In the new episode of the Champions of Performance Marketing, I sat down with Pierre Bertin, Head of Business Development at RollerAds, to uncover the strategies behind successful push notification campaigns and alternative traffic sources.
What started as a conversation about budgets and optimization quickly revealed the deeper secrets of matching audiences with offers, the power of custom bidding, and why most affiliates are leaving money on the table.
In this exclusive interview, Pierre shares his journey from Google’s Dublin office to leading business development at one of the fastest-growing ad networks, revealing insider tips that could transform your media buying approach.
Whether you’re new to push traffic or looking to scale your existing campaigns, Pierre’s insights will challenge how you think about traffic testing, budget allocation, and long-term relationship building in affiliate marketing.
Check the episode on Spotify here:
Or you can watch it on YouTube here!
Q: How did you start in affiliate marketing?
Pierre Bertin: I started in the online advertising industry back in 2012-2013, more than 10 years ago. My first experience was at Google in their Dublin office, where I was working for the French market. What brought me to the affiliate marketing world after that was a startup, a small company that needed people with experience in online advertising—people who understood traffic sources, CPC, and CPM, to help them grow their market. That’s how I joined affiliate marketing in 2017.
I then had experiences at TikTok and Pinterest, and then came back to affiliate marketing because I missed it so much. It’s unique, fun, and great.
I joined RollerAds about two and a half years ago, and I’m now the Head of Business Development for RollerAds.
Q: What do you do at RollerAds and what does it involve?
Pierre Bertin: I manage a team of business development managers. Our role is to really grow the acquisition engine of RollerAds.
We are in charge of getting in touch with affiliates, direct advertisers, agencies, and publishers. My Team tries to match them together through the RollerAds platform. We are on the front line of the RollerAds team.
Q: One of the biggest challenges affiliates face is matching offers with the right traffic. What’s your advice on that approach?
Pierre Bertin: Absolutely, and it’s even more important for ad networks like RollerAds. We have a lot of different sources – different websites with different themes for each website.
Some audiences are better for certain types of offers than others. It’s completely different from Pinterest and TikTok, which are just one app with one audience.
It’s much easier in some ways to sell Pinterest or TikTok traffic than RollerAds traffic because we have many more interests that could benefit affiliates.
The role of our account managers is to help affiliates match their offers with the right audience. We do that with the presets that we have in our platform.
A preset is a pool of publishers and, therefore, a certain audience that we know already engages with a certain theme or vertical.
For example, we have websites like Softonic working with us, monetizing their audience on push.
Those websites would be added to technology presets. So if affiliates are promoting extension products, apps, software like antiviruses or VPNs, these audiences in that preset would be highly relevant for their offers.
We have presets for many different verticals – iGaming, casino, gambling, software, e-commerce, nutra, and so on.
It’s very important for affiliates to get in touch with account managers, even though they can use presets themselves on the platform, because we have wider experience and knowledge of our audience and can help affiliates in that way.
Q: What ad formats do you promote?
Pierre Bertin: We started with push notifications back in 2019. We have since developed other formats.
We now have pop traffic, direct click (which is pop-under embedded in a particular button like an exit or play button), and we also have a native format that we are currently building our own supply for.
That should be available for affiliates and advertisers pretty soon, within the following weeks. We’re an IT company, so all our developers are focusing on this particular product at the moment.
We are deploying it within our publishers who have websites, trying to gather a strong supply so that when advertisers, affiliates, and agencies start buying this ad format, they will see performance right away.
Q: What about verticals – any vertical or specific ones?
Pierre Bertin: Pretty much all verticals except adult.
The top three strongest verticals are probably software (any product related to antiviruses, VPNs, extensions), iGaming (whether casino or betting), and e-commerce or sweepstakes.
We see betting offers performing better in the LATAM region and casino in Southeast Asia – Philippines, Malaysia. E-commerce and sweepstakes verticals are performing very well worldwide.
Q: What’s the best way for media buyers to test new traffic sources to have a good media mix?
Pierre Bertin: Media buyers need to test. We have a media buying team as part of a separate business in our company.
The secret is to really diversify traffic sources. What works one day may not work the next day. Performance can go up and down due to seasonality or because publishers stop monetizing their audience on the platform.
Really diversify your portfolio of sources.
And whenever you do a test, go frankly with it.
Don’t put just $50 or the minimum deposit required. Set a proper strategy, have a proper budget, listen to the account manager working with you, implement tracking that is crucial for optimization, and go for it frankly. If you go with $50 to test traffic, the likelihood for affiliates to get a conversion will be very small.
Most ad networks have huge pools of audience – anywhere from half a billion to almost two billion people, depending on who you’re talking to. With $50, you’re targeting a tiny portion of that audience.
Using $50 testing budget, it’s like fishing in the sea with a small fishing rope trying to get a whale. It’s never going to work. You might be lucky and get a conversion, but set a proper budget, listen to your account manager’s recommendations, and give it time. In the end, it will pay off.
Q: The account manager is trained to help you out, right?
Pierre Bertin: Of course. At RollerAds, our goal is to establish long-lasting relationships. We’re not looking for one-shot deals – just grabbing money from someone and then saying goodbye regardless of whether it works. That’s not our mentality or what we want to do. We really want to work on long-lasting relationships with all advertisers we start working with. Some have been with us from day one since we started in 2019 and are still there, still happy.
We constantly try to bring new websites and audiences for adverisers to make sure their performance remains consistent.
Q: What are push notifications and what offers work best with them?
Pierre Bertin: A push notification is like a message that is delivered from your browser when you sign up on a particular website.
From a publisher’s perspective, when they want to start collecting their audience on push notifications, they implement a small tag on the website. It’s very easy and simple – takes 30 seconds.
It’s a piece of JavaScript code you put in the body under the body tag, and you have a service worker file in the root folder of your website.
These two generate a small pop-up you see generally on websites – on desktop, on the top-left corner – that says “Do you want to receive notifications?” If you click yes, you automatically become part of that website’s audience, and this audience the publisher can monetize with us or anybody else. Once we monetize this, we can send ads to this person regardless of whether the visitor is on the website or not.
The notification contains a title, small description, pictures, and usually at least two buttons to bring people to the target URL – whether it’s an offer, pre-lander, or other destination depending on your product and targeting strategy.
Q: What niches work best with push notifications?
Pierre Bertin: Everything. Everything works with push notifications.
Push notifications are the format with the highest CTR – we’re close to 4%. With native you’re usually at 1% and even less with display or other formats. Emails are about 2-2.5%, but push notifications are really the most engaging format you can find on the market.
Everything works. You just have to make sure you match the audience with your product.
There’s no point sending an antivirus offer to everyone because not everyone needs one – they may already have one.
So it’s a matter of matching audience with offer. But ultimately, everything works. We have advertisers very happy in the iGaming industry, casinos, and betting companies – big betting companies especially in Brazil, LATAM, and the UK.
We have software companies and antiviruses performing well. E-commerce companies like Lazada, Shopee in Southeast Asia, and Tiki in Vietnam perform very well. Sweepstakes work worldwide.
Finance in the US also works, though we have more publishers than offers in finance. The offers would be more crypto and financial products performing better than mortgages or credit card loans. But we do have the audience for it. Everything works on push.
Q: What key elements should affiliates focus on to increase click-through rate or conversion rate for push ads?
Pierre Bertin: One funny thing – if you want to improve your CTR, put emojis in your push notifications. It increases engagement rate by 20%. It’s simple, but it makes the push so much more lively and fun, and it performs really well.
Creativity is also super important. If you have a colorful, engaging picture, it will perform better than a black and white logo or no pictures at all. All these little things improve your CTR. Do A/B testing as well. We recommend uploading up to 10 different creatives per campaign. Our system automatically rotates them so you can see which has the highest CTR. Then you can pause non-performing ones and push the ones performing really well.
When it comes to conversion rate, that’s about optimization and retargeting you can implement on your side.
We assist with optimization based on the number of leads you receive on particular zone IDs.
We help exclude zones not performing well and push traffic from zones delivering leads and registrations.
You can do that by increasing bids, adding multiple campaigns and creatives, and making sure you can retarget those people after that to convert leads into paid users or subscribers, depending on your products.
That’s usually how it works with lead generation, gambling, and all those products we have.
Q: For somebody new to push traffic, what’s a realistic budget for starting testing?
Pierre Bertin: It really depends on the GEO first of all.
Obviously, you have countries and audiences that are wider than others. If you target the US, we would recommend starting with a $200 daily budget for at least 10 days to make sure you gather enough data and can optimize accordingly.
So to start with, for the US, a budget of $2,000 should provide enough data to optimize, push, and get results. It would be more or less the same for larger countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia.
If you target smaller countries like in Europe – France, UK, Germany – or Brazil, where the audience is a little smaller, you can go from $100 to $150 per day. That should give you enough data to collect and optimize after that.
Q: What common mistakes do you see advertisers making on push campaigns, and how can they avoid those mistakes?
Pierre Bertin: The first one is not listening to your account manager.
Most people believe account managers just sell and try to grab money from their budget, but that’s really not like that.
If you come to us with a product and we know it’s not going to work because we tested it before, we’re going to tell you no right away. We don’t want to leave affiliates or direct advertisers, agencies hanging – that’s not the way we work.
So first off, listen to your account manager when he gives you recommendations.
Secondly, don’t expect results with $50 or a very tiny budget.
A lot of people say they’re going to test traffic and put $50, then see what happens. What are you going to see? If you want to target Monaco for $50, fine – you have maybe 20,000 people in Monaco. But if you target France, the UK, the US, India with $50, no. We’re back to what I was saying earlier – it’s like trying to find a whale in the ocean with a fishing rope. It’s not going to work. It’s too small.
Commit properly, do a proper test. If you’re not ready, that’s fine. Just try to gather whatever you need and come back when you’re ready so we can help you be successful.
These are the two common mistakes we see – lack of communication, I would say.
If the affiliate needs some convincing because they are worried that they would put $1,000 and wouldn’t get anything, I can always ask for some case studies, for data that we would have from other affiliates that are performing, that are doing the same thing and that we know is working. We can give that to you. We can explain what’s working and what’s not.
We’re very transparent. We’re very honest. We only want the best for every single affiliate or direct advertiser that is willing to work with us.
Q: Would you be able to recommend what type of offers they should get or some networks they should work with?
Pierre Bertin: Sure, absolutely. We’ll tell you where to get them as well. We have another brand – RollerAds has a brand called CPA Roll, which lists offers that we have. An affiliate can create an account on CPA Roll, take an offer that we know is working well, and then buy traffic from RollerAds and other traffic sources as well.
Q: What’s one often overlooked optimization tip for push campaigns that can make a big difference for a campaign success?
Pierre Bertin: Custom bidding is not done enough, probably because it’s time-consuming and yes, it takes time to actually optimize in that way. But it’s super important.
When you get traffic and identify zones that are delivering results or not delivering results, it’s super important to use custom bidding.
If a zone is delivering a lot of registrations and you’re particularly happy and want more traffic coming from this zone, don’t be shy to increase the bid for this particular zone. Leave your general bid for all the other zones, that’s fine, but increase the bid for this one.
The other way around – if you see a zone that delivers registrations but the leads from the registrations do not convert into paid users, you can lower the bid instead of completely excluding these zones. Maybe for the time being, while you investigate why it’s not converting – is there a retargeting mechanism in place to convince these people, to retarget this audience and turn them into users?
Maybe try to lower the rate so you don’t completely exclude traffic from this zone. Let it run for a few days. Maybe the lifecycle of user acquisition is a little longer for this particular product. We never know.
Lower the bid in that case, so you still have some traffic coming until you actually have enough data to say this zone is not working, and then you exclude completely. This is probably one of the most overlooked optimizations. Usually, people are simply excluding or adding zones, and that’s pretty much it. But they are not using that leverage with bids to make sure they still have continuous traffic that delivers good performance for campaigns.
A lot of affiliates are very impatient, and I can understand that. Our industry is very performance-driven. When we spend one euro, we want to see a return on investment of two euros. That’s normal – everybody wants that. I want that as well. But sometimes you have to be patient, let the system do the work for you, let the account manager help you out, and really take your time analyzing the data. Make informed decisions based on the data you have, not only on short-term results that you got.
Have questions about implementing these strategies? Connect with Pierre directly on
- Telegram: Pierre Bertin
- LinkedIn: Pierre Bertin
Key Takeaways: Building Success with Push Traffic
Pierre Bertin’s journey from Google to RollerAds reveals the evolution of a performance marketing professional. Pierre understands that success in alternative traffic sources isn’t just about finding the right audience, it’s about building lasting relationships, proper testing methodologies, and strategic optimization.
The most valuable insights are about:
- commit to proper testing budgets,
- leverage tracking and custom bidding for optimization,
- trust your account manager’s expertise.
Pierre’s emphasis on patience and data-driven decisions challenges the instant-gratification mindset common in performance marketing.
His point about tracking being crucial for campaign optimization, is something that we support not only because we manage CPV Lab ad tracker, but we saw how CPV Lab can improve the campaign results.
And by having a direct integration with RollerAds, CPV Lab ad tracker can send conversions easily via Postback URL (Server to Server) and improve campaign performance.
Whether you’re exploring push notifications for the first time or looking to scale existing campaigns, check what Pierre has to say!
Ready to dive deeper into Pierre’s advanced strategies?
Watch the complete interview here to get the full conversation, including detailed examples of successful campaign structures and Pierre’s predictions for the future of push traffic.
Don’t miss Part 2 of this exclusive interview where Pierre reveals his most successful campaign case studies and shares advanced tactics for scaling push traffic beyond six figures.
Subscribe to Champions of Performance Marketing and stay tuned for insights that could reshape your approach to alternative traffic sources.
Until then, read or listen the other great interviews we have listed so far as part of the Champions of Performance Marketing series!
Author: Julia Draghici
Julia is the CEO of CPV Lab and CPV One ad trackers. She has 15+ years experience in the software industry, from development to management. For more than 6 years she is helping marketers get the best out of their marketing campaigns by using a performant ad tracker. Passionate about entrepreneurship, business and performance marketing, Julia loves helping people!
