Tech tips

Many affiliates from top tier countries like the US run these offers and make lots of cash.

Glamor of the tech industry - It's common to retire in the Bahamas with millions in your bank

This guide is for newbies who are not able to successfully run these kinds of campaigns on the ad network. It assumes that you already have tech call flow - if not then ask affiliate networks or advertisers.

Tech is a favorite vertical, it doesn't require any specific targeting and angles are easy as you only have to make people click on your ads.

It requires investment into the right set of tools to generate thousands of calls.

Lots of people want to generate tech calls but they are not able to keep campaigns in ad network for long and are easily getting banned.

Here are some ways to improve your survival rate:

  1. Get the recommended hosting setup, ditch GoDaddy or HostWinds [very popular among] tech crowd. It gets you instantly profiled as tech support scammer.

Here is the setup guide: https://docs.fraudfilter.io/kb/recommended-hosting-setup/

  1. Do not use dumb safe pages like tube site, travel blog or games with no aggressive funnel - 90% tech people use this and get instantly banned since ad networks are now aware of all these tricks.

You need to learn what real advertisers do on those networks.

If you are running tech on Native ad networks - Get AdPlexity Native [a spy tool]. It will help you figure out what real advertisers run on that specific platform.

If you are running pop ups - Get AdPlexity Mobile.

Running search traffic?  Try Spyfu.

Adult? Get AdPlexity Adult.

Display ad network like Google Display Network and others? Use Adbeat or WhatRunsWhere.

The ad network can quickly figure out the con if they don't believe that you can actually make money from the safe page which you are using.

Now, you are equipped with pro-level safe landing pages.

Make your ads, landing pages, tracking URLs all appear similar to real advertisers

  1. Sign up from tier 1 country - You should know how many tech call companies are in your country from where you sign up from. If you sign up from a clean GEO, you'll not be flagged.
  1. Change domains before they are flagged. Ad networks use automated scanners, you've to also employ such technique and swap the domain on alert. This tool will help you with that: https://www.trafficprotector.com/
  1. Buy traffic in bulk - The common trend that I've observed is that tech people specifically target selected OS or Browser.

The solution is to buy all traffic and optimize it all.

Use tracker like Voluum.com and filter the OS or Browser which doesn't convert for you and send it to traffic monetization platforms like YTZ.comor Monetizer.com

Control traffic using bids, not ad network targeting options.

For example, AdWords or Google Display Network doesn't allow you to block traffic from tablets. If traffic from tablets doesn't convert for you then you should send it to monetization platforms like YTZ.com or Monetizer.com. This will help you make more money from your traffic.

  1. Monetize your safe page aggressively, you must still be compliant with the ad network policies - You'll also make money on the traffic which is being sent to your safe pages.

ProTip: Try Facebook Ads (Yes Facebook!) and target older demography or less tech savvy people using various interest and other targeting options - Run clickbait ads. You can get some ideas from Native Ad Spy tools like AdPlexity Native. The cost of call generation is ultra low and account survives really very long.

Mistakes we've seen:

  1. Not using a believable safe page. Some people using "Google.com" or "Youtube.com" as a safe page on pop networks or some other popular website.

    2. Pop networks are not going to believe you.

You must use something believable if you can't find anything then just check spy tools for some inspiration. Act like their target customer.

Use spy tools and figure out what works on a particular source!

If you are running aggressively on pop networks, please use: https://adplexity.com/auth/register?code=EARLYBIRD to find safe pages.

The safe page which works on pop might not work for AdWords or Facebook, so please exercise some caution and use spy tools!

  1. Using hosting providers which are popular among the affiliate crowd, for example, Beyond Host [from STM], HostWinds [from BHW], GoDaddy [mostly used by tech support guys] etc...

Please use our recommended setup: https://docs.fraudfilter.io/kb/recommended-hosting-setup/

Please don't sign up for any hosting provider which is used by affiliates like Beyond Hosting, Godaddy, HostWinds etc...

Why not? Usually, such hosting providers are used by new affiliates who try hard to push aggressive stuff in ad networks. Ad networks identify users with their server's IP.

If they find lots of IP belonging to company banned "Beyond Hosting" abusing their ad network, they may profile all users using Beyond Hosting as possible abusers.

  1. Using a managed hosting provider

Your server is managed by a prudish paranoid system administrator who updates something on the server then you are going to lose money. I've observed that they disable php-curl or they turn on the open_basedir directory restriction, and the client starts losing money.

  1. Using faulty DNS resolver on the server

Most managed hosting providers are using substandard DNS resolvers, these resolvers rate limit your CURL requests and you lose money.

More info on DNS resolvers here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-setup-dns-lookup/

Both of these issues can be eliminated by using the setup which we recommend.

But when this happens most people think that it's an issue at FraudFilter's end.

FraudFilter's routers are mission critical, they never stop processing traffic.

  1. Doing nothing about click loss, refer: https://docs.fraudfilter.io/kb/lower-your-clickloss/
  1. Directly cloaking on day 1. Please properly warm up up your ad account with clean ads for at least few days to few weeks.
  1. Ad account is not fully isolated from previously banned ones: not using a new virtual machine, IP, server IP, domain, and payment instrument.

Pro Tip:Use https://multiloginapp.com/ for managing your multiple accounts.

Arbitrage-Based on Ad Network Landing Page Policies and Scraping Delay

FB = Facebook.

Basic Idea: Every ad network has its own set of landing page policies and campaign requirements, some will approve aggressive landing pages while some will not approve your most compliant affiliate campaign funnel.

Landing pages which easily get approved on Native ad networks will most likely not be approved by networks like Facebook or Google.

It's easy to scrap landing pages from ad networks like native ads, pop, and display using spy tools.

Within 24 hours, HOT campaigns appear in the tools like AdPlexity {Native, Mobile, Adult}, MakeMassive etc...

Affiliates having a subscription to these tools quickly use filters and identify potentially winning campaigns.

Campaign running for 10 days+, much be profitable and fully optimized?

They also jump in with same landers and ad copies in these ad networks as approval is easy.

So, within few hours, you've many affiliates in ad networks competing with identical campaigns for same websites and placement, bidding wars are common.

Furthermore, you've in-house media buying teams of affiliate networks [maxed out payouts], ad networks [traffic direct from publishers without markup], automated affiliate workflow like Afflow or Monetizer.co [algorithmic optimization, maxed out payouts, insight into former affiliate network and lots of industry experience], bot bidders, pubs sending bot traffic - a threat to the existence of an average affiliate, they mostly operate on lenient sources like pops, native, mobile, display.

The reality is that there is not enough for everyone, hating competitors will not help you, be competitive and keep learning.

Not only this, there are many guides on marketing forums like StackThatMoney on how to run affiliate style campaigns on pop and native ad networks, very few or none for Facebook - bringing more competition from newbies.

The Advantage:

Running such campaigns on Facebook requires lots of intelligence [farming - keeping account supply, flying campaigns, and ad accounts under the radar, cloaking etc...] - It's not what your average affiliate can do, much less competition.

Besides, there is no incentive in running bots on the Facebook newsfeed, unlike native and pops where publishers can use bot traffic to increase their earnings from ads. Expect no bot traffic, you've all this quality traffic flowing to your proven funnels.

Affiliates who have mastered the art of running on strict ad networks like Facebook and Google Ads are at advantage in this game.

If you are running BizOpp, Nutra, Solar or Finance offers, you'll find tons of latest working funnels in AdPlexity Native.

If you are running Sweepstakes, App installs or Mobile content offers, you've AdPlexity mobile.

You can quickly grab proven funnels from spy tools and run them on Facebook Ads.

No sophisticated tools exist for spying on Facebook and their algorithm makes it incredibly very difficult to scrap all ads running on their network, in short, there is a long delay between launching a campaign and campaign getting riped by competition.

Creative work is generally slow. You've got your farming and cloaking system, funnel from spy tool, now you only need angles for your Facebook ad. [only creative work]. This sort of workflow is difficult to automate on FB, guarantees less competition - more profits and less trouble for you.

cloaking / sneaky redirects / malware

Context: Surprisingly, the campaign was under review mode in FraudFilter. If you remember about campaign states, campaign in the under-review state always goes to the safe page then how did they catch this account?

Reason: This user is using a slow server [GoDaddy shared hosting] and it makes really slow API calls and results in delay which is called the wait time.

You can see this delay through your eyes. It takes forever to redirect.

Redirects should always best very fast if they are not fast then you have a problem.

  1. Test your redirect speeds with Pingdom:

[The guy in the screenshot needs faster DNS service.]

High connect time and wait time means slow network [end to end latency] and overloaded server [not enough CPUs for CURL calls?] respectively.

Some ad networks measure this delay [redirect speed or wait time to be specific] and flag it as possible cloaking / sneaky redirects / malware.

If redirects are fast then ad network will not flag your URLs.

Solution: Use our recommended setup: https://docs.fraudfilter.io/kb/recommended-hosting-setup/, once the redirect is fast, this campaign will be accepted without any issue!

Furthermore, you can use our API with and develop a javascript code to redirect using JS. Using this method, the ad network bot will not see any delay.

If you don't want to use the recommended setup then at a minimum ensure that your setup results in fast redirects.

If you use our recommended setup and best practices then you'll have much higher survival rate than any other cloaker.