8 Ways of Scaling Up Your Affiliate Campaigns
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In affiliate marketing, they say, it’s all about optimization. The constant tweaking and tuning of your campaigns.
But when you’re done with optimizing and everything seems to be working well for you, what do you do next? Can you make even more money?
The answer is: yes.
From this post, you’ll learn the most effective ways of scaling up your campaigns for increased profits with PropellerAds.
How do you know when it’s time to scale up?
Here, there’s just one simple principle. To be ready to scale your campaign, you need to make sure it’s profitable.
In PropellerAds, we always recommend people to start with our automated models — Target CPA, CPA Goal 2.0, etc. It’s crucial in terms of efficiency and profit. We have an immense amount of data at hand, and these зmodels make it work for you.
So, once you get your first positive results, check for the following signs:
- Your ROI is consistently good
- Your ROI remains positive for a long period of time
- You get a stable amount of conversions
If these conditions are met, you can start thinking about scaling your campaign.
In terms of the exact numbers, use your campaign goal as a benchmark. If it has been reached or even over-reached, the campaign is ready for scaling. However, it very much depends on the offer that you promote and its conversion flow.
#1 Increase the bid
The first scaling strategy is to change your bid. But when I say change, I actually mean increase, because the only way is up.
If you need a benchmark, check out our Traffic Estimator chart. It will show you how big your bid should be in order to dominate in the auction.
Our Account managers even recommend adding about 10% to the highest current bid as campaigns are launched with higher and higher rates all the time. This will allow you to stay competitive for a while.
Ultimately, the higher your bid is, the more volume you’ll get and the more conversions you’ll be able to generate.
This probably won’t be a good strategy alone, but if you mix it with the ones listed below, it might bring you some serious profit boost.
PRO tip: segment your audience and test higher bids with retargeting audiences.
#2 Increase your budget
Another strategy is to increase your daily budget.
After the testing period, once the campaign becomes profitable, you can start adding up to your daily budget in order to buy out more traffic. We often see advertisers add up to 60-70% to the daily spendings once they break the profitability barrier.
Of course, it only makes sense if you have this flexibility and your budget allows for increased spend. But if it does, this is a totally viable strategy.
And don’t forget about our seasonal promos — that’s a good budget boost, too!
#3 Expand your reach with extra traffic options
We often recommend our clients to expand their traffic portfolio as a scaling strategy. In PropellerAds, advertisers have access to several traffic sources: PropellerAds, Broker Traffic, and a few other options.
Usually, the campaigns are launched on PropellerAds traffic, which is traffic from our own inventory of websites.
Brokers traffic, on the other hand, is high-quality traffic from our partners. The number of conversions that you receive is roughly the same, however, the viewers are new so your campaign falls on fresh eyes.
So, this is another scaling strategy.
#4 Try other formats
We often give recommendations like “this offer works great on push” or “this offer performs well on interstitials”, however, it always makes sense to test all formats.
When it comes to optimization, it’s all about A/B testing. Of course, when you’re scaling, you’re past that point, but that’s still important to keep your eyes and ears open and test every opportunity.
If you have an offer that works well on Popunder ads, try launching it on push notifications. For that, you can also use our retargeting tool. And this brings us to our next strategy.
#5 Use retargeting
One of the most effective scaling strategies is retargeting.
Retargeting is getting more and more attention these days, that’s one of the most popular advertising strategies. Everybody is seeing the same ads but once you see it for the second time you might react more actively to it.
In PropellerAds, we have several tools for retargeting.
First of all, it’s Audiences, a tool that allows you to collect users who view, click, or convert your ads into a group to use it later on.
Another helpful feature, which is only available to “Gold” and “Platinum” accounts, is Offer Optimization. In essence, it “remembers” which ad placements perform best for a specific offer and uses it to serve you the most efficient traffic if you ever work with that offer again.
In terms of content, if you’re working with the same offer, you could interest the users with a discount, a bonus, or any other kind of special proposal.
Moreover, you could approach those users with a similar offer. Let’s say you’re running a Forex lead generation campaign, and you’ve collected an audience of users who converted. Try shooting them with an insurance offer — they might respond just as well to it.
Audiences 2.0: New Retargeting Toolbox
Cross-format retargeting is another good idea. One of the most popular strategies is to use Onclick with broad targeting, collect an audience of all the users who’ve seen your ad, and then target them with push ads.
If speaking of the exact numbers, you can start by collecting an audience of approximately 100 users.
#6 Change the flow
Another thing that we can recommend in terms of scaling — given that everything has been done perfectly, everything has been tested, your creatives are on fire, your landing pages are fine — is changing the conversion flow.
Try other pre-landers. Try another flow. Try another approach altogether.
This will drive more traffic to your campaign and eventually more conversions to the offer. You’ll have to refresh your creatives regularly — and this is especially important for push notifications — but this brings something new, something fresh to your campaign.
Also, try other pricing models and other formats, but this we’ve already mentioned.
#7 Ask your CPA for a raise
If things are working out well for you and you’re getting stable conversions, another thing that you could do is go to your CPA network and ask for a rate increase.
This is one of the things that are major in order to make your campaign even more profitable, in order to scale it up.
Very often, when affiliate networks see an advertiser doing well, they tend to be okay with increasing the daily cap. So, if you have an affiliate manager, it’s totally normal to contact them for a bit of a “special treatment”.
#8 …or ask for more GEOs
You can even ask for other GEOs for your campaign, that works too!
Usually, the GEOs are limited within the offer, but you can always look for extra opportunities.
It’s even possible that the network might contact you and offer you to run a campaign in other GEOs. However, we’re always recommending to play bold, play aggressive, and ask for increased rates yourself and special conditions if you can justify the spend.
Wrapping up
And just like that, we’ve named all of the most common strategies. Do you know any other strategies for scaling up a campaign?
We’d love to hear about them so drop us a line in the Telegram chat
