If you’re running paid traffic to your affiliate marketing campaigns, you’re going to be bidding against other advertisers for the traffic, regardless of the platform you choose.
All ad servers reward advertisers based on the highest effective cost per mille (or eCPM). Most of the time, this is represented by: (CPC x CTR) x 1000 = eCPM.
In Layman’s terms, the advertiser that makes the most revenue for the publisher, consistently wins the auction and gets the most “premium” traffic.
Ad servers also reward for steady spending, advertisers that have active campaigns each day, and don’t make a habit out of frequently pausing.
Depending on the network, there are other things to factor in, such as Google’s quality score, and Facebook’s relevancy score, but your main focus should be on gaining a high Click Through Rate (CTR) and the other factors will begin to fall into place.
When you’re the new advertiser on the block, you’re going up against a lot. Advertisers that have been around for a couple of weeks already have an advantage as they’ve had time to learn the platform, optimize their creatives, and tweak their landing pages to run what makes them the most ROI.
Therefore we you’re just getting started, you’re going to have to have a budget to come in and make a stance. Since your competition’s eCPM is established, it’s likely you’re going to have to big higher than them and also strive for a higher CTR. It’s a two-prong approach.
Typically with an adserver, the ad shown first in the chain receives the higher quality traffic. The further your ad gets in the “ad chain” the lesser quality your traffic is and the worse your affiliate campaign is going to convert.
So even if you’re able to get traffic at 50% of the “average bid” it’s likely that traffic doesn’t convert near as well.
At seminars I often tell the story about paying $4.50 CPM for a media buy and making 50% ROI, while paying $2.25 CPM was actually losing me money.
While it doesn’t make mathematical sense, it does once you consider the visitors had most likely seen 3 – 4 of my competitors ads before they saw mine. Therefore my CTR was much lower and if my competitor was selling the same type of offer as me (or even using a similar lander) the person maybe simply not interested in my offering.
To develop a successful bidding strategy, your first goal is to get a good Click Through Rate (CTR). If your CTR is bad, you don’t have a chance. You do this by testing multiple ads with your campaign.
Depending how strict the platform, you want to think of images that’s going to garner a user’s immediate attention. Lots of time, this is done by using my “amateur” pictures vs. “professional.” Facebook has teamed up with ShutterStock for an easy way to get multiple images, but you want to look for images that don’t look like they were staged. [I also find it funny they have some images that Facebook will NOT accept…]
Using Photoshop, you can easily put bright colored borders around your images, or use filters that grab a user’s attention. If using mobile redirect / pop traffic you can use javascript tools to make the phone vibrate or play a noise (as long as you make sure you’re not violating the terms of the traffic source). Any creative way to gain a high CTR – you should explore! Just uploading a handful of images it’s going to cut it!
Your second goal is to start bidding high out of the gate. I get it… It sucks to lose money. I hate it. But when you’re the new kid on the block, you’re going to have to jump in to gobble up the premium traffic. If an advertiser has been sitting on the platform for many weeks, they’ve already built up their reputation, so you’re going to have to combat that.
You can control your spending by setting an overall campaign budget. Most all traffic sources have this feature and some will allow you to pace your budget over the course of a timeframe without penalizing you. Therefore if your initial budget was $500, you could bid high, and conduct a several-day test spreading out your spend evenly.
Some platforms, I’ll set my big high, budget low and have it spend as quickly as possible. Normally, this is like $25 spend, on the high end of their recommend bid. After that spend, I can normally figure out if I have a CTR winner. Most of the time, these type of tests reveal at least something with promise.
Once you start to find CTR winners, analyze what it is that is working, and make several variations. When you hit the “home run” (high CTR and steady bid) you’ll have a large amount of cheap clicks coming in, where you can then focus on exploding your ROI.
Every high volume affiliate marketer eventually comes up with their own bidding strategy. I recommend taking what I say, apply it to your campaigns, and begin to develop your own strategy that meets your campaign goals and target ROI. My biggest advice is to be bold and go into a campaign with a domination attitude!
