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My First Profitable Campaign Made $1,000/Day: A Strategy-Focused Case Study (13)

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Hey everyone,

I'm in the process of completing a series of case studies for a few high-paying marketing jobs now that I'm nearly finished with university.

My target audience are corporate types on online user acquisition teams and conversion rate consultancies. I expect that most of these readers are reasonably sophisticated. It also needs to be easy enough to follow so that a non-technical HR staff member or affiliate marketing newbie would be able to understand it.

This is a work in progress and I would love honest feedback from affiliates and online marketers. Please let me know what you liked, didn't like, and what could be improved in the piece.

Some things that people have already mentioned to me include:

• Show failed creatives
• Create appropriate graphs (Ex: CTR/CPC Scaling)
• Better formatting / more readable

The most important feedback to me will be content-based. Anyone can suggest better formatting - only other marketers can suggest content-related changes.

Here's a link to the case study on Google Drive: removed for editing

Note: If you're seeing two pages at once, hit the "Zoom In" button once. Google Drive may have degraded my images slightly - they don't look like that on the final version.

I hope that newbies can see the detail that can go into properly planning and executing a simple direct-linked campaign.

Feel free to add me on LinkedIn. I need more contacts!

Thanks,
ATG

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How you calculate the max cpc $0.05 ?

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"Given an optimistic direct-linked conversion rate of 8%, we’ll have to gather 9,375 clicks per day to the offer to reach our target revenue. Then, if we know that our maximum daily budget is $500, we can find that our “high-end” CPC costs come out to around $0.05 per click."

$500 / 9,375 = 0.05333

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I don't mean to be harsh, but it reads like this is written for a bizop blog or a StackThatMoney post.

You need to learn how to write more clearly and with impact for a more sophisticated corporate audience. If you wrote like this while employed at any of the management consulting firms I have worked for in the past, you would be fired on the spot.

This is a shame, as there probably are some good insights buried in there.

At the very least, you should learn Minto and how to properly structure and support the case study around the three key points you want your audience to take away.

If you are serious about learning how to write to this type of audience, study everything here

http://www.amazon.com/The-Pyramid-Pr...dp/027303345X/ (Only get the 1995 version)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0273713329/

and practice over and over again.

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Hey cmdeal,

Thanks for the feedback. I just ordered a copy of Pyramid Principle the other day and it should arrive soon. The McKinsey guy that runs www.caseinterview.com talks a lot about it.

I think the biggest elements that turned you off were probably the headline/title, lack of proper structuring, and a poor conclusion. I agree that none of these are up to MBB standards.

The biggest problem I'm trying to tackle at this stage relates to content. I've already planned on having to reorder and reformat most of the paper once I finalize / reduce / expand the core material.

I'm also a bit unsure how to apply the management consulting case format to these narrative-driven case studies, given that this is essentially a story about a campaign that I've created rather than a management / business strategy recommendation.

Thanks!

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Hey there,

The problem is that without proper structure and logic, even the most valuable insights get lost. Try to identify the top three insights you want to communicate and then ruthlessly cut anything which does not relate to these three takeaways. Just by doing this, the case studies will become much more powerful.

Look at something like http://www.conversion-rate-experts.c...ne-case-study/ and compare with yours.

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Thanks again.

I'll be restructuring and re-releasing the case study soon.

My worry is that distilling the content to roughly 20% the size and only three major points will force me to remove the decision-making processes from the paper.

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Great effort mate. Definitely awesome as a case study to give to other marketers, newbies and so on, but lesser so for an executive audience.

Here are my thoughts:

1. As cmdeal mentioned, for inclusion in a CV or similar it would be wise to eliminate a lot of the pedagogic parts. I have little knowledge about how this would be structured for the purposes you are pursuing.

2. Should it be written primarily in the passive/active voice...? I'm a scientist so it's hard for me to suggest otherwise! E.g.

could become
3. I think the best way forward would be designing a new written structure for the study in the form of headings, i.e. sections. If the headings are suitably chosen then they will help marshal the reader (and writer!) through the case study and will likely make your important insights more cogent. It will also make it easier to cull sections that contribute little to what you are trying to communicate to agencies/executives/etc.

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^^^ This

If you want it to appeal to "corporate types" then you are missing the mark. They are looking for VERY different things.

Its not a big deal though. Hire someone on Odesk to rewrite it for you.

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For clarification, is the action-related core content of "I did A, then B, C didn't work but I learned D, so therefore I tried E and it worked!" acceptable? I don't want to remove tried-and-failed content because those test results led me to my profitable campaign.

The feedback I've gotten prior to posting here has basically been positive and along the lines of "I learned a ton about how to plan a campaign on a budget". I'm glad to hear critical responses here.

To be honest, I hadn't planned on making a set number of important points at all. My goal was simply to tell a story about creating a profitable campaign with as much relevant detail as possible, even including methods I used at the time that I would know are non-optimal today. It seems that this is NOT the correct way to do this? My favorite parts of case studies were always the details about what didn't work on a campaign.

The way I understand it the core problem with the paper are:
A) Poor formatting. The case study is told in a narrative format and the primary take-aways are not presented clearly.
B) Lots of non-actionable / "side" content. I felt that this would give context to the campaign, and everyone generally disagrees.
C) Lack of images and figures post-planning.

What I haven't heard much of is that "the core content / strategy is bad". Is that accurate?

Thanks again guys!

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The first step to solving any problem is first understanding the problem you are trying to solve.

You need to ask yourself, what problem am I trying to solve with these case studies? If it is to get a job from a marketing consulting firm, then you need to you need to adapt your writing to this audience.

The focus of a case study targeted at corporations is communicating actionable, exportable insights.

Repeat this to yourself

It is not on telling the companies how hard you worked.

It is not on relating what you were thinking on a certain day.

It is certainly not documenting detailed minutiae: "On day one, Bill from accounting tried to calculate pension liabilities by using a discount rate of 3%. He ran into a problem with his Excel Macro, however, so he had to ask Sally from IT to help him. But Sally was busy until 4 p.m. so he had to wait until then. Finally Sally fixed the problem, but she didn't use a macro, she just used the VLOOKUP function in Excel. The next day, Bill he tried to also run the number with a discount rate of 3.5%. Afterwards, he got chewed out by the assistant accounting manager because the 3.5% discount rate may not be in accordance with IAS/IFRS although it may pass under US GAAP."

Every single successful endeavour in business (and indeed in life) is usually the result of countless failures. Thomas Edison tried 10,000 different materials until he figured out how the light bulb could work. James Dyson made over 5,000 prototypes before he created his hoover (vacuum cleaner).

Now imagine what it would like if you were forced to read through every one of their 5-10,000 failures.

Not very interesting.

You need to ask yourself, what problem am I trying to solve with these case studies?

I mentioned this several times before, but just focus on 3 actionable, exportable insights. They don't have to be ground shattering, but they also should not be blindingly obvious. You should then structure your case study around those three points.

You don't get any medals here for length. You can probably compress the content length of this by a good 50%.

Focus much, much less on process, much much more on the actionable insights. Any discussion of process should take up less than 20% of your total word count. Furthermore, if you write about processes, you should elevate this to a higher level of abstraction by focusing your discussion on frameworks rather than a laundry list of "I did this, then I did this, then I decided to to that etc. etc." Save all of that stuff for the interview itself when you get asked more detailed questions about your case.

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Exactly what I needed to hear. Thanks!

New version underway!

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I'm halfway through How to make an IMPACT by Jon Snow (recommended by cmdeal on the previous page).

I feel like I'm reading Cashvertising for business writing. My mind has been blown at least three times.

I highly recommend anyone read it.

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