General Affiliate Marketing | Finch Sells

Spot My Mistake in This TrafficJunky Campaign

Mar 26 2014

I made a mistake this morning.

Here’s the data from a TrafficJunky campaign I set up last night:

The campaign used CPM bidding.

If you had to pick three ads, which would you keep?

I picked ad1, ad3 and ad4.

One of them was a bad choice.

Here’s why.

Affiliates are trained to look for the best conversion rate.

That’s pretty smart if you’re bidding CPC (paying by the click).

But when bidding CPM, the best conversion rate doesn’t always mean the best ROI.

That’s because it doesn’t take in to account the clickthrough rate of your ads. Less clicks means your conversion rate is taken from a smaller sample, and it therefore has to work a lot harder.

Instead you should be picking the ads that generated the most revenue: ad1, ad3 and ad6.

In this case, ad4 had the second best conversion rate at 3.56% but it had 3 less conversions than ad6 at 3.19%.

While ad4 was more potent for the users who chose to click it, ad6 delivered more revenue through attracting more clicks and maintaining a respectable if lesser conversion rate.

This is something to keep in mind with any CPM campaign.

We are constantly battling for the best combination of a banner that draws conversions, but also enough clicks.

So here’s the next step.

I’ll take the headline and ad copy from ad4 and combine it with the imagery and CTA of ad6.

It’s a process I documented here that has a useful knack of producing banners that increase profit and obliterate the competition.

When to Kill a Profitable Campaign

Feb 27 2014

Campaign A makes you $50/day. Campaign B makes you $10/day.

Which one should you work on?

Most people would say Campaign A.

There isn’t a correct answer.

What if Campaign A can be scaled to $100/day, but Campaign B can reach $1000/day?

Often we fail to compute one of the most important metrics of all:

The value of our time.

You only have 24 hours in a day.

A third of those are spent sleeping (and the rest are too often spent daydreaming).

If you are a one man team — like many affiliates — you need to pick the campaigns that have the biggest possible upside relative to your desired income.

It sounds so simple.

And yet you wouldn’t believe how many affiliates I see with big hopes and penny pinching campaigns.

On a typical day, how many hours do you spend ‘in the zone’ with your creative juices flowing? 2? 3?

Is it smart to waste those precious hours on a campaign that *even if it succeeds* will net you the same wage as a guy flipping burgers for The Man?

No offence, but I don’t think so.

There are exceptions.

If you can learn the craft whilst making a small profit, you are being paid for an extremely lucrative education.

That’s smart.

If you spend your time launching tiny campaigns on the assumption that lots of small wins will add up to one big success, you’ve got it tits up. The churn will beat you.

Get positioned where the economies of scale work in your favour.

Yes, even if it means giving up your profits.

It is much easier to hit success with one big campaign and dozens of losers. The alternative is lots of small winners that all need management to stay profitable.

Once you start managing small campaigns, its difficult to stop. You become emotionally invested in retaining small profits, putting out small fires rather than blazing a path to the bonanza.

On many occasions I have surveyed the carnage of my CPVLabs and made the tough decision to delete campaigns that were making me money.

Why?

Because time is money, and I was losing too much of it.

There’s a famous saying that goes:

“Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves”

Bullshit.

Not in this industry.

If you start managing pennies, you can forget about the pounds.

They belong to somebody with bigger balls and a bigger wallet.

Brand New CPV Lab Released

Feb 10 2014

Here’s what I had planned for Monday:

Wake up.
Get henched on caffeine.
Detonate several Exoclick campaigns in the heart of mainland Europe.
Short the shit out of Manchester United FC’s share price, just for the LOLs.
Manage my tribe of Eastern Europeans.

Here’s what actually happened today:

Woke up.
Got henched on caffeine.
Frazzled the Frenchies, blasted the Germans.
Deleted browser history.
“HOLY SHIT, THERE’S A NEW CPV LAB SAY WHAT?”

Yes, it’s been a running joke that CPV Lab updates have been few and far between.

The last time CPVlabs was updated, @EagleWebAssets was walking around conferences in fur coats
— charles ngo (@Dr_Ngo) January 27, 2014

Well, joke no mo.

There’s a new CPV Lab in town, and it looks to be the dog’s bollocks (ROW: really good).

The update email is below.

CPV Lab 2.17 is Now Released!
In this update we addressed the top 3 requests from our users and also added many new core functions and improvements.
Please read through this entire post, especially the server details towards the end, as the server requirements and update install process have been updated.
Contents:
1st = Mobile Device Detection and Data
2nd = Volume, More Data and Fast Interface Speeds
3rd = Advanced, Yet Easier Ways to View & Customize Stats
YUP, There’s More…
And…there’s still more!
2.17 Update Installation
===== 1st = Mobile Device Detection and Data =====
After a great deal of research, Q&A + Feedback…we seriously addressed the overall usage and importance of mobile data across the board:
– Full Mobile Detection and Stats, including Mobile Carriers and Automatic Updates of Detection Databases every 2 weeks or less.
Over 30 Mobile Data Points available allowing you to go far beyond the traditional mobile optimization points of device name, etc. with actual content and media your visitors support.
– Mobile Audience Stats…Quickly View a Breakdown of your Mobile Visitors to identify top performing Brands, Carriers, Devices, Data Rates and Specific Features Based on the Visitors Device.
– Don’t Lose Your Cookies!:) Mobile introduces several issues with Cookie-based Tracking, however, with Desktop/Laptop users…Cookie-based tracking is the most popular method across the board and has been used since the dawn of the internet.
We didn’t want to lose the use of cookies completely, but had to support and track all mobile visitors regardless of their device settings. So, Live-Switch was born…this feature offers Cookie & Cookie-Less Tracking to Support All Visitors regardless of their device and settings. It’s all on the fly and in real-time, nothing extra to setup.
===== 2nd = Volume, More Data and Fast Interface Speeds =====
One of the biggest issues high volume users faced was sluggish stats once the database reached a certain point. To address this, we’ve added TrueCache to allow enhanced Volume Capabilities and greatly Increase Responsiveness of User Interface.
The reason it’s called “TrueCache” is because another concern many high-volume users had was the ability to customize data storage options to their hosting environment. You have this ability as well using a simple configuration file.
Check out the 2.17 Feature Guide for more details and setup instructions.
http://cpvlab.com/release/217_Feature_Guide.pdf
===== 3rd = Advanced, Yet Easier Ways to View & Customize Stats =====
The common thread from users, was the ability to group stats by specific data points using a series of dropdown boxes. But for most users, when asked…they generally and most frequently viewed their stats across all campaigns in a “routine” of specific data sets.
It became very clear, the solution wasn’t to “group” the data, as this can become somewhat cumbersome and limited based on the number of options available. But simply to view the Stats just as you wanted them…based on your Common and Most Used Viewing Habits.
So, we added just that.
Quick-Stat Views feature for Target Performance Stats allows you to quickly change you Target Performance stats by specific data points.
For Example…In 2 Clicks, go from viewing:
Carriers ‘ Visitors ‘ CTR ‘ CR ‘ EPC
To: Device Brands ‘ CTR ‘ CR ‘ Cost Per Subscriber
Anything you can think of…you can select the data points to view and save them to be quickly used anytime. You can even Drag & Drop the column order for each custom view to display the information exactly as you wish.
And…
– Multi-Select Controls Added to Show/Hide Dropdown Menu on All Pages
– Ability to filter by Visitor Type, Target, Page and Offer in Stats
– Drag-and-Drop Re-Ordering and Re-Sizing of Columns in Stats Tables
===== YUP, There’s More… =====
– If/Then Redirects to redirect visitors based on multiple conditions using over 30 data options. Send visitors to a Specific Page, Offer, URL or Campaign.
– Trends Heatmap Views to quickly identify top performing times of day by CTR, CR, ROI, Subscriber Rate, etc.
– Trends – Ability to Filter by Target, Page, Offer and by specific days of the week.
– Record Desktop/Laptop Users Operating Systems, Browser & Versions
– Greatly expanded features to Pass and Post Data to & from CPV Lab.
– Total Control Linking Options…you can now link to a specific Landing Page, Level, Option Group or Path.

This looks to be an impressive update, and a much needed shot in the arm for CPV Lab.

It will be welcomed by the many affiliates, like myself, who increasingly rely on mobile campaigns to fund their hedonistic needs.

I’ll post my thoughts once I’ve had chance to play around with the latest version.

If you are new to CPV Lab (read my very old review here), you can grab a copy for $297. If you are a previous user, or your license expired, you can upgrade for $147.