Rick Haasnoot joined experts that gave him insights
At the beginning of each year, STM Forum interviews the top experts in the affiliate marketing industry to ask them what’s working in affiliate marketing.
Our Senior Affiliate Manager & Sales Trainer, Rick Haasnoot joined these experts to give his insights and a look into Advidi’s predictions for the 2021 edition of “What’s Working in Affiliate Marketing”.
Here’s what he had to say.
STM: Rising/declining offer verticals?
The Dating vertical continues to be stronger than ever at Advidi. In 2020 we launched in-house Dating offers in Eastern Europe, specifically The Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Hungary and Slovakia.
After the launch of our US offers in 2019, we have seen a huge boost and the volumes have been increasing ever since. The need for traffic in this GEO is like a rabbit hole – it never stops. For Nutra Trials (Subscription) offers, we partnered up with a boatload of new US advertisers and built strong relationships with them to bring more offers/caps than ever before.
Affiliates were looking for successful alternatives to COD for example, and they found success with our advertisers’ Trials or Straight Sales. This can be due to issues that in person delivery billing models have faced during the pandemic.
On the Nutra traffic side, we’ve seen more and more advertisers accepting SMS/Email traffic and an increasing number of affiliates using these traffic sources.
Our Sweepstakes portfolio is bigger than ever, especially in the US. During 2020, we were able to start new and promising partnerships.
We made a big leap with US Sweepstakes Trials and are confident we are working with the biggest and highest-potential advertisers throughout the EU, UK and US.
Last but certainly not least – iGaming. With the recent closing of one of the biggest iGaming GEOs in the world, we were quick to react and offer alternative GEOs to our affiliates, such as Canada for example. We’ve also implemented real-time feedback on affiliate traffic behavior, and especially the most advanced affiliates who understand this vertical saw the benefits of it right away.
STM: Whitehat offers that are safe for Facebook?
We’ve heard from our big eCommerce partners that Facebook isn’t as reliable to promote WhiteHat offers as it was in the past. However, we saw big success for affiliates running these kinds of offers on Native, Google (SEO/PPC), and Push.
There are so many opportunities for affiliates to run whitehat brands successfully besides Facebook, please don’t give that platform too much credit.
We have partnered up with advertisers that are offering eCommerce products to pretty much all GEOs known to man, more specifically personal care, home accessories and gadgets. This is an exciting opportunity for our affiliates, and we are already seeing amazing results. We also see Google and Native being stricter towards Casual Dating. Our team is prepared for this by being able to provide clean landing pages. These traffic sources aren’t fans of redirects either, so we can provide tracking links without any.
STM: Best geo+vertical for newbies? And for veterans?
For beginner affiliates, we recommend trying low-payout Leadgen Sweepstake offers where newbies can get the hang of media buying, optimisation, prelander creation and all other tricks of the trade. Traffic in these GEOs is cheaper and there is no shortage of offers, so it’s a great way to start learning the processes of optimizing and split testing.
Good traffic sources for newer affiliates are pops, push, Google (SEA/SEO) and native.
Facebook is getting stricter across the board, and newcomers may require more guidance in the space. As email and SMS traffic is in a whole different league, we don’t recommend those sources for starters.
The Dating vertical is also a good place to start for newbies. We recommend starting in tier 2/3 GEOs.
Intermediate/expert: For affiliates who are seasoned in the Dating vertical, we recommend running offers in Tier 1 GEOs such as English speaking countries (US/UK) and Western Europe.
The competition is high, and traffic can require a higher budget, but it can be highly profitable for affiliates that know the vertical’s ins and outs.
We also recommend they look into Nutra Straight Sales and eCommerce opportunities, due to the higher costs for the customer. For veterans that have found solid ways to promote these offers, that means more earnings!
For experienced iGaming affiliates, we’ve created capacities for real-time feedback on the quality and behavior of their traffic. This helps them optimize quicker, better and get the best out of their sources.
For affiliates who run Casino CPA offers that pay on baseline deposits, we can give them feedback about the quality of their traffic much earlier in the process whenever a registration is made. This early feedback helps affiliates to optimise their flows/traffic faster and increase earnings.
We are also able to show depositors on Casino CPL offers so that affiliates can see the quality of their traffic and how it behaves on different traffic sources, placements and flows. This helps them optimise better, and of course, avoid being banned from that offer. This can also allow for them to receive better payouts in the future
STM: What is the impact of the Covid pandemic on the industry?
The global pandemic was a learning curve for a lot of industries, and for us, we continued to strengthen our efforts to improve our services and noticed a huge boost in volumes and traffic from our affiliates.
Although the global pandemic forced us to work from home and we were not able to visit our clients in 2020, our team showed true strength and character during these difficult times and tried their best to ensure our affiliates and advertisers continued to get the support they needed.
In saying this, we were excited to launch the famous affiliate competition Kings of Advidi 5th anniversary, which is a test for every possible angle that affiliates know. In September, we will be bringing the 2021 winners and our 2020 winners to Amsterdam for a 5-day extravagant experience with our team. It will be nice to once again have that face-to-face interaction with our friends.
Whether you’re an affiliate or an advertiser, we help you stay ahead with best-in-class support services. Reach out to your AM to hear more about our carefully selected, high-performing offers.
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