In affiliate marketing traffic is very crucial without which nobody can succeed. Without traffic, it’s like sailing a boat without water. There are basically two kind of traffic free and paid traffic. In this post we will mainly discuss about paid traffic sources.
Type Of Traffic Sources
Free Traffic Source: – These are the kind of traffic which is generated for free. There are many ways to get free traffic but the most proven source are organic traffic from search results by doing SEO and from social marketing from sites like facebook, youtube, pinterest, instagram etc. It sounds good but requires lot of hard work and patience as it can sometimes take even years to rank a site on page of search results. In affiliate marketing no offer last that long so free traffic in not an idle solution for affiliates. In fact, most of the successful affiliates don’t even bother waiting for so long and that is the reason all of them opt for paid traffic as its fast to get highly targeted traffic.
Paid traffic Source: – Paid traffic generally refers to buying traffic from advertising network. Paid traffic is highly targeted as an affiliate (advertiser on traffic sources) target their audience based on several factors and can place their advertisement on targeted sites. This helps in receiving laser targeted traffic fast and producing high quality conversion. Paid traffic can be classified into several category based on the type of advertisement, bidding model, type of traffic which is generated. Below is the complete list of paid traffic source and its categorization.
List Of Paid Traffic Sources – Complete Advertisers Guide
- PPC
- Native
- Push Notification Ads
- Social Media
- Mobile
- Pop & Domain Redirect Traffic
- Display
- Retargeting
- Adult
** Please click on respective traffic source to read more about them. **
- Taboola
- Outbrain
- Mgid
- Revcontent
- Yahoo Gemini
- Adnow
- AdUp
- TripleLift
- Plista
- Dianomi
- TONIC.
- AdLikeYou
- Twiago
- AdPushup
- ShareThrough
- EvaDav
- LiquidM
- Nativo
- NativeAds
** Please click on respective traffic source to read more about them. **
- Propeller Ads
- Rich Ads
- RichPush
- ActiveRevenue
- AdMaven
- Mobidea Push
- Push.House
- Adsterra Push
- Evadav
- RollerAds
- Tacolo
** Please click on respective traffic source to read more about them. **
- Facebook Ads
- Twitter Ads
- YouTube Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
- Instagram for Business
- Tiktok Business
- Snapchat Business
- Pinterest Ads
- Reddit Ads
- Tumblr Business
** Please click on respective traffic source to read more about them. **
** Please click on respective traffic source to read more about them. **
- Adcash
- PropellerAds
- SelfAdvertiser
- Adsterra Popunders
- AdMaven Popunders
- Popads
- Popcash
- ZeroPark
- Tonic
** Please click on respective traffic source to read more about them. **
- Google Display Network
- BuySellAds
- AdMedia
- Yahoo Display Ads
- AdRoll
- ReTargeter
- Exoclick
- TrafficJunky
- TrafficHunt
- Trafficfactory
- Adxpansion
- JuicyAds
- Ero-Advertising
PPC – Pay-Per-Click Advertising Paid Traffic Sources
PPC or pay-per-click is an internet advertising model which is charged for every click/visit which is sent to the advertiser’s website for related search query/keyword. These ads are generally shown on search engines when a user types any query/keyword and searches for it. The advertisement with highest bids is shown alongside search results and when a user clicks on those ads, they are redirected to the advertiser’s website.
Google is the leading search engine on the net and acquires the highest volume of search market shares followed by bing, yahoo, ask & aol. All the search engines follow the pay-per-click advertisement model. Google Adwords: Google adwords is the advertising program which show keyword/query specific advertisement on Google search engine result pages and also on publisher’s websites which is affiliated with Google Adsense. With over 63% of total search market share, Google Adwords is the most popular advertisement platform online due to immense amount highly targeted traffic. Supported advertising model by Google Adwords are CPC (Cost-per-click), CPM (Cost-per-impression), CPA (Cost-per-action), Re-targeting, Pay per call, Local ads etc.
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: N/A
- Minimum CPC: $0.01
- AdWords: Sign Up
Bing Ads: Bing Ads from Microsoft is similar to Google Adwords. Bing now has 1/3rd of total US desktop search volume according to comScore but for rest of the countries the search volume is quite low. Generally, Bing can provide 1/10th of total Google search traffic (worldwide). Even though the traffic volume is low on Bing Ads but the traffic quality if quite high and cheap as compare to Google Adwords. On top of that Bing Ads is very affiliate friendly.
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: N/A
- Minimum CPC: $0.05
- Bing Ads: Sign Up
Yandex Advertising: Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia and has a search market share of over 50%. It is not a self-serve advertising platform and has huge volume of traffic targeting only Russian audience. So, if you want to promote something on Russian market then Yandex can get you good traffic and it’s fairly cheap.
- Self-Serve: No
- Minimum Spend: Unknown
- Minimum CPC: RUB 300
- Yandex Advertising: Sign Up
Keyword Research Tool
Google Keyword Planner: With this free tool inside your adwords account you can find highly relevant keywords for your campaign. It gives you a clear idea about search volume of each keyword on google search engine, the number of click it receives and its average cost per click.
Bing Keyword Tool: Very similar to the Google keyword planner, but everything here is related to bing and not google.
Long Tail Pro: The best paid keyword research tool. It is a very useful to find high volume keywords and saves lots of time.
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Native Advertising Paid Traffic Sources
Display ads and PPC ads has dominated the market overs years. It has been over corwded and has become expensive. So as the market changes, affiliate marketers adapt to the new changes as new form of advertisement has been introduced to the market.
Native Advertising is the hottest buzz in the industry and it’s gaining its popularity very rapidly. Native advertising is basically a mixture of image and text ads and looks like editorial content on the website where it is placed. One can hardly distinguish between the content and the ad. And that is the sole reason the CTR and conversion ratio is better for native ads than display or PPC ads. Native advertising ad networks follow CPC pricing model. In other words, native advertising is simply content distribution and aims at generating instant traffic.
Below are the lists of native advertising networks:
- Reach: Over 1.4 billion monthly users
- Traffic: 50% of their traffic is from Tier 1 countries such as the US, UK, Japan, and France.
- Pricing: From $10 per day.
Outbrain: Outbrain is one of the popular native advertising platform. It’s ads appear in popular and premium quality placements like Mashable, CNN,FOX News, The Guardian and lots more of such top-quality sites.
- Reach: Over 1.2 billion monthly users
- Traffic: 50% of their traffic is from Tier 1 countries such as the US, UK, Japan, and France.
- Pricing: From $10 per day.
- Reach: Over 850 million monthly users
- Traffic: Europe, the USA, Asia-Pacific, etc.
- Pricing: The minimum amount required to start advertising on MGID is $100. The minimum bid for tier 1 countries is $0.015 per click.
- Reach: Over 50,000 monthly visitors
- Traffic: 50% of visits come from the USA and UK.
- Pricing: The minimum amount required to start advertising on Revcontent is $100. It allows both CPC & CPM.
- Reach: 400 million active users in it’s database
- Traffic: More than 50% of traffic comes from the US, UK, and France.
- Pricing: The minimum amount required to start advertising is $25.
- Reach: Roughly around 950 million monthly users
- Traffic: Most of the traffic comes from countries like UK, USA, Turkey, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Poland, and Greece.
- Pricing: The minimum amount required to start advertising with Adnow is $30. CPM can range from 10 cents to 2$.
Above are the top native ad networks out there in the market. However, the quality of native ad networks are growing rapidly and will continue to do so in near future. Below is a list of few more native ad networks:
- AdUp (90% of their traffic comes from Germany)
- TripleLift
- Plista (80% of traffic is from Germany, Russia, Poland, and Australia.)
- Dianomi
- TONIC
- AdLikeYou
- Twiago
- AdPushup
- ShareThrough
- EvaDav
- LiquidM
- Nativo
- NativeAds
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Push Notification Advertising Paid Traffic Sources
Push Notification has taken the affiliate marketing and CPA world by storm. One of the main reason why it has gained so much popularity in a short span of time is that it works on almost any vertical. Push ads engages with a real user and is a great communication tool which can result in high CTR and higher conversion rates. Brands has been leveraging push ads for quite sometime.
Push notification ads has huge volume of highly targeted real users traffic. So if you want to take your affiliate marketing/CPA journey to next level then it’s the right source of traffic for you. Below are the list of top Push Notification Ad Networks list:
- Reach: Over 1.5Β active users in its database
- Bidding: CPM or CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- Reach:4 billion push notification subscribers across more than one hundred fifty countries
- Bidding: Only CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- Reach:450+ million subscribers worldwide and 4 billion daily impressions in 220 countries
- Bidding: Only CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $50
- Reach: Serving more than 5 billion daily desktop & mobile impressions across thousands of premium online publishing partners.
- Bidding: CPM or CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- Reach: 2 billion daily impressions in countries worldwide.
- Bidding: Only CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $50
- Reach: 1 billion daily users.
- Bidding: Only CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $50
- Reach: 12.5 billion impressions per day.
- Bidding: Only CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $50
- Reach: 1 billion daily impressions in countries worldwide.
- Bidding: CPM or CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- Reach: 60 million active subscribers from more than 250 countries.
- Bidding: CPM or CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- Reach: 1.2 billion impressions and 2.5 million clicks on a daily basis.
- Bidding: Only CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $50
- Reach: 1 billion daily impression in more than 180 countries.
- Bidding: Only CPC
- Minimum Deposit: $100
Social Media Advertising Paid Traffic Sources
We all know the ever increasing popularity of social networking sites and the sheer amount of traffic they hold. With so many monthly active user’s and huge pool of traffic, social media is booming at the moment. No wonder why the ad spend on social media paid traffic is skyrocketing every year.
The main advantage of paid social media traffic is that advertisers can get advanced targeting options due to the user’s data collected by the social networking sites. It helps in creating brand awareness, getting more exposure with a growing audience and of course generating more revenue. Social media traffic is everything small business needs to grow. Below are the lists of best paid social media traffic source.
Facebook Ads: Facebook is the biggest social network site with over 2.934 billion active users (as of july 2022) and growing. Facebook ads also known as Facebook for business is the advertising platform of Facebook. Facebook ads really stand out of the rest advertising ad networks because of the huge amount of traffic and advance targeting option. Facebook not only allows targeting audience based on demographics but also on their interests which help is getting better conversions. Search ad networks like Google & Bing has advance targeting options, but doesn’t allow targeting based on demographics, interests, behavior. That’s what makes Facebook ads unique with laser fine targeting option. Facebook ads don’t only help in getting clicks to website, but also help in branding, exposure, building audience base, helps in getting more installs for mobile apps, boosting fan page post and getting more engagement.
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: $1-$5-$40(CPM-CPC-CPI)
- Minimum CPC: $0.01
- Facebook Ads: Sign Up
Twitter Ads: Twitter is the biggest micro-blogging social platform with over 238 million monetizable daily active users(as per latest earning reports by twitter on July 2022). Twitter ads lets you advertise on twitter with promoted tweets, promoting accounts & promoted trends. Twitter advertisement perfectly suits for getting more engagement to the tweets, getting more clicks to website or app installs, getting more followers & gaining visibility. It has great traffic quality and it has fine demographic targeting option just like Facebook ads with recent inclusion of keyword targeting which makes it even better.
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Twitter Ads: Sign Up
Youtube Ads: Youtube is the most popular video sharing platform currently owned by Google and has an Alexa rank of 2. So that means it’s the second most visited site on the internet. It is also the second largest search engine. Youtube lets you advertise on Youtube through Google Adwords account. Advertisement formats for Youtube Ads supported are displays ads, Overlay ads, Skippable & Non-skippable video ads, banner ads and sponsored card. More details about Youtube Ad formatting can be found here. Youtube has huge amount of traffic and the cost is cheap too. If you are into video marketing and want high quality traffic then Youtube ads should be your best choice.
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: N/A
- Minimum CPC: $0.01
- YouTube Ads: Sign Up
LinkedIn Ads: LinkedIn is the most popular professional network with reach around 849.6 million users( As of July 2022). LinkedIn ads have 2 ad formats Sponsored updates and text ads with CPC/CPM bidding model. Like Facebook and Twitter ads, LinkedIn ads has advance targeting option and allows you to target audience by their job title, industry, profession etc. The only drawback of LinkedIn ads is that they are costly and its minimum CPC is $2, but it works great for B2B marketing.
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: $10
- Minimum CPC: $2
- LinkedIn Ads: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: $1-$5
- Minimum CPC: $0.01
- Instagram for Business: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: $500 per campaign
- Minimum CPM: $10
- Tiktok for Business: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: $5 per day.
- Minimum CPM: Around $2.50
- Snapchat for Business: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: $1-$5
- Minimum CPC: $0.01
- Pinterest Ads: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Spend: $5
- Minimum CPM: N/A
- Reddit Ads: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: No
- Minimum Spend: Unknown
- Minimum CPC: Unknown
- Tumblr Business: Sign Up
Mobile Paid Traffic Sources
It’s a mobile era and mobile industry in expanding every year. People love to spend their time on mobile than on computer. Thanks to the smartphones and tablets for making life easier with better connectivity. Advertisements also take a huge leap and didn’t miss out the chance to tap into the huge pool of mobile traffic. With mobile advertisement you can show your banner ads, text ads or multi-media video ads through mobile apps or websites. You can also send push notifications from some networks which allow such service.
- Minimum Deposit: Unknown
- InMobi: Sign Up
- Minimum Deposit: $500
- AirPush: Sign Up
- Pricing Model: CPC/CPM/CPA/CPI
- Minimum Deposit: $50
- StartApp: Sign Up
- Minimum CPC: 0.01
- Minimum Deposit: $20
- Buzzcity: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Pricing Model: CPM or CPI
- Minimum CPI/CPM: NA
- Minimum Deposit: NA
- SmartyAds: Sign Up
- Pricing Model: CPM
- Minimum CPM: Unknown
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- Go2Mobi: Sign Up
- Pricing Model: PPI
- Minimum Bid: $0.20
- Minimum Deposit: Unknown
- Tapjoy: Sign Up
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Pop Under/ Pop Up Paid Traffic Sources
Pop under or pop up is a form of advertisement which opens a full webpage in a new window (either pop up or pop-under) parallel to the website the user is trying to access. This form of advertisement is really annoying for the user as it distracts them from the original content they are trying to access. Pop up/ Pop under advertisement follows pay-per-view advertisement model. You pay each time your webpage is shown on a pop up/pop-under window.
Due to its annoying nature visitors are more prone to close it even before the window loads completely (especially for pop up traffic) resulting in low engagement and higher exit rate. Pop up/Pop under is also the cheapest form of advertisement and traffic quality is also low as compared to PPC or social media traffic.
Domain redirect traffic is basically the kind of redirect traffic which comes from parked domains. Publishers purchase expired domains which still have traffic through their web presence and sell those traffic to you via any redirect traffic ad network. Domain redirect traffic has a mixture of high and low-quality traffic depending on the quality of the site it is originating and it happens to be very cheap.
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Pricing Model: CPM/CPV
- Minimum Spend: Unknown
- Minimum CPM/CPV: NA
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- Adcash: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Fully Managed: Yes
- Pricing Model: CPV
- Minimum Spend: Unknown
- Minimum CPV: NA
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- PropellerAds: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Pricing Model: CPV
- Minimum Spend: Unknown
- Minimum CPV: NA
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- SelfAdvertiser: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Fully Managed: Yes
- Pricing Model: CPV
- Minimum Spend: Unknown
- Minimum CPV: NA
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- Adsterra Popunders: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Pricing Model: CPV
- Minimum Spend: Unknown
- Minimum CPV: NA
- Minimum Deposit: $50
- AdMaven Popunders: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Pricing Model: CPV
- Minimum Spend: $2.5
- Minimum CPV: NA
- Minimum Deposit: $10.00
- Popads: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Pricing Model: CPV
- Minimum Spend: $5
- Minimum CPV: NA
- Minimum Deposit: $5.00
- Popcash: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Deposit: $200
- Zeropark: Sign Up
- Self-Serve: Yes
- Minimum Deposit: $100
- Tonic: Sign Up
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Display Advertising Paid Traffic Sources
Display advertising is simply showing your advertisement on specific websites in ad formats like text, image, video, flash & audio. Display advertising follows CPC and CPM pricing model which means you have to pay when anybody clicks on your ad (CPC) or views your ad (CPM).
Display ads helps in getting quick exposure and huge traffic in a short span of time. However, the ROI for display advertising is on the lower side as compared to PPC traffic as it depends on several factors like relevancy, nature of business, user experience, landing page, creative (banner, video, flash, audio) etc. But, display advertisement is perfect for branding and big companies use display advertisement for that. Below are the lists of paid display advertisement networks:
Retargeting Advertising Paid Traffic Sources
Retargeting is the form of advertising where you target users who have visited your site earlier but didn’t take action. This is a very effective form of advertisement because it has a very high ROI. Research shows that less than 5% of the visitors who visit the site for the first time actually convert into customers. So retargeting the rest increases signup and sales.
Major advertising platform such as Google, Bing, Facebook etc. allows retargeting. There are also independent networks which allow retargeting advertising. They are mentioned below:
Adult Traffic Sources
The name says it all. Most advertising networks don’t allow promoting offers adult or explicit in nature. But these ad networks allow all sort of adult offers as the traffic itself is adult in nature. The traffic comes from all the tube sites or image sites which have adult & explicit content.
Variety of offers works pretty well on adult traffic such as dating, adult toys, cams, antivirus etc. Most of the networks allow ad formats like banner, pop up/pop under and they follow CPC/CPM/CPV pricing model. Below are the lists of adult traffic sources and they are classified according to their traffic quality.
Tier 1: (Highest Quality Traffic)
- Minimum Deposit: $200
- Exoclick: Sign Up
- Minimum Deposit: $25
- TrafficJunky: Sign Up
- Minimum Deposit: $50
- TraficHunt: Sign Up
- Minimum Deposit: $500
- Trafficfactory: Sign Up
Tier 2: (Medium to low quality traffic)
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Final Thoughts
There are so many traffic sources listed here. I personally haven’t tested all of them, but I use traffic sources, according to my needs. I use some to scale up my profitable campaigns. Likewise, you don’t have to test all of them. Just use the one which fits your requirement and your budget.
Paid traffic is very effective and can bring you a huge return of investment (ROI) if you do it the right way. You need to track your advertising campaign all the time and optimize it based on the data you receive from your ad network. If you fail in doing that then you would end up losing advertising money. The key to making profit with paid traffic is proper strategy, tracking everything and optimizing ad campaign to its best.
It has been a very long post and if I have missed something then do let me know. Would love to hear your opinion in the comment box below.
~ To your success. 🙂