What is Social to Search Arbitrage and How Does it Work?

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.

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.

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.

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?

1. 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

1. Tonic

Tonic is a German-based traffic monetization platform, known for its 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.

1. 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 of 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 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 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 and advertise from different ad accounts, or from different platforms.

To ensure that you are not wasting your time and money on unprofitable campaigns, you will need to perform constant optimization. You will need to check the data from your traffic sources, match it to the revenue and conversion data from your tracker / search feed provider, and constantly pause, activate, adjust bids & budgets, or clone your campaigns, ad groups / ad sets, ads, and more.

At some point, it will become impossible to do this manually, unless you want to hire an entire team of media buyers who are willing to spend 24/7 watching your campaigns. This is where our campaign automation tool, TheOptimizer, can help you.

If you are trying to scale with search arbitrage, TheOptimizer will become your best friend. It has an integration with all the major ad networks (TikTok, Meta, Google, and native ad platforms), trackers (ClickFlare, Voluum, RedTrack, Google Analytics), and even search feed providers (Tonic, Sedo, System1, Ads.com, Domain Active).

You can connect hundreds of accounts in just a few steps centralize all your search arbitrage efforts in a single platform, and let our automation engine take care of your campaigns for you.

You can, for example, pause unprofitable ad sets on Facebook using an automation rule:

With this rule, any ad sets that have spent over $50 in the past 3 days with a ROAS of lower than or equal to 1, will be automatically paused. You can select which campaigns this rule will apply to, run it as frequently as needed (from 10 minutes up to weekly), and set up notifications so you can receive an email, Slack, or Telegram notification each time a change has been made.

You can also set up a rule that will automatically clone TikTok ads with low CPA at 9 am UTC every day apart from the weekend. The time zone and hour conditions are fully customizable.

Want to gradually increase your campaign or ad group/ad set budget when profitable? You can build a rule using accurate tracker revenue data.

In case you are wondering how our automation engine is superior to the ones offered by the social ad networks, we have full comparisons for Facebook and TikTok.

Social to Search Arbitrage: Conclusion

Social search arbitrage is a great way to make money online if you are willing to invest a bit of money on ads and aggressively optimize your campaigns using the right setups and tools. After you have chosen the right ad network and search feed providers to work with, you need to decide between a direct or tracked campaign flow and use a campaign automation tool like TheOptimizer to avoid losing your investment in unprofitable campaigns.

Check out our case study on how we have helped one of our clients make 6 figures per month with TikTok to search for arbitrage.

If you are running native-to-search arbitrage campaigns, we have a dedicated article on the topic here.

Need a hand?

If you want to want to learn more about how TheOptimizer can help you scale your search arbitrage campaigns faster, you can get on a call with one of our experts and get some 1-on-1 advice.

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FacebookGuides

Training: From Launching to Scaling Profitable Search Arbitrage Campaigns on Meta Ads

In this live training, we dived deep into the exact strategies top media buyers use to automate campaign launches, test keywords, and scale effortlessly—so you can focus on what really matters: driving results. Training Agenda Here’s a brief summary of what you’ll learn from this training: Tracking Setup : Learn how to set up tracking efficiently to better track and analyze the performance of your campaigns. Keyword & Domain A/B Testing : How to split-test domains and keywords to maximize your margins. Tested Stop-Loss Rules : The only stop-loss rules you need to safeguard your budgets. Campaign Auto-Scaling : Take the guesswork out of scaling by automating your growth and maintaining control. Bulk Campaign Launching : Streamline your process to launch multiple campaigns at once, effortlessly. Campaign Analysis : What to look for and how to quickly analyze the performance of your campaigns. Fine-Tuning Rules : The data-driven approach on how to fine-tune your existing rules or create new ones. Q&A and Key Takeaways

November 15, 2024

TheOptimizer

TheOptimizer Team

FacebookGuidesMeta Ads

5 Tested Automatic Rules for Optimizing Your Meta Search Arbitrage Campaigns

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.

March 28, 2024

TheOptimizer

TheOptimizer Team

New FeaturesFacebookNativeTikTok

Apply Bulk Bid and Budget Adjustments with TheOptimizer

We are happy to announce our newest feature that will allow you to apply bulk bid and budget adjustments for an enhanced campaign optimization process. In this article, we will discuss what this feature entails, how it can help you simplify your campaign management, and we will look at specific use cases with examples. The Problem If you have multiple campaigns, ad groups, ads, or publisher sites with varying bids and budgets, it’s very time-consuming to adjust all budgets or bids separately. For example, if you wish to increase all bids by 20%, you first need to calculate how much 20% of all current bids is, and apply the changes one by one. Apart from taking up too much time, this way of managing bids and budgets is also more prone to mistakes, which eventually leads to avoidable budget waste. The Solution With TheOptimizer’s new feature, this entire process can be done in just a few clicks. You will be able to select as many campaigns, ads, ad sets, or publishers you need to adjust, and apply bid and budget increases/decreases, either by a fixed amount or by a percentage. All calculations will be done by our system, leaving no room for errors. Let’s have a look at several use cases for our top ad networks to see how this new feature can help you optimize your campaigns in practice. Facebook Apply Bulk Campaign Budget Adjustments for Facebook Let’s say you are reviewing your Facebook data on TheOptimizer, and you notice a few campaigns have been performing exceptionally well recently. With the new bulk actions, you can now select these top-performing campaigns and increase their budget at once. For this use case, we want to apply a bulk budget increase of 15% for all selected Facebook campaigns. You have the option to adjust the budget by a certain percentage or set a fixed budget value. You can also optionally apply budget caps to ensure the new budget stays within a certain range. Finally, you can preview the changes before applying them. With this preview, you can see the calculated value of the new budgets. Apply Bulk Ad Set Bid and Budget Adjustments for Facebook If you are using ad set daily budgets instead, you can also replicate the same process as above on an ad set level. TikTok Apply Bulk Campaign Budget Adjustments for TikTok You can also optimize your TikTok campaigns with TheOptimizer’s new bulk actions. In the example below, we are applying a 15% budget increase on the campaign level and previewing the changes before approving the new budgets. Apply Bulk Ad Group Bid and Budget Adjustments for TikTok Similarly, you can apply bulk bid and budget changes to selected TikTok ad groups. You can increase or decrease bids and budgets using a percentage calculation or set them to a fixed value. Taboola Apply Bulk Campaign Bid and Budget Adjustments for Taboola If you are advertising on native platforms such as Taboola or Outbrain, you can also apply bulk budget and bid changes on a campaign level. For the use case below, we have selected several Taboola campaigns we wish to test with a lower budget. We are applying a global 10% budget decrease. Apply Bulk Site Bid Adjustments for Taboola A big part of being successful with native advertising is being able to effectively manage publisher sites. If you have identified a few publisher sites with good performance, you can bulk increase the site bid to scale faster. In this specific use case for Taboola, we are increasing the bid by 15%, but ensuring that it does not go higher than 80% of our reported EPC (earning per click). Outbrain Apply Bulk Campaign Bid and Budget Adjustments for Outbrain You can also optimize your Outbrain campaigns by using TheOptimizer’s bulk actions on a campaign level. You can adjust campaign bids and budgets, as well as change target CPAs in one go. Apply Bulk Section Bid Adjustments for Outbrain When advertising on Outbrain, you also need to optimize on a section level. Due to the large number of sections, this task can become very tedious when done directly on the platform. With the bulk section bid adjustment, you can make global changes and preview the results before applying them. In this case, we are increasing the section bid by 15%, but ensuring the new bid does not go higher than the earning per click value. Apply Bulk Bid and Budget Adjustments with TheOptimizer: Conclusion Effectively managing bids and budgets for all campaign levels plays a critical part in your success as an advertiser. Between managing multiple ad networks, and campaigns, and trying to allocate your budget correctly, it can become time-consuming to manage everything separately. TheOptimizer’s bulk bid and budget manager is a game-changer, and it’s currently not available on any traffic source. You can stay ahead of the competition by simplifying your bid & budget management for better results, and save an immense amount of time and money doing so. For more feature use cases with TheOptimizer, read our article about duplicating ads on Facebook and TikTok here.

January 30, 2024

Sara Bregasi

Content Writer

What is Social to Search Arbitrage and How Does it Work?