Affiliate marketing

Welcome all the new affiliate marketers! This easy guide was made for simplifying the start of your journey in running the campaigns.

First of all, let’s set it straight: what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a sphere of online marketing where the promoter (aka affiliate) runs a campaign for the advertiser and receives payments based on the number of desired actions performed by users. Such actions may include:

- registration (single-opt-in)
- registration with confirmation (double-opt-in)
- install
- purchase and many more

In the affiliate marketing world these offers are generalized in the term “CPA” (cost per action). It is an affiliate marketer’s work to prepare the creatives for a certain CPA offer, to choose the promotion texts and messages and to create the campaign with all the needed settings. It is also their task to run and optimize the campaigns, as the result of promotion directly influences the amount of profit they get in the end. In the endpoint the affiliate gets paid for the full targeted action performed by the landing page visitors.

Let’s take a look at the affiliate marketing income funnel:

There is a great variety of offers to find online using programs or getting recommendations on the qualified blogs. Keep in mind that each offer may have a different registration funnel, so it is necessary to check the peculiarities beforehand. For example, check out this install offer’s funnel:

It is essential to know that advertisers not only set a CAP (amount of leads per day) but they also can check the leads’ quality. Keep that in mind when choosing the offer as you’ll have to have a couple of optimization strategies up your sleeve.

Pros of affiliate marketing

It may seem like a lot of work, but it is all worth it in the end. In fact, according to 2023 statistics affiliate marketing industry is worth 17$ billion dollars. Outside of being a conveniently remote job affiliate marketing has a lot of other advantages. What makes experts stay and newcomers join?

1) Easy to start
It is not difficult to start in affiliate marketing. As any other work it will take time searching for the offers and examples of successful campaigns. Probably the most time-consuming would be the actual running and optimizing the campaign for the first time. And even after that when you’ve found the profitable model, it would easily turn into passive income.

2) Easy to manage
Knowing the main optimization strategies and actively using them would put you onto the next level of managing the campaign. Once you’ve tested all the options and found out the best-performing settings it is easy to manage the campaign by running small tests for improving the already profitable result.

3) Lots of opportunities
The affiliate marketing world is huge. There are multiple verticals and niches, lots of online programs and sources for finding offers and contacting the advertisers. You can find blogs, forums, and various articles on the related subjects. And the best thing is that it keeps expanding. The previous 5 years were just the beginning of online marketing which gives this sphere endless growth opportunities.

4) Easy to profit
As mentioned before, there are a lot of offer types along with CPA conditions. Payouts can also depend on the geographical locations wanted by the advertisers (usually Tier 3 countries have the lowest payouts). Earning with CPA is not hard. In order to run a profitable campaign the job of the affiliate marketer is to create a working model for the campaign, taking in mind all the settings and requirements set by the advertiser.

Verticals

One of the reasons why the affiliate marketing is so great is the mentioned variety. One can choose from the big amount of verticals to test. Especially when you are only beginning to try promoting the campaigns it is fundamental to understand the market and its niches, try different options out and choose the ones suitable for you.

Out of the variety of verticals you will find:

- sweepstakes;
- finance and crypto;
- sports;
- igaming;
- dating;
- nutra;
- utilities;
- streaming, etc.

Remember that each vertical would need an individual promotion approach, creatives and ad types. It is also very important to understand who your targeted audience is when setting the campaign’s strategy and settings.

Read more about the verticals in our Blog’s article!

PRO TIP: Where to find offers to start launching? We recommend searching for networks online, look for CPA Network platforms (Zeydoo, AdsEmpire and many others).

Starting the first campaign

After choosing the vertical and offer you are successfully moving to the next stage - preparing your first campaign!

The even bigger component for the campaign’s success is traffic quality. Adavice DSP offers converting traffic with the targeting options to meet the demand of all our advertisers. The traffic segmentation is available to all, from beginners to long-time experts. As we always recommend it is beneficial to start from premium sources collected thoroughly by our system based on the best-converting results. In addition, there are 3 other groups (standard, remnant and new) that are useful for scaling up and exploring different promotion strategies.

Moreover, the advantages of Adavice traffic and DSP settings themselves are:

- easy campaign set up;
- experienced & friendly personal support manager;
- 24/7 support availability;
- multiple ad types;
- various targeting options.

If you have more questions about launching, rates and traffic check out our Blog!

There are few crucial stages of campaign preparation, so here is a detailed step-by-step guide to check yourself:

1) Understand the target audience
Choosing the offer is only a part of the job. The other part requires setting a campaign and choosing the correct settings. For that an affiliate marketer needs to identify the offer’s target audience. It is not efficient to set random settings without clearly seeing a vision of the user you’d like to reach. This first step will set the success of your future company from the start.

PRO TIP: There is no need to write the full target audience strategy for every campaign. The affiliate marketer needs to know at least the basic indicators: geo location, language and user interests. Additionally, other indicators can be included: gender, user’s active hours, etc.

2) Set objectives
The main goal setting in the affiliate's planning process involves understanding the objectives of a campaign. Depending on the offer the aims may be gaining impressions, improving business image or getting leads. In the affiliate marketing world it is usually the latest. Creating and running the campaign is often not enough to reach this goal and additional improvement strategies should be applied.

3) Limit the testing budget
The prerequisite of the campaign testing is setting the right amount of budget. It helps to exclude the overspending on the certain settings and to run the campaign effectively. Adavice Team’s advice is to limit your testing budget to x3 amount of your offer’s payout. If the offer’s results after optimization are not showing the improvement it is better to try a different promotion strategy or to change the offer.

4) Prepare the creatives
When having an offer on your hand you can choose the few ad formats you would like to try out with it. Based on the chosen ad formats the affiliate can start preparing the variety of creatives to test. However, the campaign's creative strategies do not solely involve colorful pictures. The best beginner-friendly ad formats are pop and push traffic campaigns.

When developing the creative materials for pop campaign think ahead of:

- funnel: test out few prelanders options, pop-ups and and engaging quizzes for users
- design of the offer: if it’s possible to change try to keep all creatives in one visual style, use visible CTA buttons and attractive moving effects on the landing and prelanders

When creating a push campaign plan and search for these details ahead (additionally to the list above):

- good-quality push images
- text variations to test
- set of emojis matching the offer to test

Look into the pros of both of these ad formats:

5) Try out different optimization strategies
After the campaign’s preparation it is finally time to launch it and track the results. This is where optimization plays a great role in the campaign’s performance. Even if the settings are setted up correctly there is a small probability of overall success without optimization. Get the knowledge on optimization strategies in our Blog.

Timing of the launch

The last insight of the affiliate marketing for today will relate to the appropriate timing of the launch. Of course, you are not limited on the time of the launch. In the end it depends on the offer and its targeting nuances: geo, certain hour of promoted event or the advertiser’s choice.

On Adavice DSP there is a possibility to target day of the week and specific time of the day. Besides that you can focus your campaign’s target on seasonality or worldwide events!

Here are the lists of the hottest upcoming events you wouldn’t like to miss:

Write to us at sales@adavice.com and share your great optimization strategies and results and we will make sure to support you on the way ;)

Having any questions or would like to share your lucrative launching story with us and fellow affiliates? Write to us at sales@adavice.com! Our Team is always happy to help and hear from you, so don’t hesitate to reach out :)

See you in the next article!