The Man and the traffic #3: making a research on push notifications and setting up a tracker

In my previous article, I introduced myself and talked about my intentions of learning how to drive traffic. As there are quite a lot of traffic sources and verticals out there, I’ve reached out to you, my dear readers, for an advice on what traffic source I should choose. The majority of you voted for push-notifications.

An excerpt from a SEO-optimized text. I’m a SEO-specialist, after all.

Push notifications are small pop-up ad windows shown on your device’s screen. Push notifications can be sent to any device that can display notifications and data from the Internet. Clicks on those ads constitute push traffic. This is a great tool for promoting content and various offers, but how can I make money on it and what approaches should I use to promote push notifications?

The first thing I did was to develop a work plan:

1. gathering and processing all of the available information (articles, case studies, videos);
2. preparing the tool kit (a tracker, push traffic sources);
3. talking to our in-house affiliate team.

To make it easier for me to understand the inner workings of this format, I subscribed to a few push notification feeds. Before that, I absolutely ignored such subscription offers (I received notifications only from YouTube and Gmail).

This is how a push notification looks like on my laptop.

Such messages pop up about once every hour.

This is how they look on my smartphone:

Gathering all the available information about push traffic

Turns out there are quite a few articles, case studies and reviews on this subject, and the quality of this content is decent.

I’m not going to mention all the relevant articles here. Some articles were actually promoting certain push marketplaces under the disguise of super successful case studies. There was also a bunch of articles with promo codes. However, I haven’t used them yet, but they will probably come in handy.

There are polar opinions about this type of traffic and it has a few interesting features. Push marketplaces don’t have strict moderation policies unlike Instagram and Facebook. Targeting is easier to set, and the only thing you should do is to frequently change creatives you are using.

Some say that push traffic is dying, but this is a matter of expertise of those who express such an opinion.

So, you can start with a minimum top-up, in MegaPush and PropellerAds it’s $100. However, as push networks require a certain budget to work with, it’s better to have no less than 400-500$ on your account. It’s not advisable to set a minimum bid, as the traffic quality will be very low. It’s better to opt for a recommended price +3-5%.

In the previous article, I reached out to you, my dear readers, to help me choose a vertical to work with. Here are the voting results:

We combined the voting results and chose dating.
Thank you for helping me and taking part in our experiment!

Our in-house affiliates recommended to use a very simple approach. Make 4 or 5 creatives for each offer, test them and when the testing is over shut off non-converting ones. If possible, don’t touch anything else. Once a creative burns out, make a new one that is similar to a previous creative that converted rather well. Don’t use totally different creatives, they may screw everything up.

Selecting a push network

No consensus has been reached on what push network should be considered the best.

Here’s a selection of push networks: https://cpa.rip/partners/push-setki/

Every network has its own features, as well as pros and cons. I hope that you, my dear readers, will share some advice on the networks I should and shouldn’t work with. For now, I’ve found positive feedback on only three of them. I’m going to talk about these network in detail in my next article.

Domain

I’ve registered www.arbmuzhik.com domain for a tracker. As a domain registrar, I used www.namecheap.com, they have reasonable prices for the .COM zone. I didn’t consider Russian registrars. A;though some of them have lower prices for the initial registration, the domain renewal is much more expensive.

A piece of advice: after registering a domain and binding it to a tracker, you should delete redirect and CNAME records and add an A record with you server’s IP address.

Binom Tracker

I had doubts about whether I should use a tracker at the initial stages or not, but my colleagues told me that I would definitely need a proper tracking software.

Our in-house affiliate team uses Binom tracker, so I’ve decided to go with that one. It has positive reviews and the support team promptly fixes all the issues.

To install the tracker, you need a separate server. If you register on www.digitalocean.com following Binom’s referral link, then you will get $50 as a bonus to get started (btw, Binom’s site says that the bonus is $100, but this information is outdated).

Nota bene: you can apply for a bonus only for the first sign-up and after linking your card (I used QIWI) to your account. After I linked the card, $5 were withdrawn from it and then returned. Don’t worry, they are simply checking your solvency. Moreover, our in-house team also recommended this provider to me.

I chose a pretty affordable option that was recommended to me by Binom support team.

If necessary, you will always be able to reconfigure your server.

Tech support at Binom do their job really well, they fixed all the issues online and very promptly. Kudos to them!

So, for now I have a 14-day trial period for the tracker + $50 bonus, so I can use it for free for some time.
If you sign up at PropellerAds first and then use a referral link to register at Binom, then you will receive an additional bonus: the first month for free and a 40% discount for the entire year. Not bad, isn’t it?

Summing everything up

For now:

• I have a theoretical understanding of how push traffic works;
• I registered a domain ($10);
• I have a server (free of charge + a $50 bonus);
• I have set up a tracker.

I’ve accomplished this without any extra help except for setting up a tracker (thanks to Binom). It all took about 8 hours, including 4 hours that I spent on research.

What’s next:

• study approaches to making creatives;
• check out a spy service Push.Cpa.Rip;
• choose an affiliate network;
• set up the tracker properly;
• launch my first campaigns.

Yours faithfully,
the Man.

So, Oleg has already done all the preliminary work: he had chosen a traffic source and a vertical to work with and set up a tracker.
While he’s getting ready to launch his first campaigns, we’d like to reach out to our audience. Tell us what budget you had when you started you affiliate marketing career and when you first started generating profit.