how long should I test a campaign?

[watermelonman]

hey Charles,
I am asking this because of several reasons:
1) most of us have limited budgets and it's impossible to test everything infinitely. How long should I test it before calling it quits or scaling it up?

2) (this is related to my previous question regarding timing of launching a new campaign) one day's data won't be statistically significant so how long should we keep testing? 1 week? 1 month? 24 hours a day or just certain hours in a day?

3) Assuming your answer to the above question was "1 week". At the end of 1 week, I'll have two options---either kill the campaign or scale it up. No problem with killing the campaign---I will just launch some more. But if it's a winner and I'm ready to scale it up, other ppl using spy tools can see that I've been running this for a whole week and it's very possible that it's a winner. What if they start copying right away? Wouldn't that have a huge negative impact on my to-be-scaled-up campaign?

Goodness me, I hope I'm not over thinking and over analyzing again here. But if that's the case, please shed some light!

Thanks gazillions!!

 

[solare1]

Make sure you test each offer for at least 100 clicks before jumping to conclusions.
I read it from somewhere can't remember it.
That is with split testing the offer by the way.
Never say anything about direct linking..

Maybe I'm wrong..correct me

 

[watermelonman]

thanks I've heard that as well but the problem is that depending on the "timing" of your campaign launching, 100 clicks can be done in a few minutes. Which raises the ultimate question: is it even statistically significant at all???

 

[charles_ngo]

Persist or Pivot: Deciding What to do With a Failing Campaign - The Blog of Internet Marketer Charles Ngo - Affiliate Marketing

Testing an offer is NOT a measure of time. For example one guy could test an offer for a week and only get 50 clicks, while someone else tests an offer for 2 hours and gets 2,000 clicks. See what I mean?

Don't worry about spy tools, pretend they don't exist. Someone can take your ad/landing page and still not profit. There's so much behind the scenes stuff such as targeting, bids, optimization, offer payouts, that they can't copy.

 

[watermelonman]

Got it Charles, thanks!

So what's the rule of thumb? 100 clicks? 500 clicks? what if 100 clicks means nothing and you think it's a loser but after 300 clicks it becomes a winner?

or maybe it has something to do with the payout?

is it a science or a game of randomness? Sometimes uncertainties like this just paralyzes me(maybe some other ppl as well)