to the box on the right.




Countries: Choose the country accepted by your offer, and click "Add" to select.




Languages: I would leave this at default (note that when you DON'T select ANYTHING, it means EVERYTHING is selected - same goes for other settings that have left and right boxes and the "Add" button). You can play with this in the future. (e.g. If your target geo uses multiple written languages, you may want to start by specifying the same language your offer page is in, and of course use landers written in the same language, just to get a quick idea on performance.)

Populations: I've never found a good reason to touch this setting - have always allowed all by default.




Operating Systems: Choose the ones allowed by your offer and click "Add". (Note: If you add "Android" you'll also add all android versions. Same goes for other OSs.) (Unfortunately there's no way to toggle to "Exclude" like in PropellerAds, so if you need to exclude some selections, you'll have to select everything else EXCEPT the ones you want to exclude.)

Browsers: Again, choose the ones allowed by your offer.

Screen Resolutions: Can leave at default for this campaign.




Form Factors: Choose the ones allowed by your offer. The ones that are responsible for most of the traffic are Desktop/Notebook, Smartphone, and Tablet. I wouldn't worry too much about the other ones.

Devices: Leave at default to allow all, unless your offer specifically forbids traffic from specific devices.




Connection Targeting: Leave at default "ISP/Carrier". I'll talk about IP Targeting later.

Connection types: To be honest, I don't really see the point of this setting unless you're running a niche offer that's targeted at students, or people in the military etc. - I would suggest leaving this at default (i.e. all allowed).

Connection speeds: Since we are running a direct carrier billing offer(s), we would need mobile carrier / 3g traffic. Select "Cellular/Carrier" and click "Add". (For future reference, if you want wifi traffic, just select everything EXCEPT "Cellular/Carrier".

Internet Service Providers: This is where you'd select the mobile carrier that was specified by the offer(s). If the offer(s) accepts multiple carriers, it would ultimately be best to set up separate campaigns to target each. But you can also do a quick initial test by targeting all of them to see which ones even have potential to warrant further testing. NOTE: Some of these carrier names are outdated - what I said about carrier names in the PropellerAds lesson applies here too. Just google your desired carrier name to see if it had other names in the past - they may be what are still listed in PopAds.




Time Targeting: Set the "Timezone:" to that of your target geo. If your geo spans more than one timezones, pick the one in the middle of the country. Uncheck all the hours from 00:00 to 08:00 (you can uncheck entire columns by clicking on the times at the top).






Website Targeting: Leave at default "Disabled" for now. In the future, when you want to optimize a campaign, you can either 1)take the "blacklisting" approach by selecting "Exclude" and entering the list of placements you're wanting to stop getting traffic from, or 2)take the "whitelisting" approach by selecting "Include" and entering the list of placements you're wanting to get traffic from. You can get these "Website IDs" by drilling down into tracker stats.




Adscore Traffic Validation: Leave at the default, i.e. Allow "Valid Traffic" and block "Proxy Traffic", "Junk Traffic", and "Bot Traffic". If you have a profitable campaign, you can test these other traffic at lower bids to see if they would convert for you.




Summary: This section will show you some stats calculated by the Traffic Estimator based on the campaign settings you've specified. Remember we haven't specified a bid yet? Look in this section for the average bid ("Average bid for traffic with your options is x.xxxxxx"), then go back up to the "Budget" section and enter into the "Max Bid" field, that average bid plus or minus 10-20% just to avoid the heaviest competition (i.e. everyone else trying to bid this average). Let's take the example in the screenshot, 0.001421 (in cost per view - equivalent to 1.421CPM) - I would increase that to maybe 0.0015632 for example.



And remember to put this bid at the end of your campaign name - both here on PopAds and in the tracker. This is optional but I find that it helps me keep track of which bid I used in which campaign.

Click "Create Campaign", and you're done!



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The EXPLANATION section is in the next post.





Amy

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EXPLANATION

That was relatively painless - as most ACTION sections are.

But you must have heard the saying "no pain, no gain" - so here's the pain...I mean "gain" part.

You need to understand what each campaign setting is in order to use PopAds like a pro - and in this lesson I'll definitely give you enough knowledge on which you can build further with your own explorations.

Below are further explanations of some of the campaign settings we're looked at briefly when setting up our first campaign on PopAds.






Prefetching: You can read more about Prefetching here:

https://www.popads.net/kb/view/112

Basically: When you get around to using landing pages, when your landing page pops up as an ad, it will take time to load in your visitors' browsers. As you will see in a future lesson, it is CRUCIAL that the loading time be very fast - under 1s if possible and absolutely no longer than 2s - because nobody will sit around to wait for an ad to load. In fact, most people would close them or hit the backbutton before the ad even finishes loading.

The prefetching feature will start loading the landing page before your ad even pops up, so that it will show up sooner for the visitor.

In the beginning of a campaign, when you are still split-testing/rotating multiple landing pages (which you're about to do in a future lesson!), it would be difficult to use prefetching, because it only allows you to specify one lander url.

However, when you've done split-testing landers, and only have a single winning lander running, you can test this prefetching feature to see whether there's an improvement in lander CTR (click-through rate) and campaign CR (conversion rate).

When you're direct-linking, the "landing page" would effectively be the offer page (because that's the page that's loaded into a pop ad), and everything I said above for landing pages would apply here.

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Quality:



In general, higher-quality traffic converts better, but it's more expensive (because more people are targeting it and bidding higher for it) and there's less of it available. And lower-quality traffic converts worse, but it's also less-expensive (because less people are targeting, or are bidding lower) and there's more volume available.

As I've explained in the "PropellerAds - EXPLANATION" lesson, we really want to ensure that traffic quality is acceptable when we're testing new landing pages and/or new offers - just to give the landers/offers a chance to convert (and when they don't, at least we'd know it's not the traffic's "fault").

We can ensure quality by NOT bidding too low (e.g. by bidding average or above). And PopAds' "Quality" setting provides us with yet another option.

A good approach would be to set "Quality" to top 50% or 70% for example, to ensure high quality, and then bid average or even lower to save on cost. The only unknown here is the resulting volume you'll get, and this will vary from geo to geo (and whether you're only targeting 3g or wifi etc.)

But PopAds has a traffic estimator in the "Summary" section - feel free to play with this even right now, by starting a new dummy campaign on PopAds, and setting "Quality" and "Max Bid" to various values, then clicking to the traffic estimator to see what volume you'd get.

IMPORTANT: In the "Budgets" section - be aware that the bid is in CPV and not CPM so if you're wanting to pay $1 per 1000 views, bid 0.001, not 1!

The traffic estimator is not accurate sometimes but you'll get an idea. If by restricting "Quality" and bidding low, you're getting estimated volumes of under 3k/day, then try to either bid higher, or set "Quality" to a lower setting, or both - until you reach 3k-5k/day impressions or higher.

(3k/day is already quite low, even for a newbie. I wouldn't suggest going lower, or it would take a long wait to test your offers and/or landers.)

Note that in addition to "Quality" and bid, there are 2 other settings that can affect traffic quality: "Primespot" and "Dayparting". I will mention them below, but basically you can play with all these 4 settings to try to get good-quality traffic for cheap, in the beginning when you're testing landers and offers. If you find that you're not getting enough traffic volume to get your testing done quickly enough, just tweak these settings to be less-restrictive as mentioned above.

Also do read tip #7 ("If Traffic Volume is High, Consider Testing with Highest-Quality Traffic First") in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-for-beginners

It should tie things together for you nicely.

I want to end the quality discussion with this suggestion: As long as your bid is average or above, that should be enough to ensure traffic quality, even without restricting any of these other settings. (Note: You can find out what the "average" bid is by looking at the traffic estimator, but only after you've specified all the targeting - more on that later.) However, if you have a lot of traffic available for your geo, and wouldn't mind waiting longer for lander/offer split-testing to finish, then it may be better to target good traffic using these other settings, and keep costs low by setting the bid to the average bid. This way you can do the testing at the same price but get more conversions.

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Prime Spot: Primespot will usually convert better than Non-Primespot. We've mentioned this above while discussing traffic quality - basically if you have a lot of traffic volume available, and want good quality for testing, you can choose prime spot. You can play with this setting and observe the traffic estimator like I've mentioned above in the "Quality" section, or if you've not sure, then just leave it at "All traffic".

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Referrer: You can use this setting to blank out the referrer website if you wish. If you don't see a reason to do this then you probably don't need to - just leave this at "Standard".

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Adult content: "The landing page contains adult content" <--- if you're running adult stuff, check this box. (No need to do so for our current campaign, as you're running a mainstream offer.)

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Adblock:

Please see section "7) Test Adblock Traffic" of this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...re-Experienced

Basically you can do one of the following:

1)Check your landing page domain and your tracker domain to verify that they're NOT blocked, then target "All Traffic". After gathering some conversions, drill down into adblock stats in your tracker, and if you see that adblock traffic isn't profitable, change camp settings to "Non-Adblock only". (Alternatively, you can also target adblock traffic in a separate campaign, and bid lower for this traffic, because it isn't in as much demand as non-adblock traffic.)

OR

2)Target "Non-Adblock only". Then, if you can optimize the campaign to profitability (or at least have a promising-looking offer+lander), consider setting up a separate campaign with a lower bid to target "Adblock only" (this is optional).

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Adv. type:

Here are the 5 types of ad formats available:



Ignore the "Floating banner" format for now - that's not a type of pop ads and therefore falls outside the scope of this tutorial. The other 4 formats are basically different types of pop ads - you can google to find out what they are if you're interested.

Basically, websites that display our ads (i.e. "Publisher" sites, or what we usually call "placement" sites; PropellerAds calls them "zones") can specify which formats they want the ads to show up on their site to be in. When a publisher adds their website to PopAds' system they fill out this form:



Notice how the "Popunder" format is not only selected by default, it's MANDATORY. The other 3 formats are optional. This means that all placements will show popunder ads, and some of them will also show some or all of the other 3 formats.

And it's not possible to drill down into tracker stats to see which format converts better/worse - there isn't a tracking token for ad formats.

I would recommend to go with "Popunder" because it has the most volume (since it's mandatory for publishers) and leave "Allow other methods when the chosen one is not available" unchecked, at least in the beginning.

When you have a promising campaign (e.g. in profit, or at least have a good offer+lander running), you can always set up additional campaigns (or clone the original camp) to target each of the other 3 formats to see how they do, and go from there.

(For small geos though, the only way to get enough traffic may be to checkmark "Allow other methods when the chosen one is not available".)




Smart Bidding vs. Legacy Bidding:

Please see section "6) Know When to Use Smart Bidding vs. Legacy Bidding" in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...re-Experienced

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Max Bid: Unlike for PropellerAds, where bids are in CPM (cost per thousand visitors), bids on PopAds are in CPV or cost per view. Please be very careful here - if you specify bids in CPM then you'd be bidding a THOUSAND times as much as you were planning to!

Most (if not all) of what I said about bidding in the PropellerAds lesson should apply here as well. When you bid low you'll get traffic that is less in-demand and is likely to convert worse, and when you bid high you'll get traffic that is more in-demand and is likely to convert better.

The traffic estimator will help you decide how much to bid - more on that in the "Summary" section below.

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Daily Budget & Budget: I asked you to set these to 10 times the offer payout (or, if testing multiple offers in the same campaign, 10 times the SUM of the offer payouts) because in a vast majority of cases, an offer that doesn't convert at least once after spending 10 times the ad spend would be extremely unlikely to end up profitable after campaign optimization.




Throttling: So you may be wondering why we're not throttling traffic here as we did in PropellerAds. The answer is that we CAN be, but PopAds' throttling options aren't as straight-forward as PropellerAds', so I'm offering to you another approach. You can choose to throttle traffic or not, whatever you prefer - I've already explained the difference between "Distributed" (i.e. throttled) and "Standard" (i.e. not-throttled) in PropellerAds.

Firstly, let's look at PopAds' throttling options. If you click on the "Manual" option you'll see this:



Basically you can decrease the speed of traffic by a certain percentage, but you won't know how much traffic you'll be getting BEFORE traffic starts running, so this value is something you won't be able to specify until you start getting traffic.

So let's take an example to illustrate how you would use this. Let's say we're running an offer with $2.40 payout, and we're wanting to spend $24 (10x payout) to test it. And we're wanting to distribute the $24 over the entire day to avoid the possibility of spending the entire budget during the worst-converting hours.

I would run the campaign with throttling disabled first, for one full hour (e.g. you can set for the campaign to run for the next hour in your current day in the "Time Targeting" section), see how much budget is spent, then figure out how much I'd need to slow it down to make it last the whole 24 hours.

For example, if I end up spending $2 during that one hour, and my target is to spend $24/24 = $1/hr to make the $24 last the 24 hours, then I'd need to reduce traffic speed by 50%.

Then there's another way to throttle traffic. Click on the "Automatic" option and you'll see this:




(By the way - the first menu's options should not say "per second", because you can specify the time unit in the "maximal spending" option - by choosing from "per second", "per minute", or "per hour".)

The Automatic option is pretty self-explanatory - you either specify how many impressions you want to get (per second/minute/hour) or how much budget you want to spend (per second/minute/hour). This is useful, except the minimum amounts you can enter MAY be a bit high if you're running your first campaigns and want to limit your daily spending. The minimum value you can set the traffic speed to is 1800 impressions/hr, and the minimum value you can set the spending amount to is $3.60/hr - both of which are probably too much for you if you're only needing to invest 10x payout into testing an offer.

So - PopAds does have these throttling options, and you're encouraged to play with them later - but they seem more trouble than they're worth, so I showed you another approach while we were setting up this PopAds campaign.

Instead of throttling traffic, I had you disable throttling, then in "Time Targeting" I asked you to only run traffic during hours that typically convert OK - during the day and evening and avoiding sleeping hours.

You can use this same approach over at PropellerAds as well. I just thought it would be good to take you through both approaches for the experience.




Categories: Here you can pick the kinds of websites you want your ad to be displayed. It's important to note whether your offer accepts adult traffic - if it doesn't, and you send adult traffic to it and get caught by the offer owner (aka "Advertiser"), you will likely get kicked from running the offer.

Note: If you have an adult offer that doesn't prohibit mainstream traffic, you can still allow traffic from the "General" categories. IMPORTANT: If you're showing adult stuff on the pop ad (either your landing page, or your offer if you're doing direct-linking), you need to checkmark "The landing page contains adult content" box back in the "General information" section. That way, your ad won't show up on any placement sites where site owners have explicitly specified they don't want adult ads showing up on their sites.

Most of the time, you would either select all of the adult categories, or all of the general categories, or just allow all. To select all Adult categories, make sure "Automatically include descendant (children) categories" is selected, then select "161. Adult" and click "Add" and all adult categories would be added to the right. You can do the same for General categories by selecting "253. General" and clicking "Add".

Worth mentioning: I wouldn't try to target individual sub-categories. Pop traffic is broad, general-audience traffic for the most part, and most other pop sources won't allow you to target by category. This means that even if you're able to find an offer that converts well for, say, the category "8. General/Arts/Photography", chances are you won't be able to scale it successfully to any other pop network. And without scaling, that sub-category on PopAds probably won't give you much traffic to profit from.

However, if you've been running a campaign and have collected some stats, you can drill down to category data, and if you notice certain categories that are just spending a lot of money without converting, feel free to cut them out then - just remove that sub-category from your targeting (i.e. move it from the right box back to the left box).




Environment Targeting: Self-explanatory. Just one thing to mention here - Operating Systems, Browsers, and Screen Resolutions data can be viewed in the tracker. So if you see that particular ones are converting well/badly, you can either target exclusively or exclude in the campaign settings here.




Connection Targeting: In addition to what I've told you above while we were setting up the campaign together, there's a LOT more I would like to tell you about ISP/Carrier targeting and IP Targeting.

I've written extensively on these topics in the past, so will just refer you to the relevant threads.

Threads on how to target carriers accurately on PopAds:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...u-Can-t-Target

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...esting!-Part-1

Section "2) Target by IP List" in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...re-Experienced

Knowing how to target accurately using IP ranges can be quite an advantage if you have an offer that converts particularly well on carrier traffic.




Time Targeting: I've already explained while we decided to exclude the sleeping hours in the target country's timezone.




Adscore Traffic Validation: I personally just allow "Valid Traffic" and block "Proxy Traffic", "Junk Traffic", and "Bot Traffic". When your campaign becomes profitable, you can set up one campaign to allow EACH of these 3 subpar-quality traffic types, and set low bids (think $0.0003-0.0005/view and test upwards if profitable) to see if they would convert for you. (Reason why you need to set up a separate campaign for each type is because there aren't tokens for tracking these - so if you target all in a single campaign, you wouldn't be able to tell how each type performs.)




Summary: Please see the "2) Check the Traffic Estimator" section of this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-for-Beginners

As was mentioned above, after you've selected all your campaign targeting, you can check the traffic estimator to see what the average bid is. Starting slightly higher than this average bid would be a good way to avoid some of the competition since many other competitors would just be bidding the exact average (NEWBS! I kid. )

The highest effective bid is what the highest bidder is actually paying for traffic (with same targeting as you). The "Max bid offered" is higher than the "Highest effective bid" - sometimes significantly so - because PopAds charges in relation to the next-highest bidder. Zeno would be the one to ask about the different bidding models. The jist is that you could be bidding outrageously high and still won't get charged nearly that much - what you'd actually be paying would be close to what the next highest bidder is bidding.

As was also mentioned above: You can play with campaign settings and keep referring to the traffic estimator to see how much traffic you can expect to get. Try to tweak settings until you can get 3k+ impressions per day before starting a camp - but only if it's possible without bidding sky-high, or it would be difficult to find a lander+offer that will convert well-enough to offset the high costs.



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READING

I've referenced parts of the following threads already, but would like to ask you to read them in their entirety when you have a chance. They will help you understand how PopAds works. You don't necessarily need to read them now, but they will serve as good references when you start running on PopAds "for real" later.

PopAds Tips for Beginners

PopAds Tips for the More Experienced

PopAds ISPs - Don't Optimize for What You Can't Target!

Running Mobile? Boost ROI with Granular Offer Testing! - Part 1



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That turned out to be another long lesson - which was not my original intention, but hopefully it has equipped you with the knowledge you need to get the most out of this high-quality traffic source!



Amy