Case Study: the Rise and Fall of an Affiliate Marketing Campaign — from 100% to 9%

Today we are sharing with you a case study from Hannibal Smith, an affiliate marketer who made a profit of $2 122 by promoting an eye vision product in Ukraine. His campaign started with an ROI of over 100% but later dropped up to 9%. However, he was able to notice the downward trend, which allowed him to end the campaign with a total average ROI of 54%.

Campaign Details

Running time: 5/08/2022 - 31/10/2022
GEO: Ukraine
Affiliate Network: Nutra1
Traffic source: Facebook Ads
Offer: Oculax Expense
Adspend: $4 748.5
Income: $7 321
Profit: $2 122.5
Average ROI: 54.17%

Smith says that he hadn’t seen steady profits with vision offers until he tested this offer in the Ukraine GEO. He used the creatives supplied to him on the affiliate network and added some text adjustments to suit the GEO, and he got a working campaign.

Campaign Flow

Below is a screenshot with a breakdown of the campaign for the 2 months in which it was run.

Initially, it started with an ROI of 100%, with each lead costing between $1 - $1.5, but the longer the campaign ran, the more expensive the traffic became and the more expensive the leads. The rising CPLs made it difficult for Smith to maintain the 100% ROI that he was seeing in the beginning.

The screenshots show how the campaign depreciated over time and how the cost of a lead grew by months.

Creatives

Below are the creatives that worked best for this campaign.

Your eye will see without surgery. Record the prescription before it gets deleted.

This will improve vision by 96%. Record the prescription before it gets deleted.

Clear vision in 2 weeks. Record the prescription before it gets deleted.

Facebook Ad Accounts

Smith says that he acquired ad accounts from the ZuckerBook farming service but most of the accounts had a spending limit of up to $300. In some cases, the daily spending limit on the account even increased. So during this campaign, he had to use over 10 separate ad accounts, as some were banned during the process.

Smith says that the campaign setup was so good that there was no need to check the ad accounts everyday. The only troubles that came to disrupt it was the rising CPLs and the few accounts that got banned. However, he was running with multiple ad accounts at once so the others would cover that up.

Conclusion

This is not a campaign that makes millions and rains gold on everyone who looks at it. Rather, it is more like a well-made campaign that does what it is supposed to. Its superiority came after testing several creatives, and the winning creatives made it profitable.