When do you give up on an offer? (8)
Something I've been thinking about lately is when is the appropriate time to move on from a previously profitable offer?
For example for the past 3 months I was running an offer that was making about $150-200/day, and it seemed pretty easy to do so. Everything I threw at it converted pretty well.
For the first 2 months profits were easy, however in the 3rd month it's been a struggle and I'm about break-even.
The CVR when I first started was at about 10.5%, and then this dropped to about 7.5-8.0%, which doesn't sound like much, but thats like a 20-25% conversion drop which is basically all my profit.
Part of me at first was thinking maybe if I improve my funnel I can get the CVR back up, but whatever I do I can't seem to move it.
So is it just time to dump the offer?
I guess my question is how much are you willing to rework your funnel until you say "fuck it, this is dead"?
For me it depends on the offer's potential. If it's limited in potential scale and has quit being profitable, then I give up on them pretty easily.
If it's one that has been profitable AND could potentially scale even higher, but it quits working for me no matter what I do, I'll usually decide to 'hit pause' on it and come back in a few weeks.
I like framing it like that because that way I don't have the 'defeat' of 'giving up' on it, but I'm not going nuts hitting my head against a wall trying to get it to work. Plus, in those instances, when I 'restart' the campaign a month or two months later, I often find it does way better. Not sure if because I'm just more knowledgeable about the in's and out's of it, or if the algorithm is boosting it because it seems 'new', or what, but that's what I like to do.
Indeed, interestingly my two biggest/most profitable campaigns to date have been later iterations of ones I gave up on and 'paused' at some point previous.
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I should also add that I am talking about in Natives in the above post - not sure how well that translates to other areas -
I pause and return to "old" offers all the time. The oldest offer I'm still running has been around since I started with paid traffic, which was like 5 or 6 years ago. But this is just one specific direct advertiser, I guess they have a solid setup as it keeps on converting year after year. But it still has its ups and downs, so when I see it stopped performing well enough again, I just pause it and restart in 2 weeks or so, sometimes even few months.
I also work with one more advertiser for years, but they keep on refreshing their offers, introducing new domains and designs all the time, so there is almost always something "new" to try.
With the "standard" offers I get via the various aff. networks I work with, they usually last a few months max... then the performance starts to go down. I always give it some extra attempts to make them work again, but if it's not coming back, I just drop it. I learned not to get emotional with offers long time ago, there are always new ones to try 
Thanks for the responses guys!
I guess for me I'm still trying to further develop my feel on finding out whats wrong with my campaigns when they start going south.
Sometimes I feel like I overthink things and start doubting my fundamentals, then again there are so many variables out of your control (ie network scrubbing, oversaturation, traffic bots etc).
I guess back to the drawing board heh
Originally Posted by jabong82
Originally Posted by matuloo
My favorite analogy I try to always tell myself is that it's more like fishing than farming.
Just because I plant crops/set up a campaign exactly like another farmer/media buyer, doesn't mean the results are going to be identical, since there's infinite variables involved.
Instead it's like fishing, where you can try to duplicate the best practices of other fishermen, but ultimately you gotta just toss out bait and see where the fish are biting and go from there
Originally Posted by jack_l
My favorite analogy I try to always tell myself is that it's more like fishing than farming.
Just because I plant crops/set up a campaign exactly like another farmer/media buyer, doesn't mean the results are going to be identical, since there's infinite variables involved.
Instead it's like fishing, where you can try to duplicate the best practices of other fishermen, but ultimately you gotta just toss out bait and see where the fish are biting and go from there
Well, this is a tricky one.
The way I look at it, this is not a super scientific game. Its basically a lot of assumption, and doing things before you know things for sure. You dont wait for 95% statistical significance.
For example lets talk about banners.
If you want to test lets say 200 banners, and each banner takes $50 for statistical significance, you will need $10000 for testing them.
So a better way to go for this is to test 200 banners for early signs of performance, and then you zone in and test the likely ones more.
This way you can test 200 banners for less than $1000. And much faster too, which means you can test another 200 banners.
The same goes with landers and offers. If I feel like an offer is dead, I will probably just stop it. And I can do that too, because I am working 15+ geos and 4+ traffic sources, I always have other camps to focus on. So focus on spreading things, so you dont depend on one thing.
With that said, a simple test to know if an offer is dead for sure is just see if it is working despite trying 2-3 generations of banners and landers that works for other offers in other geos. If not, just stop running it. You can still keep in your list for retesting weeks or months later (After asking AM if it is still active of course)
Always try to keep a list of offers you can split test. I usually just ask my AM in the beginning of the month and updates that list weekly. This way you are not at shortage of offers. For me, shortage of offers is still a problem. Losing offers is the main reason why I have to pause a geo, which sucks.
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