Efficient Traffic Sources For Affiliate Marketing

In previous articles, we have already covered the history of the affiliate marketing industry and basic terms you may encounter online. The field of media buying is very multi-faceted and fast-changing, but one thing remains — the desire to grow your traffic volume and quality. But how do you do that? It is very important to choose the right source of traffic. In this article, we will look at the main sources of traffic and their defining traits.

Let’s start with ABC. The traffic source is the platform from which the affiliate gets the audience for the offers to run ads there. It is common in the industry to distinguish three main ways of attracting users: paid advertising (PPC), spam (no need to explain this one), and organic traffic — generated by quality profile development (such as TikTok and Instagram) and properly SEO-optimised websites.

By the way, you can find out more about how to find free traffic sources, as well as how to automate free traffic in our previous articles. 

Now let’s get back to the point. Take a notebook and pen to write your nerd notes 🤓

Targeted advertising 

This is a method of targeting your audience based on a unique profile containing their main characteristics: location, gender, age, level of income, occupation, marital status, and main interests. This information is kindly provided to advertisers by major traffic aggregators, primarily social networks. These include Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and other major resources. Such data is needed to set the parameters for ad settings. Additionally, one uses targeting as a tool in combination with other promotional methods.

Contextual advertising

This is a method of attracting users based on search queries. For example, display advertisements only in places that match the theme of your campaign. Major contextual ad networks will give you a choice of placements for ads, usually two:

• Search Engine — your ads will be shown in search engine results for queries that match the given topic
• Sites — your ads will be shown on sites that are connected to these contextual networks and are relevant to the subject of the ad.

Google Ads also allows you to place contextual ads in applications and on YouTube.

In both targeted and contextual advertising, there are no special recommendations in offers — both sources are universal. You are only limited by your imagination. The only thing to keep in mind: such sources as Google or Facebook do not look kindly on adult content, gambling, and medical offers. So it’s highly likely that you would need to use cloaking for your campaigns.

Push notifications

On some websites, the first thing the user sees is a pop-up that asks for your permission to send useful site updates and notifications to your device. Spoiler alert, 99% of notifications will not contain information about the site but ads, because the owner of the resource has integrated the site with a Push ad network. The network pays the owner for impressions (views) or clicks on the ads.

Affiliate marketers who work with this source are able to send notifications with images and content they want, as well as their own affiliate link to the offer. Such a traffic source is much loved in gambling, betting, crypto, and dating verticals.

Before you start to drive traffic through push notifications, read about the main mistakes young affiliates make along the way.

Click-under, pop-up, and pop-under

These are special windows that are inserted into the site structure as a code and appear when the user opens the site or makes a random click somewhere on the page.

• Click-under — when a user clicks anywhere on the site, he will be taken to a new page that is not linked to the original site. The site becomes kind of an invisible button. Click-under often sets a certain number of clicks (e.g. 4), and the user will only be able to skip them and finally visit a website only after clicking all 5 ads. 
• Pop ads — when you open a website, it automatically opens an additional window with advertising material. The window can either appear on top (pop-up) of or behind (pop-under) the main window.

For now, there are three main verticals that work well with this source: dating, installs, and sweepstakes. Explore pop-unders and click-unders and all their nuances in more detail in our big review.

Display ads

A popular type of advertising is placed on various websites in the form of display ads (or banners): animated or static pictures, with a link to a promoted source. Many experts advise looking at the mainstream, adult, and e-commerce verticals for display advertising.

Search Engine Optimization

Promoting a website to the top of the search result page. The higher your site gets, the more traffic it will receive. To do this, you need to meet the quality criteria for each individual search engine. That is why, as a first step, it is worth deciding on your main search engine and adjusting your website to its requirements.

Pay attention to the high competition in terms of SEO traffic. Most affiliates are now using it for gambling, betting, and finance verticals. They are attracted by high payouts since advertisers and affiliate networks value SEO traffic for its quality.

Mailing list

You’ve probably guessed that we’re talking about e-mail (and sometimes SMS) — they’re used by both companies and individual affiliates. The letter can contain a call-to-action, an advertisement for an offer, or informative material about the company’s activities to increase engagement. There are now many services available to automate the mailing process.

Final thoughts

You’re probably wondering why there are so many different sources of traffic. Yes, it can be challenging to choose, but let’s face it, that’s what we love about affiliate marketing — the freedom of choice. Try different sources in the context of different verticals. Only by trial and error, you will find the best combination for your ads. You’re definitely bound to succeed!