Premium Posts 2016 - Finch [PDF]

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2016 ED 10 For BBHF VIP

AFFILIATE MARKETING STRATEGY Finch's Guide to Beating Rivals, Cracking The Hottest Trends and Making Money From Affiliate Marketing in 2016

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This 2016 Edition of Premium Posts is sponsored by Adsimilis, one of the world’s leading CPA networks. It’s six years since I first started working with Sean, Eleah and Mike. I remember running traffic to some of their earliest offers. I was a spring chicken of an affiliate back then: hungry and clueless. Some of my first campaign breakthroughs were thanks to their recommendations (and later those of my affiliate manager, Naomi). Adsimilis was one of the first CPA networks to serve up European offers that converted as well as those in America. Something we take for granted now; but it was pretty damn cool back then. Their reputation for global coverage is alive today with a selection of offers that is well and truly international. Adsims stocks exclusives for some of the hottest verticals in affiliate marketing – sweeps, dating, adult, apps, pin submits, you name it – in countries that I barely knew existed. The network has grown and evolved, leading to a €100 million merger between DQ&A (their parent company) and incuBeta in November last year. There aren’t many networks that you can trust as a ‘stable hand’ in this industry. Adsimilis is one of them. Check them out if you need a top class network for your traffic. 2

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In This 2016 Edition

Introduction

4

The Cloaking Economy: Let’s Talk Reality

6

A Breakdown of Popular Verticals and Traffic Types in 2016

33

Tips to Conquer Native Advertising in 2016

77

Tips to Conquer Pop Advertising in 2016

116

The Blitzkrieg Approach to Finding Big Money Campaigns

155

Stock Creatives: How to Assemble a Library of Moneymaking Assets

182

How to Get Maximum Value From Paid Traffic with Flow Management

197

Landing Page 101: The White Hat, Grey Hat, Black Hat, Ass Hat

211

The Publisher Perspective: Building Assets and Monetising Any Niche

234

The Gamification of Affiliate Marketing: Tips For Staying Motivated

258

Affiliate Team Building: Hiring, Firing and The Foundations of Success

273

Advanced Competitive Strategy in Affiliate Marketing

295

The End: Thanks for Reading All My Bollocks Over The Years

347

Finch’s Updated List of Affiliate Marketing Resources For 2016

350

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Introduction Welcome to the 2016 edition of Premium Posts. It feels like a lifetime since last year’s volume, and in industry terms… it is. If you are new to the series, allow me to explain what follows. We have 12 posts, covering topics that should be relevant to anybody working in CPA. We will cover broad strategy, specific campaign insights, and advice for conquering some of the hottest trends in affiliate marketing today. Some of the topics inside:

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Native advertising: how to make money from advertising’s ‘Next Big Thing’.

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Pop advertising: how to beat the crowd and profit from affiliate marketing’s most competitive space.

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Cloaking: the reality of the industry today.

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Redirect Network arbitrage: how to find lucrative campaigns without knowing anything about affiliate marketing, landing pages, or… well, anything.

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Landing page hacks: how to get the maximum impact out of your pages and improve both CTRs and CVRs.

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Company design: How to turn your affiliate campaigns in to a prosperous empire that other people work for. 4

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We also have a complete breakdown of the different traffic types and verticals that you can exploit to hit profit in 2016. I’m only scratching the surface here. Reach the final pages and I promise: you will have a lot to think about. The posts are designed so that you can dip in and out. If you want to skip ahead and read a topic that interests you, go right ahead. I would advise against it though. There is an arcing narrative; some posts are designed to answer the questions raised in others. We’re going to start by addressing a key part of the affiliate industry, the divisive decision of to cloak or not to cloak. I’ve splurged my guts, balls and soul in to the pages that follow. I hope you find something useful on them. Thanks for buying, and enjoy the read.

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The Cloaking Economy: Let’s Talk Reality I want to open this year’s Premium Posts by talking about affiliate marketing’s dirty little secret. Everything (and anything) that people tell you about our industry is worthless without a basic understanding of this concept. It is the elephant in the room. It explains how a large percentage of affiliates are making money, and whether you will be in a position to compete with them. Yes, the C Bomb: Cloaking. C-L-O-A-K-I-N-G.

What is cloaking? Cloaking is the act of sending your primary audience to one page, whilst sending everybody else (non-customers) to another. The goal is to make maximum money from your primary audience, whilst hiding the page that does the selling from prying eyes. On many traffic sources, it is necessary to cloak to get campaigns live that would never otherwise receive approval. You’ve seen those weight loss ads plastered across Facebook, right?

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The classic Before / After shot followed by a headline, like “37 Year Old Single Mom Drops 47lbs with One Weird Trick” What happens when you click these ads? If you are considered a ‘prime target’, you will be sent to a landing page that aggressively sells a weight loss product using a labyrinth of questionable testimonials, fake comments, and hard-hitting copy. In this case, you’ve landed on the money page. It is here where the affiliate expects to make his profits by selling products through brute force, often at the expense of advertising guidelines, and/or the laws of the land. Cloaking is the device that separates the prime target from undesirable users who will never get to see what is producing those profits. If you are not considered a prime target, the affiliate’s cloaking software will ensure that you are sent somewhere else. Preferably somewhere completely harmless. For example, you might send a non-customer to an article on Cosmopolitan that confesses the ‘One Weird Trick’ to rapid weight loss is actually a resistance to shoving cakes in your face. This, of course, is what happens to the poor bastard at Facebook or Google who is in charge of approving or disapproving the advert. Cloaking software has the capacity to detect whether somebody clicking a link is likely to be a prime target (i.e. the consumer), or somebody to be kept away from your money page (i.e. the ad approvals team).

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Is cloaking worth the bother? The popularity of cloaking is driven by the insane potential to make a lot of money from it.

Affiliates are greedy and cannot resist the carrot of advertising on the most highly trafficked platforms in the world – regardless of whether their ads are wanted there.

By cloaking campaigns on AAA traffic sources, the affiliate can guarantee a holy trinity:

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High volume

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High profits

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High lead quality.

It is a powerful cocktail.

We can debate the potential earnings of white hat campaigns vs. black hat campaigns all day long, but this much is true: your creative license grows exponentially when you are not held accountable for the landing pages you produce.

Affiliates are increasingly dependent on cloaking expertise rather than any subtle creative genius.

This distorts the outside view of ‘how money is made’ in affiliate marketing.

The Big Fat Lie

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While cloaking has become somewhat epidemic, the affiliates who rely on this tactic are unlikely to boast about it in public.

That’s fine, except… they tend not to be so quiet about their success in general.

This creates a perverse environment where many of the most trusted sources on affiliate marketing are operating a business model that contradicts the advice and motivation they hand out on a daily basis.

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“Affiliate marketing is possible if you grind hard, work hard and sacrifice for success!”

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“I got where I am today through working harder than my rivals.”

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“Here’s my shiny new car. #ThankYouAffiliateMarketing”

Not many affiliates are willing to accept that their success correlates to the boundaries and advertising guidelines they were willing to smash, rather than the ‘hard work’ that went in to achieving said baller status.

Truth is… it’s not ‘hard work’ to cloak Facebook Ads.

It’s dirty work.

And when it comes to dirty work, who are you gonna call?

That’s right.

Affiliate Marketing.

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The majority of the CPA industry, as we know it today, is a breeding ground for bullshit, deceit and badly burned / misled consumers.

I’m not saying that from some kind of moral high ground. I’ve contributed to the mess.

It is what it is.

You could argue that the affiliate marketing industry is not directly responsible for this sorry state of affairs.

I mean, we only promote the offers that are put in front of us, right?

Well, there’s a good reason the offers put in front of us are tied inherently to poor user experience and consumer complaints, regularly ticking boxes like “Things I’m Least Likely to Give My Grandma For Christmas”.

That reason is simple:

CPA Affiliates are seen as traffic mules with a penchant for risk.

A rather inglorious job title, if you ask me.

Many of the companies trying to ‘recruit’ us are doing so on the basis that we’re happy to break rules they themselves won’t.

Is this a sustainable position that we are putting ourselves in?

Under The Cloaking Economy 10

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Look at your latest Network newsletter and tell me what you see.

A handful of hot offers to promote?

Check.

A handful of offers you’d sign up to yourself?

Err…

Many of the offers dangled under our nostrils are poor value propositions, with an over-reliance on negative option billing models.

Negative Option: Where the consumer has to take action to cancel a subscription that is charging him weekly/monthly/etc.

There’s nothing wrong with negative options (we’ll call them rebills going forward).

…Until you realise that the only way affiliates are able to push these offers to the top of the charts is by masking the true terms and conditions. By cloaking any respectability out of the equation, and hiding their fingerprints.

Increasingly, the CPA industry is dominated by offers that merchants are uncomfortable promoting themselves.

This might be because they’ve competed away the profits with the legitimate ‘brand advertising’ model, or it might be because their model only works with aggressive affiliate backing.

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Who needs venture backing when you’ve got vulture backing, right?

Our industry is maturing to a point where the affiliate marketer’s traditional advantage of being savvy and ‘on the pulse’ is less valuable. Complacency and arrogance among affiliates, combined with better access to information, means that merchants are now on the pulse too.

And they’ve got us figured out pretty well.

In most cases, in-house media buying teams are perfectly capable of running the types of campaigns that we affiliates would run for them.

And even if they are not, they need only load up a spy tool to see what every affiliate and his dog has been running for the last 7 weeks.

Of course, affiliates would love to churn out brand-safe advertising that does what it says on the tin. I don’t think any of us enjoy slapping together the milking-blood-from-stone creatives that we are known for.

Trouble is, while any brand-safe advertising remains profitable, the merchant is unlikely to pass us the opportunity.

Instead, we are called in as ‘fixers’.

The mules responsible for producing advertising that a merchant can express plausible deniability he ever allowed.

We’ll boost your profits, yes.

Will you want to see how we do it? 12

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No, probably not.

There is a large supply of affiliates entering the industry, oblivious to regulation or acceptable advertising, so there is a comfortable supply of leads and sales waiting to be tapped from aggressive marketing.

Affiliates might not realise it, but we may soon become commodities.

An industry full of indistinguishable lemmings, all using the same tired landing pages, in games of cat and mouse that Moneypants Merchant doesn’t have time for himself.

How does this affect the cloaking economy?

Cloakers reap a short-term advantage.

They have found a way to differentiate their businesses:

They run landing pages that most marketers won’t, on traffic sources that most affiliates can’t.

This results in a quantum leap where profitability is concerned.

The problem is… their method of differentiation is to dance across a burning bridge lathered in petrol whilst smoking a fag.

How else can you explain a business model where both your buyers (the customers) and your suppliers (the traffic source) are misled so badly that they both want to see the back of you? 13

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Step Inside The Cloaking Madness What are these lucrative traffic sources that most affiliates can’t run on?

Well, let’s start with… the largest traffic sources in the world.

Facebook Ads and Google AdWords.

Have you tried running white-hat affiliate campaigns on these platforms lately?

Both Facebook and Google are notoriously unwelcoming platforms for affiliates, but they reserve their ultimate disdain for the CPA affiliate.

People, like us, who are playing the arbitrage game.

We are not wanted.

Simple as that.

There are a few exceptions where affiliates can succeed with white hat models and ‘clean’ campaigns on these platforms, but the majority of our work will result in ad rejection and account wipeout.

So what happens instead?

Affiliates, being the hardy bastards that they are, see no reason to obey Facebook or Google’s commands that thou shalt not run blatant affiliate campaigns on their platforms. 14

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They run them anyway.

By cloaking.

Fuck you Google. Fuck you Facebook. Fuck you anybody who doesn’t want my dick pills shipped weekly.

The thing is, if you’ve already committed to bending the rulebook, why not tear it up completely?

On the basis that running affiliate campaigns will require cloaking anyway, affiliates opt for aggressive landing pages and sketchy offers that maximise the reward from the risk.

They dive balls-first in to the honey pot, resulting in much-reviled ads for:

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Weight loss kits

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Muscle building supplements

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Nutra

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Anti-wrinkle skin creams

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“iPhones for just one dollar…”

I’m sure you’ve seen the type of bollocks that ends up in your News Feed.

These ads typically lead to an absolute gut punch of a landing page that isn’t so much Influence and Persuasion, but Daylight Robbery.

How about those staple Antivirus offers? 15

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Affiliates slaughtered the antivirus vertical through 2014 and 2015, but not by running innocuous ad lines like: “Protect your phone: Scan now!”

Everybody knew – from the affiliates, to the networks, and right up to the merchants – that a ‘better’ headline would be:

“Your Android has (2) Deadly Viruses! Scan Now!”

Of course, such a headline will never be accepted by a reputable traffic source. It’s left to the affiliate to put on his cloaking shoes and go to town.

And so snores even louder the elephant in the room.

Everybody knows that this is the type of shit that affiliates will get up to.

And everybody stands to benefit if the affiliate swallows the risk.

So you have an elaborate dance-off as merchants and networks gently invite the darker arts of affiliate marketing whilst posturing dramatically that they don’t actually want to be tainted by them.

Merchants have approached me on a number of occasions where the basic line of discussion has been this:

Merchant: “We’ve got this great offer and our affiliates are killing it.”

Me: “Oh yeah? Where are they promoting it?”

Merchant: “Mostly Facebook, Google, the usual… you know…” 16

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Me: “But it’s not going to get accepted on there, right?”

Merchant: “Yeah I know, but the benefits make it worthwhile to find a way.”

Me: “I see what you’re saying…”

Of course the merchants LOVE affiliates who are willing to take on this risk for them.

L-O-V-E. Why wouldn’t they?

The lead quality from aggressive marketing on Facebook and Google is through the roof. It’s staggeringly cost effective.

Which is why we’re drafted in ‘off the record’, as affiliates, helping the merchant to downsize his risk whilst simultaneously maximising his profits.

A cloaking economy ensues.

This doesn’t sound like particularly ‘hard’ work to me, as an affiliate.

It is dirty work.

Dirty, dirty, dir-tay.

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Affiliate marketing is threatened by a generation of Churn and Burners who see their true battle as getting access to more advertising accounts, and better cloaking technology.

What does this mean for the CPA industry as a whole?

It means you gain a competitive advantage by increasing your personal tolerance to risk and bullshit.

If you think that it’s only a matter of time before justice strikes and the cloakers are driven out of time – dream on, kiddywink. It isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

The incentives are skewed so that every medium sized platform benefits from the cloaker’s ad dollars.

And those that don’t need them – your Facebooks and Googles of the world – are too slow to close every loophole that a cloaker exploits.

Nobody ever said that affiliates weren’t the greatest marketers in the world when it comes to finding and seizing on loopholes.

You’re damn right we are.

But it’s tough to build a legitimate business if you allow yourself to become pigeonholed and commoditised as ‘somebody who carries out the dirty work’.

You need only attend an affiliate conference to witness how painfully at odds affiliates are with their own daily realities.

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All talk, no assets.

All talk, no assets.

All talk.

No assets.

The Acceptance of Cloaking as a Business Model Isn’t it crazy?

There are now Mastermind sessions where you can pay thousands of dollars to get together with other affiliates and hear the latest methods of deceiving Facebook and other top-tier traffic sources.

Then everybody will go to an affiliate conference like AWA, or Affiliate Summit, and listen to executives from Google and Facebook talk about ‘building strong relationships’ as the key to triumphing on their platforms.

What gives here?

Publicly, the affiliate industry loves to talk up the necessity of ‘networking’.

Privately, it will shit over your ‘networking’ if it gets in the way of the bottom line.

Industry-wide, there is an acceptance that cloaking is just the way it is.

And maybe that is true. 19

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So, look, if you are a cloaker – don’t take these words personally. A few of my best friends in this industry are raging cloakaholics.

I’m talking purely from a strategic perspective.

The playing field is different depending on how you answer the question:

Am I happy to cloak campaigns?

The answer might not be a clear Yes or No.

There are levels of cloaking, levels of risk, and beautifully ill-defined shades of grey upon which you can base your business model.

Your position – and particularly your tolerance to risk – must be weighed heavily before you can formulate a strategy that stands a chance of making money in this industry.

The Different Levels of Cloaking What are those levels of cloaking?

Many of you will be familiar with the categories to follow, even if you don’t consciously rationalise them in your day-to-day operations.

Commercial Cloaking on Industrial Scale

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This typically involves cloaking your money pages with one of the industry’s leading ‘fraud protection’ solutions:

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NoIPFraud

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Fraudbuster

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JustCloakIt

Understand that whilst these services are billed as ‘protecting the agency from fraudulent clicks and unwanted visitors’, in practice, they are used for cloaking: to misdirect the approval teams at several of the world’s largest traffic sources.

Some affiliates choose to build their own custom cloaking tools.

Custom solutions are increasingly common as a way of vertical integration for affiliates running high numbers.

Another trend is doubling down on cloaking software by combining databases, or using two-tier filtering.

If you are going to spend $XXX-$XXXX on third party software, we might consider this cloaking on an industrial scale.

It is, presumably, a cornerstone of your ability to generate leads.

Thus it pays to have the best cloaking infrastructure available, and much time is spent optimizing for this variable long before a campaign is launched.

Better technology = longer lasting accounts, and less churn.

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Affiliates cloaking at the top end of the industry have two priorities:

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Keeping ad accounts alive

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Acquiring new ad accounts.

Most cloakers I speak to are seeing greater success by focusing on ‘account farming’ rather than keeping accounts alive – which is rather perverse, and sums up the problem with the model.

It’s widely expected that you will crash and burn through accounts on Facebook if you run the type of shit that affiliates love to run.

But why care if you have your next account lined up and ready?

So goes the affiliate logic.

The problem with relying on this methodology is that it places a great deal of stress on your ability to acquire new accounts.

Here are just some of the factors that will need to be stage-managed:

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Your IP address

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Your virtual machine used to access the platform

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Domains of landing pages

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Hosting used for them

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DNS and domain information

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Name on the account

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Address on the account

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Separate credit cards

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The creative itself 22

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Footprints of any asset the campaign relies on (e.g. its Facebook Page)

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The budget cap you’re allowed to spend

Then we have arguably the biggest problem of all.

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The negative feedback of running aggressive ads

On Facebook, how are you going to combat the onslaught of users reporting your shitty weight loss ad as spam? Or hiding all future posts?

Some affiliates will hire outside help to systemically delete negative comments as they appear on their ads.

They will farm positive comments.

They might even redirect a percentage of their traffic to respectable pages in the hope that it tows them away from the Worst Offenders List.

None of these issues are terminal, clearly, seeing how affiliates are still running wild and making a lot of money.

But they are serious barriers to entry, and they pose an existential threat to your business.

The decision to cloak on an industrial scale is thus a serious commitment rather than a choice to be made willy fucking nilly on a slow Friday afternoon.

Rules Driven Cloaking, aka ‘Flow Management’

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This is a Do-It-Yourself method of cloaking that can be effective insomuch that it makes the cloaked page difficult to stumble across by mistake.

You send a set percentage of users to Aggressive Page X, and the rest to Compliant Page Y – by filtering the users with your tracker.

For example, you might define that only BT customers, using Chrome, in London, will see your cloaked page.

The likelihood of getting busted is drastically reduced because the profile of users is much smaller.

This tactic differs to industrial scale cloaking in that the public page will also promote your intended offer – just nowhere near as aggressively.

It is a tactic I will sometimes use to split test grey-area landing pages that might not get approved in the 50/50 bracket. I’ll run a small cohort test on 10-25% of my traffic and look out for a noticeable jump in performance.

Unlike a full-throttle cloaking approach, the idea is that your public page is still profitable – or breaks even, at a minimum.

The rules driven cloaked page provides an extra boost to ROI, with a much smaller risk of getting caught.

It’s a good option for campaigns where you want a little ‘plausible deniability’ (“Oh, sorry, yes, some of my devices are getting redirected to Page X. Did you not see this when you approved the ad? LOL your mistake bro”).

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Plausible deniability – a term you may not be familiar with, but should get familiar with if you want to thrive in this industry.

Marginal Sample Cloaking This is where you cloak a very small percentage of your traffic to increase profits, without setting any rules to define the traffic flow.

You might set up a campaign like this:

By funnelling 90% of your traffic to a safe page, and 10% to a page with a little more spunk to it – you can gain a relative ROI boost with a lower chance of getting caught.

A manual reviewer has a 1 in 10 chance of landing on the aggressive page.

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That’s in theory, but there is still a clear danger that the traffic platform has a method of systematically tracking all landing pages served by a campaign link over time.

In this case, the reviewer need only pick out the alternate link to uncover the cloaked page.

The commercial cloaking solutions are much more sophisticated in that they can make advanced decisions about the person clicking before he/she is shown a page. They don’t need to redirect, either. Both the safe and cloaked version of the page is stored on the same URL.

This means that even if the poor sap at Facebook visits the correct landing page link, he’s not guaranteed to see the same content that a ‘money user’ would.

Not unless he can manually alter elements like his referring page, or dynamic tokens passed from it, or his IP.

Cloaking a marginal sample of your traffic is the unsophisticated hillbilly cousin of cloaking by a ruled based formula (discussed above).

Using rules adds extra protection whereby the person reviewing the ad won’t see the page unless he meets a certain criteria, which an affiliate will make deliberately unlikely.

He’ll achieve this by targeting criteria that can’t be spoofed easily (carriers, ISPs, operating system versions, etc.)

Bait and Switching 26

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This is the most primitive of all cloaking methods.

You submit a campaign for approval with an acceptable landing page. Once the campaign is approved, you revert to an aggressive landing page and run 100% of the traffic to it.

Let’s just say, this tactic works best if your traffic source of choice is seriously understaffed, or too busy to give a shit about retro disapprovals.

In all other circumstances, it’s a recipe for disaster.

The only bright spot with the bait and switch is you can plausibly deny that you saw a problem with the aggressive landing page you introduced after approval:

“Sorry, the original LP wasn’t backing out. I only introduced this one yesterday. I thought browser trapping was acceptable, anyway? Won’t happen again. On my mother’s life…”

The percentage of affiliates caught red-handed used this tired excuse is probably close to 100%.

Blaming it on ignorance will save you.

The first time.

But you can expect your account flagged if you get busted for bait and switching, after which your future efforts will come under much closer scrutiny. 27

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Some traffic sources work on a “One warning followed by $3,000 fines per infringement” basis.

If you enter said danger zone, you’d be an utter fool for pinning your hopes on the primacy of bait and switching.

The Publisher Perspective One of the points I’ve always stressed over the years is that affiliates should think long and hard about building long-term assets.

That is something I try to both practice and preach.

I have built a number of websites that produce an income derived outside the world of affiliate marketing.

This has rather changed my perspective on our industry, in terms of how it fits in to the online advertising world.

Let me give you an example. I was recently testing various types of display ads for a website I own, using a list of the Best Networks for Publishers in 2015.

I decided to take a punt on one of the higher rated networks, which had bold claims of increasing my average RPM way beyond industry standard.

So, I set up a solitary 300x250 ad unit with Network X. 28

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Five minutes later, I visit my site and sure enough, there’s the classic Photoshoppery of my fellow scumbags. It’s staring me in the face:

I quietly shudder at the sight of this relic on my property – knowing full well the negative effect on user experience.

I click the ad to see what delights await.

I’m then sent through a chain of four redirects, leading to a file being automatically downloaded to my Mac, which I give the Federer backhand treatment as it cannons in to the trashcan.

Meanwhile, I notice something funny is starting to happen as I flick around the rest of my site.

If I click any exit links, I’m not sent to my desired destination.

No matter what I click, I’m sent back to the same affiliate landing page, and prompted to download more useless crap.

Some sort of exit-link hijacking is in action. 29

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I have no idea what kind, but after removing the 300x250 placement, the redirects are promptly halted and things return to normal.

So I’m sitting here thinking on two levels…

1) As a publisher, how utterly disinterested must I be in the experience of my users to run ads that cause this sort of confusion and disruption?

2) As an affiliate, how can I bid for the first impression served when it’s sold to aggressive marketing on this scale of sketchiness?

Here’s a fun side task for those of you who own websites.

Head over to somewhere like AdCash, RevenueHits or Adsterra and sign up as a publisher.

Add their inventory to one of your websites.

Click on the first ad that displays.

What you see is [most likely] both your competition and your industry’s downfall staring you in the face.

It’s cloaked nastiness in a bow tie.

I call myself an affiliate marketer, but as somebody who also operates on the publisher side – the last people in the world that I would allow to advertise on my property are other affiliates.

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Increasingly, it’s not ‘direct response’, or ‘results-driven marketing’ that we pride ourselves in.

It’s the ability to deceive publishers in to accepting our bullshit.

Finch, this is shady as fuck. I don’t want to cloak. How can I still prosper from Affiliate Marketing? Well, I’m glad you asked.

All 4 of you.

Later in this volume, we’re going to dissect some advanced competitive strategies that can set you up for success without the need to cloak.

I don’t think it would be possible to overplay the correlation between cloaking and success for a large percentage of affiliates out there.

It’s what many leadgen businesses are built on.

Fuck, it’s what many networks are built on.

For better or worse, it’s something that has to be understood before you can piece together the true nature of this industry.

I would be doing you a disservice if I pretended that anything else would make an appropriate first post.

In each post to follow, you can assume that cloaking will have a net-positive effect on the attainable profit margins. 31

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But that is not to say that cloaking is necessary to succeed.

(It’s not.)

I will be quite clear about the ‘acceptability’ of any dubious strategies we come across.

And I’ll leave it down to you to decide where your risk aversion lies, which – knowing affiliates – I’m sure you would have done anyway.

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A Breakdown of Popular Verticals and Traffic Types in 2016 Now that we’ve addressed the elephant in the room – shit loads of affiliates are cloaking – let’s move on to look at 2016’s hottest affiliate marketing trends. We’ll start with a broad assessment of where the industry is headed, followed by a closer look at the various traffic types and verticals where affiliates are currently seeing success.

The Industry As It Stands Today If I had to divide the CPA affiliate industry in to segments based on popularity over the last twelve months, I would do it like this:

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Facebook affiliates

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Native affiliates

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Affiliates pushing sweepstakes

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Mobile traffic specialists (display, pops or redirects)

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Everybody else

Facebook affiliates rely heavily on cloaking – with an overwhelming focus on Nutra, skincare and other health based products. This market has become a battle of technology (cloaking), infrastructure (gaining access to new accounts) and networking (finding the best offers with available cap). Native affiliates also rely on cloaking, although not to the same degree. They have a broader selection of ‘white hat’ offers that work, although the cost of traffic is prohibitive. There is huge growth in this sector, and many Facebook affiliates are scaling sideways in to Native. 33

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Next we have the sweepstake affiliates. These guys are not restricted to a single traffic source, but they are dedicated to a small handful of offers that have gotten traction in many, many different countries. This vertical routinely gobbles up the bulk of a network’s ‘Top Performing Offers’ newsletter. It has become a go-to for newbies entering the industry needing solid offers to promote. Those solid offers in 2016 can usually be divided in to: iPhone giveaways, Samsung giveaways, and grocery giftcards (e.g. Win £250 to spend at Tesco). Next up, we have mobile traffic specialists. This is a large crowd of affiliates jostling for profits on the mobile display and popunder platforms. These sources have seen a massive surge in popularity over the last 12 months, especially the pop sources (which emphasizes the cyclical nature of our industry given how ‘out of fashion’ they were just two years ago). Pop sources like PopAds, Propeller, Gunggo and AdCash are all the rage. Mobile specialists will pick and choose between sweepstakes, app installs, mobile leadgen and sometimes pay-per-call. Unlike the sweepstake specialists, their expertise rests on good understanding of 1 or 2 traffic sources rather than a category of products. Finally, we have everybody else. Some other notable sectors: Adult and Dating The adult and dating spaces – both staples of the affiliate diet – have consolidated in the last year. 34

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Here the margins are tighter, the flow of new offers has stalled, and traffic is getting brokered across dozens of smaller sources. These verticals are still profitable, but competing is going to require some forward thinking. Many of the ads that were ‘revolutionary’ two years ago, are today met by lower CTRs and user scepticism. Consumers have free apps on their phones that serve the purpose of matchmaking and chasing sex. Many of these apps possess something closer to gender equality (access…to…women? No fucking way), and they are training the consumer to expect utility for free. I don’t see how this can bode well for either the dating or adult sectors in the long term. After all, it’s an open secret that most dating/adult products on the market – certainly those pushed by affiliates – are a pile of horseshit. How do we reconcile this with a generation that is increasingly comfortable, indeed expectant, that a free app can achieve legitimate results without the same charges? No Sign Up No Bullshit No Credit Card Required Indeed, the holy trifecta of banner bullet points may come back to haunt us if somebody actually designs a dating product that delivers on our promise. The best affiliates will survive, of course, but anybody in this sector should keep one eye on what disruptions are emerging from Silicon Valley. In last year’s Premium Posts I spoke highly of app installs and pay-per35

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call as potentially explosive affiliate segments in 2015. In truth, it’s been a pretty average year for app installs. Where budget can be found, it is fiercely contested. There are some huge offers dangling payouts on a CPI basis, but most of these are well policed and restrictive to promote. Many of those enjoying high-volume success with apps have done so by pursuing the right contacts in their address book. They have gotten upstream and snapped up the best offers before they land on a CPA network. On CPA networks, the apps that continue to thrive are those lending themselves to the hyper aggressive marketing tactics that affiliates are known for. Think: antivirus, battery saving, new browsers, and anything utility-based. Pay-per-call continues to pass under the radar. It hasn’t enjoyed the sort of breakout mass promotion that I envisioned when I wrote about it last year. This is only a matter of time. The tech support (call centre) space is one exception. Affiliates crucified tech support through 2015 to the point where it is now effectively Out of Action. I still see rogue affiliates taking it on in various Skype groups, but they are finding it increasingly difficult to source decent offers that offer the pay-per-call model. Tech support has become a can of worms. Be very careful what type of offers you promote in this sector. The more aggressive types will likely get you banned from most traffic sources. The rest of the pay-per-call landscape is rich with opportunities: most notably on mobile native advertising, where I think we’re going to see a lot of movement in 2016.

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The Direction of Affiliate Marketing in 2016 So, that’s where the industry stands. Where is it heading? OK, I’m going to simplify my thoughts and suggestions in to two colour coded tables: one for verticals, one for traffic types. These tables indicate three signals:

•

Current Difficulty – On average, how difficult is it to crack? Green = Relatively easy, Red = Difficult.

•

Reward Potential – How lucrative the space can be in 2016. $ = Low rewards, $$$$ = High rewards

•

Future Value – Is it an endangered space? Will the market grow? Green = Relatively safe, likely to grow Red = Threatened.

Got that?

Traffic Type Direction in 2016 Let’s start with traffic types. Below I have listed the major types of traffic purchased (or acquired) by affiliates. Some of these traffic types have been around for years – e.g. paid search, web popups – others, like mobile native, are so new that affiliates have merely scratched the surface of what will soon be possible on them.

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Here’s the table; I’ll summarise it afterwards: Type of Traffic

Difficulty

Reward Factor

Paid Search

$$$$

Free Search (SEO)

$$

Paid Social

$$$$

Free Social

$

Mobile Pops/Redirects

$$$

Mobile Display

$$$

Web Pops/Redirects

$$

Web Display

$$$

Classic PPV

$

Native Web

$$$$

Native Mobile

$$$

Adult Display (Web)

$$

Adult Display (Mob)

$$

Adult Pops/Direct (Web)

$$

Adult Pops/Direct (Mob)

$$

Future Value

Please note: these annotations are strictly my opinion. They are biased; just like everything else you read in this volume. One of you will be quick to tell me, “Actually, web display is easy if you know what you’re doing. You must be a retard, Finch.” Another will say: “PPV easy? Since fucking when?” If you have good reason to reject any of my opinions, you absolutely should. The table is intended as a reference point, and there are many ways you can interpret it. SUMMARY 38

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One of the ways to interpret the table is to look at reward value. By placing an emphasis on the profits available now, we don’t have to worry about a future that may well be clouded with uncertainty. For example, we know there is a lot of money in mastering these traffic types: Paid Search

$$$$

Paid Social

$$$$

Native Web

$$$$

Plenty of affiliates got rich pushing Nutra on Facebook last year – regardless of the long-term outlook for ‘cloaking Facebook with Nutra products’ being decidedly bleak. If the reward factor is sufficiently high, it can justify competing in a market that is likely to blow up in the short-term future. In short, you might not care that you make $0 tomorrow if you’ve made $50,000 today. This attitude manifests in the business model of many, many affiliates. Another way of interpreting the chart is to focus on Future Value and then drill down in to High Difficulty (if you want to ensure barriers to entry and a long term business), or Easy Difficulty (to locate fastest profits in the short term). For example, High Difficulty / High Future Value: Type of Traffic

Difficulty

Future Value 39

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Paid Search Paid Social Mobile Display If we know that these types of traffic will be valuable in the future, and that their learning curve is sufficiently high to run profitable CPA campaigns, then we can form a strategy that is built around knowledge of the traffic type. It will be costly for other affiliates to compete with us. Low Difficulty / High Future Value: Type of Traffic

Difficulty

Future Value

Native Web Native Mobile These areas represent golden opportunities in affiliate marketing, but they are liable to change quickly as the playing field levels. For example, when advertisers become familiar with Native platforms (particularly brand advertisers), the margins will tighten and difficulty will increase. This is already happening, but the window of opportunity remains open. The alternative is that the learning curve remains friendly, but the value is competed away. This happens with many traffic sources where there isn’t enough growth to sustain the advertiser demand: think Plentyoffish, Exotic Ads (oh sweet Chaturbate, what happened to thee?), PPV, and so on. There is no ‘correct’ path to profits. 40

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There is no ‘correct’ method to being an affiliate marketer.

•

What works for you, probably won’t for me.

•

And what works for me, definitely won’t for you.

(Trust me, I’m in some fucked up niches.) Let’s go deeper in to some analysis of each traffic type:

Traffic Type Assumptions Explained: Paid Search Examples: Google AdWords, Bing Ads, 7Search Affiliates have a love-hate relationship with paid search. They love the convenience, but hate the bullshit that goes with it. There is no more efficient way to blow up a profitable campaign than by leveraging the user intent available on platforms like Google AdWords. The downside is that Google doesn’t want you running CPA offers on its platform. Cloaking is a requirement in the majority of verticals. Pay-per-call is an exception here, and a great opportunity for affiliates to reignite their love affair with AdWords. If the model opens up beyond the US/CA markets, then we should all be ready. It will be a gold rush. Paid search is not going anywhere. Free Search (SEO) Examples: Google, Bing, Yahoo. If paid search is not going anywhere, then neither is SEO. 41

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I’ve documented my dislike for SEO on hundreds of occasions, but it goes without saying that if you do it well, you will make money. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many ‘black hatters’ over the last year, and whilst I don’t see the longevity or reduction of stress in what they do… it makes money. Period. There is a valid argument that SEO, as we know it, will cease to exist as Google gets better and better at matching its algorithms to a core vision of what users want. In the white hat world, this argument has already been won. The white hat techniques used to improve rankings in 2016 merge on PR and user experience design rather than a unique field of ‘SEO’. Nevertheless, there will always be marketers outwitting Google in the short term. Both black hatters and white hatters will remain, but both will be forced to evolve on very short notice. Paid Social Examples: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram By ‘paid social’, let’s be clear: we’re talking about Facebook. Have you tried running campaigns on Twitter? I have – it’s a fucking mess. No wonder the bluebird is heading down the swanny. Facebook remains the highest impact means of making money in affiliate marketing today. It is the platform of choice for a large percentage of the affiliates who go on to become ‘overnight success stories’. 42

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That is because Facebook has scale. Immense, wondrous, see-it-to-believe-it scale. The downside to Facebook is the risk of the tactics employed by affiliates in making it work. If you’re relying on cloaking, you are only as good as the footprint of your technology. And some would say, as good as your ability to acquire new accounts. Regardless of the cloaking model’s sustainability, future money says that paid social will continue to grow. Affiliates seeking large global audiences can’t stay away from a platform like Facebook. It’s crack to us. Free Social Examples: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest The alternative to buying a shed load of advertising on Facebook, Twitter, etc, is to grow an audience organically. Many affiliates exploring a native arbitrage model – e.g. buying ads on Taboola, monetizing them with Taboola/AdSense – will also try to build up a Facebook audience that can be leveraged for residual profits. Sounds like a good model, and I can tell you first-hand, it’s a very good one. The future downside to relying on Facebook or Twitter for free traffic is that these platforms are incentivized to make you pay for it instead. For example, Twitter’s recent pivot towards a News Feed that prioritizes updates ‘you may like’, as opposed to a simple chronological timeline, reduces 43

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the value of building a following. Twitter, like Facebook, would rather you pay to guarantee exposure. Mobile Pops / Redirects Examples: PopAds, Gunggo, Propeller Ads, Wiget Media, PopCash. Competition on mobile pop platforms is fiercer than ever. The traffic is very much in vogue. If there’s one thing you can count on in affiliate marketing, it’s that the traffic source perceived to be the ‘best starting point for newbies’ will quickly become host to the industry’s ugliest dog fights. And that is exactly what happened in 2015. Shit got super competitive. The worst competition is found when you bid on carrier traffic. Many pin submit offers are only open to certain carriers, which leads to massive increases in the bids on those carriers. We’re talking Weimar style hyperinflation if two affiliates both get their claws out. My advice is to find offers that convert on Wi-Fi traffic. (It’s pretty basic advice, but it hasn’t failed me yet.) There’s a lot more of this traffic, and it’s a lot cheaper. Another good option is to buy ‘untargeted mobile traffic’ in bulk and filter carrier traffic to a separate funnel with a higher priced offer.

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Mobile Display Examples: AdMob, BuzzCity, AdModa, Millennial Media, Adsterra, Go2Mobi This is tough. Mobile display is a battle to overcome click fraud, junk traffic and the thousands of bots roaming each network. You can’t expect to launch mobile banners and hit profit on Day 1. It’s a game of attrition where you will lose money in the pursuit of a few Holy Grail combinations that work. Some of the bait and switch banners we used to rely on, like the classic Play / Download ad, have taken a pummelling in the last 12 months. They are harder to get approved. As a result, affiliates tend to favour pops and redirects over display traffic. Interstitials are the exception. These can be display or direct traffic. Either way, affiliates are hammering them. Web Pops / Redirects Examples: PopAds, Wiget Media, Exoclick, Propeller Ads, Gunggo Web pop sources are more difficult to get profitable than their mobile counterparts. I put this down to the struggle of immediately engaging a user on a web-based device. You would think that the extra screen space might help us get our sales message across, but nope, it creates multiple distractions. The ads are easier to avoid. 45

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As a result, you will see a much lower clickthrough rate on web pops compared to mobile. Many affiliates bust out JavaScript entry alerts as a compromise – to force a response. Others will use audio/video autoplay. Flashing tabs are another good trick. We’ll be looking at landing page tricks later in this guide. Web Display Examples: SiteScout, AdCash, Adsterra, Exoclick, AdBlade, Matomy If you want to set yourself one of the toughest challenges in affiliate marketing, web display arbitrage ticks all of the right boxes. It is incredibly expensive, impossible to stay lean, and littered with junk traffic. If you go to an ad exchange, you’ll find a huge percentage of publishers offer display space that is quite simply… overpriced. They will set high ceiling CPMs with scant regard for how a performance marketer might fare on the source. These publishers are seeking brands and agencies, not affiliates or anybody held honest by a profit margin. If you are going to run web display, it’s best to stick to networks that are aware that performance marketing actually exists. Try AdCash, Adsterra, SelfAdvertiser or the non-adult inventory on Exoclick. In other words… go to platforms that market themselves to affiliates. If you want to run traffic on the big exchanges, or a source like SiteScout, your 46

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funnel needs to be locked down – I mean, fucking atomic bomb proofed – before you get there. Classic PPV Examples: MediaTraffic, TrafficVance (Propel Media), Lead Impact There are two types of PPV (pay per view) traffic.

•

Popups delivered by script placed on a website

•

Popups delivered by adware in a toolbar installed on the user’s computer.

When we talk about classic PPV, we mean the latter kind: old school adware that lets us target any website the user happens to be visiting. This remains, probably, the easiest way to make a fast buck in affiliate marketing. The targeting options are insanely precise. If you want to spring your Pet Insurance advert in front of somebody who has just read an article about insuring dogs, then you can do so by targeting the exact URL of the article. Classic PPV is a shrinking market, not to be confused with the rapidly growing ‘PPV’ offered by networks that get publishers to accept pops on their sites. Native Web Examples: AdBlade, Outbrain, Taboola, Content.ad, RevContent Can you smell the gravy? I said: can you smell the gravy? Native advertising is the new hot-doggy-on-sauce. Affiliates are flocking to it like flies to shite. 47

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Web-based native advertising is currently much more cost effective than mobile-based native advertising. This is reported across much of the industry, and it is backed up by what I have seen personally. Web traffic is around three times more expensive than mobile traffic, but it outperforms by an even higher multiple (sometimes up to ten times as effective). A lot of this is down to the type of offers that are popular with native advertisers. The expensive nature of the traffic has affiliates reaching for PPS rather than PPL offers. Web traffic remains a better converter for extracting a credit card from the user. This trend will continue as long as users remain uncomfortable making third party payments on their mobile devices – or until merchants offer a better mobile funnel with less resistance. This is one of the most lucrative traffic types to master in 2016. Native Mobile Examples: AdBlade, Outbrain, Taboola, Content.ad, RevContent, Go2Mobi The industry is getting excited about the potential of native advertising on mobile devices, partly due to the extraordinary growth and the long line of quality publishers wanting a slice of our ad dollars. What is the reality in the trenches? I saw this posted by a Go2Mobi rep on the STM Forum: “Performance is great on native, so as a result prices are pretty damn high. Lots of advertisers have seen conversions but the numbers just don't back out due to the high costs of the traffic. So basically, running 48

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a utility app install campaign on native is probably not the best idea.” This matches my own experiences. I expect native on mobile to catch on in a big way, but the prices are restrictive for the CPA offers that most affiliates are wanting to promote. You need higher payouts to have a chance, which means you need to pivot the type of offers you are bringing to native, or come up with a different model. One affiliate solution, that I alluded to in my Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing, is to run mobile campaigns on a PPL basis, swallow a short-term loss, and hope for a payout bump – essentially to run an extreme variant of the High Lead Quality strategy. These payout bumps are inevitable when the lead quality is so much better than most other sources (except Facebook and AdWords). Adult Display (Web) Examples: ExoClick, TrafficJunky, TrafficForce, JuicyAds, AdBucks. Not much has changed. Adult web campaigns are pretty unsexy in 2016. They can produce decent unspectacular profits with a lot of optimization and a good offer. For a handful of larger companies they can produce very nice profits from offers that seldom make it to your average CPA network (until they’ve had the profits royally savaged from them). We’ve reached a bit of a plateau where the same creatives have been in use for 2-3 years now. There’s not much innovation. What has changed is the severe case of traffic brokering and various smaller 49

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networks popping up left, right and center. Porn sites change their network allegiances seemingly monthly, causing Network X to make a big song and dance about their “New deal with Publisher ABC! Traffic now available!”, which the affiliate soon finds is pretty much the same traffic that he was buying on Network Y last month, now at a slightly higher price or with slightly weaker traffic. Rinse and repeat. If you want to master adult web traffic, you’ll need a team of forensics to keep on top of who controls what. Adult Display (Mobile) Examples: Reporo, ExoClick, TrafficJunky, TrafficForce, JuicyAds. Adult display traffic is growingly rapidly on mobile. The mobile placements on your typical porn site are well designed for direct response, with better protection against bots, meaning you have a better shot at getting profitable than you do with clean mobile display. I put that down to the adult industry being light years ahead of the rest of display advertising – it has performance marketing in its DNA. Hopefully the ‘clean’ industry catches up someday soon. Tip: Test every placement type and size available to you. There is easy money to be made by measuring performance across different ad sizes; particularly those you are not familiar with. Adult Pops/Redirects (Web) Examples: ExoClick, TrafficJunky, JuicyAds, PlugRush

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Adult web pops follow much the same pattern as ordinary web pops. There are a lot of them, and they are very cheap, but they require a real creative shift to capture anything like the same engagement that is seen on mobile devices. The benefit of pursuing pops and redirects over display traffic is that it extracts you from the psychological quagmire of having to source new adult banners every day. This alone can make the jump worthwhile for some affiliates… I expect the market to consolidate as usage shifts further towards mobile. It’s a good type of traffic to master, but the reward is minimal if you master it in the adult space. Your competitors have been doing that same shit for years. Adult Pops/Redirects (Mobile) Examples: ExoClick, TrafficJunky, JuicyAds, PlugRush This is the ‘growth’ option of a relatively mature industry. The biggest issue affiliates face with pop and redirect traffic is the lower baseline lead quality compared to display campaigns where the users land on the page with greater intent. You may have to settle for lower payouts, but this can be offset by the vast amount of traffic available (much of it still at decent rates) in markets that aren’t saturated. My outlook across all of the adult traffic types is ‘mixed’ at best. This is down to the uncertainty regarding user’s willingness to continue paying if/when free apps gain traction.

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There is a potential upside. If adult dating offers fall out of fashion, there will be enormous inventory available – possibly with falling prices – which could prove valuable for affiliates pushing testosterone boosters, gambling offers, sex-fuelled ‘How To’ crash courses, and anything else that works on the adult market but isn’t tied to the old-style adult dating model. Okay… Next up…

Vertical Direction in 2016 Here are the top verticals in affiliate marketing, broken down in the same way as our traffic types but without the Future Value metric. (Unlike types of traffic, verticals rarely change over the years.) Vertical

Difficulty

Reward Factor

Weight Loss / Nutra / Muscle

$$$$$

Skincare

$$$$

Other Beauty / Wellness

$$$

Business Opportunities

$$$$

Financial

$$$

Insurance & Claims

$$

Dating

$$

Adult Dating

$$$

Gambling

$$$

Casino

$$$

Sweepstakes

$$$$

Utility / App Installs

$$$$

Gaming

$$$$ 52

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Tech Support

$$$

Trade Leadgen

$$

We will summarise the challenges associated to each vertical, along with the traffic types most likely to work well with them.

Weight Loss / Nutra / Muscle Likely to Succeed

Facebook, Paid Search, Native Web, Web Display, PPV, Mobile Display

Outside Bet

SEO, Native Mobile

Unlikely to Succeed

Pop traffic, Organic Social

This is a high risk / high reward vertical. You can almost divide the industry in half:

•

Those slinging weight loss products on Facebook

•

Those who aren’t!

The biggest challenge, assuming you follow the crowd that relies on Facebook and Native advertising, is keeping accounts alive. Affiliates who don’t want to worry about getting their accounts banned left, right and centre should avoid this vertical. For those who only want to spend 6-24 months in the industry – but with a good chance of turning obscene profits in that time – Nutra is your baby.

Skincare

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Likely to Succeed

Facebook, Paid Search, Native Web, Web Display, PPV

Outside Bet

Mobile Display, SEO, Native Mobile

Unlikely to Succeed

Pop traffic, Organic Social

Skincare is the little sister of weight loss in affiliate moneymaking terms. Don’t worry though. This sister is morbidly obese and capable of turning a serious profit. How many times have you seen adverts like this?

My guess is ‘far too often’, because the ads are everywhere. Native and Facebook are the best platforms for skincare. Why am I discouraging pop traffic and organic social for both weight loss and skincare?

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Mainly because the landing pages that work well in these verticals rely on the user’s intrigue getting perked by a headline or banner. Titles such as, “1 Weird Trick Helps Single Mom Lose 53 lbs” are excellent lead-ins to an advertorial style lander, where the ‘solution’ is given. But you need tension before you can provide a solution. Advertorials are far less effective on pop and redirect traffic where the user has shown zero intent before landing on the page. As for organic social, well, come on… this is not the kind of shit that you’d recommend to your grandmother, is it? Many affiliates have focused solely on skincare for 5-6 years and have banked big money. Just like weight loss, if you master skincare products, you can forget the rest of affiliate marketing exists and operate in your own private bubble.

Other Beauty / Wellness Likely to Succeed

Facebook, Paid Search, Native Web, PPV

Outside Bet

Mobile Display, SEO, Native Mobile, Web Display

Unlikely to Succeed

Pop traffic, Organic Social

In this catchall category we have products targeting issues like: hairloss, libido, mental conditions (anxiety, shyness), healthy living supplements and teeth whitening. I’ve relegated Web Display to an outside bet on the basis that you need a mainstream product to make it work. In many cases, the products in this category will be fulfilling niche needs. 55

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(Hairloss and teeth whitening are exceptions that can be run mainstream.) For every other traffic type, the same conditions as weight loss and skincare apply. Facebook and Native drive the most traffic. Paid search drives by far the highest quality leads and sales. Somebody who actively searches for a cure to a condition is much further down the sales funnel when he/she lands on your page. Classic PPV has the potential for excellent ROI – through super tight targeting – albeit on a much smaller scale.

Financial Likely to Succeed

None

Outside Bet

Native Web, Paid Search, PPV, SEO

Unlikely to Succeed

Pop traffic, Social (free or paid), Display (web or mobile)

Financial is seared in heavy red on my table, same as it will be for every year in to the foreseeable. This includes products related to credit cards, loans, mortgages and anything that feels in essence like a hot rod up the jacksy. You cannot conquer this vertical if you are a Johnny NoMoney. You just can’t. The budgets of the few affiliates operating in the financial space should have 56

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you nervously farting your way in to whatever other vertical you had down as your second choice. I have reluctantly listed Paid Search as an outside bet, but that is being extremely generous. Not many affiliates can compete with the advertisers already present on Google, some of which will happily bid over $100 for a single keyword. Some of them don’t even care if they’re profitable. In the Outside Bet category, I have also listed SEO and PPV. You have a chance at SEO if you black hat bulldoze your way to the top of Google, but it’s unlikely to happen on a white hat strategy. Likewise, for black hatters, any success you see on a high volume term will be quickly slapped down with a manual review. Google is working round-the-clock to fuck you here. On PPV, you might get lucky for a few hours – before you realise that you’ve just entered a savage bidding war on the one keyword that actually delivers volume. Good luck winning that. Native Web is a rare bright spot and probably the most suitable traffic type for the high payout offers we’re talking about. Your CTR will be awful, leading to sky-high bids. If you can eat that, hey, you might get lucky. Many of the biggest financial advertisers have yet to shove their big swinging dicks in the Native pie, so it’s worth a shot if you’ve got nothing better to work on. Needless to say, this is not a vertical where you should be throwing caution to the wind with aggressive ‘Breaking News’ style advertorials.

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Or the usual bluster… NO BULLSHIT NO REPAYMENTS NO APPLICATION GET MONEY NOW Seriously, think long and hard about bullshitting in this vertical. It can, and likely will, come back to haunt you.

Insurance & Claims Likely to Succeed

Native, PPV, SEO, Paid Search

Outside Bet

Facebook

Unlikely to Succeed

Pop traffic, Display (web or mobile)

The insurance vertical has experienced a renaissance thanks to pay-per-call and native advertising. Popular offers include: auto, life and disaster insurance. We can include accident compensation claims in here too. The biggest mover in the last year has been auto insurance offers, by far. Native platforms with geographic targeting have faced bombardment with headlines that successfully engage the local audience, like:

•

“Drivers in Illinois Can’t Believe They’ve Been Ripped Off!”

•

“LA Car Owners Are Saving $XXX with One Phone Call!”

These offers come with payouts just high enough to make native a viable 58

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platform, and crucially, they translate well to mobile – particularly with the abundance of pay-per-call offers. Indeed, ‘Native to Pay-Per-Call’ is a combination that I am very interested in at the moment. Sources that probably won’t succeed for an insurance affiliate include: pops (“You interrupted me for WHAT?”) and display (“Meh! Insurance banner, Meh!”).

Dating Likely to Succeed

Social, Pops/Redirects (Web or Mobile)

Outside Bet

Native Mobile, Display, PPV, SEO

Unlikely to Succeed

Native Web, Paid Search

With dating we see the rise in influence of pops and redirects. This form of interruptive marketing is perfect for a vertical that relies heavily on the impulses of man. Facebook and dating is a match made in Heaven. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t see it this way. She filed for divorce several years ago. A legion of scorned affiliates are still dragging their heels and trying to make things work on Facebook, but it’s tough unless you have an agency account or your own white label site. Tough, but not impossible. Keep Facebook sweet and the dating vertical is super rewarding. Dating can work on Native with mobile and tablets (where the costs are 59

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lower), but it is too squeezed on the web to be worthwhile. A click cost of around $0.20 - $0.30 simply doesn’t leave room for profit on your average $4-$7 PPL dating offer. I have listed SEO as an outside bet, and it’s something I’ve recommended many times over the years. This is because you don’t need to own a dating site to make money from a dating offer. You simply need to understand your demographics; the content it enjoys; and where to slap banners.

Adult Dating Likely to Succeed

Adult Web/Mobile (Pops and Display)

Outside Bet

SEO, Display

Unlikely to Succeed

Native, Social, Paid Search, PPV

For obvious reasons, I can’t recommend any platforms other than those that specialize in dealing with adult traffic. SEO is a good option, for the same reasons stated in the Dating category. The ads work well on any adult site you happen to get ranked. I’ve listed ordinary Display as an Outside Bet because – well, let’s just say – some affiliates have been known to use ‘clean’ landing pages linking to dubious dating sites where the payout and conversion rate is higher. I’m not saying you should do this – sacré bleu, who do you think I am? – Only that it has been known to happen, and that I thoroughly enjoyed the profits while they lasted. 60

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Adult is banned on PPV, will have you ostracized from social networks, and can get you arrested if you push it offline. Stay reckless.

Gambling Likely to Succeed

None

Outside Bet

Native, Adult (Pops & Display), PPV, SEO

Unlikely to Succeed

Paid Search, Social, Display

Just like the financial sector, gambling offers come with many terms and conditions attached. These will vary across the different markets you work in. Regulation is tight. I am no expert on the legal implications of pushing gambling offers in each of those foreign markets. Do your research before entering this vertical. Historically adult traffic has been a great source for gambling and casino offers. There’s also a lot of activity amongst mailers and those who have gigantic email lists at their disposal (check your spam box for evidence). These offers are tailor made for seasonal promotions and ‘weekend deals’ that lure in the punters on a loss leader. I would advise newbies to steer well clear of this vertical. It’s tougher than my old granny.

Casino Likely to Succeed

Facebook, Native, Pops/Redirects (Mobile) 61

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Outside Bet

Pops/Redirects (Web), Display (Mobile), PPV

Unlikely to Succeed

Paid Search, Display (Web)

Who has read the story about that one guy who ‘broke’ the casinos? Or the single mother who scooped $3.3 million whilst sat on the toilet? Online casino offers (slots, bingo, roulette, etc.) are a popular and growing staple of the affiliate diet. They are suitable for the advertorial style that is popular on Native. This, of course, is a telltale sign that Facebook cloakers will see success with them too. And they do. Slots, bingo and casino apps can be promoted successfully on pop traffic, where it is a hell of a lot easier on mobile than it is on web. Mobile Display is a wildcard option, one that is much harder to convert than pop traffic (for reasons unknown to me). Lead quality is a big issue in this vertical. Those on Facebook and Native follow a High Lead Quality Strategy, without fail. They do just fine. Those on pop sources have to find a way to make the lower baseline lead quality translate in to sufficient sales; or optimise relentlessly to keep their margins above water on lower payouts. Difficult, but again, not impossible.

Sweepstakes 62

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Likely to Succeed

Facebook, Pops/Redirects, Display, PPV

Outside Bet

Native Mobile, Paid Search

Unlikely to Succeed

SEO, Native Web

Sweeps were, alongside Nutra, the poster boy vertical of affiliate marketing in 2015. That is partly due to the vertical translating so well to the trifecta of Facebook, Display and Direct traffic. It was also due to the availability of brand new markets in obscure countries. These offers are seasonal so I’m ruling out SEO. Black hatters might enjoy a short-term burst of profits, but it won’t last. You could feasibly peddle sweepstake banners on your own websites, thereby leveraging SEO, but this requires a lot of management for offers that tend to crash and burn. Paid Search is a better option – albeit one that is cloaking or bust. The best offers tend to involve iPhone giveaways or grocery vouchers. There’s a lot of action in Europe (particularly the Nordics and DACH), but it’s sometimes the less heralded countries where you will see the highest ROI. I have noticed this trend time and time again just before a vertical matures and enters decline. It happened with adult a couple of years ago. The onus on reaching further for untapped corners of the globe is probably a warning sign that sweepstakes is reaching capacity.

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I can’t imagine the margins will stay the same in 2016. Consolidation is due and affiliates will have to work harder for the same return.

Utility / App Installs Likely to Succeed

Pops/Redirects (Mobile), Display (Mobile)

Outside Bet

Facebook

Unlikely to Succeed

PPV, SEO, Paid Search, Display (Web), Native

I expected app installs to do better for affiliates than was the case in 2015. Many of these offers are tightly policed, since their owners do not want to risk ejection from Google Play or iTunes. Let’s face it, if there’s one company that isn’t going to put up with our shit… it’s probably Apple. Tight regulation plus a greater focus on lead quality (judged by retention rate; or how many users pay for upgrades) has left affiliates relying on the same old suspects of utility apps to boost the coffers. There’s nothing wrong with that, except utility apps are hyper competitive. The market has reached a tipping point. You need to cloak to get any of this shit profitable, unless you have an exclusive deal that isn’t available to the rest of your peers. Predictably, these offers work best on pops, redirects and mobile display traffic. They come with the advantage of being suitable for Wi-Fi traffic, which steers you away from the many hungry affiliates in the pin submit sector (where carrier traffic is fiercely contested). 64

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Will app installs spread their wings and fly to greater profits in 2016? This, I believe, depends on the strategy you take in finding the best offers to promote. It is a vertical where your outreach has to extend beyond the network’s Top 10 Offers newsletter if you want to find stuff that still has legs (and cap) in it. Why is networking so important? Because any merchant that wants his app to survive on Google or Apple’s watch is not going to be able to justify the creative madness unleashed by a thousand affiliates with zero regard for their T&Cs. Any such relationship with an affiliate must be built on trust and sustainable marketing. All of which is hard work. So, naturally, many affiliates will continue to flock to the few apps that are easier work. Those built with their marketing ‘methods’ in mind, or at least those that have a proven track record of turning a blind eye to them. The apps that invite affiliate promotion end up being those with the heaviest competition. And the affiliates who succeed are generally those who cloak harder, dirtier and nastier than the rest. It’s a race to the bottom unless you get upstream and build trust where access to offers wouldn’t otherwise be granted to affiliates.

Gaming 65

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Likely to Succeed

Facebook, Display (Mobile), Pops/Redirects, Adult Display, Adult Pops/Redirects

Outside Bet

Display (Web), SEO, PPV, Native (Mobile & Web)

Unlikely to Succeed

Paid Search

Gaming jostles with the apps vertical to the extent that many of the top gaming offers are now mobile-based, monetized by premium unlockable content, and played on phones. There are still web-only gaming offers out there, including some very popular brands in the Adult vertical that I know many of you have a fancy for (probably in more ways than one). You will recognize them by their fruity creatives promising the wank session of a lifetime on your Hub site of choice, the likes of which I have sworn to stop talking about in eBooks. From my experience, it is rare to find successful gaming affiliates that merely ‘dabble’ in this vertical. It’s an all-or-nothing affair. Facebook remains a solid (if expensive) choice for promoting these offers. Gaming is also one of the last viable verticals for arbitrage on Web Display, although you stand a much greater chance of success on mobile. You will notice there are quite a few traffic types listed in our ‘Likely to Succeed’ section. This may be optimistic, but it hints at the universal appeal of gaming offers. They are similar to weight loss and dating in that they transcend traffic types and any one creative funnel. How do we know this? 66

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Just look at the revenue reported by some of the big hitters. Supercell – owner of Clash of Clans, Boom Beach and Hay Day – produced over $924 Million in profits for 2015. That’s on $2.3 Billion in revenue. Now that is what I call mainstream appeal. In terms of how you get access to the best gaming offers, much of the same advice applies from the Apps category. It’s about who you know: building relationships, earning trust and getting upstream. Position yourself as an advertiser that can be trusted. A profitable campaign without decent cap is barely worth having – something that remains a common problem on CPA networks in this space (even once you find something that works).

Tech Support Likely to Succeed

PPV, Pops/Redirects

Outside Bet

SEO, Paid Search

Unlikely to Succeed

Display, Native, Facebook

The Tech Support vertical is what we might call explosive territory. It can be highly controversial, and the types of landing pages that we looked at in last year’s Premium Posts (scaremongering extremes) have caused serious damage to the vertical’s health. Oopsy. Most networks simply won’t stock these offers in the US. 67

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Still, there are lighter forms of Tech Support that use a PPS (or PPI) model. These are often available on a global basis. They work well on pop and redirect sources. As for the more aggressive offers, you will have difficulty getting them approved. The SEO market for Tech Support is large and has been around for years. When I was 16, I used to write articles on various computer errors for $10 a piece. The explanations upsold a Windows registry-cleaning product that made my affiliate boss a decent chunk of cash. Similar websites still exist today. Last year we saw explosive profits from Tech Support paired to a pay-per-call model and blasted out on PPV sources. The very users who were receiving popups were those likely to be in need of tech assistance (to remove the adware), and it was a lucrative period. To say the least. Naturally, the PPV networks frowned upon this type of creative. It reduced the size of their audience when the user eventually got their software removed. Affiliates continue to take chances with tech support on pop and redirect sources, or by cloaking classic PPV, but the most aggressive funnels should be avoided if you value your ad accounts.

Trade Leadgen 68

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Likely to Succeed

Paid Search, Native (Web & Mob), PPV

Outside Bet

SEO, Facebook, Display (Web), Display (Mobile)

Unlikely to Succeed

Pops/Redirects

Trade leadgen is my loose description for the various miscellaneous offers where a specialist would pay you for leads. Examples include: dentists, plumbers, repairmen, handymen, lawyers, councillors, and any other advisors. These offers are the bread and butter of pay-per-call. You’ll find a few long-form leadgen offers, but the most likely growth in 2016 comes from the pay-per-call model and delivering leads via the phone. An obvious way to do this is with Google AdWords, placing ads that leverage the simple ‘Click to Call’ function. Affiliates are allowed to run pay-per-call campaigns on AdWords with very few restrictions. That is mainly because Google can’t tell the difference between a merchant’s phone number and a number assigned to an affiliate. Poor Google. The heart bleeds. Native is another platform with big potential for trade leadgen. These offers don’t lead to high CTRs – so yes, you will pay high CPCs – but they do provide excellent lead quality and a natural transition for the consumer to ‘click to call’ at the end of the article (particularly if he is using a mobile device).

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Here we have a great chance to find utility for the cheaper mobile native traffic. Pops and redirects are a poor choice for trade leadgen, where the user is highly unlikely to give a shit about your niche service. Mobile Display seems a better bet on the basis that it only takes one tap to initiate a phone call for which you can get paid a nice sum. In practice, it is hard to crack than it sounds. When was the last time a solitary banner convinced you to book an appointment with the dentist? Or to get the bath pipes looked at? Exactly. The intent isn’t there. The only way you get intent for these offers is by locating the user at source (when he is Googling for a solution) or by seducing him with a narrative (e.g. a news story via Native ads). For now, paid search remains the undisputed king of trade leadgen – just as it is for most small businesses. Moving on… What are some general trends we can expect in the year ahead?

Predictions: What Will Take Off in 2016/17? This is where I end up looking pretty stupid one year later. What are the developing/emerging trends that will be Next Year’s Big Money? 70

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Pay Per Call… Will Catch On Eventually It was one of my predictions for a breakout 2015, but it stayed under the radar of most affiliates. Pay-Per-Call is still in its infancy. Why should we care about it? Because it represents a clear path to both legitimacy and stable profits, through a model that will grow over the coming years. I don’t think it’s going away. Last year’s Premium Posts contained a guide to Pay-Per-Call on AdWords. Much of the advice still applies. There is very little coverage of the Pay-Per-Call space on the popular affiliate blogs and forums. I put that down to the fact that it’s old school marketing. (But then so is Native.) Maybe the real issue is that Pay-Per-Call is not suitable for sweepstakes and Nutra offers. It doesn’t feel like big money, does it? There’s something distinctly less ‘growthbait’ about sending leads to a local plumbing agent. Who cares? Industries like plumbing, dentistry, plastic surgery and home repairs aren’t 71

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subject to wild swings of trendiness and profits. They are about as ‘Stable, Long Term’ as it gets.

Google Will Crash The Native Party While native networks like Taboola, OutBrain and RevContent pick up steam, there is a threat lurking on the horizon that might just redefine the industry as we know it. That threat is Google, and its emerging ‘Matched Content’ technology. I would say it’s a 99.9% certainty that Google can – and soon will – enter the native market. If you have access to Google AdSense, you may already see the signs of this. Google is now beta testing a ‘Matched Content’ unit that works almost identically to Taboola and OutBrain – except it currently only displays internal content. Why would Google release a Matched Content unit via Google AdSense if it were only designed for internal content? The end goal here is surely to open up external advertising on these units, presumably via Google AdWords. The day this happens there will be a landslide of opportunities for publishers and advertisers alike. My experience of Matched Content, from a publisher perspective, is that Google still has a shit ton of work to do before they are on par with the units provided by Taboola and OutBrain. 72

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Alas… You wouldn’t bet against a company like Google closing that gap fast. Watch this space in 2016. UPDATE: Just a couple of days before this volume was due to go on sale, I saw this in Google AdSense:

Watch out Native. Google has entered the building.

Interstitials and Videos Will Get Our Attention One of the funniest sights at Affiliate World Asia was the look on certain faces as interstitials were publicly outed as ‘that one format that’s been working really well for us this year’. It happened about four times on stage. “Interstitials! Wow. Working so great for us!” Followed by, “Why the fuck did I just say that?” You know that feeling when a piece of knowledge is dropped on the room and five minutes later every fucker is typing on his mobile, and you know exactly what he’s adding to his To Do list? Yeah, that’s pretty much the vibe I was getting, too. 73

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I’m sure interstitials will face an onslaught of affiliate attention as we all rush to compete away the profits. Videos are the other hot format that every platform wants us to take seriously, but ask any affiliate and he’ll shrug his shoulders: “Videos, man? Fuck I don’t know… Do they even sell those on Fiverr?” The people selling us traffic are adamant that – just trust them – we really do want to start buying up video traffic. “The early signs are great”, and all that bollocks. I haven’t laid a finger on video advertising, so I can’t tell you whether it’s bullshit or the recommendation of the century. What I do know is that you’re going to hear a lot more about both of these formats.

Niche Products Take Over The Native World One of the strangest affiliate success stories of the year has been the rise of military flashlights on Native:

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These things are selling like hot cakes. Follow the usual Facebook affiliate groups and you’ll see network owners rushing to ship them in on exclusives straight outta China. One of the most interesting things about the flashlight is the back-end of the product (register on the forum to see the entire funnel). It is a haven of upsells with every last dollar squeaked out of the paying customer. You’ve got rechargeable batteries, charging kits, mini versions of the same product, ‘survival’ knives (very smart upsell given the audience), and warranty protection. From this aggressive upselling, the resulting high CLTV (customer lifetime value) makes for a much higher payout to the affiliate, which leads to flashlight landing pages spreading like wildfire on high bids. The question is, what will catch on next? If flashlights were one of the craziest success stories of last year, what are we going to be talking about in 12 months time? What will be the next niche to explode out of nowhere? I can’t answer this, but I would bet big money that it uses the same model. Products with legitimacy to run on the top native sources, and a back-end that relentlessly optimizes for every last dollar. Headline product + accessory upsells

Expect to see a lot more of this winning combination in 2016.

Okay, moving on… 75

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We’ve touched on native advertising. It’s already big, and it’s only going to get bigger. The next post goes in to greater detail on how and where you can take advantage of this new frontier in advertising.

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Tips to Conquer Native Advertising in 2016 In this post we are going to pry our little weasel faces in to the cookie jar otherwise known as: Native Advertising. What is native advertising? Strictly speaking… It is advertising that blends in with the publisher’s content to create a seamless promotion. The type of native advertising can vary across platforms and websites. It is designed to integrate in a way that display advertising cannot. Why is native surging ahead of conventional banners as the traffic type of choice? There are two main reasons: 1. It is less obvious to the consumer that the content is promotional, thus it appears trustworthy.

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Many consumers simply haven’t realized that ads like the above are actually ads. This results in a CTR that is much higher than what you will see with the same creative packaged in to a conventional 300x250 banner placement. Users have trained their eyes to avoid the parts of the page where we like to slap our banners. Worse yet, they’ve got ad blocking tools that physically stop our banners from loading. Native can bypass banner blindness. 2. The bidding model is advertiser-friendly. One of the biggest breakthroughs of native advertising has been (stealthily) managing to convince some of the world’s biggest publishers to accept what is essentially performance marketing on their sites. Publishers love to get paid by a CPM model. They want guaranteed money for eyeballs delivered. Native doesn’t work like that. It forces these sites to place the value on clicks and engagement rather than empty impressions. I’m not sure if you’ve tried to run a display advertising campaign on the BBC, but the CPM rate… well, let’s just say it’s going to make your eyes water. Why would you pay empty premiums when you can buy a Native ad, via OutBrain, and welcome visitors at a fixed (and reasonable) rate? With display, the world’s biggest publishers have little incentive to improve their placements, or make them more click-worthy – not when advertisers are 78

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happy to pay for the privilege of their banners merely ‘being seen’. Native changes it up by giving the publisher an incentive to place ads in such a way that they attract more clicks, not just vanity impressions, thereby generating more revenue for them. This incentive aligns with the affiliate – he who wants his shit to actually get clicked in the first place. For once there is symmetry where publisher and advertiser’s incentives align. We actually understand each other. The industry hype you hear is the result of this newfound magic in the bedroom. In short, everybody’s pants are a little bit wet right now.

The Building Blocks of Successful Native Campaigns If you’re going to launch a native campaign, there are some basic building blocks that contribute to success. First things first, we need to understand the way that a native campaign is weighted to receive traffic. There are, generally, three factors in play:

Your bid The most popular way to bid is by CPC. This way you only pay when somebody clicks one of your ads. How you bid is tied to the CTR you expect to achieve, and the ceilings in place 79

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on the platform. For example, dry subject matter like a new report on lower car insurance is going to demand a high bid because it will draw fewer clicks. The ‘top ten cute dog videos of the day’ is going to get a juicy CTR, so it can be set at a lower bid. Ideally we want to avoid markets where a bidding ceiling is prohibitive. I buy up a lot of native advertising in Thailand for one of my websites. The lowest CPCs go for around $0.02 or $0.03. This is frustrating as an advertiser since I know my CTR is way above the market average. It should be attracting cheaper clicks, but it doesn’t because the lowest they are willing to go is $0.02. If it were not for bid ceilings, I’d be able to get my CPC down to $0.01 or even $0.005 relative to the performance of other advertisers. One of the great things about Facebook 3-4 years ago was the ability to pay less than a cent for a click and still bid CPC with an awesome ad doing the heavy lifting. That was thanks to the lack of artificial bid ceilings. Delivery was strictly performance related. Whilst native platforms are still performance based, it is a great shame that bid ceilings exist. They provide less-than-optimal results for the best ads. The solution to this? Yep, roll on the CPM bidding.

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Bidding CPM provides a sliding scale where the best ads can receive clicks for lower than the price of the bid ceiling enforced with CPC. CPM is available on a couple of Native platforms, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of it in time. For native to live up to its potential, this is critical: The advertisers must determine the going rate for CPM, not the publishers. That sounds obvious, but it is important. The second we have publishers deciding $X.XX is the minimum CPM bid for ads to appear on their website, as has happened on display platforms, our aligned incentives disintegrate, and we’re back to where we started: Publishers valuing eyeballs, advertisers valuing performance.

Your CTR Your advert’s clickthrough rate (CTR) is the control for how high you will need to bid to drive traffic on native sources. A poor CTR will require a high CPC. Why? Because otherwise the publisher has no incentive of showing your ad. It is in your best interest to produce ads that deliver a high CTR – through engaging headlines and eye-catching imagery – so that you can drive more traffic at a lower CPC. 81

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But here’s the catch: You won’t see many affiliate ads that resemble ‘click trapping’, like this one on display sources:

This method of bait and switch is pointless if you have something to sell. When you are paying for each click, your best option is to qualify the user so as to maximize the chance of converting that click. Your aim is to qualify the user just enough that you know he/she is a candidate to convert on the offer, without tanking your CTR by calling out a niche within a niche within a niche. Naturally, your chances are boosted if you focus on verticals with mainstream appeal across multiple demographics: weight loss, skincare, bizopps, etc. In these instances, you can afford to be more clickbaity, since the landing page has a better chance of engaging. The biggest challenge with native content is that quality of traffic seldom stays the same as volume increases. Two reasons why:

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•

Increasing volume by improving CTR means the accuracy of the targeting is likely to suffer. The way we usually achieve higher CTRs is by ‘bait and switching’ or using headlines/imagery that get the click first and then worry about relevance later. This model is flawed using CPC on native because you will end up paying a lot of money for a lot of clicks that produce a terrible landing page CTR through to the offer.

•

Native is prone to surges of poor quality traffic and uneven distribution. For example, you might upload 10 ads to appear across 20 categories only to find that your traffic explodes 1000% because one variation momentarily caught fire on a single placement and rinsed through your budget. That’s great if it’s the best advert and the top placement, but such circumstances are rare. Many times I have seen a sudden wipeout of several hundred dollars thanks to the worst ad in my set getting a wave of clicks (but few conversions). For this reason, ramping up the volume to a high performing ad is often best served by increasing the CPC bid rather than experimenting with the calibre of user reaching your page.

In short: CTR matters, but there is a balance to be struck when you are bidding by the click. That balance is usually somewhere in the middle – where you qualify the correct users, with just enough clickbait to keep costs low.

Your total budget / account balance Native behaves different to many of the self-serve display networks out there. Your total budget and account balance have a big impact on whether your campaigns receive the maximum available traffic. If you are the type of affiliate who prefers to load $100 to his balance, and then keep topping up as required, your campaigns will die eternally throttled. Most of the networks require that you maintain a budget and balance of 83

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several hundred dollars before they will give your bid a fair shot at scooping the full available traffic. Opinion is divided on the exact point at which throttling is a factor, with most ‘triggers’ ranging between $250-$750, depending on the platform. Maintain a balance or campaign budget any lower than this (