If you have been wondering whether you should start affiliate marketing, you have probably also asked yourself: Which are some of the best traffic sources for affiliate marketing?
What’s the difference between paid and organic, and how can you implement them in your affiliate strategy?
So, whether you are advertising your own product or another business, you need to understand how traffic sources work.
We will be answering all of these questions and more in this article.
Let’s get started!
What is a traffic source?
The traffic source is a platform that generates traffic (paid or organic); it is where you monetize traffic that comes to your page or how people get to your website.
If you are an affiliate, the traffic source is the place bringing people to your offer.
The traffic source is the origin where people first see your product, offer, or ad, and click on a display banner, search result, email, and so on. Every time users find your website, they are coming from somewhere – they saw an ad, or a referral and that is basically the traffic source.
Paid (PPC & PPV Advertising)
Paid traffic is the one that comes from paid ads. Ads usually bring traffic fast but at a higher cost.
The benefit of paid traffic is that you have a lot of flexibility in targeting your ads to the audience that has the best chances of interacting with your ad and converting.
PPC and PPV are charging methods for paid ads that define when you pay for traffic.
- PPC (pay-for-click) means you are only paying when the users click on your ad
- PPV is when the user visits your landing page for example
Organic (SEO)
Organic traffic is mostly all traffic coming from Google (or other search engine) searches.
When someone looks up your website or something related to your website (like a keyword), your website will show up in search results if you did a good job on SEO and the website ranks good or great.
While organic traffic is a very valuable resource, it usually is a lengthy process to get to a point where you can earn serious cash from your own traffic sources. You have to do some serious SEO and create valuable content. Here are some examples of organic traffic sources:
- Blogs
- Facebook groups
- Niche forums
- Google search results / organic search / SEO
The disadvantage of organic traffic sources is that they generate an unpredictable ROI. On the long run, the advantages of organic traffic sources are that they bring highly qualified prospects, are very cost-effective in the long term, and offer an important competitive advantage.
No matter the traffic source, you still need to track all the clicks and conversions to make sure you never miss a commission. Use an ad tracker like CPV Lab PRO to track paid and organic traffic sources:
- PPC & CPV
- organic traffic
- media buys
- email marketing
- mobile ads
- video ads
- link placements
- social ads
- Retargeting
- in-text ads
How to pick the best traffic source
Picking the right traffic source calls for some research and a bit of risk you have to be willing to take: you need to invest some money and time to find out if it works for you.
First, when picking a traffic source, consider the cost of the traffic source and the amount of traffic it can bring you. Your conversion rates (meaning your profit) depends on the quality of the traffic you pay for. So, you need to make sure you are making a smart move. Ideally, choose a traffic source that charges a low amount of money and generates a high conversion rate.
Second, consider choosing a traffic source that has a reasonable initial deposit. If you are just testing and trying to figure out what works best for you, it is a good idea to try and minimize your initial spendings.
Further, key aspects include rules and restrictions, the overall quality of that traffic source, market credibility, the flexibility of adjusting targeting options.
Top 10 Traffic Sources integrated with CPV Lab Pro
CPV Lab is easily integrated with ALL the biggest traffic sources out there, helping you start your campaigns faster and easier. If there is traffic source missing, let us know and we will include it with lightning speed! 🙂
Here are some of the most common types of traffic sources used by affiliate marketers:
- mobile traffic
- push notifications
- search traffic
- social traffic
- native ads
- PPV traffic
- mainstream traffic
- video ads
- adult traffic
Click here to see how to integrate all these traffic sources with CPV Lab Pro.
Let’s get to our top 10:
- Google Ads – I don’t think it needs a description 🙂 if you don’t know about Google yet, then just ask Google 🙂
- Meta (Facebook) Ads: CPV Lab comes with Facebook Ads as a predefined Traffic Source in order to make it easier to start your first Facebook Ads campaigns.
- TikTok Ads – TikTok Ads Manager supports in-feed video, TopView, Spark Ads, and Branded Hashtag Challenges. With over 1 billion monthly active users and strong engagement rates, it has become one of the fastest-growing paid traffic sources for affiliates running e-commerce, app installs, and lead gen offers.
- Newsbreak – NewsBreak is a US-focused local news and content discovery app. Advertisers can reach audiences through native and display placements within local news content, with geo-targeted options down to the city level. It’s an emerging platform worth testing for US-specific campaigns where local relevance drives conversions.
- Taboola – one of the leading native discovery platforms. It offers in-feed, video, and display ad formats, and the traffic quality is consistently high across its publisher network.
- AppLovin – AppLovin runs in-app advertising across a large network of mobile apps through its MAX mediation platform and the AppLovin Exchange. Ad formats include interstitials, rewarded video, and banners. It’s particularly strong for app install campaigns and mobile-first offers.
- PropellerAds – PropellerAds work with some of the best performing ad formats: push notifications, onclick ads, in-page push, and native interstitials.
- Advertizer – powerful on mobile traffic. The source of the traffic is mostly display, video, pop, push, RTB, native and redirect traffic. The technology and optimization algorithm behind Advertizer is powered by Monetizer, which has learned from billions of data points making it efficient when predicting what users want to see.
- ExoClick – offers 20+ different ad formats, optimized targeting and behavioral retargeting, access to big data statistics and strategic analysis tools to further improve ROI, data refresh every 60 seconds, dayparting, and 24/7 customer service.
- AdCash – a global self-serve online advertising platform for media buyers, affiliates, ad networks and publishers. They offer pop-under, native ads, push and interstitial ads.
And one bonus:
BIGO Ads – BIGO Ads is a programmatic advertising platform powered by deep learning, built on traffic from Likee (a short-form video app) and imo (a messaging app). Its audience is concentrated in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia, with growing reach in North America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. The platform supports oCPC and ROAS-based bidding with in-app bidding technology, making it a solid option for mobile-first campaigns and video-based offers. Moderation is lighter than Facebook or TikTok, which can be an advantage when testing new angles.
PRO TIPS to find the best traffic sources to increase leads & conversions
- Look for suggestions on affiliate forums.
- Talk to someone from an affiliate network. They are always in touch with what works best.
- Don’t switch often between a lot of traffic sources; you need to gather some data in order to measure a particular traffic source relevance.
- Remember to track and measure all traffic efficiently with a powerful all-in-one affiliate tracking software.
