Always Be Testing: How To Take Your Campaigns To The Next Level

If you’ve been reading our blog posts on affiliate marketing, you now know how to effectively optimize your account and become a super affiliate. One question still remains– how do you take a perfectly optimized campaign that is consistently doing well from $300 a day, to $500+ a day?

First, here are a few things you should know…

1. You need to spend money to make money.
2. If you plan on growing your offer, you need to be prepared to take a loss for the first few days. I always suggest beginning a test as early in the month as possible so you can hopefully come out ROI positive for the month.
3. Get creative! You never know what is going to work until you try it.

Spend Money To Make Money

Growing an offer is not cheap. Before you embark on this journey, you should be prepared to spend some money on your offer. Start the prep work early by tracking {domain} in your tracking URL, so you know which domains you are serving your ads and getting conversions on. This will allow you to build a new target list for your test very quickly. I would suggest using the list of domains as your new target list on CPV campaigns, and using the site name on InText campaigns.

For example, if the URL is fingerhut.com, bid on either fingerhut.com or fingerhut. I would also suggest building out your target list as extensively as possible. You should always be on the lookout for new sites that are related to your offer and retest targets that may not have worked last month or quarter. Some targets have bad days, and it could have been an off day for them. Give them another day or two in a new month. You might get better results due to seasonality or content changes where they would serve, giving you higher quality.

At First, You Might Lose Money

Nobody likes to lose money. In some cases, you need to be prepared to take a hit in the short term to achieve long-term goals. I would suggest setting yourself up for success by creating a plan for testing every month. During week one, you should retest targets older than six weeks that you’ve paused due to previous poor performance.

I would adjust the budget at +20% to give your campaign room to grow. You don’t want to suffocate the campaign with too many targets and not enough budget for them all. Set these live the first Monday of the month, and optimize accordingly as discussed in our post about optimizing.

The second Monday of the month, I would test any new domains you came across from your {domain} tracking. I would open the budget 1% per new domain. So if you add 20 more domains, add 20% to your campaign budget. On the third Monday, test any new targets you have come across in the past month and test them, again adding 1% to the budget for each new target you add in. You should be adding to the budget every time you add new targets to ensure you are allowing the campaign to serve on ALL targets effectively, and not driving traffic to a few select targets only. When you are adding or retesting any target, always set your bids to Smart Bid if available, or to at least 10% more than the minimum bid in the selected country. This will you help receive traffic on the targets to gain the data you need to either pause or drive more traffic to it.

Creativity Wins!

Once you have exhausted all related targeting options, consider what other angles may work, or how you can monetize it better with the use of a splash page. A great example of this is instantcheckmate.com. Landing pages that have worked previously for instantcheckmate.com include those that target dating and job hunting websites. For dating sites and targeting, the effective copy was “Do you know who you are going on a date with? Check their background now to keep yourself safe.” Creepy? Probably, but the conversion rates soared. For job hunting sites and targeting, language such as, “Did you know that an inconsistent background check can cause you not to get a job at the last minute? Check yours first so you aren’t surprised!” What is it for you and your offer that will work?


Reach out to our account management team at support@rtxplatform.com to learn more about how we can help you grow your campaigns.