I'm using SiteScout to buy the banner impressions and ClickBank for my products. I'm specifically looking for ClickBank products that already have fairly attractive LPs and banners - so I can sidestep that phase for right now.
After choosing a product, this is the process:
1) Use WhatRunsWhere.com to see where the product is currently running successfully - if it runs for 100+ days on a single site - it's fairly safe to say that it's doing well.
2) Use Alexa.com's sitestream tab to see where upstream current visitors are coming from.
3) Take all of those sites to Google's AdPlanner and determine what the primary target demographics are, in terms of gender, age, income, education, and category of site. So, for example, I may determine that one target segment would be: Females, interested in beauty, fitness, & health, between 35-54 with some college education that make $50-75k per year.
4) Then I fire up SiteScout, upload the banners that were provided by the affiliate publisher, and start looking through the sites with available impressions to bid on for ones that match up with at least one of the target demographic groups that I determined in Step 3. I do this until I have 10-20 sites. (This usually takes a while because I manually punch a bunch of sites into adplanner to see if they match up.)
5) I finish setting up my SiteScout campaign by day parting my ads to only run between 0800-Midnight (I've had bad experience, as well as hearing pretty poor things, about ads that run between Midnight-0800). I bid $0.10 per CPM. (This is low, but I still get a very large number of impressions from it.)
6) Then, I start the campaign and let it run for a while.
7) When analyzing the performance of a campaign, the first thing I look at are the ClickBank statistics for the number of order form impressions. (This tells me how many people clicked through the LP to actually see the order form - not the number of people who actually converted and bought the product.) I give a new product 200 clicks, spread across at least 5 sites and try to spread it out as well as I can across a given day, and if I don't have at least 2 order form impressions - I stop the campaign and find a new product. (My justification is that if the LP is really that poor at converting, it doesn't seem to be worth the time to truly go through the granular work of finding the perfect customers - is that logical enough?)
8) If the order form impressions are doing okay, I start to refine the audience by site. If a site has more than 12.5k impressions and less than 0.1% CTR, I won't run banners for this product on that site again. (My advisor at SiteScout - Steve, a terribly nice guy - gave me that recommendation.)
9) If a site has over a 0.1% CTR, I look at the hourly breakdown for that site to see if any time periods have at least 12.5k impressions and less than 0.1% CTR. Again, if they do, I'll day part out those time periods.
That's about as far as I've gotten on this strategy. My hypothesis is that I'll eventually find a good product/site/time/banner match and then I can go directly to the site and purchase space from them directly.
I'm looking for some feedback on how I can possibly expedite my evaluations or refine my strategy? Should I be focusing on creative more than sites and time periods? Is there something that I am completely overlooking?
Any advice/suggestions/comments are greatly appreciated.
After choosing a product, this is the process:
1) Use WhatRunsWhere.com to see where the product is currently running successfully - if it runs for 100+ days on a single site - it's fairly safe to say that it's doing well.
2) Use Alexa.com's sitestream tab to see where upstream current visitors are coming from.
3) Take all of those sites to Google's AdPlanner and determine what the primary target demographics are, in terms of gender, age, income, education, and category of site. So, for example, I may determine that one target segment would be: Females, interested in beauty, fitness, & health, between 35-54 with some college education that make $50-75k per year.
4) Then I fire up SiteScout, upload the banners that were provided by the affiliate publisher, and start looking through the sites with available impressions to bid on for ones that match up with at least one of the target demographic groups that I determined in Step 3. I do this until I have 10-20 sites. (This usually takes a while because I manually punch a bunch of sites into adplanner to see if they match up.)
5) I finish setting up my SiteScout campaign by day parting my ads to only run between 0800-Midnight (I've had bad experience, as well as hearing pretty poor things, about ads that run between Midnight-0800). I bid $0.10 per CPM. (This is low, but I still get a very large number of impressions from it.)
6) Then, I start the campaign and let it run for a while.
7) When analyzing the performance of a campaign, the first thing I look at are the ClickBank statistics for the number of order form impressions. (This tells me how many people clicked through the LP to actually see the order form - not the number of people who actually converted and bought the product.) I give a new product 200 clicks, spread across at least 5 sites and try to spread it out as well as I can across a given day, and if I don't have at least 2 order form impressions - I stop the campaign and find a new product. (My justification is that if the LP is really that poor at converting, it doesn't seem to be worth the time to truly go through the granular work of finding the perfect customers - is that logical enough?)
8) If the order form impressions are doing okay, I start to refine the audience by site. If a site has more than 12.5k impressions and less than 0.1% CTR, I won't run banners for this product on that site again. (My advisor at SiteScout - Steve, a terribly nice guy - gave me that recommendation.)
9) If a site has over a 0.1% CTR, I look at the hourly breakdown for that site to see if any time periods have at least 12.5k impressions and less than 0.1% CTR. Again, if they do, I'll day part out those time periods.
That's about as far as I've gotten on this strategy. My hypothesis is that I'll eventually find a good product/site/time/banner match and then I can go directly to the site and purchase space from them directly.
I'm looking for some feedback on how I can possibly expedite my evaluations or refine my strategy? Should I be focusing on creative more than sites and time periods? Is there something that I am completely overlooking?
Any advice/suggestions/comments are greatly appreciated.
.
