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💪 In It To Win It - DTAlexONE's Follow Along (9)

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Entry no. 1 on January 16, 2019

Quick Intro

Like many others, I have dabbled with affiliate marketing on and off throughout the years. I've had success with launching campaigns and getting conversions; only 1 campaign that I ever launched was profitable.

My biggest problem has been not being persistent because of budget issues. In the past, I would spend money on campaigns that were for living expenses. Management of money seems to be crucial to success in this.

But I'm at a point in my life where I have saved up a decent amount of money just for affiliate marketing from working professionally as a digital marketer.

I'm not setting an unrealistic goal of trying to make $x,xxx by a certain date. Not at all. I'm going to keep going until I make it... however long that takes.

My Current Campaign(s)

I'm currently focused on 1 offer at the moment that I am running on Facebook. I ran this same offer on Google Ads about a month ago with about $2600 spend and $1500 in revenue. I know it converts but I was not able to optimize it to profitability.

Anyhow, now I am running it on Facebook because there is more volume there AND I decided to focus on FB as my traffic source.

Offer: Beauty Product
Payout: $20
Traffic Source: Facebook
Audiences: I am running this first test on all the audiences that I will be testing at a later point once I have a good funnel that converts and is at breakeven or profitable.

I launched the campaign several times with the most recent version being today. I have tried different approaches to testing including most recently James Van Elswyk's testing methodology from iStack Training.

I took his testing methodology and tweaked it slightly to include angle as being the first variable I test because my thought process was that I can derive multiple images / creatives from an angle which will serve me in the long run.

I spent almost $540 in 3 days to test 1 variable (angle) which is too much for my budget. And in those 3 days, I received about 2 conversions. To be fair, I was also running 3 landing pages against each other so in reality I was running 2 tests, angle and LPs.



I received about 2 more that were not attributed to this campaign which is very frustrating because it doesn't tell me what is working.

So I paused this initial run.

I am going to relaunch tomorrow with the same testing methodology and incorporate all the audiences I am going to split-test later. And I am scaling the budget down.

This is what my new testing methodology looks like. The only thing changed is that instead of doing 3x payout per day / 9x payout over 3 days, I'm doing 1x per day / 3x payout over 3 days.



Questions

• My biggest challenge has been settling on a testing methodology that will give me the data and results I want without blowing my budget in the span of a week. This is why I tweaked James Van Elswyk's methodology to 1x payout per day for each creative that is being tested versus 3x that he recommends. Will this hurt my campaign?
• My second biggest challenge has been knowing when to check for statistical significance. I read through Vortex's posts as it pertains to pop traffic. I want to keep it somewhat simple right now by using rules of thumb like 3x payout for each creative that I'm testing. When a creative reaches that payout, I will check for statistical significance and pick a winner in that test. But I also recognize that if the results are too close to call, I will need to spend more money to get more data so that a winner stands out. BUT I am also not past picking one and going from there. Like Vortex said, it comes down to the individual. I want to rely on math to make decisions but do not want to aim for perfection or otherwise I will get analysis paralysis. Thoughts?
• I am targeting all my audiences together in these initial tests. My goal is to find a winning funnel from combination of winning angles, images, headlines, text, descriptions, and LP. James Van Elswyk calls this "sharpening the sword". Afterwards, I will split-test all the audiences against each other using the winning funnel. Any flaws to this approach?

Conclusion

This campaign will start tomorrow and I will wait until Sunday to determine whether to continue further and optimize or move onto a new offer. The hope is that I find a winning angle and then derive about 3 images to test against each other within that angle.

Thanks for reading!

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Looking forward to hearing how things fly. A couple of Q’s is it correct you’re running image ads not video ads and what placement are they in terms of desktop and mobile and feed or other locations? Cheers Nigel


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Two questions come to mind;
- you running on a LLA from advertiser?
- please show some results regarding FB clicks - prelander clicks - offer clicks.

Probably with this amount of spend, 540 dollar, (forget the 1x, 3x 9x times CPA people talking about) you already have some data which could be very useful.

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For now, I am running just images, no videos. I plan on introducing video at some point as the advertiser has them but wanted to test angles first and I don't have videos for each angle.

As far as placements go, I included all of them in my targeting minus Instagram.

For audiences, I have 3 LLAs. 2 created from the PageView and ViewContent (30 seconds or more on page) standard events; the 3rd one from a list of about 5,000 customers from the advertiser's CRM.

And I'm happy to show you data from this most recent FB run of this campaign.

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I am following up on this post to also include add-to-carts as I just received advice that ATCs should be a metric to look at when scouting for potential.

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dtalexone when you were running Google Ads, did you run Search ads or GDN? Is this offer from an affiliate network or you are sourcing on your own?

If the product is $20 and after 632 relevant clicks you received only 10 ATC, I would say you need to change the product/offer ASAP.

In case you are drop-shipping you need to test more products and cut them earlier. $500 for 10 ATC that's a lot. Too much actually. I don't think you can optimize this to make it profitable.

If you are promoting this through affiliate network like GiddyUp and you know people are making money with it, then try to run in other GEO. Your average CPM is $24 ... to make this profitable you need a very good offeer and optimized funnel.

Also, if you were running this with search ads on Google and you did not make it profitable then you will probably have a much harder time to make it profitable on Facebook.

Give us more info and we will be able to give you more detailed answers.

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Hey @wakeboarder!

So this offer is from an affiliate network and I initially ran it on Google Search; I ignored GDN completely.

I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment that $500 for 10 ATCs and only 2 conversions isn't the sign of a great offer. This is an ecomm product that is somewhat known and sells but may have hit its peak a while ago OR the audience has been saturated. My audiences were mostly lookalikes from the CRM and traffic.

I recently asked my affiliate manager on that network for a list of top revenue generating offers and this offer specifically wasn't at the top. And the offer is only limited to the United States. It converts but it doesn't seem "hot" at the moment. Or it could be that it's me and I'm having trouble optimizing it.

I also went from Google to Facebook because on Google, it was performing best with direct to offer and I felt there weren't that many variables left to optimize.

The screenshots that I shared were from me testing this offer with James Van Elsywk's testing method. As mentioned in my first post, I wanted to launch again using a modified version of JVE's testing method with a smaller budget. Ultimately, I ended up testing a different methodology that I had a bit more success with. I will be providing an update shortly.

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Entry no. 2 on January 23, 2019

So after my last entry, I decided to re-launch the same offer using a modified version of James Van Elsywk's testing method but using a smaller budget of 1x payout per day over 3 days versus 3x payout per day over 3 days. I also included together all the audiences that I would eventually split-test. These were the results:



For about $150 in spend, I received only 1 conversion. Needless to say, not good. But I didn't spend as much as I did in the prior campaign and it was paced better in my opinion.

While this campaign was running, two things were said to me that stuck (shout out to @bernamar!):

1. If I had access to the seed list from which the lookalikes were built on, so did other affiliates and the audience has most probably been saturated with this offer already.
2. Test different audiences and interests in $5 - $10 / daily ad sets.

So I did what any affiliate marketer would or should do - I launched the same offer using this methodology. I defined 11 different audiences in 11 different ad sets at $10 / day each using the same creatives I have been using.

And to my surprise, it is working better than the first 2 prior campaigns. Here are what the stats currently look like:



So far I have spent $270.44 for $140 in revenue. I am at a loss but that is to be expected in the beginning. I kept a close eye on all 11 ad sets when I first launched to start turning off anything that hit $10 - $15 without any conversions with the goal of finding the audiences that do convert. Only 4 were actually bringing in some conversions so I kept those. On audience A08, A07, A01... I'm almost at break even.

However, I am not sure where to continue from here because the conversions come in every other day... it's not consistent.

Now let's look at LP data for this campaign so far:



Data is a bit off here because I've been using the same campaign in Thrive Tracker for all the FB campaigns but conversions are mostly coming from LP B.

Questions

- Should I raise the budget on the ad sets that are converting? If so, how long should I let it run without any conversions before I cut it?
- I already have my eye on another offer that seems hot and my affiliate manager recommended to run it in a different geo. I like the $5 $10 / daily ad set approach and may launch it the same way. Any devil's advocates?

I enjoy updating this follow along and will continue to do so as it can only keep me sharp.

Thanks!

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good thread
following, support!

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