MAXIMIZE YOUR ROI IN AFFILIATE MARKETING IN 5 STEPS

Hiren Shah

Published on: May 12, 2019
Last Updated on: May 14, 2019

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How to increase ROI is the question affiliate marketers often ask themselves and Google. But far not everyone finds the right answers. To provide you with qualitative and expert knowledge, we asked our colleges from RedTrack to share their experience and data.

Keep on reading and find a great bonus from our tracking partner at the end of the post.

First, let us remind you what these guys do in the world of affiliate marketing:

RedTrack.io - a cloud-hosted ad tracking software to manage and analyze affiliate marketing campaigns. Tactically, it makes all tracking work and provides you with all the necessary data for optimization and improvements of promotional activities. Globally, it saves your money and helps to earn more. Ad-tracker is a must-have tool if you want to get impressive ROI. But it’s only one part of success in affiliate marketing. What else?

1. Choose the right offer

In many ways, the success of your campaigns depends on factors, to which you may not pay much attention. How not to make mistakes?

There’s a simple algorithm to follow:

1. One important thing - don't make hasty emotional decisions. Sometimes affiliate marketers have too high expectations, especially newcomers. In reality, a good profit may come only after 3 or more months of constant work. So, don’t jump from one vertical to another in search of quicker and higher earnings. Make a reasonable choice and stay persistent.
2. Use Google Trends to make sure your chosen vertical indeed can bring you high profits. Pay attention to the ups and downs of the curve. Our advice to newcomers - don’t work with verticals, if you see that its “interest curve” is rising or falling rapidly. Also, it’s better to stay away from verticals, which have strong seasonal inclinations. A relatively calm curve with no steep differences and a steady rate of interest is what we advise to look for.
3. Find a high profitable niche. The most obvious way is to look for the one, where offers are with the highest payouts. More than sometimes this strategy leads to low profits. Let’s take innovative or bank products as examples. Highly likely, you’ll work with cold audiences and will have to invest a high amount of money into user acquisition. So, if you’re not sure to work with an offer with high payouts or not, make a test with ordinary and high payout offers, compare their CR and revenue and choose the best.
4. Carefully think over keywords, suitable to the offer you’re going to work with. Check, if they have search popularity and what’s their cost per click. You may use Google Keyword Planner or other free services, depending on the geo and habits of your audience. And remember... if your chosen offer isn’t capable of selling itself, all your promotional efforts will go right down the drain.

2. Choose the right traffic source

There’re many ways to drive traffic to your landing page: paid or relatively free. But some of them can be real fraud. How not to drain your budget and get good conversions? Let’s start from the very beginning:

• Detail Your Target Audience
  
  • If you think that people, who may like your offer are absolutely different, group them by common grounds. They can be by social status, age, sex, habits and so on. When the job is done, find profiles of people that are similar to the descriptions you’ve made. This will help you not to make mistakes and sell cryptocurrencies to people, who’re looking for loans.
• Big Goals are Good, but not Always
  
  • It’s better not to choose high competitive traffic sources, if you’re a newcomer and not ready to spend big budget. Our advice is to work with smaller but more targeted traffic sources, where the traffic and conversions will be much cheaper. Otherwise, you may not get the wanted number of leads or customers.
• Good Traffic Only
  
  • 10 000 visitors and 1 conversion … sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? If you have high traffic flow, but awful CR...it’s highly likely that you're getting fraud traffic. The fact is that within one ad network you may have campaigns with 7% and 90% fraud rates at the same time. So, always check if your ad tracking service provides you with fraud reports and anti-fraud protects.

3. Work on effective creatives

Affiliate networks will often provide you with ready-made ad formats. They might look attractive and artful, but in fact will show a low CTR. You’ll be surprised, but banners with explosive colors and big titles can be 100 times more effective than professionally designed ones, provided by networks or your highly professional contractor.

Advanced affiliate marketers may try 300+ different ad formats before gaining desired conversion rate. To save your time and efforts, spy on your competitor's ads and look for the most effective ones in your vertical or niche. Find the commonalities that make them effective and use them in your creative. Your goal isn’t about making ads that you or your friends will like. It’s to make ads your audiences will like and click on.

If you see that CTR is really high, be ready that it’ll be lowered in between 1 hour and 1 day. Someone may steal your creatives or your audience get tired of it. Quickly change it to another creative or scale it to new sources of traffic. As practice shows, you don’t have to be a professional designer to make ads with high CR and CTR. Knowing the fundamentals of design and 1 or 2 graphics and video editors is quite enough.

4. Use analytics properly

Deep analytics and optimization are crucial stages of any promotional process. Here you have two choices: use Google analytics or more advanced ad trackers and managers. As to RedTrack possibilities, you can track events 24/7 across all traffic sources, and monitor offer conversions from multiple affiliate networks.

Our customers get extensive granular reporting options with 30 plus data attribution points. They include source, network, offers, landers, geo (country, region, city), OS type and version, browser type and version, connection type, date and day parting, IP, ISP, referrer and referrer domain, proxy type, user agent, language, and others. So you can drill down to three levels to understand the performance of campaigns, creatives and landing pages.

​5. Experiment

It’s okay when something isn’t going exactly as planned. Affiliate marketing is a very unpredictable industry with so many things that you can’t control…

So, the only strategy that’ll lead you to high ROI is to experiment with the elements of your promotional campaign:

• traffic sources
• landing pages
• ad formats
• creative conceptions
• landing pages
• incentive offer

Don’t stop emailing to your audience, if you see low open rate or CTR. Experiment with sending frequency, titles, CTAs, tone of voice, visual and verbal parts of email content. After all, test the same emails on another audience, that may like your product.

If you think your landing page converts traffic very bad, revise your whole our potential customer journey. Is everything okay with all the previous points of contact with the audience? Okay, then, experiment!

But always remember the golden rule - test only one thing at a time!

For Anstrex users, our friends from RedTrack prepared a special bonus. Register your RedTrack account with the promo code ANSTREX, and use the tracker with 50% off during your first month!

Stay profitable!