Welcome to another interview in our series with Champions of Performance Marketing! I had the pleasure of interviewing Maria Cherniukh, the Head of Advertising at ADxAD, an ad network specializing in banner, pop-under, and push ads.
In our conversation, Maria shared her journey into affiliate marketing, discussed the challenges she faces in her role, and offered valuable insights into current industry trends, including the impact of AI and the importance of optimization techniques.
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Q: Can you tell me how your journey started in affiliate marketing?
Maria: Yes, it started six years ago. I had just graduated and returned from China, where I studied. I was curious about working with the Asian market in digital marketing. That’s how I got hired as an affiliate manager at a performance marketing agency—a CPA network. I worked a lot with performance and publishers, which is another side from what I’m doing now. That’s how it all started.
Q: Since when have you been with ADxAD? Can you tell me about your current role at ADxAD?
Maria: It’s been a bit more than five years. I’ve been in ADxAD since March 2019. I’m the Head of Advertising and Head of Sales. My department works directly with advertisers. We optimize their campaigns and support them every day. It’s a very important part of the company.
The biggest challenge in this sphere, in general, is that it’s a very competitive market. You need to be unique and have something special that sets you apart from other networks—whether it’s unique traffic, extra quality, platform features, or verticals that no one is working with yet. Keeping traffic high-quality and relevant to all the products we’re working with is essential.
Q: Can you tell me more about ADxAD and what kind of traffic you offer?
Maria: ADxAD is a DSP platform, so we are at the beginning of the traffic funnel. We sell clicks and traffic on CPM and CPC models—impressions and clicks.
We have an in-house platform with an auction system. It’s similar to Google but smaller. You can create a campaign, set the targeting you need, add your link, set everything up, and bid. We work with various formats, like banners, pop-unders, and push notifications, with both mainstream and adult traffic.
In the mainstream, we work with gambling, different kinds of software, e-commerce, betting, and insurance—those are the main verticals. We also work with various adult verticals, including mainstream and adult dating.
Q: You work a lot with advertisers because that’s your main job. How do you explain to them the CPM and CPC models if they are used for CPA? Is it hard to switch them over?
Maria: ADxAD usually works with people familiar with these models—media buying teams of a particular product or single media buyers.
However, I often face this issue when a team only works on a CPA basis. I usually try to reach out to the media buying team because 90% of products and ad networks have a media buying team and are our clients.
Q: What do you say to them when you want to convince them?
Maria: Nothing special. I just describe our traffic. It’s always a question of demand and supply. If I know that our supply can be useful to their demand, and if they work with particular verticals we are working with, I tell them about the experience of other advertisers. I explain what we have, what we can offer, at what price, and what solutions we provide. That’s how we get them interested.
Q: They’re interested in the price. Do you have good traffic for a good price, and that’s a convincing point for them?
Maria: Yes, of course. I usually explain that traffic prices differ depending on ad formats and the GEO—across Tier 1 like the United States, English-speaking countries, and Europe, traffic is more expensive than, let’s say, Asia or India.
I tell them we have different kinds of traffic—extra quality traffic, which is very expensive and unsuitable for every offer because some offers have small payouts. Premium, extra-premium traffic is more suitable for direct products. Then there’s regular traffic, which is cheaper but still good because it can be optimized according to our targeting and particular spots. We have regular, medium-quality traffic that we constantly optimize and extra high-quality traffic, which is expensive but worth it for particular products.
Yes, there’s regular traffic from websites—the stream of traffic. Then, there’s member area traffic or clicks from applications.
It means that users who see your ad are already motivated because they need to sign up at the source or download an application where they can see your ads. This traffic is highly convertible and more expensive than regular traffic.
Q: Can you tell me some optimization techniques you recommend media buyers use to optimize their campaigns? Our listeners will be very interested in this.
Maria: Of course. The main thing for media buyers is to have good landing pages and good creatives. It should be native and suitable for the product. If we work with banners, I always say try not to use static banners; use more GIFs or small MP4 videos inside banners because they perform much better than regular static banners. Push notifications should be very native and visible, and they should have a phrase that urges users to click. The main point of a creative is to be clicked on.
Landing pages—some products require pre-landing pages because you cannot lead users directly to the main page sometimes. It needs to have more of an entertainment process. The best landing pages are entertaining with a user flow, where the user can click—it can be a small game or a questionnaire, always with pictures.
My recommendation for media buyers starting their journey is to work on landing pages, use parsers, and always look around at what others do. Check the traffic, see what kinds of creatives do better and what landing pages perform best, and be attentive to that to build your strategy.
No, I don’t mean using spy tools. I mean checking—there are plenty of tools like SimilarWeb or various others where you can see ads and what your competitors do. It’s always important in any business to do competitor analysis, keep in the flow, and know that you are competitive.
The same thing concerns media buyers. You have to check what is going on in the market and what kind of landing pages are working best on what product—let’s say, gambling, adult, and so on.
Q: How important is tracking for you as an ad network and for your media buyers? How do you see that?
Maria: Well, tracking is extremely important, and we urge all of our clients to set a postback on our platform so we can track the performance. This way, ADxAD can help them optimize better on every source and sub-source and use deeper targeting.
Tracking is extremely important, and it’s very important to set it right because every small mistake can lead to huge discrepancies, or the tracker may just not show the performance that was there.
It’s extremely important for the tracker to be simple and user-friendly and to be able to integrate with all possible platforms.
If you’re exploring traffic sources, ADXAD offers an exclusive promotion in partnership with CPV Lab: a 5% bonus on the first deposit when you use the promo code CPV24. You can find this and other promotions on the CPV Lab Partners Page. Make sure to leverage these deals and ensure every ad dollar counts!
Here is a detailed explanation of how you can integrate your CPV account with your ADXAD network
Q: How do you ensure the integrity of the traffic? Bot traffic is a problem for media buyers; we know that. How do you ensure that integrity with your campaigns at ADxAD?
Maria: Well, everybody has problems with bot traffic, but we have our checker and anti-fraud system, which cleans it constantly.
ADxAD analyzes everything that is going on our platform—all the products—and we check the productivity of particular targetings and sources on particular offers. We constantly analyze that and recommend the best options for performance at the highest level.
Yes, we have worldwide traffic for all the GEOs possible.
Q: Where do you see the trends in affiliate marketing?
Maria: I’d say that gambling is always a trend and always has been. I’d also say that AI is the trend for now in both mainstream and adult, specifically in adults. This is the future and the trend for sure.
Q: Have you adopted AI at ADxAD?
Maria: We work with AI products. For now, ADxAD has advertisers with AI games and AI adult products. That’s why I say this is definitely the trend. We use AI a lot in our work every day in routine tasks, and we are currently in the process of implementing it into our platform to make it as simple as possible.
AI can actually help pick the targetings, set the campaigns, create additional analytics, and set the settings for advertisers so they don’t have to do it themselves—to not do them manually, I mean, to automate some things.
Like the bid—to pick the smart bid that is currently competitive or the top bid or middle bid, or suggest the targeting and other settings.
Q: How do you stay up to date with what’s happening in this industry?
Maria: Well, it’s moving forward. As I said, AI is the most significant trend right now. Summer is usually a little bit of a dead period for gambling, so we await growth in autumn. I’d say that some GEOs are developing.
For example, a couple of years ago, African GEOs were not that popular in affiliate marketing, and now I can say that they are for sure—specifically in gambling.
Q: Do you attend conferences?
Maria: Yes, there will be lots of shows in autumn. We are attending the TES conference in Prague in September—this is our favorite one. We will probably also participate in Affiliate World and the i-Con conference.
Q: Is there a problem you see in the affiliate industry that you think you would like to have solved? Something that’s happening in the affiliate marketing space and it’s bothering you?
Maria: Traffic is always an issue for everyone—for networks and advertisers—because these bot farms are constantly developing new ways to hide bot traffic. There are patterns, of course, but they are growing, and we need to continually develop our anti-fraud solution.
So, this is the biggest problem in affiliate marketing. I’d say it always has been bot traffic.
For media buyers and people who work with performance, picking the right slice is always the biggest challenge. Sometimes, it’s not a matter of bot traffic, but your product may just not suit the particular targeting you pick.
So you need to be up to date. Sometimes, it’s even a question of luck—you may find that slice or not, and you need to do additional analytics.
That is always the challenge: to pick your product, your GEO, your targetings, your source of traffic, your particular source of traffic and spots, particular creatives, and ad formats that perform the best for you.
You have to change it every—well, in an ideal world, it would be every week, but at least every two weeks. And landing pages every month.
Always change the creatives because we often face this problem when traffic starts performing really well and then it drops. Advertisers ask us what’s happening, and we do the analytics.
We see that they stay competitive, and the traffic source is the same, but the creatives need to be changed. That is how we see AI can help us, and we want to implement it into our platform in the future to make it faster.
Q: When you see that case with your customers, you just recommend that they change their creatives, and then they see another spike in traffic for another two weeks?
Maria: Yes, we recommend constantly changing them; most advertisers know that. They just change it occasionally; they have a bank of creatives, and we always make recommendations regarding creatives that perform better.
Q: Do you have any advice for somebody starting now in affiliate marketing? You mentioned something earlier, but if you have something to add.
Maria: Yes, as I said, my advice is to constantly analyze the market, analyze the competitors, be in the flow, be up to date, check the trends, and check the slices. As I said, finding your niche and your slice is the biggest challenge.
You must dig a lot and see the sources, check other ads, check the traffic, and test a lot. It requires lots of testing and traffic to understand which one is yours finally.
Q: Where to check all this? You said SimilarWeb—do you have other recommendations where to do the digging?
Maria: Yes, you can go to the sources, to the websites—like the most popular websites. For adult, everybody knows which websites I’m talking about.
If we talk about gambling, there are review websites. It’s simple, actually, just doing it in Google. You need to go to—or check it in SimilarWeb—the most popular websites for particular, let’s say, keywords or specific GEOs. You go to the websites and see what’s going on there, what ads are placed, where, and how much traffic there is.
You can click and make the user journey because you should always see the market not only from your point of view but also from the point of view of the user and from the point of view of supply and demand from the whole funnel.
Conclusion
It was a pleasure speaking with Maria and gaining her valuable insights into the world of affiliate marketing. From discussing the importance of unique traffic offerings to the challenges of combating bot traffic, Maria provided a comprehensive look at the current state of the industry. Her emphasis on the rising trends of AI and its applications in advertising platforms highlights where the future of affiliate marketing is headed.
For anyone starting in affiliate marketing, Maria’s advice to constantly analyze the market, stay up-to-date with trends, and continually test and optimize campaigns is invaluable. The importance of creativity, adaptability, and thorough market research cannot be overstated in this competitive field.
If you’d like to learn more about ADxAD, visit their platform at adxad.com. You can also connect with Maria on LinkedIn or Telegram to discuss further.
To watch the full interview, check out our YouTube channel or listen to it on Spotify. Don’t miss out on Maria’s in-depth insights and additional tips that are not covered in this summary.
Stay tuned for more insightful conversations on Champions of Performance Marketing! Until next time, keep innovating and optimizing your strategies to stay ahead in the game.
And here is the entire interview on Youtube, if you want to listen to it: