When do you give up on a losing campaign?

May 31, 2007 on 10:37 pm | In Questions and Comments | 1 Comment

How many clicks do you normally give a campaign before you can it? I’m just starting off here, but one campaign has like 500 clicks, and another 300+ and no sales yet. I expected to see something in the first 100 or so that might match the rates I was seeing on Commission Junction. I got most the clicks in a day or two, then cut way back on the funds to wait and see if I got any sales, but not yet. I think the ads are working, but the conversion rate is low. I was just wondering where you found the best time to start tweaking things.

Posted with permission from an email by Aaron C.

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  1. I wouldn’t look at a particular # of clicks, since higher commission programs may take more clicks to see results than lower commission programs.

    A good rule of thumb would be not to spend more than 2 to three times what your commission per conversion might be (or expected average commission) since at that point even a few commissions might not turn you profitable. At that point, it is clearly time for a change, but that doesn’t necessarily mean turning off the campaign. It could mean searching for better keywords, or writing a better ad to get costs down and volume up.

    I had my best early success with lower CPA programs that paid $2 to $3 dollars per action. By the time you spend just $10, you can usually tell if you have something to work with or not. If I get nothing back, I drop it.
    If I get anything back… well, I can usually find at least a small margin in about half the programs that convert at least a little bit, and every once in a while when you are working on improving those small margins you finally write a killer ad that makes those small margins bigger and pushes the volume up to where you can really make money. And on the programs that never become even slightly profitable, if you are re-evaluating them every $10 or $20 dollars or so, you won’t lose too much before it becomes clear you have to turn them off.

    Be careful, though, when you don’t see returns right away. Some programs submit affiliate reports days or weeks after event dates. The program detail pages on sites like commission Junction will tell you if they use batch processing or not, and when the last batch was submitted. If you were running ads after the last batch submission, go ahead and pause the campaign, but keep checking those batch submission dates to be sure you didn’t earn commissions that just haven’t been reported yet. I’ve had to wait up to three and a half weeks for results, but most programs won’t keep you waiting more than a day or two.

    Comment by Administrator — May 31, 2007 #

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