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A lot of words have been written about 2020. It’s been an absolute mess but also taught us to enjoy new opportunities, be thankful for the small things in life, and enjoy the here and now because none of us knows what tomorrow will bring. But wait, what if “tomorrow” is BLACK FRIDAY?  OK now, that’s a whole other story because we all know what happens on Black Friday, right? People SHOP!

If you live on planet earth and into affiliate marketing, you’re probably feeling the rush around the Black Friday shopping craze, and so are we.  We are giving you a sneak peek at the mindset of an eCommerce Expert, a long-time affiliate who runs eCommerce offers for years now, and chatted with him a little about his strategy, tips for dominating eCommerce offers, and sharing his wisdom with the world.  Hopefully, this will give you some inspiration for your campaigns and help you seize new opportunities this week because time flies, and Black Friday never really starts on a Friday. 

Let’s start with some Q&A

How long have you been in affiliate marketing, and what made you choose eCommerce as a top vertical?

I have been in Affiliate Marketing since 2005. eCommerce offers are great scalability opportunities. Especially nowadays, people stay and work more from home. We see a tremendous increase in sales orders and opportunities to promote new products, brands, etc.

Any tips for succeeding in this shopping season?

Start with good Market research for what is trending, look for popular products, hot brands, etc. this is highly recommended.

Editor’s Note: We recently added a new feature to our Traffic Counter to help you explore traffic volumes per keyword. This essential tool can be a huge help when conducting your market research since it gives you a glance at each keyword’s amount of potential. The volumes are based on your campaign type, GEO’s, and OS and are available for Domain Redirect campaigns only. Check it out!

How was 2020 for you when running eCommerce campaigns, and what do you expect 2021 to look like?

2020 has been a strange year with all that is happening with Covid-19, but overall the eCommerce sector grew a lot. I am expecting a similar trend for at least in the first half of 2021.

What are your tips for newbie affiliates?

Try to find niche/markets that are not saturated yet and can still be scalable. Try to rely on Data analysis to spot trends, opportunities, etc., by using industry-leading software tools. Diversify your campaign portfolio and do not rely on just a few. Pay attention to key metrics such as Average Order Value/CPA per offer, Cancellation Rates, Average Conversion Rate.

ECommerce + Domain Redirect Keyword Campaign

Editor’s Note: We wanted this blog post to be a little more straight forward for you guys, so we asked our expert to share one of his latest eCommerce campaigns. He chose to focus on a keyword-targeted Domain Redirect campaign. This is a perfect combo when promoting eCommerce offers since you get to target extremely high-intent customers looking for their next bargain online,by using desirable and powerful keywords.

Campaign Overview  

• Ad Format: Domain Redirect
• Offer: Thomann.de (Dynamic CPS)
• Pricing Model: CPM
• Device Type: Mobile, Desktop, Tablet
• Campaign Period: October 1, 2020 – October 31, 2020
• GEO: Multiple
• Total Spent: $169.45
• Total Revenue: $960.61
• Net Profit: $791.16
• ROI: 466%

The offer

Thomann.de is Europe’s biggest music store that offers popular brands, low-priced alternatives, and many free extras for musicians. They have a huge range of instruments and studio-, light- and sound technology. They are located in Germany but ship worldwide.

Editor’s Note: This isn’t the obvious choice when creating an eCommerce campaign (and that’s also what makes it so good!), but that only demonstrates the importance of having good market research. Thomann.de is a great offer, super relevant, and trendy due to the rising interest in developing new hobbies during Covid-19 time. When choosing your offer, a word of advice is to try to be very open-minded and think outside the “vertical” box.

Budget

That particular offer has a high average basket size value. We want to make sure that we can target the best possible sources before we start optimizing. Therefore, we started with a fairly high budget of $100

GEO

Thomann.de has a large audience worldwide (see SimilarWeb Screenshot); hence we found that we should not limit the offer to specific GEOs, and we opted for a Global Targeting.

That approach seemed to have worked well since we did receive traffic for multiple countries:

Keywords

We targeted multiple keywords, which can be divided into two different categories:

• Keywords highly relevant to the brand, mistypes, and misspellings of the brand name.
• Keywords targeting users with a clear interest in what the brand is offering, keywords relevant to the brand’s product, etc.

Some example of keywords you can see below:

Editor’s Note: Use our Domain Redirect Keyword Tool to expand and broaden your search with more associated keywords to your initial keyword selected in a click of a button.

Campaign Results

After running this campaign for a period of a full month, these were our final results:

• Total Spent: $169.45
• Total Revenue: $960.61
• Net Profit: $791.16
• ROI: 466%

All in all, 101 leads were obtained from a total of 2,100 impressions (clicks)

The campaign exceeded our expectations. Another example of how profitable eCommerce can be when you follow a specific strategy and go for brands/products that can be highly rewarding and relevant to the current market trends.