Affiliates talks: Ivan Merkulov, the owner of the «Carbon» affiliate team
Here’s our interview with Ivan Merkulov, the owner of the Carbon affiliate team.
These guys drive nice traffic from Facebook and TikTok and they also develop offers for several advertisers. Ivan has shared his strategy for growing his team in 2022, told us what kind of people he wants to see on his team, and how exactly their working process is organized. We’ve got a great interview, so please, enjoy!
1. Hello, Ivan! Please tell us about yourself, your affiliate path, your ups and downs?
Hello! I came to affiliate marketing from the commodities market. At first, my partner and I tried to work as advertisers of actual products in Russia. I lost a lot of money (like a lot) because of my own mistakes and bad traffic from one affiliate program. That was my biggest fail, though it was epic. Then, I tried to establish a call center for the commodities market, as an outsource. It worked for a year and a half and brought me zero income. That was the time I started getting into online traffic, and so now I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for 5-6 years. Haven’t had any significant failures here. One of my advancements though is that it’s been my main source of income for many years. And right now, Carbon is the highlight. It is my team and we’re already 1.5 years old.
2. Can you tell us more about how your team is organized, how many publishers you have, how many managers? How do you divide responsibilities between team members? Are you looking to hire new people?
We’re a small team. At our peak, we had 10 buyers, and right now we’ve got 7. Sometimes we have to fire people too, unfortunately. As of today, we haven’t established any team leaders. My partner is responsible for traffic and we were hiring people gradually, while my partner taught them to get the right results. Then, we make our trained guys go work on their own, without assistance, and start teaching new ones. This approach still works well, and we just give our experienced guys some advice, give them new offers, and set campaign approaches.
Next year, we plan to hire more people, so maybe then we’ll have to change our interaction style. I myself can’t stop thinking about decentralizing our team, but these are just thoughts, so it’ll be a challenge.
The team’s supported by 2 creative designers, a UI designer, and a Facebook account farmer.
We’ve tried different ways to launch our campaigns: letting everyone work with any offers and GEOs, giving certain offers, dividing publishers through traffic sources. We’re still looking for the perfect system, so we decided to simply let our guys focus on what each of them does best. One works with one special offer on one source. The other one works with another offer but on two sources. The third one works on one source with 3-4 offers, and so on.
We are looking for new people. It’s not easy to get on our team because it turns out the market lacks adequate people, and we consider soft skills over hard skills. Our job openings are featured on our site, so everyone is free to try.
3. You work with several traffic sources, such as Facebook, TikTok, MT, Google. Which traffic source are you prioritizing right now and why?
TikTok for sure. myTarget is dead. We stopped trying to make that one work. And, judging by group chats, everyone thinks the same.
We weren’t really able to work with Google, so one of our goals for 2022 is to perfect our work with this source. We’ll be looking for a specialist or a team lead that’ll kickstart this direction for our team.
Facebook’s been on our nerves for 6 months, so we gave it up. We got back there just these 2 months ago (when TikTok was working weirdly). Right now, Facebook does bring us traffic, we have our own account farmer and many accounts, so it’s almost alright. And, of course, agency ad accounts help us work without getting banned.
TikTok’s been feeding us for a year already: it’s got the whole world on there, no moderation problems, no bans, no need to use anti-detect systems, proxies, or farm accounts. It’s a pleasure working there. It’s only that this source was acting weird for 2 months in October and November. Perhaps it was for Black Friday or some other TikTok issues. The point is, everything’s fine now. I spoke at Dovolny’s conference and told everything about it there.
By the way, advertisers give feedback, and products on TikTok are bought out almost as on Facebook. So you can expect a long run with TikTok.
4. Which payout models do you work with? CPA, CPL?
We choose CPA because we’re only working with one vertical right now – actual products. And those don’t really have serious offers or other payout models.
5. We saw that you once had a job opening for a designer. Some people believe that affiliates do a better job at making creatives than designers because affiliates know what transit page they’re using, so they sense what’ll drive people’s attention. Don’t you agree with this? Do you think that designers can make a great creative that’d be better than the one made by an actual affiliate?
I partially agree with this statement. If you just ask a publisher and a designer to make a creative, the publisher will make one that’ll drive more conversions because they understand what people want here. But actually, everything just depends on the work assignment – when it’s good, a designer will free publishers from a lot of excess responsibilities. This way, they can also drive traffic using their own and designer’s creatives.
We decided to hire a designer because we work with TikTok. One of the main ways to scale a campaign on TikTok is to upload new creatives. Our designer makes us 80 unique videos a day. This approach puts our efficiency on another level. We have two full-time designers, which makes our affiliates so happy.
6. Do you have your own affiliate software? If so, why did you feel like you needed one? Weren’t you satisfied with the sources available on the market?
We’re only using our own software to transfer our spending from myTarget and TkTok on Keitaro. We’re almost done developing the same feature for Facebook that’ll work without proxies. Other than that, we use ready-made programs.
7. It’s both complicated and simple to drive traffic for beginners in 2022. Simple because there’s so much information about this on the internet. And complicated because it’s hard to really get into it and apply this info in practice. What do you think, how can one start working in affiliate marketing these days?
There was always plenty of information available, but it doesn’t really help people. Somehow everyone still thinks that affiliate marketing means easy money. It may sound snobbish but I think it’s a full-grown profession in a fully developed field. It requires a lot of hard work and thinking.
Where do you start? It’s better not to. I get asked regularly about whether or not someone should get into it and I always have to talk them out of it. The way I see it, an affiliate is an entrepreneur. You’ve got your own budget, risks, products (i.e. traffic) – how is this not entrepreneurship? So, you have to start just like with any other profession: get on the theory, analyze and filter it well. Then join a team (i.e. get a job). Get yourself some experience, perhaps you’ll even have to grow and get promotions, from being an account farmer to a junior publisher, senior publisher, team lead. And then you get to decide whether or not you want to go solo (i.e. open your own agency).
Any attempts to win over affiliate marketing fast will always result in losing money.
8. Name a profitable European GEO and why you find that one especially profitable.
Well, anti-age products sell well in Eastern Europe, in Romania, for example.
The reasons are pretty standard: their buyer persona isn’t so tried yet, so they believe affiliates’ moves. They have fewer buying choices, cheaper traffic, and many similarities with our buyers from Russia and the CIS.
9. How do you pass advertising restrictions and Facebook? Do you use one of the available generators? Do you give Facebook real ID documents or make up your own? And do you see any patterns in advertising restrictions?
I guess our farming department would tell you more about it, but the majority of accounts we buy are already past these restrictions. Then, we use document generators to pass restrictions on those accounts that do get them. There are a ton of such services out there.
There’s always the same pattern: if Zuckerberg presses his button very hard – you won’t pass restrictions. When he releases it – you’re good to go. Overall, prolonged account farming helps better, as well as correctly mimicking a real live user.
10. Do you think that buying proxies is necessary when working with accounts? Some affiliates use VPN and they’re fine. And if proxies are a must, then do you choose mobile or resident?
We work with proxies, resident ones for our accounts’ GEOs, usually, it’s Ukraine. This is what our whole team does. Proxies are very problematic as well, especially when they’re hard to find. We have a bunch of sellers, but we usually buy from a trusted one. And sometimes they don’t have any, so we buy them as they get the new ones. Right now, it’s fine. But if we have 5 times as many accounts, then it’ll be a problem, we’ll have to look for a solution.
We’re trying to make our own mobile proxies at the moment, so we’ll see.
11. How is TikTok’s moderation process doing? They used to have fully manual moderation, and right now the first step of their moderation process is algorithmic. How hard is it to launch a campaign for a gray offer these days?
We drive traffic using agency ad accounts, so we don’t work with gray offers. But all semi-gray topics are good to go. Anti-age, hair growth works well, though it depends on the country. It’s harder to pass European moderation than, say, South East Asia.
You’d need a more complex campaign approach to drive traffic to a gray offer. Let the readers think of it themselves.
12. In your job openings, you say that you grant access to Facebook’s agency ad accounts. Please, tell us about them, how much easier is it to drive traffic from them? How does pre-moderation work there and where can you get these accounts?
These accounts are available on the market but under the meanest conditions. Our conditions allow us to work with profit, though we had to work a lot to get them. It depends on who you know, the right management, and a couple of tricks. But at least these accounts are normal.
All creatives and landing pages pass pre-moderation, the agency’s team helps us to brush campaigns up before launching. After you get approved, you’re free to drive traffic, you just have to put more on your deposit.
Nothing can be launched without getting approved. It’s our obligation towards the agency and we carry them out.
13. A lot depends on trends on TikTok. Trends are started by bloggers. Have you ever tried to advertise affiliate networks’ offers through bloggers? Please share your experience and thoughts on this matter.
Now, we haven’t worked with bloggers, but now everything depends on trends. The main advantage of TikTok is that it makes everything that’s already died out on Facebook work. If an offer was or still is successful on Facebook, then it’s almost a 100% guarantee that it’ll be a success on TikTok.
14. Do you use manual bidding on TikTok? It works differently for different GEOs. What do you do?
We mostly use automated bidding on Facebook, especially when the first couple of times working with a new offer. This approach gives the best results. manual bids are only valid after driving a significant number of leads and with a nicely trained pixel. Different publishers have different strategies. For example, when I did manual bids, I used to set a low betting limit (0.5-0.7 of my current CPL) for a current campaign after driving a lot of leads, and then I increased the budget. Usually, the number of leads wasn’t that big, but the cost was nice. You can do the same with duplicated campaigns or ad sets.
15. You have significant traffic volumes, so please tell us, what server do you use and why?
Thank you, although there isn’t that much traffic. At least we try to drive way more.
We use an ordinary VPS server of one of the well-known within the affiliate circle host.
Well, we’ve been working with this host since the dawn of time, so we’re also using their server. When we started bringing our spending and loading our tracker, we upgraded to CPU 6 and RAM 12GB and optimized our scripts.
16. Have you ever been disconnected from an offer for a low buying out rate? What can you do in this kind of situation?
No, it’s never happened. As a matter of fact, one of the main principles of our team has been that we have to drive a lot of traffic. I make sure that it’s always the case because reputation is the most valuable thing one can have. We refuse to work with sketchy GEOs, always work with correct age groups, so we even have a 69-73% buying out rate on TikTok in Russia. The lowest rate was about 60% for some cosmetic offers, but these always have them lower. The solution is simple – don’t drive bad traffic.
We have an advertiser that I’ve known for 5 years and for these 5 years I’d been driving their traffic solo, and now I do this with my team. This is the kind of a relationship you can be proud of, I believe. And in case a challenge comes up, there’s always a solution – increase the price on your landing page, change the age group, change your GEO and delivery terms, increase your average bill, etc.
17. Give some advice to those that have read the entire article.
Work with your mind instead of working 24/7.