PPC Native Ads as promotion method

Hi guys,

I've decided to share about one of my working points, hope it will be a useful tutorial for the beginners and a good alternative for the pros.

It's about my experience of driving paid CPC traffic to different CPA / CPL offers and earning commission on this. I was using MGID native advertising network. Actually, I'm using it for 2 years already and pretty happy with the results. You can check their website here.

To warm you up, I'd like to share the screenshots for some campaigns I promoted in the past, so you could see the potential commission you can get.









Please note, that you wouldn't get an immediate affect just starting driving traffic to a random offer. The things are a bit more complicated, and I'll try to describe everything step-by-step.


Step 1. Get advertiser account in MGID platform

Once you've been approved, you will get your personal manager who will guide you through.


Step 2. Pick up the offer you'd like to promote

I've been running hundreds of different campaigns, and from my experience not every vertical performs well with native ads.

The main goal should be reaching a certain EPC level (Earning per click) higher than the CPC (Cost per click) rate. If you do this, you start earning money.
If you pick up a CPA/CPS offer, consider the landing page. The LPs with a sales video (or bridge LPs) usually do much better than just a bunch of text. Clickbank offers did well for me, especially Health, Fintess, Dating advices etc. Binary Options is also a great choice to start with.

If you consider picking up a CPL offer, again, consider the landing page. SOI (Single Opt In) offers always work better with native ads, despite the fact that DOI payouts are usually higher. From my experience, Dating and Browser Games are the best choice. (You can also try Surveys).


Step 3. Grab your tracking link

Login into your affiliate network account and go to the section where you can generate the tracking link. It is very important to add MGID's macros in the SUB ID fields, as this will give you an opportunity to optimize the campaign. Since the biggest part of networks are using either Cake or HasOffers tracking systems, you shouldn't have any problems with inserting SUB IDs.

So far, MGID has 3 different parameters (macros) that will be very helpful for you:
{widget_ID} - will allow you to optimize the campaign by traffic sources;
{teaser_ID} - will allow you to optimize the campaign by creatives. You can also use postbacks, which will be an alternative to this macro;
{geo} - since Cake doesn't always show geo reports to the publishers, this macro may be very helpful for international campaigns.


Step 4. Setting up the campaign

Once you got an account with MGID and added there some funds, you can start setting up a campaign. MGID has all targeting options needed like country/city targeting, OS, browser etc, so be sure you will target the audience specified in your offer details. Set up the budget for the campaign.

Your AM will help you once you have any questions, the only thing you need is your tracking link. You pass it to your account manager and they will do their job - add the creatives for your campaign. Yes, they create the creatives on their own. Of course, you can use your own creatives, but I'm fully satisfied with what MGID provides by themselves.

You also have to define the CPC rate for your campaign. Here everything depends on the vertical and your ads CTR. You can afford lower CPC for dating offers for example, as their ads are more clickable. The opposite situation with Binary Options. You can get the info about the rates from your AM as well.
Once everything is set up - you're ready to go.


Step 5. Campaign Optimization

Once you sent a decent amount of visitors to your offer, you're ready to optimize the campaign. I'd suggest starting the optimization once you sent at least 1000 visitors. This is usually enough to analyze the data you've got.

The most effective for me is usually traffic source optimization. You should download the SUB ID breakdown report from the report section of your tracking platform. Such report gives you an idea of which traffic sources perform for you better, and which are not.
You can either ask your AM to block the traffic sources that don't perform for you at all. Or you can use their selective bidding feature, which is much more effective. This means you can select good-performing traffic sources and increase the CPC bid for them. This will affect the volumes of traffic you get. The same you can do for low-performing sources, just lowering their bid. All adjustments are made by your AM, so nothing to worry about, they are good at their job.

You may try different optimization techniques - by creative, be geo (for international campaigns), you can also do split tests with different landing pages. All these I've mentioned will definitely boost your EPC to the level you need, so good luck.