One of the reasons why popunders are so good for learning media buying is the budget and low difficulty to learn (affiliate friendly). The second but still very important reason is you end up dealing with 1 thing less to learn and optimize. That is on the creatives side, particularly — banners.
However, this doesn’t mean popunder traffic is an easy beast to tame. There’s also a fierce competition, and the ad format itself has been evolving lately due to browser changes and new regulations.
Let’s get started with the basics. And below this page, you’ll find pro tips.
This article is written by Servando Silva, an affiliate marketing expert.
How to make money with pop up ads
Understand the user’s intent
Understanding what the user wants is the journey’s first step. Different traffic types have different user intents, and you need to treat them accordingly.
When a user clicks on an ad, they’re giving you a signal of interest triggered by your creatives. But when you’re dealing with pop traffic, the landing page might occur just by user clicking anywhere on the page (or sometimes not even clicking anything). Now that you know this, you should understand that the user’s intent is very low on pop traffic, almost nonexistent.
This means popunder traffic, in reality, is intrusive marketing in its purest form. While almost every ad interrupts the user experience at some point, popunders have the lowest user intent. And you still need to provide “relevant” visual triggers to capture the user’s attention quickly, or they’ll end up closing the window/tab before it even loads.
In conclusion, since the user intent is low, you need to understand the user intent on the page overall. What are they watching? What’s the ideal audience for this page?
Understand the types of traffic that drive millions of impressions per day, and you’ll be ahead of the game as long as your landing pages load fast.
This brings us to the second point.
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Landing page loading speed
As we mentioned before, the user intent on pop under traffic is extremely low, and people aren’t clicking any banners, notifications, or native ads to read your content.
This means people are not willing to wait for your landing page to load, and they’ll close it as fast as they can, depending on which browser they’re using.
Your landing page needs to be fast, simple, and straight to the point. It also needs to grab the user’s attention quickly. Ideally, you want your landing page on pop traffic to load under 1 second. Don’t give them a chance to close it before it loads or you’ll be throwing money away.
SERVANDO SILVA
Many new affiliates start with slow landing pages made on WordPress with a 2MB size and a 3-4 seconds load time in a shared host account. Although it’s not any near to full effectiveness, that could work on clicked traffic from Facebook, but on pop traffic, you want to keep your landing page under 200 KB and use CDN or VPS so that it would load it less than in 1 second.
I recommend Vultr as a hosting service, though I’m aware that many use Linode or DigitalOcean to broaden GEO coverage. As for CDN, you can use Cloudflare for free or some very inexpensive alternatives such as KeyCDN and BunnyCDN. The faster, the better; you’ll see a CTR increase if you have quick landing pages.
K.I.S.S. or keep it stupid simple
Keep it stupid simple. This is a concept I need to remind myself many times because when you run popunders, you’re normally limited to simple, low to medium payout offers. Email submits, app installs, extension downloads, mobile content, etc.
All those actions require simple steps to be achieved, and the user doesn’t have to think about it much. They’re not taking out their credit card to make a $99 purchase. They might need to do it later, but for now, your most important objective is to get leads for as cheap as possible while following the rules and restrictions.
In other words, your landing page needs to be creative and grab attention quickly, but it also needs to be easy to understand and create urgency with simple actions.
Servando Silva
For mobile traffic, usually, a couple of sentences, an image, and a call to action are enough. Most of the time adding a 3-4 questions survey helps as well but don’t overdo it. You don’t need a 4,000 words advertorial for pop traffic if you’re promoting an offer to win an iPhone or a discount.
PRO tips to increase your chances with pop ads
1.Use dynamic tokens
Passing dynamic tokens to a landing page is easy if you’re using a tracker such as Voluum, Bemob, Binom, or any other. You just need to check out the tracker guides and tutorials (example) and you’ll be implementing dynamic tokens in no time. This could help you increase your conversion rate just by mentioning 1 or 2 things about the user. Common tokens to use are:
- City
- Browser
- Device (if it’s mobile traffic)
- OS
- Etc.
Be creative and use tokens wisely. Mentioning the date or month along with holidays also increases the audience engagement and trustworthiness.
2. Add scripts
While this might be something for advanced or tech-savvy users, adding scripts to your landing page will help you achieve a few things including:
- Increasing your CTR;
- Keeping people inside the funnel;
- Increasing your CR;
- Measuring and evaluating additional data such as bot traffic, etc.
3. Add social proof or options to choose
Adding social proof is a great way to increase your CTR. Facebook comments (check if they’re allowed) add credibility. If you can’t add social proof, at least add options or surveys so people can feel like they’re choosing and customizing their experience.
4. Start with whitelists
Another great tip if you’re running any type of traffic is to get started with a whitelist of websites that are performing better than average. This helps to reduce the initial volume and number of sites that won’t match your vertical and in some cases, they can be profitable right from the start.
At RichAds ad network to get a whitelist you need to speak to your manager and let them know more info about the campaign you want to test. Normally, they will ask you for the GEO, device, and vertical.
5. Split-test multiple landing pages and similar offers
Whenever you’re launching a campaign, try to split test at least 2 offers and 2 landing pages. In this case you’ll be comparing one against another, so you will get to figure out the best performing one.
After optimizing your campaign, even if you’re profitable already, don’t forget to throw a few tests every week with a lower traffic percentage just to see if your campaign could do better.
Test similar offers from the same network, similar offers from different networks, etc. Sometimes lower payouts work better than higher payouts.
6. Block suspicious traffic
If your tracker has a tool to analyze your traffic quality or identify some suspicious patterns, use it!
Some trackers can track invisible clicks, browsers without JS enabled, common bot IPs, uncommon OSes, screen orientation, etc.
Needless to say, this might end up saving you hundreds or thousands of dollars in the long run.
7. Separate mobile from desktop traffic
This is a basic tip, yet most people new in this industry don’t understand why.
Separating mobile from desktop traffic or just creating different campaigns for each GEO you’re testing is always going to be better than putting them all in a single campaign.
The bids per device and country are always different, so you’ll end up getting traffic from the cheaper countries because of your average bid. Plus, separating everything makes optimization easier later as you need to keep checking less variables in your tracker.
8. Spy and understand what works
There’s no shame about doing some market research and trying to understand what’s working now. For pop traffic, Adplexity is the best tool you can use to spy on the market and grab some ideas for landing pages and verticals.
Don’t expect to copy a campaign from Adplexity and be profitable right off the bat, but at least you’ll start in a better position now that you’re running something that’s proven to work.
How to spy Ads like a PRO? AdPlexity shares insights.
9. Focus on mid to high traffic volume GEOs if you want to scale up
Learning paid traffic in small GEOs with low competition is a great way to make your first earnings, but you won’t get that far with $10 per day campaigns unless you have dozens of them working every day.
Instead, once you’ve learned the ropes, move to bigger GEOs that will allow you to spend 3-4 figures per day while focusing on just 1 or 2 verticals. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Tier 1 or Tier 3 region, they can all work, and it’s easier to optimize when you have enough volume to sustain your activity.
At some point, you’ve got to learn how to handle high competition GEOs step-by-step!
10. Test other similar ad formats
These tips focus on popunder traffic, but many can be applied to other ad formats. If you find yourself with a bunch of profitable popunder campaigns, the best you can do besides scaling to other traffic sources or geos is to test them with different ad formats.
Web push notifications and iOS in-page push traffic have a similar quality, so if you feel like you could learn something new, you can quickly move there and capitalize on your current funnels. Please don’t do it too fast, though, one step at a time. You don’t want to lose all your profits testing in other sources and lose focus.
11. Start in Performance mode
Performance mode is an optimization flow, that you start your ad campaign in, and yes, optimization matters even before you’ve launched. But since optimizing traffic sources and parameters is a really dull process if conducted manually, RichAds introduced this mode.
It helps you get fresh whitelists, the best converting traffic sources for your ad campaign, weekly and keeps your CR high as the longer you promote — the more sources get sorted. Performance mode is highly recommended for beginners and those who want to get rid of long optimization process and get a choice on hands-free optimization.
You can learn how to launch a successful popunder ad campaign in the detailed guide, step-by-step!
Conclusions
I hope these tips will help you be a better pop traffic marketeer. If you’re interested in testing pop traffic check out RichAds and see if there’s a bonus available to get started.
If you liked my content, you can find more information on my blog at servandosilva.com and inside my favorite forum, afflift.com.
Start earning on pop ads with RichAds traffic
What is RichAds?
🔝 Push and pop ads,
🔼 Direct click traffic,
🔝 CPM for domain ads starts from $1.5,
⏫ CPC for push ads starts from $0.005,
🔼 CPM for pops — from $0.5 in Tier 3, $1 in Tier 1,
⏫ large volumes of available traffic in more than 200 GEOs.
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