Checklist 01 · by Alina Bondar · updated 2026-08-14
Your first push campaign
Twelve settings decide week one, and none of them is the creative. Entry is cheap: a Push.House account opens from a $50 top-up, RichAds from $150. Losing money is cheaper still, which is why this list exists. Work it top to bottom before a single creative uploads, and keep $500 to $1,500 per offer reserved for the learning phase. The list runs in the order the decisions actually block each other: budget first, network second, GEO math third, because a wrong answer early makes every later setting cosmetic.
Reserve a real testing budget
Plan $500 to $1,500 per offer for the learning phase, separate from the network deposit. The deposit is an entry ticket; the testing budget is what buys data. Accounts that arrive with $100 total and expectations of profit in week one leave with neither.
Pick the network by job, not by review score
Push.House activates from a $50 top-up ($70 for third-party traffic, $200 if you target India) and suits cheap Tier-2/3 tests. RichAds needs $150 and pays that back in GEO breadth and manager depth from the $500 tier. PropellerAds at $100 brings CPA-goal bidding that automates part of the optimization. Start with one, add the second after your first whitelist exists.
Do the GEO arithmetic before anything else
A US push click averages around $0.21; France sits near $0.10; high-volume Tier-2/3 clicks stay under $0.07. Divide your payout by the click price and ask how many clicks a conversion may cost before the offer breaks. If a $1.80 sweeps payout needs a conversion every eight US clicks, you are not running a campaign, you are running a countdown.
Choose classic, in-page, or both
Classic push reaches subscriber lists and excludes iOS. In-page renders on-page, reaches iOS, and fatigues slower. If the budget allows two campaigns, split them from day one; the formats price and decay differently enough that blended data misleads.
Set the tracker up first
No spend before a test conversion lands in the right tracker column. Voluum starts at $149 a month, RedTrack at $99; either beats flying blind. The full wiring order lives in the postback checklist.
Bid from the floor, not from fear
Open at or near the network's minimum bid for the GEO and format, then ladder up only where volume stalls. RichAds push floors sit at $0.005 CPC; paying triple the floor on day one buys speed, not learning.
Cap frequency at 1 to 2 per day
A user who ignored your creative twice today is not warming up to it. Caps protect both the budget and, since Chrome 144 began scoring sender engagement in January 2026, the inventory quality you are buying into.
Cap daily budget per campaign
Set the daily cap at 10 to 15 times your target cost per conversion. Lower and the campaign cannot learn; higher and one bad zone eats the week overnight, literally, because Tier-3 traffic peaks while you sleep.
Start broad on sources, with kill rules written down
Open targeting is fine on day one if every source ID has a pre-written threshold: ours default to kill after 400 clicks without a conversion. The whitelist checklist covers the full method.
Upload at least ten creatives
One creative is an opinion. Ten give the network's rotation something to optimize and give you a fatigue bench. Twenty is better; that is the entire logic of our creative packs.
Schedule by the GEO's clock
Daypart to the target GEO's waking hours in its timezone, not yours. Manila noon is Tallinn 07:00. Every network misreport we have debugged in a first campaign traced to someone reading charts in the wrong timezone.
Write the week-one review before launch
Decide now what numbers mean scale, hold, or stop, and put them in a document with a date. A campaign judged by mood gets judged generously, and generously judged campaigns lose money politely for months.
After week one
If the campaign survived its own review document, the next moves are the whitelist checklist and a proper creative pack brief. If it didn't, check the GEO fit math before blaming the ads; in our experience the geography is guilty more often than the creative. And if the tracker numbers look strange, they probably are: postbacks break quietly.