If you’re not completely up to speed on “arbitrage” strategies, I want to give you a lightning-quick introduction. Nothing too painful. Just a quick wax and tear touch up job. My goal is to tell you where to buy some of the cheapest ads (ie low CPC bids). But we’ll talk a bit about arbitrage and let you know why you might want to try it too.
In fact, let’s get that out of the way first. Then we will include it in our list of 9 new networks for low CPC costs.
What is arbitration in 30 seconds or less?
Wax up, wax up Here is a simple version.
Buy low and sell high at the same time. In the world of online advertising, 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 higher CPC ads on their own site.
Understanding the basic concept is easy. The hardest part is making sure you actually get it to work. 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 lower CPC. You can test and experiment with the traffic to see if it leads to profitable conversions for you.
If your site is optimized and you get a higher average CPC for your ad clicks, you may even be able to use these low-priced ads for an arbitrage scenario.
#1 taboo
Taboola isn’t exactly small potatoes, until you compare it to AdSense. They are doing 750 million unique visitors per month. Their model is to drive traffic to their 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 External Brain
Outbrain follows the same model as Taboola, allowing its content to be recommended on partner sites. And they work with premium destinations like 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 ad costs to stay competitive and grow your network.
#3 Facebook (mobile traffic)
Facebook has a huge amount of traffic, much of it mobile-based. You know, people checking their likes at dinner or during the boring parts of the movie, or the good parts of the movie. Their targeting is expected to be top notch as they track a lot of data about their users. You can zero in on the ideal ad clicks. But keep in mind that it can affect your costs per click. Since 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 gets all kinds of frantic eyes every day, they’re usually fleeting and focused. They want to receive their emails as quickly as possible. That opens the door for you to get those ads at very competitive prices. Note: You buy these ads from Google AdWords. In general, the less popular an ad channel is, the more likely you are to find low-cost CPCs.
#5 RevContent
RevContent ranks third after Taboola and Outbrain. Beyond the giant face of Steve Jobs on his home page and bold marketing that includes the word “manifest”, they try to differentiate themselves by focusing on some aspects of the user experience with their advertising widget. Just 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 tend to have deals in place with major publishers. Choosing Gravity over one of the others can come down to checking out their network of publishers. What is the best match? They advertise “1:1 personalized targeting.” We can translate that to mean that they put most of their efforts into tracking their users and matching them with ads. But this is a part of the algorithm for each network.
#7 YouTube Ads
YouTube can scare you a bit if you’re intimidated by the word “video” as it relates to the fact that you have to create it. But the YouTube network offers excellent ad targeting opportunities. As the property of Google, they collect a wealth of data about their users. So you should be exploring this network. If you absolutely can’t create videos, freelancers can do it for you on a shoestring budget. That video barrier is part of the reason you may see better overall CPC rates on advertising with YouTube.
#8
MGID is another one of the native ad style networks. You can get lower rates, but you have to monitor your results. You don’t want to pay for clicks on ads coming from bots. The smaller the network, the more vulnerable. Keep a watchful eye. It affects your profitability.
#9 Criteo
Critea claims that “machine learning” is the secret ingredient behind its targeting algorithms. Every ad network is constantly trying to find new ones to do it. It makes sense. By helping their advertisers get better results, they get more money from their 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 crunching, or are they building Skynet?