A Dozen+ Tactical Ad Strategies From Affiliate Summit Vegas 2017

I’m going share actionable tips I learned from Affiliate Summit to write better ad copy, improve your conversion rate, scale on Facebook ads, and business meeting strategies (not your typical “networking” tips).

ASW17 was at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. It’s great if you’re trying to find more ways improve your online ad campaign’s profits.

Improve your conversion rate through easy research

Brian Massey from ConversionSciences has some interesting insights and tools to gather data in his keynote address. There was a major site that was redesigned for $180 million and 2 years of work. After it was implemented, it lost 8{5d3ddbe771dfd7baccbc708ede1f8581564c9b62644010c5b52d123c48304749} in sales. This is just further proof that proper research and testing is vital. Here’s a few research ideas that you likely haven’t tried (but should give you unique data):

• Hotjar survey on Thank You page of offer. Possible questions to ask: “why did you sign up?” or “why did you almost not sign up?” The answers to these questions could help see a flaw in your copywriting.
  • My idea is to have a leave behind window and ask: “why didn’t you sign up for X?” After they submit their answer, ask for their email and put them in an auto responder or personally email them back. This will help you come up with other angles or unique selling propositions to split test.
• Eye tracking is “cheap” now. Sticky.ai is $550 for 50 participant eye tracking.
  • Find out if visitors are reading much of your copywriting.
  • Isolate important elements that are not being viewed but should be.
  • Remove unimportant elements that are distracting from your landing page’s primary goal.

To solidify the importance of being unique, and finding that value your customer desires, he shared this first landing page. The first AdWords ad went to this page:

The ad on the right went to:

A clear $100 off (different than the 20{5d3ddbe771dfd7baccbc708ede1f8581564c9b62644010c5b52d123c48304749} off the competitors promised) with several other changes resulted in 40{5d3ddbe771dfd7baccbc708ede1f8581564c9b62644010c5b52d123c48304749} more leads.

Affiliate marketing funnels and auto responders to earn more per subscriber

I listen to Russell Brunson’s podcast, Marketing in Your Car. He’s one of the most transparent (and credible) marketers that I see teaching today. This may be helpful for beginners to affiliate marketing — he suggests:

1. Find a hot offer
2. Ad must pull out 1 thing: what’s the one thing that your target audience must know?
   
3. Squeeze email: use a simple email capture landing page reiterating the ads headline.
4. Give them the offer: After the user clicks, redirect them to the offer.

He recommended a simple auto responder sequence to monetize an email list.

1. Email the first offer 3 times: feature a strong testimonial in one of the emails. Think of reasons why the users didn’t convert. If the offer featured all of the sales copy in a video, why didn’t they watch it? Test sending a transcript if many don’t watch the video.
2. Email a second offer 3 times: if the first offer was a health info product, now send a supplement offer. The type of solution the customer wants will vary. Some want DIY, some want personal help, and others want to “pop a pill.”
3. Email a third offer 3 times.

When buying traffic, you need to consider how many days after a user opts in, does it take for you to breakeven. With this strategy, you don’t need to breakeven on day one to maximize revenue.

Facebook ad strategies

This was a big topic this year — more than in the past. There was a panel discussion (with Alex Tshering, Jason Kryski, Marc Kelechava, Maria Claudio, & Niket Shah) where several launch strategies were mentioned:

• Start with custom audiences. Focus primarily on testing images. Then, test body copy and headlines.
• Start with a look-alike campaign. A 5k email list could make a 5-10 million person targeted audience that you could reach. Test images and video (with subtitles) first.

For scaling or keep volume consistent:

• Instead of increasing ad set budgets significantly, make a clone with a higher budget. This increases traffic quicker.
• Day/week part instead of starting and pausing ads.

For being cost-effective:

• Look alike audience could be cheaper than narrow targeting.
• Video (with subtitles) instead of an image may give higher quality traffic so you don’t need a presell page (such as an advertorial).
• Conversion pixel should fire soon so Facebook can make decisions your ads’ targeting sooner. Longer funnels should place the conversion pixel up sooner (if needed).

I haven’t tested all of these strategies so your results may vary. These experts run up to 8 figures a quarter.

Marty Weintraub had a keynote, and he mostly discussed FB targeting. Here’s two strategies that stood out to me:

1. Search Wikipedia for top shows about a subject for targeting. If you’re looking for homeowners, you could look up all of HGTV’s shows on Wikipedia. Then, pasted those shows into Facebook. You could also look up the actors for those shows too.
2. Use “active” filters (verbs). If looking for people to go to your restaurant, you’d look for phrases containing: eating, dining out, etc.

ASW expo and meeting strategies

Affiliate Summit is a show for affiliate marketers, but even though I have my own offer that I exclusively run, this show helps me connect with businesses that can improve my offer’s monetization.

Get data and tips

To get data and to look for better offers than mine, I ask many networks if they have an offer for the vertical that I’m currently thriving with. Things I’ll typically ask:

• Its payout?
• Landing page URL or offer name?
• EPC for (display, email, search, etc.)?
• EPC for mobile vs. desktop?
• Are there certain regions or demographics that yield a higher payout?
• What traffic sources is it doing well with?

There are always holes in our own funnel. Getting answers to questions like these can help place the right offer and stop a financial leak. I’ll write the information in my phone. It’s arrogant to assume that I can’t learn from anyone else in my field. Their offer may be worth split testing.

These are just a few of the surface area strategies. When you attend and can ask your own questions, the value you get is 10 fold.