Just read Finch's post and i wanted to throw a math component to it, so you can see how important optimizing a profitable campaign is.
So you've made a campaign and hit $200 a day without too much work and you want to start scaling to more traffic sources and countries because that's where the volume is... OK yes that is RIGHT, but... first you want to spend atleast a week optimizing the winning campaign!
note: If you have a profitable campaign and spend days optimizing it, you will almost always increase your profit. The optimizing stage is purely about hard work.
THE SCENARIO
Your campaign details (monthly average):
- You're buying 4000 clicks a day which costs you $200/day to make $400.
You take a week to work your ass off...
and split test 20 new banners and 5 types of new landing pages, then you make 5 variations of the winning landing page, now you rotate 3 competing offers and your outcome is the following:
- You didn't find an offer that converts better... oh well
- You found banners that increase your CTR by 30% and keep your conversion rate the same
- You made a landing page that increases your conversion rate by 20%
Math time:
- Now your 4000 clicks /day become 5200 (because of your 30% CTR increase)
- Your landing page increases your conversions by 20%
*For argument sake the offer pays $20, and you we're converting at 1/100 before.
5200clicks / 100 = $520 (52 leads)
and
$520 * 20% (landing page increase) = $624
...all of a sudden your $200/day spending is now making $624 a day ($224 extra profit a day!!!)
Now here's where the magic comes..
You scale to 4 new traffic sources and 3 new countries (very commonly done)
*For argument sake you get the same volume on all traffic sources and new countries
$624 x 4 new traffic sources = $2496
and
$2496 x 3 new countries = $7488
So your'e now making $7488/day after optimizing & scaling!
...if you didn't optimize you'd be making ($400x4x3) $4800/day instead
you'd be losing out on ($7488-4800) = $2688 PER DAY
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO NOTE IS THE $2688 EXTRA PER DAY IS PURE EXTRA PROFIT!
... the math here is good, it's a bit of a perfect world scenario (which definitely happens in many campaigns) but it makes a point. Once you've optimized your campaign, then your scaling will make that much more PROFIT.
Brilliant!
After reading this it seems so obvious but, I can see how lots of people would skip optimizing and jump right to scaling. Plus, it's probably gonna take you a lot more time and money to optimize after you've already started to scale the campaign.
-Aaron
Man.
Wouldn't it be friggen awesome to be able to sit down with a few of the top affiliates and pick their brains for great ideas?
Wait ! I get to!
Every day here at: Stack MY money!
Thanks stackman threads like this is why i will always be a stm member
How do you know when you have optimized sufficiently to start the scaling process and not hit the point of diminishing returns?
^^ exactly. I think it's a fine line between optimizing and over optimizing the root campaign. Every campaign has a life expectancy. If you spend too much time making small tweaks in the root campaign, you will lose out on the easy profits of new sources and countries.
I'd recommend setting up new countries and sources as soon as you see a decent margin on your root campaign. Then keep optimizing the lander across all sources. Banner optimizations are limited to the sources.
@Mr. Green, how do you deal with scaling to different platforms. For example, you have a campaign on a CPM platform that is profiting very well, but the ctr may not be so good, when you scale it to a CPC platform...it falls flat simply because of the ctr problems causing it to get ALOT less traffic even though the small amount of traffic you are getting is very profitable.
I've had this scenario happen a fair amount. My banner will have a ctr that sucks, but it still is super profitable.
Do you simply try to optimize the banners to get a higher ctr, or just look for similar banners that may have a higher ctr?
@bravenewworld I would go straight to the optimization station mate. Like i mentioned, before banner optimizations are limited to the sources. Go through a whole new banner testing phase when scaling to a new source.
@brave i have this happen all the time when trying to scale to other mobile networks. Some networks convert the same, other completely tank with near identical targeting. Test whatever you can and try to make it work, if not, move to the next scaling option.