From Red to Green: An Insider’s Perspective on What Makes a Profitable Affiliate Campaign

Zeropark and Voluum have integrated to allow for seamless granular optimization for what makes a profitable affiliate campaign. Take control of your Zeropark campaigns from your Voluum panel. Find out what all successful campaigns have in common, and how to achieve this using Voluum and Zeropark.

Speech by Mateusz Drela | Managing Director, Zeropark

Mateusz Drela Speech Transcript

Let me just point out that Daniel has been quite a bit embarrassed at one point. Not anymore, I mean, I think he’s retired. But if I’m gonna be talking bullsh*t, he’ll call me out on it.

You’ll know that all I’m gonna be saying is absolutely true because I couldn’t afford to bullsh*t you right here.

Okay, so, I was asked not to deliver a straight forward product pitch no matter how much I wanted to. I’ll talk more broadly about pops and redirects, Zeropark and Voluum in a broader context of online and performance marketing.

Most of the insights that I’ll be sharing with you today are very applicable in those areas. And will be applicable whether you use any of our products or not.

I’ll also take this opportunity to review some of the new amazing features that we have coming up on Zeropark and Voluum. And, I’ll share with you how these products will help you run top performing affiliate or performance marketing campaigns.

I hope to have my speaking part done in about 45 minutes. And then we can open up the floor for some questions.

Without further ado, what you’ll be hearing about in the next 45 minutes or so, first I’ll introduce myself briefly, I guess Daniel already has done most of that.

Brief Summary

I will show you stats about Zeropark, campaigns running on Zeropark just to provide some context to all these.

Then, we’ll look at 3 elements that really disqualify campaigns from the very beginning. Things that when we see them, affiliates doing, and we know, other campaigns is going to fail miserably.

I’ll then sum up the analysis of what you really shouldn’t be doing when running affiliate campaigns. And tell you and clarify, you know, what you should be doing.

Then, I’ll move on to demonstrating 2 new features that we have coming up, Voluum insights and Zeropark and Voluum integration.

I’ll show you how these features can help you run really top performing campaigns.

And then, to finish things off, before the Q&A, I’ll give you a sneak preview of what we have for you in store over the next couple of months when it comes to both Zeropark and Voluum.

Introduction

Real quickly about me. I’ve been in the online marketing industry for the past 8 years. I’ve been involved in building out 2 ad networks.

First one called Elephant Traffic. It was one of the first networks that focused on selling domain redirect traffic to affiliates.

The second one that I’m involved in right now is Zeropark which offers not only domain redirect but also pop and search traffic.

Zeropark, in case there’s someone in the room who doesn’t know, is an ad network. We sell traffic on CPM basis. It’s a self-serve platform where affiliates/advertisers can log in and really quickly start their campaigns.

I hope all of you knew that.

Moving on. Here’s a quick bit of quick look on the stats about campaigns on Zeropark.

Campaigns On Zeropark

Since we launched the platform in 2011, there are about 360,000 campaigns created on Zeropark.

35,000 of these campaigns are running on Zeropark at any given one point. About 700 to 800 new campaigns are created every single day.

And let me point out straight away that all these campaigns are verified manually. So, somebody on our team actually goes on, checks out the settings, and looks at that stuff and see what people are trying to run.

These campaigns come from about 14,500 registered users, 1500 of whom are active on a daily basis.

Here’s a really interesting bit about these statistics. Out of all those campaigns that were created on Zeropark over the years, I would say that probably 80% of them have not been profitable.

Have failed, made a loss.

Of the 20% that was left, I’ll say that a vast majority were breakeven or produced ROI of says less than 10%.

It’s only really 1-2% of campaigns that you can really see are making big money, making a big ROI. You see affiliates pulling in ROIs of over 50%, 60%, 70%.

So what is it that sets this 1-2 % of campaigns apart?

To answer this question, first of all let’s look at the con first.

Three Characteristics Of Bad Campaign

In preparation for this show, I asked our account managers to name the 3 things that when they see them when approving campaigns, to name 3 things which make them know immediately that a campaign is shi*t.

That it’s not going to work out, that it’s not going to make money.

And those are 3 things they mentioned. Pretty much all of them were in agreement of those.

The low bid, bad landing page, and no tracking.

So, let me take those in turn.

Low Bid

Low bid. Starting a campaign with a really, really low bid is a rookie mistake. It doesn’t make sense to do that.

When you start with a very, very low bid, you’re essentially on dynamic platforms where there’s a lot of competition. You’re essentially buying traffic that nobody else wants.

And, you’re buying traffic that people have excluded from their campaigns and you’re just buying the remaining stock.

If the traffic is cheap, if it’s cheap in comparison to, you know, traffic that based on given targeting, based on given geo, it’s cheap for a reason.

And when we talk about performance marketing, it’s cheap because it doesn’t convert.

What you should do instead, when starting a new campaign, when just testing out a new platform, testing out a new campaign, testing out the traffic, you should bid at least on par with the average.

Because that way, you’re getting a share of the traffic that has already been tested that has been proven to work out.

People who are successfully running campaigns are already buying it, you’re just getting a share of that. Instead of focusing on the bottom chance which just doesn’t convert.

If you don’t believe me, then here’s empirical data.

Low Bid: Data

This might be a little difficult to see from this graph. But what this is, is a histogram which shows the price point at which you have the best conversion rates.

So, what you see at this graph, first of all, the beginning of the graph, at very low price points, you have extremely low conversion rates.

The 2 points that really stand out, they correspond with more or less average bids for 2 types of traffic.

And, the first one is the average cost for traffic around the tier 2 geos. So let’s say countries like Brazil, India, and Indonesia with CPMs of around $1.5.

The second big spike you see corresponds to average CPMs in tier 1 countries, US, UK, Germany, France, and has a CPM of around $4.

If most networks provide you with some sort of a tool to allow you to gauge what a bid level should be, this is a screenshot of our tool.

Low Bid Available Tools

This is something that’s provided by, the second one is provided by pop ads.

They give you this information so that you can reference this. You can use these tools provided by ad networks to know pretty much how much you should be bidding.

If the ad network you’re using does not provide that, you can always ask account managers. You can ask people who work there. And, you can use other resources that they provide to find out this information.

So, that was the first that the account managers gave me.

Bad Landing Pages

The second one, How does this look? Okay, good. Bad landing pages.

I mean, this sounds basic. But again, going through around 1,000 campaigns a day, we see that a lot of people don’t really have a grasp on what a landing page should look like.

What really makes a bad landing page, and what really makes a good landing page.

So what really makes a bad landing page?

One, no call to action. So, a user comes in, you redirect him there. And they have absolutely no idea what to do.

They have to search for links, they have to search for buttons. And, they have to search for sign up fields, they have to guess what they should be doing.

There is no selling point. So, the user doesn’t actually know what is it that they’re being sold.

And the third thing is, the landing page itself might be good, might have all those points that I mentioned above, but the targeting might be off.

So let’s say, you’re selling quite a specific product or you’re promoting quite a specific offer that requires targeted traffic, and you’re promoting it on run-of-network. Basically, anybody.

Let me give you some examples here.

Example Of Bad landing Page

The first one is absolutely awful. There’s absolutely no idea what this thing is selling, there’s no clear call to action. It’s just a total and utter mess.

The second page, it’s a landing page with guitars. But apart from that, you don’t really know what else.

Even if you’re a super targeted visitor, even at that point, if you’re looking for guitar lessons and you get to that page, you still might click away. Because it really doesn’t offer you much more than that.

And the last example is what I mentioned, an example of a landing page that’s actually a quite good, clear selling point. It’s clear what the product is, web hosting, unlimited disk space.

There’s a promotional video which probably shares more of the unique selling points of that product. But if you were to run that campaign, you’d really have to target it specifically to people who are looking for web hosting.

Because if you just run it, just let it out to anyone, the results would be very, very similar to what you would see using those 2 pages.

Good Practices On Landing Page Creation

To share some of the good practices around landing page creation, around really funneling your users into the offer and into the product that you’re trying to promote. One as I mentioned already, clear and simple message.

Users have a very, very short attention span.

You wanna tell them immediately once they get on the page, you don’t want them to be guessing. And, you want them to know what you’re offering. What they’re getting. Why they should be interested.

It’s always a good idea to put some sort of a time constraint. This is a tried and tested method.

Think about TV infomercials. They’re always trying to put together this amazing product, they always have this line “Call within 30 minutes” to get another whatever free.

It simply works.

You wanna give your users motivation to act quickly, you wanna show them an offer that sounds unique. And, you wanna make sure to tell them that if they don’t act quickly, it’s going to be gone.

The last tip that I wanted to mention regarding landing pages is to use dynamic insertions.

You can get quite a lot of data about the user just by getting the basics. By scanning their IP or user agent.

You can display their location, you can display their ISP network, you can display their browser, OS, etc.

Anything that will make the user feel like the offer is targeted to them specifically, is going to improve your conversion rates drastically.

No Tracking

{9. Mateusz Drela – No Tracking}

And the last bit, no tracking.

This is a very, very important part, this is what I’ll spend a little bit more time on.

As you know, one of the products that we have in our suite is Voluum which is a tracking solution. So we understand how crucial this is to make any sort of campaign work, and work in the longer term.

In general, in Zeropark, we have this policy that we reject any campaign that’s actually not tracking or not tracking properly.

And the reason why we do this, is chances of campaigns to produce a positive ROI from the very beginning, from the get-go are very slim.

If we see that somebody is not tracking, then actually, they are much more likely to blame us for their failure. And blame our traffic and blame our network instead of actually looking into getting more insights on their campaign.

If you do not track, you cannot optimize. And, if you cannot optimise, you’re basically wasting money.

Because you’re spending money on traffic that is not performing for you. That is not converting.

To get deeper into this, it always makes sense and this is something that’s extremely common. Very standard in most affiliate networks or most ad networks is that they share these basic parameters which you can use for tracking campaigns.

Publisher ID, very basic. It allows you to bulk optimise very quickly.

Sub ID, Zone ID, gives you more of an insight. Allows you to perform slightly more granular optimisations.

There are other variables that you can use as well, that you can track. IP ISP, certain ISPs are associated with bulk traffic if you can get rid of that, that’s only to your benefit.

Especially when you’re running mobile campaigns, there are certain carriers which will just not perform due to network restrictions, due to some other factors.

You might wanna track that and get rid of those.

Other variables such as operating system. Mac users and Windows users have a very different profile. You’re gonna get different types of visitors depending on what sort of machine they use.

Browsers. Again, depending on the type of offer that you run, it might make sense to focus on certain browsers only or to bid differently depending on the browser or to exclude traffic from certain browsers as well.

And, devices, especially again when you’re doing mobile. You’ll find that the difference in performance across devices is absolutely huge.

The more of these variables that you can input into your data stream, the more that you can make use of, the better off you’ll be.

So, to sum up this part, just before I move on.

Summary: When Setting Up A Campaign

The thing which you should watch out for in setting up a campaign is low bids, you don’t wanna bid too low.

You wanna use landing pages which avoid the mistakes which I highlighted in the past. And follow the good practices which I presented earlier.

And, you definitely want to track and optimise.

Now, I get to move to the part where I’ll be showing you our products which is obviously the part that I’m excited about.

As you know, Codewise, our company, has built a product which allows you to create, setup and optimise campaigns in a way that gives you the best possible chance of producing a positive ROI and making money.

The tools that we built are geared towards performance marketers simply because if you guys make money, then we make money as well.

And of course what I’m referring to is Zeropark, our ad network, and Voluum, our tracking solution.

First thing that I wanna show you.

Voluum Insights

Okay, it looks quite decent. Voluum insights. It is a new feature of the Voluum tracker.

Based on a random survey of the people at this conference, I think about 50% of you are using Voluum tracker already. So, that’s an excellent step.

Here is a new element that will make it even better, even easier to use.

What you get here is a list of the top performing and the worst performing traffic bundles inside of your campaign. So on each campaign, we take 3 different data sets.

We run some algorithm to test their performance. And we come up with ones which produce the best ROI and the ones which lose you the most money.

For example, on the basis of one campaign, you can see that you’re making absolutely the most money on users who are coming in from a Samsung Galaxy 7 phone, running Android 5.1 on a T-Mobile carrier.

Conversely, you can see which sort of bundle of data you should absolutely get rid of to help you make money.

What is most important about insights, at least from my perspective, is that all the data is not only is it readily available, it’s also statistically relevant.

Product Pitch

So, you’re not really optimising on flukes or you’re not optimising on just random performance, you’re optimising and on data that makes sense from a statistical point of view.

Because with all our experience with affiliates/performance marketers, they don’t have the best grasps of statistics.

They tend to make decisions on incomplete, statistically irrelevant data or, I mentioned, flukes in performance.

Here’s a common example of what we see happening on Zeropark.

Say, an affiliate is running a campaign with us. The campaign has been performing well for the past, I don’t know, 5, 6, 7 weeks.

And then, because we offer real-time reporting, we offer real data to track their performance, the affiliate sees that their campaign has been losing money for a few hours straight.

So, the typical approach in that case, what we see happen most often, the first thing the hypothetical affiliate would do, hit up the account manager. And, say “Bro, did you change anything with the traffic?”

The second thing that affiliates commonly do, is they take that campaign. They pause it and wait a little bit, wait a few hours and try it again thinking that maybe something has changed again.

Or will reduce bids.

So, this approach is fundamentally flawed. And it’s flawed for a very good reason.

I mean, most campaigns are not gonna have a conversion rate of more than 1%. That means that these flukes in performance are just bound to happen. I mean, they are statistically likely to happen.

Flipping A Coin

Think about it as you’re flipping a coin. You’re flipping a coin 100,000 times, you have this data stored somewhere. And the average outcome is 50/50.

Then, you take the coin again, you flip it 10 times and you get all heads. And from that, you conclude that something has happened and the coin is broken.

But in fact, getting this sort of result, 10 heads in a row has a 0.1% chance probability which means it happens in around every 2000 coin flips.

So, Voluum insights have been created with the rules of statistics and probability in mind to make sure that affiliates avoid that urge of pausing their campaign as soon as something is going wrong.

And trying to get a meaningful and accurate insight of what is really happening and to present actionable insights that are based on relevant statistics.

The planned release date for Voluum Insights is August. If you guys care to come up to our booth, we can give you a preview today or tomorrow.

Zeropark & Voluum Integration

The next thing that I want to show you, the second cool feature, is Zeropark & Voluum integration.

So, we make, you know, natural thing, it makes sense, we will now allow users to optimise their Zero campaigns directly from the Voluum tracker.

We just have the first version. It’s scheduled for release.

In the first version, you’ll be able to change bids, you’ll be able to pause targets and sources and you’ll be able to pause and delete campaigns, Zeropark campaigns, directly within the tracker.

Here’s how it looks.

Zeropark campaigns are marked in red.

From the dashboard, you see campaign status. You have the ability to control bids. And once you drill down into the reports, you will be able to optimise the campaigns directly from there.

Since this is just the first version, we obviously have more features that are planned around this to come up soon.

Integration Future Plans

After the initial release, what we plan to do is, we plan to allow clients to optimise by insights. So, you’ll be able to optimise by every single data point available in Voluum.

This feature is really setting us up for automatic optimisation with insights, with performance data coming in. We’ll know we already have the algorithms built out that give us the information what is performing and what is not performing.

And what we need to do now is figure out how to adjust it better to get it to work, to really improve the performance.

And the last bit, we hope to open up Voluum for integration with other traffic networks.

Zeropark is obviously just a testing ground. It was easiest for us because it’s also our product.

But we hope to share all the technical work that we’ve done around that, offer it to other networks.

And again, give affiliates really the ability to control a whole bunch of traffic sources within one platform. Do all the necessary workaround that from the Voluum dashboard.

And that would be it. Thank you very much!