Rebooting after an unsuccessful introduction to affiliate marketing (7)
Rebooting after an unsuccessful introduction to affiliate marketing
Like a few of the folks who recently posted follow-alongs, I've been lurking here on STM for several months just reading and soaking in as much as I could. After realizing that I was benefiting from reading other follow-alongs, and seeing the helpful comments and support the rest of the community offered, I decided to write my own.
By way of background, I learned about affiliate marketing last Fall. I got as much information as I could get my hands on, and launched some campaigns on pops. I started with direct-linking and then ran some sweeps offers with landers I ripped from Adplexity and modified as best as I could. I made all the typical newbie mistakes -- I focused on English-speaking Tier-1 countries, chased higher payouts, ran only a few offers and landers at a time, etc. I never got a campaign above -80% ROI, and after a few months, I became discouraged and hit pause on the campaigns. I wasn't sure if I'd be back.
About a month ago, however, I found myself with a renewed determination to make this work. I had previously seen Amy's day newbie tutorial, and skimmed through pieces of it, but I decided to read it carefully. I started with direct linking to SOI/DOI offers, but as she and others have pointed out, those offers weren't converting well through direct-linking as they had in the past. So I dusted off some of my old landers, fired up Adplexity, and started looking for some offers to begin the next phase of Amy's tutorials.
I quickly found myself overwhelmed and lost. I knew I should focus on Tier-3 geos, but which ones? What types of offers? My familiarity was with sweeps, but I wasn't sure if I should venture further out into other verticals. What networks should I focus on? And I wondered how could I get comfort that my landers were good when I didn't know the language. In other words, if I wasn't happy with my conversions, how could I tell if it was the lander or the offer that was the problem?
Then I found Amy's post about using Optimizer with Afflow. Last fall, I read and tried to implement her multi-part Afflow Arbitrage guide, as well as the tutorials by Mr. Payne. As others have noted, those methods have become harder to implement, and I found that out first hand.
But Amy's new article about using Optimizer with Afflow peaked my curiosity. I had used Optimizer last fall when it was in beta, and it worked pretty well. So I figured I'd give it a shot now with Afflow as Amy discussed. I figured it would give me a chance to practice optimization strategies and bidding, as the landers were already taken care of by Afflow. And I fired up Optimizer to give me a chance to automate at least some of the process (mainly shutting off placements based on spend and conversions).
Of course, I started off by repeating prior mistakes. I chased high payouts and high current earnings, and started off with expensive Tier 1 geos. The first campaign I ran yielded 4 conversions, or $.46 in revenue. That camp cost me $46.88, for an ROI of -$99.01%
I quickly changed gears and spent some time looking at as much front-end data as I could find on Afflow. Not just total conversions and total revenue, but I also looked at the # of clicks generated, CVR, the EPC and the eCPM. Based on that data, I picked 9 geos (mostly tier 3 geos) that looked promising, checked on traffic availability, and fired up the campaigns. I found that for a few of them, I couldn't generate enough traffic to make it worth my while. And I found one where the competition was so entrenched that I decided to kill the campaign right away.
However, several of those geos and afflow links looked promising based on my initial runs. Unfortunately, I also realized that my optimizer setup wasn't working right, and wasn't properly tracking data from my campaigns. So while I've been working to get that fixed, I've been focusing on a few geos that had yielded the most promising results. I am using the optimizing strategies and flowchart that Amy provides in her 40 day tutorial. And the results have been very promising:
Total Afflow Results (appx the last 3 weeks)
Total Spend: $200.42
Total Revenue: $99.25
ROI: -53.97%
Last Three Days
Total Spend: $58.82
Total Revenue: $55.07
ROI: -6.37%
Obviously, I'm really happy with the direction things are moving in. My plans at this point are:
#1 - Continue to optimize my current campaigns
#2 - get Optimizer up and running correctly
#3 - Keep looking at data for potential new Afflow geos and links
#4 - Use this experience to more confidently branch out into other offers with landers.
Would love your thoughts/guidance/advice, and thanks in advance!
Welcome back to AM pastafaucet 
I'm glad to see you are having MUCH better results this time around.
Is there anything specific you need help with? Looks like you're on the right path, at least based on he past 3 days of data. But I'm sure we could help you further, just name the specific problems you're dealing with.
Cheers,
Matej.
Wow pastafaucet - GREAT job!
Everyone will encounter issues and hardships in the beginning - it's the ones that rise to the challenge to figure ways AROUND that will eventually succeed. And it certainly looks like you have what it takes this time around.
Using your case above as an example: If after the first $10 in spend you only made $0.46 in revenue, you know it'd be pretty hopeless - unless you have a large placement that zapped (say) $8 of your $10 budget.
Total Spend: $200.42
Total Revenue: $99.25
ROI: -53.97%
Last Three Days
Total Spend: $58.82
Total Revenue: $55.07
ROI: -6.37%
This is affiliate marketing. You learn. You analyze. You tweak your approach. You test different things. That's how you can turn large negative ROIs into positive ROIs.
Now, next time you test something and it doesn't work right away, you'll have the faith and self-confidence to provide the patience you need to figure/test things out, to turn it around.
This is a virtuous cycle where the more you figure things out, the more likely you'll figure out the next thing, and the more likely you're stick with AM until you succeed.
A few suggestions at this point:
1)Afflow is getting saturated. Using Optimizer will give you a leg up on traffic sources that are compatible. You're also encouraged to explore less-known networks where not a lot of people are running afflow.
2)Optimizer can be used to optimize campaigns other than afflow, so it may be time to give sweeps a try again, since you already have experience with that vertical.
3)Targeting Tier 1 geos wouldn't be a mistake per se, although I agree that it would be better to tackle them after you have more experience, such that you can test and optimize more efficiently to minimize initial losses. If you have some promising offers, and have tested enough landers to find one that converts reasonably well, it would mainly just be a matter of cutting enough placements. Big tier 1 geos typically have a ton of placements which will allow you to cut a good number of them, and then STILL offer you enough traffic to make profits from. Downside of course is, it would require a bigger budget to cut so many placements. But once you've made that upfront investment, you'd be able to run on that geo and traffic source repeatedly, without starting from scratch.
Also: We'll be publishing an extensive report on 'what's working in 2018' in a couple of days. Please stay tuned for that - it will give you ideas on what the next step up is, from pop - since pop is getting quite saturated. It is still the easiest type of traffic to master though, and getting to consistent xx-xxx/day in profits is still not very difficult. So it wouldn't be a bad idea for you to keep running pop for a bit.
If you have the budget though, I would recommend testing Native traffic once you have enough experience with pop to be able to analyze stats and optimize campaigns efficiently. Optimizer will be able to help you optimize native campaigns as well. It would just be a lot less costly to do your learning with pop, before progressing to native.
Lastly: The owner of Afflow has just launched another service, called Advertizer (advertizer.com). I have yet to give it a whirl, but will find the time to do so and maybe publish a case study on here. Feel free to test that if you're interested.
Looking forward to your updates! Have fun with all this.
Amy
Thanks Matuloo and Amy for your comments! I very much appreciate them, and the guidance and mentoring I know I can and will receive from you.
Today's results were a bit down; I had more conversions on two of the campaigns, but a bit less on a third, which dropped the overall ROI down to -20.9%. But there were another 12 placements to cut off, so hopefully we're still making progress. And I know that if the results don't pan out here, they will on another campaign.
I continue to check other afflow geos and links, and I'm starting to focus more on offers and landers. I'm probably over-analyzing the offers and geos; I probably should just pick a tier 3 geo or two (perhaps something in LatAm or TH or IN or ID) and then just run all the ads I can find with a few landers and see what data I can generate. What do you think?
I'm also looking at the Advertizer. I got an email from Afflow and thought it looked interest, and after seeing your response, I just signed up and will definitely give it a try. And I think we potentially figured out the problem with optimizer. Apparently I am not passing the campaignId token. I don't know why it suddenly stopped working, but I'm going to try to adjust my urls to include that token and see what happens.
To answer/comment on a few of the things mentioned:
The -99% ROI after $46 in ad spend definitely hurt. I initially ran it with just a $15 daily budget, and got 3 conversions for a grand total of $.10 in revenue! But I was stupid. Per afflow, that geo and link type had generated over $250K in revenue over the past 30 days, so I knew the conversions were there. I figured i just had to kill the unprofitable placements. I only planned to run another day at $15, but by the time I was able to check in, the second day was done and we were into the third. I realized it wasn't working out and killed it at that time. Major lessons learned; I misprojected how much it would cost to get data on the placements to cut
I am very much interested in getting into natives, and I do have the budget to get there. I'm going to take your advice and stay in pops while I continue to learn and get to a place where I can get profitable before making that jump, but hopefully will get there soon!
I saw mention about the "what's working in 2018" report that is in the works and can't wait to see it!
Thanks again, and I'll keep you posted!!!
Native has certainly bigger potential than POPs, so feel free to move there as soon as you master the workflow here on pops.
Thanks Matuloo. Very good advice, and I'm working on it as we speak. Will keep you all posted!
So I wanted to post a quick update. I read and re-read Amy's guides and the advice I've picked up here and on some other follow alongs, and then I picked a few tier 2/3 geos, decided I would focus on sweeps again, and signed up for as many consistent offers as I could find on multiple networks. I used a few networks I haven't tried before, and wound up having a postback tracker problem at first which I got squared away, but it meant that I couldn't peg the placements for the initial conversions for the first day or so.
I also dusted off some old landers, and ripped a bunch more from Adplexity. Cleaning the landers in a language which is foreign to me is always tough, and I haven't done that in a while. But I got a few that I liked cleaned up and threw them up and into a rotation with several offers.
I also spent some time looking at Afflow and picked a few links that I thought looked promising.
The results have been promising over the past 3 days:
ROI for Camp 1: -39.88%
ROI for Camp 2: -31.35% (with one offer being in green)
ROI for Camp 3: 282.05%
ROI for Camp 4: -50.55%
ROI for Camp 5: -87.80%
I've kept the bidding low enough that I haven't yet begun to cut placements yet, so I'm generally happy with those ROIs at this point (except #5, but such is life..). They are MUCH different than the initial ROIs I used to get.
Camp 3 showed enough conversions for one placement that I actually shut off everything else and focused on that placement. I'll probably push that out into a separate campaign and then go back to exploring the other placements soon.
And then ... just a few minutes ago, I got word from my traffic source that the one of the landers for Camp 2 got flagged by Google. The traffic source shut the camp down. It looks like just the url for one specific lander was flagged, and the lander was a simple spinner -- no logos, no sound, no promises of winning, no back button script, no vibrate, etc. It was pretty clean in terms of a pops lander.
I can easily either kill that lander or just move it to another subdirectory/domain. I've got a ticket in now, and hope to clear it up quickly.
Will keep you posted...
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