If you’re in the affiliate marketing business, you must have heard about Attila O’Dree (a.k.a. IamAttila). He’s a one-of-a-kind, candid, super affiliate who’s not afraid to share his knowledge. Recently, he ran a few push campaigns with Zeropark to make a case study for his blog. As much as we love talking about positive ROI, this time we’re going to focus on the little things that go a long way towards a successful campaign.

Preparation for Running Campaigns

Assuming you have already set your sights on an affiliate network, a tracker, traffic source and an ad format, you begin with picking the offers you want to run with. And here comes tip number one.

TIP #1: TALK TO YOUR ACCOUNT MANAGER & TEST MULTIPLE OFFERS

Maintaining good relations with your account manager in any company you’re working with is crucial. These are the people who have the most valuable insights on the performance of offers, geos or placements. And this is the sort of information you need to have in order to be successful.

How does Attila approach his ad network’s representative?

The first thing I say is – I want to run push, give me 3 geos that are doing well on this traffic type. And give me two offers in each geo, that are doing lots of volume already.

That’s two, high-performance offers in each of three best-performing geos – a total of 6 offers. Why do you need so many? Because it’s extremely difficult to distinguish good ones from bad ones without trying running them.

Speaking to your account manager minimizes the risk of getting a poorly converting offer, but it’s still not enough to just pick one, set a budget and pray for some green.

As Attila suggests, it’s useful to create a simple spreadsheet, serving the role of offer organizer. It will help you set everything up quickly.

TIP #2: SPY ON YOUR COMPETITION

There’s a bunch of tools that help affiliates see what assets the competition is using to promote offers like yours. As much as it’s useful to gather this intel, you should tread carefully, and consider it an inspiration, rather than a blueprint.

First of all, spying on your competition can bring distractions that Attila warns so much about:

You will be able to find all kinds of ads, and this is where a lot of affiliates screw up – they get sucked into all the opportunities and get off track. They think the grass is greener, maybe I should try dating, maybe I should try some kind of health ads, maybe I should try ecom on PUSH.

BIG MISTAKE!

To succeed, you need to go in, find ads that match the offers your rep gave you and then get out. Don’t get suckered in!

The second thing to keep in mind is not to blatantly copy others’ assets. It’s because of the so-called “creative fatigue”. The more the recipients see the same ad, the less probable they are to convert. That’s why you need to think of the ways you could breathe new life into the best creatives you see in your ad spying tool.

Once you’ve gained your inspiration for each of the offers you’re going to promote, it’s time to unleash your creativity.

CREATING ASSETS FOR YOUR AFFILIATE CAMPAIGNS

Let’s start with your landing pages.

You don’t need to be a web developer to find your way around affiliate marketing. There are services and freelancers you can leverage to get the job done cheaply, quickly and effectively. Of course, if you have the skills to create landers all by yourself, that’s money saved for you, obviously, but it’s not necessarily the best way to spend your valuable time.

TIP #3: ALTER THE ADS

After spying on your competition, you should already have an idea what your creative assets should look like.

Here are some tips from Attila on how you can alter the ads:

1. Changing the text

2. Changing the image to be bolder, different angles, contrasts, shock/awe

3. Using emojis. I personally LOVE the POO 💩 emoji, it converts like fire every time!

Sometimes even a change of font size can turn your ROI around.

Read More About Push Creatives

TIP #4: MIND THE LOADING TIME

When hosting landing pages, beware about the impact of loading speeds on your campaigns’ success. Attila suggests getting a VPS as close as possible to the country you’re running in. We’d additionally advise you to use Voluum for tracking your campaigns, as it will increase your redirect speeds to a level no other traffic source – tracker combination can match. This is because we pass the data on the backend.

OPTIMIZING YOUR CAMPAIGNS AND SCALING UP

Moving on to push creatives for your campaigns. Don’t hesitate to fill all the 10 slots that Zeropark gives you. The traffic will be distributed evenly among them, and it will make it easy for you to determine what winning creatives look like.

TIP #5: CREATIVES -> SOURCES -> TARGETS

“The best strategy to use to optimize push is CREATIVES > SOURCES > TARGETS” – and we couldn’t agree more with this order. So let’s begin with the creatives.

Like Attila says, you will probably want to block around half of your push creatives within the first 3 days or so. Keep in mind that a high CTR isn’t always what you want to aim for. It’s the eCPA that matters.

When you block some of your creatives, you can always replace them with new ones. Eventually, you will have to replace even those that performed best at the start, because their effectiveness will likely wane after a few days. That’s why keeping your creatives fresh is so important with push traffic.

Once you’re done optimizing creatives, and you’re still looking to improve your ROI, head over to the SOURCES tab in Zeropark. There, you will see the list of our publishers. Simply pause the ones that are unsatisfying in terms of eCPA. You can also bid up on those that have potential, so you buy more traffic from them. Lately, we’ve introduced the “Hot Sources” label in the panel. These sources are known for their extraordinary performance so you may want to bid significantly higher on them.

From there, you move on to the TARGETS tab, the list of individual placements. Cutting down on the list of sources should have shortened the list of targets, so now it’s easier to identify the placements that are underperforming. Pause them.

Once you come up with your winning set of landers and creatives, Attila suggests creating more, similar-looking ones, and opening a new Zeropark campaign.

TIP #6: CAP YOUR SOURCE BUDGET

Even the smartest optimization strategy won’t help, however, if the offer or lander is subpar. That’s why you always have to test everything like Attila does here. If you want to take a careful approach with Zeropark’s traffic, set a budget cap on a source level.

Setting up a $50 source budget will prevent your campaign from burning out the entire campaign budget on just a few sources.

I was very happy when I experienced it over and over again that ZP doesn’t overshoot your $50 budget by $200 dollars. Instead, they start to slow down traffic when the budget is near and only exceed it by a few bucks which is HIGHLY COMMENDABLE as a lot of people were complaining [about] how PUSH sources brutally overspend just like EXOCLICK is famous for on RON traffic.

TIP #7: COLLECT ENOUGH DATA AND START SOURCE CAMPAIGNS

So after running your push campaign for a while, you will get enough statistically significant data to move on from a RON campaign, and start SOURCE campaigns. The process of collecting this data took Attila around $1k.

Attila created 20 separate campaigns for each source. This allowed him to test the new creative variants on top of his best-performing ones in the broad campaign. Each of those campaigns was capped at $100 daily budget and after spending the first $20, Attila would either kill it or let it run, depending on whether they were profitable or not.

TIP #8: SCALE UP CAREFULLY

Seeing profits? It’s time to slowly scale up and let your income grow.

Here’s the way you can do it, brought to you by Attila:

1. Talk to your rep at [your affiliate network] and ask them what other geos the offer you are running is available in.
2. Take these offers, and start them off on the winning placements BUT (here’s the secret most won’t tell you) also make a totally different campaign, exclude the winning sources on here and let it collect more data so you find more winning sources in that country the offer is in.
3. Increase the budget on your campaigns slowly and monitor. The last thing you want is to take your winner that’s making you 100% ROI, up the budget 10x (sorry Grant Cardone BS doesn’t work here) and then go out and celebrate with bottle service at the club — only to return to learn that your $10,000 budget was spent, and you only made back $2000. It happens.

Remember, always to be vigilant and monitor your campaigns closely!! Real life affiliate marketing is not like what the fake gurus tell you that you set it up, and you live it up. NO NO, you have to monitor your stats, make adjustments, babysit everything as you never know when shit can go wrong. Hope you appreciate the honesty.

And that’s it! You’re now well-prepared to run successful Push Ads campaigns with Zeropark!

BONUS: MANUALLY UPLOADING CONVERSIONS TO ZEROPARK

Even the most experienced affiliates make mistakes every now and then. What happens if you mess up you campaign setup so you can’t track conversions? Attila has a trick for that as well: read how to manually upload conversions to Zeropark.

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