I’m putting this up here for comments and critiques. I’ve been in this program for 8 days. I love the idea. However, I’ve come t realize that data is king. Here’s what I have figured out so far:
- I am assuming that 1 out 100 will purchase a product. That means 100 hops on average should generate one sale.
- If you are not keeping a daily spreadsheet of the performance of your campaigns, you will fail. You must keep track of and understand your daily numbers. I found John’s spreadsheet in the Resources, I think. Once you understand it, it is invaluable.
- LP CTR% is a critical number. It is clicks divided by hops. The higher the better. Normal range is 15% to 35%.
- Until you have generated 100 hops or a sale on any campaign, you must focus on efficient, quality traffic.
- Traffic is measured by CTR (Click Through Rate). You want your CTR on any campaign to be over 2% if possible.because at 2% (1) you are driving interested traffic to the vendor and (2) your CPC (cost per click) drops dramatically.
NOTE: A 1% increase in CTR drops your CPC by 50%. Driving up CTR is therefore mission-critical. - We are taught to use low budgets to test CTR and LP CTR, which is wise. If a campaign has a low CTR out the gate, give it no more than 48 hours before tweaking it or shutting it down. Do not waste money on campaigns with low CTR. Quick example: A FB campaign I launched two days ago had a CTR of 0.654%. That is a very low CTR. I looked at the traffic by age and saw that 55-65+ were poor performers. I adjusted the campaign to target 35-55 age groupss and within hours, the CTR doubled to 1.26%. Still sucky, but a huge improvement. If I don’t see a dramatic improvement to 2% by tomorrow, I will stop the campaign and test another idea.
- Once you have a good CTR and LP CTR, I think the strategy should be to increase the daily budget moderately, say from $20 to $25 or $30, and observe the results for a day or so. If hops increase and eventually translate into sales, scale as able. If not, start over with a different audience or ad. I have learned that you can have a great CTR and LP CTR and still not generate sales because of factors like you are targeting the wrong device (mobile instead of desktop) or the target audience is interested but not composed of buyers. This is why John keeps saying affiliate marketing is a numbers game and consists of constant testing and retesting.
- My last observation: In looking at the performance of the top affiliate marketers, they are spending $1 to make $2 generally speaking. That means that if you need 100 hops to make a sale and have a modest LP CTR of 10%, you will need 1000 clicks to generate 100 hops. If your CTR is such that you are spending over $1 per click, you might spend $1,000 to generate a sale. For all the new people, do not expect to make any sales on a total budget of $100 or $200. This business takes capital to scale. If you can only afford $20 per day as an ad budget and your CPC is $1.00, it will take you 50 days to generate 100 hops. That’s why John says this is not a get-rich-quick scheme and why all the successful people take months, if not years, before seeing revenue. If you have more to invest, you can move faster. If you are on a tight budget, you have to go slowly and accept that the law of big numbers is in your favor if you are patient. In the meantime, do everything you can to get your CTR above 2%.
