Scaling Your Campaigns
Scalability is one of the key elements of campaign success. While it’s definitely a great feeling when you first hit that $50 a day, $100 a day milestone. You quickly realize that you’re going to have to push the limits and see if you can increase your daily earnings by a factor of 2, 5, 10, even 100.
So the question becomes, how do you actually achieve campaign scalability? There are several techniques you can use to reach your goals.
Expand Your Keywords
At it’s core, campaign scalability starts with generating a higher volume of traffic to your landing pages. To do that, you need to add depth and breadth to your keywords. Your bluechip keyword lists usually cost more, but produce a large amount of traffic. To scale your campaign, it’s good to pad those bluechip keywords with alternative phrases. You can do this by introducing long tail keywords, short tail keywords, broad matching keywords (with a strong negative / exclusionary terms) and atypical keywords (same industry, different niches) to the mix. These second-tier keyword lists will cost you less on bid price, bring in more targeted traffic and result in higher conversion rates.
Diversify Your Traffic Sources
One of the common traps that affiliates fall into is not having a wide enough range of traffic sources to draw from. You should look at running a successful campaign through one traffic source, such as Google, as just a stepping stone to greater success. Once you’ve locked down one source, you can add others to your portfolio––sources such as Bing, Ask, and LookSmart are good places to start. Additional traffic sources also include smaller search engines, banner traffic and media buys. Diversifying your campaigns in this way will put you on the road to full scalability.
Bump Up Your Bid Prices
Another way to achieve scalability is by upping your bid prices on keywords. This way, your ads get higher position in the search rankings, drive more traffic to your sales pages, and increase your revenue. Of course your profit margin might shrink a bit because your ad spend has increased, but that loss will be offset when your extra investment produces a 5X, 10X increase in sales. It’s always a good idea to try out different bid prices, see the results you get from them, and then figure out what bid price your most comfortable with.
Split Test Your Ad Copy
Try testing different PPC headlines against each other. When one emerges as a winner, use that one across your entire ad campaign. Do the same for body copy and calls-to-action. The great thing about testing is that it’s an ongoing process. Once you have top-performer up and running strong, you can come up with new ad copy to try and perform even better than the last one. If you’re able to Increase the CTR (Click-Through-Rate) on your ads by 1.5%-2%, you should consider it a victory.
Split Test Your Landing Pages
The same goes for landing page testing. You can A/B test for page elements such as colour scheme, image type and placement, button shape and size, as well as copy––and the list goes on. And remember, the goal with testing is to improve your CTR. Landing page split testing usually produces more dramatic spikes in CTR than it does with ad copy testing. So if you can put a killer landing page together, it’s possible to increase your CTR up to 10-15% without costing you an extra cent. Powerful stuff!
Test Multiple Offers
Make sure you try several offers, don’t get hung up on just one or two. Offers have different price points, different commission rates, and different payouts––with some generating more money for less sales and others vice versa. The only way to find out which ones are most profitable for you is to try a variety of the them out and see the results for yourself.
Utilize Your Affiliate Manager
Once you have several high-octane campaigns up and running, you may be eligible for a performance-based commission bump. Some merchants offer incentives based on volume – it’s always a good idea to ask your Affiliate Manager what’s available.
These are just a few things you can do to scale your campaigns. We’d love to hear your ideas, too. Feel free to leave your comments on this post or contact me at jbelliveau@revenuewire.com. I look forward to hearing from you!
Jon Belliveau
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Very well written information. It will be valuable to anybody who known it, as well as yours truly. Keep up the good work. I will definitely read more posts.