Ask Me Anything Anything related to affiliate marketing

[RobEnvyus]

Background: Been in the industry for about 15 years. I have ran campaigns for 10yrs+ prior to becoming a sr account manager, high volume stuff alot of niches. I've been a lead gen and straight sale advertiser. I've ran just about every traffic type. Worked at a few levels in affiliate network as account manager, operations manager and overall administrator.

I've worked with most network level tracking platforms (cake/hitpath/linktrust etc), and most affiliate tracking platforms (prosper202,cpvlab, voluum). So don't hold back those technical questions as well.

So any question you have, feel free - will leave thread open til friday.

 

[T J Tutor]

will leave thread open for 24 hrs.

Why would you limit your thread?

 

[RobEnvyus]

I work with thousands of people during a week. I cannot keep this open forever and provide timely responses. (First Question Down)

 

[Maxin]

Hey Rob!
I am about to launch into PPV campaigns rather than using Bing only. My challenge is that all my landers and sites are Wordpress, and they often take around 2 secs to load. I am on VPS with SSD, but still getting slow load times. I put a lot of time into these sites and am wondering if it is better to just create a Pre lander page with some other software - maybe Muse or Dreamweaver, or go to a managed wordpress host that supposedly will cut my load times in half, down to about 1 sec.

What do you recommend?

 

[RobEnvyus]

Your best bet is to use cloudflare.com and have them cache the site.

This is a good solution for anything that it is just static content.

Once you signup for cloudflare.com they will look at your existing DNS config and set everything up. Then they will give you two name servers to point your domain to.

This usually takes 24 hrs or less for the DNS to propagate on the internet.

Depending on your volume, they have a paid side and free side.
Both will help.

However on the paid side they can handle alot of css/jss/html minimization as well as cache'ing the content on a content delivery network.

 

[Maxin]

Thanks Rob! I am probably going to switch to the paid side. As I understand it, my PPV load time should be 1 sec or under to have a real shot. I am way over that now. Switching to paid per your recommendation in a moment and keeping my fingers crossed they can work the miracles to get me under a sec or close.

 

[RobEnvyus]

Thanks Rob! I am probably going to switch to the paid side. As I understand it, my PPV load time should be 1 sec or under to have a real shot. I am way over that now. Switching to paid per your recommendation in a moment and keeping my fingers crossed they can work the miracles to get me under a sec or close.

You should also run your page thru this

PageSpeed Insights

It will give you a list of things to correct for both mobile/desktop view. As well as a list of suggestion to improve the speed of the page rendering

 

[Max123]

What is the secret of Affiliate / CPA marketing? I have tried many times but failed... I am still struggling to find the way to get success. I have not tried mobile yet.

 

[RobEnvyus]

What is the secret of Affiliate / CPA marketing? I have tried many times but failed... I am still struggling to find the way to get success. I have not tried mobile yet.

The trick is to start small everything. Small cost to consumer, small budget etc.

Learn the process of how to track everything utilize as many sub id's and gather as much information as you can.

What Browser, Region, Age, Gender, Placement ID, Site ID, Source ID, Ad Copy ID, City anything you possibly can get your hands on!

Just remember every single niche is working for someone, some where.

Its all about getting the most bang for your buck on ad spend money. You should always gain something no matter what you spend. Knowing what doesn't work, is a step away from knowing what does.

 

[Sebastian Hanson]

I need some stats,

• What is the good percentage of CTR?
• What should be the minimum conversion rate of any offers?
• What should be the minimum open rates for MMO niche?
• Which country is also have good conversion rate for MMO niche except USA, CA, UK, AUS?

Thank you.

 

[RobEnvyus]

I need some stats,

• What is the good percentage of CTR?
• What should be the minimum conversion rate of any offers?
• What should be the minimum open rates for MMO niche?
• Which country is also have good conversion rate for MMO niche except USA, CA, UK, AUS?

Thank you.

• What is the good percentage of CTR?
• What should be the minimum conversion rate of any offers?
  
  These two questions have the same answer but different parts of the answer.

The Click Thru Rate, or Conversion Rate depending on which end of the equation your looking that is "good" is relative to the amount your being paid for a conversion. So basically, an offer that converts very little probably pays out more. Following that logic a little deeper.

A low paying offer you would need a higher conversion rate then a high paying offer in order to get closer to break even.

As far as %'s, its pretty widely accepted that any display/floating banner ad that performs at less than 0.3% or 1 in 333 is a lost cause. But that acceptable fact can go right out the window if its a $100+ payout on the offer, or of if the traffic is super cheap like $0.10 CPM.

• What should be the minimum open rates for MMO niche?

Your going to have to take this as just an example - as you need to figure out your own costs and plug everything in accordingly, but the method is the answer.

Well lets break it down, most MMO stuff pays out around $2. Since your talking email traffic lets run some ball park costs.

Some assumptions just so we can get some #'s.. 10 drops GI mail.
Cost Per IP $5 ( on a /27 server [30 usable]) $150 + hardware = $220 mo
10 drops * 10 domains a day * $8.48[.us] = $848
Data Hygiene (2mil records - clean) = $750
MTA License cost = $~500
Going to assume data is clean and no spam traps after hygiene [ unrealistic expectation ]

So your $2,318 monthly operations cost - ball park rough w/ 1 server - 2 mil records.

Assuming data already broke in and your not doing new data break in [ unrealistic expectation]

Dropping to clickers/openers/buyers 3 drops and then 7 drops to success only

So then on 2 mil records let say your 500 clickers/10,000 openers/500,000 success [semi randomly chosen #'s ]

Now obviously the open rate if you were to mail clickers / openers / success / raw data, is all going to be very different.

So you'd have to calculate that out for each list of that was all that you were mailing and see how much revenue your making in that slot.

You know this tho.
$2,318 / 30 days = $77 /day in cost, in this example you need to make more than $7.70 per drop so 4 conversions at $2 or more per drop

A million things throw this all off as well.
Is your data more young people than old people?
Did they opt in from a game related site or a finance site or ?
Are they more mobile users (desktop mmo not gonna go well) ?
So many things are data/environment specific.

Mail stuff fluctuates - rates etc are never constant forever with the same dataset.

• Which country is also have good conversion rate for MMO niche except USA, CA, UK, AUS?

If your basing an offer performance purely offer conversion rate your probably going to fail. Bottom line is always ROI. If it converts a little or converts alot, doesn't matter. Is it making profit or losing $? A good conversion rate is any that allow you to make a profit and dial in a campaign targeting.

 

[Maxin]

Now that was a serious education!

 

[RobEnvyus]

Thanks guys! Having the thread locked - i'm going on a cruise