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1 Simple & Basic Optimisation Trick That Made My Campaigns Profitable (10)

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1 Simple & Basic Optimisation Trick That Made My Campaigns Profitable



Today I want to share with you a simple & basic optimisation trick that helped me to turn my campaigns into the green profit zone.

First I was not sure if I should turn this into a “case study” or just simple share the tip & trick.
However, as I’m still running these campaigns I decided to share my approach in a form of a short story/experience.
You should be still able to extract insights that you can apply to your own campaigns right away.

So let’s get started:

This is a short story of me running adult display campaigns over the period of the last 6 months.
However “the trick” shared should be applicable to media buying on any traffic source or vertical where you are able to optimise and cut placements by your own.

Adult, with it’s many sub-niches (fetishes) and plenty of publishers offered me actually a pretty huge playground: few thousand of ad placements to play with! (pretty normal to have campaigns with 10-15k ad placements)



There is no doubt that adult traffic powers the internet and that there must be plenty of unknown pockets of profits over there.

I also got excited as it is the area of the biggest traffic volumes and least regulations/compliance issues (although it’s recently tightening up, especially with the latest Google Better Ads regulations).

The perfect combination for an affiliate!

However…also huge competition. Keep that in mind before you jump on!

…so…

I was launching, testing & trying to figure out the ins and outs.

Volumes were huge, and therefore it’s very easy to burn budgets.

I decided to develop my own in-house optimisation tool (similar to TheOptimizer) that helped me watching and optimising my campaigns 24/7 based on my rules, built lists of placements, did blacklisting/whitelisting etc.)

I simply wanted to crack it.

But let’s get back to the main reason you are reading this post: “the trick”.

In fact “the trick” is very basic thing that I should follow in the first place.

Why? Because it’s simple math and media buying 101.

But once we are in the process of launching & running campaigns, we are vulnerable to many mistakes.

There are just so many variables to focus on.

With so many variables in play we can easily miss some aspects of it.

I was running these campaigns for quite a long time, but I struggled to turn them into a more stable profitable campaigns.

Yes, there were many profitable days, but also there were still more days that I lost money.

The good sign was that I was getting conversions and in average across all campaigns I was close to a breakeven.

That gave me hope and motivation, and it also showed that there is some potential in it.

I just needed to figure it out.

On the other side this was also the point where I struggled a lot.

You know what is the game plan:

• test creatives
• test landing pages
• test offers
• make sure to block bad placements
• get the bidding right
• try to look for profitable segments (pockets of profit)
• blacklisting, whitelisting and all those other small things..

I got stuck in this loop while trying to figure out that “magic sweet spot” that will change that red line into a green one inside my tracker.



After weeks and months I started to lose hope (I was focusing purely on this vertical - adult COD offers), but conversions were still coming.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t stable I was able to have profitable days.

In this process I had over 100+ campaigns of a several types ie.: blacklists, whitelists, different pricing/bidding modes and all kind of stuff you do while trying to figure things out.

In other words quite a lot of data I was sitting on.

So one day I started to review my campaigns and look for so called “patterns of success”.

Suddenly I was looking at this one tiny one placement whitelist campaign that was running since October 2017 ie. roughly for 6 months.

During that period it made around $1600 profit or in other words $266/month on average.

Nothing special, but note that it’s from a 1 placement and totally on autopilot (I even do not change creatives).

ROI during that long period was outstanding 195.49%.

So I took a deeper look at it and also it’s “parent” blacklist campaign where I’ve found this placement in the first place.

What I’ve found was surprisingly basic thing, that I should’ve spot long time ago:

CPC was significantly lower than for other placements.

Back to basics, right?

CPC < EPC = $PROFIT

As I sad earlier, it’s very easy to get lost in the optimisation process, especially when we are trying to look for the magic combinations (placements, creatives, landers, offers, bids,…).

So what I did next was simple:

I created a new blacklist campaign (as the previous one was 6 months old).

Then I grabbed all placements that met my expected CPC < EPC condition (I knew from my data what EPC I’m making in this geo).

And then finally I simply created a whitelist campaign with only these placements.

Traffic and conversions started rolling in and the campaign turned very fast into the green zone.

It’s not 100% perfect, but the profit probability is now much higher.

Now I can keep the campaign running, and continue testing and improving the before mentioned combinations, cutting zones and looking for highly profitable pockets of profit to keep OR highly unprofitable pockets (zones) to cut.

Another easy thing I can do is to ask for higher payouts which should bring even better margins.

I hope this post or rather story can give you some ideas of different approaches we can take while running our campaigns.

The main point should be that sometimes we should go back to basics and look at the things from different point of view.

We should not forget that media buying is an arbitrage in the first place.

At the end of the day our goal in the paid traffic arbitrage game is to pay less and make more.



Cheers,
Erik

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Good job Erik! Thanks for sharing this

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Definitely newsletter material! Thanks for sharing Erik!



Amy

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This is it exactly ... it's so easy to forget about the most obvious things, when chasing the holly grail and another secret trick ... when in reality, it's all basic math and simple principles.

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Hi, Thank for sharing this tip, I have one issue which i don't understand
"I created a new blacklist campaign (as the previous one was 6 months old).

Then I grabbed all placements that met my expected CPC < EPC condition (I knew from my data what EPC I’m making in this geo).

And then finally I simply created a whitelist campaign with only these placements."

Why do you need create blacklist campaign?

Many thanks

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Hey Hieu!

The reason I created new BL campaign is because in the span of 6 months things could've changed a lot.
From my experience many zones may not exists anymore or the layout/ads placement may be repositioned and therefore the CTR/CPC would be different.
So I just run a quick BL campaign to collect fresh data and work with that.
That's the main reason.

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Erik meant that he just started fresh again ... first a standard BL campaign, so cutting placements that didn't meet his new criteria ... and once he had enough good placements identified, he just took those and made a white-list campaign to target just those.

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Thanks man, I enjoyed not only your story from this post, but the easy to the eyes format you put on here

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Great insight, thanks!

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Thank you for your post Erik,


It's very interesting to see how sometimes the solution to our problems is pretty simple!
KISS as they say, right?

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