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I must be mad to share these insights - My Affiliate Marketing Journey 03 (12)

12-18-2014 04:05 AM #1 kepe95 (Moderator)
I must be mad to share these insights - My Affiliate Marketing Journey 03

Besides learning Affiliate Marketing, I'm also running a lifestyle and self-development blog. I decided to publish a series of articles on my journey in affiliate marketing, geared towards everyone who never heard of affiliate marketing but wants a job which enables them to live a freedom lifestyle.

This is part 3 of the series, and I think everyone starting out can profit a lot from it. Maybe even more advanced guys, it contains a little Decisive case-study using generic banners, and filters getting applied. Enjoy!

<-- previous chapter (02)




I MUST BE MAD TO SHARE THESE INSIGHTS
- MY AFFILIATE MARKETING JOURNEY 03


Almost five weeks have passed, and even though the progress is slow, I’m moving inevitably closer to the black. In this chapter I’m going to drop several golden nuggets and insights I’ve gotten after spending over $1000 total and earning my first $300 in commissions. These are things I’ve figured out after investing a lot of time, testing, and money.

Normally I would never give information like this away, but today I feel like giving you some massive free value! Additionally, I’ll go into the basic success principles I’ve noticed in affiliate marketing, which are exactly the same as in other major life journeys.



IT’S NOT ABOUT WHAT YOU DO, IT’S ABOUT HOW FOCUSED YOU ARE

Most of my success so far has come from being very focused on one thing every day, for over a month. I’ve decided to pick a very specific niche, and just grind away at it–going all in, no matter what. This approach reminds me of a story I heard. It went along these lines:

Henry Ford wanted to build an awesome new car, and to do that he needed a new kind of engine. A team of engineers was put together, with the task of developing a revolutionary engine. After trying for some time, they told Ford that the kind of engine he wanted was impossible to build. He told them to keep trying. One year later they still had not found a way to build the engine, and they went to Ford again, telling him that it was impossible, that they wouldn’t be able to do it. He sent them back to work, with the message that as long as they were working for him, he would not give them any other task than building that engine. Some time later they succeeded at the seemingly impossible task, and revolutionized a whole industry.
When I started out a month ago, I was working with exactly the same kind of offer I’m still doing now.

Guess what my ROI looked like? I paid $100 and made just $5.
Guess what it looks like now? I spent $100 and made $80.

First of all, some people would view even the bottom number as bad, but for me it’s a massive success. There is no way you’re gonna be successful at anything if you approach it with the belief that the bottom numbers are bad.

How did this massive shift happen? It went up slowly and very inconsistently. Some days it made a massive jump, other days my income/expenses ratio declined again. The progress looks similar to playing the stock market, but if you look at the bigger picture there is a clear path. And you know where this path leads? To success! Give me four more weeks, and the same offer will begin to be profitable. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. You have to do a couple things right in order to make progress.




DECISIVE GENERIC BANNERS CASE STUDY EXAMPLE

All right, here goes the kind of experience you’re looking for if you’ve just gotten started with affiliate marketing and are using “Decisive” as a traffic source. This will burn the advantage I might have gained by having done this test, but I feel like sharing something valuable with you, just like so many people have helped and will continue to help me along the way. Over the last week I ran into a couple of problems–but problems always mean opportunity.

Decisive is not allowing generic banners anymore–for example, a banner that just says “Download” without being specific about what the download is going to be. So far I hadn’t any legit banners that performed better than those generic banners, so I did a little test.

Talking with customer support did not really clarify the situation. It seems like one of their traffic partners is not accepting those generic banners anymore. That’s why Decisive is rejecting them from the start, because the traffic partner would reject them. That means you’re only going to get little drips of traffic.



SO I CREATED FOUR CAMPAIGNS:




Then I got very lucky: all of the generic banners got approved. Now I had four campaigns, and started running them with the exact same targeting and bidding. The only difference was the banners. Here is the screenshot after one hour; the result is pretty obvious already. I let it run for a little bit longer and it stayed this way.


First let’s take a look at the reference groups:




Obviously the mixed campaigns are exactly the same. How can the results be completely different? Well, that’s pretty simple – there are always humans involved. In the campaign at the bottom someone must have manually applied a filter that’s keeping the campaign from getting more traffic. For whatever reason, the other campaign slipped through or was approved by someone else. Whatever the case, there is no filter for the exactly same campaign at the top.

Now if I had only tried the bottom campaign, I would be missing out on 90% of the traffic without even knowing. Maybe you have got campaigns that are running pretty well, and you don’t even realize there is a filter applied. If hadn’t split-tested those two campaigns, there would be no way to know that there is a filter applied to the bottom one. Scary, huh? And if I had been unlucky and the top campaign hadn’t slipped through the filters, the two campaigns would have performed the same and I would have thought they were both doing normally.

What I always do now if there are some kind of generic or borderline banners involved, is clone the campaign several times, uploading the same creatives in another order, and then split-testing those campaigns for a couple hours before going with one. If you want to be 100% safe, create one branded and 100% legit campaign as well as one extremely borderline campaign as references.

For some time I tried sneaking banners in, but in the long term, it’s not effective. It is possible and it works, but it is too time-consuming and destroys your whole testing workflow. Therefore I will not try to sneak anything in anymore. If someone from Decisive reads this, your comments are very welcome. Completely understanding all the systems and variables involved is one of my core goals. I just picked Decisive because I’m very familiar with it, but I would guess that this applies to other traffic sources on some level as well.


12-18-2014 04:06 AM #2 kepe95 (Moderator)



ALWAYS CHANGING, NEVER FAIR, MASSIVE UPS AND DOWNS

That’s what I’ve gotten from affiliate marketing, even after just five weeks in the industry. And there could not be a better skill than learning how to deal with this on a very basic level. Because these things increasingly apply to the world as a whole. If you are not able to adapt fast, if you need a stable and fair environment, you don’t even need to start because you won’t be able to compete.

And don’t make the call too early either. Let’s look at two real examples of recent campaigns.

The first one is an app install offer I ran for 100 conversions and then paused because the ROI did not look good. However, even though the offer was paused, some people had downloaded the app to their phone without having opened it–so those conversions didn’t count yet. But when they opened it the next day, it registered and I got paid. Over the next two days I made another $10 without spending anything. That was 20% of the total campaign revenue.

But the opposite can happen as well. Another campaign looked very good at first. I tried a mobile subscription for WhatsApp wallpaper. Off the bat, without any optimization or special targeting, the campaign broke even with 6 conversions. I knew that data was not statistically significant, but the final outcome would not be too far off, right? I let the campaign run for over $100, but it ended up with a big -70% ROI after a total of 12 conversions.



MAKING SURE TO ALWAYS MOVE FORWARD

Just by taking action, you are subconsciously learning thousands of small lessons. Your brain automatically picks up on patterns. That’s where just reading articles and advice can’t compete with real life experience. But besides learning subconsciously, you also need to analyse and understand the big lessons consciously.

The most important, basic thing you can do is to cast your ego away and always look at yourself first.You are the biggest variable in the game, and it’s up to you to optimize yourself to the highest level. Never be angry at those other affiliates stealing your campaign, the advertiser suddenly taking down the offer, or the traffic source suddenly sending bot traffic. There is no way this is going to help you, because you can’t change it. Instead, look at yourself and see what you can improve. How can you deal with those external issues in the best possible way? Develop a workflow and an issue management system.

Today I took one day off–no campaigns running, no new thoughts and banners and landing pages. Just taking it slow, reflecting on what I’ve done so far and where I have to go from here. I’m so excited about building something very big in affiliate marketing. Right now I still have to pay my newbie dues and move ahead to making a baseline income. But once that’s achieved, be ready for some awesome never-before-seen stuff!

///////


EXCLUSIVE EXTRA FOR STM:

Here is something that really hit me when I read about this in one of the countless self-development books I picked up.
This is what I mean when looking what you did wrong and finding the answers, without getting your ego involved. Advanced guys have to watch out for this even more than newbies.

Here is the study they did, it went something like this:
- There was a new operation done on the hearth, very risky, but with way better success chances than the previous standard operation
- Every hearth operation specialist had to learn this new operation, and at some point performs it the first time on a patient in a life or death situation
- A team scientists monitored a lot of docs performing this new operation for a long time

Here is what they found:
- Every doc doing the operation right and saving the patients life the first time was more likely to succeed the second and third and fourth .. time
- Every doc messing up the operation the first time was more likely to mess up the second one, third, fourth .. time

You would guess that even though they failed the first time, they would have learned from that failure and would be more likely to succeed the second time. However the opposite was the case. You as an affiliate marketer need to understand this study and the principles behind it! Otherwise you could get worse with every failed campaign!!!

Here is another interesting thing they found:
- Other docs were watching the operation of a doc who was messing up the operation
- Even though they were just watching, and the doc messed up, they were more likely to succeed themselves when doing their first operation

THE SOLUTION
They discovered that the docs who messed up the operation did not learn because they did not want to. They subconsciously blamed something else for the failure, for example the equipment, the nurses helping out, something with the patient, the operation method itself... Everything but themselves and their action. That's pretty understandable, because taking the blame that a patient died is really harsh. But because they blamed something else and not themselves, they also could not see what they did wrong - and therefore failed to learn from that and improve it the next time.

When they just watched the operation of another doc messing up, they could see his mistakes objectively and learn from them.

And when they did the operation successful they had no issues to learn from what they did because the succeeded.

- To apply it to affiliate marketing, make sure to never blame something external - always look at it objectively and see what you did wrong. No matter how unfair it seems, and no matter how big the blame or loss is.

12-18-2014 12:58 PM #3 Mr Green (Administrator)

Really appreciate the effort you have put in here!

The test concepts are really interesting, but the execution is off. You are spot on in thinking they toggle traffic based on factors like creatives. However, you definitely need more data to make any sort of conclusions with your tests.

I will be following your journey closely, you have definitely soaked up a lot of knowledge after just 5 weeks in AM!

12-18-2014 04:26 PM #4 kepe95 (Moderator)

Thanks MrGreen!

You're absolutely right about the amount of data. When I did this it was not with the main intention to do a case study, and at least the big difference between the top two and bottom two campaigns stood out enough for me to decide to go with the top campaign. I also already had a bit of a feeling for this, because my previous campaign got into a filter all off the sudden. I did not have the option to split-test back then, but I noticed the sudden lack of traffic. And Decisive had just sent out the generic banner policy mail. So I guessed that this must be the reason.

I still had those exact campaigns from like a week ago, and re-started them + spending a lot more this time. It's true that the results could have been different, however all the conclusions I made previously were validated again.

Here again the test environment:
- Started and stopped the campaigns at exactly the same time
- Everything is the same except the banners
- The two "Mix Generic + Specific" are both exactly the same, also exactly the same banners







It is very obvious how the top two and bottom two campaigns are getting the same kind of traffic, and that the bottom two are getting a whole lot of less traffic = filter.


(If you are wondering why there are no conversions, well I did not check the funnel again before starting this one week old campaign again, and the clicks went right to a 404. Of course this does not affect the case study because conversions do not matter here)

01-08-2015 09:41 AM #5 mcsteve (Member)

This is super interesting, thanks for sharing. I've just launched my first campaign with Decisive, and some of my banners were rejected for being misleading (using icons like exclamation mark in yellow triangle). I modified them so that they were approved, but I'll keep this in mind when looking at my traffic stats.

02-11-2015 03:55 PM #6 steveee1 (AMC Alumnus)

The study you put up about the doctors was really interesting to read! Thank you for this

02-17-2015 07:03 AM #7 walt_white (Member)

I'm a little confused, aren't the bottom two campaigns getting less volume because they have lower CPMs?

02-17-2015 07:59 AM #8 kepe95 (Moderator)

I'm a little confused, aren't the bottom two campaigns getting less volume because they have lower CPMs?
My CPM bid was the same for all campaigns. The only difference between those 4 campaigns were the banners I uploaded.

The bottom two campaigns ended up having a lower CPM (I am pretty sure I used the Smart CPA bidding Decisive has, that's why the actual CPM gets adjusted to the placements you are bidding on. The placements the bottom two campaigns were bidding on were obviously "cheaper" placements).

The situation is always a little confusing, but that's an opportunity as well. Imo a big one for me is doing tests like this one, talking to the support staff, and really figuring out the thin line between allowed and not allowed. Then I ride this line right at the edge = I am compliant and still making good money.

Later I also found one specific banner which outperformed those generic banners. So it's possible.
Also keep in mind that the situation might have changed since I wrote this Case Study. Take it more as a general lesson, and how to setup stuff like this to gain an advantage over everyone else.

02-18-2015 06:44 PM #9 walt_white (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by kepe95 View Post
The bottom two campaigns ended up having a lower CPM (I am pretty sure I used the Smart CPA bidding Decisive has, that's why the actual CPM gets adjusted to the placements you are bidding on. The placements the bottom two campaigns were bidding on were obviously "cheaper" placements).
This makes sense, I'm not familiar with Decisive and didn't realize you were using Smart bidding, all I saw were two very different CPM bid ranges.

Thanks for sharing this insight!

02-20-2015 05:07 AM #10 dlegia (Member)

The docs study is gold

03-04-2015 08:26 PM #11 vsystem (Member)

Kepe95 thank you. I will test now with a mix of generic and specific banners and only specific banners. I will let you know the results.

03-27-2015 03:59 AM #12 richard5150 (AMC Alumnus)

Thanks very much for sharing

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