Traffic arbitrage is the promotion of advertisers’ products with a reward – a specific amount for each sale. Let’s figure out whether it is possible to save your budget on advertising, how to do it in general, and how to optimize costs.
What are arbitrage earnings?
Let’s talk in more detail about what traffic arbitrage earnings are in general. A webmaster, or arbitrageur, connects to an offer from an advertiser. Let’s say he is ready to pay $15 for each sale of goods, namely, for a paid order. The arbitrager attracts traffic with advertising and spends $150 on it, the advertiser receives 56 applications from it and pays $500.
Thus, the net profit of the webmaster is $350. This is the income from arbitrage: the greater the difference between the amount received from the advertiser and the amount spent on advertising, the higher the income. It makes sense to save on traffic to get more profit.
You can and should save your budget in traffic arbitrage because if you spend too much money, you simply won’t make a profit. Another thing is how to do it.
Instructions and schemes on how to reduce the budget
The standard scenario of an arbitrator’s work looks like this:
- finding a suitable offer, studying the terms and conditions, and connecting to it
- selecting the optimal traffic source depending on the advertiser’s requirements
- looking for creativity and approaches, including studying competitors’ advertising campaigns;
- setting up a trial campaign and monitoring the results;
- optimizing advertising and scaling it by investing more and more money;
- making a profit as the advertiser starts paying for leads or another model.
If the ads are set up incorrectly and the webmaster has spent too much money on them, there will be no profit.
There are several moments when you can save your budget in this scheme. For example, when making money on traffic arbitrage, you should:
Use free traffic. It is not necessary to set up contextual or targeted advertising – there are offers where free traffic is great. For example, if you have your informational website or social media group, you can post a link there. You can also use cheap traffic, but we’ll talk about that later.
Optimize your ads. This means adding sites with low click-through rates to the blacklist, terminating ads with low CTR, reallocating the budget, and testing new creatives. This is not an optional but a mandatory condition for successful arbitrage: without campaign optimization, you will simply waste your budget and get nothing.
Use free services. Arbitrageurs use different software: for example, spy services to find creatives, photo editors to draw their own, platforms for analyzing groups on social networks, and so on. It’s better not to use paid plans at first, but to use free ones, especially if you don’t run ads often. Or you can use publicly available software, such as free arbitrage trackers.
Set a low cost per click. It is a dubious way to save money. You will pay little per click and reduce your budget expenses a little. But the fact is that most ad networks provide coverage based on the cost per click, and the lower it is, the fewer people will see your ad. That is, you will get cheap leads, but there will be very few of them.
There are also “black” methods to save your budget: using motivated traffic or setting up ads from hacked accounts that have money on the ad account balance. But you shouldn’t do this – affiliates are banned for motivated traffic, and ad networks themselves are banned for hacking.
Save money on cheap traffic
One of the most common ways to reduce the cost of promoting an advertiser’s products or services is to use free or very cheap traffic. But in this case, you will have to work much more with your hands. In the case of advertising, you set up a campaign, optimize it, and spend a couple of hours a day on it. And in the case of budget traffic acquisition, you work all day long.
We have already talked in detail about free traffic for arbitrage. In short, you can use only a few sources:
Your platform. It can be anything – a group on a social network, a popular TikTok account, or an informational or commercial website. In general, all the platforms where there is an audience.
Spam. You can also spam wherever there is a target audience for the product – on forums, in discussions on social media, in comments under popular articles, etc.
We also talked about available traffic for arbitrage. Usually, it is clicks from popular types of advertising. Thus, you can use them for relatively low-cost promotion:
- teaser networks – they run teasers – short ads with or without an interesting headline and image;
- clickthroughs – a type of advertising that takes the user to the advertiser’s resource with any click on an information website;
- push notifications – pop-up messages from websites or applications that look like a personalized message;
- email newsletters – an outdated but still relevant way of generating leads;
- mailers – services where people view ads for a minimal fee;
- advertising posts on social media – can be very cheap if you choose untapped platforms.
If you decide to save your advertising budget by getting cheap traffic, you’ll have to pay a lot of attention to it. For example, push and teaser networks may have a lot of “junk” sites with bots and low-quality traffic. You will have to identify them and blacklist them regularly. And when ordering advertising posts on social media, you may come across a group with a fake number of followers, so before paying for advertising, you should check whether the audience is active and “live”.
So, it is possible and worth saving your budget on traffic arbitrage if you do it correctly.
Do you know any other ways to reduce costs? Share your tips in the comments!
