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Category: Nerdy Stuff

An Actual 10 Step Guide on How to Scale a Working Campaign into Other Geos

I Am Attila 5 Comments

Happy Valentines Day 🙂

Here’s a step by step guide on how to scale a working campaign from One geo to many other geos (assuming that the offer you are running is available in other geos).

You will need to pick the top two angles and top two images from your winning campaign.    You can do the picking yourself, or your senior trusted media buyer – many of the other steps can be done by grunt labor/assistants.

We use trello for the process, and people just move the cards along the production line like a factory.  Here’s how our internal trello looks like (this is a mock up, of course I won’t screenshot our actual one with content)

Step 1 – Order translations for the winning angles in your target countries,      you can get them cheapest at www.transey.com (half price compared to OHT)

Step 2 – Get variations made of your ad – not really a must but recommended (different color border,  swap horizontal, other minor variants to have a different pixel footprint for safety reasons)  –  www.bannerslanders.com can help here or your VA!

Step 3 – Get the landing pages translated (transey) – we always run two of our best pre-landers, when the translations come in get the landers localized (changing the text, updating the images on lander in photoshop to be in the target geo language, also changing out logos/references to make sense when someone in the geo visits the lander, change people’s images/faces to that of the target audience – you want to make sure the right races show up in the right geos, etc otherwise you won’t have good enough LP CTR)

Step 4 – Get a safe site up for the geo,  populate it with local articles, etc (Safe Site Creation Service)

Step 5 – Upload the pre-landers you had localized on the safe site via FTP

Step 6 – Setup the tracker campaign, make sure the postbacks (s2s) and cloaked pixel or tracking codes are properly placed. (Voluum)

Step 7  – Setup the cloaker campaign and test to make sure it works, after you are done, set it to deny all or in review.

Step 8 –  Access the dedicated ad account you wish to run the new geo on (one geo per ad account!) and create your campaign, linking it to the safe article URL on your safe site.

Step 9 –  Wait until it gets at least 20 clicks, then turn on cloaker

Step 10 – Observe and monitor the new campaigns

*Rinse n repeat for every single geo you wish to scale to.

 

How to update SmartCJ to latest version via SSH

I Am Attila Leave a comment

run following commands in SSH

cd /path_to_scj/admin
env HTTP_HOST=yourdomain.com php update.php

Multidomain Update
You can create a file with all your domains

cd /path_to_domain/scj/admin; env HTTP_HOST=yourdomain.com php update.php
cd /path_to_domain2/scj/admin; env HTTP_HOST=yourdomain2.com php update.php

and so on and run it in SSH

sh update.sh
This way you can update all domains at once.

Note: update script doesn’t overwrite index.php or any other files at the root of your domain. So you have to copy index.php (if you use it). If you don’t want to do it each time you have 2 options:

add to update.sh something like “cp ../cgi/index.php ../../index.php ”
or create a symlink to original scj/cgi/index.php

Update rollback
There’s no built-in update rollback. The only chance is if you have created backup. Note, if you just restored mysql db – it won’t help caz you still have the same files.

Traffic Trading – A Quick Word

I Am Attila Leave a comment

I’ve been at the traffic trading game for about 4 months now, and learned a lot (much from Russians who don’t speak a damn word of English, or speak very BAD English, so I had to use Google translator, and dissect what they said to paint a perfectly understandable, and complete picture).

Traffic Trading is an art form, it is more than just adding buncha trading, forcing some hits, and leaving your script to do the rest. If you know how to trade traffic properly, you can capitalize on great growth in terms of visitors, and also ultimately make more money with the exact same site.

There are many traffic trading scripts out there, I use the built in one that comes with SmartCJ. It is very robust.

When you trade traffic, the point is prod (productivity) – prod means how much a visitor clicks when he comes from your trade partner. 1 click = 100%, 2 clicks = 200% and so on. On average, you want them to click at least 1.3 times (that’s seems to be a golden rule, minimum 130% PROD or your trade will be disabled).

Well, that’s fine and dandy but it can’t be the only thing when it comes to traffic trading… Heck no…

You have to look at unique ins/outs, you have to look at your site’s placement on their toplist (because they higher you are on a toplist, the better quality traffic you will get), you have to check their alexa, check their SE traffic stats, etc. etc.

All these metrics come into play in order to get the most from your traffic trade. Rather than get into details, I will just stop here and conclude my post.

Tips/Tricks coming in the next segment.

How to ONLY synonymize newly imported videos in group: POOL in smartCJ

I Am Attila Leave a comment

SmartCJ (at this time, version 1.50) doesn’t support the ability for you to synonymize a selected group within. So you have to get creative to do this.

What is required

A) Main smartcj tube site
B) Secondary smartcj install (for testing,etc) example: test.yoursite.com with smartcj installed in root (so admin will be test.yoursite.com/scj/admin)
C) SSH access to your server

Procedure

1) Login to main smartcj tube site, click on rotation>export
2) From the selection pick the POOL, and from the drop down menu select SOURCE URL, ALT (or Description), skip everything else, separator should be |
3) Press export
4) Now head over to the secondary (test) smartcj install, and login to the admin area
5) Click on rotation>import
6) Select URL|ALT in the drop downs, any group will do (group1, or whatever) select POOL or ACTIVE (this doesn’t matter either).
7) Paste in your list you exported from main tube and press import
8) Click on Rotation>Settings – click Synonymize tab, then turn synonymize ON, and select your desired % to synonimize, press SAVE.
9) Open an SSH to your server and login
9) Goto the cd your_domain/scj/bin
10) Then type: env HTTP_HOST=yourdomain.com php rot.php synomize_all_descriptions=true
11) Let it run, after its done you’ve synonimized all your description.
12) Click on Rotation>Export – pick URL|ALT, press export
13) Copy the list into notepad, and then head back to the main tube
14) Select Rotation>Row Massedit
15) Select URL, then ALT
16) Paste your list, and press IMPORT

This is the work around to synonimize stuff on your main tube which is in the POOL.