How to Make Any Campaign Profitable by Optimizing Your ROI? Guest Post by Addiliate

“This campaign doesn’t convert”.

This is the single biggest problem of beginner affiliates. They pick an offer, set it up on a traffic source, send $50-$100 traffic and lose the majority of their investment. They come back to us and think that the campaign they ‘tested’ doesn’t convert. Feeling frustrated and confused as ‘this was a good campaign’ they give up and try another campaign and probably the same happens there.

What most beginning affiliates don’t get is it is not the campaign that doesn’t work, it is their approach that doesn’t work. In order to make a campaign work, you will need to combine 3 elements and only if they are all present you will ever be able to scale up with a positive ROI. This approach is very similar on most Traffic Sources, so it doesn’t really matter if you buy on Facebook, Native, Pop or anywhere else.

Our Affiliate Marketing Success Formulate consists of 3 elements:

• Offer Campaig
• Audiences and Traffic Analysis
• Funnel and Marketing Creatives

The key towards a positive ROI is in the campaign optimization of your ROI using performance data obtained from your traffic and your marketing creatives. We compare it with looking for gold, the chances that you directly hit a gold mine are very low, but if you are looking in the right direction and you analyze carefully the results and processes, the chances you will find it are high (if you are willing to get your hands dirty).

 

Step 1: Optimize ROI by Finding the Right Audience Using Traffic Analysis

After you have selected a campaign you want to test, the first element of a successful campaign is targeting the right audience for that specific campaign. Differences in CR% (or EPC) can be huge, we’ve seen differences of up to 500% or even worse, sometimes a campaign simply doesn’t convert on a specific element (like for instance a specific browser or a geo). So, if you are buying on non/low-converting audiences, you’re basically throw money down the drain and your overall ROI might be negative. Cutting out those low audiences and increase your bids on the high-converting audiences will significantly increase your chances of getting a positive ROI.

Additionally, Days of the Week or Hours of the Day are absolute musts to analyze as most campaigns (or even entire verticals) work better on specific timeframes or days.

Most Traffic Sources let you target users by the metrics below so you can cut out the audiences that do not convert. Additionally, in order to achieve successful results it is absolutely necessary to adapt your bids per element:

• Device type
• Device Brand (& Model)
• OS (Version)
• Browser (Version)
• Country
• Language
• Day of the week
• Hour of the day

You will be able to find all those data points in your Voluum account. The most modern Affiliate Networks (Like Addiliate) will also give you this crucial information.

Doing this analysis and campaign optimization on a daily/weekly basis will significantly increase your ROI and most likely already make your campaign profitable.

Step 2: Optimize ROI by Finding the Perfect Funnel Using Marketing Creatives

The second element of optimizing your ROI is through analysis of the funnel and optimization of marketing creatives. The entire creative funnel of a campaign consists of several elements and each of them individually (and all together) should be optimized in order to boost your ROI.

1. Creative in Traffic source, both image and text
2. Prelander
3. Landing Page

We see most Super-Affiliates prefer to use their own marketing creatives and Prelanders as they usually have great knowledge about what works best. However, beginners ask for a lot of advice on what creatives to use as they have had fewer success cases and experience with the marketing funnel. We’ll provide you below with our general experience for each of the steps. f you need more info or details a specific campaign, please reach out to your AM.

Creative in Traffic Source (Image and Text)

So the most important element here is to find the right balance between CTR% and relevance. As in Affiliate Marketing, you get only paid per conversion. There is no need to work on ‘Clickbait-like’ creatives as you will mainly get non-interested clicks that won’t convert anyway. Even less if you are paying CPC (like in Native) as you will end up paying for non-converting clicks.

Relevance to the ads is equally important as the clicks will have to convert as well. We recommend first finding relevance (a CR% that is profitable for you) and once you have it, try to increase your reach by adding more creatives with a higher CTR%. When you do that it is important to watch closely your CR% so it doesn’t go down.

Prelander

We consider this the most important element of the creative funnel as here you really ‘Sell’ your offer. A great Prelander can significantly increase your final CR% as users are more interested in the offer after reading your Prelander. It depends on your tech skills if you want to build it yourself (with inspiration of others) or simply use a service like ClickFunnels or UnBounce to build great Prelanders easily.

Landing page

Next, the user lands on the Landing page where he/she is ready to convert. Usually, affiliates have no impact on the Landing page although some Advertisers are able to build custom-landing pages for specific funnels. If you have a very specific funnel, we recommend you check this with your AM as is can greatly improve your CR%.

Additionally, most advertisers do have more than 1 Landing page available and testing several ones could greatly improve your ROI.

How much does this optimizing ROI cost me?

Optimizing ROI can be a costly process as you will need to spend several hundreds (or thousands) of USD in order to test all your elements in the funnel which, for most beginning Affiliates, is simply too expensive. This is the main entry barrier for most Affiliates and what distinguishes the Super Affiliates from the Beginners. 

However, there is a solution for this issue that can reduce significantly the testing costs: Use Predictive Data.

Most Affiliate Networks already show you metrics like EPC or info regarding the volumes specific per offers, however, these are usually partly relevant as they only give you general info and do not specifically tell you which audience convert best. Additionally, they can be very skewed (or even manipulated) as somebody running POP traffic will get the EPC down or the use of a Prelander will always get the CR% up. The general number does not tell you much apart from that the offer, in general, can have potential.

In Addiliate, we give you additional information regarding specific Predictive Data like the average CR% per device type / OS / Browser etc.. So, we tell you if Offers convert better on a Desktop or a Mobile, better on Android or iOS or better on Chrome or Firefox. By having this data, you can significantly reduce your testing budget as you can directly cut out the non/low-converting audiences and focus directly on the high-converting ones.

The road to a successful campaign is through data

Affiliate Marketing is becoming an increasingly competitive space and it is not as simple anymore as just launch a campaign on Facebook and see the money rolling in. You really have to push on the details and squeeze the ROI by focusing on Performance Data on every single part of the Funnel using audiences and marketing creatives.