What to do if you're in the red?

For many beginners, finding themselves in the red can cause panic and a desire to quit arbitrage altogether. We'll discuss whether it's worth continuing to pour money, what needs to be analyzed and checked. If you learn from your mistakes, remove emotions, and identify the reasons correctly, you can extract useful insights.

Our checklist will help thoroughly dissect your pour and lead to thoughts on what went wrong and led to failure.

Remove emotions

Losing budget on an unsuccessful pour can happen not only to beginners. That is, the first failure by no means means that "everything is bad, arbitrage is not for me at all...". On the Internet, you can find anti-cases of entire teams where experienced guys tell how they poured thousands of dollars. Of course, failure is very demotivating, especially if a person has just started in arbitrage. But only those who do nothing do not make mistakes. Every person learned to walk in childhood, fell many times, but found the strength to get up and move on.

If there really is a goal to succeed in arbitrage, to earn well, failure should not undermine self-confidence. It is important to look at what happened with a cool head, abstracting from emotions. This is the first step. Arbitrage is stressful work, like any business, and it is important to use your head here.

No panic

After managing emotions, you can move on step by step, thoroughly analyzing each stage of the campaign.

Answer the question for yourself: is the data sample sufficient?

If the failure occurred only in the first few minutes of the pour, this is not a reason to panic. Perhaps not enough clicks have been collected, or the algorithms need more time to learn.

Example: a sum equal to the offer payout is poured into the red, but there are still hypotheses and creatives. That is, the reasonable step is to conduct additional tests, check the remaining hypotheses. It is impossible to judge whether a campaign is successful or not based on just a few clicks. You need to get at least 1,000 clicks to understand if it works or not.

Step by step and systematically analyze the numbers

Campaign data and its progress are displayed in the traffic source in the advertising account, in the affiliate program, in the tracker. What numbers are we analyzing:

• ROI. With a negative ROI, it is necessary to control the technical part. For example, a link could be broken, something could happen to the tracker, domain, redirect, API. It is desirable to check this even before pouring. However, some newbie arbitrageurs in a hurry and desire to start pouring as soon as possible can miss something, so it is worth considering the possibility of technical problems. If everything was checked, worked, but it turned out that it stopped working, you can contact the source manager, support service, find out how to solve the problem.
• CTR. There are no universal figures for what CTR is considered good. For some offers, 0.1% is already good, for others, 10% is a disaster. To identify the optimal CTR, you can study publicly available information from cases applied to your offers and categories, as well as compare with other your campaigns and periods. If it became clear that the CTR is low, it is necessary to refine the creative: rewrite the headline, text, add another image.

If the CTR is at an acceptable level, then with a greater probability, the loss of traffic occurs on the landing page. Then we leave the creative, move on to considering the landing page. We check for any deception, inconsistencies, inaccuracies, discrepancies in the texts.

CTR

CR. After analyzing your CTR, you need to analyze all conversions, focusing on your sales funnel. For example, if the funnel is creative - pre-landing - landing, then CR is studied at each stage. This is necessary to identify the bottlenecks where customers are lost. Some arbitrageurs cite 20% as the optimal conversion rate from pre-landing to landing: that is, every 1 in 5 people who were on the pre-landing page go to the landing page. This figure can be taken as a benchmark and always strive to increase it.

How to understand what to change - the landing page or the pre-landing:

• if there are few visitors transitioning from the pre-landing to the landing, with a CR below 5% - then the problem is clearly on the side of the pre-landing;
• if the CR from the pre-landing to the landing is normal, but people are not ordering anything - the landing page needs to be improved.

What problems may occur on the landing page:

• misleading, inconsistency of information - one message is indicated on the creative, another on the landing page;
• violation of logic on the landing page;
• incorrect translation, semantic errors that are read by native speakers as nonsense;
• technical problems: lead form stopped working, non-adaptive design, layout issues.

Understanding the approval process

When the campaign numbers are analyzed, it is necessary to understand what happens to the lead after they submit the order form. Almost any affiliate program indicates the approval rate for the offer. It can be used as a reference for comparing your numbers. For example: the AR is stated as 50%, but this does not mean that every second order is confirmed. One arbitrageur may have a 100% approval rate, while another may have 10%.

If it turns out that the actual AR is low, you need to understand what the problem is. For example, the problem may be with not quite quality traffic or the specifics of the product. In any case, it is necessary to write to the affiliate program manager, indicate the problem with the low approval rate, consult on why this is happening.

Analyzing the combination for burnout

There may be a situation: the webmaster successfully poured for some time, and suddenly the combination stopped working. Then you should check the parts of the combination:

• Target audience. Burnout can occur because the creative has been running for a long time and is ultimately shown to the same users. To reach a new audience, you can use different targeting settings or choose a different source.
• Creatives. In many sources - advertising, push networks, TikTok - creatives need to be changed often, literally every day or once a day. If you neglect to change the creative - burnout occurs.
• Offer. It may happen that the product is familiar to the audience, they bought and used it, so they stopped reacting to the ads. In this case, the old offer can be promoted in a new source or vice versa, take a new product and promote it in a familiar source.

When a previously working campaign goes into the red for a day, there may be problems on the technical side. Example: domain blocked, URL broken, or simply ran out of money in the account.

Realizing your strategy and approach

Novice arbitrageurs often face failure due to incorrect beliefs or ignoring the importance of tests, data collection, and analysis.

Example of a false setting: "arbitrage is easy!". Reading numerous articles, a novice thinks: you can just take an offer, copy creatives from the first pages of spy services, set up 1-2 ad groups, and wait for profit. That is, there is no study of the offer, geo, TA, hypotheses are not formulated for different approaches, calculations are not made, and even a tracker is not installed.

The approach to arbitrage and the strategy for promoting offers should take into account several aspects as a whole:

• Thorough study of the audience. You need to know everything about your customer: who they are, what culture is in the country where they live, how they react to advertising, what are their "pain points", what they like, what is important to them, and so on.
• Knowledge of the offer and the specifics of the category. For example, if a newbie arbitrageur starts working with Vision offers - it is important to understand how to promote such products in a geo, what form factor it is, how to attract people's attention, what are the advantages, what about composition, discounts, delivery, other benefits.
• Mathematics of expenses and incomes. An arbitrageur ideally should be friends with a calculator and constantly calculate: how much money to spend on a test, how much on consumables, how much income is expected according to forecasts, and so on.
• Development of different approaches and hypotheses. Example: an arbitrageur works with a weight loss offer and finds out that News, Doctor's Interviews, and Graphic Novels are popular in the geo. For each of these 3 approaches, you need to prepare a minimum of 5 creatives for testing to check all hypotheses.

Only comprehensive analytics, systematic preparation will help reduce the risks of pouring the first campaign into the red. Do not trust info charlatans who supposedly guarantee that arbitrage is so easy that a person without experience can "rake in money with a shovel" today.

If you analyze interviews, data from open sources, on average, an arbitrageur pours into the red or breaks even for the first six months. While there is a series of mistakes and learning by practice, the arbitrageur gains experience, insights that will help recoup losses and start pouring into the green. It is important to constantly analyze indicators, conduct tests, and treat mistakes as a source of valuable practical information.

Conclusion

If a campaign is poured into the red, it is a lesson that will help pour the next campaign into the green. What seems like failure at first glance can provide invaluable insights into the source, creatives, TA, approaches. In arbitrage, as in any business, a mistake can be seen as a resource for success.