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ROI, the ever-important performance measure that affiliates are often obsessed with (and rightfully so), is tough to maximize and get the most out of your affiliate strategy. Everybody wants to see the highest return on an investment made in a business.

However, squeezing out higher margins and ROI out of affiliate campaigns is a constant struggle for the majority of affiliates out there.  There’s so much involved: you need to keep a steady eye on your acquisition costs, manage your campaigns to the tiniest detail, always be on the lookout for cost-lowering measures, etc. A bit of help is sorely needed, and that’s where SelfAdvertiser steps in.

Basic Numbers

While we’re not the biggest ad network out there, our strength lies in technology, and with a daily reach of 2 billion impressions, finding the right audience at the right time is as easy as falling off a log. We work with more than 20,000 direct publishers who operate in various popular verticals such as games, e-commerce, travel, health, finance, and many more. However, we don’t just work with anybody. In this business, traffic is good as long as it delivers meaningful conversions. SelfAdvertiser’s own direct traffic is acquired by a dedicated media buyers team, along with the exclusive traffic through XML, so users have a wealth of options for creating a targeted campaign with converting users again and again.

Highly Targeted Traffic

Simply put, having a quality traffic source is vital to any success in affiliate marketing. Under the hood, our dedicated self-service platform for advertisers offers two types of traffic:

• Domain Redirect (Zero-Click)
• Pop

While there are quite a few reasons why you should make your ads pop, it’s the Domain Redirect traffic that takes the icing on the cake when it comes to delivering maximum ROI. Also known as zero-click, it’s a type of traffic that’s relatively off the radar in online advertising, which is a shame as it’s as close to search traffic as possible. Here’s how it works: Once a user misspells a domain, they immediately get redirected to an advertiser’s ad in the form of your landing page. And that’s it: the visitor is yours, presenting a great option for buying lots of clicks at a low acquisition cost.

This traffic type is considered highly converting for a few reasons. For starters, your offer is displayed to people who are actively searching for a product or service. That means they have a high intention to convert as they genuinely have an interest in what you’re selling. Next, your offer is shown automatically once a visitor submits the misspelled domain without their need to click anywhere. They are seamlessly redirected to your offer’s page, hence the zero-click alias. Another huge advantage of Domain Redirect is that your ad doesn’t feel nor look like an ad, but rather as a regular webpage, eliminating any sense of intrusiveness and maximizing receptiveness.

Targeting Your Audience the Way You Want It

Targeting ads is an essential part of any advertising campaign. You may have crafted the perfect ad in both design and content, but you’ll need to get it in front of the right people at the right time to achieve your goals. The undisputed benefit of using an ad network is the power to reach as wide or narrow audience as you like. However, what separates a good ad network from a great one is the ability to deliver quality traffic based on targeting.

SelfAdvertiser allows you to choose your targeting mode on a campaign level, as well as blacklist specific IDs, ISPs, and low performing sites from sending further traffic down your way. In that regard, there are numerous options for you to implement, like:

• Geo – By countries
• Device – Desktop, Smartphone or Tablet
• OS – Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android (Including specific versions)
• Browser – Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Samsung Internet, UC Browser (Including specific versions)
• Carrier targeting
• Blacklist ISPs
• Frequency Capping
• Traffic Distribution – Evenly throughout the day/As soon as possible
• Day Parting – Day and time
• Sources – Block sources or Whitelist
• Positive Keyword Targeting – Target content, domains and subdomains to reach the relevant audience with intent.
• Negative Keyword Targeting – Exclude keywords and domains that you do not want to target and avoid an irrelevant audience.

The more you fiddle around with each of these targeting options, the more likely you are to get a better ROI out of your campaigns. For instance, just targeting specific geos will help in delivering quality conversions but if you also add device and domain targeting into the mix, there’s a whole new batch of data to work with. It’s important to remember that every traffic source is different, which is why it’s so important to test and experiment on as many levels as possible.

Campaign Optimization In All Shapes And Size

Since pop and zero-click campaigns are considered to be very targeted and, as such, highly effective, there is usually stiff competition on those valuable keywords and redirected domains. Our built-in Bid-Per-Source feature allows placing different bids for different sources when performing campaign optimization. You can easily customize a bid for any source based on its performance (raise or lower them for sources that provide more or less converting traffic or simply pause the underperformers).

As a CPM ad network, SelfAdvertiser’s platform makes tracking performance and per-traffic-source optimization possible by using dynamic URL tags in the URL field when creating a campaign. This includes conversion tracking, which is particularly helpful for improved monitoring and ROI. It tells you exactly how many times a specific action has been completed and allows you to attach a dollar value to that action for more accurate revenue reporting. Keyword optimization includes our Keywords Tool which helps users gain insights into the available keywords inventory providing suggestions for keywords that contain particular words. This gives a fresh approach to finding new high traffic-volume keywords that you might’ve missed or overlooked, so you can receive more accurate targeted traffic to your offer.

At the campaign level, ROI is more valuable for your optimization decisions rather than directly assigning a daily budget and waiting to see what happens. The budget should be formed by the return you see, not the other way around. Our Daily Budget per Source feature enables you to define the maximum daily budget you want to spend on a single source, so once it reaches profitable levels, you can scale the source to a larger budget/bid. Additionally, you can set up a frequency cap to limit the number of exposures of your ads to the same people, so you don’t oversaturate them.

Final Words

Defining your goals with the utmost clarity and setting various quantifiable benchmarks will help you increase the payback. If you want to remain successful, you need to maximize the output of your campaigns and get the highest ROI possible. Traffic is everything in affiliate marketing, and a self-service platform like SelfAdvertiser can tip the scales in your favor. We’ve shown you what makes us a force to be reckoned with in attaining maximum ROI, and now the ball is now in your court.