The affiliate market is an environment where the design often changes, but rarely the content, because it is difficult to develop something new in a market where the most profitable mechanics have long been known. Nevertheless, there are still enthusiasts among R&D and BizDev departments ready to bundle unique experiences into a formula applicable to high-quality scaling.
Today, Traffic Devils shares the steps you need to take systematically to drive traffic efficiently.
Stage one: Prioritise who to give traffic to and in what sequence
To manage something, you need to clearly understand what you want as a result. In the case of traffic, which partner should be prioritised first. Several factors influence the choice of such a partner:
• Analysing the partner itself, their size, capabilities and prospects for cooperation. Stability of product operation, market position.
• Clear signed agreements or contracts.
• Trustworthiness of the partner – even if the contract is not very long, its reliability may in the long run compensate for some of the excess profits from a hyper-liquid but unproven advertiser. Once we have prioritised our focus, we can move on to the next step.
Stage two: Offer processing
Here we focus on a few key variables: Geo, conversion statistics based on different sources, successful/unsuccessful landing pages and of course, ROI. During the primary driving, we need to establish which geo – landing page – offer approaches are optimal in terms of profitability. We track efficiency in real-time and often adjust not only the ‘instrumental’ component like sources and landing pages but also the products themselves. At the same time, we develop customised approaches for each offer.
It is common to see situations where driving statistics indicate that a particular product, or a whole holding of them, performs much better.
The key insight here is the fact that driving in on a particular offer is not a hardened bundle that is bound to spin during some period. Within effective traffic management, the offer is as much a variable as any other part of the funnel. Of course, we use more hardcore metrics than just media numbers for outcome recommendations. These include reg2dep percentages, EPCs and a certain ‘benchmark’ driving volume.
Stage three: Traffic ‘diversification’
When we notice traffic from certain approaches/ offers paying for itself for the advertiser in a short period (two – three weeks), we can redirect some of our efforts into split tests of new promising products. This is done not out of greed, but for strategic reasons. Having a ‘base’ in the form of approaches on offers we are already confident in, we can use the available delta of time to gain a foothold on the advertiser and make a more favourable impression on him, as well as to move more quickly to volume driving.
By mastering the driving on a few or all of an advertiser’s major offers, we stabilise the contract for ourselves and generate a more predictable profit, which opens up opportunities for bolder upscaling.
Stage four: Analysis
The notional ‘fourth stage,’ which runs through all the work, will be analytics. Constant monitoring of the quality of traffic and streaming changes in the buying logic are the basis without which effective lead generation management is simply impossible.
Of course, analysis and optimisation do not consist only of synchronisation with the advertiser after the work has been done. The lion’s share of effective adjustments are our internal protocols for tracking the performance of advertising campaigns. We track the effectiveness of driving every 10% of the cap generating between 20% (conditionally set-up funnels) and 70% (conditionally set-up approaches that have already reached a certain result).
We also use a large pool of internal tools, some of them in-house, mainly to track additional customised events in analytics and to improve the quality of driving. Basic tools may include customised dashboards, self-written bots and an internal task-tracking system specific to our department. We also use numerous ‘boxed’ solutions, slightly customised to suit our needs.
In summary, often the ‘revolution’ in buying may turn out to be not just an unprecedented methodology invented from scratch but systematic work, stream tracking of efficiency and adequately calculated connection of business goals and potential profit with actions on the media level.
