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If it’s Not Broke – Don’t Fix It

  • Written by RichardRichard 3 Comments3 Comments Comments
    Last Updated: October 17th, 2008

    While I tend to abide by this rule for the majority of things in life, it doesn’t necessarily apply to affiliate marketing if you want to reach that super affiliate level.

    Once you start a campaign it may need tweaking if it’s making a loss each day, if you apply this rule to your affiliate campaigns you are basically chasing a profit – once you reach the goal you move on, rinse & repeat and get as many campaigns up and running making X profit/day. In theory it would work fine because if you have 100 campaigns making $10 profit a day, that’s $1,000 a day in profit which is a good amount but the time it takes to explore a new niche, gather keywords, build a landing page and then tweak it until profit is much longer than working with a current campaign and scaling the hell out of it.

    Take my situation for example, my campaign is making a steady $100-$150/day profit, am I happy? Yes! But I’m not stopping there, I don’t think I have even touched the surface with this niche I’m in. To tell you the truth I know for a fact I can improve the results I’m currently getting because there is so much I can work with, here’s what I have in mind for my campaign:

    • My current bounce rate is around 50%, I need to keep tweaking my landing page in order to reduce this and see a much bigger ROI instantly.
    • I actually only have 4 ad groups with under 10 keywords running which is making that ~$300 revenue each day. That just shows that I can explore into other areas and find more keywords in that niche that convert.
    • 2 of my ad groups do not have a perfect quality score, tuning those will reduce the CPC for that keywords which in turn will increase my ROI instantly.

    Those of the 3 main things I will be doing to my campaign in the near future, I then can concentrate on split testing my ads to try and improve the CTR etc. The amount of work is endless if you really want to make a campaign almost perfect!

    Getting over the “If it’s not broke – don’t fix it” mindset

    I can speak from experience that it can be difficult to get over the fact that you have a successful campaign which makes a good income, if you were to mess about with that you could ruin everything and actual lose a great deal of money.

    A great example would be tweaking your landing page, depending on how you go about this you may want to try a completely different design (review style, different colours, layout, text etc) or make slight changes to try and improve the CTR of it.

    If you throw up a completely different landing page and split test that you could in theory slash the performance of that campaign by 50%. If the new landing page simply doesn’t convert, you’ve lost half of the traffic you have just been paying for.

    What I would do

    I use prosper202 for my tracking (if you don’t, you should!) and there is an easy method to get around split testing new landing pages without jeopardizing the performance of the campaign.

    If you were to take the landing page that is performing well and make 4 copies of that, exactly the same in every way expect for 1, on the 4th landing page you can make the changes you want to test and then rotate the script between all 4 landing pages.

    This will send only ¼ of your traffic to the new landing page you are testing, which means if it performs terrible you have only lost ¼ of the earnings you would have using your old design. You then have to take the percentage opposed to the actual numbers of the sample size to find out whether it converted better or not.

    Simply rinse this method and repeat it to try and build the ultimate landing page.

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  1. #1 Jarret
    October 17th, 2008 at 5:30 pm

    While I am not into PPC anymore, maybe sometime in the future it’s great to hear that your campaign is doing so well with so few keywords!

    Now all that you have to do is get in there and find all the other keywords that will make you even more money. Great tip though about splitting the landing pages into 4 and only testing changes on one. A whole lot better losing 1/4 of your revenue compared to 1/2.

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  2. #2 Josh
    September 4th, 2009 at 10:41 pm

    Well, Richard, I have been reading this blog for a few hours now and I started with your first post. Hope to make it through the rest by the end of the day. :-)

    One thing I appreciate about you is the fact that you share your numbers. Of course the $ figures but I am talking more about the bounce rate and number of ad groups with keywords in each group, etc. These are things that a total newbie like myself have nothing to benchmark against unless told otherwise.

    I am making a list of notes that I want to remember as well as questions that pop up. Maybe you can use them for post ideas or just answer them for me. :-)

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  3. #3 Philip
    September 17th, 2009 at 2:58 pm

    Richard,

    This strategy to split the landers four-ways is nothing short of ingenious. I can even extend this concept to other areas of testing.

    I know that I’ll never get to the next level without top-notch testing skills. It looks like I can get there even faster if you keep this up!

    Thanks!!!

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