Media Buying 101

If you never ran an affiliate marketing campaign before, and you want to learn the process You are going to love this.    I am going to show you what goes into launching a campaign.   

This information will be super helpful even if you are an expert affiliate marketer and want to grow a team because you will be able to show them this 1 cent guide, and get them up to speed on understanding what really goes into launching a campaign from scratch.

This will be very useful to you (advanced affiliate) because you will be able to free up time, delegate tasks to a team and focus on the big picture – this is what I do; and trust me it’s better than doing everything yourself!

Instead of charging 1 cent for this guide, I’ve decided to make it free, because I know not many people can afford 1 cent for knowledge. It’s my goal to make this guide available to everyone and ensure they have money left over to run campaigns. So this one is on me 🙂

The 5 Steps – Table of Contents

Step #1 – Picking the Traffic Source
Step #2 – Talking with your CPA Network rep at Gotzha and collecting the offers to run!
Step #3 –  Spying to see what others are running for the offer / offer vertical
Step #4 – Setting Up the Initial Campaign
Step #5 – Analyzing the Data & Creating the Winners to Profit

Step #1 – Picking the Traffic Source

When you launch a campaign, you need to decide what traffic source you are going to work on.    This sets the tone for the talk with your AM at Gotzha (the cpa network I love working with).   We are going to be running PUSH notifications.  That is a type of traffic.    We are going to be working with ZEROPARK, which is an epic company owned by the Polish Entrepeneur Robert Gryn – I’ve done an interview with him in the past –  you may find it here.

ZEROPARK is known for High Quality Traffic,  REALLY good top of the notch service, and super competitive rates on worldwide inventory.

So, to recap, our traffic source is ZEROPARK – and our type of traffic is going to PUSH.        Armed with this knowledge, time to reach out to our rep @ Gotzha!!!

Step #2 – Talking with your CPA Network rep at Gotzha!

When I talk to my rep at Gotzha, the first thing I say is – I want to run PUSH, give me 3 geos that are doing well on this traffic type.    And give me 2 offers in each geo, that are doing lots of volume already.

The reason why I ask these specific questions is because they see what is doing good,  they also know which offers are proven and converting well.  Their goal is to make money, so at Gotzha at least my rep is always honest and helps me out by recommending offers to promote that are solid.

To Gotzha…

I created a Google Spreadsheet “ZeroPark Campaigns” and this is what the ‘template’ looks like:

As my rep sends me these offers, I fill them into this Google sheet to keep things nice and tidy. “Gathering offers” is a very important part of launching a campaign from scratch. it makes the next steps in the campaign process (spying, and setting up tracker). easier…

Step #3 –  Spying to see what others are running for the offer / offer vertical

Now that we have a list of offers we’re running, next thing we need to do is to spy and find what others are promoting on PUSH and to gather ideas and get our landing pages and ad creatives made. You can do all the creative prep yourself, hire Banners&Landers which is the cheapest/fastest way, or find your own freelance contractor.

NOTE: If you don’t want to send an email, and prefer instant skype chat add miro.netmarketing on skype to order landers and creatives for your PUSH campaign.

If you are experienced in a vertical like sweepstakes for example, and you already have a proven pre-lander, ad combination (proven funnel) you can skip this step and just use what already works for you.    

What I have is a ‘landing page’ database server and it has everything sorted by vertical/country and we have landers that have been cleaned, and coded, as well as incoming landers that are “RAW & DIRTY” and need all the malicious codes and click stealers, and other stuff removed.

If you have absolutely NO landers or ADS – you are starting from scratch, then you will want to check this out.

From my spreadsheet on Google, I took some side notes and these are the geos I am running SWEEPS on:

-TH
-BR
-ZA

Here’s something new, called SPYPUSH – The best spying tool that just came out to the public. What I do is take the country, and select it from the drop down, then select the language, and sort by popularity and browse around. I am looking for ads that are related to my offers my rep gave me. So in my case giveaways, sweepstakes, win ads.

You will be able to find all kinds of ads, and this is where a lot of affiliates screw up – they get sucked into all the opportunities and get off track. They think the grass is greener, maybe I should try dating, maybe I should try some kind of health ads, maybe I should try ecom on PUSH.

BIG MISTAKE!

To succeed, you need to go in, find ads that match the offers your rep gave you at Gotzha and then get out. Don’t get suckered in!

Here I found some perfect sweeps offers since I am giving away iPhones & Samsung Galaxy, as well as gift cards here are some ads that showed up:

Repeat the above steps for all the offer GEOs you are going to be testing for to get ideas for ads.

Once you have the ideas, you should create variants of these ads (ripping and running these exact ads is not going to give you an advantage, you need to make your own variations).

Here are some ideas on what you can ‘vary’:

-changing the text
-changing the image to be more bold, different angles, contrasts, shock/awe
-using emoji’s. I personally LOVE the POO emoji, it converts like fire everytime!

Next up landing pages / prelanders however you may call it..

With the spy tool, you can check the LPs they are using as illustrated below:

Here are 3 different styled landing pages, we can right away see the difference worth testing.
One of them is a fun spinning lander (I love these, they get awesome engagement), then we have a survey style, and a general ‘alert style’) It’s worth testing different styles as you never know what will work for you.

When looking at LPs. What you want to do is make a list of the URLs of the landing pages in a notepad or someplace. After you finish browsing and spying; get each of the landers ripped yourself, or if you don’t feel confident in your ability to find every single clickstealer they might hide deep in the css files, or the javascript files, or encoded somewhere – just get the pros at Banners&Landers to clean it for you.

Again, instead of running the exact same creative – in this case landers – get some variants made.

In my $1 epic guide to push traffic released a few weeks ago I changed the main product offer image, and wrote in big ass letters over it exposing the value. That changed brought me into positive ROI instantly. Think simple, but stuff that can have a HUGE positive impact.

Rinse n repeat the above steps for the rest of the offers we received from our CPA rep at Gotzha.

Once all the creatives are done, get the landing pages uploaded to your web hosting account. I create always a new VPS as close as possible to the country I’m running in. LOAD TIMES are VERY important in helping increase your conversions! I wrote a guide on how to optimize your landing page speed years ago right here; it still works today.

Creating your campaigns on ZEROPARK

Before you create your campaigns, you will need to setup your tracker. The first step is to make sure that your tracking tokens for ZeroPark are properly setup; without this key piece of information you will NOT be able to optimize your data and eliminate non-performing elements in your campaign!

Here are the tokens that are a MUST for PUSH Traffic on ZP!

Step #4 – Setting Up the Initial Campaign

Add in all the offers from Gotzha, Landing Pages and create your campaigns. One campaign for every GEO/OFFER pair you are going to be testing. Since we’re doing 3-4 as I wrote earlier, you should have 3-4 campaigns when you are done. Write down the campaign URLs for each somewhere so they are easily accessible and you don’t have to go back and forth to your tracker each time.

Make sure you have your PUSH ad creatives (you need a short title, a longer description and of course image) Zeropark allows up to 10 different ads per campaign, and it’s worthwhile to start with 10 to test things properly. In my experience, you will block 40-50% of your creatives after the first 1-3 days of running traffic to get data.

The best strategy to use to optimize PUSH is CREATIVES > SOURCES > TARGETS. So start with creatives and then do the sources, and last the targets. More on this later though, so don’t get side tracked thinking about it.

I have spent a little over $1000 so far; and made a revenue of around $350 so I am in the hole $650. Not what the fake gurus tell you right? They say You are going to KILL it with just a few hundred dollars spend… right?

Well, truth is you MUST test multiple geos, multiple landing pages, and multiple offers. (I am testing 2 offers per geo, 2 landers minimum, and of course multiple vertical types.)

I was running TWO campaigns in this geo at $50/$50 budget each – one mobile only, and one desktop. I was very happy when I experienced it over and over again that ZP doesn’t overshoot your $50 budget by $200 dollars. Instead they start to slow down traffic when the budget is near and only exceed it by a few bucks which is HIGHLY COMMENDABLE as a lot of people were complaining on how PUSH sources brutally overspend just like EXOCLICK is famous for on RON traffic.

72 Hours Later – Update

I’ve killed all but the mobile campaign; and let it run over the past 3 days. We’ve done pretty good, that one optimization alone got us into positive ROI. Here’s a real screenshot from my tracker:

Now it’s Monday the 11th of February 2019. Moving on, what I will do is manually upload conversions to ZP because I did two mistakes:

1. I didn’t specify the creative ID in my tracking profile so I don’t know which creatives did the most conversions
   
   2) I didn’t place the S2S postback properly so the conversions don’t appear in ZP for me to grab the creative ID that way.

So first, I uploaded the conversions (CID’s) manually to ZP. Here’s a step by step quick guide on how to do that.

Then after that, I want to look at which creatives did the best.

The strategy here is to take what works, and come up with variants and similar looking creatives based on this information.

To do that, we are going to make a brand new campaign on ZeroPark (you don’t want to touch your existing campaign, and screw things up) – we are going to upload our new variants and keep everything the same when it comes to targeting, etc.

We are also going to take our winning landing page, and try some variants of it. Different background, check the words on the lander with an editor. Maybe come up with different copy for the landing page.

Step #5 – Analyzing the Data & Creating the Winners to Profit

After Running About $1000 in spend, I was able to get enough statistically significant data to find my top sources that did best in the specific geo and gave me enough ROI so that the daily fluctuations were not a problem (since not every day is a same this is very important for success)

I then went ahead, and created one campaign for each source separately. This allowed me full control so that I can test variations of my creatives based on my top 3-4 best performing creatives from my ‘data collection’ initial campaign.

I started each campaign with a daily budget of $100 and had 20 campaigns, so that’s $2000 per day budget overall. I let it each spend $20 before deciding to kill it or leave it.

My strategy was, if it was near break even or worse, I killed it. If it was break even or in profit I left it running.

Important to note, how weird push works – when it was part of a big campaign, a source worked great but when I moved it out into its own campaign it didn’t work. That’s why its important to be vigilant and monitor your data, can’t just set it up and let it print money like a money machine.

After about a day, I had true winners that were performing well on their own. Now it was time to stop shitty ads under the creatives tab, and let the best 3-4 run.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The way push works is that your creatives burn out in 2-3 days, so what you need to do is come back and always upload new creatives every 2-3 days to the campaign. My strategy is always to make creatives that are similar to my winning creatives, just with slight variations in the text wording, or in the picture (think of flipping horizontally, adding different borders, finding similar photos)

Step #6 – Scaling, Scaling, Scaling

ZeroPark traffic quality is amazing, I didn’t expect to find winners that can scale to six figures but we did in the world of high payout sweeps offers. I am not going to give you my LIVE winners

(no one does that, not even if you pay $15,000 for a course LOL ).

What I will teach you though is what to do when you find crazy winners.

Step 1) Talk to your rep at Gotzha and ask them what other geos the offer you are running is available in.

Step 2) Take these offers, and start them off on the winning placements BUT (here’s the secret most won’t tell you) also make a totally different campaign, exclude the winning sources on here and let it collect more data so you find more winning sources in that country the offer is in.

Step 3) Increase the budget on your campaigns slowly and monitor. The last thing you want is to take your winner that’s making you 100% ROI, up the budget 10x (sorry Grant Cardone BS doesn’t work here) and then go out and celebrate with bottle service at the club — only to return to learn that your $10,000 budget was spent, and you only made back $2000. It happens.

Remember, always to be vigilant and monitor your campaigns closely!! Real life affiliate marketing is not like what the fake gurus tell you that you set it up, and you live it up. NO NO, you have to monitor your stats, make adjustments, baby sit everything as you never know when shit can go wrong. Hope you appreciate the honesty.

In Conclusion

PUSH on Zeropark is insanely great quality, one of the best things I liked about ZP is how awesome their support staff are. They approve things really fast when you talk to your rep, and they are there to offer insights and help you with ideas on how much to bid to get top traffic volume.

I never expected this to scale to $XXX,XXX in profit but it’s very well on its way. We ran High Payout Sweeps offers from Gotzha, which ones specifically I will not share because I want to ride this out and buy another scooter.

If you want to give this a go, follow the advice – if you do your own thang then it won’t be how we do it. You must follow a system down to the T to make it work. You are welcome to do your own shit, but then things might work differently. Lots of variables at play.

I strongly advise taking action NOW, as the days of PUSH are numbered. PUSH is an un-moderated, policy-free way of advertising where almost anything goes right now. It’s a matter of time before it gets banned as all it takes is 1 chrome update to end it all since most people use Chrome to browse the internet.

Hope you enjoyed my guide, and make tons of money and buy a lambo and take me for a ride 🙂

All the best as always

-iAmAttila

BONUS: How to make sure you don’t lose thousands of dollars due to this (1) common problem.

A few years ago I remember loosing over $4000 dollars because of this stupid problem that many, many affiliate marketers have experienced. I am referring to when your server crashes right in the middle of the night when you are sleeping.

There’s a few solutions – but if you prefer to host your own servers then the best solution is setting up monitoring to monitor your sites to make sure you are alerted by any means necessary or your team members know in case it crashes.

Alternatively, you may host the landers on a CDN like Rackspace to minimize this.

This FREE step by step guide is intended for educational purposes only and teaches how to run CPA offers on PUSH traffic sources from start to finish. This concept and system can be applied to any traffic source or paid media campaign.