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My 6.02% CTR, 595% ROI, Practically Hands Free Media Buy Campaign (43)

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Hey guys,

This is one of my first posts so i thought i would make it a decent one
and add some value.

I'm going to reveal to you a little campaign i had running last year which
ended up getting me some nice "hands free" profits. It's not a crazy amount
per month but it was my first real campaign where i seriously jumped in and
was successful. I guess you can call it luck.

So with that being said, lets begin.

SOME BACKGROUND
Before i started this campaign, i was one of those guys who read and "studied"
a lot but had little to show for it. I was tired of that crap... seeing no results.
Seeing other people who were "dumber" than me, making more than me. I knew
something had to change.

At that moment I told myself "screw it, lets do".

When i started taking some focused action things started to change... I ended
up buying a $300 ad spot for 30 days. Now i was committed had some money on
the line. I didn't know too much at the time but i was paying a $3 cpm (I didn't
know much better). Here were the results:



So the first month, i was losing money (-30 ROI) and the last month, i was making
595% ROI practically on autopilot. Also, i didn't know anything about starting out
with low payout offers so i was promoting a $30-$40 product. Yes, you can still
see success when you don't get everything "right"

Here was some of the revenue i was seeing with $10 spend per day:



ok enough proof. I want to take you through the process of how i got to the 595%
ROI step by step.

Step #1 - Product/Offer Selection
To begin I decided to get into the weight loss market. It’s huge. It’s been
always making money and it’s going to continue doing so. It’s one of my
“money” markets.

After I figured out what market I wanted to get into, I needed a product or
offer to promote. My criterion was simply the following:

1. It is making money (converting)
2. It provides a decent margin
3. People were selling it through paid advertising

I simply wanted to promote an offer which was already working and doing it
through paid advertising so my money worked for me.

With that being said, I decided to sell a digital weight loss product. The
margins were good... 60%-75%. I loaded up my ad spy tool called adbeat (I
like to improve my chances of succeeding from the start) and saw lots of
these “kill fat” and lose weight ads such as the ones below...



It was the second ad which caught my attention. It had a super high rank
and “ad score” so I clicked on it and landed on this following page:



I did some research and found out it was a product which had an affiliate
program. I also checked to see how much traffic it was getting. Here’s what
I saw:



That was around 400k to 500k unique visitors to a sales page. I knew this
was a solid offer that was working so I picked this as my main offer to
promote.

I also wanted a backup offer to test it against so I went to Clickbank.
I found another highly ranked offer.

To sum up...
1) I went into a market or industry which was big and people spent money
2) I chose to promote an offer which was doing well with paid traffic
3) I had 2 good weight loss offers

I was ready for the next step...


Step 2 – Where to Promote the Offer

My plan was to model what worked as much as possible and adbeat was a
“display advertising ad tool”. This meant that the ad for Customized fitness
was a display banner ad which was placed on a bunch of sites.

I didn’t feel like pleasing Google and go through the hassle of creating a
“compliant” website because this was only my first initial test. I wanted to
get results quickly.

So I ran the Customized Fat Loss URL through some tools like Quantqast and
Alexa to find out the demographic profile of people visiting the site. I also
did this with another similar high traffic weight loss offer.



The major things which stood out were this:

It was mostly females who visited the sites and a large percentage of them
were African Americans.

Ok so ideally I wanted to find a website tailored towards African American
women and had something to do with fitness or weight loss. I wanted to do a
targeted smaller ad buy. This was the plan. So I started looking...

Then it jumped out at me...

"The mission of XXXX.com is to encourage African-American women to make fitness and healthy living a priority"



BINGO!
This was right from the description “encourage African American women to
make fitness and healthy living a priority”.

It had an ad spot above the fold which was great. This was the first website
I was going to do my ad buy with.

That meant I had to move on to the next phase of the plan... Strategy &
Ads.

Step 3 – Initial Strategy & Ads

Through my self-study and experience I knew a high CTR is vital when it
comes to a fixed media buy. With that in mind I knew my ads had to be
good. I decided to take two main approaches with my ads:

1) Model Other Successful Ads
2) Either “Stick Out” or “Blend In”

This stuff works and I knew it. Sometimes you make a breakthrough by
trying something different. So I had a starting point. My plan was simple and
involved 2 phases.

Phase 1 - Find a super high CTR ad
Phase 2 – Match Landing Page to high CTR ad

So with that in mind, I began....

So my ad creation process went like this. I wanted to create 2 very different
ads with a different style to test. Then I would drill down deeper with the winner ad.

I first went to adbeat to look at high “ranking” relevant ads which fit my ad dimensions.
My ad size was 480x60.

I modeled some of the ads and designs and came up with this:



It was animated and did some cool stuff. The women got skinnier, the
button flashed etc. It was more of a curiously type of ad which I hoped
would generate lots of clicks.

For my other ad I took a screenshot of the site and the general template. I
then put it in Photoshop and started thinking. I saw some potential and went
for an ad which “blended in”.

I came up with this ad:



It blended in with the site theme and colors. It had benefits of things the
prospects wanted.

I got the ads approved and started running them. The results surprised me.

Fat > skinny (adbeat spy ad) CTR = 1.55%
Blend-In ad i created CTR = 3.15%



Both ads did awesome off the gate. A typical banner display ad CTR is
around 0.25%. But as you can see, the blend in approach totally dominated!
I knew I had to build on this.

Next thing I tried was continue with the “blend in” theme but to make it look
like a menu with multiple links. I thought I could include some benefit rich
headlines as menu links.

It worked.

4.29% CTR!

Here’s the ad:



I continued to play with this setup and type of ad. I changed the link texts,
the order and even tried animations. I eventually ended up discovering my
winning ad. One day it ended up getting a 6.02% CTR.

Here it is...



My Initial Strategy

At the very beginning, I just direct linked the ads to the offer page. This was
dumb and didn’t get me any sales.

I didn’t mind too much because I knew I had a killer ad and an offer that
was selling (from my initial research). Now it was just a matter of “building a
bridge” between the winning ad and the offer.

I first started my creating a landing page which captured their email in
exchange for the information they clicked on...




I ended up getting a 37% optin rate but the most important thing was... I
only got 1 sale out of 225 subscribers! This was after about 14 emails. I
have some ideas but I honestly didn’t know why things weren’t working better...
oh well, that’s life and marketing. You move on.

At this point, I knew I needed to change my approach. Then as I was
browsing the internet it hit me.

MY FIRST "BIGGER" BREAKTHROUGH
It was an advertisement for a joint pain product called Instaflex. However
the ad didn’t take them straight to the Instaflex website, it just “presold”
them. It was nothing special and looks something like this...



It was getting a lot of traffic and advertised a lot so just went with it...
I created my own version which followed the same selling theme as the
above page (modeling successful people works) and also matched the look
and feel to the original website.

It looked something like this:

<<< CONTINUED ON NEXT POST >>>

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Here are the main points on why I think it worked:

#1) It continued the same style as the ad into the landing page.
Do you see the two pink bars at the top and bottom of the headlines? This is
called “scent”. Conversion Optimization expert Bryan Eisenberg talks a lot
about it.

#2) It was specific and tailored to them.
You can’t really see it, because I blurred it out, but I actually called out
the reader. Something like “Dear New York Times reader”. I also made
sure to make whatever I said specifically to African American women.
So you also notice the picture? Yes, an African American woman.

#3) Used urgency.
I said you can only get the special $10 off deal for X readers until X date.
This was just a simple Date + 1 day php script.

#4) Strong, concise benefit rich copy.
You can’t see it, but I made sure my copy was honest, strong and benefit
rich. This helped.

What did all this result in?

Some sales!



**NOTE: my tracking and the beginning was pretty bad... however it was a
start.

You will also notice that the sales came from the landing page with the $10
off offer.... hence the “lander10off” tracking id.

As things progressed, I invested in a more advanced tracking solution. (cpvlab)
This is when testing go a lot easier and I noticed big jumps in my income. You
can see this in the August and September monthly income reports below...



Now I’m not going to go through all the tests I’ve done with this campaign
but I’ll go over some of the big insights and turning points.

Big Insight #1 - Test Big Changes with Strategy (optin vs. sale)
In certain situations where there is a longer buying cycle or a bigger
purchase is being made a optin with useful information is ideal. Also depends
on your strategy.

At the beginning, my strategy was to capture their email address and follow
up with offers. It didn’t work for me. It could have been for a # of factors. I
didn’t build enough trust; I went for the sale to early etc.

But the most important thing was this approach wasn’t working.
Just by switching the type of landing page, I took a campaign which was
losing money to being profitable.

In this campaign, the big turning point was when I switched from an email
capture type of landing page to a promotional type of landing page.



Big Insight #2 – It’s all about testing... everything
So how much did testing really help?

Well let’s see, let’s add up the gains I received from testing.

Let’s start with ads...

Even though I got a 1.55% CTR with my original ad, I ended up getting as
high 6.02% CTR. But since that was an all-time high, let’s use with the
4.43% it averaged over 200k impressions.

On average there were 90k impressions per month from the ad buy.

Ad 1 @ 1.55%
90,000 x 0.0155 = 1,395 clicks (to the landing page)

Ad 2 @ 4.43%
90,000 x 0.0443 = 3,987 clicks (to the landing page)

That’s 2,592 more clicks every month just by
testing and optimizing my ad creative.

Or

31,104 more clicks every year. (i wish it lasted a year )

And remember this is like getting 31,104 clicks for free since I paid a fixed
price per month.

All this gives me more changes to make money and improve my other
pages.

But let’s keep going...

How about testing and optimizing the landing page...

By testing and optimizing the landing page I made the following
improvements:

I increased the earnings per view (EPV) from something in the negative
(sorry didn’t have the right tracking setup at the beginning) then to $0.22
and then up to $0.45.

Here are just shows you what kind of difference testing and tweaking your
landing pages can make.



In this case, you can clearly see that one page can make me $0.45 per
visitor and another page will only make $0.22 per visitor. Another might lose
money.

You have to note that I didn’t wait for “statistically valid” results on all my
landing pages and tests. I didn't go through some of the guides on statistical
significance at this time basically I used my gut and intuition and moved on.

Big Insight #3 – Make Decisions Based On the Data

In this campaign, my tracking program measured many things but I based my
decisions on one single variable EPC or earning per visitor.

The process was simple. I create a test containing 2 landing pages. 1 was
the “control” (best landing page so far) and there was a challenger (the new
landing page). I let the traffic run and then check my excel spreadsheet and
look at the numbers...

Here’s how a typical test would look like on excel for me:



$0.34 vs. $0.49

Hmm... That’s an easy one.

$0.49

Done... Next test.

So I would keep the winning landing page and then create a new page to test it
against.

The numbers don’t lie.

Conclusion

Well that's about it. I jumped into this campaign and somehow made it profitable
for me. I know this campaign isn't a 50k per month campaign but i hope the
process i went though can help someone.

I'm looking to get back into this amazing world of stacking money aka affiliate
marketing. So if anyone is looking for another member in a mastermind, don't
hesitate to hit me up. I'm interested.

I'll tell you this, it was a pretty freak'n awesome feeling when you have
a campaign going well for you like this one did for me... I remember one day
helping my brother replace his shingles on his roof. At lunch, we are eating and
having a beer. When i checked my phone, i saw $250 in revenue. $10 spent.

Lets go and make some more of those awesome days happen.

Cheers,
Natural_cg

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Great post looking fwd to your followups.

One point of advice whenever I make posts with images I just host them at imgur or some other external location. VBulletin sucks when uploading images it compresses/resizes them to an almost unreadable size.

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I fixed the image links. It looks much better now.

There is no follow ups for this campaign. The publisher kicked me out. I'm assuming because i did such a good job blending in where the visitors didn't know advertiser from publisher

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Thanks for the post.. seeing those CB receipt IDs brings back good memories

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Amazing posted, interesting to see a stacker on clickbank

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Love seeing others campaigns, sparks so much creativity. Nice ROI too

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Excellent post, thanks!

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Nice way to kick off your first couple posts!

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@everyone

Thanks guys. It was pretty funny, at one point in the campaign, the publisher
wanted to make more money and added another ad slot right under mine. This totally killed my
"blend-in" look.

With one other banner spot under me, i was still profitable however, it got
worst...

They added two ad slot under me and after they couldn't find anyone to advertise for about
a week or two. Then they kicked me off

See pic:

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Great post, thank you.

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Going to research a bit.

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Thanks for sharing.

That site still sells ad placement. I am not sure why they booted you off.
May be complaints regarding product? False authority over blog's reader ( 'blend in' strategy ) ?

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great thread... nice to see the whole process and loosing first... then the switches to make it profitable.

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Yeah its nice when the "zigging and zagging" you do turns out to be profitable.

Not a prob.

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Bro! Indian?

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Great post, but i don't get whats holding you for making a BUNCH of CA$H?
You have a winning strategy and you were able to squeez a whopping 600% ROI of only one website.
There is a lot of websites similar to BGR and where you buy ads isn't the only place to buy.

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Thanks a lot, appreciate it.

To be honest, it was probably my own made up excuses which were holding me back. Now i joined STM and got the right mindset/focus so things will change.

natural_cg

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Great post!

Serves as a good reminder to me that clickbank has still got good offers that can produce a nice ROI.

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Does clickbank still deduct commissions on refunded or charge backed conversions?

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yes they do + insurance fee which is getting released after some period

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EPIC Thread! You have the workflow of a champion. Problem solving like a boss. Very impressed mate!

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Yes.

Clickbank is awesome if you want to be a merchant and want the least path of resistance. They'll do the CRM, processing, customer service, digital delivery. You just build a lander, upload some content and build you funnel after the sale. Can complain about what they do wrong but they also do a lot of stuff right. We use them a lot for building and testing products at first.

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Great Post! thanks for sharing!

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Man, this is golden! Love the part when you switched from opt-in to advertorial style. Were you still collecting opt-ins at this point or did you go straight to offer?

I'd also love some insight as to what factors you were split testing. Headlines, images, length of copy, etc.?

Great post!

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Fantastic thread mate, very thankful for the share!

I've done quite a bit with Clickbank as well, the amount of products and angles you can get from there is insane, there are MANY MANY MANY sites out there just begging to be utilised not something to be overlooked in the aff space

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I originally collected emails and then did a 14 day follow up. Then i switched
to strait to offer and stuck with that because that made me money right away.

Why get in the way of people when they want to buy

As for Insights...

1) Changing Offers Worked.
At the beginning, i was promoting offer A and it was doing ok. Then i just tried
a test where i changed the lp text to promote another product. The results?
a lot more sales and also more refunds but more profit or EPC.

LP Style
Changing landing page style worked (see case study)

Customized "blend in" ad worked
This worked for me. I guess you would need a highly trafficked placement to
make this worth your while.

Generally speaking, these broad changes brought about the biggest results for me.

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Super thread! Good job quickly testing out the winners and making those adjustments.

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fantastic post.

i got my start in AM with clickbank. it's amazing how well some of the offers on there convert.

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Great post man! There are a few other things to be learned from your experience

1) Just do it! When you launch campaigns, you start perceiving your surroundings differently. You're much more aware and sensitive to ads. As a result, you start picking up golden nuggets by looking at similar ads and landing pages, and when you apply them to your campaigns with a twist, you win.

2) Make your ads STAND OUT. The ad that got a low CTR failed because it looked too much like what you see in a typical weight loss ad. The ads that won were winners because they stood out. In a land of professionally designed ads, "ugly" wins out as we see in your case.

3) Always use a landing page. When you go for the sale too early as is done typically with direct linking, you risk turning off the visitor because they don't trust you yet. Also, when you use a landing page you're allowed to be more creative with your ads and create winning campaigns that separate you from the losers.

For example, if you create an ad that talks about 5 veggies that work for weight loss, you must link it to a bridge page that makes the connection between those 5 veggies and the weight loss product. If you direct link in this instance, the connection between 5 veggies and pulling out your credit card to purchase this awesome weight loss product is too vague and seems void of any connections.

Overall, great read! Thanks for posting.

Btw, what did you use to create your landing pages?

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This is great! Thank you for this detailed explanation!

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Sorry for the delay. I used dreamweaver and a php file.

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Hey thanks for the case study,

did you direct buy or go through a network?

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Network

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great share! Thank you for this detailed explanation!

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by the way you you used any media buys PPC network or directly bought traffic from targeted website ?

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Natural_CG, thanks for posting this. Seriously. Lots of value.
Love to see other people's strategies and thought processes.
Logical. Simple. Intelligent planning.

I am very much interested in the mindset that was holding you back. I am very new to the media buying game, but it seems to me that you have the proper mindset for profiting at a much higher level than ~$2k/month.

So what was it that prevented you from scaling this up to $10k/mo or higher?
Distractions? Lack of confidence? Lack of experience? Lack of time? Lack of funds? Lack of drive?

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Never went direct, used a self serve media buy platform.

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Pain and simple... I wasn't 100% committed to affiliate marketing at the time, so I didn't do whatever it took to take it to the next level... as well as overcome the bigger problems which happened at the end.

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Nice guide man, this has a ton of great info!

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Willing to share?

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Amazing share and fantastic information. I am going through the exact same issues with a few campaigns and employing the same remedies. Thanks for reminding me of some great key points!

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I love you approach... On this forum its all about going to a ad network and buy in and true testing you find the winning banner/LP and websites etc..... With this way you can test your banners/LP's on a site from where you know it has to generate clicks and if you have a winning banner you can expand to other ad networks etc.... Or is this a foolish look of a newbie like myself?

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