Newbie's question about first campaign optimization (7)

Hi every STMer, this is my first time posting on STM and I am honored to have the opportunity to meet super affiliate to answer my questions. I'm a newbie in affiliate marketing and like most people choose vortex's 40-day guide to get started and learn the basics knowledge. Then I read STM's 2022 annual report and found that many super affiliate recommend TikTok, so I want to give it a try. Wasting money starting with the T1's Geo might not be a good choice for newbies, but I wanted to give it a try.

A bit of nonsense, now let's talk about the problems I encountered.
The offer is an Eco offer, sell Mosquito Killer Lamp，recommend by My AM in ClickDealer, the payout is $40.
The tracker is FunnelFlux.
My TikTok is personal ad account (just for test).
Ad setup : 1 Campaign --- 4 Ads Group ---4 creatives video ( each ads group only 1 video). The bid model is CBO and lowest cost. Budget: $50. Age: 18+. Country: US. Then no more limit.
Creatives:
creatives 1 and 4 were native content （unpack product and test product), add popular music ( recommended by TikTok app), and add some stickers, CTA words .
creatives 2 and 3 download from the manufacturer website and other shopping site (like 1688 and other manufacturer seller site), besides change popular music ( recommended by TikTok app), and add some stickers, CTA words .

After running few hours, spend $20 and the result shown as page:


Of course, 0 conversations, 0 add to cart
1: Cost: 6.06 CPC: 2.02 CPM: 26.23 Impression: 231 Click: 3 CTR: 1.3
2: Cost: 7.53 CPC: 1.26 CPM: 21.58 Impression: 349 Click: 6 CTR: 1.72
3: Cost: 3.08 CPC: 1.54 CPM: 7.82 Impression: 394 Click: 2 CTR: 0.51
4: Cost: 3.33 CPC: 0 CPM: 17.25 Impression: 193 Click: 0 CTR: 0

As the 3 and 4's CPA are too low, so I decide to stop 3 and 4 ( whether I stop too early?).Then continue running 1 and 2.
Spend another $14.5, as it's time to 12 pm, and the data not good, so I decide to stop this campaign.

1: Cost: 9.82 CPC: 1.09 CPM: 10.03 Impression: 979 Click: 9 CTR: 0.92
2: Cost: 18.26 CPC: 1.40 CPM: 12.10 Impression: 1509 Click: 13 CTR: 0.86
The CPC and CPM are too high and CTR too low.

My problems and ideas:
1. Is creatives not good and result in too high CPM and CPC, besides too low CTR?
2. Did I make changes too early ( stop 3,4 early)?
3. As this offer's payout is $40, how much I need to spend on test ( 10* payout or less)? Whether the test spend is calculated on a combined campaign cost or per ad group? Maybe I need to start from low payout
4. My campaign structure is 1-4-1, is there any recommendations like 1-xx-xx?
5. Any good suggestion on making creatives ( youtube video or other group)
6. I used to run an ad in TikTok, the result is not so bad ( of course still no conversation )

Cost: 20 CPC: 0.23 CPM: 4.85 Impression: 4122 Click: 86 CTR: 2.09

It's a revshare offer and after spend $20 with no add to cart, I stop it(This is the first ad, afraid wasting money), may be I need to restart this campaign

Finally , thank you all for watching to the end , putting up with my poor English and ads descriptions , and thank you again for answering my questions . I am very happy to have the opportunity to meet all super affiliates in the forum.

Xiao

2022-08-03

Upload
When I create creatives, I also upload one video in my personal tiktok account. And today I saw the video, it got 200 views and 2 like.

Compare to ad creatives
CPM 17.25 Click 0

So can I use the free traffic to promote offer ( I forgot to add link in my tiktok account), but the problem is my offer target country is US, and tiktok promote this video to Kyrgyzstan and Republic of Moldova.

Still confused on how to optimize ads and when to stop no hope offer.
Best regards!

Originally Posted by randomtravel

but the problem is my offer target country is US, and tiktok promote this video to Kyrgyzstan and Republic of Moldova.

Xiao, here are a few notes I have about your campaign.

Notes:

1) What type of campaign are you running? Is it traffic/video views/conversions? Based on the type, the reason you might not be getting any conversions is due to running either Traffic or Video View campaigns.

2) You stopped creatives 3 & 4 too early. And even 1 & 2 too early as well. After about $30+ spend, you stopped the campaign on a $40 payout offer? Typically for an offer that pays out $40, I'd like to test an ad x 1 payout. So if you have 4 creatives to test then $160 all together. However, even with that said if I see after $20 spend on a creative with really poor CTR under 1% I would pause it because let's say you get a conversion even at .80% CTR the chances of you being able to scale on that creative can be slim due to the low CTR. Those are my thoughts on this, but there are some experts in the field that have scaled campaigns less than 1% CTR. I think it all boils down to if the CPA after $xxxx spend makes sense to you.

3) What's your budget like for TikTok? I probably spent near $10-15K figuring out TikTok with lead gen & ecom combined. If your budget is less than $10K, I'd suggest running lead gen as there's less steps involved vs ecom.

a) With lead gen all the user has to do is fill out a form with their personal information. With ecom the user has to fill out their personal information and their credit card info to a website that looks sketchy af. Some of these gadgety type offers like mosquito killer have outdated webpage designs vs modern ones. I'm sure some super affs can make it work. Because they know all the ins and outs of the offer. For a newbie myself and you, we don't know how these super affs operate so we have to rely really running ads and *spray and pray* and hope it works.

b) Ecom has different funnel events to work with too. Which is why I asked in the beginning what type of campaign you're running. If you're running conversion campaign and getting no Purchases then you might have to go up the funnel like ATC/View Content. Also, you have to make sure you have tracking down to the T especially with ecom(because of different funnel events) - How many VC/ATC/IC events are you getting as opposed to lead gen, how many SubmitForm events are you getting.

4) Rather than running CBO, do ABO instead. 1 Ad per Ad Group. Straight from TikTok's documentation about CBO, "Make sure your ad group budget at least covers 50* target CPA. Avoid setting an extremely low campaign budget which may result in insufficient system exploration."

5) In terms of making creatives, I join other TikTok groups like TikTok Insiders(Max Finn) and TikTok Ad Buyers Group on FB but these are not really necessary. To make really good creatives you have to spend an excruciating amount of time on TikTok understanding the trends, sounds, and effects people are using. And most importantly of all the opening hooks and opening 1-3 seconds is the most important. Here are some examples of some opening hooks I've written/gathered/took inspiration from: https://veiled-reindeer-883.notion.s...934484cfa7943f

Some of these hooks, you can use it for any kind of niche. But, you have to work on testing multiple hooks to find which one is the winner. In the notion file I shared, you can see how many personal loan hooks I tested.

6) Lastly, your offer. You have to make sure that you're willing to spend a sizeable budget on the offer you're testing. Ask your AM what's the volume generated for this offer on a weekly/monthly basis on TikTok not just as a whole. For a offer like this if it's really the best offer at the moment you should have no issues getting conversions if your creative is good. If possible, try looking at spy tools like pipiads to see if it's ran there and for how long. An alternative is looking at the facebook ad library and see if anything is there as well. But with that said, even if you don't see any ads on these spy tools it doesn't mean that it's not doing well. Everything comes with testing.

I have probably worked on the same offer that you're promoting as well. Might be a different product. But mosquito repellers should still be hot at this kind of time. I didn't test this offer extensively mainly because at the time, I was just running 1 creative and 1 offer for testing and if it has any traction I'll move forward if not I'll move on to the next offer.



And here's the creative: https://youtu.be/BiX0Y4J_z4s

At first, my CTR was above the roof like 2.5-3% CTR but then it stabilized around 1.5-2%. The reason why imo I think my CTR was so high was due to the initial mosquito sound and movements in the first 1-3 seconds of the video. In my stats, you can check the Video Views at 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%. I would take some of those factors into consideration to see how well your creative might be doing. It does make sense that obviously you receive a lot more views on 25% than 100%, but if your numbers are drastically in the VV 25% range then it's probably ideal to work on your creative. Nonetheless, I hope you take away some useful information here and definitely read over the TikTok section a couple of times too especially ScottyG/Cassshy posts. They have given me more clarity on some of the stuff I had issues with such as custom audiences.

Originally Posted by stungads

Xiao, here are a few notes I have about your campaign.

Notes:

1) What type of campaign are you running? Is it traffic/video views/conversions? Based on the type, the reason you might not be getting any conversions is due to running either Traffic or Video View campaigns.

2) You stopped creatives 3 & 4 too early. And even 1 & 2 too early as well. After about $30+ spend, you stopped the campaign on a $40 payout offer? Typically for an offer that pays out $40, I'd like to test an ad x 1 payout. So if you have 4 creatives to test then $160 all together. However, even with that said if I see after $20 spend on a creative with really poor CTR under 1% I would pause it because let's say you get a conversion even at .80% CTR the chances of you being able to scale on that creative can be slim due to the low CTR. Those are my thoughts on this, but there are some experts in the field that have scaled campaigns less than 1% CTR. I think it all boils down to if the CPA after $xxxx spend makes sense to you.

3) What's your budget like for TikTok? I probably spent near $10-15K figuring out TikTok with lead gen & ecom combined. If your budget is less than $10K, I'd suggest running lead gen as there's less steps involved vs ecom.

a) With lead gen all the user has to do is fill out a form with their personal information. With ecom the user has to fill out their personal information and their credit card info to a website that looks sketchy af. Some of these gadgety type offers like mosquito killer have outdated webpage designs vs modern ones. I'm sure some super affs can make it work. Because they know all the ins and outs of the offer. For a newbie myself and you, we don't know how these super affs operate so we have to rely really running ads and *spray and pray* and hope it works.

b) Ecom has different funnel events to work with too. Which is why I asked in the beginning what type of campaign you're running. If you're running conversion campaign and getting no Purchases then you might have to go up the funnel like ATC/View Content. Also, you have to make sure you have tracking down to the T especially with ecom(because of different funnel events) - How many VC/ATC/IC events are you getting as opposed to lead gen, how many SubmitForm events are you getting.

4) Rather than running CBO, do ABO instead. 1 Ad per Ad Group. Straight from TikTok's documentation about CBO, "Make sure your ad group budget at least covers 50* target CPA. Avoid setting an extremely low campaign budget which may result in insufficient system exploration."

5) In terms of making creatives, I join other TikTok groups like TikTok Insiders(Max Finn) and TikTok Ad Buyers Group on FB but these are not really necessary. To make really good creatives you have to spend an excruciating amount of time on TikTok understanding the trends, sounds, and effects people are using. And most importantly of all the opening hooks and opening 1-3 seconds is the most important. Here are some examples of some opening hooks I've written/gathered/took inspiration from: https://veiled-reindeer-883.notion.s...934484cfa7943f

Some of these hooks, you can use it for any kind of niche. But, you have to work on testing multiple hooks to find which one is the winner. In the notion file I shared, you can see how many personal loan hooks I tested.

6) Lastly, your offer. You have to make sure that you're willing to spend a sizeable budget on the offer you're testing. Ask your AM what's the volume generated for this offer on a weekly/monthly basis on TikTok not just as a whole. For a offer like this if it's really the best offer at the moment you should have no issues getting conversions if your creative is good. If possible, try looking at spy tools like pipiads to see if it's ran there and for how long. An alternative is looking at the facebook ad library and see if anything is there as well. But with that said, even if you don't see any ads on these spy tools it doesn't mean that it's not doing well. Everything comes with testing.

I have probably worked on the same offer that you're promoting as well. Might be a different product. But mosquito repellers should still be hot at this kind of time. I didn't test this offer extensively mainly because at the time, I was just running 1 creative and 1 offer for testing and if it has any traction I'll move forward if not I'll move on to the next offer.



And here's the creative: https://youtu.be/BiX0Y4J_z4s

At first, my CTR was above the roof like 2.5-3% CTR but then it stabilized around 1.5-2%. The reason why imo I think my CTR was so high was due to the initial mosquito sound and movements in the first 1-3 seconds of the video. In my stats, you can check the Video Views at 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%. I would take some of those factors into consideration to see how well your creative might be doing. It does make sense that obviously you receive a lot more views on 25% than 100%, but if your numbers are drastically in the VV 25% range then it's probably ideal to work on your creative. Nonetheless, I hope you take away some useful information here and definitely read over the TikTok section a couple of times too especially ScottyG/Cassshy posts. They have given me more clarity on some of the stuff I had issues with such as custom audiences.

When testing an offer, if you are a newbie, we strongly recommend you start with testing offers with lower payouts and more effortless flow.
Also, choose smartly the number of campaigns you will run, as a significant number of campaigns will get you nowhere. You will spend your budget, and it would be impossible to track the campaign's performances and see the potential mistakes you are making. Focusing on a few campaigns will give you an overview of the behavior of the one performing better and the one not that well and see what makes the conversion rates higher or lower.

When you launch your campaign and start promoting an offer, you focus on the campaign's performance that you previously launched. But give the campaign the time, do not change anything regarding your campaign that quickly. Give it at least seven days trial period. After that, track, of course, daily your performances of the campaign in real-time, and you will carefully see what you have to optimize and make it more cost-effective than it is. Maybe you are the lucky one, and you get it right from the first shoot, and you would not have to adjust anything, but if there is something to improve, you will have like seven days to see it from the proper perspective.

You measure your campaign's ctr, cr, spent, and other vital parameters. Of course, you know that things change fast, from hour to hour, not to mention day to day, but we recommend having some period to see how it is behaving.

Originally Posted by randomtravel

1. Conversion campaign
2. Yes, I think stop too early, but after review my creatives, I think I need to change my creatives.
3.Thanks for suggestion, I will turn to lead-gen offers. You are absolutely right that those mosquito repellers offer's pages are out of date (If I meet those websites, I won't buy those products by myself, LOL)
4. After read more threads in forum, I know it's wrong to run CBO first to test offers.
5.Thanks your guides in creatives. Today I just read your FA thread, and your creatives improved significantly，that's amazing!
6.I post questions in your FA thread about ScottyG's audience target approach, what a coincidence