Category Archives: Guides, Tips & Tutorials

GTmetrix: This Is Your Site On SPEED

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It has been mentioned before on this blog that landing page loading time matters. Each precious second that you shave can mean more dollars in your pocket. I always thought that I did a pretty good job of keeping my landing pages fast. I used small, optimized images, had a good server, etc. But that was before my friend Rohail introduced me to GTmetrix.

I was skeptical at first, but it looked simple enough to try. All you need to do is put in your landing page URL and press go. So I did. GTmetrix analyzed my site in a few seconds, and it came back with a grade of C- for my page. I was surprised, since I thought it was loading pretty quick at 1.5 seconds. But the truly amazing thing about GTmetrix is how much detail they give you about how to speed up your site. They have it all laid out from the top factors affecting your speed down to the smallest ones. And everything that they suggest comes with more info about how to do it. For example, one of the suggestions for my site was to minify the javascript files I was using. All I had to do was click on the links for the minified code that it generated for me, replace my code with it, and upload it to my server. It took about 30 seconds to complete. They’ve also got a lossless image optimizer built in. If your images are too big, just download the optimized versions and upload them to your server. Simple. When I was done completing the high priority tasks that GTmetrix suggested, I re-tested the page. I was blown away! The load time was now down to 0.6 seconds. A few simple tweaks had cut my loading time in half, and then some.

GTmetrix Screen Shot

Looks like I’ve got some optimizing to do on this blog…

So how much does this tool cost? Absolutely nothing. It’s free. Bookmark it now and do yourself a favor. I use it on every single lander I do now, and it continues to amaze me how quick my landers are loading. If you take the time to read the info on how each tweak actually works, you will learn a great deal about better coding and web server best practices as well. I can’t recommend this site enough, and thanks again to Rohail for turning me on to it!

How To Set Up A Postback URL with CPV Lab

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CPV Lab has been my tracking platform of choice ever since it launched. Despite the name, it can be used to track just about any type of traffic, not just CPV/PPV. I’ve used it for PPV, Facebook, Media Buys, and Mobile. Recently I had a campaign that required a Postback URL (also called Server-to-Server Pixel) for tracking instead of the usual pixel. It’s basically the same thing, but instead of placing a pixel on the landing page that gets loaded by the user’s browser, your affiliate network’s tracking system itself will tell your CPV Lab that a conversion has taken place. This is the primary tracking method used for Mobile campaigns, where pixels often don’t work. It is also much more reliable for tracking correctly (at least in my experience).

There is nothing in the CPV Lab interface that tells you how to do it. I had to go searching for the answer in the CPV Lab help desk, so I figured I’d share it with you. It’s actually quite simple.

First you will need your Image Pixel URL from your CPV Lab installation. Just go to the Edit Campaign window (any campaign), scroll down and copy the code in the box labeled “Image Pixel”. It should look like this:

<img src="https://yourtracker.com/adclick.php" width="1" height="1" border="0" />

Now copy just the URL part:

http://yourtracker.com/adclick.php

Next we are going to add “?subid=” on to the end of it, so we have this:

http://yourtracker.com/adclick.php?subid=

The final step is going to depend on what tracking platform your affiliate network is using. They each have a “token” that will make the system place the subid value into your link dynamically. Below I’ve listed the tokens for some of the most common tracking platforms.

Cake: #s1#

LinkTrust: [=SID=]

HasOffers: {aff_sub}

HitPath: xxc1xx

To complete your Postback URL, just paste the correct token onto the end of your link. If you aren’t sure what platform your network uses, just ask your Affiliate Manager. Here’s an example using the Cake token:

http://yourtracker.com/adclick.php?subid=#s1#

That’s it! Now all you need to do is send your new Postback URL to your Affiliate Manager and tell them to place it for you. Be sure to tell them it’s a Postback URL, not an Image Pixel. Also, if you have the proper access, you can place it yourself in all of these platforms I’ve listed above. It depends from network to network and also offer to offer whether they allow you to place your own pixel.

Try it out, once you get it working you won’t go back to Image Pixels…

Why Landing Page Loading Time Matters To Affiliates

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This is a guest-post written by Kate Carpenter, the lead designer over at the web-oriented design and development studio, Fireworksable.

What are page loading times?

I assume that simply by reading the phrase “page loading times” most of you understand what it means, but for those who don’t I’ll elaborate:

The page loading time is the time it takes for a web page to complete loading of that it’s content in a visitor’s browser. The time it takes to load a page increases as the file-size’s of the it’s content increases.

Making sure that page loading times are optimized should be a key concern of developers, however when you hire a cheap freelancer from Digital Point or Elance to put together your landing page or website, it’s often not taken into account, ultimately at your own cost.

 

So, why exactly do page loading times matter to me as an affiliate?

 

If you don’t take into account how fast your page loads, chances are you’ll experience a higher bounce-rate and lower conversion-rate than you would had you optimized properly, due to:

Impatient visitors, which tend to make up the majority of us.

In this day and age, we’re used to getting stuff done very fast. That’s why when we visit a web page that appears to load slowly, even if it’s just by that tiny little bit, we’re very much inclined to hit the back-button.

Google and it’s various algorithms.

Google search now takes into account the loading time of a page when ranking pages, so if you get a lot of visitors from organic search, you could see your primary source of traffic start to slip away.

It also plays a part of your “Quality Score” if you’re using Google AdWords as an advertising platform to run PPC campaigns (NB: I think I read it only effects the search network and not the display network, but I’m not entirely sure).

What can I do to improve my page’s loading time?

 

Here’s two things you can do to improve the loading time of your web pages pretty significantly without diving too much into the technical side:

Compressing those images of yours.

 

Images are by far the biggest contributor an increased page loading time, as they tend to make up the majority of a page’s content in terms of file-size. Compressing an image allows you to remove unnecessary little bits of data from it, and reducing it’s file-size.

For the average affiliate whose not too technical, the best way to compress images is by using Yahoo!’s SmushIt, image compressor.

“Minifying” any JavaScript you’ve got.

 

Often JavaScript files can contain additional comments, white-spacing or code indentation that pumps up their file-size. Removing these additions is called “minifying”.

 

Again, for the average affiliate whose not too technical, a great way to “minify” JavaScript files is by using Google’s Closure Compiler.

 

Some final words on the subject of page loading times…

You can also calculate your page loading time on a scale of 1 – 100 by using Google Page Speed, as well as advice for improving loading time, specific to your page.

In all seriousness, I really recommend that you check out the resources I’ve mentioned in this guest-post, as it shouldn’t take you much longer than 10 or 15 minutes to compress your images and “minify” your JavaScript, and while the impact won’t be a 200% increase in conversions, it will certainly be worth far more than the time spent doing it.

To Direct Link or Not To Direct Link?

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It’s one of the oldest questions in Affiliate Marketing: to direct link or not to direct link? Google made their stance on the issue pretty clear when they all but banned direct linking on AdWords. Now they don’t even like so-called “bridge pages” which lead to affiliate offers with little content on them.

But still, traffic sources such as Facebook and PPV still allow for direct linking. I get asked almost every single day whether you should direct link a campaign or create a landing page for it. Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast answer. The truth is (and has always been) that some campaigns work better direct linked and some work better with landing pages. Neither method works better all of the time. You need to test it out.

That being said, a strategy that I have seen work well for affiliates is to direct link a campaign to quickly evaluate whether or not it has potential before they go to the trouble of building out a landing page. Especially if it is in a brand new niche that you have not promoted before, where you don’t have any creatives or landers sitting around ready to be used.

It’s easy to throw together a direct link campaign on PPV or Facebook. Run some traffic to it, and if you are getting enough conversions to break even, or even just under, it’s a good sign that the offer has some life to it. That’s when you can buckle down and put together a landing page to bring the ROI into the black and start making money.

 

Targeting Campaigns By Demographic

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A popular technique is to target your campaigns with demographics. This is easy to do on Facebook, and it can be done on PPV as well with a little bit more work. Here is a basic strategy to get you started.

1. Go to Quantcast.com

2. Enter the url of the offer that you are promoting (such as “match.com”)

3. Click the Demographics tab from the left hand menu

Now if you are doing Facebook marketing, you can take this info and put it directly into your targeting for the campaign. Age, sex, etc. For PPV, you need to figure out what kind of sites that people in your target demographic also like to visit, then you bid on those urls. Here are the steps for that.

Quantcast Planner

Quantcast Planner

4. Go to Quantcast.com/Planner (this will require you to register a free account if you don’t have one already)

5. On the left menu, under “Audience Definition”, put in the demographic info that we learned from the previous steps.

6. Under “Filters”, click the empty box labeled “By Category” and then choose a relevant category from the list. (You must do this or else you will end up with a bunch of junk urls like google.com and facebook.com)

7. Click “Download”.

Now you have got a list of demographically targeted urls that you can use in your PPV campaign. Keep in mind that targeting demographically is not quite as accurate as targeting by keyword, but there can be a lot more volume. If you know that you campaign appeals to people within the demographic, it’s just a matter of building the right kind of landing page and/or finding the right offer that appeals to them. The good news is that if you get one of these to work, the rewards can be huge.

Low Cost / High Traffic Niche Markets on DirectCPV

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DirectCPV has been sending out some cool newsletters lately. It seems like they are really trying to step up their game and get more people to run traffic with them by actually being helpful! Novel idea, eh? Their latest newsletter actually has two great pieces of information in it so I thought I would share with you in case you aren’t a subscriber.

According to DirectCPV, the top 7 niches that have lots of traffic and not much competition are:

  1. Shopping
  2. Gaming
  3. Sports
  4. Social Networking
  5. Entertainment
  6. Dating
  7. Adult

Honestly I can’t believe that Gaming, Entertainment, and Dating are on this list. Those are all massive niches for CPA offers. Gaming and Dating are self-explanatory, and Entertainment is easy to promote IQ Quiz offers with. You should be able to make thousands of dollars using these three niches alone. If you get creative, you can definitely promote CPA offers on Shopping, Sports, and Social Networking domains as well. It just might take a bit more landing page and campaign design to capture the audience’s attention.

DirectCPV has got the actual domains that have lots of traffic just waiting for bidders listed as well. To see them, just login to your account, click on Advertiser Resources, and choose Low Cost Domains. As an added bonus, they have launched a new Domain Research Tool. You can type in any keyword, and it will give you a list of domains with lots of traffic for that keyword.

I get emails every single day from people asking me where to find the best targets to bid on or how they can make their campaigns more profitable, so I thought I would share this to give you a leg up. There’s no affiliate links for DirectCPV in this post. I just thought it was cool of a PPV network to reach out with some helpful advice for their advertisers.

When EPC Isn’t The Most Important Thing…

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When affiliates first get into this industry, they are usually always in search of offers with the highest payout. They figure if the payout is higher then they will automatically make more money. Obviously that’s not the case, since people can bank with $2 gaming offers even harder than someone running a $50 free trial offer.

A much better metric to go by is EPC (earnings per click). If you are making $0.50 a click on an offer, that is much better than $0.25 a click, right? Seems simple enough. It’s true, EPC is a much better measurement of the quality of a campaign that simply going by the offer payout. But is it the absolute best method? Nope.

Here’s the problem. Even if an offer gets $0.50 a click instead of $0.25 a click, you might still want to run the $0.25 offer. Why? Because it may get more clicks. This is where eCPM (estimated cost per mille, or estimated cost per thousand impressions). This one can be a bit trickier to figure out than EPC, where you just divide earnings by the number of clicks. But if you are willing to do the math, eCPM will give you the most accurate picture of which offer makes more money.

Here’s how to figure your eCPM:

eCPM = (revenue/number of impressions delivered)*1000

This really works to find out which offer is working the best for you on a landing page with multiple offers, or if you are split testing two different offers on a landing page. It doesn’t really work if you are just direct linking, unless you are doing PPC and you want to count your ad impressions as the impressions, but that gets a little dicey. So if you are using landers, get calculating and see what you find out, you may be surprised by the results.

How to Strategically Create and Optimize Landing Pages

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This is a guest post by Danny Schwartz, lead designer at landing page design team WePixelate.

As a landing page designer and former affiliate, I’ve got the best of both worlds and a ton of knowledge when it comes to creating and optimizing landing pages for conversions.

One thing I’ve come across time and time again in the affiliate industry is that unlike traffic sources, people tend to not approach landing pages and optimizing with a degree of strategy. Perhaps this is because people in general tend to look towards increasing traffic to increase profits rather then optimizing landing pages, or perhaps it’s because there doesn’t seem to be an exact logical path one can take when designing landing pages to ensure that they achieve the maximum level of potential they possibly can.

People tend to approach landing page optimization and creation with the mindset of “oh, I’ll just change out that call to action there” and “hmm, let me try a pink background instead of white”, essentially it’s an approach which favors tracking random elements, as oppose to tracking elements that have a logical basis for being changed.

What do I mean by this? I mean start thinking strategically about which elements are going to have the biggest impact on your conversions, and change them, not the color of some random icon on your page.

Here’s a little insight kind of steps I take to create and optimize landing pages for my clients. I will be throwing in an example of a dating website for a campaign that is specifically targeted towards males that are between 30 – 35 for a Facebook campaign.

  • Create 6 or so completely different styles of landing page, that all deliver exactly the same message, for example “Free exclusive account, only 1 left, find your match now” with a description of the account they will be getting. One page may for example contain a picture of a 30 year old professional kind of guy making out with a similar girl, another may contain a set of pictures of girls who are “using this service”, another will have a picture of a really sexy girl lying down, each page having a different call to action and fonts and what not. Point being, each page is drastically different, with the only similarity being the message.
  • Once my client has tested each one to a reasonable standard, e.g. 100 clicks, I then take the best converting page and change out the message that’s delivered to the visitor, taking the offer they’re looking for and spinning it into a different perspective, so for example I’ll have “We’ve got the kind of women you’ve only dreamed of” or “Women so sexy that you won’t need to Facebook stalk people any more” or “Over 1,273 people have found their perfect woman”. Point is again, drastic differences so that differences can really be felt.
  • My client then tests each new page to a reasonable standard, e.g. 100 clicks and tells me which one is converting the best. I then take that page begin changing smaller elements and working with the client to do back and forth tests, until we reach a point where continuing to optimize is no longer worth mine or my clients time, e.g. where any changes are too small to make any significant impact.

This is what I define is a strategic way to create and optimize pages. Unfortunately, being affiliates, there’s a certain “peak” level, where optimization becomes ineffective due to merchant landing pages play a significant if not, the most important role in attaining those conversions. Pre-selling and pushing visitors to make a purchase or fill in a lead form is one thing, but ultimately, it depends on the merchant to secure that lead or sale.

Case Study: Buying A Site on Flippa for Profit – Part 2

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It’s been about 12 days since I started this Case Study (check out Part 1 here), so I thought it was about time for an update. Unfortunately due to the holidays, I haven’t been able to spend as much time working on the site as I wanted to.

I really haven’t made many changes to the site itself at all, other than some small on-page SEO fixes. The main things that I have done are link building and social bookmarking. If you don’t have the time to do social bookmarking yourself (like me), I highly recommend Red_Virus’s $25 package. I have used Amit for several projects and he always does a great job. I’ve had a site get ranked just from these bookmarks alone.

Here’s what the traffic has looked like since I took over the site:

Case Study - Traffic Stats

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the site has a good amount of Pageviews and a decently low Bounce Rate. So the people that get to the site seem to be sticking around and browsing for a bit. I just need to continue increasing the traffic. The good news is the trend is definitely upward for overall visitors.

As far as monetization, the affiliate banner I put on it has failed so far. It gets barely any clicks and it has not generated a single lead. I’ll have to test out different banners or offers to optimize this. For AdSense, it’s averaging about $0.75 – $1.00 a day right now. So at this rate, if I leave it alone, it will pay back the money I spent on it in about 2 years. Obviously that’s no good, so more optimization will follow!

The next step is to start an email list so that I can capture addresses and send them relevant articles and affiliate offers on an ongoing basis. That’s all I’ve got to report for now!