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Traffic arbitrage, is that no longer a thing? (5)

04-27-2019 07:57 PM #1 rets85 (Member)
Traffic arbitrage, is that no longer a thing?

Hey guys,

I'm pretty new here, thanks for having me.

By day I run a "standard" relatively large digital marketing agency. We specialize in Marketing Automation, SEO, Google Ads and Facebook Ads and manage roughly $10M for clients in media budgets. I've recently started learning about the whole BH side of things, and a while back there was a lot of talk about traffic arbitrage. Sending FB Ads traffic to websites that have Adsense (or variants) installed in order to capitalize on the difference in CPM costs between the publisher side and the advertiser side.

Is this not a thing anymore? Can you not do it with Pop/Push/Other methods?

I guess what I'm asking is, what are the current methods for arbitrage?

Thanks!

04-28-2019 07:15 AM #2 joe_versiontwo ()

Hey,

It's definitely still a thing just much more difficult than it was a few years back.

Take a look at any native widget and it's likely you'll see at least 1 or 2 traffic arbitragers. Native in general is still a pretty decent method. The big guys in the space spend + 7 figures/month. Secret here is to measure your page monetisation from all your ads - AdSense, header bidding, etc in as close to realtime as possible and come up with a script that gives you revenue per session (RPS). If you can get that RPS by ad, article, geo and device, then deduct a margin - say 30% - and set that as your cpc in the traffic source via API and your buy is almost guaranteed to be profitable. Keep that automation working and then it just becomes a content game, can you get create good enough ads and articles/galleries to generate high enough revenues for your bids to win the traffic.

Facebook is much harder to traffic arb than it used to be as they now limit reach (to basically zero) of gallery content. I know a few people making it work with listicle type content but margins are super thin.

Right now I hear the best new method is Snap and there are guys doing +$20k days just on this source in the UK.

Oh, and pop/push - I've not seen anyone doing arb on these sources at scale. Typically the ad partners don't like those sources so RPMs will be super low.

Hope that helps.

04-28-2019 01:19 PM #3 rets85 (Member)

Thanks Joe, this was very informative!

I'll do more to explore the options and circle back.

04-28-2019 08:04 PM #4 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

This recent thread should be of interest for you rets85: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...t-monetization

04-29-2019 03:18 AM #5 maynzie (Moderator)

Right now I hear the best new method is Snap and there are guys doing +$20k days just on this source in the UK.
Yeah the ads I see which I find interesting on snapchat are pure clickbait arbitrage, some of the angles are insanely creative it had me clicking for the story

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