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Should I Cut these Widgets? (10)

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Hi All,

I am running a M.E. offer that pays out $45 per sale - it's a trial that costs the customer an initial $7. It's in a tier 1 country.

My campaign has been going up and down depending on the day. I'm overall at about -7% (1100 spent 1035 in) and it's been running for 5 days on RON MGID. I spend about $200 a day, split into 2 campaigns, one for mobile, one for desktop. Tablet traffic has been atrocious so far so cut it.

I've cut the obviously bad widgets, using similar rules to those used by Jack on his new revcontent FA. But I will say that I need to be a bit more lenient than him because I'm not running a VSL where his LP is a title, a pic/video freeze and 4 lines of text so my stats won't be anywhere near his 40% LP CTR.

In fact, could he or anyone who has run non/vsl diet/skin/M.E offer tell me what LP CTR to expect/hope for? I've seen super affiliates run the "shark tank winner" LP and it would be interesting to hear what CTR they expect from that. My experience with those landers is 4% mobile and about 7% deskstop on RON - I don't have nearly enough data to run whitelist campaigns like Jack did.

Ok, back to my campaign...

However, a few widgets have been dragging my campaign into the negative. I have about 14 widgets (7 mobile, 7 desktop) that have spent over $12 but less than Jack's $20 figure. They have decent LP CTRs, 8% (mobile) 14% (Desktop) and have each sent 20-40 visitors to the merchant page. Yet not one conversion. My traffic is cheap so the numbers work if I don't have these laggards in my campaign.

Do these stats imply that the merchant offer isn't good enough for them and I should therefore cut them for this offer but try them again for a new offer in the same niche?

All the best,

dls123

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Judging from your initial results your campaign doesn't look bad at all. It's only 5 days running and it's already at -7% ROI, thing which is a pretty good sign that the offer converts well.

When you say you plan on blocking widgets on MGID, are you referring to the main widgets or subwidgets?

Also, when it comes to cutting poor performing widgets, I would suggest to take in consideration both the offer payout as well as the landing page ctr. So if your offer pays $45 on a conversion, I'd leave it running at least 1x the offer payout, or maybe a max of $35 - $40 if the landing page ctr looks promising. If you're giving $35 - $40 of ad spend before cutting them, you still have $5 - $10 of profit if a conversion happens.

Another approach would be to use your offer's performance stats from the offer network. Based on the general stats of the offer like conversion rate and earnings per clicks, you can easily calculate what should be the minimum LP CTR for your offer to be profitable while taking a tailored optimization approach for that specific offer.

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I agree with @platinum - if the widget has a good lp ctr I would try to give it 1x offer payout before you block it. Maybe .5-.75X if you're really eager to block stuff (on that follow-along of mine you referenced I am blocking at .5X offer payout if no conversions but that's definitely on the aggressive side I will admit).

And then yeah, when I've run men's nutra type offers before with those long advertorials I usually get closer to a 5-15% lp ctr too. Much lower than those mini-lp's you see for the VSL's.

But yeah, your camp is doing better than any of my attempts at MGID over the years, so I'd say you're doing great so far man! I know a lot of folks kill it on MGID but I could never get it to work, but if you're at almost break-even so far that's a fantastic start - I would definitely keep going!

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Luckily for me, at the moment these one don't have subwidgets... So it would be the widgets. I have blocked some subwidgets elsewhere for having 0% LP CTR after 30 views.

I find that quite lenient. And I'm by no means stating that I am right, just that I haven't thought of it this way (I should expand my thinking!)

Correct me if my assumption is wrong. For most campaigns, most of a campaign's revenue comes from a limited number of widgets (guesstimate of 5% of the widgets that see a campaign's traffic). They "carry/or fund" the others. Their stats would likely be fantastic, like a CR of 50% etc. They push up the averages. Therefore, it's about finding those widgets as soon as possible and dropping any that don't look like they could become the "stars"?

I find this approach really useful, thanks!

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Such a relief reading that!

​Thanks for the feedback. Will do! I just feel like approaches to optimizing are a bit of "flook" at the moment. I had a widget that converted after 3 views, then hasn't done anything for the next 480. I'm still ahead for it. But if it were the other way round and I waited for every widget with a good LP CTR to break-even or get slightly ahead I think I'd go broke! How does one manage that dilemma?

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Yeah it might just be that the campaign either works R-O-N or doesn't... that's usually the case on Taboola and Outbrain for me- if it doesn't work early on it rarely works later no matter how many widgets I block.

Again though I don't know the 'best practices' for MGID so perhaps someone will chime in with that.

I guess you just need two rules, one for each widget on when you turn it off and one for the campaign as a whole on when you turn it off.

Again though your start so far you reference above is extremely good, that's definitely an impressive ROI for it just being the first few days of a campaign.

Are you testing it on Revc too or just MGID?

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Exactly, I have the same question. For a higher payout offers, waiting for each widget to spend 1x the payout before blocking it will be too expensive. I request to all the super affiliates here to answer this question please. What shall be the ideal test budget for testing Nutra COD offer with payout $45-50 per sale? Or should be optimize each widget on the basis of clicks, for example to block sub-widget id with above 200 clicks and 0 conversions? Please help!

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I tried both and RevContent went completely bust. Zero sales. Double checked the tech and funnel, but after sending over 300 merchant views without a single conversion I called it quits. It's odd cause I know a "big" affiliate is running exactly the same funnel on RevC and has been doing it for over 30 days now. I'm assuming he's got either 1. a bigger budget and willing to take a loss to find the best widgets (and bidding higher than me) that then make up for the early losses or 2. has something that I don't even know to look for. Is that a correct assumption?

Yep, luckily for me I've got enough conversions to keep this campaign almost break-even (collecting data) to answer the campaign question. The answer to the widget rule is the one really bugging me - certainly not simple without a huge budget.

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What was your approach when testing out RevContent? How much did you spend on that test?
Judging from Jack's follow along and overall feedback I have from a few other media buyers that are currently running on RevContent, their quality and overall results have improved a lot.

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I don't doubt RevContent, I have another campaign that's a bit better than even after 15 days (another issue altogether, can't increase budget without ROI going into negative), just in another vertical.

For this campaign, I spent $380 over 4 days with competitive bids that I have used in the past (although another vertical but still within Nutra). I wasn't especially aggressive with the cutting, didn't cut any that spent less than $20 with LP CTR over 8%. In the end, cut 3.

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