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Some first philosophical questions as a beginner (4)

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I read a lot of posts, while configuring some first campaigns and learning Binom and affiliate platforms.

I have "already" a few philosophical questions that I am sharing as for me they are elephants in the room. I am a beginner so I may have not grab all concepts yet, take this post as it is: a kind of brainstorm / internal questions from a starter (I even hesitated to post that stuff).


Question 1.

It's recommended to start with tier-3 or tier-4 countries to reduce the cost for beginners. This is a good advice. But I see a lot of people continuing this way even once they know perfectly the tools and the process. They are doing marketing in countries they don't know after all. I understand the learning process and the need to reduce the cost, but the main variable of adjustments between success and failure seem to be the offers, the landing page, and the traffic, right? And this funnel can be summarized by: "knowing the local culture". I wonder what is the rationale to focus at 90% on the numbers, not on the marketing in itself, which leads to the question n°2.


Question 2.

Why are we so data-focused? It's like data should determine our intuition, while in other industries, the data is here to confirm (or not) the intuition. In science for instance, it works like that: it starts by an intuition (or a model), and the data or observations confirm it or not. It does not work by "brute-forcing" the offers, trying all combinations until we find one winning.

This leads me to the question n°3.

Question 3.

Why the description of publishers is so short in affiliate platforms? I mean: it's always a basic screenshot of their offer page. That's very frustrating. It seems like we even don't care of what is exactly the offer. How to do a proper selling LP without even know what is the offer exactly?

Question 4.

What is the business model of affiliate platforms? I don't speak about traffic platforms, but those which collect and propose offers. What I don't understand is that they collect offers, surely with many details, and we have only a poor screenshot to decide if we want to bet on it. What did I not understand?


Thanks a lot!







To give you a general feedback on the current status extension: currently, the extension is in beta status as I am pretty sure there are some bugs. Furthermore, it is currently in further development to be published in the Google store, which is just a mess as the new extension protocol imposed by Google is full of bugs. So I will not be able to publish a new version until they correct

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Please never hesitate to ask questions! And these are darn good ones!


I'm guessing you must have been reading about pop traffic? This is basically the general methodology to running pop campaigns:

1)Collect a bunch of offers

2)Rip a bunch of landing pages and fix them up quickly (or, just use the one/few that have worked decently recently)

3)Quickly test these offers, cut losers early and scale winners

4)Rinse and repeat

Things to point out about this methodology:

-There's not a whole lot of innovation involved. Yes some affiliates would spend time on producing more creative landers, but more often than not, this effort does not pay off, so most affiliates don't spend a lot of time on this. This is why affiliates don't spend a lot of time on research or on understanding the culture. Basically just rip-and-run.

-With everyone basically using same/similar landing pages, the OFFER becomes one of the major factors for success/failure of the campaign.

-It has become more difficult to make big money from pop. It can require the testing of 10's of offers before finding a promising one that can be scaled.

-So, because it takes so little effort to test an offer, combined with the need to test lots of offers as quickly and as cheaply as possible, affiliates don't tend to spend too much time studying the offer page initially. And this is also why testing low-payout offers would be better for newbies - because when you're testing so many offers, costs can add up.

-When a promising offer is found, an affiliate is encouraged to study the offer more closely, and to customize the landing page further to make the lander-to-offer transition smoother and less jarring, which can achieve better ROI. (Doing this during the mass-testing stage may not be the best use of time.)

-And because pop traffic is basically broad traffic, there's no audience targeting, so there's little need for audience research.

-These are also reasons why, with pop, we focus so much on data (your question 2) - because there isn't a lot of marketing involved. (Please note though, that in marketing in general, analyzing data and making data-driven decisions is very important.)

But not all types of traffic are like this. For most other traffic types, you're absolutely right - focusing on marketing and research, and on understanding the audience and the local culture, is usually PARAMOUNT to success. I always say that pop is easy and cheap to run for beginners, so would be a good way to get your feet wet. But if you have the budget and the patience, and would like to tackle something that has higher profits potential than a few hundred dollars in profits per day, definitely explore beyond pop.



You almost sound like you're talking about the scientific method.

Advertising is about:

1)Identifying the ideal audience for your offer, and knowing where to find them and how to target them with your ads.

2)Doing audience research to find out their pain and pleasure points, triggers, needs and wants etc.

3)Using this research + your marketing and copywriting knowledge to craft ads that will get them to take action on your offer.

Intuition certainly does play a big role, and so does her friend, Creativity. The general method is to test multiple angles to see which ones the audience responds to the best. There may also be multiple audiences ("audience segmentation"), each of which may respond differently to different advertising angles.

I guess my description is similar to what you're saying, except: Instead of speculating one model and testing to see if it works, we come up with multiple advertising angles and test all of them. That way we increase the odds of finding at least one angle that will net us profits.



Talked about this above.



LOL I hear you and agree that networks could be putting more effort into providing better screenshots!

But what kinds of offers are you talking about?

For offers that accept wifi traffic, you can just use a VPN software, set it to a/the country accepted by the offer, and browse to the affiliate link to check it out.

Carrier-billing offers though can only be accessed by people that have a phone with a data plan from the particular mobile carrier. You can subscribe to services like Adplexity carrier to access them, but the subscription fee would only be worth it if you're running lots of such type of offers and making good money from them (so - probably not on pop). For those, you may decide to just make do with the screenshot from the network.

But affiliate networks do so much more than provide screenshots. Here are some of the functions they serve:

-Liaise with various offer owners (aka "advertisers") to make lots of offers available from a central dashboard.

-Typically issue commission payments more frequently than advertisers do, which can really help with cashflow.

-Have more time to spend on nurturing smaller affiliates, compared to some big advertisers that only have time for big affiliates.

Having said that: It's no secret that you can potentially make more money by running directly with the advertiser, by cutting out the middleman (i.e. the network). So once you find a good offer that can be scaled, this may be something to look into.

Hope that helps! Please feel free to continue this discussion!



Amy

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It´s pretty easy.

The success or failure of a campaign depends 90% on the offer so this is where you need to put most focus on.

Landing pages and traffic are also important but without a good offer your campaign won´t succeed.

Because data is king.

We are promoting products we don´t use ourselves in markets we don´t know anything about so data gives an unbiased and real impression about our performances.

Intuition is mainly a very subjective thing, your intuition can differ alot from my intuition.

It´s similar to assumptions.

Especially as a beginner such things are very bad advisors because often/mostly they are not neutral and can lead to very bad results.

With more experience you learn more and more what works where so that you can evaluate your marketing better.

Nonetheless there´s no way around testing because that´s the only way to really know how a campaign/offers performs with your traffic.

For me it´s exactly like this, I don´t care what exactly the offer is.

When you test many offers (and I mean many offers) you would waste so much time when you want to check each and every offer page.

Geo, vertical, product, offer restrictions/requirements is all I need to know to prepare creatives and LPs.

For sweeps for example prizes are exchangeable, for dating it´s all the same (apart from different sub niches), download PIN submits are all almost the same as well.

If you see success with an offer you can still customize your whole funnel to match the offer better but trying to see and check every single offer is just waste of time for me.

In the end it mostly doesn´t tell you much anyway if the offer is converting or not, the only way to know it is testing.

It happens that looking offer pages don´t convert at all whereas very bad looking offers convert like crazy.

I better spend some money on an offer to get a real impression about the performance instead of spending lots of time to check and investigate offers that I ultimately have to test anyway.

They are basically doing what we are doing: They receive commission from advertisers and offer owners when they bring new users/signups/sales/whatever.

They are the niddle man in the cash flow between the advertisers/offer owners and you

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Many thanks to both of you.

I need to digest these elements

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