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Joining the Pack: A Lone Wolf's Venture Into Affiliate Marketing (51)

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Hey Everyone,

I'd like to start off with a sincere thank you to everyone here who helps to make this community what it is. The old adage is true - you get what you pay for. I haven't found one thread yet that hasn't had SOME piece of actionable advice in it. So thank you to everyone who has contributed to the knowledge base here!

Anyways, I'm a bit new around here but eager to get going. So without further adieu - here's my follow along!

After some careful thought I've decided on an offer for a physical product in a fairly uncommon vertical. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm doing.
This may not be the best offer but I'll learn more picking a dud offer and running with it than I would reading for 2 weeks trying to find the "best" offer.

I'm planning on running Sitescout. From what's been said on here it looks like Sitescout is fairly challenging - especially for a beginner. I suppose its time to get ready for one bumpy ride. I already have my deposit there and can't back out now.

Yesterday I spent most of the day reading, signing up for affiliate networks, finding and offer, and creating some banners. Out of the three or four that I applied to only one got back to me in a reasonable amount of time. Great, these guys should be able to keep up with my speed of execution! So after spending a few minutes talking to Derek I was officially a member of AboveAllOffers!

Of course the first thing I did was to go and look at all the different offers. Seeing some very high EPC numbers for a bunch of "Step 2" offers and not having a clue what they were I signed up for a whole bunch of em!
My AM was quick to fill me in on what exactly a "Step 2" offer is and why it's EPC numbers are skewed. Back to the drawing board. Fast forward an hour later and I had stumbled around enough to find the offer that I liked!

I'm hoping to get my first traffic running by this weekend. So back tracking from there, I will need to

• Get a VPS
• Get CPV Lab
• Get tracking setup
• Get retargeting setup
• Figure out how to blank the referrer (is this a redirect?)
• Get launched!

VPS and CPVLab should be done today. I'm hoping to get my tracking setup today as well.

That's all for now,
Tom

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CPVLab can blank or fake referrer for you.

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Awesome, one less thing to worry about getting set up!

Thank you!

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Looks very interesting - I look forward to hearing how you get on!

You're absolutely right - pick an offer, test, and you'll learn more than you would in 2 weeks of analysis paralysis!

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A quick question,

I've been doing some research into a lot of the follow along threads and there seems to be a pretty big learning curve. Well duh Tom.
But hear me out. From what I understand, the length of time it takes to get over this learning curve is largely affected by the amount of data you have.

So having more data should then, logically, shorten the time it takes to get over that learning curve - right?

How do I get more data? It could be obtained by utilizing cheaper traffic sources which would consequently need to be paired with lower paying offers.

An offer paying $0.20 could get a creative tested for ~$0.60 (2-3x payout is a typical rule of thumb, right?). So, if the traffic base is deep enough I could, in theory, test 100 banners a day for under $100. That is definitely appealing, especially coming at this so new.


A) Run a low-payout offer for a short period of time (7 or 14 days?) to gather data as quickly as possible and start to develop a gut feeling for this stuff.

B) Dive right into Sitescout and physical product


So with that being said, A or B? Adapt to new knowledge and change plans? Or stay the course - full steam ahead?

Thanks,
Tom

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I would vote for option A.... simply because on SiteScout you can/will easily burn through a lot of money without getting anywhere...

Mistakes there, in e.g. campaign setup, split testing approach, banner styles etc. are going to be a lot more costly cf. many other traffic sources.

There's the old proverb of trying to run before walking and SiteScout + a physical product is definitely a swift jog.

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Your thinking is very solid indeed. I'd also go for A.

Note that you could combine the two - run low-payout offers on Sitescout. That way you're learning the platform at the same time. It might be a bit tougher, but gets you where you want to go.

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Option A it is then!

Thank you VERY much for the feedback. Based upon the responses I was getting to Sitescout it seemed like I would have had a very painful road ahead.

I have talked to my AM and he suggested a new game signup for a low payout offer to try. He also suggested display / PPV traffic for it and suggested Mediatraffic.

Off to Mediatraffic I go! Hopefully I'll have some preliminary numbers to put up tonight.

Thanks again for the feedback!

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I don't know if MediaTraffic would be the best place to start for PPV. Unless their deposit limit is real low and you can't start with the 1k (Traffic Vance/Lead Impact) or $500(50onRed) require.

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From searching is appears traffic volume and quality is biggest issues with Mediatraffic. Any other reasons to run from these guys?

Additionally, should it be a red flag that my AM suggested them?

It sounds like Traffic Vance or Lead Impact is the place to be with 50onRed being a distant third - right?
Looks like its time for a bit more research...

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If you are just starting, you probably should start on larger and growing channels such as Google or Facebook. The learnings you get there will be a lot more applicable in the future than on a channel such as PPV which is already small (and shrinking even further).

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Why not a mix of A & B. Play with sitescount and a few offers, then start with the physical product?

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Finally have some data!

I'm currently running two offers. Both are DL'ed at this point. Trying to focus on getting decent CTRs first.
One offer is for a physical product on Sitescout and another adult dating signup driven by Exoclick.

I know - it is all over the place. But right now I'm just trying to learn the basics.

Physical product offer
This was the first creative EVER that I ran. And it sucked.

So I paused that ad. Changed the colors and layout a bit to better match the site I was advertising on. I'm still waiting on a bit more data, but it definitely looks like an improvement at this point.




Adult Dating Offer

My second set of banners seems to be be marginally better than my physical products'. So I guess thats a good sign.

The five creatives are all variations of one angle. However this doesn't seem like quite the right way to go about things.

Would it instead be better to split test multiple angles initially? And then split test the winning angles with different variations?

It's exciting finally having some data to look at!

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Had my first conversion! Was under $5. Sitting at ~$75 in spend right now. Certainly not near ROI but I didn't expect to be at this point in time. This particular campaign had a $0.80 spend at the time of the conversion.
I need to get some landers up ASAP. DL'ing is killing me.

The new banner on the physical product ending up having the same CTR as the original. It seems -- tough -- to get someone to click on your ad if its a physical product. Perhaps my traffic source just needs to be changed. Anyway the physical product campaign has been paused for the time being.

I've been working instead on the adult dating offer. My banner CTRs continue to keep climbing upwards. Newest round of banners look like they are definitely headed in the right direction, but it's still a little too early to say for sure.

Problem: exoclick seems to keep screwing up my animated banners. After running for a while they stop loading in the campaign page.
Now, does this mean that they also will not load when displayed to the end user? Or is it exoclick just being weird?

exoclick's data seems to be screwy too. Often times I'll reload and get 0's in all my clicks until I refresh a few times. Strange.

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Congratz, sometimes a flood starts with a crack in the dam

Landers, YES! Prioritise that, nice to see you're spending with no fear man thats a good early mindset. Yah Exo is kinda buggy, you'll learn what to expect still a great source once you get past the buginess.

You just need to get some landers up, keep split testing offers/landers/banners keep spending data but make sure you're methodical about it. Make sure every test is defined, what are you trying to achieve from this test etc

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Thanks maynzie!

Landers are priority #1 today for sure.

I figured it would probably cost me about $500 to learn what didn't work. If I come in under that, then great! But I had the mindset going in that I'd lose $500 before I saw consistent green.

I ran a test the other day trying to see how the ratio between my bid price and the high bid price affected conversions. And holy shit! Bidding a little low was absolutely KILLING me! I raised my bid up a little higher than the max and had my best day so far. Conversions were much much higher and CTRs seemed much better as well.

It seems (at least with my SUPER limited testing) that "middle of the road" bids is like throwing money into the wind. Either pay a bit more for premium placement or scrape the very bottom for pennies on the dollar. Anything in the middle seems to be just asking for trouble.

It looks like that crack in the dam is widening a bit!
Ended yesterday with ~$15 in revenue on a spend of ~$19.
However, $7 of that was testing banners that under performed.
Those poor performing banners have been cut and I'll be scaling the campaign up a bit today with the winning banners to see if I can see some green!

$23 or so in revenue for the week.

This stuff is FUN! Excited to get going with landers and start building a list.

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So the chapter on adult stuff is coming to a close. My GF hated the stuff. Can't say I blame her too much.

Anyway, I ended up just upping my budget to try to go through my $200 on exoclick in the fastest amount of time possible to keep her happy. A few things I found

• Ads NEED to be changed / updated regularly. They die out super quick.
• RON can be MUCH cheaper than bidding on premium inventory ($0.13 clicks vs $0.30 clicks)
• RON also has WAAAY more volume

While I certainly wasn't profitable with this one, it was a decent learning experience.
http://i.imgur.com/ZG0ktMI.png

I still had a LOT more optimization that could have been done on that offer. I think simply adding a LP would have had me in the green on some days.

Not being one to dwell on things, I've found my next offer. It's a software install offer. Low payout, so I should be able to collect a lot of data at a reasonable price.

My first round of ads is pending approval right now.

I'm using the approval time to get a landing page going and try to get my tracking set up correctly.

More data in the next few days...

PS: After realizing creative creation was the biggest time suck I decided to change things a bit. After a quick post on CL I've got half a dozen or so resumes sitting on my desk from local graphic designers. I'll let you guys know how this pans out.

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That's a really positive sign.

If you're enjoying the journey, it makes it much easier to get to the destination.

Whenever I'm not actively running campaigns, I always find I really miss it.

Looking forward to the next update!

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The past week has been quite boring. $0 revenue. $50 in spend.

Tested a few different offers with a bunch of different angles and just couldn't get them to stick.

One was for a download / install. In hindsight, these seem to be incredibly hard to get people to convert.
They have to click your ad, download, click through numerous security warnings, and finally finish the installation for the conversion to count.
Compared to a SOI offer thats a ton of work for the end user.
I get the feeling that these sorts of offers need some VERY sneaky auto-downloads or landing pages to be profitable.

Another offer is for a game.
Pushed almost a hundred clicks to it so far and no conversions.
Something seems off with this one.
Going to continue running for today and cut it tomorrow if it keeps up this way.

I've realized too that Sitescout is terribly slow in approving ads.
Had a campaign Pending since Thursday that just got approved a few hours ago.
Yeah, yeah I know its the weekend and all. But damn, thats a long time!

So to combat that as much as possible I'll be keeping the pipeline filled with camps awaiting approval.
This will be done via the 30 day challenge.

Every day I'll be doing

• 1 new campaign for a new offer
• 1 new campaign angle
• 2 new creatives / LPs for existing campaigns to improve

So far today I've gotten two new campaigns for new offers up and going.
Hopefully Sitescout will get them approved before May so I'll have some data to look at...

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Sounds like you're doing it right! Find the golden offer and work from there.

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Had my first profitable campaign yesterday!

Made about $1 with a 10% ROI. It sure isn't much but its a start.
Unfortunately my best ad for this camp was taken down retroactively.

Anyway, this profitable camp came off of one of my two new campaigns I made the other day.

Had two conversions within the first 10 clicks.
Previously had sent >100 clicks to my last offer with ZERO conversions.
Lesson learned: Test many offers.

I think I'm ever so slowly starting to claw my way towards a profitable day.

Also, a BIG thank you to caurmen for creating his tracking tutorials.
SUPER helpful! Thanks man!

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Nice progress man - it's a nice feeling when conversions start flowing in during the first handful of clicks. Shame about the ad going down considering how long you had to wait for approval!

Keep it up, keep testing, stay motivated :-)

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No worries! Looking forward to hearing your next updates!

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Ugh.

New round of ads for my profitable camp all got rejected.
They were all quite innocent in comparison to what got accepted last time.
Interestingly, I didn't receive an email citing the reason for rejection this time.

Could they have put me on some sort of high-risk list? Could they be looking at my ads more critically now that I had one get rejected?
Or am I over thinking things here?

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Are the ads compliant? If you think they are then re-inspect their terms and if you still think they are compliant you should ask your rep or support why they were rejected.

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Thanks for the feedback.

I'm certainly no expert on compliance, but they seemed very tame.
There were no false claims, nothing explicitly sexual, and no promises.
Not even any images other than the logo.

I couldn't find any piece of the terms that I was no adhering to.
Looks like its time to open up a ticket. Thanks zeno!

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If I were you I would go straight to LI.

They have the most volume out there.

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tldr; PROFIT!

Alright I'm LONG overdue for an update here.

I ended up walking away from Sitescout. After about $800 in spend I just couldn't get anything even remotely close to breakeven there. Traffic quality seemed poor and approval times were absolutely atrocious.

So I jumped ships over to POF. I struggled with it at first, focusing too much on ROI. After realizing I just needed more data and upping my spend to $50 / day for a week I FINALLY had enough data to start looking at trends. And I now, today, I have my first profitable campaign! Sitting at a 33% ROI. Scale is still quite small here, but its nice to be making atleast a few bucks.

Takeaways for anyone following along...

• Test all kinds of shit. Like everything. I wasn't profitable until I found my balls and upped my spend to get data.
• Realize when stuff isn't working. I was bleeding money at Sitescout. And wasn't learning nearly as much as I have at POF.

Next steps for me

• Scale this campaign and push the same theme into different angles
• Keep developing my super-secret in-house software.
• Scale, Scale, Scale

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Awesome! Congratulations!

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Fantastic. Nice work!

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Been pouring through my data the past few days with a fine tooth comb looking for things I missed and started to see a pattern emerge that made my stomach drop. I had been overlooking something obvious that was costing me money AND hurting my revenues. You see, I had been optimizing ads for vanity metrics, primarily my CTRs. I was ruthlessly cutting ads with subpar CTRs and letting ads with good CTRs run.

But CTRs =/= Profit. Some of these ads with high CTRs had spent many times the offer payout without a single conversion. Conversely, many ads that were ruthlessly cut had very profitable numbers, but subpar CTRs. So I have now updated my super secret in-house software to prioritize optimization first by profit, THEN by vanity metrics. I'm also working in some automatic leak report generation features to alert me when shit starts going awry.

Also, a BIG shoutout to @cooperoil. He showed my that my CVR was less than HALF of what it should be. So if I can get that up to where it should be, I should be looking at 100%+ ROIs. Very excited about that. Thanks again man!

Things are looking good. I'm excited about what the future has in store.

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No problem, I think you are perched on the edge of a very profitable campaign!

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I see so many people make this mistake that it drives me nuts.

CTR doesn't pay your bills. You can't buy a cheeseburger with CTR.

The only thing that can pay your bills or buy you a Happy Meal at Mickey D's is profit.

CTR is not a vanity metric, but it is an intermediary one. It is one (of many) influencers of profit.

But CTR is never a goal in and of itself.

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Wohoo! Another profitable day! But something new happened... ALL of my camps were profitable! Currently at a 22% ROI for everything, with my most profitable camp hitting 147% ROI!

All metrics are looking great today. Really wasn't anything that looked liked it needed improvement.
Just need to scale and start digging into day parting. It seems that a lot of my campaigns have conversions happen only between certain times...

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Exactly, I never suggest putting too much emphasis on CTR, I don't really track it either, in the end of the day the green is what matters!

Awesome results lone_wolf! Hopefully it keeps up, keep optimising and get the scaling process happening bruz. With dayparting try not to limit your traffic too much you may find it adversely effects your ROI but only way to know is to test

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Congratulations! This is excellent!

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Looks like that was a bit of an anomaly. CVRs have dropped back to ~5% or so. I feel I've gotten CTRs, or more importantly, CPCs to a "good" level that I seem to be able to maintain pretty well. However the CVRs are what has been hurting me.

So in hopes of trying to improve CVRs... what should my high-level thought process be for getting CVRs up? Is it simply a more consistent ad -> lp -> offer page experience?

I don't think its my landers. LP CTRs are good - 35-45% generally. It just seems like my users aren't converting on the offer page.
I'm probably due to test another offer, huh?

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Test another offer.

For CVR, I would focus on the consistency of your ad > lander > offer page flow.

Are all components emanating the same angle?

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Roger that. Another offer it is.

All the text and images all convey the same angle. With the higher CTR ad images being used on the lander. And the offer logo on the lander as well. The biggest thing I can think of to increase the consistency would be using UI elements and backgrounds from the offer page.

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Cool thread. I have a feeling you will be doing very well in a month of two if you continue testing. What is the network you are using right now? Only POF?

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Yeah give us some updates Lonewolf!

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Unfortunately nothing too exciting. The coolest thing is probably another layer of automation in the software.

Seem to be averaging a -(25-30%) ROI for the past week. Have a fair number of duplicate ads "stuck" in my software that are plugging up the queue for some newer creatives. I should probably go through and scrape off all the stuck ones. I suppose that every bug I find now will be one less I'll have do deal with when I'm scaling big though.

Finally (almost!) have a LP rotator up and going and split testing a few new LPs with some cool stuff on em. One element came from something maynzie posted years ago
Hoping that these new landers will push CVRs up to a level they need to be at.

On a side note: dabbling with CSS crap certainly isn't a good use of my time. I gotta get that outsourced once I start getting some profits rolling in.

Signed up to a new network as well. It doesn't seem to cater to my vertical very well though. Think I'm just going to skip over them and find another network.
So I need to get signed up to a few more - still.

I sure hope so! I've only been running on POF right now. Have a trick up my sleeve to start getting some targeted direct buys going though. But that won't be happening until I can get a good handle on POF.

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I'm going to assume things are going well ?

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Indeed they are!

All key metrics are increasing - albeit a little slower than I'd like. Still not consistently profitable, but have been seeing much more green lately.

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Hmm... I've been seeing a huge drop in CVRs in the past week. About a -30% drop. Same landers. Very similar ads. Ad CTRs and LP CTRs have remained very similar as well - the traffic just doesn't seem to be converting anymore.

I was thinking that this offer may just have been burnt out. So I swapped a new offer in and am still getting poor CVRs. This new offer was another one from the same offer owner. Could that be part of the reason? It wasn't a big enough change / difference?

Would running completely different offers from different offer owners be the best choice here? Or am I overlooking something stupid?

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Hm - that's definitely something that would concern me, but it's probably not offer burnout per se. You would be unlikely to see a sudden drop like that.

Have you talked to the network about this, and asked if there are any technical issues on the backend?

Also, try running the same offer with a different network - or several different networks - and see what happens.

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I have talked to my network and they seemed to think everything was fine on their end. Didn't offer too much of an explanation as to why that may be happening either.

Just got the same offer from another network live this morning. Also testing a totally different offer at the original network as well. Between these hopefully I can start to figure out the cause or find something else that works even better instead!

What scared me most about this incident wasn't the dip - but it was the fact that I couldn't explain the WHY behind the sudden dip. Ups and downs are bound to happen. It's inevitable and it's something I can't do anything about. But not knowing something? I sure can change that!

Thanks again caurmen for the help!

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No worries - hope you sort it out OK!

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Woohoo! Got dayparting on for the last hour of the day. Looks like I'll be wrapping up the day with a whopping $5.29 profit at a 24% ROI! Feels like its been a LONG time since I've seen any green.

Nice to have a bit of validation that I'm on the right track. I think I've got most of the kinks worked out in my process flow now. Not perfect by any means - but a good enough start to start seeing some consistent green!

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Things have been slowly improving. I'm starting to see $5 profit during parts of the day for the past four or five days straight. Was up to $15 at one point the other day. But it's still increasing too slow.

redrummr said something that hit home for me
"the top affiliates know that you just smash and pound through the dangling carrot that is "campaign on auto-pilot""

Great, great quote. And that will be my goal for the next three weeks. You see, I've given myself a deadline. I said that if I can't hit $25 / day profit by the end of the month then I have to call it quits and walk away. The opportunity cost is just too high if I can't reach that amount of revenue in the time I've spent doing this. Especially as my skills and knowledge continue to grow. Until then though - its balls-to-the-wall, smash-and-grab mentality to the end of the month. So I can give it a true 100%.

Big focus will be scaling. I can't hit $25 / day profit when my revenues only hit $20 on a high day. It just isn't possible.

List of Actions to fix that:

• Get more offers. Sign up to more networks.
• Target wider and different demographics. Current demo seems pretty burnt.
• Smash-and-grab 8 hours a day

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Are you calling it quits on this campaign, or AM as a whole?

I'd not recommend the second one unless you have a very solid plan B or your goals have changed! (Or unless your budget is running low, of course).

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