Arbitrage Strategy: Where to Buy the Cheapest CPC Ad Clicks

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 touch up wax and rip job. My goal is to let you know 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’ll put it on 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, the professionals who achieve this have a simple formula:

My total ad revenue from paid traffic > My total ad spend

The 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 you actually make it work. That means finding a way to earn more than you spend on ads.

Here are 9 Ad Networks With 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 might 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 making 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 focus 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 cost-per-clicks.

#4 Gmail Ads

Gmail ads are text based. While Gmail has all kinds of frantic eyes every day, they’re usually 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 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 “manifesto,” they try to differentiate themselves by focusing on some aspect of the user experience with their advertising widget. Like the others, it’s a great idea to try them out.

#6 Gravity

Gravity.com is also in the referral business. Each of these networks tend to have agreements in place with major publishers. Choosing Gravity over one of the others may come down to checking out their publisher network. What is the best match? They advertise “1:1 personalized guidance”. We can translate that in the sense 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 you having to create it. But the YouTube network offers great ad targeting opportunities. As a property of Google, they collect a vast amount of data about their users. So you should be exploring this network. If you absolutely cannot create videos, freelancers can do it for you on a minimal budget. That video barrier is part of the reason you may see better overall CPC rates in 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 ad clicks 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 make 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 gathering and number crunching, or are they building Skynet?