The typical CPA affiliate has three main components to a campaign that determine whether it’s a failure or a success: Traffic Source -> Landing Page -> Affiliate Offer. We’ll discuss traffic sources, as this component can make or break the whole campaign.
Paid traffic sources typically fall into a few major categories with countless subcategories.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC is very broad. Search engines, as well as most social networks, use a PPC bidding model to sell off their ad inventory. There are also ad networks dedicated to selling media on a pay-per-click basis.
Many affiliates start out by using PPC because there is typically not a large monetary commitment; ads are easy to change and the traffic tends to be scalable. The problem with PPC is that search engines and social networks have high quality standards which sometimes causes an issue getting the ad to actually run.
Pay-Per-View (PPV)
PPV, sometimes also called contextual traffic, is generated through adware installed on a user’s computer. The user downloads a game or other piece of software bundled with adware provided by an ad network that caters to this niche.
The advertiser can then bid on targets based on keywords the user types or websites they visit. This triggers a popup. Some advantages to PPV are that there are no quality score issues and getting your ad to show up is as simple as outbidding the other advertisers that want to show up on that target.
The downside is that the traffic tends to be lower quality, harder to monetize and there is so much that it can crash your server.
Media Buy
Media buys are typically priced one of two ways: a cost per impression basis (CPM) or flat rate for a set time period. You can either do individual site buys where you contact a webmaster and negotiate a deal to advertise on a site, or go through an ad network and have your ads placed on many sites.
The upside to media buys is that if you can create a profitable campaign, the opportunity to scale it out is tremendous. The downside is that you are typically locked into your media buys and the upfront investment required can be substantial.
I’ve used all of these traffic sources profitably. My advice to other affiliates is to master one traffic source to start. Rather than jumping around and trying to capitalize on the latest and greatest source of traffic to hit the streets, learn the ins and outs of one particular source.
This will allow you to have a solid traffic source to launch new campaigns, better connections with account managers and sometimes gets you access to profitable information that other affiliates would never find out about.
Ad Hustler has been advertising online for more than 7 years, and he blogs at www.adhustler.com.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 11 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/29057000/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-11
FeedFront issue 11 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2010/07
