Search arbitrage campaigns are very popular these days, especially with native traffic sources such as Taboola.
With arbitrage campaigns, you don’t even have to deal with creating landing pages or any kind of presell pages as these campaigns are directly linked and therefore don’t require advanced and complicated setup to get started.
So it’s pretty straightforward to set up, however, arbitrage campaigns have two main limitations that are not the easiest to work with.
These restrictions are:
#1 Most search feed providers require proof of past ad spend and will typically accept advertisers with proof of at least $ 1,000-10,000 per day.
# 2 – Sometimes it can take up to 2 days for sales to be approved and shown in your stats. Because of this, it can be difficult to optimize your campaigns.
How do I find search feed networks?
You can easily research the best search feed provider networks on Google or ask more experienced marketers on internet marketing forums such as iAmAffiliate.
But to save you some time, here are four networks that are good places to start:
- System1
- tonic
- Sedo
- Domain active
Browse feed offers
Search feed offers are result feeds with specific keywords that others are bidding for on search engines like Google. So when you are promoting arbitrage links, you are basically promoting that.
Advertisers who buy search traffic from Google can accept clicks from these feeds by checking the “Include Google Search Partners” box.
These offers are divided into the following types:
1-click flow – When the visitor is served directly with the advertised service / product listing link.
2-click flow – If the visitor is served with a pre-lander, he will be redirected to the advertised service / product list links.
Conversion Payouts
The aim of the offer is for visitors to click on the search result provided via our search feed. However, the payouts for this seem to be small. It may seem very difficult to convert these offers as the revenue per click (RPC) can only be $ 0.01 to $ 1.
But in reality these offers generally have high conversion rates, which of course can also depend on the GEO and the product or service, but generally the conversion rate on these offers is 15% or more, which is pretty nice.
How to set up a campaign
Many marketers run search feed arbitrage campaigns without even using a campaign tracking tool. You just enter search feed links as the final url.
This may sound good because it’s quick and easy, but it’s not really efficient.
Ad tracking tools are so useful that I can’t even imagine running a campaign without a proper tracking tool.
My favorite tracking tool is Redtrack. It has an easy to manage user interface with all the advanced features for one great price! They even offer a 14-day free trial so you can’t go wrong.
By using a tracking tool like RedTrack You can easily keep track of your expenses / income and use automatic optimization with API-based automation tools like The native optimizer.
You can also add different offers and industries from different search feed networks in a single campaign and RedTrack will A / B test them for you.
Simple funnel – alignment to 1 GEO
All you have to do is create a simple tracking campaign where you just add one offer to your flow and that’s it.
Extended funnel – targeting multiple GEOs
With RedTrack you can also address and test several GEOs within a single campaign. All you need to do is set up a few rules in your flow to make sure you’re directing visitors to the right search feed / offer.
So when you create your flow in RedTrack, you need to create a separate funnel for each target GEO.
And one for the untargeted GEO traffic. To set up a funnel for the non-targeted country traffic, you need to create a new funnel and select EXCLUDE in the filter settings and add the countries you ARE targeting as a value.
So if the traffic is NOT from the US or UK (in this example) it will be redirected to your global offering.
Optimize your campaigns
With arbitrage campaigns and average low payouts, we need to start optimizing as soon as possible to block poorly performing publishers and adjust our bids.
So if you have an average RPC of $ 0.65, for example, you should block widgets with a low conversion rate after spending around $ 1.5 on them.
The most important metrics that you need to monitor regularly are:
- Exchange rate
- RPC (revenue per click)
- ROI (return on investment)
Manually update your sales
Unfortunately, once approved, you have to manually upload the conversions to your tracker until you get massive data and traffic.
You will need to manually download the approved conversions as a CSV file from your search feed network and upload them to RedTrack to see the correct sales data in the tracker.
You need to be careful and make sure you don’t post the same conversion twice, e.g. B. If you upload conversions several times a day. If you upload the same conversions twice, you will get incorrect results and make optimization difficult.
Auto optimization
Since it’s not easy to make big profits, deal with low payouts, and aggressive optimization from a single campaign, automatic optimization is extremely useful in traffic arbitrage campaigns.
That’s why I like to use TheOptimizer Native. You can even set it up with it Automatic sales update!
If you regularly upload your conversions to RedTrack, you should simply set up a schedule on TheOptimizer where you basically tell the system to get your campaign data every day at a specific hour for yesterday, the day before yesterday, last 3 days or last 7 Days.
Automatic optimization rules
Since both costs and revenues flow into our platform, we can easily create rules for automatic optimization for our arbitrage campaigns.
Examples of rules for automatic optimization:
– Block widget rule 1
Taking into account data from: Last 14 days / Except: Today & Yesterday
IF the spend on the traffic source is greater than or equal to $ XX AND the ROI is less than -40%
Usually run every 10 or 20 minutes
-Block widget rule 2
Taking into account data from: Last 14 days / Except: None
IF the spend for the traffic source is greater than or equal to XX $ AND the conversion rate of the tracker is less than YY%.
Usually run every 10 or 20 minutes
– Optimize bids
Taking into account dates from: Last 7 / Except: Today & Yesterday
IF the spend for the access source is greater than or equal to USD XX AND the ROI is greater than YY% AND the ROI is less than ZZ% AND the time of day [select 3 specific hours in a week]
Set the bid to 80% of EPC and then do not lower the bid below $ x, xx AND not above $ y.yy
Usually run every 1 hour
