Interview with a Pro Affiliate: Servando Silva

[servandosilva]

One last question from me. I talk a lot about my 3-5x the payout multiple for testing. I know based on things you've said that your multiple is higher. What is your strategy for deciding on a testing budget for a new campaign? When do you pause and move on?

It depends on the traffic source completely.
3-5x maybe enough to test something like FB ads or a source where you can't really optimize much by filtering and segmenting OS, websites, sources, browsers, etc.

Native for example considering you buy traffic in thousands of sites as well as pops has much more things to test and analyze and 3-5x will barely scratch the surface. So I like my budget there to be a minimum of 20x but sometimes up to 100-200x the payout of the offer.
Many times for example, if you spend 5x the offer payout there's a website/target/siteID that will consume 70% of that traffic initially, so in reality you only spent 30% of your budget in the rest of the websites (so more like 1.5x of the offer only?) and you can't decide if a campaign works or not without any statistical significance like that.

Besides, there's also the landers factor in which you want them to spend a similar significant amount per website, so if you start with 3 landing pages and your budget was 10x payout initially now with 3 landers you need to increase that to 30x or you'll only gather 1/3 of the data you thought you were going to gather. I usually start with 3 landers and 2-3 offers so that means I need to increase my budget by 6x-9x of what I was going to test if I were to use only 1 offer and 1 lander (I never direct link though but if you direct link this is another path to test as well).

 

[servandosilva]

can I join this team if possible.

Thanks but all the people I hire are local and were not looking for more members.

 

[servandosilva]

If I can ask last question too - how do you choose what offers to promote (before test them), talk with AM from the network and pick the most converting ones, the ones with best EPC or the new one which look promising?

Also what custom elements do you put on the ripped landing pages you use for better CR and how improve your landings?

I look for volume (number of conversions) instead of CR/EPC. CR and EPC metrics don't really say much unless you pair them with the volume and traffic source. Some networks never want to talk about volume and they just talk about CR/EPCs misleading affiliates into testing offers that have very little potential of scale.

As for custom elements, nothing fancy besides a few scripts sometimes, a few tracking point and maybe custom parameters shown by the tracker. No secrets here.

 

[Lino58]

How to get started without confusion and have you a training program to teach affiliate marketing step by step for newbies on CPA?

 

[Soundengine]

Would you please tell us more about your decision to focus mostly on mobile? What was your reasoning or thought process behind this?

 

[servandosilva]

How to get started without confusion and have you a training program to teach affiliate marketing step by step for newbies on CPA?

I don't have a training program. A simple way to get started is to get your tracker, decide on a vertical and a traffic source and forget about the rest to avoid confusion. Luke has many guides here already with videos on how to setup everything including networks he recommends. Stop reading and start taking action!

 

[servandosilva]

Would you please tell us more about your decision to focus mostly on mobile? What was your reasoning or thought process behind this?

Mobile has now more market share than desktop traffic. WhenI decided this like 5 years ago mobile had over 30% market share but nowadays is more than 50%. This will only keep growing while desktop devices will be used less and less. I want to be in the growing side of the industry, not on the dying side

I'm not implying desktop traffic will disappear forever, of course. However mobile will grow much faster thanks to smartphones and tablets.

 

[chervenkov]

I look for volume (number of conversions) instead of CR/EPC. CR and EPC metrics don't really say much unless you pair them with the volume and traffic source. Some networks never want to talk about volume and they just talk about CR/EPCs misleading affiliates into testing offers that have very little potential of scale.

Yes, usually they don't provide info about volumes, what you do when they don't say you the volume on conversions.
Besides of this, what is better - run one campaign with profit 50 $ or 5 smaller campaigns with 10 $ profit.

 

[servandosilva]

Yes, usually they don't provide info about volumes, what you do when they don't say you the volume on conversions.
Besides of this, what is better - run one campaign with profit 50 $ or 5 smaller campaigns with 10 $ profit.

If a manager doesn't want to provide me with any information like that I just don't work with them. There are plenty more who are willing to work with you.

As for your second question, a mix between both is a good thing to have. Bigger campaigns require the same amount of work to maintain and optimize so having bigger campaigns is more efficient but also more risky as you're not spreading your money between several offers.

 

[needahand]

Hi servandosilva!

Can you please show us a case study? I'd like to see how you take an offer and create a campaign showing which ad network and how to run it properly. I'd like to see your thought process.

 

[servandosilva]

I have a couple case studies posted at the Affiliatefix Forum and I think another one at STM.
The last one is pretty recent (last month) and you can find it here: https://www.affiliatefix.com/thread...urney-on-zeropark-to-10-000-per-month.157580/

Other than that, I haven't really posted case studies publicly.

 

[Luke]

I have a couple case studies posted at the Affiliatefix Forum and I think another one at STM.
The last one is pretty recent (last month) and you can find it here: https://www.affiliatefix.com/thread...urney-on-zeropark-to-10-000-per-month.157580/

Other than that, I haven't really posted case studies publicly.

I am sure we can come up with a deal to get a good case study here on affLIFT

 

[manu]

This was a nice surprise as the first thread I read on affLIFT! Servando is one of the most down-to-earth people I've met in the space. He's one of the smartest and careful with his statements, while also outperforming so many of the big talkers out there...

So when are we gonna see you speaking on stage, Servando?

 

[Luke]

This was a nice surprise as the first thread I read on affLIFT! Servando is one of the most down-to-earth people I've met in the space. He's one of the smartest and careful with his statements, while also outperforming so many of the big talkers out there...

So when are we gonna see you speaking on stage, Servando?

Haha, glad we're off to a good start Manu! Happy to have you here as well

 

[servandosilva]

This was a nice surprise as the first thread I read on affLIFT! Servando is one of the most down-to-earth people I've met in the space. He's one of the smartest and careful with his statements, while also outperforming so many of the big talkers out there...

So when are we gonna see you speaking on stage, Servando?

I'm not a fan of being in stage. Not because of being afraid or anything like that, but it draws too much attention.
We'll see.

 

[manu]

I'm not a fan of being in stage. Not because of being afraid or anything like that, but it draws too much attention.
We'll see.

Makes sense. I know you'd have quite a few interesting things you could talk about but absolutely understand that you're not a fan of the attention.

 

[6lack]

What's the minimum budget for paid traffic you recommend to start with?

 

[servandosilva]

What's the minimum budget for paid traffic you recommend to start with?

It depends on what type of traffic you want to learn.
$1,500-$2,000 would be the minimum recommended for some sources like pops, push and redirect, but $3,000-$5,000 for native, FB or other sources.

 

[artron]

Reading the thread, Servando, you do not use direct linking at all.
So you use landers exclusively, right?
Of the landers available, what are your favorites? Do you find advertorials do well, or quiz landers?
On Landers, how many clicks do you think is good before going to the offer?

What's your thoughts on landing page load time? Any tips on this front?

Lost clicks (traffic source says you got 'em, tracker loses some, offer page gets even less). How do you minimize this?

Would you say you've found success with popovers/popunders? And if yes, what's your ratio on adult offers vs general-audience type offers?

Thanks for keeping up with this "AMA" thread!

 

[servandosilva]

Hi Artron.
Let me answer your questions.

1. Yeah, I use the landers 99% of the time. There are many advantages of using landing pages besides conversion rate that can help you optimize your campaigns that you cant do without landers.

2. I have no favorite landers. Some work for some campaigns and traffic sources. Some work for others. I let data speak instead of having favorites.

3. Doesn't matter. This is something you need to calculate based on your Cost per click/view, your conversion rate or your payout. For some campaigns it could be only 1 click every 500 views and for others it could be 1 click every 10 views. Both can be profitable depending on the cost of the traffic, your CR and your payout.

4. I try to make it as fast as possible. Especially with pops, a slow lander can pretty much kill the campaign. We redesign our landers and compress images as much as possible plus we use high speed servers to load them as fast as possible.

5. By having fast landers and trackers you can minimize both click loss from the traffic source to your lander and from your lander to your offer.
The redirection speed and load time of your landers are important but many times it's also the network or advertisers fault. Split test the same offers between networks.

6. Yeah. We made over 2 million in revenue with pop traffic although we don't run it as much anymore. I almost never ran adult offers. 99% of it was mainstream.

Hope this helps!