Driving traffic to push notifications in 2020 and staying in the green

Hi! My name is Maria Dorvey, and I would like to tell you about my push traffic journey and share some of my honest thoughts.

To begin with, I have been working with push notifications for quite a while but with occasional interruptions.

In 2018-2019, I was growing my own push database by buying up cheap clickunder traffic from some sources. As for now, my database looks like this:

I stopped building my own push database for a couple of reasons:

• Over time, push notifications have grown in ubiquity. The number of subscriptions per user grew considerably as did the number of push notifications, which led to a rising unsubscribe rate. At some point in time, it stopped being profitable altogether.
• I was also working with some other traffic sources such as Yandex.Direct^[1] that proved to be more lucrative.

I decided to renew my focus on push notifications after I read a practice-oriented article by Wildo^[2]. I thought that I had just the right sources that would perform well. Moreover, I had large volumes of remnant traffic that didn’t convert well with nutra offers.

My choice fell on an ad network I had been working with for a few months. It was important to me that a network offered a Trafficback feature, high bid, and also bought push subscribers. The latter was all the more crucial since I had to maintain the cash flow.

So, I successfully worked with the network I picked up until January. Here are the totals for the entire period:

At some point the network stopped buying up push subscribers and I had to leave.

When choosing a new network to work with, I took into consideration the same criteria: a trafficback URL, high bids, and whether a network buys push subscribers.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about:

If a network buys up push subscribers, it pays you a fixed sum of money for each new user who has subscribed to push notifications. 

Trafficback URL is commonly used to monetise remnant traffic, i.e. traffic that cannot be accepted for some reasons. 

I contacted a number of networks and eventually decided to work with Evadav.

No, let me explain why a trafficback feature was so important to me.

I run remnant traffic and redirect it to nutra offers. Check out the screenshot below and pay particular attention to the Finance column.

At that, I earned $9300 in all the time I worked with Evadav.

As for GEOs, I targeted Russian-speaking audience and mobile users in particular. 

Unfortunately, Evadav doesn’t allow you to download an all-time report. So, here are the stats as of January.

By OS:

By browser:

Then came February. The market had to withstand a lot of issues, and I felt rather discouraged for a number of reasons. Yandex.Direct was producing poor results, and other traffic sources also failed to show the same performance. Moreover, I was concerned about the newest Chrome update. The screenshot above reveals that Chrome accounted for the lion’s share of my traffic. So, I decided to stop my ad campaigns for some time.

In March, I returned to affiliate marketing and started running traffic once again, although this time the volumes were lower. I can’t speak for the rest of affiliate marketers, but my data suggests that the CR went down from 11 to 9, which is not that bad. Take a look yourself.

March

January

Conclusions

Here are the conclusions I arrived at while working with push notifications.

1. Push traffic can be profitable across multiple verticals, but it has to be relatively cheap. If you’re choosing between working on RevShare and selling push subscribers for a fixed sum, opt for the latter if you have the necessary cash flow. It will pay off in time.
2. Ensure the network you are working with offers a trafficback option.
3. Push traffic will survive in the near future and beyond. Unfortunately, I don’t know how affiliates who drive traffic FROM push notifications are going, but as far as those who drive traffic TO push notifications are concerned, everything is all right.
4. Note that networks buy only mobile push subscribers. When it comes to the CPC model, mobile traffic is more expensive on paid sources. Just take this into account.
5. When choosing a traffic source, focus on cost per click. What I can recommend to do  is drive traffic from different sources at first, agree upon the best sources with your network and then choose the ones that suit both parties.
6. It’s very important you test your landing pages to know what CR to expect.
7. Change your domains all the time. This has a direct effect on your subscribtion rate.
8. If you run remnant traffic, test out multiple offers and verticals. What is good for me can be bad for somebody else.

Thanks a lot for reading this article. Hope it will come in handy. I would also like to thank Evadav for responsive support and payout bumps.

1. A context ads system by Yandex, a Russia-based corporation specializing in Internet-related products and services.

2. A Russian-speaking affiliate marketing expert and influencer. Back