Complacency – self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies
In any business, complacency can kill profit. People as a species tend to be easily satisfied. Look at how many people work for $50,000 a year and are thrilled to get a $2,500 raise. If they got a $10,000 raise they would probably wipe the bosses ass for the rest of the year as an added responsibility.
$2,500 A Year Raise = $6.84 Per Day*
$10,000 A Year Raise = $27.39 Per Day*
*Amortized Over 365 Days
My point here is that a false sense of satisfaction can kill your profitability.
Here is a story that relates to affiliate marketing:
I had been running an offer for months. Many months in fact. When I first started the campaign the network I was running on was the only network that had this offer, or any offer like it. I normally like to split test a few different offers to see where it converts best. Obviously in this situation that was not possible. So the campaign was profitable and doing around .15 cent EPC. I always kept an eye on the campaign and it was always profitable so I just let it be and didn’t really touch it much.
Fast forward and the conversions were declining on the offer (probably was getting scrubbed in my opinion). This got me into action mode and I started looking high and low for a comperable offer. I found one, popped it into a rotation and holy bejeeses I got a .60 cent EPC. That is a huge increase. I thought maybe it was just some lucky traffic as the first few clicks but close to 4,000 clicks later that day, the traffic held up with that conversion rate.
My complacency lost me thousands of dollars.
This should teach you a lesson. Never be complacent. Always be tweaking and you will be a success in this business.
Definitely, I have similar experiences like this where I had a great campaign running steady every day and I was satisfied with it. Then 2 months later I finally decided to throw up some new ads (on facebook) just for shits and giggles and my CTR went up 400%, so my bids went down a ton and traffic poured in like crazy, turned it from decent money every day to amazing just from making some new ads…just goes to show, constantly optimizing and trying new things can pay off huge.
I agree to an extent but also disagree with your analysis as well.
1. You can’t divide salary by 365 days a year as if you were an entrepreneur because employees simply don’t work 365 days a year. A more accurate analysis would have been based on the average of 2080 work hours.
2. Most people settle with pay raises of pathetic figures like $2500 and $10k because they’re ignorant and don’t know any better. Not that their happy with it necessarily but because they’re too dumb to know the different and accept this as a norm (after all, its what their taught).
That said, I do agree that you can always strive to do better for sure. The only thing is, for something as little as $0.15 EPC, I would have tried a different campaign that could scale much higher, beyond even a meager $0.60 EPC, especially if you’re doing volume on it.
another point to make on the 9-5’er salary is inflation.
My wife’s boss made a huge deal about giving her a $1.5/hr raise and her other employees rejoiced in her “sticking it to the man”….
Unfortunately her grinch husband pointed out her raise underpaced inflation for that year. Meaning that her other friends and coworkers actually lost earning power by keeping the same (crappy) job. Ironically her line of work is not touched by economy since people always get sick.
Just saying you could add another line to that calculation to prove your point even further. Inflation rate for 2008 is almost 4% even with the market’s downturn http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/HistoricalInflation.aspx so that 5% raise is actually far less.
How did you drive traffic to an offer making you $0.15 EPC since CPC must be below that? Organic?
@Phrench – Cheap traffic.
It might still be little luck maybe… i had days when campaigns gone to 500% roi from 50% roi for one day, then back to the normal 50% roi. This is less likely on 4000 clicks… but still possible.
@Vlad – Your completely right. Weird stuff happens.