I'm working in online advertising since 1998 and finally decided to start my own blog.

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OPTIMIZATION

How to make profitable campaigns with PUSH notification traffic from Megapu.sh

Posted By One Comment October 23, 2018

PUSH notification AD format has been gaining lot’s of traction lately among affiliates from around the world, being used across multiple verticals and niches. Many see PUSH as the descendent of the POP traffic format, as that has been under scrutiny from Google for a long time … though they are still failing at blocking it and POPs continue to be served in the billions per day 🙂 But whatever happens to POPs, it’s always a good idea to test a new format, isn’t it?

WHAT ARE PUSH NOTIFICATIONS?

First of all, how do these PUSH notifications work? I’m sure you’ve seen one of those small alert windows, asking for your permission to send you notification. It can look like the one on the screenshot below…

Once a user grants this permission, it’s possible to send them push notification at anytime of the day, as often as you like… regardless of whether they are browsing the site they agreed to get pushes from or not. Obviously, they can still revoke the permission at anytime, so it’s wise to not abuse the system and keep the amount of pushes at a reasonable rate. Annoy the users to much and they will “unsubscribe”. The screen below shows what a push notification message actually looks like, both on a desktop device or mobile phone.

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BOT traffic – How to detect fake hits and what to do about it!

Posted By 10 Comments April 28, 2017

One of the biggest annoyances for every paid-traffic affiliate marketer is dealing with the bot traffic, which results from the high amount of various BOT’s, that are surfing the internet. According to some estimates, more than half of all internet traffic is actually caused by BOTs in one form or another – crawlers, spiders, rippers … some are legit tools, some not so much.

There is not much we can do about the google crawler, for example, SE crawlers are an acceptable part of the internet ecosystem. There are many legit reasons for running automatic systems that mimic user behavior, so I’m not gonna complain about such tools at all.

But what really SUCKS, is BOTs that are deployed by fraudsters, in order to defraud advertisers and media buyers. There is a whole lot of cheaters, who create ton’s of sites with fake traffic and sell these BOT traffic impressions to various traffic networks.

To get an idea about how HUGE this problem actually is, read this Forbes article : https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/12/20/methbot-biggest-ad-fraud-busted/

Some traffic networks do their best to detect this fake traffic, but many of them just turn a blind eye to the problem – every impression they can sell brings them profit, whether it’s real or fake … so some networks simply don’t care and act like the problem is not theirs to solve.

One way or another, BOTs don’t buy, so we don’t want them in our campaigns, or at least as low amount as possible. Since these clicks totally screw up the optimization process, is in the interest of every affiliate, to detect them and block placements/sources with too high % of fraudulent traffic.

When optimizing a new campaign, you need to make sure that you are working with human traffic, it’s completely pointless to attempt any optimization with fake BOT traffic –

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BlackLists or WhiteLists? What should you focus on when buying traffic?

Posted By 6 Comments March 29, 2017

Every traffic network out there has both good and bad publishers in their portfolio. Publishers are guys/companies who run sites or apps, that they sell ad spots on. That’s how we, the affiliates, can buy traffic from them. The problem is, not every publisher is a honest person, some are flat out assholes who code BOTs and sell them to us, scamming us for money and wasting our time.

Unfortunately, we cannot count on the traffic networks to solve the problem completely, because even in case of BOT traffic, they still make their commission. That’s why many networks turn a blind eye to this problem …

On top of that, some cheaters are pretty good coders, so detecting advanced BOTs is not so easy. So even the honest networks have a problem catching all the crap. One way or another, pretty much any traffic source at least offers the option to pause/block specific placements that are not performing for us and/or use Blacklists or Whitelists. A placement can be a site, app or a specific ad spot, depending on the network and traffic type.

But there can be many reasons for blocking a placement, not just BOT traffic … just as there are many reasons for targeting particular placements only. In this article, I will explain what White and Black lists are, why and how to use them, whether one is better than the other and why that is the case…

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How to improve the CVR (Conversion) and CTR (Click Through) of your Landing Pages?

Posted By One Comment March 06, 2017

Landing pages are like salespeople, they have dramatic effect on the conversion rates of our campaigns. We all know that a good Landing Page (LP) can mean the difference between a profitable and a losing campaign. In case you’re not familiar with the Landing Page concept, please read my older article that deals with Landing Pages and explains why you have to use them : http://www.matuloo.com/landing-pages-what-they-are-and-why-use-them/

There are two main performance factors, that determine the quality of a Landing Page. One is the CTR (Click Through Rate) and the other one is the CVR (Conversion Rate). In order to profit, we need to reach good numbers for both of them.

This might sound as an easy task, but it’s not 🙂 The fact is, these two usually work AGAINST each other. The higher the CTR, the lower the CVR. And vice versa, LPs with high CVR usually have low CTR. I will get back to why this is the case a bit later on.

Some affiliates would argue that all that matters is a high Conversion Rate, which is true to some extent … but if you have a Landing Page with very low CTR, the high conversion rate will not save you.

Let’s take a look at an example.

The CTR % tells us how many visitors of the LP actually clicked on something on it, usually some Call To Action (CTA) button. CVR means how many of those who clicked on something, and got to the offer, actually converted into a subscriber, member or made a purchase.

LP1 : 20% CTR and 10% CVR

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Maximize your profits with a backbutton redirect – script included.

Posted By 17 Comments February 16, 2017

A clever affiliate marketer always takes every step possible, to increase the ROI of their campaigns. In the competitive world of affiliate marketing, there isn’t any other way to survive anyways. You have to stay on top of your game.

If you don’t squeeze every last drop of revenue from your campaigns, someone else will, which will give them a competitive advantage against yourself. Then it’s just a question of bidding higher than you … and your traffic is gone.

Today, I’m gonna talk about a simple and effective trick, that is very popular, but still overlooked by many. It’s called the Back-Button Redirect.

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When do you have to make separate campaigns at the traffic source?

Posted By 2 Comments February 07, 2017

We, the affiliates, tend to be lazy folks … no need to deny this 🙂 So we all look for any shortcut possible, to make campaign creation easier. However, in an attempt to save some time initially, we can sometimes actually make our lives more complicated in the long run.

An excellent example of such approach would be creating campaigns at Traffic Sources, that contain more targeting elements at once. By targeting elements I mean options like GEO, Device, OS … pretty much everything that has direct influence at the BID level.

While it’s definitely easier to select multiple targeting elements at once in a campaign, instead of setting up a separate campaign for each element, it will be a mega pain in the ass to analyze this mess later on. Not even mentioning how fatal this could be in terms of bidding – you will be overpaying like mad.

Since there are so many targeting option available these days, let me take a closer look at the most important ones and explain why it’s mandatory to make separate campaigns for each of them.

Before I move on with it, let’s set one more thing straight, we have to create campaigns at 2 “levels” : 1st level is at the traffic source, the 2nd level would be in your tracking solution. Modern trackers make it possible to split traffic according to a 1000 different rules so it is

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Do you have to target each GEO (Country) separately or can you mix them?

Posted By No Comments January 27, 2017

This is a very classic question, asked by almost every affiliate who starts with paid traffic campaigns.

Usually it goes like this : “Hey Mr.Matuloo, I started this campaign for Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, using a kickass PIN Submit offer that my Affiliate Manager recommended to me … and I’m loosing heavily on it, why is that?”

Well, cause you’re a LAZY ASS, that’s why. There is only one reason for mixing several GEOs in one campaign – LAZYNESS – I know it’s faster to create such campaigns and it looks tempting to have one mega campaign that targets 500 Million people. But that’s not the way it works, unless you’re in the game to loose money.

BUT WHY WOULD I SPLIT THE GEOS, IT’S ALL LATIN AMERICA!!!

Oh my, there are so many reasons for this, so let me list & explain the most important ones :

1. Language – Properly translated creatives and landing pages pretty much ALWAYS work better. In some GEOs, you can do well with English langu

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Got a great performing banner? Duplicate it! Let me tell you how.

Posted By 14 Comments December 21, 2016

Hello guys, this is yet another article that was inspired by questions posted on the STM Forum. Coming up with topics to write about on my own, is a surprisingly hard task. So instead of trying to guess what you might be interested in, I thought it would make sense to just write about what people ask for. And since I spend a ton of time over at STM, many of the question will be sourced from there 🙂

So let’s go back to the million dollar question :

GOT A GREAT PERFORMING BANNER? HOW TO MAKE MORE LIKE THAT?

We all know this situation, some banners simply work better than the rest. Doesn’t matter whether you made that banner, ripped it somewhere or your AM gave it to you (some really do this) … as soon as you got a banner like this, you SHOULD IMMEDIATELY duplicate it and make more variations from it.

Affiliate Marketing is a competitive industry, any advantage that you can get is like blessing, but you need to act fast. Having variations of well performing banners at your hands, ready to replace the old ones anytime you need that … this can be your competitive advantage and your ticket to Profitopolis!

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Buying traffic? You definitely need a set of proven banners, landing pages and traffic sources.

Posted By 2 Comments December 12, 2016

Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest moving and ever changing businesses that you can get into. What works today, might be dead by tomorrow. An offer that you were killing it with just last week, could be paused today. Your well oiled campaigns can die anytime, from a number of reasons …

So how does one fight this? What can you do, in order to be able to restart as fast as possible, in case something goes south? I’m using a simple trick for a long time already, it’s all about one thing : You need a set of BENCHMARK creatives along with a pre-tested traffic source(s) that you know EVERYTHING about!

Note: in case you are new here, you might want to read my definitions of affiliate marketing terms and abbreviations!

SOME THEORY FIRST.

When starting a new campaign from scratch, you always need to go through certain routine.

Pick some offers, prepare banners, prepare Landing Pages, pick a traffic source and launch … wait for data,

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How much should you bid for traffic? HIGH or LOW? What’s the difference?

Posted By 2 Comments December 02, 2016

Pretty much all traffic networks are using the auction model, when selling their traffic. Of course, you can also make FLAT deals with them, especially when going for BIG volume, but that’s not an option for new affiliates at all.

On top of that, with offers going down anytime, caps getting filled at random times of the day and a lot of other factors you cannot influence … I’m not such a big fan of Flat deals anymore, because you can’t stop them at will. These days, I buy bulk of my traffic via bidding auctions.

HOW TO APPROACH BIDDING?

There is a ton of different ways you can approach bidding, everyone will develop their own strategy at some point. Some people love to mess with bids all the time, some set a low one and wait for the outcome, some love to sit in the middle, some at the top … but I don’t want to write a summary of all the possible bidding models here.

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