Many affiliates reach a point where they believe they have tried everything to increase their campaign’s success; it’s not only frustrating, but it also stifles their business growth. This situation is common and arises after they have worked on their SEO and explored paid search. They are left thinking that if they pay for more traffic, they’ll just lose more money. However, the truth is that tapping into other traffic sources can yield great results.
Stop treating organic and paid search as your only levers
Search traffic is the best for intent-driven campaigns, but it’s also the most finite. Keyword volumes don’t change, in hyper-competitive verticals CPCs are so high that it’s almost impossible to maintain positive ROI, and you have to go through the ad approval process on major search and social networks every time you want to test something new.
Affiliates trying to scale campaigns to these levels need sources of traffic that are labor-free, can be turned on almost instantly, don’t eat up margins at the required CPM or CPC rates, and can be scaled up without waiting for anyone’s approval. That’s exactly what programmatic and direct-buy traffic acquisition models look to deliver. Pop-under and push notification traffic operate at such a scale that even if you’re targeting a niche, the ads will be seen by millions of new people every 24 hours. The CPM and CPC buying models allow you to bid for traffic at a rate that keeps you in the black, rather than simply being bid out of the auction by a bigger company.
The creative rotation and targeting have to be continuously optimized but the reward is that the traffic just keeps coming. For affiliates with search backgrounds, this transition is where true scale starts to happen. Arbitrage only works if your cost per click is well below your payout per conversion, and that math is a lot easier to make work on a programmatic network than on Google.
How pop-under traffic actually works
Pop-under ads are often misunderstood and not given the credit they deserve. Pop-ups can be intrusive as they appear on the user’s screen upfront, unlike pop-unders, which load quietly in the background and are only visible after the user has finished reading the current page and closes the browser. This means that the user’s undivided attention is on the pop-under ad as they are no longer distracted by the content they were just reading.
For affiliates, this is a golden opportunity to present their pre-lander or offer page to the user in full-screen mode, exactly at the moment when the user is about to leave the current page. This makes pop-unders particularly effective for utilities, sweepstakes, health, finance and other similar verticals.
Finding the best pop under ad network is the foundational step here, because network quality determines traffic quality. There are tons of networks claiming to have pop-under traffic, but the reality could be that many publishers are just popping up a new window. This results in being off-topic for the whole transition mentioned earlier. And it’s a vital transition! 99.9% of the time, a window just closed in that person’s face. Are they going to open another window with something similar? Only if it’s sufficiently removed from what they were just viewing.
Pre-landers are not optional at volume
Sending traffic directly from the ad to the affiliate offer can be successful in certain situations, but it’s a risky approach when dealing with large amounts of traffic. Cold traffic sent directly to a merchant’s page without any context rarely converts well enough to justify the cost.
Pre-landers are designed to resolve this issue. A pre-lander page acts as a buffer between the ad and the offer, presenting the user with some information or interaction before they reach the actual affiliate offer. This warms up the user and ideally creates some interest, while also weeding out unqualified clicks before they reach the offer page.
The type of pre-lander you create will depend on the specific niche or vertical you are working in. For instance, finance and insurance offers tend to perform better with quiz-style pre-landers that gather some information or level of interest before revealing the offer. Sweepstakes offers, however, generally perform better with straightforward, benefit-oriented content and a clear call to action. The idea is always to generate a small signal of intent before the user is passed on to the offer.
Regardless of the style of pre-lander you create, one of the most important elements to consider is the page load time. Sluggish loading speeds can significantly impact your conversion rates, as potential customers are more likely to leave the page if it takes too long to load. In fact, conversion rates can drop as much as 4.42% for every extra second it takes your page to load within the first five seconds (HubSpot). To avoid losing out on potential revenue, dedicate time and resources to optimizing your pre-landers with the help of content delivery networks, image compression, and stripped-down HTML content.
Push notifications as an off-site retargeting channel
Push ads are not used as much by affiliates since they usually view them as a tool to grow their list. Instead, push notification traffic should be considered a distinct advertising channel – a programmatic one – that sends ads straight to the screen of the user’s device, whether they are browsing or not.
Push traffic is excellent for time-sensitive offers. Utility products, finance, apps, short window e-commerce, and app downloads all respond well here, as the push offers immediacy without the user having to be on a particular page.
The other major benefit of push traffic is that because the user has to opt-in personally to receive notifications from the publisher, you have a minimum level of interested engagement that random pop or display traffic doesn’t produce.
Certainly, with some bigger financial products, there’s a serious theory behind increasing familiarity levels until they respond. However, with push, a percentage of the unresponsive will still be seeing the offer headline every day for months.
Here’s the thing: push traffic can drive you mad if you allow it to. Frequency capping is non-negotiable. Running the same creative to the same user more than once in a 24-hour window typically kills response rates and trains users to ignore the notification source entirely. Set caps at the campaign level, not just the creative level, to avoid saturation across rotation.
Tracking infrastructure before you scale anything
Campaigns with high numbers of interactions often stop without causing any noise due to a tracking failure. When using pixel-based conversion tracking at a large scale, you run into two issues: browser privacy mechanisms blocking third-party pixels, and discrepancies between the numbers reported by the ad vendor and the affiliation network.
Server-to-server tracking solves these problems, because the postback URLs send the conversion information directly from your tracker to the affiliation network. Since the information is not being sent from the user’s browser but directly from the server, the browser’s privacy settings become irrelevant and all conversion events are sent as expected.
Before you start scaling a campaign, you should ensure your postback tracking actually works. Send a test conversion, check if it appears in your tracker and in the network dashboard, and make sure that your subID values are being passed. Without subID values, you cannot link the conversion back to the placement, creative or publisher, which means you have no way of optimizing your campaign.
Unfortunately this step is often skipped because the enthusiasm for scaling a campaign doesn’t compare to the boring technical setup. However, a campaign with 100,000 impressions per day will actually deliver wrong optimization data if your tracking setup is not functioning correctly.
Real-time bidding and placement-level optimization
The quality of programmatic traffic is not consistent across placements. Even with the same publisher or network, some placements will perform much better than others. If you aren’t able to track performance data at the placement level and optimize toward those that convert while ditching the others, you’re wasting cash on the underperformers while also missing out on volume from the top performers.
This is especially true for pop and push as you can be buying traffic from many sites across the network without knowing in advance which ones are providing it. If you are able to optimize bids or whitelist at the placement level, the additional profit from identifying and pushing spend toward the top-performing placements can be immense.
If you are running on a pop or push source and they provide you with a list of your placement/site IDs with performance data, a first great optimization step is to look for placements that are already below your target cost per conversion and raise the bid for those directly or proportionally bid less on any overcost placements. Cut any placements that went double or triple the CPA for which you gave them a chance.
Matching traffic type to offer type
This is the compliance point that actually gets affiliates suspended: running incentivized traffic on non-incentive offers. High-volume, low-cost traffic is sometimes incentivized, meaning a user does something in exchange for a reward inside an app or platform. Most typically, this is lead information (which can lead to the wrong kind of lead). In the worst cases, the user doesn’t even know they’ve completed an action.
Incentivized traffic CAN drive great volume: when the incentives are well-aligned. App installs are great for incentivized traffic as any install has value. Certain types of sweepstakes structure nicely for incentivized traffic. And offer walls are specifically designed to use incentivized traffic. The key when considering this traffic is when the user completes an action: are they actually interested in what we’re promoting, or just sweeping up rewards?
However, incentivized traffic also tends to be some of the worst traffic in terms of long-term value, whether that’s re-engagement in the case of apps or simply accuracy for lead gen. They did it for the reward, not because they were genuinely interested (there are exceptions to this, of course, which I’ll come on to). For insurance, finance, and subscription offers, incentivized traffic shouldn’t be anywhere near your plans. Most networks will make it a compliance point that it’s not.
Scale comes from systems, not budget
Investing more money into a setup that you already know is broken will only allow it to produce bad results at a faster pace. Affiliates who are running high-volume campaigns profitably are not doing so by merely spending more money than everyone else. They are able to do so because they have cleaner tracking, better pre-lander setups, tighter frequency controls, and traffic formats that allow for margin.
Pop-under and push traffic are not meant to be “shortcuts.” Instead, they are real channels with real learning curves, real fraud risks if you are not working with good networks, and real optimization requirements. However, they are also channels where the CPMs are small enough that positive ROI is attainable, and the scale is large enough that small conversion rate improvements will make an impact. This is the perfect storm necessary to bust through the search and social ceiling that most affiliate campaigns are currently facing.
