Aamir Has anyone run Facebook ads on affiliate sites to drive the traffic? Is it a good idea? Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on backlinks, we can drive targeted traffic to site by spending only few bucks. What you guys think? Should we apply this strategy? 3 👍🏽3 19 💬🗨📰👈
L.E. McArthur I've done it, and also ads direct to offers. It's not just a few bucks though. You will have to have a decent spend, lots of testing, and excellent tracking to optimize the campaign enough to be profitable, (if at all). I no longer use social ads. But I have been using Google Ads non-stop to my affiliate sites for the last 18 years, along with other ad networks. Yes, buying ads instead of backlinks is a great idea and what I focused on exclusively for a long, long time. I have never bought a backlink and never needed to. But ads have their drawbacks too. I got into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) more seriously a few years ago and am loving it. It's like free traffic! 😝 I'm getting most of my results organically now, (and still don't buy backlinks). So yes, by all means try ads. But know that it's not as simple as you may envision.
Aamir ✍️ » LE McArthur You get backlinks organically? L.E. McArthur » Aamir I pay zero attention to backlinks, but yes, all the backlinks I've ever gotten have been organic, or from another one of my sites. Dusan » LE McArthur Your affiliate programs must have high affiliate commissions then? Cheapest Google ads are around 0.2$ a click. 100 clicks are then 20$. But that's with the cheap ads. Ads can easily be 5-20$ a click. Do you target specific keywords like longtails in order to reduce the costs? L.E. McArthur » Dusan I pay anywhere from 0.15 to 2.00 per click for my industry. I don't touch garbage like the Amazon program. I focus on digital offers and services with competitive payouts. And as far as keywords go it's about conversions – I target keywords that convert to sales and ignore ones that don't. 🙂 Rather than focus on long-tail or not, I simply target very niche, lower competition audiences from the start. I'll also say that I've tested many niches, and most won't make their money back with G Ads. You will need to test multiple offers and strategies before finding a win. That's where the expenses can add up. These days it's still hard to make big money this way as an affiliate – that's why I think a mix of paid and organic is the way to go. Aamir ✍️ » LE McArthur Why are you against amazon program? L.E. McArthur » Aamir Because those commissions are a joke. Dusan » LE McArthur That sounds like a good plan. Digital goods have high profit margins so I assume you have affiliate programs paying multiple decimals for percentages. That's the only way to get back the investment and be profitable with Cost Per Click (CPC) of 2$. Maybe Bing ads is also a good idea. They should have lower rates than G ads. L.E. McArthur » Dusan I use Bing as well.. low volume though. Yes, high percentages when that's the structure. But for digital services or memberships, its sometimes a single payout for a set amount. Because digital products are unlimited and scalable, payouts don't have to be tied to the product price – they are based on the lifetime value of those sales to the sponsor. So in some cases my payout is a one time chunk, sometimes equivalent to more than 300% of the first purchase. I also like revshare affiliate programs, but they aren't as ideal for ads because the return trickles back over time, making stats a little harder to interpret. Dusan » LE McArthur That's very interesting.. I wonder does targeting such offers use keywords that are sometimes totally unrelated to the product but more offering a solution for the problem expressed in the keyword? Digital products keywords often have low volumes from what I know. I could be wrong. But if someone is having a problem with file encryption for example, the keyword could be unrelated to the product itself but the article could present the product as a solution. There are also affiliate programs that pay on reccuring payments like some hosting providers do. So once you get enough affiliate sales you build a "portfolio" of referred "clients" and the hosting company pays you constantly as long as they renew their service. This could remedy the cost of ads in the long run. L.E. McArthur » Dusan Yes, now you've got it. I absolutely target the user's desire or problem they want to solve. And I'm currently having great success with landing pages that are actually how to blog articles, in which the product is something that will solve the issue. And yes, renewals are great but harder to measure in the short term. In all cases, extremely detailed tracking and measurement is key. Dusan » LE McArthur Sounds like an excellent approach to this method of getting affiliate sales. Thanks for sharing a bit! I bet it takes a ton of back and forth to make this approach profitable.
Jay Yes, retarget your existing visitors and increase audience size by 1%. Personally I would never run social ads without retargeting existing audiences only, or risk spending your ad budgets on click farms. Backlinks and ads are not really comparable in my opinion, although yes ads can help with rankings on all platforms, but they're still very different for what they do for your business. The best way to find out is to try it! Roger That's called Arbitrage. Driving converting traffic through advertising has been used by affiliates for decades. But you have to really optimize your landing page and advertising to the ultimate. Conversion optimization. I know people who spend millions of dollars per year doing it and they optimize every little thing and A/B test to squeeze every single conversion possible out of every dollar they spend. It's not an easy thing to do successfully and I'm in awe of the people who do. In the early days of AdSense people use to send Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic to landing pages that were basically AdSense mine fields, where the ads blended in with the content and users had like a higher than 50% chance of clicking on an ad. They called those MFA sites (Made For AdSense). But Google killed that business model. 💟👍🏽5 Matt Diggity 👑 Hard to get positive Return of Investment (RoI), especially when you're an affiliate and you have: 1) Smallish commissions 2) No benefit from lifetime value (LTV) Usually the cost of converting someone via ads > the payback – at least on an affiliate content website. That said, you can DEFINITELY get positive ROI from an email lead magnet, and autofollower series… combined with retargetting. 🤔💟2
L.E. McArthur » Matt Diggity Agree – that's why affiliates who want to try this can look for higher payouts and get LTV from revshare programs and/or collecting subscribers at the same time.
