Gambling Push Traffic Marathon. Part 5

This is part 5 of our marathon — running traffic from the Pushads.biz ad network to the Welcome.partners gambling affiliate program. Today we’re checking the results and walking through how we managed to blow $200 in a day with nothing to show for it.

Checking the First Campaign Results:

The first ad we created in the previous marathon installment was a flop. It got 30K impressions and just 26 clicks — average CTR of 0.09%. We decided to scrap it and start fresh: tweaked the old ad, tested different copy, and updated the icon.

Launched with a higher CPC bid.

Traffic picked up and CTR improved a little.
P.S. Ignore the dates — our first runs were in February but we didn’t get around to writing about it until now.

In the Welcome.partners dashboard we only saw 9 registrations — ignore the click count there, since only unique visitors are tracked, and if a visitor had already been to the casino site before, the credit goes to whoever originally sent them. We reached out to Welcome.partners support, and they suggested testing mobile traffic and switching the landing page to a registration form. So we built a new campaign for mobile, replaced the landing page with a reg form, and made a new creative.

We set the CPC to around $0.02, launched both mobile and desktop, and left the account running for a full day. Mobile results:

Desktop results:

We got 10,000 clicks and burned through $210 — all of it at a total loss. In Welcome.partners, we ended up with just 11 registrations.

Takeaways:

Total spend was $260 with zero return. We believe the main issue was a poor campaign approach. We could have cut our losses down to around $75 if we’d been actively monitoring the account and watching CTR throughout the day.

We still haven’t fully figured out why the last desktop creative hit an 11.72% CTR, but it’s most likely due to a change in how Pushads.biz now calculates CTR — it’s now based on read notifications rather than delivered ones.

Either way, the mistake was ours — we needed to be watching the account constantly. The only real downside of Pushads.biz we found is the lack of spend limits, but the team has said that feature is coming soon.

We’re not giving up on the marathon — we’ve learned from this and in the next part we’ll be testing new approaches.