How to Optimize Affiliate Marketing Campaigns for Instant Profits – by Colin Dijs

Do you want to know how to properly optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns to watch your profits grow? This post is just what you’ve been looking for! 

As you know, optimization is a crucial part of the media buying process. Sure, the right traffic source generally defines where you’ll be running your ads, but it’s actually the optimization process that takes your campaigns to the next level. The level, where you start making those golden profits every affiliate marketing is dreaming about. 

Affiliate marketing basics 

Affiliate marketing heavily depends on media buying. Let’s have a quick look at the entire process.

In theory, it goes like this: you spend 10¢ to earn 20¢ which gives you a profit margin of 100%.

Basically the more you spend the more you  earn. 

Getting to the part when you can sit back and watch your profits grow basically means getting the hang of this very process and repeating it successfully over and over with different levels of investment. You can get there just by following these three simple steps:   

1. Testing
2. Optimizing
3. Scaling

In this article, I will explain the first two. Once you understand how they work, you will be able to move on to scaling. Let’s start! 

Campaign Testing 

The testing phase of the campaign is quite simple: you need at least three headlines with three images and you get a minimum of forty-five variations.

The more variations you have the easier it will be for you to learn what works for your target audience.

Then you can test different landers. Having at least two variations of a landing page will allow you to test your audience’s preferences even further.

Try using an ad tracker, like Voluum, to get a detailed overview of what is profitable and what is not. Once you get a better understanding of all the do-s and don’t-s with your niche and your target audience,  you can move on to the optimizations phase.

Campaign Optimization 

We all know that many affiliates do the rip and run. They just get a lander from the spy tool and  run with it, but what do they really have? Nothing much. All they’ll get out of this approach is a couple of dollars. That’s it. And that is still the best-case scenario for beginners. 

To get real profits, you need more. The true power in media buying is having a good flow. A flow that will stand out from the similar already-running ones and that is coherent enough for the user to understand.

There are several optimization steps for you to take at this stage. You can optimize at the ad level, the landing page, or rotate offers to see which one works best.

The real struggle behind optimization

For a single campaign, you can have a tremendous amount of creatives. However, as you keep on adding creatives throughout the campaign, it eventually gets quite difficult for you to do all this optimization manually.

Especially if you run your ads on multiple sources. As I’m trying to extensively scale my business, I’m always in front of the screens, logged to numerous platforms at the same time. Never-ending joggling between all of them often results in frustration, wasted time, and lost opportunities. 

When you have different campaigns running on different ad exchanges you need to log in to each of them and check their performance. Usually, you will be doing it multiple times per day. All this to make sure everything is running smoothly, to see what needs to be optimized and to implement any necessary changes.

My solution here is to use Voluum’s brand new automation tool called Automizer.

I was able to beta test this tool and I was amazed by the possibilities it offers. My team’s effectiveness has increased tremendously, but in the end, it was the ability to have one tool to control the entire optimization process that stole their hearts.

Voluum’s alternative to “The Optimizer” brings astonishing results. 

Automizer is available on every Voluum plan for free up to $1000 in ad spend/mo, so you can test it for yourself. 

Automate optimization process with Automizer 

Automizer allows you to integrate  Voluum panel with your traffic sources, and based on this integration perform actions on your campaigns straight from Voluum: 

• Automatically update costs on all levels
• Pause/ resume your Outbrain campaigns from Voluum
• Adjust your bids 
• Set up customizable alerts
• Create automatic rules
• Create whitelists or blacklists of various dimensions 

This is pretty amazing, as it gives you the possibility to control all your advertising from one platform. 

My favorite and most-used aspect of Automizer are rules and alerts. 

What I personally like to do is set a rule for a dimension instead of focusing on a campaign level. This way, once the rule is set, if a certain creative is not performing well, Voluum will automatically pause it. This way, I can be sure my budget will not be wasted on under-performing elements. 

The Three-Day Optimization Rule 

As an affiliate, you will be testing and optimizing different types of offers. Here’s a tip from me for those with low payouts like sweepstakes, casino, dating, SOI offers, etc. It’s a rule I created myself, and it’s called ‘’Colin Dijs’s Three-Day Rule’’. 

How does it work? For offers that have a payout of less than $15, you need to spend three times the CPA per day for three days. 

If after three days you have more than nine conversions, you scale it. If you have less, you turn it off as it is not profitable. This rule works per placement, so if you have more than a couple of placements it may drain some of your budget. But if you have a whitelist then, it would be about fifty placements, so it wouldn’t be such a big deal.

Again, Automizer comes in handy here. It will help you to control your performance by automatically pausing campaigns that are not profitable. Let’s say that your payout equals $10. All you need to do to follow my three-day rule is to set up a rule in Voluum with a condition ‘’cost’’ is ‘’higher than’’ 1,5 times CPA. If it isn’t converting, your placement will be automatically paused. 

“Thanks to rules and alerts, I can test my campaigns more efficiently. With Automizer I can really save lots of time.” 

And there’s more. Once you learn what works and what doesn’t, you can create your custom whitelists and blacklists and use them as a condition for auto-rules. This option is especially useful when your chosen traffic source doesn’t have a blacklist/whitelist feature.

You can also set rules for other parameters, basically anything you want to test. Voluum Automizer will take care of the rest, ensuring that your budget doesn’t go to waste. At the same time, Voluum automation will take care of most  of your everyday tasks. 

You get the basics – now it’s time to act! 

I’ve left the most important part for the end: Affiliate marketing is not about listening. It’s about doing! 

So get yourself a huge coffee, sign up to traffic sources, check out offers from affiliate networks, and launch your first campaign! I promise you, if you manage to really put your heart in it, it will be worth the effort. 

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out, or you’ve been doing affiliate marketing for a while, I highly recommend Voluum. This tool will make your journey with affiliate marketing much easier. You will be able to optimize campaign flows with custom rules and enhance their performance from just one platform. 

Voluum is the must-have tool for any affiliate marketer who takes their business seriously and wants to scale it to the next level.

So if you’re ready to pick up this challenge….

sign up to Voluum now!