Marketing comes with a lot of data. If you’re trying to run your marketing by yourself, your ad tracker and affiliate marketing software are your best friends. Of course, you need to learn how to use them, what to be looking for, and what you can change in the event that your ad campaign isn’t running as smoothly as you’d hoped.
1. Review Your Options
Look at your traffic options. Your campaign should allow you to buy source specific traffic. If something isn’t performing well on iOS but it’s exceeding your expectations on desktop, pause the source that isn’t working. There’s no sense in allowing money to go to waste or misdirecting your budget while you’re trying to work out the kinks. You can always change your approach for certain sources later.
One of the most effective sources of traffic in a progressive ‘banner blindness’ epidemic is native advertising. Although it’s still unknown for many, research shows that it’s much more efficient than traditional display ads. If you are looking for a native advertising platform, you can learn more here.
2. Double Check Your Traffic Flow
The most important thing to ascertain is that visitors are coming through your paid traffic and reaching your landing page, moving through to ultimately shop. Your affiliate tracking software should equip you with the ability to run test campaigns. These tests will show you if things are working properly, allowing you to rule out technical errors as a reason for poor campaign performance. If you’re running into errors, check your software’s FAQ or contact their customer support for help.
3. Give it Enough Time
Don’t start messing around with your campaign because you haven’t broken your sales record in a few days. You might get a few people at the beginning to become shoppers, but purchases may not always be predictable. It’s just the nature of the game. Potential traffic doesn’t always correlate to actual traffic, either.
You can use the traffic calculator at ZeroPark to get an estimate of traffic per keyword. You’re not going to get all of that traffic. You’re only going to get a fraction of it. Even out of that fraction, fewer still will actually become customers. And that’s a great outcome. The strongest advertisers in the world have a 10% conversion rate, meaning that one in every ten people who arrive at the desired destination will ultimately become customers. If your conversion rate is between 2% and 5%, you’re still successful.
Don’t start panicking if you aren’t seeing phenomenal numbers at the very beginning. That one in every ten statistics may pan out as three in every thirty, or ten in every hundred. In other news, the first 50 people may not spend with you at all, but then a big cluster of 5 visitors will all make purchases.
You don’t know when those conversions will actually happen, and you need to wait and see. You might have a great campaign, but you’ll only be able to tell once you’ve waited enough time and accumulated enough data to make that call.
4. Make Sure Your Campaign is Strong
Once you have enough data, it’s time to evaluate your campaign. The campaign itself may be the problem. You may have inadvertently mismatched offers, promising something to people who live in the wrong area to get it. Make sure that isn’t the culprit before you start making major changes.
Two other reasons why your campaign might not be performing well are your landing page and the offer you’re promoting. It doesn’t matter how great your landing page is if your offer isn’t something that people actually want. Nobody runs for a 5% discount or a free sticker. Make sure you’re giving people what they actually want.
The biggest thing you have to worry about is the way your landing page looks. If it’s cluttered, broken, unprofessional, covered in jargon, or appears cheaply made, people aren’t going to trust you. You can be promoting a great offer, and that will only contribute to their distrust.
Your landing page needs to look legitimate and answer all of the important questions. Make sure people know who is behind that landing page by incorporating easy to find “about us” or “contact” links to reinforce your legitimacy.
5. Give Your Worst Performers the Ax
Once you’ve discovered what isn’t working, get rid of it. It’s better to spend time creating a better ad campaign than it is to waste money running one that isn’t working for you. If you use a great native advertising program, they may even offer you suggestions about optimizing your campaign or creating the foundation for a campaign that will produce the results you want.
The Takeaway
Optimizing your affiliate marketing campaign is easy, as long as you’re patient and take the time to understand the way your ad tracker works and the significance of the difference between each traffic source. As long as you’re willing to keep testing until you get things right, you’re capable of creating a campaign that will blow your competitors out of the water.
