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Built a new website and started marketing - I need your advice! (10)

11-08-2015 08:23 AM #1 bluedoors (Member)
Built a new website and started marketing - I need your advice!

Hi STMers,

I would very much appreciate your affiliate marketing advice on which option I choose going forward. If you have a few minutes, please read through the below and comment with your thoughts.

The Product

I have recently launched a betting system website. The user journey is:

long form landing page > user signs up (lead) we show them in detail the system -> user decides whether to buy system.

I have performed user testing across the user journey made improvements, so hopefully the site should sufficiently convert though we will always be analysing to plug leaks.

Marketing Plan

The plan is to test 3 marketing channels and see if any are profitable. Our sales LTV is conservatively $50.

If we find a profitable channel, we will focus our marketing spend on that particular marketing channel.

Marketing channels:

Facebook ads
Media - banners
Media - native (outbrain/taboola)

Note we are also reaching out to bloggers/influencers/friends and a referral programme.

(Poor!) Facebook Results So Far

Yesterday we commenced Facebook ads (3 target markets each with 3 ads), the figures:

spent $157
generating 385 clicks (CPC $0.40) to our long form sales page
from these 385 clicks, we generated 4 lead (CPL $38)

Our target conversion rate from lead to sale is 20% so we have (in theory) made a 0.8 sale at $50 = $40 revenue.

So overall, these 4 leads we will only make an estimated $40 versus the $150 cost.

Going forward to turn a profit, we therefore either need to 4x the conversion of our long form sales page or reduce our CPC by 4x (or we could increase $50 LTV or increase 20% lead to sales but please assume this is fixed for the purpose of this).

Where Do I Go For Here?

We need to either:

Option 1) Optimise Facebook Ads - Reduce Facebook CPC by 4x from $0.4 to $0.1 e.g improve targeting/image/copy

Option 2) Try Other Marketing Channels - Try the other 2 marketing channels (banners and native) , could produce a $0.1 CPC. For example, we could try SiteScout for banners and Tablooa for native ads.

Option 3) Improve Landing Page - Improve the conversion rate of the sales page (without reducing lead quality) from 1% to 4% or try a significantly different approach (e.g. short page form to increase leads but reduce quality).

Q1. Which option(s) would you take from here?

Is it spewing money to try different marketing channels until we’ve optimised Facebook and the landing page?

I am currently thinking of a mix of Option 1 and Option 3 - split test significantly different landing pages and correspondingly each with their own specific marketing message on the FB ad.

Q2. Would any STMers be interested in a weekly call to help me?

I have knowledge in conversion (copy/imagery) but not the practical side of running tests on SiteScout, Taboola and relatively inexperienced on Facebook. I am more of a ‘product’ type person, however very keen to learn about AM. Would there be any STM member interested in helping me out? e.g. a weekly 1 hour call for a suitable $ hourly fee ($50/hr?) to review our campaigns and discuss strategy? If so, please let me know

11-08-2015 10:17 AM #2 cmdeal (Veteran Member)

Your payout/LTV is really low. Depending on geography you are in, you will be competing with affiliate that get well over $XXX.XX per signum for traffic.

11-08-2015 11:39 AM #3 bluedoors (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by cmdeal View Post
Your payout/LTV is really low. Depending on geography you are in, you will be competing with affiliate that get well over $XXX.XX per signum for traffic.
Hi cmdeal,

Thanks very much for your reply. We are targeting an LTV of at least $150, however to begin with whilst we do not have data yet on monetisation efforts (post sale upsells) so we figure let's try to set a conservative $50 as an LTV to see if we could make this profitable.

Maybe our first goal should be look to validate a higher LTV asap, to do this we need to get 10+ leads through so we can start to analyse this, so maybe we market until we have enough leads to validate our LTV (and get feedback from those leads on where our leaks are).

11-08-2015 03:13 PM #4 crysper (Member)

There is a rule on subscription based businesses to not invest in paid channels unless you know your crucial metrics: LTV, churn, cost of service... You need to have at least a good idea of these metrics before spending money on it. However, i don't know your market and I suppose that's not easy to get free conversions unless you have your own websites to drive traffic to your system.

My idea is to buy a website that already gets organic traffic in your niche and on which you can promote your product. I would talk with the website owner to let your banner for a month for a fee and see how it converts. You can try this with 3-5 offers simultaneously to have better choices.

11-09-2015 09:49 AM #5 bluedoors (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by crysper View Post
There is a rule on subscription based businesses to not invest in paid channels unless you know your crucial metrics: LTV, churn, cost of service... You need to have at least a good idea of these metrics before spending money on it. However, i don't know your market and I suppose that's not easy to get free conversions unless you have your own websites to drive traffic to your system.

My idea is to buy a website that already gets organic traffic in your niche and on which you can promote your product. I would talk with the website owner to let your banner for a month for a fee and see how it converts. You can try this with 3-5 offers simultaneously to have better choices.
Hi crysper,

Great thanks very much for your thoughts.

Interesting regarding not investing in paid channels unless you know the crucial metrics. Its just difficult as without driving some initial traffic I can't really collect sufficient data. Plus ideally we'd be using traffic from the future scalable traffic sources to generate the KPIs and identify leaks.

So as you suggest, I think we need traffic, just small enough that we don't burn money but large enough that we can assess the KPIs until we see the KPIs are profitable and can then scale. Are there any default user numbers we should have in mind? e.g we should get at least X leads to validate conversion to sale KPI? I know from a UX design perspective most major issues are identified from only 5-10 users (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-many-test-users/) but unsure from a conversion/key metrics perspective.

We had approached a few sites we thought were good demographics from banner space (one has accepted for $300/month) so we can use this as one of the traffic sources to see how we convert. What you are thoughts over approaching individual sites versus running small campaigns on SiteScout (or similar)? Just not sure whether the time it takes to reach out to individual sites is worth it, plus whether we'd get better deals by going to the site or going via a SiteScout type site.

Thanks again, really do appreciate your thoughts.

11-09-2015 04:06 PM #6 Gary (Member)

Personally I would stay away from Sitescout until you know your metrics, like others have said. It's classed as remnant traffic, i.e all the rubbish that no-one else wants to buy.

You will also find a lot of it is bot traffic, so unless your know what you are doing you will burn through money with no results.

It seems to me like you are trying to do this on an extremely tight budget with a fear of spending the money to get valid data. Your foray into Facebook shows this as you mention the "true" LTV is around $150 and you spent this to get a conversion so in effect you broke even which is pretty damn good to start with. You also mention needing 10 conversions through so I would be looking at spending at least $1500 to get these to have anything meaningful to look at.....in theory you would be breaking even at your target LTV

With a tight budget I would go where your potential customers are and that's existing gambling/ betting sites. Do some buys direct with sites in the niche and get as much traffic through the door as you can. Or do tightly targeted stuff on Facebook. Get just one source of traffic working with the data you get rather than spreading it out into different areas. You will simply spend money spread out too thinly and get disillusioned with the results.

You can also look at what your competitors do, where do they get their traffic? Reverse engineer their systems and see what that brings up. Don't try and re-invent the wheel, instead takes what works already and improve upon it.

11-09-2015 06:23 PM #7 bluedoors (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by Gary View Post
Personally I would stay away from Sitescout until you know your metrics, like others have said. It's classed as remnant traffic, i.e all the rubbish that no-one else wants to buy.

You will also find a lot of it is bot traffic, so unless your know what you are doing you will burn through money with no results.

It seems to me like you are trying to do this on an extremely tight budget with a fear of spending the money to get valid data. Your foray into Facebook shows this as you mention the "true" LTV is around $150 and you spent this to get a conversion so in effect you broke even which is pretty damn good to start with. You also mention needing 10 conversions through so I would be looking at spending at least $1500 to get these to have anything meaningful to look at.....in theory you would be breaking even at your target LTV

With a tight budget I would go where your potential customers are and that's existing gambling/ betting sites. Do some buys direct with sites in the niche and get as much traffic through the door as you can. Or do tightly targeted stuff on Facebook. Get just one source of traffic working with the data you get rather than spreading it out into different areas. You will simply spend money spread out too thinly and get disillusioned with the results.

You can also look at what your competitors do, where do they get their traffic? Reverse engineer their systems and see what that brings up. Don't try and re-invent the wheel, instead takes what works already and improve upon it.
Hi Gary,

Thanks very much, all very helpful thoughts.

I'll avoid Sitescout as you suggest and instead look to buy directs in the niche, plus when we return to facebook we'll go more tightly targeted than our initial ads.

In terms of the first campaign, unfortunately none of the 4 leads went on to convert, and from reviewing their website pages and user recordings our post-signup journey needs improving.

It's tricky to know the balance between spending to get more traffic versus analysing the traffic we've received and improving the landing/lead gen page + sales conversion page, but when we see facepalm actions by the user we know it's us at fault and so need to make the change.

Hopefully if we can work fast enough, we can improve the product every time we see users struggling within 1-2 days, then switch back on FB advertising (whilst continuing to run the banners on our direct buy niches) and hopefully sooner or later we'll reach the point where CPA < LTV.

In terms of competitors, the bigger ones have been working with various media buying style companies though we need to bite the bullet and upgrade on http://whatrunswhere.com/ I believe to see social ads which was $300 or so, unless there is an alternative?

One additional question, once we've confident our conversion+product is sufficient strong, we would like to promote to affiliates. How is the best way to go about this? Should we submit our website to Clickbank and any others now?

Thanks again!

11-11-2015 08:03 AM #8 crysper (Member)

It seems that you have a very tight budget, in this case you need to get really creative. I don't have experience in your niche and I don't know the market, but as cheap/free "growth" tactics, I think of:

1) Make a list of 100 blogs on gambling/betting. Contact the owners with tools like quickmail.io or others and try to get a review of some sort for free. You have to consider that you need to give them a pretty good deal to feature your system, like free credits, etc (whatever delights the bloggers and their readers)
2) Start a campaign on forums. In your niche it's much harder, but you need to get creative. Help the community, start discussion, etc
3) Once you get some traffic run contests, sweepstakes, giveaways, etc to get new users. I hope you have a good referral system in place.
4) Build an email list and send a newsletter with tips, tricks and other really helpful stuff in your niche

Anyway, you're in a very competitive niche and if you don't have a good budget it's hard to succeed. If you have the budget, try to get at least 20 conversions and see how the users evolve over time. There are more advanced analysis like cohorts, where the LTV, CR, etc will increase on the next round of users after you make the improvements based on the usage the data of the first group, but what's important now is to get a pretty good idea of how users perceive and how much they spend in your system.

11-11-2015 09:36 AM #9 cbrughmans (Member)

What's the URL of your site?

11-12-2015 10:35 AM #10 bluedoors (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by crysper View Post
It seems that you have a very tight budget, in this case you need to get really creative. I don't have experience in your niche and I don't know the market, but as cheap/free "growth" tactics, I think of:

1) Make a list of 100 blogs on gambling/betting. Contact the owners with tools like quickmail.io or others and try to get a review of some sort for free. You have to consider that you need to give them a pretty good deal to feature your system, like free credits, etc (whatever delights the bloggers and their readers)
2) Start a campaign on forums. In your niche it's much harder, but you need to get creative. Help the community, start discussion, etc
3) Once you get some traffic run contests, sweepstakes, giveaways, etc to get new users. I hope you have a good referral system in place.
4) Build an email list and send a newsletter with tips, tricks and other really helpful stuff in your niche

Anyway, you're in a very competitive niche and if you don't have a good budget it's hard to succeed. If you have the budget, try to get at least 20 conversions and see how the users evolve over time. There are more advanced analysis like cohorts, where the LTV, CR, etc will increase on the next round of users after you make the improvements based on the usage the data of the first group, but what's important now is to get a pretty good idea of how users perceive and how much they spend in your system.
Hi crysper,

Thanks very much. In terms of budget, I could spend $10k if needed but I just feel we're too inexperienced at AM and our product is still unproven LTV wise to start spending this, I'd prefer to keep a smaller budget until we can validate our LTV (and the site doesn't have big leaks) and also get used to AM.

If I were to do this from scratch, I should have spent 3-4 months as an AM and promote other proven products but given I am in this situation I hope it won't be long till we have a good enough product to get our conversion and LTVs high enough to either AM ourselves or see if any AMers are interested in promoting us.

Regarding growth tactics, I agree, we've started some of those growth tactics and we'll crack on with your suggestions we haven't yet started. It'll be interesting to see the success/failure we have wit AM versus growth hacks/tactics (where the cost is $ per hour to grind through them).

The plan for the next week is 1) finish product improvements based on initial cold traffic analysis 2) focus on some growth tactics 3) set up some a handful of direct buy campaigns.

Hopefully based on 1) we'll see a better converting product and start generating an initial LTV and from 2) and 3) we'll start to see which marketing efforts are profitable and scalable.

Thanks again, the advice is hugely appreciated.

cbrugmans - thanks for your post, regarding the url I'd rather not post it, maybe this is -EV but just prefer to keep it private for now!

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