A Complete Beginner: The Very First Affiliate Marketing Campaign [Case Study]
Today we have an amazing case study from our Follow Along contest we organized with our friend Luke Kling, the owner of the affLIFT forum.
What’s special about it? The case study’s author, Ahmed Naser Abdelgaber, had never tried affiliate marketing before our contest. It was his very first campaign ever — and, a little spoiler ahead — we were REALLY impressed with his results.
No more introductions, let’s look at this gem!
About the Campaign
Before running his very first campaign, Ahmed has been reading tons of information about affiliate marketing on the affLIFT forum. Armed with theoretical knowledge, he decided to try running a Sweepstakes offer. Here are the campaign details:
| Trafic Source : PropellerAds Traffic Type: OnClick (PopUnder ads) Affiliate Network: Golden Goose Type of Offer: Sweepstakes Tracking Tool: Bemob Geos: TN Offer Payout: $0.27 |
Ahmed shared all details about how he prepared for his first experience. We won’t retell it here in the blog, but you can read the full version of this case study on the forum, in the follow-along thread. Still, we will focus on how he picked an offer.
To make things easier for the first time, Ahmed decided to choose an offer in his native language — Arabic. So, he needed an offer targeting Arabic-speaking countries — to avoid any mistakes in landing pages and creatives.
Another criterion was the average CPM: with the budget of $100, he decided to stop on the GEO with an average CPM of $1-$5.
The choice fell on Tunisia — a GEO with an average traffic volume, Arabic-speaking users, and an average offer CPM of $1-$5.
So, Ahmed found a Sweepstakes offer for Tunisia in Golden Goose and created a landing page using Purelander:
By the way, PropellerAds customers get the juiciest discounts from AffLIFT, PureLander, and Golden Goose — check them out!
Setting a Campaign
Ahmed worked like a pro! He added his campaign to the Bemob tracker and adjusted all necessary settings in his PropellerAds account. Here is how he set his campaign (scroll the gallery):
Besides, Ahmed added a ProPush Smart Tag to his landing page for extra monetization. Great job! Even some experienced affiliate marketers miss this step — while it can really boost your profit.
Campaign Flow
Can you imagine that? The very first campaign ever and 70 conversions/73% ROI just within a single day. We even started doubting he was a newbie!
What happened later? Well, we can’t describe it better than Ahmed did it himself:
Does anyone know what red color looks like?
Let’s just look at his daily stats for the first four days, sorted by hours and OS versions:
Campaign Results
Numbers speak louder than words in this case study. Well, really, what can we say when Ahmed didn’t change literally anything in his campaigns to optimize them, and his profit only kept growing?
Here are his final results, according to the Golden Goose network — 791 conversions and an overall profit of $213.
And, without no effort as well, he also got an extra $25 from ProPush! Here is the evidence:
Comments from Konstantinos Kafkalias, Senior Account Strategist at PropellerAds
Great job, Ahmed!
On behalf of the Account Strategists team of Propellerads, let’s have a look at what Ahmed did well, and what more we can all do to keep the green numbers for our campaigns.
Step by Step guide for setting up tracking:
Ahmed, thank you for this. You show in simple steps how anyone can integrate with the Bemob tracker.
It’s worth mentioning here that Propellerads is fully integrated with 13 trackers, plus, we can help you integrate with any other s2s tracker out there.
Choosing offer based on Affiliate’s mother tongue
I need to admit that this is a very smart move, as it helped Ahmed to be confident about the content.
When choosing offers, knowledge of the culture and language of the user is of high importance. Be careful, though, not to fall into the trap of limiting your options based on the above.
Each GEO, vertical and offer have their own specifics, be brave to explore as many as possible!
Setting up the campaign
Wow, man, I wish all first-timers were so efficient!
Emphasis on the ‘Audience’ collection and ‘Audience’ exclusion – Ahmed, very smartly, decided to be collecting all the converted users under one audience, which he named ‘Tunis’.
And right away, excluded this audience from the newly created campaign. I mean, he will never show his campaign again, to all the users that have already converted!
This is money management, my friends.
Adding Propush.me tag
He extra-monetizes his page by collecting push notification subscribers and selling them to Propush.me.
Ahmed chose a Sweepstakes campaign to run. Sweepstakes are crazy good for extra monetization, for two reasons:
- The vertical is universal and the audience is broader. The bigger chance that the user will be more curious to subscribe to a push service, expecting special offers, discounts, etc.
- Sweeps have relatively lower payouts, so with Propush.me extra monetization, you really feel the difference!
You should do it too — try ProPush.me for your next campaign!
Next steps
With positive ROI comes the need to scale! What we suggest to Ahmed, from now on:
- Test offer on all the ad formats. Onclick, Interstitial ads, In-Page Push ads. You know that the offer converts, go get them
- Optimize the existing campaign by analyzing the following: Operation System (OS), OS Versions, User Activity, Time scheduling
- Play with ad models, and create a Whitelist campaign with top-performing zones, on a CPC basis, to get as much traffic as possible from the good-performing sources
- Test new GEOs, new offers, and get to understand the traffic of Propellerads
Thank you, Ahmed, and good luck on your journey.
It was inspiring enough, right? So why wait — we bet you can rock like Ahmed, too!
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