Take Control of Your Campaigns. Make Them Your OWN!
by: Bill Finlay of Wolf Storm Media
No two campaigns run exactly the same. Dealing with human beings we can make predictions and guesses, even really good ones, but that random irrational element will creep in each time. This is the factor that makes testing so entertaining, yet so necessary. Experienced affiliates are always testing and refining all aspects of their campaigns, not because they can’t help meddling, but because they know that even from day to day the same campaign can vary. On a new venture, especially, skilled affiliates will leave nothing to chance.
Just because you have the ability to test everything doesn’t mean you ought to set out to test everything, but there is definitely a range of topics you should look at. To begin a campaign most affiliates will use some of the various online research tools to determine who to target and where, or with which keywords. The first thing to know about these tools that may cause you to do some testing is that most of the ‘data’ they show are either estimates or calculations based on estimates. This doesn’t mean the data is useless, just that before you base actions on information from sites such as Quantcast, Google Ad Planner and the Google Keyword tool, you should at least mark these figures as questionable. This goes for third party tools as well, since Market Samurai, Traffic Travis, and other similar tools collect their data from the same spot: Google. In many cases where there is not sufficient traffic or data to offer a concrete result, Google will make an estimate based on past data or similar searches. By the time a keyword or demographics tool is finished with the numbers, they may be only a pale reflection of reality.
There is no sense in letting suspicion of data quality paralyze your campaigns, but do keep in mind that just because Quantcast says a particular site is visited by 70% women, doesn’t mean that’s true today, or that the statistic holds true for the URL deep inside the site you’re interested in. If there’s a way to check the data with another source (Quantcast vs Google Ad Planner, for example), definitely consider it. If not, just remember where the data comes from. If you do your own testing on a site, via survey or other methods, you may find this a more reliable method.
Not only will collecting and monitoring your own data (via tools such as Prosper202, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, etc.) give you more meaningful results and let you turn your campaign into a winner, it will also help you avoid another pitfall of blindly using the popular prediction and estimate tools discussed above. The weakness of those tools is that they’re the same tools everyone else uses! If ten different affiliates see an offer and decide to use the same traffic source to run it and all ten rush to the same handful of tools for keyword suggestions and competitive site analysis you can be that the result will be 10 similar campaigns.
You should certainly use Google’s database to it’s full potential. When you begin a new campaign, you really will save time by going to Compete.com, SimilarSites.com, Quantcast, Google Ad planner, etc., but let these tools be just the beginning. In a sense your job as a skilled affiliate begins where these tools leave off. The most powerful campaign tool you have at your disposal is your mind! Use your creativity to question the results these fine online tools provide and use the data they provide as a jumping-off point to explore more possibilities.
It is your responsibility to take what you can quickly discover with these tools and go a few steps further. That is what will let your campaign beat the competition. So for your next promotion, pick an offer or a demographic and research away using the web tools, but then see what you can do to think outside the box and bring your campaign into new territory.
