Affiliates talks: Traffic. Deals
Prepare yourselves, we’ve got another great piece of interview for you today. Nikita and Andrey, the owners of the Traffic.Deals team, have gladly accepted our invite today. We’ve talked about accounts, campaign tests, traffic sources, different ad approaches, proxies, and many more. Get yourself comfortable and enjoy the reading, it’s got a lot of interesting insights.
1. Hello guys! Please tell us about yourselves, how did you start in affiliate marketing, how much money, time, and nerve cells did you spend before you had started gaining profits?
Nikita: Hi! I came to affiliate marketing through working as a developer for a team of guys that were already skilled enough, they needed good tech services. The first months we worked together, we drove nice profit on nutra campaigns (mind me it was 3 years ago) and media buyers that worked for interest were practically hitting the jackpot back then. Later I grew out of the team and decided to create my own with a friend. We rented our first office, hired our first employees, two of our other friends. Based on my experience, we started pretty steadily and made our first 100-300 thousand rubles. We did understand which GEOs meant what for us and what exactly we can make with them. This is what we have now, we try not to lose our steam.
Andrey: Nikita and I came to affiliate marketing about a year and a half ago, we both were heading towards this niche, so we gathered our resources and just started.
We’ve spent a lot of nerve cells, much more than money (and we did not even have that much money back then, we used to borrow it a lot and start like that).
Those weren’t the best or easiest of times but we did well even though the overall approach to affiliate marketing was different those days.
All of Facebook's breakdowns were always taken too personally, we used to think that affiliate marketing was dead, which caused us to lose a lot of drive and energy.
2. How many people are there in your affiliate team? Do you need any helpers? If so, then what can you offer and what kind of people are you looking for?
Yes, we do have a team. Right now, it’s divided into several offices, each of which has 2-3 teamleads that have 2-3 publishers working under their command. We aren’t looking to hire right now.
3. Please tell us, what traffic sources do you work with and what are the prospects?
Facebook has always been and always will be our main traffic source. We’ve tested Google and TikTok too. Google’s showed some results, but we never became fond of TikTok.
4. Which payout model do you prefer, CPA or CPL?
CPL, of course, is more preferable, it’s practically transparent in its measurements. We usually base our decision on the offer, then we test it. After, we estimate under what rate and what percent we can drive that campaign we were testing and, if we get the conditions we ask for, we just go for it.
5. What types of accounts do you usually work with? Do you use farmed accounts to launch campaigns or just to manage other campaigns?
We do not have a certain pack of accounts defined now, so we’re using everything we get to. Farmed, rented, automatically registered accounts. The ones we use the most are farmed. You know, it’s different every day or even every hour. We cannot give you a decisive answer here.
6. What do you think, if CPM is too expensive but leads’ cost is acceptable or even below average, what does one do to this kind of account? Do they need to continue driving traffic, stop the campaign, or scale their budget?
It’d be dumb to stop this campaign since it drives cheap leads. I’d continue with it and, if the campaign’s budget has the resources, I’d also play around with it.
7. How do you scale your work right now? By using more accounts? Or do you duplicate your ad sets and ad campaigns?
We always make the doubles (2-3 of our ad sets) because, as it happens, one of them is always unprofitable. The sizes to which we expand our campaigns always depend on the number of active campaigns and, consequently, the budget we have for them.
8. Have you ever tried driving nutra traffic without cloaking your content? Meaning, using a website that fully corresponds with Facebook’s requirements? If you have had such an experience, then please share.
We have thought about making our pre-landing pages whiter but we never did.
9. Which European GEO has the most potential right now and what ROI can one achieve there, with the right approach?
Europe always comes with eligible payout rates, oftentimes they even provide an approval guarantee. There’s not much difference in the country, really: Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Poland – all of these will bring you at least x2 of the resources you spend, considering that you have picked your warriors right (promo/creatives/ad copy). Right now, we’re able to have a 200-250% ROI with one of the GEOs I mentioned above.
10. Before you test an offer or a GEO, do you study its population, its mentality, purchasing power, and other stats? Or do you just consider your previous experience with those GEOs?
We tend to count on our previous experience. Right after we see the offer and GEO couple, we can already pretty much estimate our profit.
11. What proxies do you use, resident or mobile? Perhaps you have your own proxy farm or do you share your mobile internet?
We use resident proxies at the moment, from different providers. At some point, we were often using USB-4G/LTE modems.
12. When you conduct split tests of your promo materials, how many landing and pre-landing pages do you usually test? How do you divide that traffic and that criteria do you measure the results by?
We usually take 3-4 pre-landing pages (regardless of the fact that they go with a fill-out form or a landing page), give each of them an equal amount of traffic, and then watch their dynamics. The traffic is divided into streams set for bots or moderators and target users. The result of such split testing is usually visible with the first clicks.
(a result of a split test with such metrics as clicks, unique clicks, landing page clicks, landing page CTR, number of conversions, and CR)
13. What is bringing you better conversions right now, videos or static banners? What should the ultimate CTR be for nutra campaigns (adult, weight loss offers, etc.)?
We always focus on banners. Video creatives tend to bring worse results, even though they can spend more of your budget. As for us, our CTR is always 5-10%, depending on how blunt the creative is.
14. What do you think, what are the key aspects for successful nutra campaigns these days?
Secure and unique tools (so, trackers, domains, white pages, accounts, payout cards). If you use a commonly known campaign launch plan, then you need to improve it yourself (by using farmed accounts, warming the audience up while driving the campaign or before). Overall, Facebook is so different for everybody and the ways you use to work with it are very much individual.
15. According to your experience, which way brings more conversions: a pre-landing page and landing page or just a landing page with a fill-out order form?
Oftentimes, a pre-landing page with a fill-out form shows the best results. but even right now we have such active approaches that use both pre-landing and landing pages.
16. How reasonable and relevant are spy-services right now? Do these help you or do you use them almost never? If you do like to use them, then what exactly is it that you like about them?
We don’t normally use them but sometimes we do have the urge to see what others are doing. It’s rare, but sometimes we start working with new verticals. So, to see what kind of creatives are used there, we study out our target GEO in a spy-service. Lately, I’ve been using AdHeart.
17. Do you favor automation or do you prefer to do everything manually? Please tell us, what automation software do you use and what do you do with your own hands?
Automation of the whole working process is our main goal right now, it’s what we’re trying to do by developing our own automated campaign launch tool. We’ve tested the Dolphin software and it does work well with a lot of routine and repetitive tasks that our publishers do manually. We aren’t using automated launches at the moment because Facebook is extremely unstable and we have to change and test campaigns all the time.
18. Give some advice to those that read the whole article.
Test more, and don’t stop on just one GEO or vertical, you have a much more profitable campaign approach somewhere near you. And don’t just focus on one offer, I can speak from my experience that the same vertical and the same GEO can show vastly different outcomes with different offers. Change your supplies, too – the less you use one routine way for your launches, the longer will your campaign approach bring you conversions.