Use This Free Spreadsheet To Find Profitable Campaigns

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Your goal as an affiliate marketer is to arbitrage your ad spend - to make more in affiliate revenue than you spend on buying ads - and keep a nice profit. Ideally your goal is to do this at scale so you can make a lot of profit.

That’s pretty much all successful affiliate marketing is - profitable media buying at scale.

But the scary thing is, especially for most people who are new to affiliate marketing, is the prospect of spending ad dollars on campaigns and losing it, with no certainty of a return.

Well, although you’ll never get certainty of a return on ad spend, there are some things you can do to increase the odds of finding a successful campaign before you spend a penny on ads.

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Talk To Your Affiliate Manager to Find An Offer

Before wasting money trying to sell an affiliate offer, ask your affiliate manager for the top 10 best selling offers on the affiliate network. They’ll often send you breakdowns of each offer’s revenue, conversion rates, earnings per click, the most successful landing page for the offer, and sometimes (if they know) the traffic sources and ads.

If you’re on a network like ClickBank that doesn’t have an affiliate manager, they will usually have useful metrics like gravity score to tell you what is selling well.

Just getting this list gives you a massive leg up in your future ad buys because at least you’ll be starting with an offer you now know converts. And conversions = revenue. And more revenue than ad spend = profit. And we want more profit.

Create A Simple Media Buy Calculator In A Spreadsheet

This is the fun part for me. This is where you get to play with the numbers and really feel out whether a campaign has a good or bad chance of working, and if it’s worth you spending ad dollars on testing.

I created this simple media buy calculator in Google Sheets years ago, and use it almost weekly when sussing out new campaigns. I made a copy of it here for you to copy to your own sheets.

This simple media buy calculator lets you adjust a few different variables in your marketing funnel to see if it’s viable to start running ads, and once you’ve started to run ads what you need to adjust in order to get it to be profitable.

Variables you can adjust:

• Daily Spend - This is your daily budget for your ad campaign

• CPC - This is the average cost per click you’ll be paying for your campaign

• CTR of Lander - This is the click through rate of your landing page. The percentage of people who click your ad and view your landing page, that click your affiliate link.

• Conversion Rate - This is the percentage of people who clicked your affiliate link, who converted your offer.

• Payout - Your affiliate revenue per sale for this offer

This spreadsheet is a good way to simulate campaigns before you start spending money on them. It lets you paint a picture of how the campaign might perform.

If you know the rough conversion rate of an offer, and its payout, you can start to play with different scenarios of “what if I spent this much per day at this CPC, and my landing page had this CTR…” And the spreadsheet will tell you whether or not you’ll be profitable.

How To Tune Campaigns For Higher Profit

Once you have a campaign you’re running there are 4 things you can do to increase your profit margin - lower your CPC, increase the CTR of your landing page, increase your conversion rate, and get a higher payout.

These 4 factors are like dials you can continue to tweak to get your campaign into profitable territory. Let’s talk about how to improve each of them.

BUT FIRST: Please understand that the more well targeted your audience is, the better all of these factors are going to be, and the more profitable your campaign will be.

You can have the best marketing funnel but if you’re targeting the wrong audience it won’t matter. So PLEASE make sure you’ve researched who the most likely audience is for your campaign, and target them.

Ok. 🙂

How to lower CPC: This one is less important to me now that most of the ad platforms are shifting towards automated bidding like “Target CPA.” But traditionally the higher the click through rate of your ad, the lower your CPC. The more relevant your ad is to your targeted audience, the better its CPC should be. So try to make engaging ads, with good headlines, like these:

“See why [target audience] are snapping up these $39 [offer]”

“Top 5 best [offer] of 2024”

“34 Discounts Most [target audience] Don’t Know Exist”

“Powerful little [offer] is saving [target audience] thousands”

“Yes, [target audience problem] are real… but this genius device is helping”

How to increase landing page CTR: The click through rate of your landing page is one of the biggest multipliers in your campaign funnel. Look at the difference between the simulated profit on these two sheets, and all I’ve done is increase the CTR of the landing page by 5%:

Increasing the CTR 5% in this simulation added $315/day in profit to the campaign. You can typically increase the CTR by:

• starting with a clean, clear & easy landing page design

• make sure landing page LOADS FAST

• adding clear call to action buttons 

• displaying limited time discounts for the offer

• hyperlinking the text of the offer name on the landing page 

• using great images/videos/gifs showcasing offer

• using scarcity to drive clicks 

• making a very benefit driven landing page 

• clearly showing how the offer will fix the users problem 

• adding social proof

How to increase conversion rate: Increasing conversion rate has part to do with you and a lot to do with the offer’s own landing page and check out flows. This is where it would be worth you split testing multiple offers to see which one converts the best.

For example if you’re selling ear buds, try getting 2 or more ear bud offers and split testing them to see which has a higher conversion rate. You want to be running the best converting offer, and some offers have their backend dialed in better than other offers selling the same products.

Things you can do include:

• Writing a 🔥 advertorial for the offer

• Using scarcity

• Using social proof

• Write a sales page using the PAS (problem, agitate, solve) or AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) formulas 

• Showcase the product in action via amazing hero images/gifs/video

• Discover a powerful marketing angle for the offer (checkout “cashvertising lifeforce 8” or have chat gpt write a list of testimonials for the product and pick one to write an entire article around.)

How to increase payout: Getting a higher payout also contributes to how much you can make with this campaign. To get a higher payout you can either negotiate a higher payout with your affiliate manager (I don’t recommend doing this until you’ve sold 100+ of this offer), or you can find a similar offer that converts as well that pays out more. It’s worth noting however that sometimes it’s the lower paying offers that make more money because they convert much better. So factor this into the media buy calculator when you make it.

Learn how to launch and grow an affiliate program for SaaS

Launching an affiliate program for your SaaS business can be intimidating if you’re new to it, but it is pretty simple. Rewardful has boiled it down to three core principles in their free online course:

• Principle 1: Make it simple for affiliates to earn money

• Principle 2: Run your program like a professional

• Principle 3: Build an affiliate recruitment system

By the end of the course, you'll have a clear picture of how affiliate marketing can work for your business.

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Wrapping Up

Media buying is no joke, and can be a faster way to lose money than setting it on fire if you’re not careful. That’s why all media buying should have some sort of game plan, or pre-buy simulation and be mapped out to increase your odds of success. So before buying ads, try simulating your media buy in the media buy calculator. If you enjoyed this edition let me know with a reply to this email, or comment on the post on commissioncrew.co.

Until next week!

Cheers,
Matt