I’ve been in affiliate marketing for about 3.5 years, and since my start to this day, there have been many interesting changes. For example, some major traffic sources that were mainstream in 2016-2017 and made us money are now hardly used by anyone.
These semi-dead sources include:
Push Networks – you might find this contradictory: “they appeared quite recently, why are push notifications dying?” The thing is that most advertising networks that offer push notifications work with them quite aggressively. As a result, a user can receive up to 20 pushes a day from a single ad network. And if they’re subscribed to several such services? Imagine their attitude towards the content in these notifications. Frankly, many are just annoyed and looking for ways to unsubscribe. That’s one problem.
Another problem is that push networks have opened their affiliate programs, allowing everyone to replenish their subscription base… Ha… How cute. I can imagine what desperate profit-seeking webmasters and arbitrageurs are pouring in there – minors, pregnant women, the elderly, dogs, pigeons)) Gambling conversions with pushes are weak and rarely meet KPIs because many users are non-paying.
Regarding buying pushes in Russia and the CIS, another drawback appears – the cost per click can reach 14 rubles in Russia. FOURTEEN RUBLES, CARL, for crappy traffic of kids and animals, converting at 1 to 1000, are you kidding me?
For gambling, I do not recommend Push networks.
Sources desperately fighting for survival
Google Adwords – hasn’t yet turned into an arbitrageur killing machine, but it’s rapidly moving in that direction. Accounts where forbidden topics are streamed, especially casinos and betting, with or without cloaking, now live not for several days but are banned in just a few hours. Most casino and betting ad accounts live less than six hours. To profit, you need to farm ad accounts in bulk and quickly reload campaigns to pass moderation and keep traffic flowing. Now, only those who can do all this in bulk work with this source, so the traffic volume from Google for gambling and betting, and the competition for traffic, has significantly decreased. Even the tops are starting to leave this doomed place…
Those who remain in Google are now successfully streaming context on the brand. More on bookmakers than casinos, as it’s currently extremely difficult to break through in casinos. Google leaves fewer loopholes for arbitrageurs, but I believe that the strong spirit will always prevail and find a way around all the obstacles.
If you know how to search, you can find a lot of interesting things about casinos in Google, proving that some arbitrageurs have indeed managed to grasp some secret knowledge and continue to dominate the advertising of various casinos 🙂
Facebook and Instagram – working with these social networks is also becoming more difficult day by day. Facebook’s AI is not in our favor, and avoiding bans or farming new accounts has become quite difficult and resource-intensive. However, at present, Facebook and Instagram are among the most popular sources of traffic for gambling and betting. Currently, about 70% of gambling traffic comes from these sources.
For now, the main problems preventing us from working with these sources are more or less solved. For example, the problem with moderation and cloaking in FB is solved using mobile casino apps, and the problem with ad cabinets can now be solved by buying campaigns. In principle, it is still possible to survive in FB.
All these thoughts lead us to the idea that either we need to let the market breathe a little from us and try to move most of our efforts to mastering other countries and new offers, or it’s time to give birth to new approaches! Give birth, maybe someone will get a Nobel Prize, who knows… xD
Here are some examples of creatives from Instagram targeting:
Pouring from FB into top countries, as well as from Adwords, is much easier for the same reasons. Plus – there are now arbitrage approaches that have long blown over in the Russian market.
Telegram – arbitrageurs working with Telegram are also having a hard time now. Firstly, the recent innovation of marking channels considered sacrilegious by users with a “SCAM” label hits the reputation, and hence the conversion of traffic on many channels that work with casino schemes.
Betting is also affected. If your channel’s bets don’t hit regularly – expect a scam label and mass unsubscriptions. Fortunately, none of my betting publics have yet been affected by this problem, but I feel how quickly it can change for the worse due to a few negative forecasts. If this happened to my channel, I think I could partially get out of this situation with a post like: “yes, there are failures, but we will fix everything and provide positive bets!” (considering that my channel generally doesn’t have many losses). Perhaps this would help me retain some old users and avoid mass unsubscription, but the “SCAM” label would still significantly affect the flow of new users and it’s not entirely clear how traffic would convert to such a channel if you pour it into Telegram from other sources, for example, from FB.
Another problem with Telegram, if we consider it purely as a traffic source, is the rapid growth in the number of channels whose admins deceive us for money by selling advertising in inflated communities. Everything is inflated in Telegram: both channel subscribers and views, it’s simply impossible to navigate by them, and what then to navigate by – is unclear. Moreover, it’s absurd, but sometimes it comes to the point that the channel admin inflates a few subscribers on your channel so you can see the effectiveness of the purchased advertising and buy it again… And then you wonder why your traffic from Telegram doesn’t convert? That’s why
In general, I do not recommend buying in Telegram for gambling or anything else.
Using Telegram as a platform where you accumulate your target audience is possible.
Google Play and App Store – previously, applications were uploaded without problems, lived for months, and brought tons of almost free traffic through ASO. Arbitrageurs rejoiced, ROI was off the charts, and could amount to thousands of percent. Everything was fine until people started complaining about low-quality mobile applications, and employees of these platforms noticed that we often upload what they would not like to see in their stores. Policies changed, moderation became stricter, we got cloaking – everything became more or less good again, but the security of play markets also does not stand still – finding new and new violations, they learn to find and neutralize them faster, and we in turn try to circumvent these bans again and again.
Now promoting your applications in these stores using ASO with target casino keywords is practically impossible. The same goes for keywords in comments. Any suspicion by the play market that you are showing people a real money casino results in a ban of the application and possibly the developer’s account. The exception to this rule is applications uploaded to the store at least a year ago. For some unknown reasons, these applications continue to live with target casino keywords and are not banned. But this is also only for a while. There are few such applications left, Appstore and GooglePlay are still slowly removing them, but they bring a lot of traffic to their owners. One such application, ranking at the top in Appstore for 5-7 target keywords, can bring about 300 deposits daily.
It will be quite a difficult task for newcomers to break into here. Passing moderation in the App Store is now almost impossible, leaving Google Play, but it is also tightening the screws to the maximum.
Currently, arbitrageurs mostly use play markets not to get conditionally free traffic from ASO, but to upload their webview applications there and pour traffic onto them from FB (even without ASO, casino applications live very briefly). This approach increases FB traffic conversion by an average of 30% compared to pouring the same traffic into the mobile version of the landing page.
Also, thanks to the use of mobile applications, you can significantly increase your income from RecShare by using push notifications, chats, and other features inside the applications that increase conversion and return players to the platform.
Stable and Complex
Teaser networks, native networks – are not the most convenient sources of traffic, and therefore they are not so popular among arbitrageurs. Especially they are not popular among beginners, who are really scared off by huge budgets and tons of analytics required for mastering and optimizing them.
Teaser networks have always been a territory of freedom for arbitrageurs, although over the past year their policy has undergone minor changes, and moderation in some sources has slightly complicated (yes, we are forbidden to use SHOCK, HARSH, and write in caps…), but in most of them, you can still freely stream any offer themes, including casinos and betting.
All would be fine, but all these sources have some disadvantages:
– low-quality, cold traffic that needs to be warmed up.
– from this arises the need to work with pre-landings and accordingly make them – the amount of work on creating creatives immediately increases several times.
– the need to set up complex analytics – you need both a tracker and metrics to objectively monitor the quality of traffic from different platforms.
– you need to be technically savvy, possess a basic level of html, php, js, to write simple working scripts for passing tags or catching bots.
– a lot of traffic, requiring large budgets to master, but at the output, teasers do not give such a high ROI – on average 30-50% in Russia and the CIS.
– teaser traffic does not always fit the advertiser’s KPI, especially if you use a mislead approach (which further reduces the quality of already a priori not very high-quality traffic) – you risk facing an increased hold, reduced rate, or, in the worst case, a reject.
I recommend it only to those who have a budget of $2000 to test two teasers and nerves of steel.
TOP teaser and native networks where you can buy quality traffic:
- http://www.revcontent.com
- https://etarg.network/
- https://www.taboola.com/
- https://www.outbrain.com/
- https://adcash.com/
MGID, Revcontent, Taboola, Outbrain, and Adcash made my list of good native advertising networks.
There are also networks that can be worked with successfully:
- https://content.ad
- https://www.adblade.com/
- https://evadav.com/
- https://triplelift.com/
- https://www.nativo.com/
- https://www.sharethrough.com/
- https://gemini.yahoo.com/advertiser/home
This market is full of strong players, there’s a lot to explore!
Clickunder, Pop-under, adult traffic exchanges – these sources are characterized by very low click prices, for example, the cost per click in Russia can be from 0.10 rubles, and colossal traffic volumes – millions of clicks per day, just for your campaigns. In principle, if you launch several streams from different clickunder networks to the same site, in the absence of proper preparation, you can accidentally break it.
Such traffic is characterized by very low quality, a large number of bots, and accordingly, low conversion, but with such a penny price per click, it can give a small ROI, usually around 30-50%.
The quality of players from such traffic is not the highest, so they usually give a rate of about 25-35 dollars for it. To work with it, you can use the advertiser’s landing page right away or a short warming pre-landing – for example, with a wheel of fortune or a wealth test.
To work, you will also need all the skills of a teaser shaman: owning a tracker, the ability to analyze, and nerves of steel.
I also do not recommend clickunder, especially to beginners, but if anyone wants to try, here is my list of networks with more or less normal clickunder/popunder traffic:
- https://new.popunder.net/index
- https://www.exoclick.com/
- https://advmaker.net/webmasters/
- https://visitweb.com/
- https://hilltopads.com/
- https://clickadu.com
- https://bodyclick.net/
- http://mixtraff.com/
- https://www.popads.net/
- https://popcash.net/
- https://www.juicyads.com/
- https://trafficmarket.store/
There are also such sources as CMS, like contextual teaser networks from Google 🙂
I have hardly worked with this source in terms of traffic purchasing and have touched on them very little, mostly when it was necessary to resolve some controversial situation regarding leads not meeting KPIs.
There is a lot of traffic in them, one arbitrageur can pour 100-150 deposits daily (I know such), and judging by everything, it is easier to pass moderation with gambling and cloaking there, but for some reason, the quality of this traffic on gambling, in most cases, leaves much to be desired – it barely fits the KPIs of advertisers. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but there are few of them. Perhaps they also possess some secret knowledge that arose in their heads as a result of many tests.
In summary, from the traffic sources in which you can now earn and at the same time not kill most of your time on routine, we have left:
– Facebook/Insta + mobile applications from Gambling.pro, traffic from Inst + Telegram.
– Google, context on the brand.
– Teaser and native networks + mobile version – difficult, but a lot of traffic and for any GEO.
– Clickunder/popunder + catchy pre-landing – also not easy, but you can work in the plus.
Overall, that’s all.
Of course, this is in the context of traffic purchasing.
After all, we still have SEO and doorways, ASO in mobile stores is not completely dead yet (although on the edge), spam on social networks, forums, and review sites, bloggers on YouTube, in Inst, on Twitch (just keep a very close eye on the quality of traffic), channels in Telegram, email databases, Tinder… xD, niche social networks, sites with posts and feeds (like pikabu), movie sites, gaming sites, photo stocks.
And some even use “offline methods” and place their links on city sidewalks and in entrances)))
In any case, the gambling vertical is unlikely to ever dry up. Old offers fade away and new ones appear, the same happens with sources and target audiences. Plus, we also do not stand still! Even if one day FB, Insta, and Google are turned off in the world, today’s arbitrageurs, already knowing what kind of money is there, will never leave it alone and will look for ways to get this traffic again. And they will find… As usual)) Because, if you really want something and put maximum effort into it – everything will definitely work out.
And if you need help mastering CPA marketing and Gambling and
Betting verticals, sign up for the Gambling.pro affiliate program and feel free to ask all your questions to your personal manager! Their contacts will be in your personal account.
And that’s all from me, I hope this article was interesting and useful! Work with pros – pour in the plus
