Hey folks!
How do you keep the courage of your convictions when optimising campaigns?
I am asking this as a newbie who is finding it very hard to follow through with optimising.
I know as I get more experienced this will get easier, but I guess sometimes even experienced affiliates get unsure about making changes. I also get that you gotta make changes to improve your profits. I also guess as I get used to tracking my campaigns day-to-day, I'll feel more secure seeing how changes affect campaigns.
I will look at my data and carefully pick out variables I think should be blacklisted because they appear to be performing worse (maybe spending a load more than everything else for no return, much higher CPC, etc). But for whatever reason I'm finding it scary to make the changes.
This is probably not helped by the fact that last week I made some changes to my most promising campaign to date (specifically put its CPC up, which is kinda important to get it to scale with) and since then it seems to have gone very downhill! (I don't know how much of this was the Easter weekend affecting results though.)
So how do you keep the courage of your convictions to make changes to your campaigns?
Constantly reminding myself "All it takes is one campaign"
All you need is to find one working campaign and that campaign could be your million dollar campaign.
Remove as much of the emotion out of it as possible.
Build a plan which involves never going with "gut instinct". Run to statistical relevance always. Create budgets for testing and stick to them.
Imagine you're your own employee and this plan that you create for yourself is a top down directive and you must follow it to the letter of the law. Then every 30 days spend 1 day and step out of your employee role and back to your manage/director role. Look at the plan, decide what specifically about it makes sense and doesn't. Optimize the steps of the plan. Then follow it another 30 days.
Carry on this process and my guess is within 6 months you'll have an amazing plan you can hand to someone else to work.