Does your traffic actually make you money?

It’s one thing buying traffic.

It’s another thing to know if it’s making you money!

If you browse the forums, which are generally full of people who don’t know what they’re talking about telling others how to do things, the forum consumers logic goes, you should be looking to get your money back almost instantly. At least within a few days and at the very outside a month.

That’s the logic I used to subscribe to.

After all, wherever you look there are people saying the same thing.

But here’s the scooby…

I’ve never, ever, been able to make a return on my advertising spend (which is all buying traffic is) that fast.

That’s not to say that some people don’t make a return that fast. I’m sure there are plenty who do. These are the folk who test, test, test and test a bit more.

I’m just not one of them.

And I’m probably never going to be!

Everything changed for me when I was sitting down for lunch with some of the senior team at Agora. We were chatting over what was working and what wasn’t.

I flat out asked how long it takes them to recoup their advertising spend.

The answer…

They aim for twelve months, but sometimes it can take a bit longer.

WAIT!

Let’s look at that again.

They aim to break-even on their advertising spend within a year, but sometimes it can take longer.

I thought I’d been generous with 3 months, but clearly I was way out.

So… I went and built my own tracking platform so I could see how many leads were active in each campaign, how much they were costing and how much revenue they generated.

Then I organised my cash-flow so that I didn’t expect to get my advertising spend back for eighteen months (if it’s earlier that’s great).

And now… I’m waiting to see the results!

Oh yeah, I also changed the volume of advertising. If I’ve got to wait a year or longer to see results, then I want to test as many sources and campaigns at once as possible.

Currently I’m working with two companies and have twenty three campaigns running across them. I will add in two or three more companies in January and take it from there.

The results?

Waaayyy to early to tell.

But thirteen of the campaigns have made sales, we shall just have to wait and see if they’ll make enough to be profitable.

The lesson of the story:

Don’t expect to make a return on your advertising spend overnight. In 2018 plan your advertising so that you can wait a year for it to break-even. Not ideal, but if you want to scale to the size of Agora, it’s something you’re gonna need to do!

Ciao,

Michael