RevContent Follow Along (13)
Hey everyone, this is my first follow along so I will do my best on creating a good format to follow. Any feedback, comments, & advice would be much appreciated 
The basics
I just launched a skin campaign about an hour ago. I basically have a $5000 initial budget . I've launched before on RevContent and have had conversions and profitable days, but was struggling to get a consistent positive ROI.
Traffic Source: RevContent
Offer: Skin Cream offer recommended by an AM. Haven't seen anyone else running it which I'm not sure is a good thing or a bad thing.
Lander: Advertorial (It's the same one everyone uses. If you've ran skin you know which one I'm talking about)
Tracker:
OS: Desktop
Initial Test
What I did prior to launching was search through Adplexity to find out what is working with skin. I launched one campaign with 8 different photos, all with the same angle. I plan on finding the winning photos first and then split testing angles later. Here is one of the ads.
Whitelist
I spent about 5 or so hours on Adplexity and saw where other people were running skin. I also spent about 2 hours searching Google for sites that might target my demographic. Whenever I found sites that looked like it would be a good fit I added it to the whitelist. I have about 30 in total, but will constantly be adding more. These aren't necessarily proven widgets, but from the terrible CTR I'm getting right now I'm assuming most of these are not bot heavy (at least so far). In the past when my CTR's were too good to be true it was because bots made me think people loved my ads. My plan is to find profitable widgets and then move them to a different whitelist made up of proven winners and scale it.
Bid
I started my bid at 0.91. I thought that was an extremely high bid, but my ads are hovering between the 2 and 5 position so I assume it's just a medium bid. Every time I see it hit the 1 spot it seems to go back to 2 right when I refresh it a minute later. This is one of the things I still don't understand on RevContent. I never know what I should bid, but I picked 0.91 because when I had my bid under 50 cents I received next to no traffic.
Things I Could Use Help With/ Questions
1. Is my strategy of finding decent widgets and whitelisting a good strategy or would I be better off targeting full categories that would work with skin and finding winners there?
2. Bidding strategies/ recommendations
3. What is a good CTR rate for people clicking on my ads? Right now I'm at 0.020% and I'm guessing that is pathetic. 24,000 impressions with only 5 clicks in 2 hours time with a 0.91 bid seems a little off?
Any advice or tips is greatly appreciated. I put a $200 cap on this initial test so I'll have some data tomorrow.
Damn, no conversions. With this amount of clicks I figured I'd at least get a few
Here are the widget stats.
I'm thinking it was just a bad offer and I reached out to an AM who has one of the more popular offers at the moment. We'll see if the new one performs better than this offer.
Any suggestions on where to go from here?
Update:
I chose a more proven offer. It was one of the top ones I've see all throughout RevContent. My CTR was much better this time. One rookie mistake I made was I failed to delete the click jacker code that was in my landing page, but I am about to fix that so the stats would have been better if I wasn't sending 10-20% of my clicks to someone else. On the positive side I got a conversion which will ease my anxiety a little.
Plans to improve campaign:
1. Redo landing page and make sure their is no click jacker code in it.
2. Create blacklist campaign for same offer in one or two topics as . I am trying to spend around $200 a day, but was only spending an average of $50 a day with the small 37 widget whitelist I had.
3. Figure out how to get better CTR's on ads to landers. As of now they are terrible (0.045% for the weekend) despite the fact I'm using the same ads that seem to work for the ads I've seen spying. I heard something that if you take an ad, put it in Photoshop and make even the most unnoticeable change then re-save it under a different name it will have a better CTR on RevContent because they will count it as a fresh ad. Is this true?
4. In
Those are my plans for now. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on where to go from here and thank you everyone so far for you help!
Update for today and yesterday (spent daily budget by the time I checked computer today)
I launched 2 campaigns yesterday around 5pm. 1 whitelist and 1 blacklist. Here are the stats:
Spend = $350
Return = $153
Profit = -$197 for -43% ROI
Those numbers would be not too bad for a new campaign, but I realized this morning that I stupidly sent 63.8% of my traffic to other countries besides the US because I accidentally the targeted all countries in my whitelist campaign. I did get 1 conversion for $40 from this accidental traffic so if you take away this mistake (subtract the foreign spend + foreign conversion) the numbers would look more like this:
Spend = $127
Return = $113
Profit = -$14 for -11% ROI
Shame I made the mistake because I would have been almost profitable had I not done that. I fixed the country targeting, but I have already reached my spend today being that the foreign widgets ate up my spend so quickly so I will wait til tomorrow to get more data. I see promise in this campaign as I have hardly done any optimization besides finding the ad photos with the highest CTRs and I'm already close to break even (minus the mistake). My ad CTR's have been pretty good too with a CTR of 0.51% for my whitelist campaign and 0.23% for my blacklist campaign, but that is far from accurate considering the foreign traffic. Once I block the badly performing widgets and find the best ad copy I believe those 2 small changes can bring this into green.
I had a few specific questions in regards to deciding which widgets and IP addresses to blacklist/ block:
1. How much should a widget spend without a conversion before I cut it?
2. What is a good CTR from lander to offer that shows a widget has promise and what is a bad CTR that indicates when a widget should be cut?
3. How do I recognize which IP's need to be blocked? I believe I'm getting bot traffic, but am unsure how to recognize it.
Thanks in advance for feedback. I will post again tomorrow when new data comes in.
Hey, looks like you're off to a good start, looking forward to seeing more data.
I'm new to native so I can't really answer your questions, apart from n°3. Check this thread: Bot Test by Caurmen
Its a good start. Good luck, I'm subscribing!
Great stuff man!
Update:
After spending way too much to realize that 2 offers had no hope (one had a 2% CR and the other I spent $300 without a single conversion), I finally found an offer that is converting better. This new offer converts 5.69% of the people who make it to the offer page and 50% of them went for the upsell. I can work with that.
Overall stats from new offer that I started running Friday:
2063 clicks
107 clicks to offer
CTR = 5.18%
CR = 5.69%
Overall spend= $532
Revenue= $288
ROI= -$244 for -46%
ad CTR= 0.110%
I am running with a WL of 44 widgets. One immediate action I took to increase my ROI is I removed 4 widgets from my WL that had 700 clicks with only 4 clicks to offer. If they had been eliminated before my ROI would have been -20%. Still in the red, but at least better. I have a feeling that the next time I look at my stats I'm going to see an improvement on ROI just on this alone.
Other advice I received was that my ads probably suck, which is why my ad CTR is 0.110% and my lander CTR is 5.18%. My biggest focus for now is finding the absolute best ad paired with the best headline as I feel like my landing page, landing page copy, and offer are pretty good. I'm not saying my landing page is perfect, but it is less of an immediate concern than my bad CTRs.
I'd like to see my ad CTR at an absolute minimum of 0.20% and my lander CTRs at an absolute minimum of 9% by the end of the week. Even those numbers are somewhat mediocre, but those are the numbers I feel I would need to break even. I have no problem with breaking even for the time being as I look at breaking even as getting free data that can be used for profits later.
The biggest positive change I've seen is a week ago I was very pessimistic of being able to get this to work as I had garbage offers up until Friday. Now that I have something promising to work with I know I can get this in the green if I just make the changes needed to improve the CTRs.
Thanks for following and any recommendations are greatly appreciated!
I think the new offer is actually converting better than the previous offer at 2% to 5.69% . But what I notice is the same you figured out, If you can get better with your ad copy and increase clicks to your lander, but that will still leave the CTR at the same rate, which means you need to figure how to increase the CTR of the lander to the offer page. And my other question here is, are you testing more than one offer, more than one lander cause you cant totally assume the lander is bad if you dont have other metric of measuring it. As much as possible will advise to test more than one LP,Offers,Adcopies .............
Updated stats since Friday:
Spend: $836
Revenue: $612
Profit: -$224
ROI: -27%
These stats were between 3 camps. My WL of proven killers, my BL camp, (started Mon) and a WL camp of 112 unproven widgets that I think have promise (started yesterday, no conversions so far).
Right now I could make roughly a consistent $50-$75 daily profit if I just ran my WL, but I'm spending a huge chunk of my profits on my other 2 camps for the past 3 days trying to find more winning widgets. As much as I would love to just see green every day $50 a day isn't a lot and spending money trying to find more good widgets is the only way to scale.
The good news is my BL despite not being close to profitable did get 2 conversions. Both sites seemed very targeted to my products so despite my ROI for that camp being about -75%, if those 2 widgets end up making $20 a day each in the long run I'll make back the money I lost trying to find them in no time. I added both of them to my WL.
Plans to improve:
1. Will be increasing my spend from $200 daily to $300 daily. $100 for each of my 3 camps. If my WL continues to stay profitable I will up the spend on that to $200 daily for a total of $400 per day.
2. Aggressively removing bad widgets from both WLs and adding bad widgets to BL.
3. Testing 3 landing pages with very minor variations. Most of these variations are just added links from lander to offer. Trying to find a sweet spot as my last test I've noticed more links increase CTR, but decrease CR. If you have too many it seems that people reach the offer page before they are warmed up enough.
Questions I could use feedback on:
1. How many clicks to a particular widget without a conversion before you should cut it?
2. What is a good CR and CV for a particular widget?
My best widgets and worst widgets are obvious. It's the ones that have a few conversions with bad CTRs and CVs that are the ones I'm iffy about. Wondering if there are general rules when deciding which widgets to cut.
I have improved my ROI every week for the past 4 weeks and my motivation has skyrocketed with each improvement. I believe that if I continue to do what I'm doing my ROI will continue to improve each week.
any update? very nice article. i'm also going to try revcontent + ecommerce. wondering if revcontent is better than taboola.
Nice follow along! Hope you got to the green line with your campaigns
Hi Friend,
You have done a good job, I am following the thread to share some insights when you have some data we can analyze.
Home > Native >