Day 3 already huh, well yesterday was the worse day so far of the campaign so I’m not sure if I deleted something I shouldn’t have or it was just a bad day. In fact I did the thing that I always stress not to do – check your statistics on a regular basis throughout the day.

I can tell you from experience that it can alter your mood about affiliate marketing, when you see yourself doing well you are happy right? It’s exactly the same when you are doing badly, emotion kicks in – should I pause the campaign for the day to save losing more money? Should I start again? I’m not cut out for this…

These are the things running through your head and I was spending more money each time I checked without a conversion. I bit my lip and left it for the day, the last time I checked was before I went to sleep and I had spent about $22 and made nothing. I was having doubts whether to pause it and check the campaign in the morning but I decided against it.

Morning came around and I was eager to check how it went over night, here are the results:

Impressions: 8,587
Clicks: 73
CTR: 0.85%
Avg CPC: $0.40
Cost: $29.27
Revenue: $28
Profit: -$1.27
ROI: -4.34%

So, as you can see by leaving the campaign running I turned a $22 loss into a $1.27 loss, which also means I’ve saved myself from going into the red for this campaign on a whole.

Let this be a lesson to you all, don’t let emotions affect your decision making when it comes to affiliate marketing.

What I’ve done this morning

As usual I’ve gone across the campaign (setting the dates from launch until now) and deleted any keywords with:

- Over 100 impressions and 0 clicks
- Clicks but a CTR of under 1%

I will begin to analyze the landing pages and text ads to see which have been better since launch and perhaps throw another one in to split test with the better one.

August 2008 goal

If you have read the post about my goal you will notice I said I need to make 2 sales a day with this campaign in order to reach the $1,000 barrier in the 20 days left of this month. If I was to get the 2 sales a day the total revenue made in those 20 days would be $1,120 so you can see I can afford to lose 4 sales along the way and still reach my goal so I am still on target .