Drive traffic to a dry offer and earn $5700? That’s what we got right!

This is a story about a discovered-too-late approach that could yield an income, but much less than expected. In my team, approaches are usually tried and tested by several buyers with a net profit of $20 000- $70 000. However, there is nothing educational in these cases, save the opportunity to brag how dope we are. 

This case, though, features good decision making, as well as errors. By analysing these errors we learnt a whole load, and, I hope, the readers can also benefit from them.

Offer and affiliate network

Summer was a good run for crypto. We had about 5 offers in operation simultaneously. Mostly we worked with Canada. Quite often we bumped into Imperial Oil bundles on spy services, but we didn’t pay much attention, since all buyers were into other approaches. In August we filled our ranks and one of our offers was discontinued, so we faced the question of testing new brands. 

We got our hands on that same Imperial Oil that we’d seen plenty on the spy services. We linked up via CMaffiliates, since they have a lot of cool brokers that deal virtually with any brand. Also, due to a long period of cooperation, we get very good rates and exclusive payment models. 

Immediately, we agreed on the CRG model, which guaranteed 8% of the leads at a CPA rate. Since the CPA was $900, adjusting to CPL gave us $72 per lead.

Driving from Facebook

The team drives traffic from any sources, but Imperial Oil only concerned Facebook. We approached it qualitatively, rather than quantitatively. It is important that the advertising network algorithms had enough time to learn, so it was necessary to give each account about 3-5 days for running traffic. 

For this we ran traffic directly from quality farms. That said, the farms had a new type of fan pages, often native. Beforehand, the FPs were warmed up with $5-10. In this way we didn’t even notice the August crisis. 

Many people try to reduce the cost of running traffic by linking around 20 farms and increasing auto-registrations. This type of approach has a multitude of downsides:

• Too many steps to start driving traffic;
• A complicated workflow with maps;
• It’s difficult to monitor every account’s effectiveness;
• Autoregs die too quickly, which leads to no optimization.

We targeted men and women between the ages of 35 and 60. There was an attempt to drive only to large cities. This approach works well with Tier 3 countries. In Canada, however, the only result that we got, was the increase in CPL with no change to the conversion rate.

Creatives, landing pages

I can’t claim to have used pioneering approaches in regards to the creatives. We took about 5 approaches from spy services, modified 5 approaches from there, and created 5 according to our own tasks. These are the options that had the best conversions:

The landing emphasizes the opportunity to earn money by investing in shares of an oil company. The triggers included increasing energy prices due the conflict in Ukraine and sanctions imposed on Russia. Most of the traffic was detected on the prelanding page. In other words, the preland had an application form. This is what the most effective landing page looked like:

Results

Each lead averaged out at $30-40. However, the traffic conversion stood at just over 4%, considering the KPI was 8%. A screenshot of the stats:

Because of that, we were switched to CPA from CRG. For a couple of days we were driving traffic and making a profit, but one after the other, brokers began to drop the whole Imperial Oil idea. So, we had to terminate the offer, having recorded a relatively low (for us anyways) profit of $5 700. 

Conclusion

By all means, the ability to make a bundle profitable is an important skill. But if we’re talking about earning from home – that’s not enough. It is critical to select an offer that is relatively fresh, so that the audience won’t be oversaturated, and brokers would keep buying it for at least a couple of months. 

In the end, we spent time and effort on testing and walked away with 10 times less than we were used to squeezing out of a single bundle.

I strongly recommend insisting on driving traffic using the CRG model. It is much less stressful for the advertiser, compared to CPL, since it provides space for flexibility with the terms. As for solo-buyers and teams, it allows them to test bundles cheaper and quicker. It goes without saying that in order to get such terms, you need to run your fair share of traffic, and as a result have a good reputation in the affiliate network.

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