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As an affiliate, what’s your biggest fear? Are you more like regular folk and scared of snakes, spiders and all sorts of creepy-crawlies? Perhaps clowns scare the bejesus out of you? If you are like the rest of us, that’s ok.

However, we all know what terrifies you deep down: losing money. In the performance-based world of affiliate marketing where the competition is fierce and things change every so often, throwing away money on inefficient traffic sources and types can be the end of your business. You need to savor every last bit of traffic that gives you back in ROI, and one such traffic is Domain Redirect.

Why Domain Redirect

This type of traffic is not quite as recognized as its compadres such as PPC, banner ads, social media ads, and so on. That’s a shame because Domain Redirect (also known as zero-click traffic) is hailed as one of the most targeted campaigns around that typically generate high conversion rates (if set up correctly, that is). And it’s one of the fairly common types of traffic too.

If you ever typed a domain into a browser and wound up at the wrong website because you misspelled something (chances are, you most likely have, probably hundreds of times) – that’s the basis for Domain Redirect.
In a nutshell, users who misspell domains get redirected to your landing page with your offer. Sounds neat, we know, but what makes Domain Redirect campaign a fine-tuned vehicle for conversions? It’s all about these three factors:

• High relevance
• High intent to convert
• Non-interfering look and feel

High relevance relates to the very core of Domain Redirect campaigns in that they are associated with a user’s misspelling error. For that reason, your offer is shown to highly relevant visitors – those who are actively searching for a product. Let’s say you are advertising t-shirts by targeting the appropriate keywords (more on that later on). After mistyping anything related to your keywords, your offer is displayed to these visitors whom you know are looking for something, meaning they have high intention to convert in the first place.

Consequently, the format of the ad itself plays a significant role.  It is presented as a web page in the same browsing tab, giving off a non-interfering vibe, rather than disrupting the user experience. In addition, because you simply redirect visitors to your offer’s page, your ad is effortlessly displayed without any need for additional clicks (hence the zero-click alias).

Where the Money Lies

As one of the few ad networks on the market that offer Domain Redirect campaigns, SelfAdvertiser knows a thing or two about how to squeeze the most out of them. The first thing you need to know is that these campaigns are considered very targeted and highly effective. As such, redirected domains are a commodity, coming with lots of competition as part of the package, so your best bet is to offer high bids if you want to score traffic. However, much of your success depends on how you set the campaigns. You have two options:

• RON-Domain Redirect – a run-of-network campaign that targets every single publisher within a network.
• Keywords-Domain Redirect – a keyword-based campaign that targets a more relevant audience.

Source: SelfAdvertiser

The RON-based campaign has a broad reach, offering excellent value for affiliates who want to increase their traffic and gain more widespread exposure. Because it competes against other RON-Domain Redirect campaigns and receives traffic from all Domain Redirect opportunities, it has easy campaign management. On the other hand, a Keywords campaign suits affiliates who are promoting a specific niche, and as such, it is considered highly targeted. The campaign will only receive traffic from Domain Redirect opportunities defined by your keywords, and your ads will show on particular sites related to the selected keywords.

As you might imagine, running a keywords-based campaign is a more demanding task due to the specific audiences you’re targeting. Hence, it’s vital to use keywords correctly in order to get the most traffic. For instance, contrary to popular belief, you need to use the correct targeted keyword instead of the mistyped ones (shirt good, shirt bad). You can also take a look at your campaign data and identify keywords (in most cases, these will not include misspelled versions of keywords, domains, or URLs).

Know the difference between short-tail keywords (targeting a broader match to get more impressions) and long-tail ones (usually three to four words that are highly specific to your offer), as well as between positive and negative keywords (terms you want to exclude from showing to your audience).

As a little bonus and a sign of transparent service, SelfAdvertiser offers Domain Redirect keyword inventory for the world’s hottest geolocations, as well as volume per Geo inventory, so you what you’re getting. On top of that, our self-service platform connects to a vast publisher network that counts over 20,000 direct publishers, resulting in an ad reach of 2 billion daily impressions.

How to Make Your Domain Redirect Campaign Stand Out

We’ve mostly covered all the essential source-related aspects of Domain Redirect traffic: using targeted keywords for even more segmentation and having insights into the inventory status (lots of variations on brands that attract high-quality traffic). There’s one more aspect that you need to master, and that’s the landing page. It’s an entry point to your offer that can either validate your entire effort or cancel it in an instant. Numerous elements create a top-notch landing page, mainly depending on your goals.

Still, you can sort them into two groups: good look and functionality. A landing page that looks good and is user-friendly will entice users, rather than scare them because of off-putting design. There’s no rocket science behind this: a quick online search will provide you with all the necessary tools and resources you need to create a winning one.

Domain Redirect traffic is quite similar to the highly sought search traffic, which means highly targeted and converting visitors at your doorstep. The key is to use relevant keywords and attach a quality landing page. Now that you know the ins and outs of this type of traffic (and where to get it), you’ll have no trouble scaling your campaigns for maximum ROI.