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

Category

Tracking Campaigns

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

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

Continue Reading

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

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

Continue Reading

Damn Fallback redirects can get you banned from traffic sources, fight them!

There are many things in affiliate marketing that are getting on my nerves, the so called FALLBACK redirects are one of them. The sad fact is, pretty much all affiliate networks keep on using them, even thou they can get us (affiliates) banned from traffic sources and they (affiliate networks) know this very well.

I keep seeing this topic pop up on the STM Forum all the time over and over again : new affiliates are wondering, why they can’t see the offers they promote, when clicking on the link themselves. Or why they got a campaign rejected by a traffic source, even thou they picked a totally white-hat offer that’s not breaking any rules.

I’ll tell you why, it’s the fucking fallback redirects that’s causing this. You don’t have to ask for them to be activated, they are ON by default … in order to make you more money as the networks claim, when in reality the extra revenue is pretty much non existent in

Continue Reading

Traffic Targeting – The Best Friend Of Anyone Running Paid Traffic.

Whoever want’s to start buying traffic has to understand targeting. It’s one of the most important skills you need to master, but also one of the easiest to understand. Let’s not waste time here and move on with the topic, so what exactly does targeting mean? Simply put : it’s a way of picking just the traffic that we need. So instead of serving our ads to every single visitor of a site, we decide who we want to show them to.

Continue Reading

Why you must split test the same offer/product via multiple affiliate networks?

SPLIT TESTING THE SAME PRODUCT, WHY WOULD I DO IT?

When I was starting in affiliate marketing, there was one thing I couldn’t understand, because it wasn’t making much sense. Every experienced affiliate told me, that whatever offer I’m about to promote, I should find it in more than one network and compare the performance in one network against the next one. So basically, they told me to send traffic to EXACTLY the same product, through 2 or 3 different affiliate networks.

Continue Reading

What is Tracking And Why You Should Use It.

One of the best things about online marketing is the ability to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Unlike TV, newspaper or radio campaigns, you can literally track anything online – where the visitors came from, what they clicked on, what device they used to connect, what type of internet connection they used, what landing page or product converted them … you name it.

Continue Reading