I thought I would take a little time to show the Noobs some love! You guys are working so hard to get delivery that I want to make sure that you don’t make a common mistake and base the success of your campaigns on ePCs. While ePCs are a good indicator once you know your data and how different verticals perform to it, they can be very misleading and using them to set your schedule could be costing you some serious $$$$! Trust me, I have learned this from experience. eCPMs are what you are making per email sent and aren’t going to vary with delivery, offer payouts, conversion rates, etc. I have seen campaigns that looked awesome with $3+ ePCs back out to eCPMs of $0.25 or lower. ___________________Example__________________________________ Best BizOpp Ever pays me $5 per lead. I sent 1mm emails, get 5000 clicks because I am using a generic creative that drives a lot of interest. The campaign doesn’t convert so well because the creative is generic, but I still generated 200 leads or $1,000. My ePC is only $0.20, but my eCPM is $1.00 and within my target. I now mail Join My BizOpp Club to 1mm and I get paid $100 for every sale I generate. The creative I use is concise, so I only generate 500 clicks. I get a 1% click to conversion and generate 1 sales, or $500 in revenue. My ePC is $1.00, but my eCPM is only $0.50 or half of what I made mailing Best BizOpp Ever. Now which offer do I want to pick to mail to the rest of my 10mm subscribers? If I mail Best BizOpp Ever I will make $10,000, while Join My BizOpp Club will only bring in $5,000. ____________________________________________________________ Sorry if this is dumbed down… I just wanted to make it as easy as possible to grasp. I increased revenue by 20% just by switching to scheduling by eCPM. It's harder to do if you are manually working your stats, but worth it if you can get an increase of 20%! I know there is a lot to take in when you are getting in to the biz, so I hope this helps! With all of the costs associated with mailing, every little bit helps get you closer to success!
Oh yeah... networks love promoting offers by ePC because it's the only metric they have unless a mailer is willing to share with them how much mail was actually sent. I am guilty of this myself...but only after I have positive confirmation from another mailer that the deal is working for them. In case you don't know, here is how you calculate eCPMs... Revenue / Amount Sent X 1,000 $1,000/ 1,000,000 = 0.001 X 1,000 = 1.00 (Yes, I am kind of a n3rd because I <3 Math!)
Good points. Also be careful of getting too caught up in conversion rates that a network quotes. If a campaign converts at 80% and has a payout of $100, that sounds pretty awesome right? But what if it gets no clicks? Exactly.....the offer bombs. Any data set can be manipulated and skewed. The one data piece that can never be skewed is ECPM..... :thrasher:
Being an account manager for a few years, I have come to really appreciate mailers and (few networks) that actually understand these terms. When someone asks for a higher payout "just to be competitive" it really makes my eye twitch! An experienced affiliate will know not to just look at the "face value" of an offer. We all have seen the freebie offers like iPad. Well if you are a mailer and a network boasts they can give you $4 just for an email submit...dont be so quick to jump on it. You have to take into consideration their scrubs. Another word I have grown to hate... scrubs. They may offer you $4 for a simple email submit on a freebie offer, but after a 50% scrub...now where are you? Then you have a network that was willing to pay you $2.25 for that same offer but only scrub when the data was not good, like duplicates or international... or whatever legitimate reason other than just trying to be greedy. Wooosaaaaa.... I now feel a bit better now that I got that off my chest just a tad. Although it was small, it was a point that I just had to make. So please continue to share other useful informational tips...it makes my job more enjoyable!!
Point well taken people, when i deal with networks who rave over my epc's and epcm's, i giggle and say that they have no idea how many people i just dropped that offer to, was it 100k or was it 3 million. so epc's arent so accurate to me, i am still old school, cpm - ecpm Call me crazy i guess, lol
Great points on this thread, and I know I have had this conversation quite a few times lately, so let me share another way to look at some of these stats. Ecpm is always the standard, networks do push the epc as airin said because thats the info they have, but how you look at ecpm matters too. Sounds simple right? Look at emails sent and how much it earned per 1000, but this is email which differs from display, search engine traffic and lead gen in that delivery is not 100%. I won't try to tell experienced mailers which numbers they should be using, there are different theories here, but I will share some of my own theories: (purely opinion here) 1. Ecpm I based on delivered, not sent. If I am checking my delivery numbers, then of course # sent matters, so if checking how much an offer is making compared to other offers including delivery rates, I would base off of sent. If I am testing the actual offer creative, I use delivered (which is also not accurate because of junking, but still better than sent) because its the only fair way to really do an ecpm, which is based on how many impressions you had. Blocked emails do not equal an impression. 2. What is the goal of this email? First thought is money right? Not always. 1-5% of your data (after bounces, scrubbing and complainer / traps are removed) will make you 80% or more of your money, so segmenting is huge to give that data the best attention. Ecpm is king on clickers and converters, no doubt about it. But what about new data? Is ecpm what really matters here, in my opinion, no. You want to make money on it sure, but getting these people to join my opener or clicker file is far more important, so they can join the data that gets the best offers. Here, open rate and click thru rate is king since sending an offer that makes a good ecpm on your active data will not do as well here, also may get blocked more, and also could bring down the overall ecpm of the offer making it look worse than it really is. Here, you can take a shitty paying offer that gets tons of opens and clicks, as well as converts, making that data more valuable in the end by getting it to stand out as an address that will perform and increasing your cash cow data, thus increasing that 80% block of where your real revenue comes from.
