Ripping landers and banners and still loosing? Watch out what you copy! (5)
Ripping landers and banners and still loosing? Watch out what you copy!
Why to rip anything in the first place?
When starting out in any vertical, its absolutely crucial to get some baseline data to compare the performance of your campaigns against. You can try to make a blind shot, but its hard to come out with anything solid when you know nothing about the market. The logical (and probably also the best) solution to this problem is to rip a few banners, landers or whatever from your competitors and run them for a while. There is nothing wrong with this approach to be honest, but what if you already ripped a solid sample of banners/landers and you are still -80%?
Let’s Copy and Profit? Probably not.
I see new affiliates doing one false assumption all the time : “I rip a banner, click on it and copy the LP and it must be working, because it works for those who I just ripped it from.” OR “I load this and that spytool, rip whats there and Im on my way to profitopolis.” This is so wrong on so many levels and I would like to explain why. Many people asked me about this, so let me put the most probable reasons into this post.
Who did you just copy?
Do you realize how many people try to break into AM daily? How many newbies fight for their chance to get a bit of the $ pie? And guess what they all do at the beginning… they copy the others by ripping whatever they find running somewhere. There is a good chance you just ripped the campaign of another newbie, who is trying to wrap his brain around the fact that the funnel isnt working. You need to copy a profitable campaign, not one that has been copied a thousand times and isnt working anymore. You can bet your arm and leg that there is a ton of already dead campaigns floating around, simply because the newbies keep on copying them, thinking they just ripped the best campaign in the world.
Spy Tools are not perfect!
A quality spytool is an amazing tool that can make your life easier, but it can also make your life more complicated. Spytools are “robots”, they dont think and they can only do as much as they were coded to 
If they cannot detect cloacking and get around it, they will grab LPs that are only there to hide the really profitable stuff. If the spytool cannot properly simulate a carrier or GEO, they wont be able to grab the properly targeted LP and offer and will collect fallback data … you dont want to copy any of that. If you see one LP being pushed almost everywhere, it can either be an LP that is killing it or a LP that a huge advertiser uses to cover the real ones he is using. Always think when copying anything from a spytool and make sure you are using one that is coded properly.
The Targeting, another unknown variable.
Say you just got yourself an android phone and bought the best VPN available, in an attempt to figure out what’s the current hit served to the horny adult site mobile visitors in Germany. You head to xhamster, which is usually a very expensive site with plenty of spots to get a ton of good quality traffic from. You copy the first few banners you see and the LPs too. Now you run them yourself and bang ... -50% or even worse. How come is that possible? It could be the targeting – the original buyer might have different cap, keyword targeting, day parting, device targeting, OS targeting, browser targeting… tons of variable that you cannot figure out by spying. I used an adult example for easy understanding, but it works the same in mainstream.
Did you hit a testing funnel?
By now you know that you shouldn’t copy new people, you know that you have to use spy tools carefully … so you spent your time by figuring out who are the more experience people, you know what LP domains names appear in the mix often and for a long time and you only copy from these people… but you are still negative and ready to commit a suicide. You know what, even the best affiliates have to test new stuff all the time and as you can guess, big % of those test are failures. If you happen to copy a testing campaign that is a failure … well, don’t think I need to go on.
What payouts are you getting?
Let’s assume you did everything the right way, you copied the proper funnel from the experienced affiliate who was making a killing, you ran it on your own, tweaked the targeting as much as possible ... and you were still negative. Sounds like a dead end, so what now? Chances are, the original affiliate has better payouts or a better converting offer. You can check what aff network he uses and apply there too. You can also ask for a paybump, or at least ask your AM if there are others with higher payouts. If nothing works, try a different, but similar offer or take the funnel to a different placement/site/source … chances are it could work somewhere else with cheaper traffic.
Loosing campaign will not become profitable just because you run them now!
Do not fall in love with your campaigns, even more so with those you just ripped. If you happened to rip a loosing campaign, it will not become profitable just because you are running it now. If it looks like a failure, simply drop it once you ran enough traffic to it and start again with a new one. Do not waste time on something that has no potential.
Ripping is the start, not the target goal!
So you finally managed to rip something that is showing potential? DO NOT STOP HERE! Tweak it to keep it profitable or even profit more than the original affiliate. Sometimes, the working funnel you just ripped, was already tuned to maximum performance, but just as many times, it was not. Play with it, change layout, colors, borders, buttons, imagery … whatever that comes to your mind. Make variations of what seems to work and never stop. Ripping should be the start and not the goal of your efforts. Do not settle with being a copycat!
THE END
I have found myself doing some things that you mention here. Thank you for the post.
Originally Posted by guille
“I rip a banner, click on it and copy the LP and it must be working, because it works for those who I just ripped it from.”
^ yah its amazing how differently a presell page with react just on different media types, let alone different targeting. spying is always best for ideas, or lazy testing. Not for finding a already done camaign.
Great write up dude!
Learning basic HTML/CSS/PHP will always make life easier, think thats some of the reason so many rip over creating something. https://www.codecademy.com/ is how i personally taught myself PHP, its a good place to start.
Originally Posted by jasonaao
I wrote it exactly to make people realize spying is more or less an inspiration and not the recipe to become rich - thou it can also work out that way
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