General Affiliate Marketing | Finch Sells

The High CPM Fear Factor

Aug 19 2011

How do you shop for a good advertising deal? Do you measure the CPM? The scarcity of the competition? Or do you simply throw caution to the wind, buy the traffic and pray to the deities that margins turn profitable?

I think a lot of affiliates gravitate towards self-serve platforms as a matter of security. Once there, they compare CPMs to what they’ve paid in the past. This helps to formulate an idea of value for money. It’s no more than a hunch, but can often be enough to deem a traffic source suitable or unsuitable without spending a penny.

The problem with measuring CPMs in this way is obvious. The equation lacks the mechanical wheel of a clickthrough rate to actually mean something. Without the CTR, there’s truly no way of knowing whether a $10 CPM or a $0.10 CPM is going to do more for your bottom line.

Sounds like common sense, but plays out like anything but.

From my experience, many affiliates have shown themselves to despise high CPMs. They’ll make it clear not only by refusing to work with certain traffic sources, but by refusing to experiment with their bidding strategies on platforms like Facebook and Plentyoffish. Why? Why are affiliates so apprehensive about paying more to potentially get more?

I think many of us share a strain of inferiority complex. We don’t consider ourselves worthy of bidding the absolute top dollar on ad placements, because we somehow believe that our survival nature depends on scraping the barrel and monetizing dregs of traffic that the other real advertisers didn’t want.

Does this sound like your own attitude towards buying ads?

Think about it. When advertising on Facebook, do you have a glass ceiling where you’ve convinced yourself bidding any higher would turn a guaranteed loss? Is that belief backed on solid evidence, or simply a hunch that grew when one campaign slipped in to the red?

I think there’s a fear factor attached to high CPMs. A misplaced belief that in bidding more, we’re losing margin for the sake of a few more eyeballs. You will often find that campaigns can be turned profitable at two ends of the spectrum.

By monetizing the scraps, living off low volume and turning the stragglers in to potential customers.
By bidding the premium, reaching your actual target market and making up for greater costs with an improved conversion rate.

I tend to encourage newbie affiliates to aim for the first target. Without money and/or experience, you should get your tail wet by learning how the system works and trying to turn a profit on the lower quality traffic.

But for established affiliates who have reached the plateau where they make good money but can’t take the next step, stop bidding for the scraps! Grow some balls, place a little faith in your skills and bid where the volume is. There are guaranteed to be a few hiccups along the way, but the future is much brighter when you succeed.

This much is true on Facebook and Plentyoffish, but it’s a damn near prerequisite if you want to enjoy success buying banners through display networks. You’re going to be met with high CPMs. There’s no getting around it.

Some affiliates spend so much time frothing on Facebook Ads that they assume clickthrough rates of 0.08% are an unspoken industry average when moving on to other banner exchanges.

They see a CPM of $5 and think “Shit, I have one click to get the conversion or I’m at a loss. This isn’t going to work.” I remember taking that attitude to a popular gaming ads platform and being pleasantly surprised when my ads jumped from 0.12 to 1.5 CTR, just through the merits of the different platform.

If you’re making the jump from one traffic source to another, leave your expectations of the CPM at the door. You’re going to have to spend money before you have any true perspective. That may strike fear in to some, but it’s a welcome barrier of entry for those who are already reaping the rewards.

Recommended This Week

If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.
If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine! Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

The Reality Of Affiliate Markeconomics

Aug 10 2011

How lucky are affiliate marketers to be financially independent?

Whichever way you look in the press, percentages of individuals are doomed. 9 percent of the population is unemployed, 95 percent is too stretched to buy a first home, 47 percent is busy looting Asda for a packet of rice. Forgive me for my number crunching cynicism, but why are we so obsessed with percentages?

Since when did the individual view his professional crisis as a colour on a pie chart?

CNN and the BBC can spend hours dissecting every last tribulation of the economy to a fine detail, but ultimately, they can only deal in averages and sweeping states of the nation. We, as individuals, have to take responsibility for rising above the insufferable fate that awaits those who aren’t personally driven to swim against the tide of national averages.

When reading the newspaper fills you with a sweeping sense of dread, maybe it’s time to put down the shit rag, turn a blind eye to the latest headlines and continue with life and business.

There’s only so much scaremongering I can handle on the subjects of unemployment and business growth before it starts to turn really fucking old really fucking fast.

It’s tempting to blame our personal failings on the condition of the state. Tempting, but ultimately beating around the bush in spectacular fashion.

If you are one of the millions who cannot find a job, how about creating one? Or locating where the demand is, and adjusting your skills to match?

If you are one of the millions who cannot pay a debt, how about living within your means? Or finding the willpower to say “No” when faced with materialistic desires that you simply can’t afford but choose to have anyway because you’re a feckless tool.

Recently I’ve seen affiliate marketing as the perfect source of income during times of economic turmoil. It’s flexible, fluid and allows me to speak from a high horse of pro-entrepreneurism that simply isn’t possible for most honest businesses.

I don’t believe it’s mere coincidence that the last recession in 2008 triggered an almighty boom in the notorious “work from home” kits. Your average family was worried about the fragility of employment, and how it would service debt if his and her jobs disappeared overnight.

Fast moving affiliates jumped on that vulnerability and made an absolute killing with home biz kit rebills. They didn’t last forever, thank god, but highlighted how recession, depression or market euphoria doesn’t matter a damn jot to the entrepreneur who can change what he sells at the flick of a switch.

We have the power to move where the money is.

Online entrepreneurs don’t have to spend months in the trenches doing research, lobbying banks for loans or calculating intricate margins to ensure their stock levels are correct. Instead we can react to market trends, create digital products in a matter of weeks and have them available to download with none of the risk of tight margins.

No matter how grave the economy becomes, people will always be buying. Where there is spending, there is the desire to spend knowledgeably. And where there is people asking these questions, there is a shit ton of affiliates queuing up with ebooks that monetize the answers.

Thanks to the rise of the Internet, we know better than most how lucrative it can be to move quickly in to those buying markets.

Our price for this flexibility is the impending sense of business instability, the castle built on sand syndrome. These are shackles that most successful affiliates learn to cast aside, either through diversifying or by removing the word ‘complacency’ from their newspeak.

Even if our domestic economies were to face total annihilation, it’s never been easier to spread the wings and set up shop elsewhere. Is it so hard to advertise to foreign countries? To translate your products in to the native tongue of a more extravagantly spending nation?

Not really, it’s just another challenge we can overcome in days while the brick and mortar business is still occupied in the prison of distribution logistics.

Affiliate marketing clearly has a lot going for it, but with such rapid movement in to new markets, we are also guilty of filling the web with more useless crap than the average surfer could sift through in a lifetime.

This is where I see affiliates biting the dust in future. Our industry has grown so fast and so profitably that we’re going to have to become much more accountable for the information we publish and any claims we make. Dare I say it, we may actually have to start slapping our names to some of this shit.

Our landing pages are typically hidden in subfolders, draped in anonymity with WHOIS protection. We anticipate customers will buy through our links because we treat them like hopeless lemmings, selling them the moon and then shoving them off the cliff face. How long can it last?

Aggressive marketing has always existed. Yet with the freedom affiliates have, there’s never been such a whirlwind of false, bad and misinterpreted information.

We specialise in creating sales, but the actual companies we sell for are becoming more and more disconnected from the selling process. This results in more and more bullshit. More and more customers being shoved off the cliff.

Affiliate marketing, despite the rising costs and legal shitstorms, is still a very lucrative industry. It always will be, by virtue of the fact that it’s an industry composed of all other industries. How can it go out of fashion?

What needs to change is the culture of anonymity and the kamikaze any bold claim will do approach to selling. The sooner affiliates focus on providing genuine quality to the industries they choose to work in, the faster the bad press will disappear and the quicker we can get on with calling ourselves actual businessmen.

Recommended This Week

If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.
Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!
New reader? Add Finch to your RSS.

What Disney Can (And Can’t) Teach You About Dating Ads

Jul 27 2011

Watching a Disney movie is like wading through all the stereotypes that have been proven wrong since your childhood. It can be a traumatising experience for the Bridget Jones thirty-something who still hasn’t found a man remotely akin to Prince Charming. If you’re a guy, it’s more of an exercise in ninety minutes of wishful thinking.

I’ve never been a Disney fan. It lacks swagger, and I just hate how the annoying brat always wins.

I guess my personality can be summed up by the sweeping emotion I felt at the end of Wall-E (was that even Disney?). My girlfriend shed a tear of happiness. I felt a pang of resentment that the fucker didn’t get crushed.

Alas, Disney movies can still serve a purpose – even for black hearted affiliate marketers such as myself. They can help us explore the visual stereotypes that have been ingrained in to consumers from an early age.

There’s no finer example than the portrayal of a handsome Prince Charming. Check out the chops on this smug bastard:

Everything about the dude screams stereotypical attractiveness, but what features create that image? I think the defining attributes are the pumped macho build, the wide smile and the chin.

Knowing what we know, that girls from a young age are conditioned to view these physical features as attractive and desirable, how would Mr Chinny fare as the lead model for our latest round of dating ads?

Very well is the answer, certainly from the majority of my own tests.

Guys with “the Disney Chin” seem to have a natural advantage when it comes to clickability. Ironically, the effect was amplified when I used an amateur model who also happened to be dark and handsome.

Get chin, get laid.

Another interesting finding was the correlation between images that appear professional, and those taken in the amateur MySpace hobag style. If I used a professional model with a big chin, the CTR was much lower than an amateur quality photo of a male who possessed the same chin factor.

I guess this confirms what most of us already knew. Photos that look “home-made” will routinely outperform the rest.

But does it tell us anything else? Maybe females are banner blind and happy to ignore Disney stereotypes when they’re obvious to the naked eye. But shove the same stereotypes in a natural looking environment and you will frequently reap the rewards.

If Prince Charming is a good marker for your female dating ads, what parallels can we draw between Disney and single males?

I ran a similar test using the classic Princess (blonde, hair-down-to-her-arse…) as my requirements for suitable female models. In nearly all cases, this classy respectable image was outperformed by two twin click factors: tits and ass.

It seems guys don’t want to click on ads that follow the Disney stereotype of beauty. Maybe that’s because beauty is an afterthought to the male instinct of click whatever gets the loins a’pumping. Who knows? But I found in nearly every experiment, the skankier the chick… the faster the click.

Guys respond much more readily to a pose that can be interpreted sexually, heavy make-up, secretary glasses poised at lusty angles (Click BOOM!), and a bit of rough around the edges.

Does that mean they’d date the same woman? Probably not, but it’s an effective formula for attracting clicks.

Recommended This Week

Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!
Another useful tool for spying on competitors – and building PPV target lists – can be found on MixRank. MixRank lets you locate the best performing ads on Google’s content network, and also pinpoint where they are being shown for the most profit. It’s good and it’s free.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. You can also follow me on Twatter if that’s your kinda thing.