Offer selection for newbies - Can you trust your AM? How many fakes out there? (5)
Offer selection for newbies - Can you trust your AM? How many fakes out there?
Hi guys,
I am a super newbie on the forum. After launching 4 completely failed campaigns, I am here to ask for your feedback about offer selection.
Almost every experienced member suggests: ask for the best performing offers to your AM.
Okay, I believe you, but this leads always to the same results.
PROBLEM 1: Even if the offer count on every network may look huge, the top performers for mobile today are very polarized: win an IPhone SOI AND Install this Antivirus. When you surf the internet, they are everywhere (every placement, every traffic source, every geo). Are they saturated? I am sure that they worked and work well for the early adopters, but is still there any room for the newcomer, TODAY?
PROBLEM 2: Let's assume that the newcomer could make it work. If I went for the top converters, this should be the "win an iphone SOI" offer. However, if I pick 10 or 100 of them, they all have the exactly same layout/style/conditions/funnel. They are the very same. So what is the difference among them? They may convert differently, but not very differently (unless some of them are scamming the publishers, see the next point). This reduces the choice even further.
PROBLEM 3: I tested some of these offers myself using chrome anonymous mode + VPN (hide my ass). Many SOI offers don't convert at all even if I complete the form correctly. Others require you to confirm your email address even if this should not be required. Furthermore, most of the time the confirmation email goes to the spam folder and you can forget about that conversion forever.
PROBLEM 4: most top offers are so popular that they are considered phishing by google and it is pretty useless to send my traffic there: they will never convert because the browsers will block them (example: http://m.giornofortunato.com/cgi-bin/wingame.pl. Some offers are even rejected by the traffic sources because google or others consider the offer a scam/malware/phishing. And yes, I am talking about the offers suggested by my AM.
I know that many marketers work very well and are very successful, but I can't realize how to choose which offers to test effectively. Should I go for something less popular and forget about my AM?
Can anyone help me here?
Thank you!
You can trust your data, that's why you gotta split test offers.
AM's often try and push new offers onto people to test, one way to prevent this is to ask for a report by revenue.
^ What iAmAttila said. 
Stats don't lie. Instead of checking each offer for the problems you listed, it would probably be faster to just give a bunch of offers a quick test to see which ones are best.
A good approach would be to choose a hot vertical+geo, rip every significantly-different lander you see on Adplexity, and test every offer you can find for that vertical+geo. (If running display traffic instead of pop, then you'll need to make some banners as well.)
If stats look promising, keep optimizing. If not, stop running the camp. Simple.
So how do you know which verticals are hot in a given geo? Examples of ways to find out:
1)Browse through the top offers lists on as many affiliate networks as you can, to see which verticals and geos are doing well.
2)Talk to your AMs and fellow affiliate marketers.
3)Use an intelligence tool such as Adplexity. On Adplexity, you can choose a geo, a recent time-frame (e.g. 1-2 weeks), choose your ad type and traffic source, choose the "Received Most Traffic" option, click into some of the ads and you'll see what kinds of offers are getting the most traffic at the moment.
Also: Caurmen has just written the perfect post with tips on how to spot many of the bad offers so you can save some test budget:
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...low-Testing-It
Hope that helps!
Amy
To answer why they convert differently although they seem to have the same style...a lot of reasons:
- even if they look similar for you, each LP has different performance. Why? Psychology...that's why we all test lots of LPs even in the same style and see huge differences in performance
- backend funnel. Some advertisers have a better backend, better path offers, better matching for the users to offers, better upsells and email sequences
- better email delivery, as you noticed for yourself
- based on their backend performance they shave leads too so that their payout match their competition (that's why you should split test offers with different payouts and not go for the highest one even if they look the same to you)
As iAmAttila and Amy said, the easiest way is to test the offers and let the data speak. The worst approach is to view the offers and take guess.
Only work with AMs you trust. No point in working with people you don't trust.
Test the offer yourself before you launch it (in different browsers) and make sure you know where the pixel is placed so you know the conversion flow
Never launch an offer without tracking (preferably S2S global postback) - test the tracking before launching
And split test your campaigns among different networks to compare performance metrics
Have a clear cut-off point to stop running a campaign when it goes from ROI+ to ROI- as every offer will eventually die out (so milk it fast)
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