One of the best and easiest techniques that works consistently in traffic arbitrage is to segment audiences and analyze those segments. Many people have probably heard about it. It’s done during the preliminary tests of the company before optimization, when we simply look at which of the segments showed themselves more effective after a certain period of time or a certain number of clicks.
For example, if we break down the flow of traffic by city, we’ll see that depending on the city traffic will bring different profits, or depending on the age and gender of the audience. The age itself can also be divided into a large number of segments, and cities can be segmented into regions or metro stations. In order to conduct such analytics, you need to collect data.
In the case – when we do segmentation manually – we need to spend part of the advertising budget to collect primary data, by which we will already be guided and select profitable audience segments. This is inconvenient – because we spend money on primary data. Smartlink is able to analyze data in real time and not waste your budgets on audience tests, it does everything on the fly.
It collects data by which the rotator will later navigate and conduct its own analytics. It independently identifies segments of the audience, such as gender, age, geo, type of connection and operator, the device itself, from which it accesses the network and the operating system, as well as all kinds of trifles like screen resolution, browser version and language. In general, all possible and available information is collected, even if it is not used in analytics today, in the future there is a prospect to collect more data and work with more diverse audience segments, and of course, with the release of AI on the market it will be possible to train smartlinks to determine the audience segments and implement machine learning into the system.
Since we have the raw data on audiences and the conversion price, we can calculate the profitability of each audience segment.
Based on the collected data and their analytics, the rotator automatically finds profitable segments for the list of offerers that are relevant at the moment. So, for example, with segmentation we can see how one offerer shows better for the age category 18 and older, and the segment 13-18 shows better with another offerer, or it can be all the same offerer, but the segment 13-18 will show better with a different pad or a different landing page. The smartlink rotator selects not only effective offers, but also promotional materials for them.
Usually finding a minuscule segment – you simply disable such a segment of targeting to improve the performance of your advertising campaign, leaving the 18+ audience, and getting rid of some of the unprofitable audience. Smartlink, in turn, allows you not to narrow targeting, but to fill all segments of the audience with the most profitable solutions.
This example with age is the most trivial and the easiest to explain the principles of smartlinking. As mentioned earlier, the choice of an offerer or promo is influenced by a huge number of parameters, from screen resolution and device, to language and the GEO in which the visitor is located.
Automation of all this allows us to always direct traffic to the most relevant offers and prelends, because their conversion rates are constantly calculated, as soon as any promo loses its relevance and its rates begin to decrease, the rotator automatically selects the most converting promos and replaces them. That is, it does not once pick up your advantageous offer and promo, and also keeps track of their actual data.
If the offer for any reason shut down or he ran out of capps – smartlink will automatically replace this offer with another, active and second most profitable at the moment. If at some point the promo stops converting, the rotator will start splitting this promo with others and find a more profitable one.
By distributing leads evenly among webmasters, it’s possible to keep advertisers with limits, rather than pouring them all the 3000 leads they need on the first day and then feeling the profit drawdown for the rest of the month.
Now that it’s all happening automatically and in real time – you can take your mind off the issue of monetization and focus only on getting traffic and mastering new sources.
How do you make a smartlink more efficient?
All the smartlinks turned out to be about the same in practice, so we started making our own solution, and as a result of working on that we were able to make some progress, which I’d like to share with you.
Of course, the more offers in smartlink rotation – the more profitable it is to monetize all your traffic, but at a certain point you will still face the problem of uniqueness of offers. Most mainstream smartlinks offer the same monetization solutions, because they try to offer the most profitable offers at the moment – no wonder they end up being the same everywhere.
I know this firsthand. There are those who listened to my previous report, when I told how we spammed mobile messengers and got free mobile traffic through it. First, we were limited by the number of operators’ subscribers and switched from wap clicks to datings, then when the dating offers in the market became insufficient for us, we began to develop our own solutions for our own needs, which would cover our needs.
In simple terms, we made our own datings, which closed some of the missing countries. We made them for ourselves, and we are ready to share them with you. Practice shows that smarts with new offers are the best, because the audience is not yet trampled out.
You have to look at smartlinks a little more globally. Very often it happens that webmaster comes and tests only 1 country, gets less profit and leaves without understanding what’s wrong. The priority inside the partner network is to increase profitability of all traffic, not of a particular country, that’s why it happens. Nevertheless, this nuance has positive sides, you can always take up a particular country and work on a particular geo, increase its profitability and rates if necessary, giving it a higher priority.
The second way that improved smartlink’s profitability is by optimizing the server solutions. First of all, the codes of all the webpages and pads were optimized to speed up their loading, as well as the codes of redirects and traffic distribution channels. The delivery of the page content is done in such a way that the content is loaded from the servers of the country from which the visitor came to us, thanks to the distribution of servers across all continents, rather than concentrating them in one place. These solutions allowed us to avoid traffic losses and speed up smartlink operation by about 2 times compared to the nearest competitor that I worked with before I created my own smartlink solutions.
Statistically, the largest portion of the Internet audience is men between the ages of 18 and 34. The only thing that unites all people on the planet and can be a key interest is a desire to communicate, make social connections and new acquaintances. The second advantage of the dating niche is the high CTR of creatives and unobtrusiveness.
Of course you all perfectly understand, that dating creatives with girls will be more attractive and clickable, the more so they do not allow to reveal the whole point at once, without loss of traffic. On the contrary, our experience has shown that the less intrusive were the creatives in the deiting, the more they interested people, as they resembled the real users of the Internet. I have already showed you an example of how we increased the number of clicks in our spam campaigns by giving up a huge sheet of appealing text. At that point, we simply sent the text “Hello, is that you?” on behalf of a stranger and dropped the link. The link at first was a wap-click video, but later there was a dating site, the person thought that he had to register to view the profile, whether he was on it or not, and the unobtrusive nature made him believe that this was not spam and not advertising.
The final, but equally important factor is ease of conversion. In datering you don’t have to order a product or confirm something over the phone, or pay for anything. Often we get either offer with a subscription, or with free registration. Of course there are also revshara, but most often the conversion is fast and does not require from the user a lot of actions or payment.
Where does one get traffic to smartlinks?
One of the most common ways in Ru, is massfollowing and masssliking in instagram, very many have tried, many have earned and are earning to this day. Told me about it 4 years ago, it still works.
The principle of operation is identical in all social networks, the user base is taken, another base is created – bots, and these bots begin to perform actions on user pages, which in turn are displayed in user feeds or the interface of social networks, in the form of notifications. You get a “Like” on a photo in Instagram from an unfamiliar girl, or another girl likes your post on the wall in facebook, you go to see who it is, and you see that the page is empty, and the wall hanging spam record. You can also remember about the unobtrusive nature of the actualizing niche, you can make it so that the last moment you will not guess that this bot, only by clicking on the link, and even then, if you understand that it is a payer. The average user is unlikely to guess about the deception.
The same principles are used not only in instagram or vkontakte, one of the last topics where they used a similar method was Facebook and its comment widgets on third-party sites. If it made no sense to spam comments inside Facebook posts, because the anti-spam filters there were already quite developed, the anti-spam filters in the widgets for the sites were more loyal. So the craftsmen thought of parsing sites with Facebook comment widgets, and in those widgets to leave a comment with an appeal to the user in the comments. Thus, when our victim logged into his account on Facebook, he saw that somewhere he got a reply to a comment, looked at the notification and saw our message, left outside the social network on a third-party resource inside the widget.
The problem with this scheme is that it’s a very narrow market. You can’t gather a bunch of thematic sites and propagate their widgets on a particular thematic offer if you want to make good money. You have to think globally, and here again smartlinks help us out, when we simply work on all-geo and on the biggest chunk of the audience. In addition, smartlink will set up all the rules for the distribution of traffic according to country, operator, device, and other data.
If in the last example a huge number of bots promoted each of their own entries, in this example all of their actions are aimed at spiking the activity of one particular entry. Almost all social networks are trending and recommending content based on its spike in activity over a short period of time.
Of interest – instagram once reported that 38% of instagram activity is done by bots. This kind of spam is more often used in Pinterest or Tumblr, when the bot farm promotes a particular entry, but the easiest way to observe this story is on YouTube, and by its example it’s easier to understand why smartlinks in this situation act as a great monetization solution.
If you put the activity metrics on a video for 20 minutes – it would go into the “trends” tab of YouTube, where the video already gains its organic views, simply because that tab is viewed by the site’s audience.
At some point YouTube trends were flooded with videos from Turkish and Indian channels. Someone started buying views on Russian videos in those countries, and they were generated from prerolls on third-party sites like online cinemas. Then these Indians went to watch their regional videos, which helped them get to the top in Russia. This was enough to understand how ranking in trends works.More about this method you can read in my article – “Interesting youtube traffic.”
All the same instagram, there is also a similar scheme, when they bring with the help of bots 1 particular entry in the top for any hashtag, just screwing it up the number of likes promoting the entry in “Best Publications by Hashtag”. At the moment, we can see someone promoting the hashtag #CAR for Asian dating. You can read more about this topic in my article – “What is Smartlink.”
