How Exploring The "Problem Space" Can Lead You To Profitopolis! (9)
How Exploring The "Problem Space" Can Lead You To Profitopolis!
Regular STM readers will be quite used to me referring to a "problem space" when discussing how to test angles, offers or campaigns.
But what do I actually mean by that?
Well, it's quite a simple concept, and one that's really, really useful in Affiliate Marketing.
Let's take offer and angle choice, for example.
Imagine that we put all possible offers for a vertical / traffic source combo on one axis of a graph, and all possible angles on the other axis. Then imagine we turn that graph into a three-dimensional one, and plot the third axis as ROI:
We could turn that 3D graph into a "landscape" of all possible ROIs. If we can land a campaign on the peaks, we make money, because we're in +ve ROI territory:
The only problem is, we don't have a map, and we don't even have any light to see the terrain of our ROI landscape:
So what do we do?
We send out explorers with torches, of course! Or rather, we launch campaigns. And each campaign illuminates a little bit of the landscape.
So the first time we launch an angle / offer combo, we end up looking at a landscape like this:
What we do next is really important. To illuminate the entire landscape, we'd have to launch hundreds of campaigns. So how do we get the best sense of what's out there as fast as possible?
If we concentrate on making small variations of our initial angle/offer combo, maybe changing the wording on our headlines or testing minor alterations to the angle, we illuminate the area around that angle/offer combo very well, but don't learn much about the surrounding area:
And if we stick with one angle or one offer, and only test on the other axis, we end up with a line - some useful data, but we're still not seeing much of the landscape we're trying to explore:
However, if we test wildly different angles AND wildly different offers, we start getting illumination all over the angle/offer landscape - and that means we can get a much better sense of where the potential profit might be:
From there, we can narrow down the promising spots of the landscape, and most efficiently find the peaks:
And that's where we build our city of Profitopolis!
You can think about any problem where you've got a large or infinite number of choices in this way - landing page design, bid testing, and banner choice to name three. It's a really useful metaphor that'll help you make choices in affiliate marketing and beyond.
And that's it! Hope that was useful! If you have comments or questions, please do post 'em below!
Wow incredibly creative way to explain it. With such kind of creativity for sure I will find more profitable campaigns too 
.
When you talk about offers are you talking about the same offer in different networks or completely different offers? Do you reuse your angle in totally different offers?
@jjbachiller - both. I'd count the same offer in different networks as being very close together in the problem space, and different offers in the same vertical as being further apart.
So, for example, the same antivirus app on different networks - very close. Another similar antivirus app - close but not as close. A security app that isn't an antivirus - pretty far away.
Caurmen what a perfect way to explain what we do!
I'm sure a bunch of us will visualize these images next time we launch a campaign/vertical/offer.
Cheers,
-Rainmakr
Great analogy Caurmen. That graph made me keep thinking of cartesian components in three dimensions lol.
On a more relevant note however, since the landscape is indeed quite vast, there exists situations where you will not be able to expose a peak (regardless of peak height). Thus we have to assume that luck is factored into this analogy if you are randomly picking offers.
Hahaha beautiful! Really nicely done Caurmen!
Thanks, everyone!
@novvyy - absolutely, luck is always an issue. However, to go a bit mathsy on this, the distribution of number of campaigns launched to find a success is definitely on a bell curve - provided you're following best practise all the way through the process. Choose a solid vertical and traffic source, create angles intelligently, choose geos intelligently, and it's unlikely - possible but unlikely - that you'll not find success within a reasonable spend.
Quite like the analogy and the pictures are pretty cool.
How much LSD did you do to come up with this? Really cool way to think about it. Thanks
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