The Internet is a vast ocean of information and an endless source of supply for your affiliate marketing campaigns. That’s why making sure you receive only the highest-quality traffic is crucial for the success of your business. And with the abundance of possibilities, how should one know which ad network to get into business with?
That’s why in this article you’ll find a detailed collection of recommendations on the best affiliate marketing traffic sources in 2022!
Read on and make the best choice for your business.
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What is a traffic source in affiliate marketing?
As with everything in affiliate marketing, there are two ways of understanding what a traffic source actually is. Depending on the type of your business, that is whether you’re an advertiser/media buyer or a publisher (website owner or website owner representative), a traffic source is actually the opposite side of a coin.
In general, as the name suggests, a traffic source is a source of online traffic. Every time users view your ads they must have encountered them somewhere first.
So, if you’re a media buyer (affiliate advertiser) promoting various products or services, a traffic source is your supply channel. A traffic source supplies you with online traffic to monetize your offer.
For publishers, a traffic source often means a tool or platform through which they monetize online traffic generated by internet users coming to their page.
Naturally, there’s a number of different types of online traffic sources so if this topic is still a bit vague for you we recommend having a look at the article below.
Traffic Sources for Internet Marketing.
The best options for growing your business.
What is an affiliate ad network?
An ad network is a self-serve advertising platform that serves as an intermediary between publishers and advertisers. It works as both an SSP (Supply-Side Platform) and a DSP (Demand-Side Platform) depending on the publisher’s or advertiser’s perspective.
To put things simply, a traffic source is often a synonym for an ad network in the affiliate industry. Although it needs to be remembered this is only true in a sense of a traffic source being a tool — that is an ad exchange/network platform.
Such platforms allow media buyers to buy either clicks or impressions from ad exchanges that collect the traffic from publishers. A perfect demand-supply channel machine.
How to recognize a good traffic source or an ad network? FAQ
Naturally, going into business with a company that you can trust to provide top-quality services is essential. That’s why before advertisers buy traffic from a given ad network/ ad exchange/ traffic source platform, a thorough check of the company’s offer and inventory is crucial.
Here are the most important factors to take into consideration while deciding on which advertising platform to cooperate with.
Is it a trusted traffic source?
That’s definitely one of the most important questions to be asked. Luckily for us — the Internet never forgets. Always research your options and check the available reviews or ask the affiliate community. If there ever has been an issue with a traffic source, these guys will know and won’t hesitate to let you know.
What ad formats does this traffic source offer?
Depending on what kind of offers advertisers want to promote, and what ad formats a traffic source offers, the collaboration between them might or may not be possible.
What is the traffic source’s reach?
Most credible and trusted ad networks disclose that information. It’s good to know beforehand what kind of traffic volumes may be expected. That’s especially important if you’re only starting in affiliate marketing, if you’re already an experienced media buyer, if you only want to test or already scale your campaigns.
What are the available cost models and the average cost of traffic?
That’s important not only to see whether the traffic source is actually compatible with your offer, but also to plan and estimate your budget. If the prices are too high, it might not be profitable for you to run your campaigns with this particular traffic source. Then again, if you know what prices to expect you can plan your marketing budget and strategy accordingly.
How much traffic is available?
One of the most important aspects. What would be the point of entering into business with a supply platform that doesn’t have enough supply, right? Also, knowing the available volumes of traffic can help you decide whether a given traffic source is a good solution for learning, testing, or scaling in affiliate marketing.
How does the compliance work and how is the traffic quality ensured?
As we already mentioned, with the Internet being an endless source of supply for your marketing campaigns, making sure you receive only the highest-quality traffic it’s crucial. What legitimate business owner wouldn’t want to check whether what they buy with their hard-earned money is actually worth the money? Or how does the quality-check process look like and what measures are put into place to ensure that quality is received? Always stay vigilant.
What are the traffic/ad restrictions?
Also, just to be sure you will actually be able to run your campaigns with a given ad network’s traffic, it’s essential to check both their traffic and ad restrictions and regulations.
What targeting options are available?
Next, once you’ve made sure that a chosen traffic source provides quality service and can be trusted with your campaigns, it’s time to see if you really can make a perfect fit for each other. With the abundance of high-end ad-tech solutions, a perfect traffic source should be able to give you all the tools you need to make the most of your ad campaigns. And that includes a wide variety of targeting options to direct your ads precisely where you need them to be found by users willing to convert.
What optimization and automation options are available?
Once your campaigns are up and running, the real fun begins. Now it’s time to make sure your campaigns are really making money, leave out all the placements where you are losing it, and focus your energy and budget on what’s worth it.
But since affiliate marketing is a 24/7/365 day business, a little help never hurts. We’re not saying that someone will literally make money for you while you sleep, but being able to leave your computer while resting assured that your budget isn’t being burnt by a simple mistake is key. And that’s what AI-powered auto-optimization features are for.
What verticals are supported?
Verticals and niches are the general categories that your offer may belong to. Having that categorization helps divide traffic into segments that match the correct traffic with correct offers. Usually, traffic sources offer a wide variety of verticals and niches, but just to be sure that your offer will find its perfect match it’s good to know beforehand what verticals are offered by a given traffic source.
How does the support work?
Although this may seem like an additional question, it’s not. Being able to reach the support team of your traffic source is crucial for the success of your campaigns. A quality traffic source that cares for the success of their clients will make sure that the needed support is provided to the best of everyone’s abilities.
Especially that affiliate marketing is a global business and even a simple thing as time difference may become a break or make element for your campaign to turn green. That’s why, a good communication channel with the support representatives, as well as access to support and educational materials should be provided.
Is there an onboarding process?
Talking about educational materials, a thorough onboarding process might save everybody lots of work later on. Just make sure that your traffic source provides dedicated support once you join the platform, and there will be a person responsible for helping you learn how to navigate and make the most of the tool.
What are the best affiliate marketing traffic sources or ad networks in 2022?
So, what are the best affiliate traffic sources that you could join in 2022? To be honest, the number of internet traffic sources is beyond comprehension. Depending on what kind of affiliate marketing business you’re in, what kind of ad formats you’re looking for your offers, what’s your budget and experience, the answer to that question will be different.
The below collection of ten recommended traffic sources for affiliate marketers in 2022 takes into consideration paid advertising solutions for affiliates on all levels of experience, from basic to advanced, while also available for bigger media buying agencies.
Since we at Zeropark specialize in pop and native advertising, we have only listed traffic sources that offer similar inventory. As we strongly believe in our platform and the services we provide, we hope you will excuse us for starting this list with our favorite — that is ourselves.
We strived to compare all other ad networks based on the same criteria and tried to do so to the best of our abilities based on the data available to the community. We hope this overview will help you make the best decision for your affiliate marketing business. Let’s dive in!
Zeropark
Zeropark is a self-serve advertising network that’s been long known to help digital marketers scale their performance marketing ad campaigns. Founded in 2012, Zeropark offers a variety of ad formats available for both affiliate marketers and advertising agencies.
What’s special about Zeropark is that, as a traffic source, it offers the biggest volumes of available ad impressions on the market. While as a self-serve ad platform, it’s constantly driven to further develop its features and platform functionality to help marketers make the most of their campaigns.
To give you a clear picture of what we’re talking about here are some hard-cold facts about Zeropark. Also, if you’d like to learn more about Zeropark yourself, just have a look at a special onboarding offered for everyone interested.
Zeropark’s inventory includes:
- Domain redirect (also known as zero-click) traffic,
- Pop up and pop under traffic,
- Injection traffic (keyword-based variation of pop traffic),
- Custom solutions are also possible for native in-app and search traffic.
Zeropark’s reach offers:
- 3.5 billion ads served daily
- +5000 active advertisers
- 37k running campaigns
Minimum deposit: $200
Available cost models: CPV/CPM and CPC
Available payment methods:
- Wire Transfer
- Credit Card
- PayPal
- Webmoney
- Payoneer
Support channels:
- Chat
- Skype
- Account Management
- Telegram
Targeting and optimization:
- Advanced device/network targeting,
- GEO, region and city targeting,
- Dayparting,
- Custom bidding,
- Campaign capping,
- Bot filtering
Auto-optimization features:
- Rule-based optimization
- Full automation with the Voluum ad tracker also enables you to track and auto-optimize your campaigns with the Automizer tool. Note that unique features are available for Zeropark clients that no other traffic source integrated with Voluum can offer.
PropellerAds
PropellerAds, founded in 2011 is a self-serve platform that helps unite digital marketers into one complete advertising ecosystem. They’re one of the industry-leading ad-serving and optimization companies offering billions of unique visitors monthly and thousands of advertising campaigns launched daily, across desktop and mobile.
Naturally, the PropellerAds ad network is able to do so through a number of available ad formats, unique targeting features, and optimization solutions. One cannot forget to mention they’re advanced options for fine-tuning campaign targeting or large volumes of available traffic.
Just like with Zeropark’s overview, here’s a collection of stats and facts on PropellerAds as a traffic source.
PropellerAds’s inventory includes:
- Pop under ads
- Native interstitials
PropellerAds’s reach offers:
- +1 billion audience coverage
- 70k ad campaigns monthly
- 32k active advertisers
Minimum deposit: $100
Available cost models: CPV/CPM and CPC
Available payment methods:
- Wire Transfer
- Credit Card
- PayPal
- Skrill
- Unionpay
Support channels:
- Chat
- Account Management (Platinum Users Only)
Targeting and optimization:
- Retargeting
- Advanced device/network targeting,
- GEO/city targeting,
- Dayparting,
- Custom bidding,
- Bot filtering
Auto-optimization features:
- CPA Goal feature.
ExoClick
Exoclick, founded in 2006, is one of those traffic sources that seem to offer almost all possible ad formats. Harnessing programmatic buying from their RTB supply-side platform (SSP) gives them direct access to multiple sources of high-quality inventory.
To get a full scope of ExoClick’s extensive portfolio, here’s a summary.
ExoClick’s inventory includes:
- Native
- Video
- Display
- Pop up and pop under
- Interstitials
- Direct Link
ExoClick’s reach offers:
- +8.5 billion daily ads
- +65k publishers
- +20 ad formats
Minimum deposit: $200
Available cost models: CPV/CPM and CPC
Available payment methods:
- PayPal
- Paxum
- Wire Transfer
- Webmoney
Support channels:
- Account Management (min. $20k/mo spend)
- Chat
Targeting and optimization:
- Retargeting
- Advanced device/network targeting,
- Dayparting,
- Custom bidding,
Auto-optimization features:
- Automatic bidding
- Optimization rules
MGID
MGID is an innovative global pioneer in native advertising that drives revenue growth for all participants in the advertising ecosystem, founded already in 2004. And although it is mostly known as a native advertising platform, their self-serve ad network also found a spot in this article.
So, if you’re already familiar with MGID as a native ad network, but you haven’t yet had a chance to learn you can also run ads with them and would like to know more, here’s an overview.
MGID’s inventory includes:
- Native ad formats
MGID’s reach offers:
- +32,000 content websites
- +850 million unique visitors monthly
- +185 billion content recommendations monthly
- +200 GEOs and regions available for targeting
Minimum deposit: $100
Available cost models: CPC
Available payment methods:
- Wire Transfer
- PayPal
- Webmoney
Support channels:
- Skype
- Account Management
RichAds
RichAds is yet another global self-serve ad network designed and developed especially for performance-marketers. Founded in 2018, RichAds specialize mainly in pop traffic, trying to further develop features enhancing campaign targeting and optimization for those areas.
RichAds, though much younger than other traffic sources on the market, is already a pretty well-known platform within the affiliate community. To help you better understand what RichAds have to offer just look at the below summary.
RichAds’s inventory includes:
- Pop up ads
- Pop under ads
RichAds’s reach offers:
- +4 billion ad impressions daily
- 220 GEOs in all tiers
- 4 ad formats
Minimum deposit: $50
Available cost models: CPV/CPM and CPC
Available payment methods:
- Wire Transfer
- Credit Card
- Webmoney
- Paxum
- ePayments
Support channels:
- Chat
- Skype
- Telegram
- Account Management
Targeting and optimization:
- Retargeting
- Advanced device/network targeting,
- GEO/city targeting,
- Dayparting,
- Custom bidding,
Auto-optimization features:
- Automated rules
- Target CPA and Smart CPC
EvaDav
Evadav is yet another advertising platform on our list trading popular ad formats and offering self-serve solutions for online marketers. Founded in 2018, Evadav has quickly become known for its friendly UI and is continuously trying to improve and further develop its functionality.
To learn more about EvaDav ad network solutions read below.
Evadav’s inventory includes:
- Pop up and pop under ads
Evadav’s reach offers:
- +1.5 billion daily ads
- 27k advertisers
- 34k publishers
- 2.2 million ad campaigns monthly
Minimum deposit: $100
Available cost models: CPV/CPM and CPC
Available payment methods:
- Wire Transfer
- PayPal
- Payoneer
- Webmoney
- Skrill
- Bitpay
- Credit Card
- Paxum
Support channels:
- Chat
- Skype
- Telegram
- Account Management
Targeting and optimization:
- Advanced device/network targeting,
- Dayparting,
Auto-optimization features:
- Optimization rules
Clickadu
Clickadu is a digital advertising network for web and mobile channels founded in 2014 and offering its expertise, unique capabilities, and experience in revenue maximization for publishers and advertisers.
Clickadu is also one of those ad networks that besides the most popular ad formats offer some of the more unique inventory. Here’s a detailed overview of Clickadu’s portfolio.
Clickadu’s inventory includes:
- Pop up and pop under ads
- Video
- Skim links
- Instant text message (native)
Clickadu’s reach offers:
- +7k active users
- 2.5 billion ad impressions daily
- +26.5 active campaigns
- 3.3 million daily conversions
Minimum deposit: $100
Available cost models: CPV/CPM and CPC
Available payment methods:
- Wire Transfer
- Credit Card
- Paxum
- PayPal
- Webmoney
- ePayments
Support channels:
- Chat
- Skype
- Account Management (Incl. Managed Service)
Targeting and optimization:
- Advanced device/network targeting,
- Dayparting,
- Bot filtering.
Auto-optimization features:
- SmartCPM, SmartCPA bidding
Adcash
Adcash is another global self-serve online advertising platform for media buyers, affiliates, ad networks, and publishers. Founded in 2007, having over 13 years of experience in the ad tech industry, Adcach enables advertisers to reach global audiences while allowing publishers to monetize web traffic with minimal effort.
Offering ad formats that belong to the scope of this review, we’d decided to add Adcach to the list. For more information and details, have a look below.
Adcash’s inventory includes:
- Pop up and pop under ads
- Interstitials
- Native
- Display
Adcash’s reach offers:
- 200 million unique users daily
- 250k conversions daily
Minimum deposit: $100 (self-serve) or $1000 (managed services)
Available cost models: CPV/CPM and CPC
Available payment methods:
- PayPal
- Skrill
- Webmoney
- Credit Card
- Wire Transfer
Support channels:
- Account Management (incl. managed service for high spenders)
Targeting and optimization:
- Advanced device/network targeting,
- Dayparting,
- Custom bidding,
- Bot filtering
Auto-optimization features:
- CPA Target bidding
AdMaven
AdMaven, founded in 2015, is an innovative digital display advertising network. The company combines great expertise with high motivation and aspiration for constant improvement. This helps them to offer advertisers high-quality traffic to maximize their ROI and reach while providing publishers with highly performing ads to better monetize their web pages.
Here is the summarized overview of the AdMaven ad network’s offer.
AdMaven’s inventory includes:
- Pop up and pop under ads
- Interstitials
- Native
- Display
AdMaven’s reach offers:
- 2 billion daily ad impressions
- +1 billion highly performing users
Minimum deposit: $50
Available cost models: CPV/CPM and CPC
Available payment methods:
- PayPal
- Payoneer
- ePayments
- Paxum
- Wire Transfer
- Bitcoin
Support channels:
- Phone
- Account Management
Targeting and optimization:
- Advanced device/network targeting,
- Dayparting,
- Custom bidding.
SelfAdvertiser
SelfAdvertiser by Intango, founded in 2014, is an ad network using its in-house technology to provide a safe, user-friendly, and intuitive platform with flexible targeting capabilities, automated bid optimization, and real-time reports.
Though much smaller when compared to Zeropark and PropellerAds, SelfAdvertiser is a common choice with affiliate advertisers mostly thanks to its simple UI and a variety of ad formats available.
Just like with other traffic source examples, here are some stats and facts on the SelfAdvertiser ad network.
SelfAdvertiser’s inventory includes:
- Domain redirect traffic
- Pop up and pop under ads
SelfAdvertiser’s reach offers:
- 33k direct publishers
- 831 million daily ad impressions
- 2 billion ad requests
Minimum deposit: $100
Available cost models: CPV/CPM and CPC
Available payment methods:
- Wire Transfer
- Credit Card
- PayPal
Support channels:
- Chat
- Skype
Targeting and optimization:
- Advanced device/network targeting,
- GEO targeting,
- Dayparting,
- Custom bidding,
Auto-optimization features:
- Auto-Optimizer feature
Conclusions
Again, let us emphasize that there are many more options available on the market and that the above collection of recommendations is based on what we know best — traffic sources offering pop, domain, and native traffic.
As we said before, it seems only fair to check whether what you buy with your hard-earned money is actually worth it, right? Even the Mad-Eye Moody (cough cough… or not) would say — constant vigilance!
Hope the above article will help you make the best decision for your affiliate marketing campaigns. And in case you have any questions, feel free to contact our support team, talk to our onboarding manager, or simply…
… SIGN UP TO ZEROPARK TODAY
&
RUN ADS THAT CONVERT!
Kinga Gawron
