Wow! Very helpful! Lots of intel packed in here. Thank you so much Jon!

Hey, Nick. Affiliate ads are always challenging, but I don’t hate what you suggest. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Traffic campaign if you are going to optimize for the button click. Instead, you would use either the Sales or Engagement objective with the Website conversion location, then select that event you’ve created for the button click. I would then make sure to change the attribution setting in the ad set to 1-day click. It’s not guaranteed success, but it’s certainly worth trying.

As for the awareness campaign along with middle funnel ads, you should always experiment. But I’d caution you that unless this is for a high ticket offer, everything beyond that primary campaign could end up being a waste of money. Just be sure to monitor it.

My theory is that I am sending data back that is more unique than what most of my competitors are sending back, who are optimizing for purchases… which means i am signing up for cheap remnant traffic. I know that the quality of traffic is lower, but that doesn't matter because the vendor doesn't care how many people make it to their sales page. The purchase qualifies them. And I will be tracking ROAS, to make sure that I am profitable.

By the way, I am also planning on using an awareness campaign to introduce myself and a big middle of funnel audience with lots of compelling content that subtly leads to a landing page visit.

I won’t say never, but considering how optimization works it would likely lead to bad results. When you initially optimize for engagement, those results tend to be low quality. It doesn’t mean that these people are actually interested in your video. There are ways that the optimization can take advantage of weaknesses in placements, for example, to get more and cheaper views. Using this pool as your starting point for trying to get purchases is unlikely to be more effective than simply optimizing for purchases from the beginning — and you’ll spend more because you had to run two campaigns to do it.

Again, that’s my expected result. But always test.

I think you’re referring to custom events, not custom conversions. And that’s really the point here. There should be no difference in the way ads are delivered if you’re optimizing for the same event. It’s the performance goal and conversion event, not the objective, that ultimately determines how your ads are delivered.