What's your workflow when launching new campaigns?

[crysper]

Many newbies don't know how more experienced affiliates are launching and working on their campaigns, so let's share a typical model that you find doing when starting new campaigns. If you are working with multiple sources/platforms share the one you got the most success in.

I will start mine, Facebook PPC (btw, I will make a detailed guide on this on the dojo, so dojo members, stay tuned on this

1. Asking my aff manager what new offers has for social and works well with Facebook
2. Doing some market and demo research on the offer using quantcast, alexa.
3. Checking with a spy tool to see if I have the luck to find some ads for that offer. If I got lucky, I will analyze the competitor.
4. Thinking of 3 angles I might try
5. Searching for 20-30 images for each angle. I'm using the AffKit image finder for faster search http://www.affkit.com/tools/image-finder
6. I crop/resize the images in batches with the Image cropper and resizer, another useful AffKit tool..you'll find it for free inside the dojo
7. I set the tracking and test it
8. I'm creating several different campaigns for each angle, 2-3 age groups and few other campaigns to split all the images in batches of 5(to get even impressions for all ads)
9.I Let them run a few days and cut the un-performing ones.
10. I will tweak the 1-3 ads that got a good CTR on the best angle. I'm using crazy ctr for this, but there is also the banner tweaker tool on AffKit
11. I will tweak and test new images based on the winners and so on. After a couple hundreds spent, If I'm lucky, I'll find a campaign that breaks even. After breaking even it's just a matter of time/work to get a nice ROI
12. Repeat the process...and if the ROI is amazing, scaling up or moving to media buying.

Please share your workflow here, even if you are in SEO, PPV or Mobile, it will be very helpful for everyone.

Cheers

 

[azgold]

Thanks for this guideline! You're right, I had little to no idea how the pros do it. After reading your post, it's obvious that what they say is true - it's a lot of work. Luckily for me, so far I find it fun. Mostly.

From reading what you wrote, I need to spend a lot more time on research and development of ads.

 

[crysper]

Thanks for this guideline! You're right, I had little to no idea how the pros do it. After reading your post, it's obvious that what they say is true - it's a lot of work. Luckily for me, so far I find it fun. Mostly.

From reading what you wrote, I need to spend a lot more time on research and development of ads.

It's a bit of work, but the most it takes to optimize the campaigns. It depends on your budget how much you can initially test. Also, the relationship you have with your AM counts a lot. He/she can tell you lots of details about the offer(if it's a good am), what angles usually works for the offer, the demo, etc. For some offers they may not now too many details, but for the high converting ones, they surely know.

Regarding to optimization, if you get an initial ROI of -30% or higher, the campaign should be easily optimized to break even.

 

[azgold]

It's a bit of work, but the most it takes to optimize the campaigns. It depends on your budget how much you can initially test. Also, the relationship you have with your AM counts a lot. He/she can tell you lots of details about the offer(if it's a good am), what angles usually works for the offer, the demo, etc. For some offers they may not now too many details, but for the high converting ones, they surely know.

Regarding to optimization, if you get an initial ROI of -30% or higher, the campaign should be easily optimized to break even.

Thanks so much!

I have awesome AM's in two networks, really great....I just didn't think to ask them those questions!

 

[Bloody Tourist]

Thanks!

Could you also share how you name, file and organize your campaigns for easy reference?

 

[crysper]

Thanks!

Could you also share how you name, file and organize your campaigns for easy reference?

I'm using a tool called Asana, founded by one of the Facebook co-founders. It's a team oriented task management application which i started using when I was outsourcing software projects. I got used to it and I'm using it for lots of things including for setting tasks for campaigns.

I also use a lot my own tools that I built(obviously), like AffKit and CrazyCTR to gather and tweak ads, but also to store ad images there, in campaigns. Before that, I simply grabbed images, resized/cropped them and stored in folders inside a Desktop folder(i know, not a good place

How I named the folders? I didn't have a pattern, usually the offer name. Occasionally, when there were multiple angles, i made separate sub-folders.

As you can see, i didn't have an exact way to organize my stuff, I'm bad at this...but you can improve it a lot if you are the organized type.

 

[Bloody Tourist]

Thanks bro, very helpfull!