The Art of Scaling a Campaign

This is a guest post entry into the Inspired Affiliate Marketing Secrets Contest written by Richard Bonner of RichardBonner.net .  If you would like a chance to win some great prizes including a Flip Mino HD or an iPod Nano , please see full contest details. If you enjoy this post, please take the time to leave a comment and leave your feedback.

---

When you have battled through the initial setup of a campaign and have found one that has potential, it’s your job to take things to the next level and “super affiliate” it! I want to talk you through the process of some of the things that you can do in order to increase the performance of your current campaign.

The list below is not in any specific order but it’s probably the order I would implement them into my campaign (or something similar). Others will no doubt argue on the order but that’s something for you to decide .

1) Rotate offers

Different offers from different networks will convert differently, more times than not the exact same offer from a different network will even convert differently. You should always rotate various offers until you feel that you have found the best one based on its eCPC.

Just make sure that you don’t try X from X one day, then Y from Y the next – this is because conversions fluctuate on a daily basis so it will not be a true comparison of which converted best.

2) Ask for a higher payout

Don’t be afraid to ask your affiliate manager for a bump in the payout, especially if you are sending them a decent amount of volume. Talking from experience they often give you a small bump when you are sending them constant amount of leads, even if they only give you a $1 bump, by sending them 10 leads a day you will earn an extra $10 in revenue each day.

Having a higher payout will also allow you to bid higher on your keywords to get into those prime positions.

3) Improve your landing page CTR

This is an important factor in my opinion because if they are on your landing page it means you have already been charged for that click (assuming your doing PPC) so you need to analyze what people are doing on your landing page and split test different variations of the headline, picture, call to action or even the whole style.

A great tool I have found for this is www.clicktale.com , they have a free account which will let you track one domain and provide you with heatmaps and even recordings of what people are doing on your landing page. Use it to your advantage!

4) Improve your ad text CTR

Another essential thing you should be tracking is your ad text, you need to test different variations in order to get the most traffic over to your landing page. Along with having a great landing page CTR and a converting offer you are sure to maximise your earnings.

Even small changes such as using punctuation, capitalizing every starting letter or using numbers could have a huge difference in your CTR. You will never know what converts the best until you try it!

5) Use the big 3!

Most people create campaigns for Google because they have heard “that’s where the money is”, this is no doubt true because it’s a fact that Google has the largest market share in the search engine industry. However, a great scaling method is to simply export your campaign and upload it directly into Yahoo!, MSN or any other lower tier search engine. There is still a great deal of money to be made on the other search engines, if you don’t have your campaign on at least the big 3 then you are potentially throwing away a great deal of money.

The campaign may need some tweaking because terms that convert for Google may not convert for Yahoo and vice versa but you will have a good head start having the data that you have already collected.

6) Increase your bid

Once you have started your campaign and think it’s ready to take it to the next level you have to take things down to keyword level. Begin analyzing your converting keywords to see what the average position is, you can try increasing your bids to get a higher position which will give you more impressions and more clicks in theory.

Just take note that depending on your campaign the number 1 spot may not be the best position to aim for, take a search campaign for example. Being in the number 1 position may lead to a number of blind clicks (users just click it because it’s at the top without even reading your ad), this will no doubt increase your CTR of the ad itself but it will also increase your bounce rate and reduce your ROI.

Play around with the bids until you feel that you are in the best positions for each keyword giving you the best ROI.

7) Research additional keywords

I wasn’t sure where to put this step because some people will try to scale a campaign by adding keywords straight away and try to find the converting ones. The reason I have put this as the last step is because I would like to be confident that I have the best possible ad, landing page and offer before I started throwing thousands of keywords at a campaign. I guess it depends on your approach to the campaign .

When it comes to researching more keywords you have a number of options, you can:

Go Deep!

Basically you look at your current converting keywords and expand on those, this is a good method to go deep on the areas of your niche that has been proven to convert.

This process will usually involve gathering more long tail keywords.

Go wide!

This will bring you back to basically where you started, having the knowledge you have you should be able to think of more wide terms in the niche to try and find more sub niches that convert.

This process will usually involve gathering more short tail keywords.