Newbie Not Getting Conversions? Troubleshooting Checklist Here. (3)
Newbie Not Getting Conversions? Troubleshooting Checklist Here.
Shishev and I have been helping AMC students to find their first profitable campaigns. When a student isn't able to get a conversion at all, or is getting very few conversions, we would help them to find out why. We thought it would be a good idea to make a troubleshooting checklist to help in these cases so I did just that, and I thought it may be helpful to some of you new members as well, so here's the list...
1) Check Offer Links. Check affiliate network stats to make sure the traffic you've been sending, actually ended up at the intended offers. Compare against your tracker stats to make sure the numbers are not too different - up to 20-30% difference is normal clickloss.
You can also check that the offer itself is working - either try to go through the signup process yourself (you can notify your AM ahead of time to avoid any misunderstanding), or ask your AM to trigger a conversion.
2) Check Postback Links. Make sure you've appended a clickID token to your offer url when adding it to the tracker. Then check your affiliate network to make sure you've either added a global postback url for the overall account, or added the postback url to each of the individual offers you're running. Lastly, verify that the variable you used to pass the clickID in the offer url, is the same variable you're using in the postback url to post conversions back to the tracker.
3) Check Tracker Click URLs on Landers. Check your lander code to make sure you've replaced your outgoing links with your tracker click url.
4) Make Sure Landers are Displayed and Functioning Correctly. Browse to each lander and click through it to make sure everything looks and functions correctly. View and click through landers from desktop and/or mobile depending on which device type(s) you're planning on targeting in your campaign. Try show the important stuff above the fold (i.e. put visitor-interaction elements like buttons, spinning wheels, links etc. where the visitor does not have to scroll to get to). To find out how a lander would look like on a variety of devices, OSs and browsers, use this tool: https://www.browserstack.com/screenshots
5) Check Campaign Link. Browse to your campaign link a number of times to make sure you're reaching the landers you specified, and click through a couple of the landers to make sure you're getting sent to the offers you specified.
6) Check for Speed if Running Mobile.
a) Check Tracker Speed. If you're using a managed tracker like
http://www.serp-perception.com/redir...eed-tester.php
Also check server load to make sure it's not running out of resources at peak volumes. If so, consider upgrading your server.
b) Check Lander Loading Speed: For example using this online tool:
https://www.webpagetest.org
Temporarily comment out the entry pop first, because that can screw up the loading speed evaluation on some tools.
c) Check Combined Loading Speed. Of course you can add together the redirection and lander loading speeds found in the first 2 steps, but you can also do this as an extra check. Take the campaign url and test it at webpagetest.org (again, making sure that the landers you include in the camp have entry pops temporarily disabled). The total loading speed should not exceed 2s or you'd lose a significant amount of visitors. For mobile landers you'd want to shoot for 1s load time or less (of course the faster the better).
There are tons of things you can do to optimize a lander for speed - I won't cover that in detail here. A few common things to do off the top of my head are: Use a CDN, e.g. Amazon Cloudfront. Optimize image size, e.g. using kraken.io. If a lander doesn't have a favicon, add an empty one: e.g. http://transparent-favicon.info/
You can use tools like webpagetest.org and Google PageSpeed Insights to give you tips on how to optimize for speed.
Please see the "On Landing Pages" section of this FAQ for more lander optimization tips (including speed optimization tips):
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-AM-FAQ-Thread!
Just don't forget to reinstate the entry pops when you're done!
7) Ensure Traffic Quality. When testing unproven offer and landers (i.e. offers and landers you haven't tested before):
a) Use Your Go-To Traffic Source. This would be the traffic source you've had the most success with in the past. This will give your camp the best chances of getting conversions and allow you to test more cheaply.
b) Bid Befittingly and Beware of Bots. Bid at least average to ensure you're getting decent-quality traffic. Consider either running a bot test, or siphoning a percentage of your traffic to afflow to track the % bot traffic from each placement. If using afflow, be sure to use a tracking token to pass traffic source placements to afflow stats.
8) Ensure Enough Offers and/or Creatives are Tested.
a) Use Ripped Landers First. When testing unproven offers, use the most-popular ripped landers (at least in the beginning), and don't forget to optimize for loading speed as mentioned above. Unless you've tested a fair number of landers across several geos for that vertical, and already know which lander(s) works well across multiple geos, test at least 5 landers, preferably 10 or more. This will ensure you have at least one decent lander in the mix. Save your creativity for later, when you already have a proven performing offer.
b) Use AM-Recommended Offers First. When using 2-3 offers of similar payouts to split-test landers (to cut down to a winning lander), check with your AM to make sure those offers are converting well for at least a few other affiliates.
c) Test on Pop First If Possible. If banners are involved, consider using pop traffic to lock down a decent offer+lander first, then test banners.
9) Run Enough Traffic. Ensure you've run enough traffic to give the campaign a chance. One of the most popular newbie questions is, "how much test budget should I allocate to a campaign?" I find this hard to answer without looking at detailed stats of the specific campaign.
However, as a bare minimum and based on sheer common sense, you should spend on traffic, at least this amount: (sum of payouts of all offers) x (# of landers). A multiple of that amount may be needed depending on the particular situation, but if you're running say 3 offers with average payout of $2, with unproven 10 landers, and you've only spent $10 and aren't seeing conversions yet, then you should definitely run more traffic before deciding whether you should ditch the campaign.
10) Don't Give Up. Thanks to member mattia_maschi for suggesting this one! "Failure" is merely a result of giving up before finding success. Nobody ever said running paid traffic campaigns was easy! Keep troubleshooting to verify your setup is correct, then keep testing until you find your first profits. After your first profitable campaign, you'll be more motivated to stay in the game.
That's it - short and simple! If you can think of more to add to the list please let me know and I'll add it - would be nice to have a list of 10 - nice even number. 
Amy
Many thanks Amy for this great post, absolutely illuminating!
As a newbie I would humbly try to suggest the 10th point of this guide: "Do not give up".
I know this is not a technical point but I think it is important, specially at the beginning when it seems you are throwing money out of the window and many doubts attack your thoughts.
Thank you again for writing this checklist!
Mattia
Originally Posted by mattia_maschi
Amy
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