Hi Stackers,
So far I've started my journey by beginning with Traffic Junky and want to share my progress so far. New to affiliate marketing I found what I thought is a reasonable adult dating offer and read that tier 2 traffic would be a good starting point as tier 1, in particular the USA is way too competitive. That in mind I scraped a few banners and busily set up my ads targeting Canada and Australia. For some reason I decided it would be best to target all networks (desktop) and see what the CTR's were like and bid very low. I knew I needed a landing page so set one up to redirect to the offer - pretty standard from what I could work out.
After day 1 I had some very limited data to play with. My LP had a CTR of about 25% average which I was okay with (tell me please if this is not where it should be). These ads performed pretty dismally with CTR of about 0.15% even after optimising the ads which was difficult as they all had poor CTR. I achieved a couple of conversions in Canada (just 0.49%!) and a couple in Australia (2.02%). Both had the same ads but Australia performed significantly better? Strange... I could have added new ads but decided to move on as ad performance generally seemed rubbish.
I was losing money but decided to test the US. I set up a campaign with scraped banners (about 5) and this time only selected what I considered 'primary spots'. This time the average CTR was around 0.2% for most of my ads with one way outperforming the others at 0.6%. I decided to 'pimp' the best performing ads by added borders, flags etc... which had a marginal improvement. At the minute I have paused all ads except for the 1 with the high CTR. Is this what you would have done or should I continue to add new ads? I'm waiting for the results over the next day to see if I can become profitable with this one ad. This ad performed very differently on different spots and I now have just the 1 spot running which performed well.
So far I've learnt that there is no reason (that I can identify yet anyway!) why some ads work and some don't - even the same ad on different spots has big differences in results.
There's been several times already when I've thought about giving up but I wanted to share my progress so far so that you follow my journey to profitability and hopefully I can get some insights from you guys along the way. If anyone has anything to add at this point please let me know!
You ripped a couple banners, and tested a few countries on traffic junky.
Marginal effort is always going to yield marginal results.
Try creating your own funnels and getting an idea of what actually works and doesn't work!
As a newbie I've just been testing the system to see if results are possible without spending too much time on creating banners/LP's initially. You are absolutely right and my intention is to spend time creating my own banners and LP's.
Everyone has to start somewhere....
I get it. Adult is definitely a difficult place to start too, due to there being so many moving pieces.
Feel free to pm me if you need any help!