Hey Guys,
So my business partner and I are a bit stuck on this one and we figured we would bring it to the wisdom of STM in a quest for greater ROI.
We have an offer that we are promoting on various native ad platforms that is a well converting lander. We have been running this offer for a few months now (direct linking), and slowly but surely we started small on one traffic source and then spread to more similar traffic sources and other device types as we gained ROI and scale on our initial traffic source through offer landing page and ad split tests.
As we have continued to scale our campaigns we have continued to test ads, placements, and device types across various native ads traffic sources to the point where we are now at $2,000-$3,000 in daily revenue. The only problem is, as you can tell from the title, is that our ROI is essentially flexing around break even and in and out of profit. We have tested and optimized off a lot of bad or under performing placements, and at the moment are left with only targets that have either had a historically positive ROI, or don’t have statistical significance yet.
Technologically speaking:
Currently we are running the campaigns through Prosper202 set up on Beyond hosting’s best VPS with Litespeed, and we are using a Storm On Demand VPS for landing pages (even though we are not currently using landing pages for this campaign) as well as Max CDN for the images on our landing pages (for when we have previously tested some landers).
However, we plan to: Switch to
Concerning the Ad Angle:
The ads we are running now are either a variation of ads that where being used to promote a very similar product at massive spend, in other words a well tested converter for this niche, and additionally an ad that’s proven a consistent earner for nearly a year in this niche. While the ads we are using have generated EPC’s that have made profit now and then, they have mostly hovered around the same CPC we are paying.
One thing we have considered is that while we have been raising CPC’s to maintain a decent volume of traffic, we have lost some of our ROI in the process. What we will do now is take the same ad that’s been working and alter the image and headline ever so slightly to increase CTR and volume, rather than upping the bid.
Concerning Device Targeting:
We started out targeting desktop through native ads, and we have since expanded to targeting tablet and mobile traffic, which has now turned into the majority of our traffic. Our offer lander is mobile optimized and everything seems to be going fairly well in terms of generating consistent sales, its just that to maintain a good placement we have had to raise our bids, to where we are now breaking even roughly.
Landing pages
We have tested landing pages before with this offer with minimal success, but we know that they can be used in this niche for this type of offer. We will most likely take an advertorial that we know is working for a very similar product in this niche, change out some of the copy and images for versions that are more specific to our offer, and then see how that works. We also intend to employ exit pops, stay behind pages, retargeting and other scripts on our new landers to further boost ROI.
Some of the main changes we are planning i have mentioned above but i will mention them again here along with some of the additional changes we are planning:
We are upgrading our whole tracking system. This should make our links faster, which don’t have a speed problem at the moment, but this should improve ROI especially since we are running so much mobile traffic. This includes switching to
We are going to start testing landing pages again, creating a new lander based on another lander that has been proven successful for products in this niche. We will also employ exit pops and pop unders to further help increase ROI.
Rather than increasing our bid to get more traffic we are going to focus on improving the CTR of our ads, without damaging the quality. That may include playing around with the brightness, contrast, etc of our image, or trying other very similar images.
We plan to implement retargeting on our landing page, and retargeting our conversions with a similar product.
Continuing to trim off bad placements. Within each of the traffic sources that we are promoting this offer there are a ton of placements that just trickle in traffic, and little by little we are pausing them if they don’t convert after a certain spend, or if its not profitable.
We essentially are aiming to take what we have now and make it work at least 30% better as soon as possible. We are really looking at some nice volume and with a few tweaks, we can turn our current campaign into a nice earner, and scale it further. I know that with the help of STM, we can certainly achieve our goals, and I look forward to everyone input.
You've mentioned testing out the angles, ads, and landers. Have you split tested the same offer from other networks? Split tested similar offers? How's your lead quality? Have you asked for a pay bump? How about managed or direct buys instead of self serve?
Hey man, we have tested multiple offers, lead quality is good and we have received several pay bumps as well. We have looked into buying direct and will be testing soon but most of the direct buys are CPM and expensive so the EPC might not be there to make up for it. Your suggestions are much appreciated man. Thanks!