Want To Refine Campaign Optimization Process - Looking For New Ideas (2)
Want To Refine Campaign Optimization Process - Looking For New Ideas
Hey STM,
Background: I'm hitting my 6 or 7th month in affiliate marketing and want to find smarter ways to go about optimizing my campaigns. I currently run Native and play the cat and mouse game on Facebook. I spend about 10k/day without any cloaking for native and my ROI will hover between 30 to 70% depending on traffic source and whether or not I'm allocating my time on Facebook at the time or diving into my campaigns. Currently I am a 1-man army, I will task out tech projects or straightforward creative/landing page tasks; however, before I begin building out my team I am committed to building out a foundation that helps reduce some of the aspects of campaign optimization that makes me neurotic.
The problem is that there is always something "else" to be done to improve the campaign and I can find it difficult to balance that with wanting to have a feeling of being "done" or accomplished at the end of any given day/week/month. I like to be able to systematize everything and am extremely organized. I'd also like to have a finite amount of steps I need to do each week for native campaigns and allocate any remaining time to "Big Blue".
I want things that are easily measurable and prove the process myself so when hiring my own buyers:
1. I know what it's like to be in their shoes
2. Have a construct that they can be successful in and that I can manage results to.
Here's an example of a Monday for the Native/Display-side (things vary based on the day, but not a ton):
- Check Offer EPCs (make sure they are in line with 7 and 30-day trends)
- Update P/L (yesterday's numbers)
- Update Campaign Sheet (just a deep dive into CTR, CVR, etc.)
- Review Live Ads (cut any lower performers)
- Cut Ads For XYZ Source
- Submit Ads for X vertical on XYZ
- Submit Ads for Y vertical on XYZ
- Submit Ads for Z vertical on XYZ
AND THEN THERE IS THE CAMPAIGN OPTIMIZATION PART OF THE DAY (typically Monday and Thursday) THAT ROUTINELY MIND FUCKS ME THANKS TO MY OCD - Here is where you can help me out...
Currently this is my "process" for optimizing my campaigns - they have all been running in excess of a month and are profitable...
- Monday - setup my landing page tests (test headlines, images, CTA, etc.)
- Thursday - setup offer tests
I broke it up that way to avoid testing too many variables to begin with.
I run this in a cycle as my stuff hits statistical significance. If a campaign would be new, I'd be focusing on split testing completely different landers, but since I have these sources dialed in my optimization funnel looks something like this: headlines > images/CTA/etc. > Offers... in a constant loop. Occasionally I'll pop in some new landers I see spying around just to make sure I'm not missing out on anything.
Would be interested to hear how other larger affiliates handle this process? I've been better about being more hands off and moving changes to more of a weekly basis to get in more data, which means more time for optimization. Just wondering if any of you have any proven, structured systems and parameters around how you manage this. Yes, many of my campaigns could probably be fine with just a few new images week in and week out and crank for a while, but if I'm not able to find more volume on another source I prefer to use my current time further squeezing the ROI.
Sorry for the convoluted thoughts and babbling...
Taking a break from writing headlines to write this - tried this sweet tool today that measures your EMV (Emotional Marketing Value) - http://www.aminstitute.com/cgibin/headline.cgi. Found the EMV for each of my top landers and then wrote headlines until I had 3 iterations that beat the EMV for the current winner.
Look forward to the feedback.
Hoping some fellow STMers can weigh in 
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