Affiliate marketing campaigns can be very short-lived. It’s especially frustrating when you find a performing offer, but before you realize it’s worth scaling, the ROI starts to decline because you did not get time to optimize. However, there are a few techniques you can try to preserve high-performance and long-lasting campaigns.
With this in mind, today we bring you seven tips to increase the longevity of your marketing campaigns!
1. Use landing pages to increase chances for success.
No matter what type of affiliate campaigns you run, be it redirect ads, display ads or native you really should invest in attention-grabbing landing pages. As a matter of fact, a few of them.
Direct linking to an offer rarely works in affiliate marketing. You need this extra stepping stone to generate a demand for the promoted goods or services among your customers. It’s quite a competitive business, and ad spying tools contribute to stuffing the internet with very similar landing pages. That’s why you should always try to be one step ahead of the competition.
Remember to measure and repeatedly check the performance of your landing pages. Not just the website traffic, click-through rate, or the number of sessions, but also the on-page behavior. For advanced landing page auditing, we suggest going beyond Google Analytics. Marketers often try tools like Hotjar to measure the scroll depth and determine the hot zones of your website.
2. Improve campaign longevity with fresh creatives.
With all this data in your hands, it’s easy to identify the elements that don’t perform well, whether it’s the copy, images, videos, or the call-to-action button placement. When your marketing campaign starts showing signs of going south, it’s time to analyze all prospects and switch things up.
Sometimes altering elements on your landing page won’t be enough to reach success.
The same goes for ad creatives. They’re very important to the success of your advertising campaigns and their length in the affiliate marketing business. That’s why marketers need to alter both message and visuals whenever the CTR starts dropping to test and see what elements cause the drop. It’s useful to run a split test of your creatives whenever possible, so you know what kind of graphics and/or copy work better than others.
Keeping your marketing content and creative assets fresh and different from business competitors’ will surely give your campaigns an extra boost and improve their longevity.
3. Invest in successful sources.
“If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it” – Beyonce.
When buying traffic from an ad exchange, you see an overview of publishers and placements your affiliate advertising campaign appears at. Constant revision of both the sources (publishers) and targets (placements) tabs in your ad platform is a fundamental part of PPC marketing campaign optimization.
These tabs show you where a marketer is losing money, and where they’re making profit. If particular prospects are a success already, make use of that. Pause campaign or sources that aren’t any good, and increase your bid on the ones that are profitable.
This is a very simple strategy that can do wonders for your campaign’s efficiency and extend its lifetime. And you don’t even have to do it yourself. If you want to save time, rely on Rule-based optimization or AI algorithms to make the most of your campaigns for you.
4. Plan your campaign marketing budget.
You can be almost certain, however, that the well-performing placements will also get noticed by your competition – other advertisers in the affiliate advertising industry. That’s why you need to evaluate how much your new bid should be so that it buys more traffic than the rest of the advertisers and ultimately wins marketing momentum.
Before you take any action on your sources or targets, make sure the sample size is big enough to alter your marketing strategy. Don’t rush to increase your bid as soon as you see the first conversion. You don’t want to miss a chance of scaling up, but being patient in the first two or three days of running a marketing campaign will prevent you from both overspending and missing out on valuable placements.
Observe the process, research consumers and digital marketing trends, test ads, try new media, think like a client, and make use of the marketing tools available for the affiliate business.
5. Don’t limit your marketing campaigns too much.
Insights about superior and subpar sources and targets are extremely valuable. That’s why it’s important to always keep a broad (Run-of-Network or Keyword) campaign open. This way you can ensure being plugged into the stream of newly added publishers and placements.
Monitoring the performance of your marketing campaign means research of a wide array of content. Adding new or updated sources and targets helps you quickly identify the new, hottest placements in the platform, and get an advantage with your marketing campaigns over your competition.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pause sources or targets in your RON campaign as long as you give one or all of those a solid chance to bring you conversions. Such optimized broad campaigns will definitely help you keep your whitelist campaigns fresh by providing you insights on what sources and targets you should add to those whitelists.
6. Use whitelist data to scale your marketing campaigns.
This point is pretty much a follow-up action to keeping a broad campaign open. Once you’ve identified the sources and targets that bring the best results, it’s time to use that message and create a whitelist campaign.
What’s the difference between a whitelist marketing campaign and a broad campaign with paused subpar sources? The broad campaign will keep receiving traffic from all new sources, while whitelists will only buy traffic from one or selected the sources you choose.
Whitelist campaigns are set up in the same way as other campaigns, the difference being the first step, where rather than RON, you need to either choose a Target or a Source targeting, and the last step in which you upload the list of targets or sources.
You can always throw in additional placements even after the campaign starts. That’s why you need a broad campaign open. Whenever you identify a new, great placement, add it to your whitelist campaign and use it as a scaling-up plan.
It’s important to feed your whitelist campaigns with new sources and targets as it has a direct and positive impact on your campaigns’ longevity.
7. Keep your campaigns clean.
Last but not least – stay away from shady tactics.
Getting a quick profit using black hat techniques may be tempting. Yet, it’s a straight way to lose in various businesses. Black hat tactics are getting easier and easier to detect by all parties, so even if you see profits coming at first, don’t expect to get paid and prepare to get banned for life by your traffic source, tracker, and affiliate advertising network. Not to mention to become quite easily recognized by consumers, which can ultimately hurt the affiliate media brand.
Having some particular audience of subscribers and visitors carries a responsibility for the quality of content you are serving to customers. Long-term audience trust is way more valuable than short-term, questionable profit. That’s why publishers don’t put up with dirty tricks. One scam can cost them everything for their brand and customers’ trust.
Staying away from shady tactics and keeping your digital marketing clean will improve the amount of traffic you can buy, and hence, the longevity of your affiliate campaigns.
Conclusions
A marketing campaign that lives long, attracts customers, promotes products, and spreads the marketing message is what all businesses strive for. That’s why implementing these seven tips for successful and long-term might be just the key to success.
Extend the lifetime of your campaigns.
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