Native Ads + Clickbank [Case Study]

I get the same question a hundred times every single day, and I get it. You see me on YouTube, on Facebook and even on LinkedIN now flexing the results of my Clickbank campaign.

“Colin, what product are you promoting?”

“Colin, which traffic source are you using?”

“Colin, What is the ROI?”

And the always classic..

Well today you’re lucky because you’re a member of the Dijs University Forum I will expose it all. The offer, the lander, the ads, the traffic source and even the placements.

So you can hopefully get an idea of what is possible with native ads and Clickbank, a potentially fruitful combination.

I know this is a premium community and I shouldn't even have to say it but I'm still going to. There's no use in copying the information displayed in this post, your campaign will die out very quickly. Instead, use it as inspiration to build your own campaigns.

Let's get started with the offer. Before starting this Clickbank project I had never ran anything significant in the big three niches: health, wealth and dating. But with native I knew there was big opportunity to run on scale, even when testing.

The nutra vertical always fascinated me due to the high CPA on the offers. Coming from sweepstakes where EPC's are $0.10 to $0.20 seeing EPC's of $2.00-$6.00 was pretty insane.

Of course you also know the traffic will be more expensive but still interesting. When my eye was on Nutra the decision was very simple. I think most of the Clickbank beginners just have a look at the gravity which gives an indication of which product would be interesting to promote.

The Definition of ClickBank Gravity:

Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by promoting the vendor's products during the past 12 weeks.

It's not the best indicator but as a beginner you have to start somewhere. So I just looked at the highest gravity product on Clickbank in the "Health & Fitness" category.

With more than double the gravity as the 2nd place product "Leptitox" showed great promise. So I decided to get up and running with that offer. Now I had decided on an offer. I needed a landing page and an actual traffic source I could run this on.

Lazy as I am, Adplexity was open in under 2 minutes. As I work a with Adplexity behind the scenes we have access to all Adplexity spy-tools.

So as I want to run native ads first thing I do is get a lander that's suitable for native ads. There's obviously no use in going into mobile, desktop or push as these ads displayed and lander included are useless for native.

Once you're inside Adplexity Native you see this.

You will see all kinds of random ads as that is the standard filter "newest" ads shown. Not to worry though, don't get confused it's super simple from here. What you do is you go to the left hand side where there's a search menu and you scroll down to the "Affiliate Network" section. Then filter on "Clickbank".

Once you've done that the whole screen will be filled with Clickbank Ads. However the filter is still on "Newest" which means it will show you fresh ads, ads that have just been launched. What you want to is look for ads with the likeliness of being profitable. How do you find those? Well, let's do something you should normally not do.

Let's assume something. You might assume that once we put the filter on "Received Most Traffic" we will get ads that have received the most clicks over the set date range. The assumption then is, would someone send 10.000 clicks to an offer if it's NOT making money? Hmmm..I don't think so. Hence that'd be a good assumption to make in this scenario.

You can do the same with "Running Longest". Why would someone run a campaign for 5 months if it doesn't make any money? You can even open the campaign, look at the stats and then see if there's enough clicks to validate your assumption.

There's so much information in Adplexity but that's not what this case study is about. So let's grab the lander and go.

I decided to go with this bridge page.

It has several click url href positions on this lander. The call to action "Watch Now" button of course. But also the person image and title is clickable and the video. That one is the most important one as it says "Tap to watch video" as soon as they tap they get taken to the offer which is a video sales letter. So the flow is coherent.

So now we have the offer, the landing page, let's look for the traffic source.

As I use Voluum as my tracking software and it was my firs time testing native and first time testing Clickbank I thought I'd make things as easy as possible.

Makes sense right?

Reached out to my buddy Artur at Voluum and asked him if he could assist me in picking in choosing a good native source. He told me they had a DSP which would be suitable for what I was trying to do and promised me the account manager would be very helpful. Okay, so fuck it let me try that.

So I signed up for Voluum DSP and got my account manager. Nice guy, easy to work with and very fast with replies (what I like). I hate it when account manager are super slow like they don't care about beginners and only want to help the big spenders.

Inside Voluum DSP there are 22 different ad exchanges connected. Pro's and Con's of a DSP:

Pro's:

(1) The DSP (Demand-Side Platform) allows you to apply for only one source, the DSP itself. You have one account and can connect to twenty two ad exchanges. This is very convenient as normally you'd have to apply and connect to all twenty two of them which would take a lot of time.

(2) Lower deposit amount. In the scenario where you'd want to test multiple ad exchanges to see which one has the best placements for your ads you'd have to deposit thousands of dollars to test all of them as their is a minimum deposit for each platform anywhere from $50-$500. With Voluum DSP the minimum deposit is $500 but you can test ALL ad exchanges with that budget.

(3) Super helpful account managers. The Voluum DSP staff is really something else, yet do I have to find a company with better customer service. Wether you're a complete beginner or advanced affiliate this customer success team will cater to your needs. From suggestion ad exchanges, source or placements to whitelists and optimisation the team will assist you with super fast response time.

Con's:

(1) Increased costs due to the fact the DSP provides you with all these wonderful pro's they also are a business and need to make money so they take a very tiny cut of your spend as compensation of the service.

So as you can understand, me being lazy and all I don't mind giving them a little compensation for making my life a lot easier.

So my Voluum DSP account manager told me that Nativo would be a suitable exchange for Leptitox as most of the other more common Nutra Ad Exchanges like RevContent have banned "Leptitox" as a product and you're not allowed to promote it.

Note: This is a problem I ran into when scaling Leptitox 95% of the exchanges do not allow this product to be promoted.

Anyway, with avg. sale of $65.98 as a CPA it gives you quite a lot of room to test. I've seen conversions go as high as $270 when they take the up-sells.

Nativo is one of the most premium native advertising networks and CPM's go really high. I mean, really high. I started at a 2.5 CPM and optimised placements ran at a $28CPM at times.

Note: I didn't run directly with Nativo. I ran the Nativo ad exchanges through Voluum DSP.

Fortunately to get stated asking crying like a little bitch and spamming my account manager he gave me some information.

"Nativo, US, web traffic only, freq 2/1"

So now we have the offer, traffic source and lander.

Let's get the ads and copy. I did rip some stuff from adplexity and made some adjustments too.

"Take what's working and make it better" - Colin Dijs

 

 

Those are the images. Below the copy.

As you can see the images and copy are very similar as you find in the most traffic on Adplexity.

So now we're all caught up. You know the lander, offer, ads, copy, traffic source...everything basically. But there's more...

Things that are never talked about by affiliate marketers, things that happen behind the scenes. Important things.

I'm going to highlight a couple of them right now so keep reading!

These are my three winning placements. You can see one runs on the current default bid and gets a really high win rate. (current default is $8). The one with a little higher bid of $12.00 also gets a solid win rate.

However, the one with a crazy CPM of $30.00 (is still most profitable) only gets a win rate of 23.22%.

Still worth it though as I know it makes the most money but apparently a lot of other people also know lol.

As Nativo is quite an unstable source for me I work with a 3 to 7 day average. Meaning if you work with a $100 a day budget you'd already need $300 to $700 in spend to be able to analyse your results in a stable matter.

Stable for me is where at least the EPC/Rev is stable without a 20% difference over the days.

With Nativo I noticed that some days you get really good traffic which converts well and other days it doesn't convert at all. So $1k+ days to $0 days. Which is quite annoying but I guess something you'd have to deal with if you do less than 20 conversion a day on such a relative higher CPA product.

Let's show some interesting metrics. So when I started the campaign I turned off all ad creatives with an iCTR% lower than 1 within the first 3 hours as they all had 1000+ impressions. You can see an average iCTR of 1.26%.

Average landing page CTR 34.43%. I tested direct linking but it almost got no conversions at all so wasn't worth it.

Overall CV of 0.69% and CPV of $0.79. Mainly due to the big sources with shit traffic from the first couple of days I had to filter out.

A small issue which turned into quite a significant issue was the refund and chargeback rate on Clickbank. I mean the video sales letter landers are super aggressive and therefore also convert quite well I guess, however dealing with refunds and chargebacks was not as I expected.

The rates went quite above what I thought would happen. Refund rate of maybe 1-2%..ok. But 6.45%? and then a chargeback rate of 0.81%?? That's 7.5% of revenue you're losing based on charges made.

I still work with a 30% RoI on scale when running campaigns like I always have, however....-7.5% on the Clickbank backend will give you 20% net which is too low to run campaigns for if you work on the minimum.

Fortunately this campaign went up to 55% some days so it's not an issue..but it could be.

Got another cool one for you. I think nobody would be upset with an additional 20% revenue right?

But how? That's the questions..

It's actually quite simple.

A back button redirect script.

probably over 50% of the people who click your ad will go back and not click through to the offer. What if you could show them to the offer anyway?

As I said..back button redirect script. They hit the back button to go back to the source where they came from but actually are redirect to the offer. Haha, hacker style. Really works. Added like 20% extra revenue for me.

You wan it right? So here it is:

<script type="text/javascript">
var newUrl = location.pathname + location.search;

(function(window, location) {
history.replaceState(null, document.title, newUrl+"#!/backbutton");
history.pushState(null, document.title, newUrl);
window.addEventListener("popstate", function() {
if(location.hash === "#!/backbutton") {
history.replaceState(null, document.title, newUrl);
setTimeout(function(){
location.replace("Your offer or camp url here");
},0);
}
}, false);
}(window, location));
</script>

I hope this post gives you inspiration to launch your own campaigns. If you have any questions post them!

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