In the fall, I talked about affiliate marketing in this article. One of the messages was that targeting is significantly inferior to content marketing in terms of effectiveness. There are several reasons, but the main one is the abundance of newcomers. Since, as part of my work, I constantly communicate with the owners of affiliate networks and monitor their development, growth or decline in volumes online, I have enough data for conclusions.
Now I want to send a kind of anti-case from the owner of one of the affiliate programs: how to get 100 registrations for $1,000 through the target, download the support and stay without traffic. To the delight of haters, the names of the grid, proof-screens and other joys of cases (which are easy to draw) will not be here. The owner wants to leave incognito both himself and his partner. So, in my own words, I will retell the story of how the affiliate network searched the web through the targeting of Book-Face.
About affiliate program and advertising campaign
Gambling affiliate program based on the AlterCPA engine. Standard offers at rates slightly above the market. For example, there were offers for Australia at $240 at the start and an Inst2Dep envelope of 15k1.
The first affs were recruited through acquaintances and, God forgive me, by spam in PM. The database was parsed from chats. We received a couple of dozens of affiliates with a volume of traffic, but there are always few leads. And there are few webs. So more are needed. Where to take them? The obvious answer is through targeting.
Since Book-Face turned off Russia, they decided to start targeting Ukraine and made a look-alike on the base, some of which were our own, and the other part was bought from someone trusted. The goal of the campaign is conversions.
In creatives, standard messages for affiliate network were:
- Arbitrator? See what gamble offers we have!
- If you know how to generate traffic, register and start gambling at high rates!
- Your best partner in traffic arbitrage. Free apps and PWAs for each bay.
Format – video, beautiful brand design. A total of seven creatives were tested. The question was approached quite competently. I didn’t analyze the advertising campaign meticulously, and I’m not an expert, but it’s clear that there are no banal mistakes.
Results and conclusions
As a result, a click cost about $0.2, and registration $10. The ratio of clicks to registrations is 50:1. The result is not the best and it would be possible to work on the landing. But that wasn’t the pain at all. Those 103 people who registered “pleased” with the quality:
- 24 people did not reply to the manager at all.
- 35 people asked questions like: “What is traffic arbitration?”. We listened to the answers, received links and an offer to help launch, and then went into the sunset.
- 39 people reached the opening of offers, but disappeared without launching traffic.
- 4 people did not top up the test cap.
- 1 person periodically gives some traffic, closed 3 caps in 4 months.
The conclusion that we came to with the marketing of the affiliate network, the owner and my personal ones is that the targeting gives far from the best quality of the audience. Experienced media buyers, who are most interested in affiliates who do not have their own training school and a crowd of competent affiliate managers, are more likely to come on the recommendation in the chat or after reading useful reputational material in the media.
Of course, you can find webs, but the target is extremely expensive and this traffic in our niche is not worth the money. A large affiliate program can play around with this. But at the start, I would recommend investing in in spam and content marketing.