How to test campaigns very quickly? (11)
I come from a more traditional media strategy background, and it often takes days if not weeks to plan a successful creative campaign with targeted media placement based on solid research and strategy. How can a super-affiliate test 2-3 campaigns every single day without compromising on the strategy? Surely to stand out from the crowd you need significant investment into research and strategic thinking behind a campaign to deliver solid performance, or else you're just testing the stock-standard creatives and targets that everybody else is using?
Some insights into exactly how a campaign can be tested in a few hours for profitability would really be appreciated. I suppose its quick to do research on WRW, Quantcast, Alexa etc., but it can take days to create a good landing page or custom high quality creatives - what's the secret here?
When I first launch a mobile campaign I'm testing only one thing - how well the offer converts before optimization. All of the other work comes after that. Many offers just don't convert well on your traffic for any number of reasons, and the first test is designed to eliminate duds so you can focus your time on the winners.
Stackman wrote a great post on this: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...obile-Campaign
Different verticals may have different strategies though.
That stategy sounds more geared to building out a campaign for a specific offer/client where the due diligence of research and planning helps you execute a campaign.
But in the AM world where there are thousands of offers... would you rather spend days building a hypothesis or whip up an experiment to give you facts right now?
There are many situations where researching demographics, competitors, cultures etc. are useful for campaign creation, execution and scaling. However if we spent days on this for every single campaign we would never get anything done.
@bluebit - because affiliates are working on their own, are generally their own stakeholders, and aren't working with stringent, paranoid brand guidelines, we can iterate much faster than mainstream advertisers.
It's comparatively simple to brainstorm 20 or so potential angles for a campaign, and one or two of those are almost certain to be very unusual - there simply aren't enough digital advertisers out there that every angle's been tapped. From there, creating some ads is a matter of minutes in Photoshop - even less if you test the waters first with just text ads or creatives you already know work. Landing pages are a bit harder, but still, 30 minutes to create a few landing pages from a template is very doable.
The ensuing campaign would be laughed out of a mainstream advertising industry meeting, because it looks pretty crude a lot of the time, but crude doesn't necessarily mean ineffective! And the advantage is that an affiliate can move far, far faster - sure, our campaigns might only be half as polished, or possibly even half as good, as a carefully-planned-out media strategy, but we're launching 50x more of them. That's a lot more data to learn from and a lot more approaches tested per day.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks caurmen. It does require a different kind of mindset, which can be a bit of a challenge to perfectionists!
The fastest way to testing many campaigns in a short amount of time is finding a niche with many offers doing well.
A good example of this is mobile virus offers. Must be 10-20 converting great at the moment. Here's how to rapid fire test.
1. Get the best offers approved and ready
2. Get your 2-3 landing pages made and ready
3. Get your banners ready
4. Convert all to appropriate countries
5. Make sure you have a decent budget
6. Spend a day launching all
7. Keep the best ones, test more banners/pages and scale.
Thanks stackman, makes sense. Where can I find the best examples for mobile landing pages on this forum?
We don't share anyones pages, so its only what users share themselves. Thoroughly check the mobile section, and do some local spying on your phone
Originally Posted by bluebit
Affiliates run aggressive creatives on a wide array of (often useless) placements. If we were pressurized to explain our decisions to a department head, we'd end up doing much more research and 'strategic thinking' before launching. We wouldn't want to look reckless.
It may take days or weeks to come up with a professional and cohesive strategy, but that process is what keeps you in a job, right?
And yet being somewhat reckless is often the reason why affiliates stumble in to gold -- and why the rest of the time we come up smelling of shit.
I'm all for doing basic research before a launch.
Demographics, placements, types of audience, offer funnels... it's all worthwhile.
But how you react to the data is much more important than how you prepare for it on a whiteboard.
Launching quick and -- as the others have said -- finding some conversions (signals in the noise) is the best strategy. Particularly on mobile where I doubt a single affiliate on this board could have predicted or planned for his biggest campaign.
Got it. In media strategy with big clients, good strategists ace most of the campaigns they launch for good brands. In affiliate marketing, 9/10 campaigns fail abysmally with terrible ROI. It makes a whole lot more sense now, and it also makes the industry more dynamic, fast paced and exciting because of this.
If you want some example landing pages, there are a goodly number of mobile landers in the Big STM Landers Thread over here: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ing-Adult-more
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