My New Affiliate Journey

[Dafp]

Hi,

I'm new to the forum, not all that new to affiliate marketing but starting out again after a few years off and never got into it to make enough to stick to it.

So I've signed up with quite a few websites but knew I had an account with MaxBounty so went with them.

So here's my story so far.

Created some landing pages for the offer via elementor through WordPress.

I've signed up to Bemob, set it up and installed it correctly.

I'm now using paid search traffic as a traffic source and using the Bemob tracker to see what keywords its converting on etc

With the landing pages I have, I went and signed up to a usertesting free trial, to compare my landing pages and give their opinion. Although having just one persons opinion is almost pointless, but was free so still went with it.

So far the start has been a bit scattered as I haven't spent much time maintaining and keeping ontop of my ad accounts. I think my current ad spend is around £210 and I've had around 4 conversions, giving me a total of £260, so far I've actually made a profit.

My plan now is to carry on testing both landing pages and potentially create another one with different colours etc.

If I'm honest I think I got a bit lucky with my first couple of conversions, so taking the profit so far with a pinch of salt.

The reason I'm making this post is to ask for any tips or guidance on how I could potentially improve or where I may go wrong when I start to invest more time and money into this. From users in here with experience, in my opinion I find these affiliate programs that these gurus sell are usually a complete waste of money. Would be interesting to hear peoples stories or any advice would be appreciated.

 

[GriD]

Hello @Dafp !

Welcome here at AffiliateFix,

It sounds like it might be a good idea for you to create a follow-along thread!
(I learned a lot from running one recently )

You will have people following you and provide suggestions/ideas!

 

[Aiden L]

First of all welcome to Affiliatefix

4 conversions, giving me a total of £260,

Can I ask what niche you're working in or what you're promoting?

So far the start has been a bit scattered as I haven't spent much time maintaining and keeping ontop of my ad accounts. I think my current ad spend is around £210 and I've had around 4 conversions, giving me a total of £260, so far I've actually made a profit.

Whats your CPC?

in my opinion I find these affiliate programs that these gurus sell are usually a complete waste of money.

I totally agree with you on that, they're just selling people dreams instead of providing valuable and worthwhile content.

The reason I'm making this post is to ask for any tips or guidance on how I could potentially improve or where I may go wrong when I start to invest more time and money into this.

Make a follow along and show us your progress. This will give us better idea about your campaign which will allow us to give you better advice. My first bit of advice would be don't go in at 50%, it's all or nothing! Check your tracker daily (especially for google!). People like to set up scripts that autoclick your ads to eat your budget. So please be mindful.

 

[Graybeard]

WELCOME ABOARD ...

━━━●──────────────
Remember Jurassic Park's Chaos Theory ?

I think until you have a few hundred clicks its going to be hard to find much of a conversion pattern with PPC (SEM).

1 conversion for 18 clicks would be on the higher end for SEM PPC traffic. But that's only from what I have done in the past. Your product/offer may yield very different results.

To test affinity towards landing page designs you might want to try some bulk network ads first just because of the price differential --they are a lot cheaper.

Place Google-Analytics on the test landing pages and look at each ones 'dwell times' spent on the page --that will indicate viewer interest when comparing your tests.

 

[Aiden L]

View attachment 18978

Lmao if you’re going to spam bs at least do it properly. That’s a screenshot dumbass.

 

[PaidPoints]

It is very great that you started out with paid advertising and made profit on your start. Most people don't. As per my recommendations. The strategy to not risk losing funds at all is to try make some bucks with free promotion methods, then use the profit you made from free promotion to jump in on paid promotions .

 

[SEOBlogPosts]

Welcome to the forum! I don't know much yet about PPC so I can't offer much advice there. I do suggest like the others to start a follow-along thread. I did and have learned so much. Good luck!

 

[Honeybadger]

I've had around 4 conversions, giving me a total of £260

@Dafp
What product or service are you promoting that returns avg £65 per conversion?
Guessing software with recurring commission

 

[Aiden L]

@Dafp
What product or service are you promoting that returns avg £65 per conversion?
Guessing software with recurring commission

Probably a cpa lead gen offer, some of those have great payouts depending on which niche.

 

[Dafp]

First of all welcome to Affiliatefix

Can I ask what niche you're working in or what you're promoting?

Whats your CPC?

I totally agree with you on that, they're just selling people dreams instead of providing valuable and worthwhile content.

Make a follow along and show us your progress. This will give us better idea about your campaign which will allow us to give you better advice. My first bit of advice would be don't go in at 50%, it's all or nothing! Check your tracker daily (especially for google!). People like to set up scripts that autoclick your ads to eat your budget. So please be mindful.

I'm promoting a CPS in the home furniture niche. One of my main issues at the moment has been trying to find my average CPC as its been mixed across each ad network I've been promoting on. I think at some point this week I'm going to start fresh and really put my mind too it.

WELCOME ABOARD ...

━━━●──────────────
Remember Jurassic Park's Chaos Theory ?

I think until you have a few hundred clicks its going to be hard to find much of a conversion pattern with PPC (SEM).

1 conversion for 18 clicks would be on the higher end for SEM PPC traffic. But that's only from what I have done in the past. Your product/offer may yield very different results.

To test affinity towards landing page designs you might want to try some bulk network ads first just because of the price differential --they are a lot cheaper.

Place Google-Analytics on the test landing pages and look at each ones 'dwell times' spent on the page --that will indicate viewer interest when comparing your tests.

Thanks for that, so basically as a cheaper way of testing which landing pages are working a little better, pay for some bulk pop or push ads? I stayed away from them as I assumed conversion rates for them types of ads are very poor. But I didn't think about using them to test out landing pages, thanks for that.

@Dafp
What product or service are you promoting that returns avg £65 per conversion?
Guessing software with recurring commission

Its CPS offer for a home furniture company, they give a percentage of the total sales so it could be mixed.

 

[Dafp]

@Graybeard when you mentioned "bulk network ads" I've gone with a Push Notification campaign type. But now I have that setup I think maybe popunders would have been better?
Maybe I'm thinking too much into it, I'm new to bulk ads, I've gone with Propellerads, so maybe it's because I don't know what I'm doing.
I've set it all up in Bemob and I've added around 6 creatives. I'm managing the landing pages via bemob, so I have 4 which I'm testing which Bemob will switch up for me.

I have GA setup on all pages so I guess it's now a waiting game for traffic to hit.

 

[dudeimlost]

Hey there @Dafp and welcome to the community and welcome back to the dark side I see you've got everything pretty much set up, but I think your questions are leaning more towards the tracking side of things?

I'm promoting a CPS in the home furniture niche. One of my main issues at the moment has been trying to find my average CPC as its been mixed across each ad network I've been promoting on. I think at some point this week I'm going to start fresh and really put my mind too it.

I utilize multiple platforms and networks too, I recommend using this cheap tool that I personally use to help me with the analytics of my affiliate sales (or all the other number stuff that are just a mess on my dashboard)

Maybe I'm thinking too much into it, I'm new to bulk ads, I've gone with Propellerads, so maybe it's because I don't know what I'm doing.
I've set it all up in Bemob and I've added around 6 creatives. I'm managing the landing pages via bemob, so I have 4 which I'm testing which Bemob will switch up for me.

I have GA setup on all pages so I guess it's now a waiting game for traffic to hit.

I've used Propellerads before and definitely recommend it, keep going with that ad network but I second @Graybeard's suggestion;

Personally, I would script the hits to add my own 'tokens' for *a unique user ID*, postal code, city and state based on the IP locations.
If you test enough traffic you could buy the PPC SEM for the best locations and maybe see a higher ROI based on that data. You would need to buy 4K or 5K push clicks however to see enough conversions for this acquired data to make any sense.

Push clicks are a dirt-cheap way for you to obtain key information in narrowing down your geographic target market. You have a very narrow niche that requires an equally narrow targeting campaign, you just need to gather enough data for your paid traffic to snowball properly.

 

[Graybeard]

Push ads will be cleaner traffic. (Meaning: less bots and other nonsense.)
So it's clicked traffic at less than $0.10 CPC or so?
I would use whatever 'tokens' are available that would be useful to your analysis. Like &sid={site_id} I don't know off-hand what might be available at propellerads as far as URL 'signaling' tokens.
PropellerAds Tracking Tokens this may help.

Personally, I would script the hits to add my own 'tokens' for *a unique user ID*, postal code, city and state based on the IP locations.
If you test enough traffic you could buy the PPC SEM for the best locations and maybe see a higher ROI based on that data. You would need to buy 4K or 5K push clicks however to see enough conversions for this acquired data to make any sense.

 

[Dafp]

Push ads will be cleaner traffic. (Meaning: less bots and other nonsense.)
So it's clicked traffic at less than $0.10 CPC or so?
I would use whatever 'tokens' are available that would be useful to your analysis. Like &sid={site_id} I don't know off-hand what might be available at propellerads as far as URL 'signaling' tokens.
PropellerAds Tracking Tokens this may help.

Personally, I would script the hits to add my own 'tokens' for *a unique user ID*, postal code, city and state based on the IP locations.
If you test enough traffic you could buy the PPC SEM for the best locations and maybe see a higher ROI based on that data. You would need to buy 4K or 5K push clicks however to see enough conversions for this acquired data to make any sense.

Thanks for that, I think I have some sort of setting incorrect on Propellerads as I've just paid around $10 for 23 clicks, I didn't think I would be paying that much.

I've also either got the Google Analytics setup incorrectly, or there is an issue with bemob, as GA is saying I've had just 7 vists, where Bemob and properller are both saying I've had around 23-25 visits.

Back to the drawing board.

 

[Dafp]

Hey there @Dafp and welcome to the community and welcome back to the dark side I see you've got everything pretty much set up, but I think your questions are leaning more towards the tracking side of things?

I utilize multiple platforms and networks too, I recommend using this cheap tool that I personally use to help me with the analytics of my affiliate sales (or all the other number stuff that are just a mess on my dashboard)

I've used Propellerads before and definitely recommend it, keep going with that ad network but I second @Graybeard's suggestion;


Push clicks are a dirt-cheap way for you to obtain key information in narrowing down your geographic target market. You have a very narrow niche that requires an equally narrow targeting campaign, you just need to gather enough data for your paid traffic to snowball properly.

Thanks for that, I think in terms or affiliate analytics I'm nearly there. I'm using bemob and they've been very helpful in getting me setup if I had any issues. I think I may need to focus on testing different landing pages properly, to see which work best. Instead of having a single landing page and just throwing all my traffic at it, just because it's converted twice after around 30 clicks doesn't nessicearily mean to say it'll continue to convert. I think I just got lucky.

 

[Graybeard]

Push clicks are a dirt-cheap way for you to obtain key information in narrowing down your geographic target market. You have a very narrow niche that requires an equally narrow targeting campaign, you just need to gather enough data for your paid traffic to snowball properly.

I am talking about wider range geo-fencing. 5-10 sq mi 7sq km~

 

[azgold]

Instead of having a single landing page and just throwing all my traffic at it, just because it's converted twice after around 30 clicks doesn't nessicearily mean to say it'll continue to convert.

If you test, you may find one that converts even better. Also, after people have seen your page a bunch of times, they'll start to ignore it, so a fresh page is good, too.

 

[Aiden L]

I've just paid around $10 for 23 clicks

Thats a cpc of $0.43 waaaaaay too much for a cpc model. Maybe you accidently paid for cpm traffic, that burns the budget quick for an offer that's untested. CPM is also not a guarantee of clicks but a high volume of views. I
normally switch to cpm when an offer is converting like crazy, for USA I would pay 0.05 for 1k views.

 

[Dafp]

Thats a cpc of $0.43 waaaaaay too much for a cpc model. Maybe you accidently paid for cpm traffic, that burns the budget quick for an offer that's untested. CPM is also not a guarantee of clicks but a high volume of views. I
normally switch to cpm when an offer is converting like crazy, for USA I would pay 0.05 for 1k views.

What ad network are you using mate?

 

[Aiden L]

What ad network are you using mate?

Propeller mostly, did you go with the recommended bid?

 

[Dafp]

Propeller mostly, did you go with the recommended bid?

Ye and I've literally just realised I had the CPA Goal pricing model set. So going to create a new campaign with the CPC model, but before that I need to make sure my GA is setup correctly for each landing page.

 

[Aiden L]

Ye and I've literally just realised I had the CPA Goal pricing model set. So going to create a new campaign with the CPC model, but before that I need to make sure my GA is setup correctly for each landing page.

I would always advise against using the rec bid, they're a business after all so they will try to get more money from you. Optimal isn't always the best. Test different bids based on your budget and keep track of the results, If you run tier one try a cpc of 0.04 to start or if you're doing tier two or three 0.01-0.04. Also can I ask why you're setting up GA if you're running propeller? Surely you would want to set everything up in bemob first as that can hold and give you more in depth info on your campaign.

 

[Dafp]

I would always advise against using the rec bid, they're a business after all so they will try to get more money from you. Optimal isn't always the best. Test different bids based on your budget and keep track of the results, If you run tier one try a cpc of 0.04 to start or if you're doing tier two or three 0.01-0.04. Also can I ask why you're setting up GA if you're running propeller? Surely you would want to set everything up in bemob first as that can hold and give you more in depth info on your campaign.

Ye I planned on setting up GA on the website pages themselves to see which landing page has the best user reaction. I did want to try to see which of my landing page buttons a user clicks too, to see how far down or which button a user is clicking. Maybe that's a bit too much, but i don't know. Either way I thought if I added GA to my landing pages I can see which of then is interacted more with from a user perspective and which has the better bounce rate.