Most Common Media Buying Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
So many people come to affiliate marketing with a dream of huge earnings. At least half of these people quit after the first failure not even realizing that the big success was in fact very close.
That to say, as affiliate marketers, you guys have already been able to figure out that falling prey to flaws and errors is not the worst, the worst is not to be able learn from your own mistakes.
So we have prepared some very useful tips for the media buying process, and as a huge portion of mistakes happens at elaborating the campaign, let’s take a look at how this process should be held.
1. Identify Target Audience, and Decide How to Reach It
First, get a clear picture of the existing customers, and investigate who they are. Distribute your audience into segments such as demographics (age, gender, social and marital status), geolocation (area, city, country), behavior (interests, hobbies) and other groups to understand with whom you are dealing. After getting to know your audience, try to find similarities and patterns to get an idea of the target audience or people who may be interested in your product or service. After identifying the target group, think about the way to reach those people: search engine ads, website, blog advertisements and social network platforms like SMMrank. Make sure you know what platforms and devices your target group uses.
2. Elaborate the campaign strategy
It is highly recommended to think of several campaign strategies. In case of low budget just go with the only one, it’s ok.
3. Prepare creatives
Try different approaches: different graphics, texts, don’t be afraid to combine them. Some unexpected combines might be the most successful ones.
4. Start promoting affiliate offers
How much should you spend on one campaign? For the first time, the sum of the two leads is enough. For example, the advertiser pays you 1$ for one lead, then you should spend at least 2$. This is the best practice for testing media buying in Affiliate Marketing.
5.Analyse the results
You got the leads – fine! No leads? Then you should analyze offers’ CTR, combine best performing offers texts and try out new creatives.
6.Test it once again
Conduct test with different audiences, landing and pre-landing pages. If creatives have a great CTR, but there are still no/little leads, the problem is in the wrong audience, landing/pre-landing page.
If after proceeding with this algorithm you didn’t get sufficient results, then you should check another technique.
What to improve
- Test different GEOs
Seriously, try out different regions/countries. Leave the ones with best performance rate.
2. Change the target audience
Try it with different ages, behavior (interests, hobbies) groups etc.
3. Don’t forget about time
Start only when your audience is active, so check when your target audience is online.
4. Learn your audience behavior on landing/pre-landing page.
Use analytics to learn your audience’s behavior, you will definitely find what to improve.
Still don’t succeed?
Here might be the reasons:
- You don’t test
Saving some money is a must, but don’t save it on tests, it’s crucial for the success of the whole business.
- You jump to conclusions
It’s more a consequence of the previous point. If you don’t test enough, but make a snap judgment that this particular campaign doesn’t work, you may lose money again. Don’t hurry! You didn’t get positive results after the first test, don’t give up! You might have a temptation to do so, but in most cases, you still can pull it off. First of all, try to optimize the campaign. Secondly, conduct more tests with different parameters. Once you’ve conducted several tests you can be sure that this particular campaign is not working.
- You’re juggling several campaigns at a time
If you are starting your media buying journey, and you obviously don’t possess a huge budget, do not test several offers simultaneously. You will most probably run out of money after the first test and thus will not be able to gather more data for each offer. Also, as for creatives, the less is more. Use 2-5 creatives for one offer, with more creatives you won’t get enough data.
- You use numerous traffic sources at a time
If you are a beginner, don’t mess with more than one source of traffic simultaneously, it will confuse you, and you will not be able to analyze the tests results.
- You got bots-hacked
Bot-driven ad frauds might be the reason for unsuccessful campaigns. Make your homework and learn the reviews about your source of traffic. In case you put an ad in social media groups, make sure there are real people there.
Wrapping it up
Overall, yes, you might think: it’s too complicated and maybe not worth it at all. Wrong! It is absolutely achievable, Rome was not built in a day. Just go through our tips and try to use them in your media buying campaigns. We surely welcome your thoughts and ideas!