Affiliate marketing can also be referred to as direct response marketing as you’re looking for potential customers to take immediate action.
Unlike branding campaigns, when you setup an affiliate offer, you’re looking for conversions to start trickling in so you can optimize for a nice return on your investment.
That’s why when buying your traffic or starting your campaign you first have an understanding of your target audience’s engagement level.
For example, if I’m sitting here on my laptop and load up a website like CNN, it’s likely my engagement level is pretty high.
Obviously, I have some time to kill as I’m going to read the news, if I see a banner ad that catches my eye, I may click it and become a successful conversion.
About an hour ago I was standing in line at Starbucks scrolling through social media while I waited for the massive line to die down. Just as I saw a headline that caught my eye, another cash register opened, and back into my pocket went my phone.
See the difference?
Especially if you’re running mobile CPA campaigns, it’s important that you have an understanding of this going into the campaign.
This is also why Display traffic sources (i.e. Adwords) convert better than your Pop and Redirect networks (i.e. PopAds).
If your ad just “shows up” the average Joe seeing it, isn’t going to know where in the heck it came from. Heck, I’m in the industry and when I see a pop-under I wonder which site it came from!
Had I seen an ad that caught my eye, clicked it, I would be on a landing page that I expressed initial interest in.
Having a firm understanding on all of this, we can go into campaigns with a much better mindset as to how we need to be testing and developing campaigns.
If we know the audience isn’t expecting our ad, we need to make sure we do everything we can to garner their attention. In mobile affiliate marketing we call this developing a pre-lander. We use bold headlines and colors that draw the eye in. Where allowed, we’ll also play an alert or possible trigger the device to vibrate.
If we are simply direct linking to the offer, we want to have an understanding where the traffic is coming from. Is it a news website? Music? Just knowing it’s Pop/Redirect we know it’s most likely from a file sharing or media website.
Obviously if the user is on a website to download a piece of media, we wouldn’t want to direct link to a game offer. Even if the traffic is super targeted, without a user’s engagement, it’s going to be a lost click.
Now if the user was expecting a piece of media and we sent an related download content offer, we have a much better chance of converting the traffic.
Understanding a user’s engagement level is one of the most important parts to becoming a successful affiliate marketer. I often tell beginners, not all clicks are equal!
The more you know about your audience, the higher you’re going to be able to bid, and the more creative you’re going to be able to get developing high-converting campaigns!
