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hephaestus' Native Ads Follow Along Entry - Insurance Hacks (25)

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I love competition and this contest is a great way to get me focused on learning CPA on native ads. I've got a bit of experience running native ads for arb, but I want to diversify into affiliate offers.
I've run some low-effort tests with insurance and it seems promising.

Here's why I'm taking on insurance

- many offers are pay-per-lead, not pay per sale -- people clicking on native ads have pretty weak purchasing intent, so convincing them that they should get a quote is hard enough
- i'm not going for a high payout offer because i want a lot of conversion data to learn faster
- targeting on native networks usually sucks, so i'm running an offer most everyone reading news website would qualify for
- 'boring' markets tend to be over looked. that means no competition from arb sites and low competition other affiliates
- i have some contacts in the insurance industry, i can potentially sell off the leads directly if my campaigns work out

Goal

- run consistently profitable insurance campaigns. develop a workflow for testing CPA offers on native ads.
- build up the website I'm hosting for my articles. if you're running 'fake articles' might as well run them on a 'real website' as 'real articles'. What's really the difference between a fake article and a real article?

Traffic sources

- Yahoo Gemini
- Outbrain
- Facebook (yeah i know it's not technically 'native ads' but i'll be running it anyways)

All of these can get content approved in less than 24 hours. I want to iterate fast, and I don't want to wait around for my stuff to get approved.

if campaigns go well, i'll port them to other traffic sources

Offer

Pay per lead life insurance. Payout is about $12. I want to throw a phone number on the page to collect on phone call leads too, but I'm still looking for a good pay per call offer.

Country

USA. the offer only accepts US traffic. some of the competitor's offers are only allowed in specific states. that makes it tough for native ads because of how archaic the networks are with their targeting.

Bids & Budgets

No idea what's good for CPA, i'll just start at 20 cent cpc and $100 daily budget between all the networks.

Tracking

Voluum and Google Analytics

Voluum to track CPA effectiveness, and Google Analytics to track overall site engagement

- Voluum answers: what's making me money today?
- GA answers: what might make me money? which campaigns have high bounce rates? what about time on site?


Upcoming Tasks

- scope out life insurance on all the spy tools
- Think of 10 angles, pick 5 to test
- write 5 article landing pages
- create 2 unique ads for each article
- find a pay-per-call offer for insurance
- find the same offer i'm using on other affiliate networks

I should have this first round of tasks done by march 10th

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Nice ... I will be following this one very closely!

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Very smart!

One additional idea - I'd also recommend just doing a bit of Googling for Life Insurance sales, and starting a swipe file for copy. There are lots of great landers for this vertical on Google organic or adwords - the ones coming up top on the major keywords are likely to have been split-tested within an inch of their life.

Obviously you can't just use that copy in the same way, because of the differences between native "landers" and the more conventional affiliate lander, but the key pain points the landers hit, the phrasing they use, and even the imagery will be very useful in designing your own creatives.

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Interesting! Looking forward to learning from this one!


I have no experience in promoting insurance-related offers, but I'd imagine the biggest reason for most people to buy life insurance would be to provide for their loved ones if anything should happen to them. Perhaps tug at the heartstrings a bit with something like this:



I don't know whether videos are permitted on landers, but that's the kind of feel that could work well for people that have kids, whether it be achieved with a vid or images or copy or all of the above.



And showing some stats may also work well:


"More than 4 out of every 10 people do not own a life insurance policy in any amount."


"70 percent of U.S. households with children under 18 would have trouble meeting everyday living expenses within a few months if a primary wage earner were to die today. 4 in 10 households with children under 18 say they would immediately have trouble meeting everyday living expenses."


"Why aren't people buying more coverage? Unfortunately, many Americans overestimate the cost of life insurance:

->83% of consumers say they don’t purchase more life insurance because it’s too expensive, but consumers believe life insurance costs nearly 3 times the actual price.

->$400: What most Americans believe a 20-year, $250,000 level term life policy for a healthy 30-year-old costs annually.

->$150: What it would actually cost."


(References: Here and here.)



Listing some mortality rates by age-range may be good also...




Amy

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Thank you Amy. I'll give the video thing a shot, I was planning on doing an article but having a video on there could work too.

Stats definitely help. Best thing I've seen is to make the stat directly relevant to the reader.

Like "do you want your kids to inherit your mortgage? 70% of children strugglebto put food on the table with a 2nd mortgage"

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I'd try testing a whiteboard or kinetic text-style video lander here if you can. May well be worth testing something that "feels" more personal and less slick.

One other thing you could consider that I've seen done - and it was very effective - was a cut-out explainer video literally made by printing images, cutting them out, and then placing them on a white background in front of a camera - literally putting them on and taking them off as the camera was rolling. Very simple, very quick (a few hours) and worked well for the guy who tried it.

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Here's some test data from running on facebook. I'm doing some tests there while my stuff is under review on the other networks.
I've been working on other projects recently and i'm behind track on my objectives. I'll be working on angles today.

Stats:



Ads:





Landing Page:






Voluum numbers: Not much to look at. Also the numbers are very off due to how facebook started to pre-fetch landing pages for users of the android mobile app. Cost is also inaccurate.



This post goes into details about the recent inaccuracies with facebook:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Stats&p=264564

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I thought of some insurance angles, now it's time to make landing pages and ads

- "secrets" -- the 'secret' to life insurance they don't want you to know about

- "fear/kids" -- would your kids live on the street without your income?

- your work coverage is insufficient

- cheaper than other insurances: what is more important: your car, your house, your job or your family?

- inheriting a mortgage? can your family pay off your mortgage or afford to move if you die?

- for your spouse wife / husband to live a happy life. what if your wife is stay-at-home and not working?

- pay for funeral costs, estate taxes, loans, and car, home, and education debts

- whole life vs term -- 'exposed: whole life is a scam find out why you should only get term life' vs 'term life insurance is a scam get whole life insurance before it is too late'

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That's an interesting approach. Asking questions in your headline may well pull clicks, although they'll be low purchase intent. If you can convert them with a good lander, though, it might work well.

That's likely to be pretty effective, I'd have said.

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Which country are you running this?

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USA

It's a lead gen offer, i'm not going for high lead quality, i'm trying to think of anything i can say to get them to fill out the form

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Seems like a solid set up ... any data yet?

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Here are some ads I just submitted for gemini

A:







B:

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Not sure about these ads ... the ones you created for Facebook are much more compliant ...

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ha you're probably right. i'm testing the waters to see what i can get away with.

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in retrospect you called it out correctly, ads disapproved





im gonna try some super safe ads to see if anything can get approved with this campaign

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Stat update from facebook. Waiting for my other campaigns to be approved.

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You're good at coming up with angles! However, I'd strongly suggest that you spend time on your headlines and images.

The best place to learn to do both, would be to browse around viral news sites: ViralNova, Upworthy etc. And just look at their headlines and images and figure out why they work so well, then incorporate some of those ideas into your own ads and landers.

The headlines need to be VERY clear and easy to understand, as well as invoke strong emotion/interest. "The Secret to Better Insurance" doesn't sound too interesting. "Would Your Kids Pay the Rent?" - the meaning here isn't readily apparent.

As for images - the image of the woman used on the lander doesn't stir up any emotions. The pic of the police tugging at the blanket doesn't either - not unless/until the visitor has read the ad text, which many people won't.

In a world where everybody is bombarded by ads left right and center, we need to make our ads stand out. Were you at AWA? Tim Tetra in his presentation talked about the "Tetra Trifecta" - Relevance, Emotional Impact, and Clarity - as being a formula for successful ads. If the visitor feels that your ad is relevant to him, and if you can effectively trigger his emotions, and make the whole message so clear that he can understand it at one glance, then you've got him.

I have very little experience with facebook though - so have no idea how far you can take the "emotions invoking" and still get approved. Even if you do, all it would take are a few people that get pissed off enough by your ad to leave negative comments for you to get banned. In this sense, running on the more "traditional" native sources may be easier. But then facebook allows you to target by demographic. So you pick your battle.



Amy

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Thanks Amy, i'll give that a shot. I need to come up with good headline and image combinations for all the angles I have.

I also need to make a few different versions of the landing page to correspond to each angle.

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gold nugget #1

gold nugget #2
gold nugget #3



i just created a bunch of ad images to make them sharp and stand out... going for the intrigue... but totally forgot about invoking the emotion

those are good reminders for me

THANK YOU AMY!

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I'd suggest coming up with a big bunch of headline ideas and posting them here - you'll be able to get feedback rapidly on which ones are clear and which ones aren't that way. It's a great trick to get different perspectives and avoid wasting money.

For example, I'd have suggested "Would Your Kids Be Able To Pay Rent If You Passed Away" as a modification - clarity, clarity, clarity

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yeah good point. I think the next best thing for me to do is just come up with 20 unique headlines and post them here.

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Looking forward to them!

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Hi hephaestus how is this camp coming along? The contest will be ending soon.



Amy

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Quick update: I'm looking for more pay per lead offers on affiliate networks networks.

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