If you’re not fully up to speed on “arbitrage” strategies, I want to give you a lightning-fast introduction. Nothing too painful. Just a quick wax and tear touch-up job. My goal is to let you know where to buy some of the cheapest ads (i.e. low CPC bids). But we’ll talk a bit about arbitrage and tell you why you might want to try it too.
In fact, let’s get that out of the way first. Then we’ll include you in our list of 9 new networks with low CPC costs.
What is arbitrage in 30 seconds or less?
Wax, wax. Here is a simple version.
Buy low and sell high at the same time. In the world of online advertising, the professionals who achieve this have a simple formula:
My total ad revenue from paid traffic> My total ad spend
Referees pay for cheap ads. And then they get those visitors to click on higher CPC ads on their own site.
Understanding the basic concept is easy. The hardest part is making sure it really works. That means finding a way to earn more than you spend on ads.
Here are 9 ad networks with the lowest CPC ad costs (that aren’t bots)
I want to share with you 9 ad networks that are on my radar for a lower CPC. You can test and experiment with the traffic to see if it generates profitable conversions for you.
If your site is optimized and you get a higher average CPC for clicks on your ads, you may even be able to use these low-priced ads for an arbitrage scenario.
# 1 Taboola
Taboola isn’t exactly small potatoes, until you place them alongside AdSense. They are making 750 million unique visitors a month. Their model is to drive traffic to your content by posting links on their partner sites. As an ad buyer, your content becomes a recommendation and ad clicks can be more profitable than the big players.
# 2 Out of the brain
Outbrain follows the same model as Taboola, allowing its content to be recommended on partner sites. And they work with premium destinations, including CNN and ESPN. They are not as big as Taboola, although they are not far behind. That’s a good thing, as it puts more downward pressure on your advertising costs to stay competitive and grow your network.
# 3 Facebook (mobile traffic)
Facebook has a massive swath of traffic, much of it mobile-based. You know, people check their likes at dinner or during the boring parts of the movie, or the good parts of the movie. The targeting is expected to be top-notch as they track a lot of data about their users. You can focus on the ideal ad clicks. But keep in mind that it can affect your costs per click. Because Facebook works hard to monetize all that mobile traffic, you benefit from lower costs per click.
# 4 Gmail Ads
Gmail ads are text-based. While Gmail has all kinds of frenzied eyes every day, they are generally fleeting and focused. They want to receive your emails as quickly as possible. That opens the door for you to get those ads at very competitive rates. Note: buy these ads from Google AdWords. In general, the less popular an ad channel is, the more likely it is to find low-cost CPCs.
# 5 RevContent
RevContent ranks third behind Taboola and Outbrain. Beyond the giant face of Steve Jobs on their home page and bold marketing that includes the word “manifest,” they are trying to differentiate themselves by focusing on some aspects of the user experience with their ad widget. Like the others, it’s a great idea to try them out.
# 6 gravity
Gravity.com is also in the recommendation business. Each of these networks tends to have agreements with the major publishers. Choosing Gravity over one of the others can come down to checking your publisher network. What is the best combination? They advertise “1: 1 custom targeting”. We can translate that to mean that they spend most of their efforts tracking their users and matching them to ads. But this is part of the algorithm of each network.
# 7 YouTube Ads
YouTube can scare you a bit if the word “video” intimidates you, as it relates to having to create it. But the YouTube network offers some great ad targeting opportunities. As a property of Google, they collect a vast amount of data about their users. Then you should explore this network. If you absolutely can’t create videos, freelancers can do it for you on a minimal budget. That video barrier is part of the reason you can see better overall CPC rates in advertising with YouTube.
# 8 MGID
MGID is another one of the native ad style networks. You can get lower rates, but you need to monitor your results. You don’t want to pay for ad clicks that come from bots. The smaller the network, the more vulnerable. Keep an attentive idea. It affects your profitability.
# 9 Criteo
Critea claims that “machine learning” is the secret sauce behind its targeting algorithms. Every ad network is constantly trying to find new ones to do it. It makes sense. By helping your advertisers perform better, you earn more money with your traffic partners. We have to test to see how they perform compared to the other networks. Is machine learning just simple data collection and number processing, or are they building Skynet?