Guarantee you wont lose money on Affiliate offers

I have been playing with a few new networks and some new places to promote affiliate offers of late and something has become painfully clear.

To rely on the stats given by the network is the same as dangling your cash in a shredder and flicking the on / off switch.

Typically the logic goes something like, lets have a look at the EPC for this offer and to start default bids on traffic at about a qtr of that until we get enough data to refine that.

This is the result from a new network I am trying (Not naming which one)

Quality I am sure you will agree. In my defense I was on holiday and didnt stop the test when I should have but it was a brief test at low value.

So in future I am going to use the following method for setting my default bids. (New network only)

Work out what a 2% ctr would provide me and set my bids appropriately. So if I know that the offer I want to test is going to give me $10 per conversion on avg then I will need 500 clicks to get that and 500 clicks cant cost me more than 2cents each, run away run away….

I would therefore conclude that its best not to PPC test this offer but to throw some cheap organic seo traffic at the offer to see what their data integrity looks like instead.

Anything else is burning cash until you know the network better or you get data to support theirs.