Cash on Delivery with the Asian market has huge potential for scaling due to recent insights. The mentality and lifestyle of people proves that “cash on delivery” is the most cost-efficient business model for this region. This session will show you how effective scaling techniques and full content localisation can make you millions of $ on COD offers with Facebook.
Speech by Ella Mak (Head of Affiliate Management Department, AdCombo) & iAmAttila (Blogger & Superaffiliate)
Ella Mak & iAmAttila Speech Transcript
Hey guys. It’s really nice to be here on the stage with like the best combo that could possibly be imagined like super affiliate of AdCombo network.
The one, who hit not only in the top 50 for our Ferrari contest but in top 5, actually.
Yeah, thank you for having us guys. It’s a real pleasure to share our success story that we had with AdCombo with you today on the stage.
Today we’re gonna share the secret of our cash cow. It is the underestimated Asian market. And how to make like a million dollars, which actually Attila did with our network for the past year.
iAmAttila’s Secrets To Millions
Okay, so today we’re gonna be revealing iAmAttila’s secrets to millions. His team joined AdCombo in June 2016.
They were running cash and delivery offers on Facebook.
Today we’re gonna be talking only about one offer, which was really good. It was a top seller in our network.
And Attila, of course, he had like the first, how to say, he was the first one to run it because we value our super affiliates and we gave him the first move.
I hope you like don’t mind it. And you have like a lot of things to grow here. So, we will be going to see Princess Mask in Thailand.
Of course, it was not the only offer that he was running, and he was running both nutra and skin. It was not only Asia, but it was also Europe.
But in terms of returns and investments and in terms of volume, this is Asia right now that made like 80% of the profit.
Luck in Asia
Yeah, we had really good luck running in Asia. I believe the reason why we had such great luck in Asia was that a lot of affiliates, they always go for English Geo’s because that’s the easy thing, right?
Yeah. that’s true, like the USA, Great Britain or maybe like the local market and the language that they can speak. But that’s not exactly what you should do when you run offers.
Yeah, exactly.
The harder it is to run an offer, the more barriers of entry, the higher the ROI. And the reason behind that is that people always go for the easy.
And if you do the things the way we do, we always go for the hardest because we know that there’s not gonna be that much competition. There’s gonna be less exposure.
Yeah, and CPC will be lower of course. Actually, these markets are easy for new businesses because there is like a lot of traffic. And we have like huge volumes in our network because we have like internal media buyers.
So, like nearly all kinds of traffic can be successfully monetised with AdCombo.
Here you have like stats for Attila’s account. And some of the offers are private.
Yeah, let me just show you here. We ran Vietnam, Thailand, Hungary, Spain, Belgium, did really good and the Czech Republic, Serbia, and Poland.
And, as you can see a lot of our success was in the Asian geo’s. Most of the affiliates that I know, they always do the US because you know it’s a huge demo.
I don’t like to do the US because there’s so much competition. I’d rather make money. So, that’s why I picked Asia because the numbers told us, like come here, cheap traffic and tons of volume.
COD Offers
We were able to do really good, like overall in a span of one year did a little bit more than $1.8 million in revenue on AdCombo using these awesome COD offers.
And of course, another reason for taking a closer look to the Asian market because here are the stats for Facebook top countries and top cities.
You see that the United States, it dominates it with like 11%.
But there, they’re all tier two countries. And the tier two countries is exactly the business model of what AdCmbo does.
Like what we do, we have our own offers, we have our own products in tier two countries. These countries are hugely underestimated.
They have lower competition because not that many affiliates run it. It’s easier to start because CPC is much lower there. There is like really, really huge potential.
If you see as the top cities like Bangkok for Thailand, it is even number one. That’s why it was such a success with Princess Mask Thailand for Attila and his team.
AdCombo’s Landers and Pre-landers
And, please look here. There was like the default white head lander for Princess Mask offer. What is good about AdCombo is that we already have like all the landers and pre-landers provided, right?
Yeah, like one of the coolest things about AdCombo that we liked when we joined because I heard from a friend of mine in May, that you know, I should try some offers.
So, I signed up. And when you go into their system, unlike HasOffers or Cake, they let you select pre-landers and also different offer pages.
And right away just get one link and start sending traffic.
So, you know, I did a little test and it looked good. We were like “Wow, okay let’s do more of this. Let’s add some media buyers and focus on AdCombo offers.”
AdCombo Offers
And that’s how we arrived at creating basically our own offers. Because this one right here is a typical lander that’s available in their system.
But when we ran it, our ROI was not that good because as you saw from the previous presentation, there’s a lot of different things that you can add to a lander to make it convert better.
And Drew did a wonderful job talking about that.
So, that is our screenshot with the stats of with default lander. And of course, default lander is they’re like good, they’re okay.
But because Attila joined like the first so we didn’t have much time to test, you know, like to play with different pictures and to play with different texts and sales and everything.
What we suggested that to increase his ROI though it was like 10%, still like not bad but like still low, right?
Well I mean. 10% is not bad for a white hat. Because guys that do Shopify for example, know that if you get 20-30% profit after every single expense, that’s awesome.
So I mean, for a lander that’s available for anybody to run, to get 10% right off the gate was pretty good. But we wanted to increase this. They suggested, “Why don’t we use API?”
And at that point, I was like “What the hell’s API? Like, what do you mean?”
And then, they explained API is. That we can make our own custom landing page for the offer and that is exactly what we did.
We enlisted.
The Trick in Making Your Own Landing Page
Can you go back, please? Yeah, okay. So we created our own landing page.
And the trick in making your own landing page is to fragment your target audience. Facebook is extremely powerful when it comes to targeting.
You can create custom landing pages that speak right to the audience and that’s what we did. Instead of having one general landing page, we created multiple landing pages.
The guys at BannersLanders actually, made a wonderful job and created different landing pages for us so that we could target and send a message to different kind of people which is the most relevant to them.
And that is exactly how we were able to realise a really nice jump in ROI.
Unfortunately, we can’t share our landing pages because the campaigns are still running.
Don’t worry they will find the spy tools. So this was the stats after we optimised the lander.
You see like approval rate became higher. It was like 64% before and we reached 50 or something.
Yeah, so it was like really good, plus 50% to the approval rate. Unfortunately, we can’t show our CR here because like, when you work with API we don’t get clicks, we get only the conversions.
But trust me, it was like really good too.
Yeah, sorry just gonna run over and get a drink.
Oh okay, I thought we were just running the stage, like dominating it.
Secrets Behind Massive Success
These are the three secrets behind massive success. You can agree that these campaigns, they were like massive success, like such huge ROI and such huge earnings for only like one here.
And, if you’re lucky actually because today I’m going to briefly touch on our, let me fix this pointer thing, I’m going to explain to you the difference between API and a typical affiliate offer flow.
Why API is actually better and why you should also do API.
I’m also going to briefly touch on our Facebook way of running campaigns like how we create the ads, how we structure them. And all of that stuff and how we optimise it.
How we also do retargeting, not only Facebook but other means to squeeze out every last drop of profit that you can and shoot from your campaigns because you should never, ever leave money on the table.
API Versus Regular Offer Flow
The first one, traffic distribution, and API versus their regular offer flow.
Of course, API takes some technical stuff that you need to know, but it is pretty easy to find. We’ve to get specialists for that, like hire a company who can do it for it. Or just like to find a freelancer who will help you with that.
Especially right now, when Facebook like is being so mean. Is it okay saying that here? Like a little bit mean.
Lately, like the past month…
I mean, I don’t know if you guys read my blog, iAmAttila.com, but they were so “mean” as Ella I would say that they actually banned my fan page. And it’s been running for 4 years and I had 6,400 or something like that, followers.
And they just banned me overnight. Like that’s it, you’re done.
And it was part of a 300 fan page sweep and I had to email them 11 times. 11 times by the time I come across one person inside Facebook who actually read my email.
Because, you know, if you’re on Facebook, you probably experienced this. You email them and they cut and paste a message and tell you to screw off, basically.
I was just persistent and kept sending the same thing over and over and again and then I got it back.
Exactly, even the AdCombo page was like banned several likes last year or something.
The good thing about using API, it means that you have perfect control and everything.
And also, you’re independent on like what kind of traffic are the affiliates sending because as we hold them all in the system and they can run like Alpapanda traffic or like whatever else they want.
So API, it makes your clean traffic safer.
How API works
And here it is, how API works. So it’s like the standard thing, no, sorry. It’s like the standard thing that when you use AdCombo landers.
So you’d send traffic directly to it and we just get them in AdCombo. This is how API works. You have it all in the affiliates sides, right? And the clicks go to a custom landing page that was made by BannersLanders for Attila.
And then you sent us the data that we need exactly to AdCombo.
Why API is Better
Okay, so in case you’re confused why API is better, here are three reasons.
One of the main reasons that I personally fell in love with API after these guys introduced me to it, was that you can save your data locally.
If someone fills out a COD offer and they give their name and their phone number, you can save that on your server before sending it to AdCombo. And this is really, really good and let me tell you why.
First of all, there are many, many ways that you can go back end monetisation. And this is super important because it lets you squeeze even more profit out of the whole thing.
For example, if you’re running offers and you’re just so close to breaking even, you can sell the data or you can create retargeting campaigns through different platforms, even different traffic sources by using the data.
That’s why it’s super important to save the data and API lets you do that with ease.
Now, the next important thing is what I basically mentioned already is that it lets you create your own landing pages with a custom function like live chat, dynamic design elements that are totally exclusive to you.
Plus this plays a great role in making special landing pages for different audiences.
Like, you could make a skin cream that is for getting rid of wrinkles. You could make a skin cream that helps people with certain skin conditions hide it.
And, by having API, it can be the exact same product but speaking to different audiences, which your competitors are not going to be doing because they’re not gonna go to this length unless you know they’re willing to do the work.
The next thing, okay I just explained that, next slide.
Secret Behind the Traffic
And of course there is like some secret behind the traffic, right? So the strongest thing of Atilla is of course, not in making custom landing pages but you know that he is like a pro in different verticals and different niches.
He will be revealing a lot of secrets today about what stands behind the traffic.
Yeah, like for example, let me see some hands of how many of you are familiar with Instantly Ageless?
Okay, come on, you must have seen that if you run skin and stuff like that.
But basically, they have these really awesome videos that you might have seen on your Facebook feed, which shows a woman getting some cream applied under her eye.
And then they turn on some kind of fan and like magic, all of the wrinkles disappear. Now, the problem with this is that every single person that runs skincare on Facebook uses the same ads.
So, me and my team we like to do things differently. What I did is I reached out to some Hollywood makeup artists and I said, “Hey, can you turn a 40-year-old woman into a 70-year-old woman for me using just makeup?”
And they said, “Of course.”
Then we filmed this whole process. And we created our own videos that show the person becoming younger. All they are doing is they’re just like erasing from under the eye, the makeup that was applied to look like it is wrinkles on film.
So this was one of the tricks that we did.
Video Ads
And we ran exclusively video ads because if you were to test, like I welcome anybody to test this, but if you compare pictures to video ads, the reach is going to be bigger.
For some reason, Facebook prefers video ads because its users engage with it more. And Facebook is all about pleasing their users.
We do what Facebook wants us to do. So it’s video ads.
Objective Selection
Another thing is the objective selection. When you create a Facebook ad campaign, it’s 100% important to select the right objective.
Facebook is such an advanced system that they know who buys stuff, who just clicks on things and who just comments, shares and stuff like that.
If you want people to buy a skin cream, then what you need to do is you need to run website conversions with the purchase objective.
Basic Tips on How to Set up a Facebook Campaign
Here are some basic tips on how to set up a Facebook campaign for success.
You want to have one design per ad set. You do not want to throw many different ads into one ad set because that is not going to give you statistically significant data that you can optimise.
It’ll throw off your figures. And you won’t have a clear vision of which one is the right ad to run.
Now, another thing that you must do is duplicate that ad, that exact same ad 3 times inside this ad set.
And this is done as a good practice because for some reason, even though it’s the exact same ad, Facebook is going to treat it differently. Like, one might have a CPM of 20, the second might have a CPM of 30, and the third one might have a CPM of like 12 bucks.
If you do the numbers, you want the one with the $12 CPM.
So is it like you making some competition with yourself, right? So that Facebook treat them like differently and gives the advantage to one of them?
Well, I think it’s more about just, like randomizing. Because Facebook algo is super random. And we’re just giving them what they want, like stuff to randomize.
Bid Manually
And another thing is there’s a really good trick that we use and we bid manually, usually in the beginning. Three times what is the suggested.
And, people might think, “Oh my god, you’re nuts.”
But the reason why we do this is that, how Facebook works is it’s gonna show your ad sooner if you bid higher, right? So we bid high so that we establish our placement in the algorithm. And then we slowly decrease that.
This way we get the positioning to always be shown first, which gives us more clickers and more buyers. And then later, we gradually decrease so that we come in at the CPA that we want to pay so that we realise ROI that we want to get.
Black Mask
So, could you also share some hints about targeting? Because that offer, it actually like clears the pores, like a black mask. Actually, Princess Mask is like our own brand black mask product that became really like popular in the Asian market.
The good thing about the black mask is that you can target like everyone from the age like 18, but then what happened?
A lot of people who are 18 and they want to, I don’t know, clean their pores. And then don’t answer the phones or they don’t want to actually order the product.
So I was like they’re not really reliable, they cannot actually pay. How did you narrow this audience and what was the most prosperous for you in terms of demographics?
Broad Category
Well, I want to show you guys like usually, when we start an ad campaign we go for broad.
In this case, we did 45+ female. It’s pretty standard in skin care, right? Another thing that we did and let me just show you with this button here if it works, oh yes, okay it worked.
What we did you see, there is our targeting. Thailand, 45 female and we added the general the broad category of skincare. And there we go, that’s our audience.
The audience is pretty huge. It’s like 2 million, right?
And if you’re on Facebook, you often hear that like 2 to 5 million is like the magic spot. In this case, it really was.
So, we started with this and then that is how we started running our ads.
Ready for the next slide, Ella.
Scaling
And, now it’s time for the scaling method because you have already as we said in Thailand, there is like massive users that reach the right offer. But, the hardest thing is always to scale the traffic.
Okay, well we basically ran our 2 ad sets for 72 hours because a lot of people make the mistake that they start an ad and they cut it too early. And Facebook usually needs 72 hours to stabilise the data.
After we ran our 72 hours of campaign and data started coming in, we were able to look at this data and pick the winners.
And that is when we went to scale the winners because we usually jump on scaling right away because I’m not scared to lose a couple of thousand dollars because I know, once we hit the winning campaigns and come back twice fold.
So it doesn’t matter.
And the lesson in that is that don’t be scared to make risk because in affiliate marketing you can turn around on a dime. So it’s important to scale the way we did if you want to hit this kind of numbers.
Now, in terms of scaling, this is what we usually do.
Like, if there’s a winning ad set, I like to duplicate it 10 times at the same budget. And also 10 times a double budget.
Switch the Optimisation Objectives
And, I wanna switch the optimisation objectives. Like from purchase, we’re gonna switch it to add to cart for example, or for lead or whatever.
Because what that’s gonna do is it’s gonna target different people.
Remember how at the beginning of this presentation, I told you guys that you don’t want people who like stuff, and comment and clickers and stuff like that.
But by the time you get to a point where you are seeing potentially profitable ad sets, it’s a good idea to try playing with the objective, to try people that click stuff.
Who knows, there might be people who’re gonna buy it because you know your ad is good and that’s how we did it.
Can we jump back and I’ll just run through this slide. The scaling, okay.
Fragment by Age Group
Another cool thing to do, especially in the skin on Facebook is to fragment it by age groups. We do age groups of five. So, basically 45-50, 51-55, 56-60, and so on.
And another thing is that when you run Facebook, you need to have 15 actions happen on the objective for the pixel to start doing the work.
And when people say a pixel is gonna do its work, it’s not something magical. It’s an algo that needs data to optimise.
What’s gonna happen is when you start hitting the minimums that it requires, it’s gonna know, okay there are 15 people that clicked and brought this product, let me go out and see what they have in common. And then let me find more people like that.
So that’s why it’s very, very important to hit those things.
Duplicate the Winners
Okay and another thing that you can do and is the last tip for scaling is to duplicate the winners and set a super high budget.
Remember, we’re doing white hat here for API. If you do black hat, you’re gonna be banned like crazy if you increase too fast.
But if you do a white hat with API, it won’t happen.
So what you do is you duplicate the winner, you set a huge budget like $5,000 for one ad set and you to do manual bidding and then a super low like CPC or CPA.
Then, you wait 6 hours and then you gradually increase, slowly, up to a point where you start getting traffic and then you can play with it.
Like, know your numbers that is the key. And that’s my stuff for scaling.
Retargeting
Okay, and right now we’re going to also speak a little but about retargeting because this is like the thing that everybody knows and really needs to do.
Because even with not really serious skills, retargeting can give you like 10% more ROI at the end. So it’s really a good thing to do.
Of course, you know that retargeting means like reaching people who already are familiar with the brand. And so this is the scheme of how it usually works.
Usually, a potential customer goes through sources of traffic then it goes like to the presell page. And all the presell pages are like blog-style articles, they’re also provided at AdCombo.
So if you just want to register and have like this quick test, it is as easy as that. Go take all the creatives and just run it. Then, goes to lander.
And then, for example, you can retarget those people who came to the lander but they didn’t buy anything. This is where retargeting pixel works, right?
And you can create a campaign that will go only to that audience who actually was at the lander.
3 Types Of Retargeting Campaigns
With our campaigns with AdCombo, we did 3 types of retargeting campaigns.
I teach my media buyers always to do 3 kinds of retargeting because there are different scenarios. We’re just gonna quickly grunt through these slides and show you why.
Okay, so there are people who clicked on your FB ad and they did not buy anything.
The solution is to retarget them with a different lander because maybe they didn’t like this lander so they bounced.
And what is good is like you can create those landers or they’re also like, once the offer is open to everyone, we have like 5, 7, a lot of actually working landers that are targeting like different demographic groups.
Okay, so here’s the retargeting campaign number two. People who stayed more than 30 seconds on your offer and then they left.
They were browsing. That means that they were interested. So you want to retarget them because you know these people want to buy this stuff but for some reason, the landing page and what it said did not resonate with them.
So that could be because they didn’t like the price.
What you can do is retarget them on Google Adwords, Bing, Yahoo everywhere and say, “50% off just for you.” And that’s it.
And, the limited amount left. So it will motivate them too.
And then there is like retargeting campaign number three. So people who clicked but didn’t order. You can easily retarget them with a different offer.
If you know that they have like this problem, they were looking to purchase this for that thing, even at AdCombo, we have like different offers, different products for each niche.
You can easily run a retargeting campaign for that.
Results After Retargeting
And here are our results for the Thailand offer. After we did everything.
Now this includes retargeting.
As you can see our approval rate jumped from 55% to 70% which if you ran COD offers you know that is very, very, very good.
And the reason why it jumps so much is that we also retargeting in there. You see, we did almost 300k on just this one.
And the age, because the age was higher because people they’re more responsible for what they buy and what they do.
So that’s why we reached such like really huge results, right?
Good job Attila.
Thank you.
