How to Recognize When You have Squeezed An Offer Dry? (8)
Hey stacker,
How are you all doing 
I was wondering for anyone who has run and ended a big affiliate campaign when you realized you have squeezed an offer out and saturated the audience?
Of course the obvious tells, decreasing CR% and ROI is a potential signal but how do you know if it's the offer and not your creatives/lander or just your traffic source that's tapped out?
Also, have you ever tried to revive an offer? If so, how did it go? Did you find it worth it effort.
Would love to hear all the strategic war stories you have to share, feel free to hide any details your not comfortable revealing.
That´s a good question, I try to answer as good as possible.
Let´s start from the easiest options, creatives and landing pages.
To check if it´s one of these just test the original funnel with a different creative and just test the original funnel with a different landing page.
That being said landing pages often can work for very long time.
I have some landers that I downloaded more than 4 years ago from Adplexity and I still use them exactly the way I used them 4 years ago already and they still work good.
With creatives it´s similar, when I have a good working creative I also use it sometimes for months.
About saturating the audience, this happens more on small geos but not that much in bigger geos.
For example I had one offer that I ran only in Germany with the same approach and same lander for several years and it made constantly few thousand Euros per month.
Probably it would have continued to work but my traffic wasn´t available then anymore.
But you see, some stuff can even be run for years without saturating the audience.
In all fairness I have to say that it wasn´t a traditional CPA offer.
In the end best is to check the different metrics and then try to find out what´s the reason for the performance drop.
Here is a rough breadown about the three key elements of a campaign (creative, landing page and offer):
- Creative CTR and/or CVR decreased but LP CTR and CVR as well offer CVR stays same? -> Test new creative
- Creative CTR and CVR stays same, LP CTR and/or CVR decreases, offer CVR stays same? -> Test new landing page
- Creative CTR and CVR and LP CTR and CVR stays same but offer CVR decreases? -> Probably it´s the offer
With more infos or some stats it would be easier to answer more related to your situation.
There are so many different offers out there to chose from that it´s mostly better to find a replacement for the original offer.
It also depends on why the offer stopped converting.
For example it happens over and over again that offers get optimized from the advertisers for their profit.
When it´s then not converting that good with your traffic anymore you just have to move on.
Or maybe the offers database is filled already and many of your conversions are duplicates and not counted anymore.
Let me know if it helps already, when you have more questions just ask.
I feel like you're using the terms campaign and offer interchangeably, when they're two different things. Example: You can revive a dead campaign, but not a dead offer.
So let's look at some of your questions.
First, I look at the targeting (how big is the audience) and the appeal.
Broad appeal = Diet
Broad targeting = No targeting
Niche appeal = A caddy to transport Hamsters
Niche targeting = targeting a smaller audience or you're targeting a small country.
The more broad the appeal and targeting is, the less chances of it ever being Saturated. If things aren't working, then my immediate gut is to keep testing out different angles. Offers don't get saturated, angles do.
If you're promoting something niche, then you're going to be restricted. My focus then is not on angles, but expanding geos / traffic sources. If something's tapped out, then pause for a few months. Sometimes just restarting again after a few months = profit. Then rinse and repeat. You have to let the "banner blindness" reset with the audience.
Other thoughts:
* Don't forget that seasonality can affect demand and interest. So yea, sometimes it does make sense to pause.
* Angles, angles, angles. I can't stress this enough. People have been selling diet shit for centuries and it's still not "saturated". The difference is the angles / unique mechanisms.
* Competition affects things. If you have a ton of other people copying your creatives, then everything's going to be saturated rather quickly. It then becomes a battle of operational efficiency (you can pump out creatives / angles faster than them) or who has more moats (actually having a good offer exclusive)
Offers die but usually it's not due to sheer saturation but rather a ton of people using exactly the same techniques, angles and creatives to promote it, just as Charles mentioned above.
But the performance of an offer can definitely decrease because of reaching high saturation levels. I've seen this happen with dating and live cam offers... some large advertisers have been buying ALL the traffic they could get. As a result they have grown their email DBs to insane sizes and it was getting harder and harder to send them leads that they didn't collect through one of their several platforms or websites. So technically, those offers were still live and collecting subs, but more and more of them were "duplicates" so they didn't pay for them or even register them in stats, so the CVR was decreasing slowly and steadily.
When I see that the performance drops, first thing to play with are the creatives for sure. Banners, then LPs, testing new angles etc... you can often revive the campaigns this way. And re-using old creatives is also a great strategy that Im using all the time.
On a side note, decreased performance of the offer, and I mean the OFFER not the campaign (funnel) can have several reasons, doesn't have to be saturation only. Sometimes the advertiser changes the flow which impacts the CVR, they could start scrubbing some leads, maybe they introduced some filtering that labels some leads as fraudulent. It can also be a change at the traffic sources side, the traffic quality could have decreased due to some changes in the inventory... large flat buy, lost good pubs...
One way or another, when a campaign/offer decreases in performance, I always try to make changes to bring it back. But once I see it doesnt make sense from whatever reason, I just move on. it's tempting to find out what caused the decrease, but it's more important to know where to start promoting something else and make profits 
Originally Posted by fastaj
How are you all doing
I was wondering for anyone who has run and ended a big affiliate campaign when you realized you have squeezed an offer out and saturated the audience?
Of course the obvious tells, decreasing CR% and ROI is a potential signal but how do you know if it's the offer and not your creatives/lander or just your traffic source that's tapped out?
Also, have you ever tried to revive an offer? If so, how did it go? Did you find it worth it effort.
Would love to hear all the strategic war stories you have to share, feel free to hide any details your not comfortable revealing.
And if the decline is sudden, I would check with my AM to see if there are issues with the offer.
If in spite of testing a sufficient amount of new creatives and bids, I can't turn the campaign around, I would try to get pay bumps to justify running the campaign for as long as possible.
As for whether it's worth the effort - it varies and there's no certain way of knowing in advance. But the bigger the campaign (e.g. the more geos and more traffic sources I could make profitable), the more money I can justify to spend on "reviving" it.
Another suggestion I can make is that if you're running a branded offer where the brand has a good reputation, it would definitely be a good idea not to give up too quickly, because those can run for many months/years with continuous testing of fresh creatives.
When I was a new'ish affiliate, I learned that one the hard way, by giving up on a really good international offer from a reputable software brand that was making me lots of money until it started to decline - but instead of testing lots of creatives I lost heart and moved on. A couple of years later I was STILL seeing the offer pop up on top 10 offers lists, but each time I did I thought the offer must have been approaching end-of life so never decided to give it another chance. Over time I started to notice that good brands tend to exhibit the same trend of longevity. Not saying this is always true, but definitely worth more effort in salvaging/reviving.
Amy
I've had this experience and it's a tough one. This was a CPA offer in the gaming vertical that paid on a registration event. What ended up having the best effect was building a negative audience to exclude people that may have already converted (since this was a CPA offer and only paid on first registration).
Adding other pools of traffic can help as well, for instance if you are buying FB then make sure to add Insta. Or if you are buying Google Search then add Google Display. You can usually setup some new audiences on existing traffic to jumpstart the new campaigns.
I hope this helps!
[QUOTE=travelsite_io;413734Adding other pools of traffic can help as well, for instance if you are buying FB then make sure to add Insta. Or if you are buying Google Search then add Google Display. You can usually setup some new audiences on existing traffic to jumpstart the new campaigns.[/QUOTE]
Yup, adding a new source is one of the proven ways of combating burnout of any type. The more "different" the new sources is, the better.
But the performance of an offer can definitely decrease because of reaching high saturation levels. I've seen this happen with dating and live cam offers... some large advertisers have been buying ALL the traffic they could get.
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