Many of today's online professionals are involved in marketing. One of these specialties is traffic arbitration.

What is Traffic Arbitration?

Traffic arbitrage is one of the popular ways to earn money on the Internet. The essence of traffic arbitrage is to buy traffic in one place and redirect it to another. Let's explain how it works with an example: In traffic arbitrage, you attract customers for affiliate marketing. At the same time, the partner company does not sponsor advertising or other activities. For example, there is a company that sells phones. She is willing to pay $20 for each client you refer. You set up an ad for $100. Advertising brings 10 customers, the company pays you $200. Yes, you made $100 in arbitrage. The guarantor of payment by the store to the webmaster is the affiliate program.

Basic concepts

• Affiliate marketing (eng. affiliate marketing) - help in selling goods for a commission. For example, any electronics store can sell appliances. Each of these stores is engaged in affiliate marketing, that is, it sells someone else's product for an additional percentage.

• CPA marketing (cost per action) is a type of affiliate marketing. The difference is that you receive a reward for a certain action. For example, for a purchase request, user registration, or the purchase itself.

Types of arbitrage traffic

Three main types of traffic arbitrage can be distinguished:

• Direct arbitrage - in this case, traffic goes directly to affiliate programs
• Using a landing page, when traffic goes to a special page (Landing Page), and from there to an affiliate program using a referral link.
• Using the landing page and registration. Traffic is poured to the landing page, after which the user must register via email. This allows you to collect an email database for further distribution.

What does an arbitrator do?

The most important skill of an arbitrator is setting up and analyzing ads. The advertisement itself can be different and on different platforms. For example, contextual and targeted advertising on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube, advertising from bloggers, or website traffic.

"White" and "black" arbitration

Arbitration can be divided into "white" and "black". It depends on the type of project you are driving traffic to.

• "White" arbitrage is the promotion of conventional products, online stores, and online goods. For example, a clothing or equipment store uses targeted and contextual advertising, SEO promotion, or social media posts for this.
• "Black" arbitration is the promotion of products and services that can deceive users. These are usually bookmakers and gambling. For promotion in "black" arbitration, clickbait (content that attracts attention with a headline, but its content often does not correspond to reality), bypassing advertising bans, and other prohibited methods are used.

Features of traffic arbitration

Working with traffic arbitration has three features

• You can lose money. Since the arbitrator invests his money in advertising and promotion and receives a reward only after attracting customers. There is always a chance to burn out and not bring anyone.
• Ads need to be constantly tested to understand what works well and what doesn't, so the arbitrator needs to run regular tests.
• Most likely, a team will be needed.

Where to buy traffic

Buying traffic depends on its type and source. Let's look at the most popular sources of traffic:

• Free traffic. In this case, you get traffic for free, but you spend your time placing the site on thematic resources, forums, social networks, and so on.
• Own site. If you already have your site, where you can place a link to another resource, you can get traffic from it.
• Contextual advertising. Traffic can come from contextual advertising that you place on Google Ads or other contextual advertising services.
• Social networks. The source is similar to the previous one, only the advertisement will not be displayed on the sites, but on the social network.

Filtering of low-quality traffic

When you pour in traffic from multiple sources, you may end up with a non-targeted audience. To attract high-quality traffic, it is recommended to use a landing page.

This approach increases the number of actions from the user and makes it possible to filter out a non-target audience. On the other hand, the use of a landing page provides an opportunity to analyze the received data.

To do this, you need to set Google Analytics statistics on the Landing Page, and then set the goal - that is, how many real conversions there should be from the landing page to the partner. Then we look at how many transitions there were to the goal from the entire number of visits from a specific site. This is how efficiency is determined.

Where to drain traffic

After you have received traffic from some sources, it should be "merged", that is, redirected to another resource. Various affiliate programs are suitable for this.

• CPA program. As I wrote above, CPA is a cost per action, i.e. payment for some action. For example, for registering on the site, ordering a product, filling out a questionnaire, or uploading a file.
• Affiliate sales program. In this case, traffic is directed to sites where the user can order