Neogara

Traffic sources

Preparing creatives, looking for your target audience and segmenting it, creating or purchasing profiles and other expendables – this is but a fraction of what you need to do before you launch a campaign promoting an affiliate marketing offer. This is a multifaceted task, with one of the most important points being finding the right traffic source.

In today's article, we will briefly talk about all the traffic sources out there and give tips on working with each type. No time to lose, let's get started!

General traffic source classification

Let’s introduce a little order and divide all traffic sources into 3 groups.
The first is standard paid ads, the scores of which are our constant companions when we surf the web. This includes social media, browser contextual ads and any sort of cooperation with ad market giants. They provide a place to drive traffic from - we, in turn, offer them good money.

The second area is practically free spam traffic. This includes mailing lists, teaser ads, and push ads. This is where webmasters with small budgets or just affiliates who make money on clicks and ad views come in. In the case of spam traffic, making a clickbait ad and driving insane hyped up traffic won’t be much of a challenge. If your goal is to get clicks and transitions, this will do just fine - but if you’re after something more serious, the campaign will most likely fail.

The third sector is closer to paid ads and is called organic traffic. This term refers to ads that are perfectly camouflaged into surrounding regular content and presented to a potential client under the guise of a recommendation from a specialist or even an ordinary Internet user who runs their own blog.

Also, all existing traffic sources can be divided into alternative and classic ones. The latter includes targeted and contextual ads, while the former - all other advertising platforms - we’ll cover each block in more detail later on.

Targeted ads

This is when you promote offers via social media and similar traffic sources. The main advantage of this option lies in the name itself - the targeting or segmentation of the target audience, depending on up to dozens of different parameters.

Basically, all of them can be divided into social and demographic and behavioral characteristics. The former includes the client’s age, sex, location, marital status, place of work, device type and OS. It also includes their income, place of work or study and lots of other factors – you can detail the target audience down to their city or even the street of residence, all such information is collected and updated daily by search bots.

As for behavioral factors, these are the interests of the target audience. For example, you may choose to only search for people who do sports or people who are interested in politics.
Subsequently, all these requirements are collected into one desired category of potential customers, which will be shown the ads you’ve prepared.

Contextual ads

As we mentioned in the beginning, this is mainly the promotion of ads through browsers and its partners. Using dozens of parameters to narrow down the audience lets the webmaster gather up only the users that are genuinely interested in the promoted offer and keep showing them the product which will eventually turn them into leads.

The main advantages of this method is the massive coverage and the most extensive database of search queries, which potential clients will use to find your product.

The first advantage is more obvious, since we’re talking about corporate ad giants who can boast of an insane daily flow of customers.

As for the second advantage, when we search for something in a browser, we enter our queries into the search bar and it is with the help of these keywords that the AI delivers the most relevant pages to us. You can set as many such keys as you like for your ad campaign, ensuring that you will definitely reach the right users who are genuinely interested in purchasing your offer.

Currently, there are 2 targeting ads traffic sources – Yandex.Direct and Google Ads. The former offers the affiliate Search Engine ads (in the browser) and the Yandex Advertising Network (which includes all the company's partners), which are tailored to working with a Russian-speaking audience. The latter also includes both search ads and display networks, with the second option being Google partners and the company's personal traffic sources (YouTube, Google Play, and so on).

Push notifications

Pushes are a small ad with a similarly small image and a short but engaging text message. The ad usually pops up at the page’s corners or as a push notification if we’re talking about mobile devices.

The main feature of this type of ad is that the user gives their consent to being shown such content. How come? According to generally accepted standards, a potential client must first agree to receive messages by pressing the appropriate button. This distinguishes push notifications from other traffic sources and allows you to filter out artificial/untargeted traffic or just basic bots.

Push notification affiliate networks also have almost zero restrictions when it comes to ad campaign launches, meaning that preparing quality materials for the selected offer won’t be much of a challenge. The only thing is, try not to overdo it with the frequency of messages and try to make them genuinely useful for the person. Otherwise, they’ll just cancel their subscription and you’ll end up wasting your AC budget.

Teaser ads

The format is somewhat similar to the previous entry, but this option is more spammy and is suitable for distributing clickbait ads with spicy creatives and intriguing headlines.
You often find such ads at the bottom part of the website, with them offering to share with you the secrets behind celebrities and their youthful looks, famous politician doppelganger secrets and so on. In other words, the main goal of the ad campaign is to interest the audience in the content, motivate them to click on the banner, or at least just look at it.

If you want, you can add much more meaning to the teasers and target the ads to sell the offer, and this approach will also work well, but it will require more effort, time and money from you when preparing the ad itself.

Clickunder and popunder

Another spam format that responds to user clicks. To trigger a clickunder, the user needs to click anywhere on the page and that will redirect them to a completely different link, unrelated to the original content. Popunders pull a similar trick, but with a minor change – the click will trigger a page to open in a new separate browser window, making it stand out from the other tabs.

You can also set a specific number of clicks that are required to trigger the transition. Potential clients won’t always be willing to interact with such ads but the format is still quite popular for BO, casino, nutra, dating and binary option offers. Clickunder and popunder work great for these categories.

Yandex.Zen

One of the most popular sources of free traffic. This platform lets you post interesting content for Yandex users and in return receive money for views. And besides, no one's stopping you from adding native ads into your content.

You can easily run several blogs (posing as multiple experts) and provide your readers with different promotional offers in the form of recommendations. Zen currently has 15,000,000 users with that number only growing with each day and considering that Yandex’s AI is also constantly evolving, you’re bound to secure a nice profit here.

TikTok

An emerging social network that we decided to cover separately in today’s article. Its distinctive feature is its ad format - ads can easily be disguised as TikTok content since the latter is entirely made of videos.

Here you can create useful tips and integrate offer ads into them, you can directly promote specific promotional offers or subtly hint at a link in your profile that leads to the webmaster's landing page. In other words, you’re faced with a sea of opportunities, there’s also an advanced AI that will promote your clips for free if it sees that the audience is interested in them.

Telegram

This traffic source is also a social network, but we’re covering it separately and you may have already guessed why - Telegram does not have a personal advertising account feature or targeting settings. All ads are distributed by buying traffic from bloggers or creating your own channels and making ad-filled content there.

This is a great platform for spam, where you can take absolutely any audience, even a cold one, and offer them ads for binary options, casinos, and similar promotional offers.

Email ads

Over time, this traffic source has become less popular, but it still offers ample opportunity to launch successful ad campaigns. This can be done in several formats at once - you either simply bombard random users with spam, or systematically warm up the target audience with the help of a funnel and encourage it to perform the target action.

It’s also a great option for secondary lead generation or re-targeting - when some of clients almost made it to the target action but wavered off at the last second. The advertiser can provide discounts or personal offers to regular customers, thereby allowing the webmaster to work with the same audience and get a decent profit from it every time.

Summing up

As you can see, affiliate marketing is brimming with traffic sources, with all of them tailored to different objectives and advertising offers. Some options enable you to take the audience by storm, while others encourage you to take it slow and hold the client’s hand.