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Follow Along (Testing the new Revcontent) (48)

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Hey everyone-



So as those of us who follow native ads know, Revcontent has made a lot of changes in the last 6 -9 months.



First they got rid of their “official” whitelist feature…



Then they got rid of tons of their “low quality” publishers (which was a good thing certainly)…



Then they got rid of their “Brand” targeting…



Then- last week- they got rid of “Topic” targeting as well… meaning the only choices are now “Native”, “Push”, or “Adblock”… whereas before within the Native category you could choose “Health and Fitness”, “Conservative News”, “Liberal News”, etc…



As a result of all these changes, I was curious how good Revcontent’s traffic now is, and whether there are still kinks to be worked out, and what kind of volume is attainable, and I figured other folks would be curious about the same thing.



As a result I wanted to start a follow-along of a very generic run-of-network international campaign on Revcontent and document the results here for anyone’s benefit who cares to read it 😊





Here’s the basics:



Network: Revcontent


Targeting: Native (Run of Network)


Device Type: Desktop


Geo’s: 20 or so Tier 1/Tier 2 geo’s (stuff like US, UK, Australia, Mexico, South Africa, etc)


Browser Language: English


Offer: A proven health vsl that I’ve already done about 5k with on Revcontent on a whitelist campaign- this way we know it’s something that works for sure and can take that variable out of the equation. Average conversion is 40$ after factoring in returns/etc.


Funnel: Ad to landing page (typical short landing page for this type of vsl) to offer.


Ads: Will upload 6-8 proven ads to start, and delete all but the most profitable two at least once a week (presuming enough spend), and upload at least 3 new ones a week (again, presuming enough spend to warrant it).


Bidding: Going to start bids very low – at a penny actually – and then raise by .01-.02$ periodically until they are spending 100$ a day. Am also going to take 20 or so proven widgets from my whitelist campaign and target them at the same bids I’ve been targeting them at, to hopefully help achieve a greater level of profit from the beginning and not go to far into the red. In this regard it’s not a “pure” run of network campaign, however I will still able to extrapolate the same “run of network” data by just subtracting the spend/revenue of those widgets.


Budget: 100$ a day to start, will likely increase soon.


Tracking: Done via Thrive


Traffic Pacing: Off


Rules (done via TheOptimizer):


-Block widgets at 10 traffic source clicks and 0 landing page clicks (run every 10 minutes)


-Block widgets at 30 traffic source clicks and 3 or less landing page clicks and 0 conversions (run every 10 minutes)


-Block widgets at 400 traffic source clicks and 0 conversions (run every 10 minutes) (for those rare widgets that get lots of clicks and lp clicks at cheap bids but just never convert for some reason)


-Block widgets at 20$ spend and 0 conversions (run every 10 minutes)


-Block widgets with 1 conversion and more than 70$ in spend (run once every 12 hours)


-Block widgets with 2 conversions and more than 115$ in spend (run once every 12 hours)


-Block widgets with 3 conversions and more than 150$ in spend (run once every 12 hours)


-(Manually) adjust every widget with 4 or more conversions to 60% of it’s EPC, going back 6 months



Campaign Start Date: March 16^th, 2020

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Note: All my updates will have about a week lag on them, hence just starting the thread now even though started the campaign on the 16th...

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Brilliant @jack_l

I'm sure this will be a great and informative follow along!

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So near the end of day three, we have had limited volume but good profit, with pretty much all of both from the 20 ‘whitelist’ widgets.



The 20 whitelist widgets have spent 138.05$ and generated 8 conversions or 320$. Just for interest, a couple examples of widgets from among those 20 are davidicke.com, honesttopaws.com, and christianheadlines.com.



The ‘run of network’ targeting has spent 27.08$ with no conversions. The bid on it has been raised twice by a penny and is now at .03$.



We have had 18 widgets blocked by TheOptimizer for triggering various rules so far (actually all of them for triggering the “10 clicks with 0 lp clicks” rule ).



Again just for interest, here’s a few of the sites that have been blocked:


Todayifoundout.com

Omglane.com

Cdn.com.do

Education.spoutable.com

Mellisasouthernstylekitchen.com



Regarding ads… one ad has been killing it, getting most of the volume and 6 of the conversions at a 16$ cpa. None of them are doing ‘bad’ though so haven’t blocked any yet.




Going forward: I am about to increase the run of network bid to 0.05$ - as I continue to do that the run-of-network widgets will account for a bigger and bigger percentage of the overall spend, so we'll be able to see how decent the run of network traffic is in that regard.

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Thanks for this thread, jack_l. Looking forward to seeing your results.

So just to clarify, those 20 whitelist widgets come from your previous campaigns for this offer that have converted well?
And you put them in the "Widget Targeting" tab?

Without giving it away, could you tell me a bit more about the offer, eg, maybe what subcategory the offer is in? (diet or weight loss, diabetes, supplement...)

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It goes without saying that I'm following this

Also fascinating that you can run Native at $100 a day.

I know you can do it with non-Tier 1 geos with MGID and power inbox, but I've never seen it done on RevContent.

Next, you'll showing us how to run Taboola on $20 a day :P

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Yes - so I took the top 20 widgets from that pure whitelist campaign and entered them in individually. They would have eventually got clicks anyway in the run of network campaign, but basically they each start at 60% of their historic EPC from the whitelist rather than at a penny like everything else.

And then yes, the vertical is one of the two you mentioned lol.

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Hey man thanks for the kind words!

And then yeah... Revc used to always overspend which was awful... but at the same time they don't have much international traffic... so if you're targeting non-US or especially non-English it's a lot harder to get spend...

I had a French diabetes campaign on Revc once that was super profitable but I couldn't get it to spend more than 40$ a day or so so eventually turned it off... although in retrospect I probably should have just left it on as it's not like it took up a lot of time.

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What’s up everyone!

So this is day six or so…

As of right now we have spent 403.16$ and had 18 conversions, or roughly 720$ in revenue… so not too bad…

The ‘whitelist’ widgets have spent 276.45$ and have 14 cvr for 560$.

And the ‘run of network’ widgets have spent 126.81$ and have 4 cvr for 160$.


Those numbers are actually quite great, but before any native newcomers get big eyes and decide Revc must be ‘easy money’, I should add that that is a better outcome at this point that 95% of the campaigns I start… and in large part is because I picked a long-established funnel and offer to test.


Anyway… no ads have reached the point of being blocked yet… but a couple are getting close..

For widgets… there have been 42 widgets so far that have been blocked by the rules we put in TheOptimizer…


Also.. just for interest sake… my “best” whitelist widget got off to a bad start, and was blocked by the “2 conversions but 115$ in spend” rule I referenced above… I unblocked it and added it to the ‘exclude’ list on that rule, but that is a good object lesson in how easy it is to block widgets that could prove to be great, as that single widget probably accounts for at least 25% of the profit I’ve ever made on Revcontent…


Anyway… at start of this update the “run of network” bid was at 0.05$, and since the run of network traffic has been (narrowly) profitable up til now, I am going to increase it to .07$. (Slow and steady wins the race!)

The 20 ‘whitelist widgets’ are still at the bids I initially uploaded them at.


Also- had a problem come up on the tech side and Thrive and TheOptimizer both responded in under 5 minutes and had it fixed within about 3 emails between the three of us, so huge props to their support teams on that.


Here’s an image of the stats so far on TheOptimizer. Most of the widgets visible are the ‘whitelist’ ones since it’s so early. I blocked them out just on the 1 in 100 chance someone copied the campaign and targeted those same exact ones since it might mess things up, but later on I’ll probably just post a pic without them blocked out once the campaign is more established:



Ignore the 'revenue' and 'profit %'s columns- I can't get Clickbank to send accurate info on that. I just take 40$ as the average value and judge profitability by the 'cpa' column.


And then here's an image of the daily spend so far on Revc:




Will update again soon!

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Awesome thread, jack, keep us updated, thank you! Following

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So, I'm still a bit confused: Are you running two separate campaigns, or just one? Meaning a whitelist one with only those previous proven widgets, and a different RON campaign -- or do you mean you entered the whitelist widgets manually into the RON campaign in the Widget Targeting tab (if that's possible).

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Yes, makes sense now - thanks for breaking it down for me

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Hey @jack_l

Would you mind explaining the theory behind adjusting the bids to 60% of the EPC?

Does that mean you are aiming for 40% ROI?

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Awesome follow along!
I'm pretty happy with the changes they made so far. It seems that the value/cost is slightly better than before.

I was told that I was the only advertiser with this issue!!! hahaha


Have you tried the pacing feature?
I'm doing pacing and no push on a USA RON campaign... the traffic has been very steady and controlled.

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Yep exactly

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Oh man... yeah... overspends and 'bot widget attacks' used to be VERY common. Thankfully they seem to have cleaned that up.

But yeah... I haven't tried pacing much but I will do that...

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Awesome follow along Jack!

Taking a look at your widget performance screenshot above, looks like the EPC varies a lot from one widget to another.


When manually setting the bid to 60% of the EPC, I guess you're not applying the same strategy on widgets that have an EPC from $3 and up, right?

Also, considering widgets avg CPC and actual EPC (revenue from the tracker divided by number of clicks on revcontent), I believe it will be easier to automate the bidding using automatic rules based on specific EPC levels.

Example - After 3 or 4 conversions widgets show the following performance patterns:
- widget XXXX has an EPC of $6.5 and an avg. CPC of $0.62
- widget YYYY has an EPC of $3.4 and an avg. CPC of $0.25
- widget ZZZZ has an EPC of $1.1 and an avg. CPC of $0.75

So, instead of running the changes manually, for the above examples, you can have 3 rules that take care of setting the bid to 3 different percentages of the EPC to avoid overbidding while still keeping things under control on autopilot









Also, adding another condition like Hour of the Day, you can schedule the action to be executed at a specific hour or hours of the day.

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Hey @platinum -

Thanks for the great info!

I would totally do that... the problem is I can't get Clickbank to send accurate information on revenue... the total revenue that gets posted to Thrive and in turn to you guys is always more than the reality...

Plus... even if that wasn't the case, the upsells for these Clickbank info products mean that a single sale could equal anywhere from 20$ to 200$... so even if the revenue data was accurate, it could take 10-20 conversions per widget to have the revenue reflect the 40$ per sale average that we see long-term... plus that doesn't take into account future returns/chargebacks, etc...

As a result, that's why I create all the rules based on CPA rather than EPC... if that makes sense...

If there was a way to override the 'revenue' variable and just have every conversion automatically count for 40$ that would make it easier...

But yeah, that is why I do the calculations manually for widgets with more than 4 conversions... plus I like to keep an eye on things anyway so doing so forces me to look through the performance per widget every few days

But yes, were it any other type of offer I would definitely be doing that.

I may run some US lead-gen on Revcontent here soon too and in that scenario I would definitely use the EPC-based bidding as you outline above. Perhaps I'll do a follow-along for that too

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This is awesome, thanks for sharing. I lost hundreds if not thousands on crazy bot widgets on RC in the past. Battling back and forth to get the funds back. Seems like it's better now than it used to be.

Looking good this!

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@anthonyl For sure- I will give it to them I think they have mostly eliminated the problem - I used to suffer from the exact same thing. I think it has definitely changed things dramatically in terms of 'best practices' on the platform, as before I think having whitelists (and blacklists of bad widgets) was incredibly valuable if not neccesarry, whereas now it functions much more similar to Outbrain or to Taboola fixed bid.

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That's awesome, I'm gonna give them a shot once again. It got that bad in the past I paid a developer to create a private rules dashboard with API etc.

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Hey @jack_l

When you started at 0.01cpc and slowly increased, obviously traffic is slow but how long did it take to start getting impressions? I'm periodically increasing too, with higher bids on past profitable widgets.

I spoke to support as my previous rep left, and they told me to use bids around what I did previously. But now that it's kinda RON I don't think I should in the beginning, maybe half?
Slowly increasing is not really gaining much momentum, how often were you increasing?

Also did the widgets you manually added/bid on get traffic faster? Mine still seems slow all-round.

Maybe just need to be more patient I don't know.

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@anthonyl - it all depends... sometimes I can start at a penny and get impressions right off the bat... sometimes I don't and only the 'whitelist' ones with high bids get them... sometimes the run of network will get clicks right off the bat but not the whitelist ones for some reason... depends on various factors..

I would say around the 0.05-0.09$ mark is where you started getting real traffic on desktop international... so if you aren't getting any impressions yet I would definitely increase. Revcontent's platform is HIGHLY responsive so if you increase and don't see a change within an hour or two I wouldn't hesitate to increase again

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Hey man, thanks for the reply. Ok this makes sense, I have 2 campaigns - mobile/desktop separated. I'll keep a close eye on it. It's just 1 GEO for now, to have more control/granular testing as this GEO worked very well with RC in the past for the same funnel.

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Hey @jack_l thanks for keeping this thread updated!

A few questions for you:

1) When you reduce the bid to 60% of historical EPC, isn't that going to significantly reduce traffic (and hence revenue)? Would it cause dropping out of some placements entirely?

2) To me (a newbie), some of TheOptimizer rules seem at first glance like they're prematurely blocking. Example, 10 traffic clicks with 0 LP clicks. And for Conversions, just one more conversion on any of those rules would make the widget profitable. Really, all the rules. This says to me that you believe there's a *greater* chance that widgets throughout the network are on average, "bad" or won't work out... versus giving them some wiggle room.

3) A few posts back you said "Eventually, in a year or two (hypothetically), I might have 300 widgets set to....(etc)" Your timeframe (1 or 2 years) has me thinking to myself "I can't wait a year to see good results, I need to see profit quickly" ...LOL It's nice to see that maybe native campaigns can have longevity -- though I kind of doubt that with some Clickbank products? -- and with affiliates copying campaigns? But I'm also hoping that with natives, I could see decent daily profit within the first month. In other threads it seems thedudeabides starts out spending hundreds a day, which makes sense because aren't we just buying data? Why not buy as much as possible up front, find the profitable widgets, and scale? (Why start at pennies/day bids and stretch it out over months?) Hopefully my overall question makes sense. Fill me in on your thinking here.

Thanks again.

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Hey @summitview - fascinating questions!

First of all - I would stress that the way I am running this campaign is not the only way to do things... there are probably other folks who do great on Revcontent using entirely different strategies...

To answer your questions though...

1. If a widget has 4+ conversions and it's EPC is .50$... I wouldn't want to ever bid .50$ or more on it or I would lose money... I could certainly choose to set the bid to 80% or 70% instead of 60%, but on the other side I could be even more conservative and set it to 50%... it really depends how aggressive vs conservative you want to be.

Regarding volume, yes in some cases that will cut off all volume, but on international this is rare, because even if you cut off your US traffic for example, or US/AU/CA/UK/NZ... you'll still get clicks from all the other geo's you are targeting that have low volume but cheap clicks (Mexico, South Africa, Singapore, etc). Again though, it's all just a balance basically...

2) You are right, my rules are pretty aggressive... and I am definitely going to miss a few good widgets I block too early... again, it's just a balance... the less and less aggressive your blocking rules, the longer it will take to become profitable, although you may find more profitable widgets in the end. For me, I'd rather block fast, get it profitable, and then if I am really, really killing it later on, maybe I'll do redo the whole process from scratch to give those blocked widgets another chance.

But yeah, actually the rules on blocking widgets that have conversions but have negative ROI aren't ideal... your post made me just remember that I've done something different in the past which is actually better, which would be to just lower the bid on those converting but non-profitable widgets to the same 60% of the EPC. So let's say it has a cpc so far of .20$ and two conversions for an EPC of .10$, the rule would change it to .06$. I'm actually going to change that right now I appreciate you catalyzing a lightbulb moment on that!

3) I hear ya I'm definitely not planning on waiting a year to be profitable either! lol - As you can see, the campaign is profitable already, and even the run of network widgets aren't in the red... my point is just that in a year or two I should have both a) higher volume, and b) higher ROI, because by then I'll have blocked so many not-so-good widgets and will have the bids dialed in on all the good ones

3B) Actually campaigns on Revc and Clickbank products specifically have extremely good longevitiy... there's people who have been running the same weight-loss campaign on Revcontent for 5 years, just always split-testing every new weight-loss offer that comes up and going with whichever one has the highest ROI. So yeah some of the individual products don't last forever, but the vertical itself does and you can just continually swap in new offers. Another example is DIY Power. I've run DIY Power on Revcontent for pretty much 18 straight months at this point, doing at least 5 figures revenue on 4 different offers in that vertical, and trying out 8 or 9 total (basically every single one on Clickbank).

3C) I believe TheDudeAbides was talking about Taboola when he mentioned starting at several hundred a day. Taboola is way different than Revcontent though... especially if you are using SmartBid they are extremely, extremely different platforms in terms of what works and what doesn't. I don't know if TheDudeAbides starts his Revc camps at several hundred a day or not... it just depends... if I was targeting a whitelist of 100 proven widgets on Revc US, with a good offer I knew I wanted to run, I might just leave the spend wide open and let them spend as much as they can, because as you said, you want to get the data as fast as possible. With a scattershot international campaign like this though, the value is in the super-cheap clicks you can get... as a result by starting with super low bids, you are able to a) identity the good widgets cheaply, and b) block the bad widgets quickly. I wouldn't mind spend 300$ a day doing this if I could, but because I'm starting the bid so low on the run of network widgets, the campaign won't spend that much... indeed the daily spend is a good way to check if your bid is where I want... in that I want to be spending the bare minimum possible to get traffic, and continually raise the bid slowly on the run of network traffic as more widgets get blocked...

Another point to add is that I'm also sacrficing some volume/profit by not running the US separately... there are some widgets on Revc that do fantastic in the US but not great internationally... there's others that only get traffic from the US anyway so do great on both... basically there's tons of ways to do things but it's always a balance of time investment and money investment vs potential return... since Revcontent doesn't have a ton of volume to begin with, I prefer to focus on the "low-hanging fruit" as much as possible

Again much appreciate the great questions man! Feel free to add any additional stuff as I love geeking out on this stuff

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@jack_l ... that's a seriously valuable post you just made!

Thanks for taking the time to write in detail and explain - really helps. I'm sure I'll have more questions for you later

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Hey @bluewax -

I am... It's kind of stalled a bit though... appreciate you asking about it and reminding me about it will update it here in a bit

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Thanks @jack_l for the update. Much appreciated.

As you say Revcontent is pretty much saturated with affiliates ripping and running.

Also, it's probably because it is much more affiliate friendly than Outbrain and Taboola.

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@bluewax Yep... Illustrative story of the pro's/con's of each: We were running a DIY Power Clickbank VSL on Revc last year, doing maybe 400$ a day at a profit, several months on end at that volume, no higher... then we managed to get it approved by Taboola... within the first week we had it up to 10k per day, but then on day ten their moderators changed their mind and retroactively blocked all the ads they had approved and disabled the entire campaign lol... and just like that, the fun was over

But yeah, I would love to see Revcontent get more market share from the other native networks, as I really like it alot. I also need to try their 'Auto-Boost' thing. I do everything as Auto-Optimized/Smart-Bid now on Taboola and Outbrain, so its really weird to do Revcontent and still go in and manage all the widgets manually... I'm not sure how good their Auto-Boost feature is but I definitely think that's the future of native. There's no way that any affiliate can compete with good AI in that regard, and the networks that figure out how to make their SmartBid/AI-optimization work are always going to make more money (at least it seems that way to me).

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Hey @jack_l Last time I spoke to my Revcontent rep he said they're no longer do the autoboost... but you never know.

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Ahh interesting... I didn't know that!

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what is your ad's average position? perhaps you are bidding just a little to low?

By the way, have you tried collecting emails from these short type of landing pages... before the user goes to the video?

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Hey @jack01 - most of the volume comes from widgets with adjusted bids so you can't see the position on those... since it's INTL it all depends on the country too.

But yeah that's a great question re: email capture... I haven't tried it on this campaign although I did try doing that for the weight-loss niche a few months ago- both on Revcontent and Taboola- and I just couldn't get any signups to save my life unfortunately...

Going to be trying to get into it again but going to do so via one of the blurbs on a listicle- almost like my own 'Sweeps' offer like "joint our newsletter and be entered to win a ___" type of thing. Still researching the logistics on that though.

How are things going for you these days?

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Hey @jack_l do you ever run worldwide campaigns as opposed to selecting a large group of T1/T2 countries like you have in this campaign?

I have a nutra campaign running for a diabetes supplement and I’m currently only targeting US, CA, UK, AU & NZ but I’m just not sure if I should add in more countries or go completely worldwide...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Hey @bhal07 - Yeah definitely. Usually I just go through and select every country I could conceivably imagine the offer doing well with, and then if one gets lots of clicks with no sales I take it out. For instance Brazil always does bad for me so I don't use it, same with India.

I usually include the US so as a result I don't want any countries that have high volume/low quality/low price. I usually target the ones like the ones you mentioned + wealthier European ones plus wealthier East Asian ones plus maybe Costa Rica, Panama, and Mexico (they have lots of English speaking expats). Other ones are surprising too like Jamaica does well, as do lots of Island nations actually.

The thing is that on Revc the non-US volume is so limited and all the sites are so US-centric for the most part that it seems to me the majority of INTL traffic is just US expats anyway or people in those countries who are reasonably wealthy/decent English speakers.

Again, the only exceptions I've noticed are Brazil/India/Philippines. They might be fine if you just bid a penny, but then you wouldn't get any US traffic. Plus they don't have enough traffic to make it worthwhile to target them alone anyway in my opinion.

On Taboola its much different, where India gets like 40k per day and the Philippines 2.5-3k per day. So there you can really target small geo's like that much more effectively. Even ones like Bangladesh and Kenya can make you a little bit of money.

And then of course everything depends on the offer too and whether it accepts traffic from a given geo.

Clickbank allows sales from anywhere in the world, but at the same time, not many people in Bangladesh have debit cards so I wouldn't really target it with Clickbank offers even if I could. I think there's probably good affiliate networks that specifically focus on COD (cash on delivery) offers that are perfect for SE Asia though.



Edit: So yeah to answer your question, I would definitely target more broadly than that but just keep an eye out to make sure one country isn't gobbling up the traffic without conversions. Unfortunately Revc doesn't send data per geo though so you have to estimate with your tracker which is far from accurate :/

PS Be aware that if you add a geo to an existing campaign it will send all the ads back into moderation. So if you want to experiment with new geo's you may want to start a separate campaign or clone your existing one or something like that.

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Wow thanks man, incredibly helpful. I’ll definitely duplicate my current campaign and try international then, might just exclude GEOs like India or Galway keep an eye on them since my offer does require credit card payment. Cheers.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Hi guys, I am trying a similar campaign on revcontent, but maybe my approach is wrong. By force of habit I always create a separate campaign for the US and other countries that I think have big volume on the traffic source, or when a unique bid level is needed. So on this particular case I had a US campaign, one for ca/uk/au/nz/ie and another for the rest of the world.

Thing is I can’t get any volume on the US campaign or the other top tier campaign with the bid at 10cent like jack has on this follow along. I needed to get closer to 30cent before getting substantial volume on the US campaign.

So is my approach wrong here? Will I get substantial US volume at 10cent if I had just created 1 global campaign?

Is it similar for other native sources that going with a global campaign is the way to go vs individual country campaigns?

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Hey @aprospector -

Nothing wrong at all with separating out the US - indeed one could argue that's a better strategy than the one I chose for this follow-along.

You are right though, you won't be able to get any traffic in the US at $0.10...

If you target 20-30 countries including the US, you'll get a little bit of US traffic at that bid, from widgets that 'fall through the cracks' at different times of day, but if you're just bidding on the US alone, I doubt you'll get any clicks at that bid level.

In the strategy I'm using I'm bidding up 20 good widgets at the beginning, plus raising the bids on any sites that get conversions...

So for instance let's say a widget gets a conversion or two at $0.10$ from France or Jamaica or something, then I raise it's bid to $0.22$, it gets another couple conversions in Canada, then I raise it to $0.36$ and its now getting lots of US clicks too, and getting conversions there.

The idea is to block the bad widgets with cheaper clicks from low-cpc countries, and then continually increase the bid on the good widgets til where they're eventually getting lots of US traffic, which is the geo that accounts for the vast majority of Revcontent's traffic.

If I was going to do US by itself, I'd probably start at like 0.40$ or so and do the same strategy- slowly raise the bid on converting widgets, and then slowly raise the overall bid too. Indeed, if you eventually get up to the 0.90$ mark or so you'll discover absolute gems that convert at insanely high rates. Although the real gold is the lesser-known and newer widgets that convert well and are cheap too.

But yeah, the strategy I used for the follow along is sort of a different strategy then there would be on Outbrain or Taboola, because they have lots of INTL traffic, whereas Revcontent is very much US-centric.

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Also just a random note: for any folks reading this who are flirting with running on native, I would definitely recommend Outbrain and Taboola over Revcontent. I love Revcontent's platform and the company itself- it's probably my favorite out of all of them- and it's a great place to learn natives since its so usable and they are so-affiliate friendly, however when it comes to actually generating profits, Outbrain and Taboola both seem far and away superior in my opinion. Primarily due to the low volume and lack of INTL traffic on Revcontent, as well as the high level of competition on Revcontent due to the fact that it is- as I said above- so friendly to affiliates.

So yeah, definitely recommend trying Revcontent, especially if you're just starting out, but would recommend investing more time and energy learning Taboola and/or Outbrain once you're serious about generating profits.

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Thanks Jack,

I've been wondering about trying Outbrain/Taboola, I've only tried 2nd tier sources like Revcontent, content.ad and mgid so far. So as someone who has experience with 2nd tier sources and now moved to the top sources, can you give us your opinion on:

- Starting out, how difficult it is to get accepted as an affiliate marketer, what the min initial deposit is. Most importantly, what is the minimum ad budget you should expect to spend to test a campaign, especially compared to 2nd tier sources.

- It seems like Nutra dominates in the 2nd tier sources, but my impression is that its very difficult if not impossible to get nutra approved for top tier sources. So, what type of offers are affiliates running successfully on top sources, is it mainly ecommerce type offers? Any other niches good for affiliates there?

Thanks.

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Great questions @aprospector -

I don't know if its hard to get accepted as an 'affiliate marketer' per se, but if you don't present yourself professionally they probably won't bend over backwards to work with you... just make sure you're writing emails to them in a professional tone, and get a branded email like support@aprospectordigitalsolutions.com or something like that.

Re: initial deposit, Outbrain basically only takes credit cards, so there is none. Taboola mostly takes credit cards until you're spending a lot then they'll take wires. So actually its easier than Revc or MGID in this regard because you can just hook up your credit card to the account.

Minimum ad budget for testing campaigns is the same... indeed you can test a lot of stuff for under 100$ in my opinion (low payout offers I mean, especially in cheaper geo's).

You're right, no nutra will be allowed, other than some extremely, extremely whitehat type nutra offers in India or Brazil perhaps. Only Clickbank thing I see Taboola allowing is that Keto Diet one, but you can't link to the vsl or tsl, only to the 'Quiz Page' where you answer questions to create your custom diet. Then there might be 1-2 health vsl's that sometimes run on it, but I think they're private ones that only a few folks have access to.

Outbrain is a little more open to health stuff, and I'll sometimes see diabetes or tinnitus vsl's on there, but I've never personally had success getting them approved. I did run a DIY Power vsl at scale on Outbrain though last year.

Mostly what seems to be successful on Taboola and Outbrain is financial lead-gen (life insurance, car insurance, etc), dating, app installs (Slotomania, Vikings, language-learning apps, etc), search arb, content arb, and ecom gadgets. I'm even seeing some Sweeps offers lately too ("Win A Free Chick Fil A Gift Card" etc).

I'd say finding offers to run is definitely the hardest thing. I've had almost all my success on Outbrain and Taboola be in non-US geo's like the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Scandinavia, etc... but your average affiliate network isn't going to have a lot of stuff from there. With that said, as they say, "The only way to succeed in business is to be in business", so I figure the more stuff you run and experiment with the more opportunities you'll see and the more offers you'll end up with access to.

If I was going to recommend one well-known affiliate network for running on Taboola/Outbrain it would be Clickbooth - they have a great mix of ecom, financial lead-gen, dating, and app installs.

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Thanks so much @jack_l for this value-packed follow-along! I learned so much from this one thread. It should be recommended reading for all native noobs!

Thanks for all the valuable insight!


Amy

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Thanks Amy - appreciate the kind words

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This Value Bombed post cleared lot of doubts & gave ideas thank you so much. I've been doing clickbank lately on content.ad & seeing refunds rates around 20% & worst of the worst day it will be 30%, I see that you are rising CPC to 60% of your EPC and keeping 40% as profit and in that 40 you'll have refunds, chargebacks & clickbank holds/allowences still how are you able to make profit out of it.

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Hey @patrickbekhem -

Very cool - I've never tried Content.Ad - how do you like it?

As far as refunds/chargebacks, the offer I'm running in the above follow-along (Diabetes Freedom) has a long-term refund rate of 8.42% for me, and a chargeback rate of 0.86%.

In the past, I've had other successful Clickbank offers in the 15% range, but that's about the highest I've seen. And certainly there are some with much lower return %'s.

If you are seeing a 20-30% refund rate just in the short term, then its probably even higher long-term... suggesting that that might not be a good offer to promote...

Anyway though, when I bid 60% of the EPC for a given widget, I'm actually doing that AFTER accounting for returns and everything... I just calculate that expected return % into the calculation...

If its' a new offer you're trying for the first time, I'd say maybe presume you'll have a refund % of 10%.

Also another important point- if you are running Clickbank offers via paid traffic, most of the vendors will whitelist you for a higher commission if you ask... so usually once I've made 1-10 conversions I email the vendor and explain that I'd like to try to scale their offer up on paid traffic, and that it's likely to be in the red at first but that I'm willing to invest the time and money to hopefully make it work and get it into the green and scale it, and ask if they could give me a higher commission to aid in doing that. Almost every vendor I've asked has said yes. You definitely want to make sure to come across really professional though and courteous, as many of them also seem to worry about unscrupulous affiliates advertising the product in a questionable manner, etc.

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Assuming you had decided to move forward with this campaign, what would you have done differently moving forward?

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Good question - I think I would just keep doing the same thing but test more ads, more landing pages, more (other) diabetes offers...

Other than that would do all the same pretty much...

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