Scaling campaigns

Once you have found a profitable offer or you have a campaign that is close to breaking even you might want to scale the numbers up to make as much profit as you can.

First of all, keep in mind that every offer has a cap and you should regularly check with your affiliate manager to see if the quality of your conversions is backing out for the advertiser. If the quality isn’t up to par, you won’t be able to increase your budgets and the offer might be paused for you.

Luckily, if you’re working with mVAS offers the quality of the conversions isn’t that much of a problem, as I explained before when we analyzed the conversion flows, nonetheless, it’s good to check every once in a while just to see if you have the green light to scale up.

Once you have a proven funnel close to break-even or in the green and you have approval from your manager, here are some strategies you can use to scale up your campaigns.

• Increase daily budget
• Increase bids
• Duplicate campaign in similar countries (if the offer allows it)
• Duplicate your campaign with different bids
• Duplicate your campaign on other similar traffic sources
• Duplicate your campaign with other ad formats

Let’s go over how each method works:

Increase daily budget

This is the simplest, yet more effective method to get started. Assuming you followed my recommendations to assign daily budgets in the testing phase, you can start increasing your budget as long as the campaign is still profitable or close to breaking even.

If your initial budget was $10 per day, you can easily increase it to $20 per day, then $40 per day, then $100, etc.

As long as you keep optimizing your campaign every day and assuming the offer still converts and has enough cap, this should increase your volume quickly and your profits with it.

At some point, you will find the traffic source doesn’t have more traffic to give you even if you increase the daily budget. That could be at $30 per day or $3,000 per day, depending on your targeting filters and the population available in the geo you’re targeting.

If this happens, it’s time to test some other scaling methods.

Increase bids

Increasing your bids is the second method I recommend to get more volume, if possible. If your campaign is breaking even or just below that, increasing bids might not be a great idea unless you’re struggling to get any traffic.

However, if your campaign’s volume potential is 300,000 visits per day (according to the traffic calculator) and you’re just buying 30,000 visits per day and it doesn’t spend more even if you increase your budgets, it’s probably because you’re being outbid.

Increase your budgets slowly and be patient. Don’t go overboard and change the bids many times per day. My recommendation is to increase or decrease the budgets by 10-20% at a time and let it gather data for 24 hours.

If you increase your bids by 5% you might not even see a difference. And if you suddenly increase your bids by 50%, you might find a ton of traffic going to your tracker but since you’re increasing your CPMs, your ROI might decrease a lot and it could pull back to red numbers.

One advantage though is that bidding higher usually results in higher traffic quality, at least for pop traffic. However, unless your ROI is super strong (above 50%+) you shouldn’t make huge changes to your bids or you might end up with a hurtful surprise.

Duplicate campaign in similar countries

Another method many affiliate marketers use when they have a profitable campaign is to scale it up to other geos if the offer allows it. Truth be told, this is more common on offers that work for many countries, such as email submits, app installs, downloads, etc. but sometimes it can be done with mVAS offers as well.

If you have a winning campaign and a strong funnel (high converting vertical + good landing page), it’s worth testing a similar offer in another country where people speak the same language. Or you can go the extra mile and translate the landing page to test it in other geos as well. Make sure you pick a strong offer for the geos you want to test and always ask your manager if you’re in doubt.

Duplicate your campaign with different bids

If your campaign is doing well but you find yourself in a tough spot about the CPMs you're paying, this strategy might work for you.

Try duplicating or triplicating your campaign with different bids. If your original campaign is running with an average bid of $1 and you have raised it to $1.2 while being profitable, try launching the same campaign with a very low bid such as $0.5 and maybe another with a super high bid at $2.5.

For the new campaigns make sure you follow the initial daily budget rules not to burn a lot of money while testing.

Sometimes you might find your campaign performs better at super high or very low bids (especially if you’re struggling to break even) and this is a good way to find out.

If the offer works at several bids, you’re golden because now you’re making more money from different slices of traffic in the same traffic source.

Duplicate your campaign to other traffic sources

Sometimes you have milked your traffic source enough and you still can’t hit the numbers you want from a profitable campaign. Don’t worry though! There are tons of pop and push traffic networks to work with. More than you can count with your fingers, that’s for sure.

One of the simplest ways to increase your numbers is to duplicate your campaign in a second traffic source. If your funnel is strong, you might find yourself running campaigns in 5-10 or more traffic sources at a time.

Be patient though. A profitable campaign has very high chances of working in another traffic source, but it’s not 100% guaranteed. Always start slow and test your landers or offers slowly with a limited daily budget when testing new traffic sources. If you test four traffic sources to scale your campaign and only two of them show decent numbers, focus on those and once you reach a positive ROI test another two and keep going.

Duplicate your campaign in other ad formats

Last but not least, you can try duplicating your campaign to test if it works with different ad formats. Some ad formats have similar performance and you just need to adapt your creatives.

For example, if you have a strong campaign running on pop traffic, you might want to test redirect traffic or even push.

If you’re running web push you might want to try in-page push or pops. At the end of the day, many traffic sources have similar traffic because the ads are shown on the same websites just within different formats.

Be creative and test as much as you can and milk that campaign because sooner or later it’s going to stop performing well.

Now that we have gone through many methods I use to scale up my campaigns, let’s talk about whitelists and blacklists.