The Most Active and Friendliest
Affiliate Marketing Community Online!

“AdsEmpire”/  Direct Affiliate

Tiers of Traffic in Affiliate Marketing: why geo-targeting matters?

zeropark

Traffic Manager
Traffic Manager
ZeroPark
What are country tiers in affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing allows advertisers to target ads at people all over the world. To make your life easier, all these countries have been divided into three groups — tiers — based on a number of factors, like:
  • financial status
  • geographical location
  • languages
  • legal regulations
  • technological advancements
  • society and ethnicity
This allowed for identifying three main areas that share similar characteristics, called TIER 1, TIER2, and TIER3 GEOs.

So what countries belong to each group? Well...if we were to include them all you’d get tired scrolling down. That’s why you can check the full list here or have a look at our blog article for the shortened version that we’ve prepared for you.

Here are a few brief observations, though:
  • Clearly, Tier 1 includes mostly English speaking countries plus rich Western European ones.
  • Tier 2, as could be expected, is a mix of countries from all over the world that could be described as medium level.
  • The last group, Tier 3, consists of all the other countries — either the poorest, the least developed, or simply the least attractive for affiliate advertising. Do not write it off just yet, though. Bear with us and you’ll see there’s a huge potential in Tier 3 countries.

lH6uqckLKCwyuW8Rc-bJRDL1XdAhsb4beHRKGSI3OZPDwv54FGpxqSG-l-pSPu3LlHBvx2croPXn3eunEtoFafvKVhFAWLXPUdAN0G7ZY15xkxR0tNf1NCyjYYGRn_NXCHC5Rm4L

Why is geo-targeting essential for digital advertising?
Geo-targeting is a very important part of any digital advertising strategy because careful targeting and optimization are crucial to the success of your campaigns. That’s why geo-targeting is a key component of your marketing strategy.

It allows you to analyze the audience’s preferences and can get you real far in affiliate marketing. The more you learn about your ads’ recipients, the higher your conversion count.

Where to invest your advertising budget?
Once we’ve established the basis as to why geo-targeting is an essential part of your business, let’s have a look at each tier and discuss its characteristics, pros and cons, as well as what areas are especially worth focusing on.

OO7rDfl9jLEUKzul8vjwlLDgy0CfQA7TLhoKVpgf5kqidEFS8XcbRy5HuKXXqbcGFGCp9nNOVGSP7dXgOWp3RU0XJZndYSKx-AfDCPGIV4k1UfEr6E7tMtNCQL6wPUt6IlhSowI4
US, UK, AU, CA joined by FR, DE and IT. What a party, huh?

As mentioned already, Tier 1 consists of the English speaking countries plus the three Western European ones. These are definitely rich countries, with a huge spending potential, high technological advancement, and broad mobile devices adoption. All this makes them a very attractive target for affiliate advertisers.

v3EP7vqBzF3Rnv1l22jyuYg6ZJeFU_r9o8kr-qDuYrNjifyQvsb6pBNhJMNCdp4NwxQgJFOodcdRhHvuuafKQOCn32IwiT02lFMBevZxwQ-i-VQPVkpSDgqf-CiAGQeAUVVnZfKZ

The second group is a mixture of the remaining European countries, Asian countries, and the better-developed countries from the African continent. Generally, people there aren’t as prosperous as in Tier 1. Although this may be a sign of a smaller spending potential, it varies heavily depending on a country. That’s why advertisers need to check how a particular country they’d like to target performs despite its Tier characteristics.

G-WzXhNo1WGQc5CePubuSr08-0IOZSiSybXUqMjyMBnrVtrGpuuT1F_1xIT54yR8hQXPEE3BqbqaZvzXI-K4thP0sz4DdQsD-5X6rGtMEObri3mRwz9SLQWgnpoDBhslZVhYHYHh

For some advertisers, the Tier 3 countries are the wild, wild west of affiliate marketing. There are little rules, lot’s of traffic for very occasional prices, many campaigns that wouldn’t even be accepted in other GEOs are scoring it big in Tier 3, and the competition is much smaller.

There’s a huge potential in Tier 3 GEOs that’s only waiting for takers. The technology has moved forward significantly in the last few years, and mobile adoption, as well as the online payment solutions, are only growing. This means more and more offers actually make sense to be run with Tier 3 countries.


Top GEOs & Cost-Per-Click
The higher the tier, the higher the prices — that’s something we’ve already established. Now, to help you understand why it’s better to go for Tier 3 regions if you’re only starting, here’s some food for thought.

Some Tier 3 countries, like the Philippines, offer lower CPC prices, smaller competition, big volumes, eager audiences, and still use English as their conversational language, so you don’t even need to worry about translation. What’s not to like compared to the crowded, expensive and highly demanding US market? Let’s do some basic math.

  • If you want to run push ads in the US, your CPC is $0.04.
  • While in PH it’s only $0.0072.

That’s 550% higher price per click for a Tier 1 country as compared to Tier 3!

It means that in order to buy 1000 clicks and test your campaign’s set up, you’d need to spend $40 for the US targeting, and only $7,2 on your PH campaign. Having a $100 testing budget allows you to gather way more data running tests on PH traffic rather than US.

Screenshot_2020-07-08_at_13.30.26.png

Screenshot_2020-07-08_at_13.30.44.png

Screenshot_2020-07-08_at_13.31.03.png

English-speaking yet cheap GEOs outside of Tier 1
Another thing is that, many of the countries outside of Tier 1 do actually use English. Often as an official language, or simply because the language adoption is high among its citizens.

That’s why we’ve prepared a list (that we’ve already shared with you on our blog) with countries where English is commonly used as the set device language, therefore making it the preferred website (ad) viewing language should work, too.

Geo-targeting and optimization tips for successful campaigns.
Advertisers need to be careful when choosing what tiers and countries to target, and that’s for a number of reasons. It’s not only about which region is the most profitable, or what’s better for more or less advanced affiliates.

If you want to learn more about things we briefly explained in this forum post, just head to our blog article!

Y03dHeKwV-HTE9H0WyF2R20By9OsSn1QTbL-R8YfbiQ2WSr1ZjrfzSC752j4ce_UqQ7R93yZduEKgSUyU6qikZ_iOmFiu9BDutyp8TbA9AhuqGde9dh6HcD7HTLfXYuVap0sKNzG

>>>> CLICK HERE <<<<
Read and learn all you need to know about different tiers of traffic in affiliate marketing, and why geo-targeting matters! Enjoy scaling your business.

Magda​
 
Great article and well put. I'm curious; how come you don't see Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland) as Tier 1? I'd say we fit all the criteria for being a Tier 1 country :)

Tiers are determined based on a lot of things but mainly on how much advertizers are willing to pay for these GEOs. Even though the countries are rich economically, the click prices never go as high as the countries that belong to Tier 1 already.

Traffic networks don't determine the Tiers - it's advertisers and how much they're bidding in each country. We only grouped the countries together based on their cost similarities.

Magda
 
Sorry, that will not work in the US that well
upload_2020-8-5_16-11-32.png


*that's not including very low income people that do not bother filing taxes ie children-dependents ... so the lower group may be in fact a larger percentage.
Super poor and super rich ... who do you want to reach and how much ad money do you want to waste?
The top richest 6% will not be interested is most offers people use here but they might be interested in Porsche hood bras or some other luxury item. In another spectrum you might want to target slightly below average income earners with some other offer they might have interest in.

  1. I am assuming human traffic allowing -0- bot/fraud waste
  2. This schema is pretty much 30%-50% world wide --every country has pockets of wealth and the middle class that can possibly afford things.
  3. It's possible that the lower range would buy something too --more a necessity or essential
One-Size does not fit all -- traffic uses server resources and many offers are picky about the traffic CR maintained.
So, the question here is; what segmentation you can offer within the GEO (Region,Metro, City, Postal [US zip] code)?
So, without selecting the local demographics GEO ISO-Code "US" is meaningless.
 
Last edited:
One-Size does not fit all -- traffic uses server resources and many offers are picky about the traffic CR maintained.
So, the question here is; what segmentation you can offer within the GEO (Region,Metro, City, Postal [US zip] code)?
So, without selecting the local demographics GEO ISO-Code "US" is meaningless.

We based that division 100% on the data that we've gathered over many years – so, that division is true for Zeropark's inventory and advertisers. :)

As for more advanced segmentation, we offer region and city targeting with additional option to choose the language for push traffic (in case of targeting multi-lingual countries).

Magda
 
That's a great and very informative post, thank you! I might also say regarding Tier3 countries that even though the traffic cost is way cheaper but it's a big question if there is a profit at all from those countries so it is probably better to spend $40 instead of $10 but to have any ROI than zero ROI.
 
banners
Back