Today, we present a case study of BobZhang, an affiliate marketer and an active Afflift forum user. His story is rather interesting, because BobZhang did a lot of experiments, discoveries, reconsiderations, and conclusions that may encourage and help every affiliate marketer.
BobZhang has been in affiliate marketing for 5 months already. He was doing pretty well, but at some point, he realized that he wanted a self-challenge that would bring some more money and boost his skills. He wanted to get $3000 in 30 days, and this is how this case started.
Here are the campaign details:
The last two months were pretty productive for BobZhang, but did he get what he wanted? Read to find out!
BobZhang started with a couple of CPA campaigns to make a test and see which traffic satisfies him more - PropellerAds or Broker. And, of course, he used the ProPush Smart Tag and TrafficBack feature for additional optimization, which was a really good idea (you will see why). He had doubts about the pricing model to choose, so he switched between two of them, but finally stopped on RevShare.
The stats of the first day looked this way:
The earnings of the first day make $38.38, which is BobZhang’s average income. In total, he has 80+ campaigns at PropellerAds, around 20 GEOs, with only 30 campaigns that cost more than $1. Plus, he was running “some survey offer from Zeydoo and Mobidea”, as he also mentioned on the forum.
And the statistics look this way:
Here are the GEOs:
The second day brought these numbers:
Since BobZhang changed his pricing model at ProPush a couple of times a day before, his profit from Smart Tag decreased a bit, but still the numbers continued growing.
Our partner did some more A/B testing of the same Survey offer from Zeydoo and Mobidea and concluded that Zeydoo was more efficient. As such, Mobidea stayed for backup.
Also, BobZhang found the three most profitable GEOs and tested them in a range of ad networks, spending about $8000 in three months, which was a significant sum.
However, the results were far from desired. Still, BobZhang gathered some useful data from his testing and distinguished the most converting offers, landing pages, GEOs, and targeting settings. Now he was trying to find another profitable traffic source in addition to PropellerAds.
BobZhang’s efforts were rewarded with $38,5 in total, where PropellerAds brought:
And here are the numbers from ProPush Tag:
And also some additional money from TrafficBack, a special link that redirects users to a relevant offer in case they block/close/swipe away the opt-in window:
Basically, ProPush brought the most part of profit that day: $25. PropellerAds brought less income this time because BobZhang tested new offers, which took a part of his budget. One of the most efficient ways to use ProPush Tag is to cover your testing budget, which worked for BobZhang.
Another step of our partner was testing and comparing top GEOs for two chosen offers with a couple of different landing pages for each (also, for testing). Also, BobZhang’s personal manager at PropellerAds recommended two more Survey offers for testing.
So, in general, he created 6 campaigns at PropellerAds:
Unfortunately, the 4th day was far from gladdening - BobZhang realized that he accidentally lost almost $100, because after topping up one of the advertising networks he used, not only the new offers were launched, but also the old ones. It happened automatically, and our partner didn’t notice that at once. When inactive offers started rolling, part of the purchased traffic went nowhere.
However, this day also brought some good news, and namely - profit.
It was $21.38, where most of the amount comes from PropellerAds and $1.48 - from TrafficBack.
Even when profits decrease, ProPush TrafficBack can still help you get at least some of your money back.
As for the changes, BobZhang added 4 new GEOs for 3 campaigns - these were aimed at data gathering and further optimization, plus - one campaign to test and distinguish which offer is the most converting.
Also, BobZhang started checking and stopping low-performing campaigns so as not to waste his budget in vain.
The fifth day brought BobZhang $28 in total, where $6.8 was from ProPush Tag and $1.26 from TrafficBack. Here are his campaigns, launched for data gathering and testing:
Current strategy of BobZhang was launching a lot of campaigns and testing numerous offers and GEOs. Also, he used to choose the cheapest offers regarding payouts - not higher than $0.149.
These were two things he decided to rethink - offer prices and the amount of regularly launched new campaigns.
This day was one of the most demonstrational in terms of ProPush efficiency. Namely, BobZhang lost $27 in PropellerAds, but ProPush brought him $25. So, thanks to ProPush, BobZhang lost only $2!
And here are the stats by GOEs:
BobZhang realized that the time had come to reduce the number of tests and try some offers with higher payouts to save his money.
He also made some optimization efforts and focused only on the most successful offers. He still continued testing creatives, GEOs, targeting, and more - to find the best way to promote chosen offers.
This time, BobZhang did some polishing - he stopped testing new campaigns and optimized his most-converting ones. Now he stopped working with non-efficient targeting settings, landing pages, and scheduling.
One of the forum users suggested that BobZhang should try Direct Click traffic type, and he picked five GEOs and two offers to launch ten campaigns of this kind:
This was the “greener” day for BobZhang, supposedly because Direct Click:
As you can see from the numbers, ProPush Tag and a TrafficBack feature are doing a great job. This time, they are rather sources of additional income than life-saving pillows to cover traffic expenses. As you can see, ProPush has a number of earning scenarios - all beneficial.
Finally, BobZhang found his most successful GEOs due to the tests performed:
These were a bit more expensive than those he used to work with, but all in all - they also brought more profit. Unfortunately, a switch to more expensive GEOs ended up with some ROI drop (which is natural):
The offer performance still was not as stable as BobZhang expected:
And the budget invested in traffic was still pretty high. Thanks to ProPush, our partner managed to get a significant part of the testing budget back. Still, the deadline BobZhang set for himself just ended, so he decided to share some conclusions.
So, in general, BobZhang earned $871.42 in 30 days, where ProPush brought about 35%:
Even though the goal was to get $3000, this is also a very nice result. What is more, BobZhang managed to gather tons of useful information from his numerous tests and optimization efforts.
His main insights were:
But our partner decided to continue this challenge, so read what happened during the next month.
After two weeks, 50% more profit was a reward for BobZhang’s efforts:
So, BobZhang decided to analyze campaigns by weeks, not by days, to get clearer information. And the third week of this big challenge ended up successfully - with $472. ProPush brought an additional income of about $260, which is more than a half.
Another week later, the challenge was finally over and BobZhang could boast of $1725, which was almost 60% of his initial aim - $3000.
So many things happened during the challenge period: BobZhang did a lot of testing, optimization, and communication with other affiliates. Some of his attempts were successful, some - not really. The only thing that stayed stable was ProPush - additional income to cover traffic expenses and extra money.
Whatever campaign you launch, never forget to add ProPush Tag to your landing page or website - this will help you get more money and feel more confident about your experiments. Good luck!
Try ProPush Tag for more profit!
This is how Nick, one of our Afflift Follow-Along contest participants started his story. And he was pretty right — one of the main affiliate marketer’s pains is tons of money lost on tests. Is there something that can relieve this pain?
Yes, the answer is additional monetization. Let’s look at how you can compensate for your testing expenses — on the example of Nick’s campaigns.
We thank Nick for sharing his case study — and if you want to thank him, too, join ProPush.me using Nick’s referral link.
Nick wanted to be honest about his latest efforts this year: he ran multiple campaigns without much success. His favorite vertical is Sweepstakes, so he was mainly focused on it. Besides, his recent campaigns also included iGaming products.
Nick even has his course on how to profit from Sweepstakes — you will find it (and tons of other useful posts) on his website.
Here are the stats of some campaigns Nick has been testing lately (mainly Tier 1 GEOs):
Yes, the test stage can really hurt your feelings and budget. Nick was playing with creatives, landing pages, angles — and it all swallowed up money.
— Over a couple of months, I managed to dig a $1,950.10 loss on this group of tests, losing just over half of what I spent. That feels pretty bad.
Such large spending doesn’t have to be so painful, though. Extra monetization alongside running your main offer can cover a significant amount of expenses — and sometimes, even most of them.
Nick proves it by showing his stats from ProPush.me. He uses ProPush Smart Tag with all his campaigns:
Here are the stats for the same group of campaigns we showed before, but with ProPush they look much more attractive:
— With that additional revenue, my ROI improves to -36.37%, making it much less painful. That counts as a “successful test” in almost any affiliate’s books.
Before ProPush, Nick tried a similar extra monetization solution from another company. However, as he said, it didn’t bring anything even close to the income he gets from ProPush.
As you might know, ProPush offers two ways how you get your income:
According to Nick’s experience, his users stay subscribed for approximately 2–3 weeks. Remember, though, that he uses Push traffic — it means that his audience has many other push subscriptions so far. With other traffic types, a user’s lifecycle might be longer.
So what did he choose: CPS or RevShare? The answer is RevShare, and Nick vividly showed us why.
He collected 1114 subscribers from a single GEO, and the highest CPS rate for this GEO was $0,14. Now look at the table:
| Subscribers | Potential earnings with the CPS model | Earnings with RevShare |
| 1114 | $155.96 | $608,16 |
If Nick chose the CPS model, he would earn only 25% of what he got with RevShare. Yes, RevShare takes more time to start bringing profit — but it’s probably worth it, nah?
Nick’s experience proves that extra monetization is not only a pleasant bonus — but also great support for your budget when you are testing expensive campaigns.
— I was mind-blown. I will even avoid running campaigns where I can’t have ProPush implemented in some way.
We think such a review makes it hard to resist trying ProPush. Agree?
Join ProPush today, and save your affiliate marketing budgets!
Good news — you can! And this is exactly what our partner did within the Follow-Along contest we organized together with our friends PropellerAds and Afflift. Meet Pablo T, the Afflift Forum member — and his experience with ProPush.me and Push Traffic.
Pablo was determined to focus on a single traffic source and a single vertical. As he said himself —
— No more jumping around and chasing shiny objects!’
His choice fell on a Sweepstakes offer with a $10 payout. It could be pretty challenging: nobody gives so high payouts for easy conversions! And here are the other campaign details:
Pablo decided to give his campaign a three-day test, using one landing page, and see if he gets conversions. Another important detail: he set his campaign to run only from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. and use only Classic Push ads.
If you are curious about how he set up his campaign in detail — welcome to the gallery!
And, after he set up everything in PropellerAds, Pablo added a ProPush Smart Tag to his landing page.
The very first day of testing showed a low CTR, so Pablo decided to add more creatives to see if they perform better. However, things didn’t change much: the second day did not bring any conversions, too, even though the CTR became a bit higher.
Here are Pablo’s stats for Day 2:
And, with 282 impressions from ProPush.me, there was still no extra profit:
Of course, Pablo started optimizing his campaign. What did he do?
While the main offer hadn’t brought any profit yet, ProPush stats showed a more positive result. A $6 profit is the profit, too!
Later, Pablo’s main offer finally brought the first conversion. So, there was a -58% ROI and a single conversion — not the best result you can hope for.
The campaign was crying out for optimization!
Pablo decided to make changes in the User Activity targeting and add In-Page Push traffic besides Classic Push.
Here are his first results after his optimization efforts:
To make things clearer, see what each row in the stats above means:
Meanwhile, ProPush profit got stuck at $6 — nothing has changed since June 3:
It seemed like using Push traffic with ProPush was really a bad idea… but let’s see what happened next.
Pablo kept optimizing his campaign: comparing landing pages and creatives and In-Push and Classic Push traffic types. Two landing pages finally showed a positive ROI!
And Propush got off the ground, too:
Long story short, campaign optimization did not help much: while some of the slices were performing okay, there was still negative profit.
But, surprisingly, ProPush generated some more earnings:
Pablo’s main offer didn’t make a hit. Even after he added two Popunder traffic campaigns to test it, too, the results did not become much better:
In the end, Pablo admitted that PopUnder traffic was not doing better than Push Traffic for his main offer. The final results for two weeks showed only 15 conversions, collected mainly with In-Page Push traffic.
However, Pablo managed to earn $14 with ProPush — and he liked it! It’s not easy to get even such an amount with Push Traffic, so it was not bad at all. Provided he didn’t make any changes in his ProPush settings, it’s a good result!
Most likely, things would be much better if Pablo had chosen the other traffic type from the very beginning. Still, you can see that ProPush can do its job even when you send this controversial Push traffic.
So, don’t just refuse extra monetization if your offer needs the ‘wrong’ traffic type. It can work as well — probably, not that efficiently, but still.
Join ProPush today and boost your earnings, too!
Why did we find this Follow-Along Contest case study exciting, although the final profit was not that impressively big? Because it vividly shows that ProPush.me works fine even if you have low volumes of traffic, and literally everyone can get their piece of the pie.
And don't forget to visit the Afflift forum, follow the threads, and share your own insights!
Viccarterann told us that his campaigns hadn’t been really successful lately. He thought that his main issue was that he picked the wrong offers. So he was determined to concentrate on the PropellerAds network as a very high-quality traffic source and do his best to find suitable converting offers. Here is an overview of his campaigns:
Again, his main aim was to find a profitable offer that would convert easily. We mean, he didn’t intend to spend much time on extra monetization — and luckily, he didn’t have to! All that Viccarterann needed was to add a Smart Tag from ProPush.me to this landing page — and don’t think about it again.
Thanks to his previous experience, he was pretty sure in this step: here is what he said:
— In the last few weeks, I have not sent any traffic to my landing pages, but Propush continued to generate money! Just look at the stats:
Viccarterann willingly shared his checklist for setting up campaigns — including extra monetization tools.
Here it is:
Viccarterann tried various approaches towards his PropellerAds campaigns. He spoke to his account managers in CPA networks to get the best offers, tried targeting different GEOs, and tested various landing pages — but not that it all worked out. For example, here are his stats with the three new GEOs he decided to test after the other campaigns failed:
As Viccarterann supposed, the reason might be very high competition for the chosen offers. He didn’t blame ProPush.me for it, as the similar campaigns without a ProPush Tag on the landing pages had more or less the same flow. And, what is more, unlike the main offers, ProPush.me did bring some profit:
Not bad for not doing anything — this was Viccarterrann’s verdict on his ProPush.me stats.
However, he needed to start getting profit from his main offers, too — and this time, he decided to change CPA Goal to SmartCPM. It caused a pretty large click loss, but finally highlighted an offer that had potential:
Despite the negative ROI, this offer had the chance to show green numbers later. To optimize it, Viccarterran did the creatives' A/B testing, deleted the worst converting zones with the biggest spending, and changed targeting settings to work only with the Chrome browser.
It didn’t change things much, so he decided to add one more campaign (the one with the -79% ROI on the screenshot above), and combine both campaigns with a CPA Goal model. To do it, he requested the report from the Bemob tracker (it’s a nice feature, try it for your projects, too!) and got detailed information on each campaign:
Now, having more accurate data on hand, he created a new campaign — a combination of the previous two:
Besides, he added a special Backbutton campaign:
It helped! As you see, the numbers finally became green, and the ROI has extremely boosted up to more than 100%. If there was more traffic, the profits would have been much more exciting, but anyway — it works!
ProPush.me Tag was still active, meanwhile. Again, it did its job perfectly — and only the small traffic volumes prevented Viccarterran from earning much larger amounts:
As Viccarterann said himself, ‘Not a big deal — but it’s free money!’.
The two final campaigns kept bringing small but stable profits, with positive ROI and net profits.
So did ProPush:
It turned out that you can install a ProPush Smart Tag once — and earn $1 per day doing nothing else with it. As you see, even the small traffic volumes on the main offer can result in some additional revenue from ProPush.me — so we are not just for high-rollers.
Overall, within a month, Viccarterann got almost $20 of ‘free money’, as he calls them himself.
So, Viccarterann put the ProPush Smart Tag on all landing pages he used and kept getting subscribers. The more traffic he sent, the more subscribers he got — and nothing changed in the main offers’ flow. He also noticed that when the CTR of his campaigns rose, his ProPush CR percentage also increased — and it was evident even with relatively small earnings.
The best thing Viccarterann found in ProPush is that he didn’t have to do anything special to increase the subscription rates — and he will keep using ProPush for his future campaigns.
Want to try such a lazy monetization?
You are welcome to join ProPush.me today — and share your best case studies, too!
