Ask Me Anything Why affiliates quit & how to earn with Zeropark on a small budget? [Zeropark study]

Hey guys,

You might have observed on the forum that many beginners open a follow along, post a few updates and then disappear into oblivion, never to be seen again. If you’re wondering why so many affiliates get discouraged and quit before earning any money, so were we. That’s why our in-house business analytics team decided to look at raw data of hundreds of new joiners to determine what actions lead to affiliates quitting.

We’ve been able to determine some key differences between those who stayed and started earning, and those who quit within a week without seeing any green. Without further ado, here are the conclusions.

⭐️ Why affiliate marketers quit before turning a profit?
Both groups, those who quit and those who didn’t, focused on launching RON campaigns in Zeropark. They used the same kind of feeds and all came with a variety of previously acquired offers.

However, affiliate marketers who quit within a week had the following distinct behavior that we observed based on Zeropark data:

1. Setting low bid values
People who quit within a week used low bid values regardless of the GEO they chose to target. While the correct way to approach bidding is by evaluating what kind of offer and where you plan to run, beginners with insufficient knowledge seem to choose low (or as low as possible) bids without considering the campaign’s parameters.

People who stayed and continued running their campaigns were characterized by a greater variety in choosing their bids. Albeit still staying on the lower side, their bids were more diverse and seemed to take into account factors like the GEO targeting or the bid’s win-ratio (showing which bids exactly lose to the higher-paying competition). Overall, they set strong bids significantly more often than quitters.

2. Running campaigns in Tier 1 GEO
Those who chose to give up started by running their campaigns in Tier 1 GEOs, while those who persevered focused their efforts mostly on Tier 3. Additionally, the first group (the quitters) has spent the most money on their Tier 1 countries as opposed to the second group (the winners) that spread their budget more evenly over different regions while still putting the most focus on Tier 3.

3. Jumping between many campaign types
The group of new joiners who quit affiliate marketing shortly after starting came with a greater variety of offers and tested various combinations of vertical + ad format + targeting. Despite initially following the beginner advice of starting with a RON campaign, over the course of the first week on the platform, they ended up jumping between many different campaign types.

On the other hand, non-quitters came with a lesser variety of offers and ran less varied campaigns. Additionally, they often came with gambling, crypto, or e-commerce offers signifying greater affiliate marketing knowledge and previous experience.

4. Not engaging in optimization tasks
Out of the assessed group, non-quitters did more optimization such as adjusting the budgets, dayparting, or changing the frequency filter. Those who left shortly after starting did less basic optimization and focused on rule-based optimization instead.

5. Incorrect use of Rule-Based Optimization
Lastly, quitters made use of Zeropark’s rule-based optimization. While both groups seemed to engage with auto-optimization equally to some degree, the group who left the platform shortly after, often used the feature in unusual ways. The rules they’ve set, albeit enforceable, were often impractical or illogical which resulted in overall incorrect optimization of their campaigns.

Conclusions: Affiliates who quit before turning a profit were largely making the basic mistakes that are common for beginners with no experience. Things like setting the lowest bid possible at all cost, shiny object syndrome which caused them to jump from one campaign to another without properly optimizing, and playing with the platform’s advanced features without preparation and learning. These are all mistakes frequently talked about in basic tutorials, blog articles, and documentation.

The final conclusion is that starting affiliate marketing without learning and researching prior to campaign launch on any platform is simply not a good idea. All of the mistakes made here could be avoided by making the smallest effort of learning the basics by e.g. searching for a ‘beginner guide’ on the forum or reading the 7 Biggest Affiliate Marketing Mistakes article.

⭐️ How do you run successful campaigns in Zeropark even with a low budget?
Although all traffic sources have the same function, each platform is different and requires a different approach. That’s why we decided to make a shortlist of essential tips on how to start with Zeropark, even if you do have a small budget and limited resources.

1. Choose beginner-friendly GEOs and offers
Even though that tip seems entirely obvious, it’s important to delve into details here. Yes, Tier 1 is NOT a beginner-friendly GEO. It’s highly competitive, and if you do have a small budget, you have a very small chance of scoring conversions there.

Still, that doesn’t mean all of Tier 2 and Tier 3 countries are beginner-friendly, especially if you’re not an experienced advertiser just yet, or don’t have a budget to burn while testing. Here are some competitive GEOs to avoid:

❌ PUSH TRAFFIC

TIER 2: CZ, CN, AR, ID
TIER 3: TZ, GE, UG, IN​

❌ DOMAIN TRAFFIC

TIER 2: TR, CZ, CO, ZA, MX
TIER 3: LK, HN, BJ, KE ​

❌ POP TRAFFIC

TIER 2: UA, BG, PE, MY, MA
TIER 3: HN, AZ, KW, GE, BH​

Again, remember these may work well given your offer and the budget allows for taking up the challenge.

Additionally, while sweepstakes, vouchers, lead gen, and downloads are all beginner-friendly, it doesn’t make them effortless. It hardly ever happens that unoptimized traffic with low bids is going to bring you conversions. Sure, one or two might happen but it’s not quite possible to instantly make money just because you have beginner-friendly offers and GEOs.

⚠️ Beginner tip: Learn more about tiers of traffic and why GEO-targeting matters; Learn more about how to pick CPA offers that convert; Read a case study on how to pick offers.

That being said, if you have a low budget and want to launch campaigns with Zeropark here are tried and tested combinations (in Tier 3 GEOs) that are the easiest to reach profit.

✅ PUSH TRAFFIC:

• Pakistan + Pin Submit/Gaming offers
• Angola + Gaming offers
• Azerbaijan + Hobbies and education
• Haiti • Angola • Ethiopia • Sri Lanka • Mongolia • Kenya + Sweepstakes offers

✅ POP TRAFFIC:

• Pakistan + Smartlink offers

Note that these are the combinations that currently work with Zeropark traffic. They are ideal for clients with small budgets, as the volume of traffic in these GEOs might not be sufficient if you’re hoping for a 4 digit revenue.

2. Stick to your plan
As our research has shown, jumping between different offers and different campaign types is not the best way to go about learning affiliate marketing. Unless you have a big budget, of course.

So, always remember to assess what you’re willing to lose and how much you can actually test with your budget. If it’s really small, it’s best to choose a few offers and one ad format and launch a RON campaign and optimize it. Eventually, you can run a source or target campaign from the best performing placements in the original campaign.

However, it’s not advisable to try many GEOs, offers, and ad formats at once when starting with a limited budget.

3. Perform optimization tasks
Optimization is an extremely important step to take soon after launching your campaign. While letting it run for a couple of days (with set budget limits) is useful to properly scan and assess the traffic, it is only at the optimization stage that you can bring out the potential of your setup.

The optimization tasks will help you evaluate where’s the best traffic for your offer. While optimization should be based on the data you gather for the first couple of days, here are the actions you should take:

✔︎ Set budgets (campaign, daily, source, and target)
✔︎ Adjust frequency filter
✔︎ Set traffic filters for devices and OSes
✔︎ Choose granular options such as browsers or OS versions
✔︎ Set dayparting​

⚠️ Beginner tip: Read 25 Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners and learn more about how and when to optimize your campaigns.

4. Learn about Rule-Based Optimization
Rule-based optimization, while extremely helpful for beginners and experts alike, can be tricky to use when you have no idea what you’re doing. The best way to get started is to set the default options suggested by the platform. They are safe to try and universal for any campaign with an offer payout of $2.50 or higher.

If you choose to come up with your own rules, it’s highly advisable to message our support team (support@zeropark.com) and ask for a check/advice when setting your rules for the first time.

But first, there are various resources where you can learn the basics of Rule-Based optimization and how to use it for the benefit of your campaigns.

1. Blog article
2. Zeropark documentation
3. Video explainer

That concludes our study and the resulting list of tips for beginners. We hope this post can help many beginner affiliates with limited budgets see their first green numbers.

As always, if you have any questions, we’d be happy to answer them, so just shoot me a DM or message our support team.

Good luck with your future campaigns,

Magda

 

Hi! Yes, RON means Run-of-Network. Basically, when you choose targeting for your campaign you should start with RON for a chosen country or countries in the case of the Multi-Geo RON campaign. That means you'll buy all the traffic (all the possible placements) available in a traffic source's inventory at the bid price you've set for a given country or countries. Later on, you can remove placements (targets) and groups of placements (sources) if they don't convert for your offer. Lastly, you can choose to run target or source campaigns based on a list of best converting placements or groups of placements.

In short:
RON campaign - target all of the available traffic for a given GEO
Source campaign - target chosen groups of websites
Target campaign - target chosen placements (websites)

Hope that clears it up a bit.
Magda

 

Yes you would need a whitelist. The majority of sources and trackers don't reveal the websites and neither does Zeropark. However, whitelists are lists of the best performing sources/targets so you can get them either by messaging the support team or by creating a RON campaign and pretty much noting down the best performers so you don't need to know what websites are underneath.

Magda

 

Hi, your tracker seems to be using a different IP database from ours. You are not receiving traffic from California, this is a simple database mismatch