Learn how to leverage TheOptimizer.io’s latest features, reporting upgrades, automation rules, bulk launching, and expert tips to boost your campaign profits.

Search arbitrage media buyers waste thousands of dollars a month testing different strategies on Meta Ads before finding success. But what if there was a way to cut your losses, boost your profits, and streamline your workflow? These 5 automatic optimization rules are the unfair advantage you’ve been missing. Before you begin! Please note that thresholds and time zones defined in the following rules are for reference purposes only! It is highly recommended to adjust performance thresholds to your actual thresholds, as well as adjust the time zone settings to your ad account reporting time zone or another time zone that fits your needs. Cut Non-Promising Campaigns Part of your day-to-day process is that of regularly launching new campaigns daily. This process helps you find new winning campaigns, but at the same time increases your ad spend and the possibility of generating bigger losses from testing. This optimization rule will help you minimize your ad spend waste by automatically turning off non-promising campaigns on time. Rule explanation: The rule checks if a campaign has been running for more than 4 days and if it has generated less than 40 conversions. It also checks the ROI between the last 2 and 4 days, and for yesterday if it is worse than negative -30%. Additionally, the rule targets the hour of day at which the actions are executed. Here we select the ad account time zone and combine it with the execution frequency of every 1 hour. The goal of this rule is to pause newly launched campaigns if after 4 days of running the campaign hasn’t reached the break-even zone.   Detect Performance Dips The purpose of this rule is to detect negative performance changes in a good campaign and prevent losses before it wastes any profits generated so far. It aims to identify campaigns that have been performing well but have recently experienced significant performance decreases. Rule explanation: The rule checks if the tracker ROI between the last 4 to 2 days has been greater than 10% and if the ROI for yesterday has been less than negative -10%. In addition, it checks if the CPA has a 50% increase compared to the CPA between the last 6 and 2 days. It executes the next day after the previous day’s revenue has been finalized by using the Hour of Day condition in combination with the execution frequency of every 1 Hour.   Clone Winning Ad Sets The purpose of this rule is to help you scale your Meta campaigns horizontally by detecting and cloning winning ad sets 2 times each 3 times a week. Rule explanation: The rule evaluates the performance of your Meta campaign ad sets over two-time intervals: the last 6 to 3 days and the last 2 to 1 days. If the performance is greater than 15% in both intervals, the rule initiates a cloning action. Additionally, the rule incorporates an Hour of Day condition, which restricts the cloning to occur only three times a week, specifically at 1 am in the ad account’s time zone. This condition is implemented by combining it with an execution frequency of every 1 hour.   Scale Winning Ad Sets The purpose of this rule is to help you automatically scale the budget of your winning ad sets or campaigns by automatically increasing the ad set or campaign budget by a specific % of the current budget. Rule explanation: The rule checks if your ad set or campaign has more than 50 conversions in the last 7 days (excluding today). Then it checks if the ROI of your campaign or ad set between the last 6 to 3 days and 2 to 1 days is greater than 20%. By using an Hour of Day condition in combination with the execution frequency of 1 hour it makes sure to update the budget only 3 times a week at 1 am your specified time zone (ad account time zone). Once all these conditions are true, it increases the budget by 40% of the current budget by respecting the minimum and maximum budget limits.   Low-Performance Alerts The purpose of this is pretty straightforward. What it does is alert you if any of your Meta campaigns or ad sets are running on a negative ROI for more than 4 days. Rule explanation: The rule checks if your campaign or ad set has less than 30 conversions over the last 5 days. It also checks if the ROI between the last 4 to 3 days, 3 to 2, and 2 to 1 days is worse than negative -10%. It executes every 2 hours and sends an alert via email, slack, or telegram with the names of your Meta campaigns or ad sets that meet the rule conditions. No optimization action is executed.   Running search arbitrage campaigns shouldn’t be a struggle. These simple-to-implement rules put campaign optimization on autopilot, giving you the freedom to scale your winners and ditch the losers without breaking a sweat. It’s time to work smarter, not harder, on your Meta Ads.  

Ever get that sinking feeling that your Meta campaigns are a black hole for your budget? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. In fact, Meta Ads (aka. Facebook Ads) has changed a lot over the past few years and media buyers like you and me have to constantly change the way we buy traffic to get the desired results. Let’s go over a quick checklist of things you need to keep present before launching your next Meta campaigns in 2024. Conversion API Tracking and Attribution As new regulations are being constantly added to the online advertising industry, so are the tracking limitations too. Since Apple’s IOS 14 privacy move, we saw that relying on website pixels is not sustainable anymore. In fact, new privacy changes have been introduced by major browsers like Firefox and Chrome by putting an end to 3rd party cookies. What this means is that you need to move from relying on website pixels to Conversion API solutions. By making this move, you will be able to accurately track your Meta campaigns performance and have a clear understanding of where results are coming from, while still being able to feed Meta Ads with the right conversion signals and user information it uses to optimize your campaigns. If you don’t have any idea where to get started with Conversion API, I would recommend checking out ClickFlare.io. It offers a pretty solid conversion API solution for Meta and the team behind it is always ready to help if you need a hand with the setup.   Meta Ads Audience Targeting Back in the days, it was pretty easy to deal with Facebook Ads (now Meta Ads). All you had to do was combine the right targeting options with the right ads to build up your optimal audience and boom, you had a decent campaign running. Now with all the privacy changes imposed by government regulations, you’d rather go for broad targeting instead of picking specific audience interest. To put it simple, adding interest targeting to your ad sets will likely increase your CPMs without providing any additional benefits in terms of results. So unless you are promoting a niche product or service, I would highly recommend going broad.   Meta Ads Creative Testing Meta Ads (aka. Facebook Ads) continues to be a creative centric platform. Before anything else, Meta focuses on creative engagement – after all people hang on Facebook and instagram to get entertained or be informed. So one of the most important things for a creative is to drive a healthy amount of engagement. Think of likes, positive comments, and clicks. If you are planning to test image ads, it is very important to test angles and design styles separately. In case you are into video ads, that applies there too. Whether you are doing stock image and footage animations with voiceovers or UGC-style ads, make sure to separate the angles, actors, and video styles accordingly. Pro tip: If you’re going to use UGC video ads, make sure your first couple of seconds have a strong thumb-stopping hook. Thought-provoking or controversial statements help a lot with that.   Meta Ads Budget Allocation Still to this day, Meta Ads is looking for at least 50 conversions in 7 days for your campaign (or ad set) before it exits the learning phase. So allocating the budget wisely is crucial for your campaigns or ad sets. Instead of allocating random budgets from what you feel right to test waters, do some basic calculations and allocate the right budget amount for your goal CPA. Example – You want to collect auto insurance leads at $20 per lead. Min Daily Leads: 50 Convs ÷ 7 Days = Around 7 leads/day Daily Budget: 7 leads x $20 = $140 /day You can always test the waters with smaller budgets, but the chances of you getting out of the learning phase on time and being able to scale your campaigns fast enough are pretty low.   Funnel Optimization for Meta Ads The best tool you can use to pitch your products and services after the prospect has clicked on your ads is your landing page. There is where you can further capture your prospects’ attention using the power of story-telling or make them engage in a smooth and fun to interact questionnaire. Adding landing pages to your funnels gives you the ability to further refine your angles and optimize your funnels by A/B testing different angles or landing page styles to see what resonates best with your audience. Pro tip: Make sure to A/B test one element of your landing page at a time as well as isolate landing page testing from creative testing. Testing multiple creative and landing page elements all at once often leads to unreliable results. Check out Landerlab.io if you’re getting started with landing pages, or looking to upgrade your current landing page solution. It is packed with hundreds of ready-to-use landing page templates you can easily customize through its fully-fledged visual builder, run A/B test experiments, as well as collect and access lead information without having to deal with 3rd party tools.   Meta Ads Campaign Optimization and Automation There are two types of Meta media buyers. Those who launch and manage a handful of campaigns on a monthly basis, and there are those who launch tens if not hundreds of campaigns a day and manage hundreds or thousands of campaigns at any point in time. If you belong to those that run a handful of campaigns, you can handle most of your campaign optimization tasks manually on your own. However, if you’re one of those who consistently launches 10s of campaigns every day, and manages hundreds or thousands of campaigns simultaneously, then you need a solid automation solution. By adding an automation solution to your media buying routine you will be able to launch more campaigns while spending less time, detect your campaign performance changes, cut out losers and scale winners without having to waste your days behind your ads manager. TheOptimizer offers you the power to do all of that from a single dashboard. Besides all the automation capabilities, TheOptimizer allows you to bring hundreds of Meta ad accounts in one single dashboard, so no more need to jump from one ad account to another.   In conclusion, Meta campaigns in 2024 require a strategic approach considering conversion API tracking, audience targeting, creative testing, budget allocation, funnel optimization, and campaign optimization and automation. By following this checklist and incorporating the recommended tools, you can effectively handle the ever-changing Meta Ads and achieve successful campaign outcomes. Remember, adaptation and continuous optimization are key to staying ahead in the ever-changing digital advertising environment.   [vc_empty_space height=”15px”]

You can pour your heart and soul into crafting the perfect ad campaign, but the truth is that not every campaign is destined to succeed. From the campaign start date to the day it breaks even, there are so many variables involved that sometimes it feels like a guessing game when it comes to finding winners. Remember, each campaign you launch gets served to a different audience, who reacts differently to your creatives, angles, offers, etc. So, instead of throwing good money after bad campaigns, there’s a smarter way for you to handle these situations. Frequent Use Cases Campaign Start Date in Campaign Mass Launching If you’re launching multiple campaigns on a daily basis you may already know that most of these campaigns will end up getting stopped if they don’t reach specific KPIs within a given time. Challenge: For instance, if you’re mass-launching campaigns on Meta you know that it might take 2-3 days of running before a campaign starts showing promising results. So you have to consider that and carefully monitor your campaigns daily to make sure that you’re stopping bad campaigns on time. If not, you can easily waste hundreds of $$ on bad campaigns. The Solution: Instead of handling this process manually, you simply create an automatic rule that stops all bad-performing campaigns automatically. Campaign Start Date for Controlling Bids One of the best practices for running native advertising campaigns is that of starting a campaign with a high bid, then after a while dropping it to a more conservative level. Doing so helps you get over the initial learning phase quicker as well as test your ads against the top publisher sites where the competition is higher and you generally need a higher bid. The Challenge: While resetting bids to a more conservative level manually, can be an easy task if you’re only launching 2-3 campaigns a week. It becomes pretty challenging when you launch tens of campaigns each day. You have to remember when you launched the campaign, analyze each campaign’s data, and then lower your bid at the right time. The Solution: Create an automatic rule that resets your campaign bid to a specific level based on your campaign’s actual performance. Campaign Start Date for Scaling Winners Every traffic source has its own campaign learning phase and optimization cycles. So before you start scaling a potential campaign, you have to make sure you’re following these cycles and systematically adopting your scaling strategy according to each traffic source. The Challenge: Tracking the launch date of multiple campaigns, and analyzing each campaign and ad group results manually is pretty challenging even for the most organized media buyers. Most buyers scale their campaigns quite randomly ending up doing quite the opposite of what the traffic source algorithm needs. As a result, turning a potentially profitable campaign in a looser. The Solution: Create automatic rules to increase your campaign or ad group budgets automatically in steps after X days if the campaigns or ad groups are showing potential results. Obviously, there are way more situations worth looking at or that need to be addressed using automation, but that would make this post extremely long and hard to follow. Let’s move on to the good stuff and learn how to set up these automatic rules.   How to Add Campaign Start Date in Rules With the help of automatic optimization rules on TheOptimizer platform, you can automatically pause campaigns or ad groups, change bids and budgets, or run other important optimization actions based on the start date of your campaign. To use the campaign start date in rules, create an automatic rule of your choice and add any prequalifying conditions like ROI, spend, etc. Then add “Campaign Start Date” as a condition. Choose from “Greater Than”, “Greater Than or Equal To”, “Less Than”, or “Less Than or Equal To” in the list of logical operators. Then, select the option for using the current date or a specific date. When using the current date, you can use the logic of “current date minus X days” to look back in the past, or “current date plus X days” to look forward into the future days. When using a specific date, you are simply executing actions based on a specific date. For example, if “If campaign start date is greater than March 28, 2024” To put it simply, use “current date” minus or plus a specific number of days when you want to run an action relative to the start date of a campaign. Alternatively, use a specific date if you want to run an action before or after a specific event, such as the end of a promotional campaign or the start of another one. Log in to your account, or sign up for a free trial today and experience the power of automated campaign management. [vc_empty_space height=”15px”]

How to identify and address your campaigns’ performance drops before they significantly impact your profits and ROI…

If you are currently running, or planning on starting, social to search arbitrage campaigns, this guide is for you. It has everything you need to know, including a comparison of the top ad networks & search feed providers, information on tracking & campaign setup, and tips on how to optimize your campaigns. What is Social to Search Arbitrage? Social to search arbitrage involves buying social media traffic through paid ads, and redirecting it to a parked domain (i.e., monetization page) displaying related search results. These monetization pages are provided by companies such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, and each search result represents an ad for which other advertisers are paying. Companies like Google work with partners to supply the search results you see on a monetization page. These partners are also called search feed providers. We will give a list of the top search arbitrage feed providers in a bit and explain how you can apply for these platforms.  Is Social to Search Arbitrage Profitable? Before you dive any deeper, you probably want to know if this type of traffic arbitrage is profitable. If you are running social to search arbitrage campaigns, you will be making a profit by buying traffic for cheaper on social ad networks like Meta or TikTok, and selling it for a higher price to search feed providers.  Search arbitrage is a business of small margins. The payouts are generally low, resulting in low revenue-per-click. However, conversion rates for search arbitrage offers can be very high if you make your ads highly relevant to the keywords you are targeting, and continuously optimize your social media campaigns based on KPIs. When we discuss campaign optimization, we will give some tips on which metrics to prioritize.  So, in short, social to search arbitrage can be very profitable, but your profitability will highly depend on other factors. We already discussed traffic quality above, but traffic quantity is another important factor. Since search arbitrage has small margins but high conversion rates, a larger amount of traffic means more revenue.  Finally, apart from mastering social media advertising (highly relevant ads, good copy, top creatives, the right targeting strategy etc) and investing in getting more traffic, you also need to choose your ad networks wisely. When looking for the right ad network, your focus should be on finding platforms with high engagement and low cost-per-click. Let’s take a look at the top social ad networks next. Top Social Ad Networks to Buy Traffic From As of now, Meta and TikTok are the two main social ad platforms for social to search arbitrage. So, what are the key differences between these two platforms?  Meta (Facebook & Instagram) Meta’s biggest advantage is its audience reach and diversity. With over 3 billion users for Facebook and 1.35 for Instagram, this is by far the biggest social media platform in 2023. This means that the audience is also more diverse in terms of demographics and interests.  The key downside is that competition on Meta is higher, leading to more expensive cost-per-clicks (CPC). Keep in mind that this is only a generalization, and the actual cost of traffic will heavily depend on your ads and targeting strategy.  2. TikTok TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for search arbitrage. At 1.7 billion users as of recently, its audience is considerably smaller compared to Meta’s.  TikTok’s biggest strength is its superior audience engagement rate of 5.69%, compared to Facebook’s 0.06% and Instagram’s 0.47%. Ads on TikTok generally blend in very well with the rest of the content on the platform, resulting in higher conversion rates. Which platform you decide to run paid ads on will highly depend on the keywords and offers you are promoting. For example, if you are promoting dental implant results, you will most likely want to prioritize older demographics.  We have a full comparison article between Meta vs TikTok ads here. You can also find more information on how to run TikTok to search arbitrage campaigns here. Top Search Arbitrage Feed Providers Tonic  Tonic is a German-based traffic monetization platform, known for their Tier1 search feed, high EPCs, and quick creative approval process. You can apply here.  2. System1 System1 is another major player in the social to search arbitrage space, providing offers from top advertisers and verticals, including health, finance, and travel. You can get in touch with them via this form.  3. Ads.com (previously Bodis) Another top traffic monetization platform, Ads.com has over 15+ years of experience in the industry, and they also partner with Tier1 ad search providers. You can create an account with them here. You may be asked for an invitation code, in which case you can contact the team inside the platform to inquire about your next steps.  4. Domain Active Similarly, DomainActive partners with top advertisers and helps you monetize your paid social traffic. You can sign up here.  5. Sedo Sedo is one of the largest domain marketplaces in the world. You can register here.  Before approving your application, these companies will most likely need to see some sort of proof of spend. There is no specific budget you need to spend to qualify, but generally, top search feed providers are looking for media buyers who have the potential to spend more or less 4 figures per day. Traffic quality will also be very important, as well as a few basic rules such as no incentivized, push or fraudulent traffic. Social to Search Arbitrage Campaign Setup The way you set up your search arbitrage campaigns will determine how data moves from TikTok or Meta to the search feed, and it will define your tracking capabilities.  You can set up your campaigns in two different ways. The direct flow is when you do not use a tracker in-between, while the tracked flow includes the use of a third party tracker. Direct Flow Since there is no tracker present with this setup, the final destination for your TikTok or Meta ads will be the link provided by your search feed provider. Generally, you need to build the campaign links manually under the direct flow. If you are not sure how to build your links, you can find examples for the top search feed providers and social media ad networks below. Please make sure to replace the domain and specific parameter information based on your specific case.  The direct flow is straightforward, easy to set up, and cost-effective, but it limits what you are able to track for your campaigns. If you are just starting out, this could be a simple solution, but if you are trying to scale and working with larger budgets, you will most likely need more granular data to be able to optimize your campaigns efficiently. Apart from this, you would also miss out on the ability to split test keyword groups or different search feeds under one domain. Sending conversion postbacks to TikTok or Facebook is also more limited depending on the search feed.  For these reasons, most search arbitrage experts opt in for the tracked flow. 2. Tracked Flow  The tracked flow involves using a third party tracker. For this to be possible, you would need to use a tracker that has a direct integration with social media ad platforms like TikTok and Meta, but also with the search feed providers you are working with. ClickFlare is a good example of a tracker that has an integration with all the platforms mentioned in this article.  Your campaign URLs in this case will be generated by your chosen tracking platform.  Using a tracker like ClickFlare, you will get access to deeper data about your visitors, including country, region, city, device type, OS, OS version, user agent, etc. You will also be able to rotate two or more keyword groups under a single domain, split test search feed providers, and send accurate postback conversion data back to TikTok and Facebook. ClickFlare will also automatically update revenue data from your search feed providers, removing the need for you to manually update finalized revenue data via CSV. Social to Search Arbitrage Campaign Optimization As we mentioned above, search arbitrage is a business of small margins, so in order to scale and succeed, you will most likely need to launch a large number of campaigns, advertise from different ad accounts, or from different platforms.  To ensure that you are not wasting your time and money on […]

Are you running TikTok to Search campaigns with Tonic and looking for a comprehensive guide to help you through this process?  We’ve got you covered!  In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about setting up TikTok to search arbitrage campaigns with Tonic, from tracking, to tips on how to make your campaigns profitable! What is TikTok to Search? TikTok to search arbitrage is when you buy traffic from TikTok (via paid ads) and direct that traffic to a monetization page with relevant search results. The monetization page will display a few different results, and each result will send the user to the website of the business running search engine campaigns. Usually, the TikTok advertiser would get paid each time a visitor clicks on one of these search results.  These search results are displayed by search feed providers. Search feed providers are Google, Yahoo, or Bing partners. We will dive deeper into search feed providers in a moment.  This process of buying and selling traffic is commonly referred to as “traffic arbitrage”. It’s extremely effective for conversions, because it ensures that each visitor is qualified twice – firstly, when they click on the ad, and secondly, when they click on a specific result on the monetization page. Instead of buying traffic from TikTok, you can buy it from essentially any advertising platform, such as Meta, Google, Taboola, Outbrain, and more. So, why are we focusing on TikTok to search arbitrage?  TikTok has become one of the fastest growing platforms within the search arbitrage space over the past two years. Being a relatively new platform, the cost of buying traffic from TikTok is lower than most other platforms at the moment. TikTok’s smart algorithm, advanced targeting options, and unprecedented high engagement rates, are also attracting more and more search arbitrage marketers to join the platform. Search arbitrage feed providers As mentioned above, the search landing pages linked to various offers are generated by search feed providers. These providers are going to be the ones paying you in the end, so you need to review them carefully.  Some of the most popular search feed providers are:  Tonic  Sedo  Domain Active System 1 Ads.com For the purpose of this article, we will focus on Tonic. They have a large range of over 1,000 offers, and they only accept a select number of advertisers. You can apply via the form here. Tonic offers a number of benefits, such as high EPCs, accurate reporting, automated features to reduce your workload, quick creative approval process, and excellent customer support, amongst other things.  Tonic search arbitrage campaign setup flows Do you have your TikTok ad account and your Tonic account ready? Now, it’s time to learn how to set your campaigns up for success. The campaign setup will dictate how the data will flow from TikTok to Tonic, and what type of information you will be able to track.  There are two general ways to set up your campaigns – the direct flow (without a tracker), and the tracked flow (with a tracker).  Direct flow  With the direct flow, the visitor will go directly from the TikTok ad to the link provided by Tonic.  In this case, you will usually have to build the campaign link manually. You will need to append the required tracking information to the links provided by Tonic, and use them as destination URLs for your campaigns.  Here is an example of how the direct flow links for your campaigns should look like: Note: this is just an example, please make sure to replace information set on parameters like IDs and event names to match the ones you will use in your campaigns.  Although the direct flow is simple to implement, it comes with its own limitations, especially when it comes to tracking. Your tracking capabilities will be limited to the tracking & reporting capabilities of the search feed provider. That means that you will have limited access to detailed visitor data, which makes optimizing your campaigns more difficult.  This is why most search arbitrage marketers run their campaigns using the tracked flow. 2. Tracked flow  With the tracked flow, a third-party tracker is added between TikTok and Tonic.  With the tracked flow, instead of using the tracking URL you get from Tonic as the destination URL for your campaigns, you will need to use the tracker generated campaign URL.  There are plenty of affiliate trackers out there, but ClickFlare is one of the only trackers that has a direct integration with major search feed providers, including Tonic. The main benefit of using a tracker like ClickFlare is that it provides you with extremely granular data on a click level. ClickFlare has a direct integration with both TikTok & Tonic, meaning that after the initial setup, it will automatically update your cost & revenue data. If you are not very keen on the technical side of tracking, ClickFlare offers a free on-boarding session where an expert will guide you through the entire setup process.  Apart from getting access to more accurate & detailed visitor data, the tracked flow also allows you to easily A/B test two or more sets of keywords or tracking domains under a single campaign. Or, if in the future you want to test another search feed apart from Tonic, with ClickFlare you can also split test the different search feed providers under the same campaign. How to make TikTok to Search Tonic campaigns profitable In order to make your TikTok to Search Tonic campaigns profitable, you will need to nail down targeting, have strong creatives & update them frequently, and constantly optimize your campaigns based on your KPIs.  Let’s start with targeting. TikTok allows you to target based on three dimensions – demographics, interests & behaviors, and device. Many advertisers make the mistake of being highly selective with their target audience, and in return receive very little traffic.  Whenever you apply a new targeting criteria, for example “only include visitors from the US”, TikTok provides an estimated audience size (highlighted on the right). This will indicate whether your target audience is too narrow, narrow, balanced, or fairly broad. While there is no right or wrong way to do this, generally you might want to avoid being on the “too narrow” or “narrow” side. “Balanced” is what is usually recommended by TikTok, and “fairly broad” could also work, especially if you are trying to gather data.  When it comes to creatives, TikTok is one of the platforms with the highest ad fatigue. TikTok recommends updating your creatives every 7 days! It sounds daunting, but it can be easier than you think. You can use TikTok Creative Center to see what types of ads are working for your niche. Then, go to a free stock video platform, such as Pexels, and browse over 1,000+ free TikTok videos. You can edit your videos using a free video editor, like CapCut.  If you want to take your TikTok creative game to the next level, you can actually pay TikTok creators to make ads for you. This is called UGC (user generated content), and this type of content converts extremely well on the platform. There are platforms out there, such as Trend.io or Trendzi, that can connect you to top TikTok creators. If you want to learn more about platforms or tools that can help you with your TikTok journey, we have a full article on that here.   We hosted a large search arbitrage meetup during Affiliate World Barcelona 2023. Jack Antaki, COO of Trendzi, talked about their TikTok to search Game-Changing Strategy Behind $110M of Testing. You can watch his presentation full of golden nuggets here. TikTok to Search: How to run Tonic search arbitrage campaigns on autopilot with The Optimizer We talked about targeting & creatives, now it’s time to focus on campaign optimization. You may have heard that search arbitrage is a “numbers game”, which means that in order to succeed with TikTok to Search, you will most likely need to launch many campaigns & ads, sometimes using different ad accounts.  This is where automation tools like The Optimizer come in handy. You can connect all your TikTok ad accounts, as well as your tracker or search feed accounts (depending on which campaign flow you go for) in only a few steps. This will allow you to optimize all your search arbitrage activities from a single platform.  If […]

Working with our clients, we often get the question, “Why would someone need both The Optimizer and ClickFlare?”. While the two marketing tools share a few similarities, they also differ greatly in functionality and features.  In this article, we will dive deeper into The Optimizer vs ClickFlare comparison, discuss their differences, and how you can use them in combination for better results.  The Optimizer vs ClickFlare: The Similarities Starting with the obvious, both The Optimizer and ClickFlare are tools that help marketers improve their performance. They are both part of the same parent company, and are created to address various pain points online marketers encounter.  As a marketer in 2023, you probably know how important it is to advertise on various platforms at the same time. If you are advertising on Meta, TikTok, Google, or native platforms at once, it can become tricky to have an overview of the bigger picture and manage all your ad accounts effectively. This is why both The Optimizer and ClickFlare have a direct integration with all the major advertising platforms in the world (social, search and native), allowing you to manage all your accounts from a single dashboard. If you are in the search arbitrage industry, both The Optimizer and ClickFlare have a direct integration and can pull data automatically from the major search feed providers, such as System1, Tonic, Sedo, Domain Active, and Ads.com.  This is as far as the similarities between the two platforms go. Now, let’s take a look at the differences. The Optimizer vs ClickFlare: The Differences Although both The Optimizer and ClickFlare have the same integrations, they serve different purposes. The Optimizer is a campaign management & automation tool for advertisers, while ClickFlare is a tracker.  As a tracker, ClickFlare allows you to automatically track click data, create complex funnels, test different offers, fix attribution issues through the conversion API integrations and postbacks , generate detailed reports, compare performance, and more.   The Optimizer pulls data from your traffic source and tracker exclusively through API, and it allows you to manage your campaigns on auto-pilot via an advanced rule engine. You can create rules to automatically pause campaigns or ads when certain conditions are met, increase or decrease budgets by predetermined amounts at specific times of the day, clone top performing campaigns and more.    Both products can work as standalone – if you need a tracker but aren’t ready to dive into campaign automation yet, you can still use ClickFlare.  Vice versa, you can use The Optimizer in combination with other trackers (we have an integration with all the other major trackers like Voluum, RedTrack, Google Analytics, AssertiveYield, Everflow etc). If you are doing search arbitrage, you can also directly integrate with the biggest search feed providers. Finally, you can use The Optimizer without a tracker as well. As far as you are passing accurate data back to the traffic sources, then that would be enough for TheOptimizer to automate your campaigns.   Because these tools can work separately from one another, they also have separate pricing plans. The Optimizer starts at $199/month, and ClickFlare starts at $69/month.  The Optimizer vs ClickFlare: Why You Need Both Although The Optimizer and ClickFlare work great as standalone tools, they work even better when used simultaneously.  As mentioned above, ClickFlare provides super granular data on click level, so you will be able to see in-depth data about your traffic. You can use ClickFlare’s advanced tracking capabilities to get access to fast, reliable and accurate data, and then feed this data to The Optimizer to automate campaign optimization tasks via precise rules.  Because The Optimizer is a rule engine that works based on conditions (such as, if CPA is greater than 25, pause campaign), its success heavily relies on the data it receives from your cost and revenue side. If this data is accurate, the automation rules will have a much higher success rate.  The two platforms also have a strong integration with each other, which means you can connect your ClickFlare tracker account to The Optimizer and pull your data in a matter of seconds using our ready-made tracking template. That way, you can implement both tools right away without any hassle or complicated tech work on your side.  We also offer extensive support to our users. Our team of experts works closely together to help you set everything up on the tracking side and explore what you can do with campaign automation through a free on-boarding session. This way, you won’t get lost between the two tools, and you will receive proper support on how to best use the two platforms in combination. The Optimizer vs ClickFlare: Conclusion In this article about The Optimizer vs ClickFlare, we discussed the main differences between the two tools and how they complement each other.  ClickFlare is a tracking tool that allows you to gather quick and reliable data, while The Optimizer uses that data to automate campaign optimization tasks via our advanced rule engine. Using both tools together will allow you to save an immense amount of time and hassle, and scale your campaigns faster on platforms such as TikTok, Meta, Google, and native advertising platforms.  If you want to explore these tools further, you can always book a free demo call with one of our ClickFlare experts here, and with The Optimizer team here.  If you’re looking for more marketing tools that will make your life easier, read our article on The Top 9 Affiliate Marketing Tools You Need In 2023 and 9 Must-Have TikTok Tools.  [vc_empty_space height=”15px”]

In the constant pursuit of business growth, it comes as no surprise that lead generation has been the top priority for most businesses throughout 2023. There is an overwhelming amount of options out there when it comes to generating leads, including a mix of organic and paid efforts across an endless list of platforms.  With so many different channels and methods to generate leads, digital marketers are facing a very pressing challenge – how can they filter through all the available options in order to generate quality leads with a high chance of converting?  In this article we will discuss the top paid advertising platforms for lead generation in 2023, and share best practices on how to leverage them to generate quality leads. What are the best social media paid advertising platforms for lead generation? Let’s start with the most obvious answer – social advertising platforms. According to recent data, 68% of online marketers state that social media ads have helped them generate more leads.  But which platforms are likely to generate the best quality leads, and how do they compare to each other?  Youtube Ads Youtube has 2 billion monthly active users, making it one of the biggest social media platforms to date.  We have placed it at the top of the list, mostly due to its advanced targeting options. Beyond the standard demographic targeting, Youtube also allows advertisers to target based on the audience’s past search and watch history. As an advertiser, you can also choose which type of Youtube videos you want your ad to be shown on.   Combine this with a very strong call to action on the ad, and you are likely to increase short term sales by up to 30% according to Hubspot.  The main downside of Youtube is that you need to create longer form videos, which costs time and resources to make. TikTok Ads You have probably heard all about how popular TikTok ads are right now, but actually, only 18% of online marketers are using TikTok ads for lead generation. You still have time, but you need to be quick! A recent study reported that about half of online marketers that were questioned, plan on leveraging TikTok in the near future for this purpose.  In the meantime, this relatively low level of competition means that the cost for advertising on TikTok is the lowest among all platforms at the moment.  TikTok also has a smart algorithm and a plethora of basic and advanced targeting options you can use to generate quality leads. If you want to learn more about 6 winning strategies on TikTok, read our previous article here.  The biggest challenge with TikTok is that you need to create a large amount of videos in order to continue being successful. With this platform, trends come and go very fast, and ad fatigue is very high, with ads often “expiring” after 1 or 2 weeks. More and more companies are using UGC (user generated content) brands that connect you to TikTok creators.  You pay a flat fee, and the creator shoots and edits the video on their end. This is a good solution to produce the videos you need at a much lower cost. Also, these videos blend in better with the rest of the content on the platform, making them more engaging and less transactional.  Meta Ads Meta includes Facebook and Instagram, making it one of the biggest social media platforms worldwide, with 3 billion monthly active users.  Although Meta offers the same targeting options as TikTok, Facebook has been around for 12 extra years, which means the platform has gathered more data and supported an even smarter algorithm.  In terms of lead quality, again video content generally works better than static images, especially if you educate the consumer about your product throughout the video. You can do this by focusing on offered value and addressing pain points, instead of just stating features. Having a clear message and including testimonials also helps.  Image by Poll the People One downside of Meta is that traffic is more expensive than TikTok. If you are not sure whether to focus on TikTok ads or Meta ads in 2023, read our full platform comparison here. What are the best native paid advertising platforms for lead generation? If your focus is on generating high quality leads, you should consider native advertising platforms. 75% of customers trust editorial sites, compared to 54% who trust social media. Native ads are often placed on trusted sites, and they seamlessly blend in with the rest of the content on that page, making them ideal for higher conversions. There are hundreds of native platforms out there, but what are the top options?  Taboola Taboola is one of the biggest native advertising platforms with 500 million daily active users. Most of the traffic on this platform comes from Tier-1 countries such as the US and UK.  Taboola partners with high quality websites and trusted sources, such as Business Insider and Fox, and apart from offering advanced targeting options, they also have a strong algorithm that matches the offer with the right audiences for better results. Outbrain With 1.3 billion unique users, partnerships with esteemed sites such as CNN and BBC, and half of their traffic coming from Tier-1 countries, Outbrain is another top native platform to consider. They also offer advanced targeting and retargeting options.  Taboola and Outbrain are two of the most popular native advertising platforms, which also means that the competition is higher and you need a bigger ad spend budget to promote your offers here.  MGID MGID has been one of the industry leaders since 2008, with 850M unique visitors monthly and sites like MSN as partners. The traffic here comes primarily from Tier 2 countries, most notably from Eastern Europe and South-East Asia.   RevContent The last native advertising platform we would like to focus on for this article is RevContent. Most of the publishers are from the US, such as Forbes.  RevContent have branded themselves as a high-quality traffic platform by stating that they reject a large number of publishers and have established very high standards when it comes to their qualifying and compliance policies.  Based on your company’s goals, budget, and target GEOs, you can decide which platform/s to start with.  In terms of content, advertisers still heavily rely on image ads for native platforms, but video ads or gifs appear to work better for engagement. If you want to learn more about how to boost your native ads profits in 2023, read our previous article here. What is the best search advertising platform for lead generation? Google Ads There are billions of daily searches on Google, which gives you as an advertiser access to a very broad audience.  Because you are specifically targeting people who are already looking for your product/service, search ads are the most effective way to generate high quality leads for your business.  This top-notch quality also makes Google Search ads highly competitive, and more expensive than the other platforms on this list.  How can you manage all your paid advertising platforms for lead generation? Depending on your offer, vertical target audience, ad budget, and your team’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of resources, you can decide which platform to put your focus on.  Remember to “not put all your eggs in one basket” and test different channels instead. Platforms are constantly changing, updating their policies, and becoming more competitive, so make sure to not fully rely on only one channel. You can A/B test your offer across 2-3 different platforms, and focus on scaling the ones that are working best for you.  Successful lead gen marketers are often running campaigns on various social, native, and search platforms at the same time.  If you are in the same position, you may need to consider a campaign automation tool like The Optimizer. Our tool has an integration with all the traffic sources mentioned in this article (and more), and it can help you optimize your campaigns from a single dashboard. If you want to monitor performance, stop creatives that are not working, and scale creatives/campaigns that are performing well, The Optimizer can automate these tasks for you without you having to log into tens (or sometimes hundreds) of ad accounts each day.  Advertising Platforms for Lead Generation: Conclusion In this article, we discussed the best paid advertising platforms for lead generation in 2023. […]

If you are an affiliate marketer, you have probably heard the saying “successful affiliates work smarter, not harder”.  A large part of working smarter involves using the right affiliate marketing tools that will help you achieve your goals, scale profitably and save time and money in the process. In this article, we will introduce the top 9 affiliate marketing tools you need to succeed in 2023. We will cover everything from hosting, landing page building, tracking, and automation. Affiliate Marketing Tool 1: Hostinger for Domain Hosting Having your own domain and website as an affiliate marketer gives you a lot of freedom and control over your design, content and structure.  There are thousands of domain hosting services out there, but Hostinger is one of the most affordable platforms. It’s very reliable and speedy, and it’s easy to use even if you don’t have technical knowledge.  They offer various pricing plans depending on your specific needs, starting from as low as $1.99/month for basic web hosting. If you sign up for a one-year hosting plan, you also get the domain for free the entire year.  Affiliate Marketing Tool 2: LanderLab for Building Landing Pages The ability to build high-converting landing pages is a big part of your success as an affiliate marketer. Not only do you need to build a lot of lead or sales pages, but you also need to do a large amount of testing to figure out what actually works.  LanderLab is an extremely user-friendly tool that allows you to build landing pages with no coding or special design skills.  You can choose from 100+ industry-specific landing page templates that are proven to convert. You can also integrate your tracker or lead management system, run A/B testing directly from the platform, and import existing landing pages from zip to use as inspiration.  The starter plan begins at $69/month. Affiliate Marketing Tool 3: ClickFlare for Tracking Being able to track and analyze detailed campaign data in real time is crucial for scaling.  ClickFlare is the perfect tracking tool for affiliate marketers. It allows you to create and track complex funnels, it integrates with all the key traffic sources (native, social and Google), and it gives you the ability to track, route and A/B test unlimited pre-landers, landers and offers. If you are looking for a reliable and affordable tracker, ClickFlare pricing begins at $89/month. Affiliate Marketing Tool 4: Adplexity for Spying on Competitors An important part of online marketing is finding out what your competitors are doing and learning from their successes and mistakes.  Adplexity uses data from various ad networks and allows you to see which ads are getting the most hits and have been running the longest. You can filter by landing page or ad keyword, days running, country, ad network and more. The tool also gives you the ability to see the landing page each ad is sending traffic to, as well as the offer URLs. You can download landing pages you want to use as inspiration, and directly export them to your landing page builder of choice, for example LanderLab.  Adplexity offers different plans for various traffic sources, starting from $199/month. Affiliate Marketing Tool 5: Canva for Design Whether you want to design an ad, social media post, email header, banners, or even edit videos, Canva can help you.  The tool is again extremely easy to use, and you can create beautiful designs that convert without any prior design experience. There are thousands of ready-made templates you can use, and the basic plan is completely free! If you want to upgrade, the Pro version is still only $12.99/month.  Affiliate Marketing Tool 6: ChatGPT for Content & Copywriting We know, we know. You are probably already using ChatGPT, but there are a few tricks that tend to give better results when it comes to writing high-converting copy.  Whether you want to write copy for a landing page, email, ad, or blog post, you always need to give ChatGPT a clear idea of what the product is, who the target audience is, and which goal you are hoping to achieve.  You also need to instruct it to write a text focused on benefits (instead of simply features), include a compelling call-to-action and headline, include testimonials, and address pain points. If you want to take it a step further, you can use the ChatGPT prompt, “I will show you 5 examples of my writing. Replicate my writing style and tone of voice to write a new text about X topic”.  You can use the basic version of ChatGPT completely for free. Affiliate Marketing Tool 7: Trendzi for Video Ads We could drop endless studies and statistics on why it is absolutely crucial to incorporate videos into your affiliate marketing strategy in 2023. To keep it simple, all research strongly indicates that videos are better for lead generation, branding, sales, and overall performance. Especially if your advertising platform of choice is social media, you need to consider using UGC (user generated content). As Trendzi says on their page, UGC videos are video ads that don’t look like ads. Through platforms like Trendzi, you can choose a creator and give them instructions on what type of video you are looking for. They will create a video that blends in and feels organic, which has been proven to lead to better conversion rates.  Trendzi offers different pricing packages, starting from $500 per video. If you want to learn more about how the platform works, we recommend watching their presentation from the Search Arbitrage Meetup in Barcelona in 2023. Affiliate Marketing Tool 8: The Optimizer for Campaign Automation If you are advertising on various platforms through several accounts, launching and managing a large number of campaigns, and playing with big advertising budgets, our campaign automation tool The Optimizer is made for you.  With The Optimizer, you can set rules to automate routine campaign optimization tasks, such as adjusting bids and budgets, pausing campaigns or ads that are not performing, cloning ad sets, and more. This will allow you to free up an immense amount of time and make sure you are efficiently managing your advertising budget in order to scale faster.  Here you can read how some of our top clients used The Optimizer to scale on TikTok and native platforms. The Optimizer’s starter plan begins at $199/month. Affiliate Marketing Tool 9: NordVPN for Cybersecurity Using a VPN service such as NordVPN will mainly provide you with online security, making sure that your online activities and sensitive data are secure and protected from potential cyber threats. For example, the tool will ensure your information is kept private in public places, like cafes or while on the move.  NordVPN will also protect you from competitors finding out about your strategies, provide access to geo-restricted information, and allow you to check how your landing pages appear to people in various locations. The monthly plan begins at $12.99/month and there are multiple discount packages available. Top 9 Affiliate Marketing Tools: Conclusion To keep up with the competitive landscape of affiliate marketing in 2023, you will need to use specific tools for different parts of your operation.  The affiliate marketing tools discussed in this article are: Hostinger for domain hosting, LanderLab for building landing pages, ClickFlare for tracking, Adplexity for spying on competitors, Canva for design, ChatGPT for content & copywriting, Trendzi for video ads, The Optimizer for campaign automation, and NordVPN for cybersecurity.  Regardless of which tools you choose to leverage, make sure that you are always working smarter rather than harder. [vc_empty_space height=”15px”]

With a total of over $11 billion in advertising revenue, TikTok is one of the hottest platforms for fast growth right now. This may surprise you, but scaling your TikTok campaigns can be much simpler than you think.  In this article, we will look into how you can scale your TikTok campaigns in 6 simple steps and share our best tips and tricks to try out. How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 1: Nail Down Targeting The first step, before we dive into the details of targeting, is knowing your product and your audience. The more information you know about them, the easier it will be for you to select the right criteria.  Let’s start with the basics. On TikTok, you can target on three core dimensions:  Demographics: location, gender, age, language  Interests & Behaviors: general interests, video interaction, interaction with creators, interaction with hashtags Device: operating system, device model, connection type With so many targeting options available, a lot of advertisers make the mistake of selecting a lot of criteria and not receiving any traffic. A good approach here is to only start with the necessities first. You can select your target location and language, and exclude users younger than 18 years old, especially if your goal is to make purchases.  Selecting interests & behaviors can work if your target location is the United States, but if you are catering to a smaller market, you may need to keep it broad.  If you do select specific interests, make sure to enable “Targeting Expansion”. That way, TikTok will target people from different interests if it is relevant to your product. Each time you select a criteria (for example, exclude users below 18 years old), you will see an estimation of your audience size (top right). Along with this data, you will also see a target audience indicator from TikTok.  There are four indicators:  Too Narrow: The audience size is too small, and you will need to remove some criteria to ensure your ads receive enough traffic  Narrow: The audience size is still small and not ideal.  Balanced: The estimated audience is at a balanced level, and TikTok recommends this for most advertisers.  Fairly Broad:  The audience size is large. This is not necessarily a problem, especially if you are just getting started and want to gather more data. You can always start broad and eventually cut or remove things that are not working (we will discuss this more in Step 3).  How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 2: Play With Your Creatives You may have heard that TikTok is a “creative-hungry” platform. In fact, TikTok recommends changing your creatives as often as every 7 days!  So how can you keep up with this pace? First, know when to change your creatives and when to do nothing. If an ad is performing extremely well, we do not recommend changing the creative, even if TikTok’s 7-day mark has passed. On the other hand, if an ad is performing exceptionally badly, chances are that changing the creative will not make a huge difference.  Generally speaking, the perfect moment to change your creatives is when performance is getting stale.  If you have a design team, this should not be a big issue for you. If you are working alone, take a look at our article about the 9 tools that will allow you to create ads faster with the help of free stock videos, or platforms where you can connect with affordable UGC creators.  How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 3: Cut Things That Are Not Working Sometimes, no matter how good your creatives are or how well you have perfected your targeting, things simply don’t work out. In this case, you will need to employ a defensive strategy and cut underperforming campaigns, ad groups or ads.  First, you will need to set clear rules for yourself based on your metrics and goals. For example, if the campaign has been running for 7 days and ROI is below 0%, you will pause the campaign. If you only have one TikTok account and a few campaigns, you can do this easily by checking your data and manually pausing underperforming campaigns.  However, if you are running multiple high-budget campaigns from several accounts, you should consider automating this process. TikTok already offers a few simple automation rules on their Ads Manager dashboard, but if you want to manage hundreds of campaigns and TikTok accounts with more complex rules and metrics from one single dashboard, an automation tool like The Optimizer is extremely helpful. You can set your timeframe, conditions, and select all your active campaigns.  The Optimizer Rules This is a simplified example with dummy numbers just to showcase what the system can do, but you can customize this according to your preferences. Instead of ROI, you can choose any other metric you use (conversions, CPA, clicks, ROAS, etc). You can select data from today up until the last 90 days, and choose to run this rule from weekly to as often as every 10 minutes. The system will also notify you when it executes a rule.  How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 4: Gradually Increase Budgets On the other hand, if things are working out well, you may want to increase your budgets. A common mistake is increasing budgets too quickly. In general, increasing them gradually by 15-20% at a time is safer.  Again, you can do this manually, using TikTok’s rules, or using an advanced automation tool like The Optimizer.  Here is an example of an automatic rule you can set within The Optimizer. According to this rule, the system will check if there are any campaigns that have spent more than $50 and reached an ROI of over 50% in the past 7 days. For each campaign that fits this criteria, the budget will automatically be increased by 15%.  The Optimizer Rules The exact same approach works for decreasing budgets when needed.  How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 5: Clone Ad Groups If an ad group is performing exceptionally well, you might want to increase bids and budgets more than the recommended 20% rate. However, this can confuse the algorithm and cause performance to drop.  This is why we generally recommend cloning top performing ad groups instead. As with the previous two steps, this one can also be delegated to our automation system. Depending on your own metrics, you can specify which ad groups should be cloned. The Optimizer Rules If you are still unsure of whether an automation tool is right for you, check out our case study on how one of our users made $195K in a month with TikTok ads while using The Optimizer.   How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns Step 6: Know & Monitor Your Numbers Finally, it’s important to know and consistently keep track of your numbers. Which metrics are important to your business? When do you make money, and how do you monitor your results?   This may sound like a small step, but in reality it is often what sets successful advertisers apart from their competitors.  Create a list of your key performance indicators, such as CPA (cost per acquisition), conversions, click-through-rate, ROI, etc. For each metric, calculate at which level they are exceptional, average, and bad. Then you can begin the process of gathering data, increasing budgets for exceptional results, monitoring average results, and cutting bad ones before they can lose more money. How to Scale Your TikTok Campaigns: Conclusion In this article, we discussed how you can scale your TikTok campaigns in 6 simple steps by nailing down targeting, playing with your creatives, cutting things that are not working, gradually increasing budgets, cloning overperforming ad groups, and constantly monitoring your numbers.  The first step in completing these steps successfully is knowing your business, audience, and key performance metrics upfront. With your knowledge, you can start optimizing your campaigns manually if you only have a few, or using an automation tool, like The Optimizer, to take things to the next level.  [vc_empty_space height=”15px”]

In 2023, the majority of people on the internet still do not know about native ads, and that is what makes them so effective. It’s no secret that everyone hates ads. But native ads have found a way around this obstacle by seamlessly blending in with the rest of the content on a given platform, essentially not looking like ads.  And it works! Reports suggest that 75% of customers trust editorial sites (commonly used on native advertising), but only 54% of them trust social media. This leads to native ads being perceived as less intrusive, getting higher engagement rates, and ultimately resulting in more conversions.  Image by Outbrain In this article, we will look at all the steps you need to take to boost your affiliate marketing profits in 2023 through native ads.  How do Native Ads for Affiliate Marketing Work? There are two key components to native ads for affiliates. First, you need an offer (or product) to promote. The most common way to find offers is by signing up for affiliate programs or networks. Next, you need traffic to send to your offer. You can buy traffic from ad networks. We will explain these two steps in more detail below.  You can then create an attention-grabbing ad that will be placed on different native sites. This ad should include an image and headline related to your offer that will make people want to click on it. Finally, you will need a landing page to direct traffic to. Image by Taboola Native Ads for Affiliate Marketing Step 1: How to Choose the Right Offers There are many methods to help you figure out which offers to promote on native platforms. First, you need to identify booming verticals and industries. For example, health-related offers always perform well. In 2023, offers related to weight loss, nutrition, fitness, and supplements will continue to garner interest.  The fastest and most effective way to figure out which verticals are “in” right now is to use spy tools, such as Adplexity. Adplexity uses data from a vast number of ad networks, and tells you which offers are converting.  If you look at the example below, you will see which offers have been receiving the most traffic in the United States in the past 3 months. You can clearly see that health-related ads are dominating. Apart from health, other booming verticals include financial offers, search arbitrage, cars, travel, and dental care, amongst others.  You can go even further and research trending topics within your chosen industry to narrow down your focus. Google Trends is a great free tool for this. Simply choose a country and type your keyword, and you will see how popular that term is. For example, the keyword “diet” has been enjoying a steady high interest in the US throughout the past 3 months.  When deciding which affiliate network to sign up for, you need to choose a well-established one that has plenty of offers within your target vertical and pays out good commissions. A few of the big platforms are ClickBank (the biggest offers as of May 2023 are supplements and weight loss), Perform [cb] (previously known as ClickBooth), GiddyUp (mostly for e-commerce offers), Jumbleberry (diet, self care, e-commerce offers) and more.  You can also go on comparison sites such as OfferVault, where you can find an overview of top affiliate offers and connect with trusted affiliate networks. Because commission rates and application guidelines constantly change, we highly recommend doing your own research as well. Affiliate marketing communities such as the STM Forum can help facilitate this research by giving you access to the latest information in the industry.  Native Ads for Affiliate Marketing Step 2: How to Find the Right Native Ad Networks There is a large amount of native ad networks you can buy traffic from. The key factors to consider when choosing your native ad network are:  The size of the platform: bigger platforms have more publishers and users, which leads to more high quality traffic. Their top-performing verticals: if your offer is within the travel niche, you should also look for an ad network that is big within that niche. Here you can read which verticals are working best for various native ad platforms. Their available GEOs: if your main location (or GEO) for the offer is Brazil, but your ad network only has US traffic, that is not a good fit. Always try to find platforms that support your key GEOs. Costs: bigger platforms have advantages in terms of traffic quality and advertising technology, but they can be more competitive and expensive. Minimum spend requirements for bigger platforms are also higher. Support: check what kind of additional support each platform provides (such as assigning you to an account representative, quicker approval, etc).   The top five native ad platforms in 2023 are (in no particular order):  Taboola: is one of the biggest native ad platforms, with over 18K advertisers and 500 million daily active users. You can target many different GEOs across a large number of verticals. Taboola partners with high quality websites, meaning the quality of traffic is expected to be very good. If you have a decent budget, you should definitely consider this platform.    Outbrain: another big player in the native ads market, with a large user base and an excellent list of publishers (such as CNN and The Guardian). Outbrain supports traffic from over 50 countries and all the major verticals, and they have great targeting options and traffic quality. Again, if you have a big budget, this is a great platform for native ads.  RevContent: a smaller player in the native ad space, mainly partnering with US publishers such as Forbes. RevContent is also known for supporting various verticals, and offering great support to their members.  MGID: has been around since 2008, with most of their traffic coming from Tier 2 countries (most prominently South-East Asia and Eastern Europe).  Yahoo DSP: the platform is known to be cheaper, with most of the traffic coming from the UK, France, and the US.    Depending on your personal goals, vertical, target GEO, and your budget, you can then choose one or two native ad platforms to start testing.  Native Ads for Affiliate Marketing Step 3: How to Create High Converting Content The best practice to create high converting ads and landing pages is to check what is working within your industry.  Continuing our diet offer example, if you enter the keyword “diet” on Adplexity, you will see the best performing ads related to that term.  If you click on the top left result, you can see the landing page this ad is directing traffic to.  The ad we clicked on lands on the advertorial below. Now you can see the entire redirect chain and learn not only which ads are converting, but also see their landing pages and offers (by clicking on outgoing links).  You can download these landing pages directly from Adplexity and use them as inspiration for your own campaigns. To create images for your ads, you can use free stock photos from websites such as Pexels, and then edit them for free on Canva.  If you are not ready to commit to a spy tool yet, you can also do some research on your own by going to top native publisher sites or looking for examples online. However, this method is much more time consuming and you can never be certain which ads are working and which are not.  Native Ads for Affiliate Marketing Step 4: How to Scale your Native Ads Campaigns Boosting your profits as an affiliate marketer with native ads can be challenging. In order to scale profitably, you need to dedicate a lot of time, and often money, to make it work. Being successful with native ads requires constant monitoring, testing, and optimization, especially during the first couple of months. Since native algorithms still have a long way to go, most affiliate marketers start broad and then narrow down by cutting underperforming publishers, placements, and creatives, and scaling what is already working well.  If you want to take your native advertising game to the next level and play with bigger budgets over a longer period of time, you will need to consider automation tools, such as The Optimizer. [vc_empty_space height=”15px”]