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10 Affiliate Marketing Tips for Optimizing Campaigns Using Whitelists and Blacklists (1)

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Hi guys!

Collecting data and information about your advertising campaigns is one of the most important things to make this business a successful one. 🤑💰
And that’s what affiliate marketing whitelists and blacklists are for. 👌
Read the article to learn about 10 Affiliate Marketing Tips for Optimizing Campaigns Using Whitelists and Blacklists and become an affiliate marketing pro! 🔥

What are whitelists and blacklists in affiliate marketing? 🤔
Affiliate marketing whitelist and blacklists are essentially records of all your targeting, bidding, filtering, and creative choices… both the good and the bad ones. Keeping track of all these steps is essential for you to become a successful affiliate advertiser and never to repeat the poor decisions, while replicating and improving the ones that made you profit.

Whitelists are a collection of well-performing placements of traffic. These placements can mean:

• sources — in Zeropark, sources mean publishers who display your ads, where one source may contain several targets.
• as well as more specific targets — meaning single traffic placements, also known as target IDs or site IDs, from a given publisher.
• but also ad creatives — if there’s an especially well-performing set of ad creatives or landing pages (including both visuals and ad copy or CTAs).
• or anything else (e.g.: traffic filters, GEOs, devices, etc.) that brings exemplary performance and has proven to show a trend or a pattern that can be recreated for other campaigns.

Blacklists are the opposite of whitelists. Whenever advertisers are able to spot a traffic placement (meaning any of the examples listed above) that shows especially low performance for their offer, it’d be wise to blacklist such placement.

What’s often done when it comes to blacklisting, or simply blocking traffic, is blacklisting particular IPs or ISPs. Also, whenever there’s a signal of fraudulent traffic or bot activity, let your traffic source representatives know so that their compliance team can take care of it.

Blacklisting allows advertisers to save time, money, and effort by blocking unprofitable items and focusing only on profitable areas of their campaigns.

Where to get whitelists from? 🤔
There are many ways of obtaining whitelist data for your campaigns.

1. Advertisers can simply ask traffic source representatives for one.
2. They can also create it by themselves.
3. Do research among community groups and forums looking for industry insights on what’s currently working well.
4. Sign up to newsletters and receive such data updates directly to their inbox.
5. Read industry news and articles and stay up to date with the latest trends.

Zeropark Tip: Remember to include as much information as possible when requesting a whitelist from a traffic source representative. The more insights about your campaigns, the better tailored and suited the whitelist can be.

The usual set of necessary information would be:

• Ad format you want to run your campaign with
• Vertical of your offer
• GEOs you’re interested in
• Offer details (mobile or desktop, adult or non-adult, etc.)
• Offer restrictions (excluded GEOs, mainstream-only, etc.)

How to create your own affiliate whitelists and blacklists? 🤔
To be able to create your own whitelists or blacklists, first, you need to launch a test campaign. A test campaign should always start with as broad targeting as possible to get the most available traffic and analyze to identify what’s working well (whitelists) and what’s not (blacklists).


Optimizing affiliate campaigns using whitelists and blacklists [PRO TIPS]
Now that you know what whitelists are, where to get them from or how to look for them, but most importantly, how to create your own whitelists, it’s time to learn how to make the most of campaign optimization hacks using the whitelist data you’ve collected!

1. Traffic segmentation 🧮
Whenever advertisers launch a new campaign, it’s highly recommended to start with broad targeting first. In Zeropark, for example, that’d mean running a RON (Run of Network) campaign.

Broad campaigns allow you to buy all available traffic from all publisher sources matching the ad format, GEO-targeting, as well as other targeting and filtering choices. Once you start buying it all, you’ll be able to start testing for the best-performing placements.

If you decide to go multi-geo targeting, similar rules apply. Start broad, buy traffic from all available locations, and only then see which countries perform better than others.

Always make note of the top-performing placements from your broad campaigns, be it RON, keyword, or multi-geo one. Once the winners are selected, try narrow traffic segmentation.

For example, you can buy traffic only from a few selected sources or targets per GEO, or traffic matching only selected keywords, coming from selected sources, for selected GEOs. Remember though, that the narrower your targeting, the smaller volumes of available traffic.

2. Important metrics 📊
But how to decide what’s profitable and what’s not? Well... that’s why collecting data matters. There are no set and fixed values for what numbers signal profitability. Everything depends on the campaign’s budget, set up, campaign longevity, volumes of available traffic… and your patience.

CTR (Click Through Rate), Win Ratio and eCPA (Effective Cost-Per-Action) are the most telling and should be the basis of most of your choices.

3. Estimating budgets 💰
Make sure that you have a reasonable budget for testing, as your offer will underperform if you haven’t allocated sufficient funds for your campaign budget. That includes setting sensible bids to be competitive enough against other advertisers with similar offers.

Also, you need to maintain the cash flow to let your campaigns run consistently and without long breaks. Higher/lower minimum budgets may be recommended depending on the payout of your offer, but the recommended minimum values can be set as presented below:

• Daily budget is $100
• Source budget is $20
• Target budget is $5
• Time for testing before whitelisting placements is 4-5 days

If you don’t want to spend that much, you can definitely make a campaign work with a smaller budget. Try a low payout offer plus Tier 3 GEO and you should be able to test your campaign set up with low-budget values.

4. Smart bidding 🧠
There are various bidding strategies in affiliate marketing, often depending on the available budget. Still, these bidding tips that will surely help optimize your campaigns:

• When setting campaign bids, you should always bid slightly above the suggested amount.
• Once you’ve spent a portion of your daily budget, you should review the results and bid up on the sources that have a win ratio below 50%.
• If set bids aren’t winning impressions, it may be because they’re too low.
• Adjust the bid based on the Win Ratio and profitability.
• If one of your sources is winning 100% of traffic, try to slowly decrease the bid to see if you can keep the Win Ratio high with slightly cheaper bids.

5. Custom bidding ❕
The key point of any optimization and whitelisting traffic is investing in profitable placements while cutting or pausing the low-performance ones. Custom bidding was made just for that, allowing advertisers to set a custom bid for any target/source whose performance differs from the rest of the available traffic.

Setting a custom bid on a given source or target allows you to receive more (or less) traffic from that source/target, if we raise (or lower) the bid.

7. Traffic targeting and filtering 🎯
When setting up your campaign’s targeting and filtering options, make sure your campaign is reaching the right audience, in the right place, at the right time.

Remember that more specific targeting helps you save the costs of showing your ads to the wrong users. However, narrow targeting cuts both, how much you spend on traffic and how much traffic you receive. That’s why, sometimes it’s recommended to come back and test broad campaigns to see if any new profitable sources of traffic popped in the meantime.

8. Conversion capping ✂️
A conversion cap is a limit of allowed conversions per day for a given offer. It resets at midnight in the offer’s time zone. Once the cap is reached, an offer will not convert again, so sending traffic to this offer is pointless.

That’s why being able to set the same cap in your traffic source prevents you from spending money on traffic and/or conversions you wouldn’t get paid for. Thus saving you both budget and time.

The conversion capping feature allows Zeropark to automatically pause your campaign when a cap is reached. For that to work, you need to have conversion tracking set up correctly.

9. Rule-Based Optimization and AI-powered support 🚀
Rule-based optimization feature helps you manage your campaigns through Zeropark’s AI-powered algorithm. For the RBOs to work, you need to set the requirements that a given source or targets must fulfill within a given time frame.

Zeropark offers three basic rules based on the payout to help set these rules up. It also helps advertisers to identify the top or worst traffic placements by automatically pausing or resuming actions upon meeting the set criteria.

Please make sure that the rules do not contradict each other and are realistic. You can edit them based on the following items:

• Source or Target
• Spend or Click
• Time range
• ROI, Conversion, eCPA, CR
• Greater vs. Lower

You can set up to six active rules, however when setting them up, it’d be recommended to run with two or three rules at the beginning. This is to prevent the rules from conflicting with each other and being too strict. Some examples of recommended RBOs would be:


10. Testing, whitelisting, optimizing, scaling. 📈
Running successful affiliate marketing campaigns means continuous testing, monitoring, and optimization of campaign’s performance. It’s a never-ending process, 24/7/356, a true rollercoaster of emotions and market fluctuations. But despite its nerve-racking nature, this business keeps on drawing new advertisers, and rewarding the ones already in it. So, if there’s anything else we can possibly recommend as the last tip for future pros of campaign whitelisting and optimizing, it’s the patience to keep doing what you're doing already. Only better.

If you want to learn more about…

• What are the benefits of using whitelists and blacklists?
• Key performance metrics and how to use them.
• Traffic segmentation.
• How to use day-parting to your advantage?

Magda

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