Leaving your campaigns unattended

One of the main reasons we get into affiliate marketing is to get away from the rigid structure of a day job.  The last thing we want is to be tied to our campaigns like a normal job.  But how can you leave your campaigns running when you are not around to watch them?

There is no question that when you are first bringing a campaign up to speed, it needs a lot of frequent attention.  But once you have a good campaign dialed in, you should have some room to breathe.  This topic came to me, because as I write this I am traveling in pretty remote areas and have not had internet access for over 2 days.   Am I worried about my campaigns with huge daily spends running all alone?  Well, to be honest a little, but not too much.  I have a few systems in place that allow me to leave things alone when I have to.

Budget Limits -  Many of my campaigns run without budgets or ridiculously high budgets that could never be reached.  But before I left, I switched on budgets just above the average daily spend.   That way if something crazy happens while I’m gone, it should top out if it hits the cap.

Server Monitors – Hosting outages are really the Achilles heel of affiliate campaigns.  Sending huge PPC spends to a landing page that’s down is death.   Although you can’t really prevent it, you can monitor the servers and be paged if there is an outage.  There are tons of free and paid server monitoring systems out there.  In my opinion landing page uptime alerts are critical to every campaign.

Affiliate managers – I suggest having your account manager’s numbers in your phone at all times.  If something important were to happen either your end or theirs, you can be reached by phone.   I also like to ping them to give them a heads up if I will away.

If you take these steps, you should at least be able to forget about your campaigns for a while without panicking every 10 minutes.

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7 Comments »

Comment by WayneDog

2008-06-29 14:54:18

Server monitors should be in place at all times regardless of whether you are home working as usual or away on vacation. I learned that the hard(expensive) way a few years back. Now I have a solution in place that not only checks my server regularly but also looks for certain text on my landing pages to make sure they are still displaying since server downtime is not the only thing that can go wrong.

Make sure to exclude the IP that pings your server in your tracking system as well to make sure it’s not throwing off stats.

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Comment by PPC Fool

2008-06-29 23:19:01

Any server monitor recommendations?? Funny I’m also traveling with limited access to my campaigns …

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Comment by Chad

2008-06-30 14:51:53

Ya, check out this post for more info:

http://www.cdfnetworks.com/dont-forget-to-monitor-your-landing-pages/

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Comment by Janet

2008-06-30 04:44:49

MMmmmmm, even with your good ideas in place, it does not sound like the kind of business model that I was aspiring to. Doesn’t it bother you that it is such a hands-on business? I want to have less stress in my life….any thoughts appreciated.

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Comment by Niche Affiliate Marketing

2008-06-30 16:18:22

Great points Chad.

One of the great things about affiliate marking is that you can leave your auto-pilot site or ppc campaign unattended for weeks and go off on a vacation or something while still making money.

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Comment by Matt Larson

2008-07-01 02:44:06

Hey Chad,

Great post - can you give some concrete examples of what you would need to contact your AM for in case of emergency. Besides bumps or background information before starting a campaign, I’ve never really utilized them as well as we should have.

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Comment by Chad

2008-07-01 03:03:10

Well, for example if your conversion rate drops below a certain threshold, you may have them contact you to see whats up. If you are doing a lot of volume, they will do this for you.

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