How Long To Test Offfers Before Profiting
Successful affiliate marketers are always testing and developing new campaigns so when one dies
out, another takes its place. When promoting a product or service that you don’t own it’s necessary
to develop an army of campaigns so you can sustain a consistent business.
Several factors weigh into being a successful affiliate such as how long do you “lose” money before
you become profitable? How many campaigns do you “test” to keep your daily profits high? What
campaigns are scalable?
The landscape of affiliate marketing, more specifically CPA affiliate marketing, has changed a lot
over the last twelve months. With affiliate networks and advertisers dropping like flies you have to
take careful consideration when running traffic to any offer.
I recommend that publishers focus on ROI first. In 2009 it was nothing for me to spend six-seven
figures a month on a media buy and get a 30 – 40% return and be happy. There was a huge variety in
offers and networks that would do anything for the traffic. Bi-weekly to daily payments – whatever
it took to keep it coming.
Now days it just doesn’t make sense to setup a media buy like this, because it’s possible the offer
could go down or you may have to adhere to a certain cap.
Depending on how much an offer pays determines how much money I’ll spend testing. The higher an
offer pays, the higher my testing budget. The lower an offer pays, the lower my testing budget. For
example, I’ll setup a mobile campaign with a budget of $25 if the offer pays around $3 – $4.
After $25 spent if I’m no where near being profitable, I move on to another source and/or another
offer. Some people think the more they spend, the more-likely they are to become profitable. This is
not true.
Early on you should be able to measure ROI and while I agree there is always room for optimization,
it doesn’t make logical sense to keep running traffic if you’re no where in the ballpark of
profiting/breaking even.
If you’re buying traffic for a higher paying offer (let’s say $30) then you want to adjust your budget
accordingly. I personally like to do about ten different creatives with a $100 budget cap for offers
that pay around $30 and see where I am after the spend is up.
I then concentrate on the creatives that converted, creating several more to see if I cannot increase my
bottom line with a solid eCPM (the metric most ad server reward advertisers on).
Scaling now days takes place when you’re consistently getting a large ROI and are able to branch out
to similar traffic sources. For example, if you’re spending $2,000 a day at one traffic source and
getting a 100%+ ROI for a couple days straight it only makes sense to port the exact campaign over
to a similar traffic source and run it.