The rise of automated optimization tools....what are your impressions? (9)
The rise of automated optimization tools....what are your impressions?
In the past year, a few rule-based automation tools appeared. They connect the APIs of traffic sources and trackers, and cut the campaigns based on some rules.
It might be the trend for 2018... lots of tools might emerge since more and more networks will open up with an API, even though the current state and documentation for many of them is quite bad. It might be again like Spy tools "rush", when tons of spy tools launched a few years ago.
Have you guys used any of these tools?
What are the downsides?
What's the interest level for such tools in your aff circles?
I haven't used any of these tools, but I'm all for it. Think it will level the playing field a bit, helping those who have less time and/or programming knowledge and depending on the tool, those who have less statistical know-how. If rule-based, at least there is still some brainwork involved.
Downsides, I guess additional costs, and for now limited network support. Depending on the level of automation, it can also lead to AMers learning less.
Inevitable really as well, everything is moving towards automation!
Adapt or die!
Originally Posted by crysper
I guess we are one of those automation tools, Optifyme(Beta)!
And I have also noticed many tools have been released during this passed year, specially for Native traffic..
1. Aside from our tool, I have used other Automation tools for different traffic sources that ours still did not support. (some native)
2. I believe as Rolandb mentioned, there is additional costs, and some traffic sources doesn't yet have advanced API to support all of the automation features. However, I am sure I save a lot more money monthly than what the tool costs.
3. My aff circle are interested as well as using our tool currently, and has been helping us improve.
Some history on Optifyme:
Since I started affiliate marketing a couple of years ago (early 2014), I always wanted to automate the optimization process of cutting out crappy sources. This was due to the fact that I couldn't sleep at night by constantly checking stats to see if there is a new "bot" source or something that's draining my budget (And it sucks to wake up in the morning to see that you missed something.)
So I got a team together to develop an application that connects to my main traffic sources through API, and sends API signals based on rules you set.
Flash forward to now, our team has been working tirelessly to make it a public tool, and we are integrating more and more traffic sources constantly. Aside from automation, you can chose for Optifyme to send you a Notification, for example if your CR, CTR or ROI dropped.
Right now we are in public beta stages and support Zeropark and Exoclick, as well as
I'm a big fan of automation, but I generally prefer to roll my own.
We're still in the very early days of this kind of automation. We're still at the experimental stage: we've not been doing this long enough manually, let alone automatically, to really know what works best beyond the trivial examples (blockers, known-state bidders, etc), and thus running automation using rapid-development, very simple tools allows a lot more experimentation than using or relying on a more complex tool with a more sophisticated UI.
Also, of course, I'm comfortable writing API scripts and using the command line, and my approach tends toward the experimental anyway. 
It'll be an interesting journey. I'm particularly interested to see more AI and ML-based tools roll out, although I suspect a lot of those will remain as in-house tools for a while yet because of the data requirements to train them.
AI needs a lot of data for training. If a company like this appears, I think the best approach is to strike some deals with traffic sources and networks and provide it as a public API. Once it's trained, an auto optimizer bot that will work on all major traffic sources, would be a gold mine. However, it's very hard to pull this off and requires some serious investments together with a big and smart team.
Automation is a big trend and a huge resource and time saver.
You will be seeing more and more of these not only in affiliate marketing but in every industry.
As far as we know, there are more and more market players every day who are using some sort of automatic optimisation tools or implement rules. Here in Zeropark we are beta testing some of the API features, this should lead to better and faster performance when optimising remotely.
I think the rest of the players will not wait for too long after the first successful attempts. So as @cmdeal said, adapt or die!
I don’t think that automatic optimization should be used in all cases – there will always be a part of the business that will depend on good connections with your partners with whom you want and should work directly. As for the rest, automatic optimization definitely offers many advantages.
But, instead of making our clients use and pay for such tools separately, we’ve decided to make automatic optimization a part of our tracking tool.
During the last three years, we have developed advanced automatic optimization tools that have resulted in increased revenue and profit for all our partners. These tools take into consideration all relevant user data and use it to lead each user to the best converting offers/campaigns for their specific case. This is based on a unique smart algorithm developed by a team of BI experts.
We are also currently working on our antifraud platform that will reject suspicious traffic from the start, so that only high quality traffic reaches the final destination.
Both automatic optimization tools and the antifraud platform are well-integrated within our Affiliate Software so their usage is natural and intuitive – this means that there is no need for API integrations of any kind at your end.
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