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How to avoid cheap EPC?

Dec 18, 2020 | Affiliate Marketing

Small earnings per click are a problem many affiliates face at some point in time. The reasons can vary, but the result is always detrimental. Our affiliate marketing network wants you to thrive in the affiliate world, and avoid all EPC problems. Whether it is a simple technical mistake, problems due to inexperience, or something else, we are here to help you battle cheap EPC.

Understand your traffic

Pay per click advertising is on the rise due to its huge potential and the possibility to advance very quickly. No wonder many affiliates decide to follow this model when they start their careers. Still, you will have to avoid common affiliate mistakes and put in some effort.

This way you won‘t be wasting money on ads that end up unclicked. With every filter you add to your campaign, you are catering to a more refined group of visitors. In other words, you are spending less and getting a higher percentage of clicks. Thus, you will be increasing your rank and helping your overall EPC. As you can see, EPC ads can boost your profits if done properly, Some filters to consider include

Illustration of a cellphone shaped wallet with money coming out of it. — See what your audience likes!

Learning all about your traffic is one of the best ways to ensure lowering your costs and increasing earnings. For example, you can pinpoint the times of day, week, month, or year when your visitors are most likely to click your ads. The next logical step is to show ads according to those findings.

Gender
Age
Financial situation
Previous online behavior

How to notice cheap EPC?

There is no universal EPC, as the amount of money you make depends entirely on the type of product you are selling. That is why it is very important to stay informed about the average EPC in your particular vertical. Use an EPC calculator and figure out how you rank among other affiliates. Of course, you should also consider the quality of the product you are advertising, as well as the size of your audience and your own experience level.

While you can not expect to make as much as affiliates who have had years to perfect their campaigns, your EPC still shouldn‘t be significantly lower than your direct competitors‘. For example, problems may occur when you start receiving bot traffic which can significantly lower your earnings. Additionally, there are many technical details that can go wrong and cause a drop in earnings.

Illustration of a phone and a lock. — Make sure everything is okay!

How to choose the right offer?

Many affiliate networks and other pay per click sites show their EPC display their EPC. You may think the obvious choice would be to pick the offer where EPC is the highest. However, you need to be mindful of the differences that occur between different campaigns.

We can not give you a way to surely determine if an offer is just what you want. Yet, if you take the time to figure out which offers suit your audience and style especially well you will be able to create your own formula. The first step is to study your offer statistics and the second one is applying that knowledge to see what applies best to your specific niche, audience, and situation. Only then you can find the best offer for you.

Hence, if you see an offer that gives drastically higher earnings per click than others, don‘t rush into it. Figure out if the other conditions will prevent you from actually making a profit in some way. The most common mistake when it comes to cheap EPC is not having all the necessary information. Not understanding the connection between EPC and CPC can be a great downfall and prevent you from making the right choice.

Illustration of people lifting up a graph arrow. — Take all the precautions you can!

To put it simply, you can not make a decision based on EPC or CPC separately. Your profit is equal to the difference between these two numbers. In other words, knowing your costs are going to be low doesn‘t mean the campaign will be successful because EPC can be low as well. Apply the same principle the other way – if you are getting a decent sum with every click, but also have to pay a lot of money for said clicks, the offer may start looking a lot less enticing.

We firmly believe every affiliate who invests their time and effort into a campaign should be rewarded. Be mindful of your EPC, but also don‘t forget other elements of the offer for best results.

One Common Audience Targeting Mistake to Avoid on Facebook

Dec 2, 2020 | Social Media

Ever wish your ad spend would only cover tangible business outcomes and not cut into profit margins? Lucky for you, this is possible with performance marketing!

Performance marketing is a risk-free solution to maximizing business or brand growth. It’s an innovative way to de-risk your marketing spend as it ensures you’re only paying for the consumer or user actions that are most valuable to your business. Performance marketing is best suited for advertisers who are looking to maximize their return on investment (ROI)!

Performance Optimizations: Audience Testing

As any media agency or seasoned media buyer will tell you it’s key to constantly and strategically optimize various aspects of your campaign in order to continuously deliver results. Standard optimizations include creative iterations to avoid ad fatigue, along with testing various bidding strategies and audience testing to expand your reach.

Audience testing is especially crucial to the success of your performance campaigns because without reaching the adequate audiences, you risk spending an excess of funds to find the users who are most likely to convert. Even if you have found your golden audiences that consistently deliver, over time, they may stagnate as audience saturation increases or as more competitors enter the market and bid against these audiences. This is precisely why it’s important to continue to test new audiences – even in established campaigns.

The Problem with Product-Centric Audiences

If your offering is a health supplement, it would make sense to target users who are interested in health supplements, right? Not necessarily.

Oftentimes, advertisers are at the mercy of the ad servers they traffic on. If you’re running your campaign on Facebook for example, there may not be any available in-platform targeting data to build an audience around ‘health supplement interests’. Even if the data is available, what are the odds that your competitors are not also bidding against this audience? Further, you may be limiting your reach by only targeting users who are interested in your specific category, brand or offering. The last point holds true if you’re limiting your targeting to lookalike or website based audiences.

Enter Correlational Audiences

If you’re wondering how to overcome these audience targeting hurdles, we’ve got you covered! Simply give correlational audiences a try!

First, let’s define the term. A correlation is a statistical relationship between variables used to describe or predict information. On the other hand, causation (also known as cause and effect) is when an observed event or action appears to have caused a second event or action.

Simply, targeting audiences that are not closely tied to your offering or category (ie. correlational audiences) may be more advantageous than solely targeting causational audiences in the long run. Why? Not only are competing advertisers less likely to pursue these audiences, it also allows you to constantly expand your reach and target users who may not have shown interest in your specific offering or category.

Over time, these audiences may yield lower acquisition costs (CPA/CPL) or may result in larger conversion volumes since the reach for these audiences is likely higher! Going back to our preceding example, targeting users who have shown interest in ‘iron deficiency’ may be useful. Targeting against this correlational audience in Facebook exposes your campaign to upwards of 200,000 users in North America who you may not have reached otherwise, and who may end up being interested in health supplements!

Correlational Audiences: A Live Example

To further illuminate this concept, let’s look at some data! Our internal team of performance marketing experts ran extensive tests to see how this theory performs in action.

The client in question was in the beauty and fragrance sector. Our team created audiences in the beauty category that would most closely match the offering. Concurrently, they created correlated audiences focused around frequent travelers, users interested in public events, and users with recent or upcoming anniversaries to name a few.

As shown in the chart above, the correlated audiences yielded slightly higher cost per acquisitions (CPA/CPL), though they also delivered over 3x as many conversions!

Take Control of your Media Spend

It’s time to take control of your marketing spend. If you’re interested in launching highly converting performance-based campaigns, look no further! Our team of experts have implemented correlational audiences and a variety of advanced media buying tactics across verticals/industries with success. Together, we can help you think out of the box with your audience targeting which can deliver more conversions for your business!

If you are interested in taking your performance to the next level, let’s chat. We’re here to help!

5 Video Advertising Mistakes Every Marketer Must Avoid

Oct 7, 2020 | Video Marketing

When it comes to video advertising, the creators are always under pressure to compile engaging and informative messages to win over new clients. These communications should have a clear call to action and must stand out against competitors’ ads.

As to err is human, it is quite natural to commit common errors while creating video ads. Unfortunately, careless advertising mistakes counteract all the hard work and devastate a company’s credibility and miss out getting newer clients. Hence, to avoid such common blunders and to give viewers a negative first impression, it is essential to know about specific things.

One of the initial steps is to double-check all ads before posting to be sure you’re not committing the clichéd video advertising mistakes.

Let’s take a look at what is video advertising:

Advertising through video is the latest and newest trend in the marketing industry for effective brand promotion. This strategy benefits every type of business immensely.

Video ads are the ideal way of communicating with prospective clienteles; these promotional materials enable a company to convey one’s message efficiently to a wider audience. Hence, video advertising allows a marketer to get more exposure in the market. Research says that videos have a more compelling power compared to written advertisements.

Nowadays, every consumer seeks instant information about their choicest product or service. Undoubtedly, video marketing works wonder. Advertising through video is the only channel that can adequately satisfy such clientele needs. Video ads deliver the message at a lesser time compared to any blog or article or any advertised text.

As video advertising holds a crucial position in an organization’s brand promotion, any mistake can destroy the image of a company. One must have detailed knowledge about the many pitfalls of video advertising and never commit these blunders.

Mentioned below are 5 common yet shocking video advertising mistakes that you should avoid now:

Mistake 1: Professionalism is taken for granted

While marketing with video, a businessperson needs to present his brand’s competence level. Here, professionalism is the final word. Your consumers must trust your trade name. So, it is necessary to show a video professionally.

Before creating a video one should understand the essential company culture and its image. Lack of professionalism can be detrimental to the success of the organization. Every conveyed promotional message has a theme. This theme should be presented efficiently.

Although B2C and B2B companies have different company image and specific advertisement requirement, yet, all should portray competence of the brand whether in a fun manner or severe corporate attitude.

Mistake 2: Not giving enough importance to voice-over tone

Voice over is the crucial part of any video marketing. Hence, a marketer must understand the necessity of the usage of a proper tone. If the video tone is not engaging, consumers won’t view the video and all your efforts will go in vain. Make sure to synchronize the voice-over tone with the main theme of your video.

But, one should also keep in mind, if the video has similar kind of tonal aspect throughout then, it will become monotonous and consumers would not find it interesting.

Hence, it is necessary to understand the primary purpose of your video. You can implement some fun elements also simultaneously with a serious business approach. Whatever the tone is, not to confuse the audience, it should be consistent.

Mistake 3: Not doing a proper survey with competitor video ads

It is essential to perform a survey before creating a video advert. Mostly, one should see how competitors in the industry portray themselves. Then one can compare one’s own company and dramatically modify itself based on the industry standards.

Consumers have different expectations from different industries. An entrepreneur should follow them within reason or it could cost the company in the long run.

Mistake 4: Presenting a video ad in strange, ambiguous, or indirect approach

Your video is an attention-grabbing tool; it’s perfectly fine to try something different with your video. But people should not create any promotional video material in strange, ambiguous, or indirect manner.

It is not surprising that a creator would want to spawn a video that goes viral. But there are steps to follow. Incorporating unnecessary artistic and abstract details would hamper the inner essence of video advertising. The fundamental purpose of marketing through video would fail and it won’t fulfill your purpose.

Mistake 5: Not considering video ads post timing:

Timing plays a significant role in video advertisements, but many promoters don’t realize that. Just like other projects or product launches, video adverts should also follow a specific schedule.

Scheduling your video ads would take you to a wider client base. This way a publisher would convey his message at the same the time efficiently to a large mass of target audience.

Scheduling enables you to perform proper ads distributions. Adequate ad post timing can be aligned with the audience(s). Throwing up video ads at any time of day may be appropriate for specific brands but for the most part – there should be some strategy for the distribution.

For instance, watching an advertisement of a fruit juice in the morning would be more useful and boost sales at that time versus at night. Aren’t you shocked to learn about these advert errors? Yes, all these mistakes are common to hindsight, yet, they are shocking. If not taken care, these faults can tarnish the reputation of an organization.

Bottom line

If you’re planning to create a cutting-edge video advertising, then follow the above steps. Although common, yet all such missteps would piecemeal land your business in danger. Whether you are tech start-up or a big firm, committing errors won’t justify your position. It is necessary to be alert and conscious while posting any video materials for promotion.