Case Study: Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (Low Price) + Instagram

Traffic source: Instagram (targeted ads)

Spend: $2,000 (+/- $300)

Revenue: $4,370

Profit: $2,370 (+/- $300)

Campaign duration: January 16, 2018 – January 23, 2018.

Offer: http://m1-shop.ru/ofersmy/add/1614

Affiliate network: M1-shop.ru

Hey everyone!

I decided to share my story about a pretty solid run on the “Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Replica” offer. Just a heads-up — no screenshots from the ad account, as it was deactivated a long time ago.

Choosing the offer

The long, dry (profit-wise) holiday season was long behind me, and I still couldn’t get anything to stick. My budget was visibly shrinking — every day I’d scroll through my feed hoping to find “the one” offer that would turn things around. Then one day I came across a bunch of smartphone replicas — Samsung and iPhone knockoffs. I’d worked with phone replicas before (pretty successfully), so I figured I’d try to cash in on familiar territory. I tested two Samsung models: Galaxy S8 and Galaxy Note 8, both at low prices. One thing that appealed to me was that the Caucasus region wasn’t excluded from the geo. And people there love status symbols. The Galaxy S8 just didn’t perform for me — at best it broke even. Maybe I just didn’t nail the creatives. But the Galaxy Note 8 clicked immediately, from the very first creative.

The Creative

I only had one creative, and it was made in the simplest way possible. Yes, I know the “right” approach is to test a whole batch of creatives, but I like doing things my own way:

1. Found the official promotional video on YouTube, cut out everything that felt unnecessary. Made the video square by cropping the sides (used Camtasia for editing).
2. First I pulled out the audio onto a separate track and deleted it — easier to do before cutting the video into segments. Then I kept only the best moments from the promo and assembled them into one video sequence. Added music I liked.
3. My video was exactly one minute long. I would have made it longer to fit in more info, but Instagram’s one-minute limit forced my hand.
4. I don’t like text overlays — usually I just add an arrow and the word “Shop.” In this case I used text to cover unnecessary on-screen text from the original promo.

 

Here’s how the final video turned out:

Unfortunately the ad copy also got lost with the dead account, so I’m reproducing it from memory:

Warehouse clearance on branded smartphones! Samsung Galaxy Note 8 replica for only $123! Order now — hit SHOP

Line 1 with feature (from landing page)

Line 2 with feature

Line 3 with feature

Line 4 with feature

Fast delivery nationwide, pay on delivery! Hit SHOP — elevate your status!

I also added emoji throughout the copy: fire, lightning bolt, checkmarks, etc. All the product specs were pulled directly from the landing page to make the copy look more credible. I intentionally included the price in the copy to boost conversions — the low price itself acts as an extra hook.

Campaign Settings

Geo: Russia

Placement: Instagram feed

Gender: M/F

Age: 18–65+

Bid: Auto

Billing: Impressions

Delivery type: Standard

 

Running the campaign:

I ran for conversions on auto-bidding.

The offer payout was solid from the start — $11.50 — but I messaged the M1 manager and asked for a bump, and they added $0.60 to every order. So $12.15 total. Pretty decent, right? On the evening of January 16th I launched the campaign with a $770 daily limit. And yes, I mean $770, not a typo — a speaker from M1 at a December conference explained the benefits of starting with a high daily budget.

In short: setting a high daily budget of $770–$1,500 at launch lets you run tests very quickly and makes scaling massively simpler. When an ad set catches with this approach, it immediately delivers the maximum number of leads per day, meaning the affiliate doesn’t have to constantly fiddle with the campaign, bumping the budget up 40% every 12 hours (or however people usually do it), which attracts moderation attention and then means days of waiting for the cost per lead to stabilize.

Of course, high budgets come with downsides too — you need to watch your dashboard closely and refresh the stats often (especially during testing), because money burns fast. You can easily blink and end up deep in the red. Anyway, before I’d even spent the first few hundred, I was getting slammed with orders. I was thrilled and left everything running overnight.

Morning came and the excitement dropped a notch: the stats showed quite a few trash orders. Which, honestly, you’d expect when running a low-price offer with Caucasus geo included. Either way, the campaign was profitable, and I didn’t stop it — I just dropped the daily limit to $300.

On top of that, the offer payout was increased, and everything ran smoothly from there. You can clearly see the EPC spike in the screenshot:

Results:

While the week-long run with the Samsung offer performed pretty well, I ended up moving on — another offer had caught fire with better profit and higher volume, and I didn’t have enough working capital to run both at once. But that’s a whole other story I’ll tell you later. Either way, both the creative and the offer still had untapped potential. So if you’re the first person to read this case study and launch with my exact creative setup — you’ll see solid profit. And for those who put their head into optimizing and improving on this case — the offer will stay profitable for much longer!

You can register with the top product affiliate network (if you haven’t already) by clicking this link.

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Wishing everyone profitable campaigns — keep pushing forward!