What is quality traffic? Buyers have their own answers to this, and affiliate programs have theirs. And what will happen if they are compared and conclusions are drawn? This is what the One Media media buying team and the One Partners affiliate program have undertaken.
Vlad, Team Lead of Affiliates One Partners, and Yaroslav, Team Lead of One Media iGaming Team, shared how to identify low-quality traffic in the first minutes, which tools are best suited for this, and what other factors to take into account. This article will be useful both for buyers who want to understand how affiliates evaluate traffic and for aff-managers and AP representatives who want to learn more about the teams’ approaches to this issue. We invite everyone to read it!
Quality Control at One Partners CPA-Network — Told by Vlad
- What 3 quality metrics do you look at first before an up?
The number of FTDs is a classic, but only the tip of the iceberg; of course, it is important to look at Retention/LTV, even if the AP works on a CPA model, no advertiser will be happy with traffic where the first deposit becomes the last. Hence, the ARPU. Before an up, we must check the quality of traffic, average check, repeated deposits, and NGR. In short, volume, activity dynamics and quality retention are the indicators that decide your boost.
- What minimum volume of traffic do you consider sufficient for assessing quality?
50+ FTDs – this is the volume at which you can give a qualitative analysis of traffic at a weekly distance. With 10-20 FTDs, you can analyze, but a longer distance is needed for assessment, because even with 2 random bonus hunters, it is already minus 20% of the quality.
- What sources or formats of traffic do you not work with at all?
We work with FB, Google, TikTok, SEO, ASO, Influence, and In-App. What are often called “expensive” sources – but they are also the highest quality and the most timeproof. With One Partners, buyers freely use both PWA and Android applications. The latter, by the way, can be ordered from us for various needs – rent or buy. We do not accept push, pops, teaser, zero-cost, Telegram, X, or Threads traffic. We consider low-quality traffic (no surprises here) as motivated, fraud, having many chargebacks (if the product itself is of high quality, then it is definitely a mislead), and high-risk traffic in general. We look at retention and never rush to conclusions.
- What signals are set up to catch a problem in traffic earlier?
A very high CTR, combined with a minimum number of registrations/FTDs, quickly highlights the problem – it is clearly visible when users click with the same intervals. Such markers can also be set up by buyers in the tracker, not only AP. Another signal is the peak of traffic/deposit activity at an atypical time. Of course, it is different for each geo – you should not be surprised by spikes in activity in LatAm or Spain at lunchtime, because this is siesta – a time to relax. But really, when there are more deposits made at 6 am than at 6 pm, we cannot ignore it or attribute it to local peculiarities.
- What services help distinguish fraud from a “crooked test”?
Any good anti-fraud systems will cope with this: from FraudShield to TrafficGuard, proven trackers are also useful. The more criteria they highlight, the better.
Affiliate programs pay special attention not only to IP or behavioral factors, but also to fingerprints (for example, the service distinguishes OS and its versions, if the version is very old and there is a lot of such traffic, questions arise), transactions (here it highlights, say, the frequency of transactions – if there were many small payments made in a short period, then this is also suspicious), even account history. Currently, anti-fraud services are well developed, but human specialists are also involved here – AFDs, employees of anti-fraud departments.
- How do you make quality decisions when the buyer’s data and yours do not match?
At our AP, they are as simple to configure as possible; we always ask buyers about it. This is how many problems are solved. Of course, we contact partners, listen to their position, ask our questions, and only then make an objective decision. We treat this as a diagnosis; we never make unfounded accusations – it is, above all, about mutual respect.
Quality Control in the One Media Buying Team – Yaroslav’s Insider Tips
- Which tracker is better to use as the first filter for the quality of your traffic?
This is Keitaro and the lesser-known, but no less cool, cloud marketing platform AIO.
Its biggest advantage is end-to-end analytics, which lays out all the information before your eyes at once, without the need to open the tracker separately. The system itself selects the strongest offer according to a certain criteria – say, EPC, but constantly tests the rest and updates in real time; it allows you to see from “above” where on the way to conversion everything is well or not, where exactly the quality is sagging, even from the very beginning, and what is working as it should. Keitaro is very reliable – it deeply analyzes traffic, tracking sources, conversions, key metrics, providing valuable information and reports for making the most objective decisions.
- Which spy tool helps to weed out well-worn approaches?
There are few secrets here: we recommend choosing a high-quality spy that will cover the maximum of materials from those sources that the team actively works with, with a large number of filters – this way you can clearly understand what approaches competitors use and which ones you can adapt for yourself.
Tyver and Adheart are some of the best candidates. Tyver is great because it gets more than 92% of creatives from Meta, including those that have already been removed by moderation. Filtering by link identifiers is especially useful for our business. In Adheart, we track the duration, engagement, and type of creatives.
- Which service is the first to show an anomaly even before the conversion drops?
Ranking and scale coverage in AIO help: in the analytics section, it is easy to configure tracking of the necessary metrics and create a preset from them for regular use. Provides accurate reports with flexible filtering by geo, OS, audiences, etc. You can also rely on cohort reports: you can fully track a player’s path, when they entered, when they made a deposit, etc.
- Which services really save the budget on tests, and do not complicate the process?
Let’s return to AIO: it minimizes human errors and can handle any volume and any number of ACs. It is characterized in particular by machine learning, which is now a must. It greatly simplifies MVP testing, with results easy for anyone on the team to track.
There is a built-in landing page editor and the ability to change the creative directly. So the buyer can independently, without resorting to a tech specialist or interfering with the code, test several variants of landing pages with changes, say, three different title variants. And this will not require large investments of time or money. If necessary, you can add a server or domain in one click, and there is also a DDoS protection mode. An absolute win-win, everything you need in one place.
- What filters do you set before the first redirect, and which ones after the click?
Broader filters before redirection:
- Banning geo/suspicious IP groups
- Black and white lists of sources
- Blocking bots at the server level
After that, narrower ones:
- Analytics of behavioural signals
- Rule-based alerts in trackers, which usually concern conversions and clicks
- Identifying other anomalies in user behaviour
- How do you track changes in the quality of the same offer over time?
The first sign is a drop in conversions while the number of clicks remains the same as usual. You should not compare single points: what was a month ago and what is now, you need to look at the dynamics in this period, and focus on KPIs.
It is worth emphasizing: changes in the quality of the offer itself are possible, yes, but you should never forget to update advertising materials. If the buyer forgets to update the materials or does it irregularly, and the indicators fall, then the problem is not in the offer. The reason for the changes may also be seasonality. It was launched during the holidays, during the vacation period – everything was fine. People went to work, and it became worse. This is normal.
- What tool would you like to have for better traffic, but for now, you are replacing it with manual solutions?
If AIO (honestly, not advertising, just a good service) has everything you need for testing and optimizing campaigns and team landing pages, then we do not yet have a full-fledged service that helps get better traffic from the advertiser’s landing page. The ideal service for this should:
- Check speed and tech, mobile-first
- Track any changes to the landing page
- Track click/conversion anomalies, check redirects
Now, to cover all this, you need many different tools – from BrowserStack to PageSpeed Insights.
So, affiliate programs are focused on high-retention traffic and now have many opportunities to detect low-quality traffic across many criteria, from frequent payments to account history. Meanwhile, buyers without high-quality trackers (or platforms that include them) with a large number of filters to set up before the redirect are nowhere to be found today.
The key to successful, profitable cooperation for all parties is the professionalism and expertise of each party, as well as tracking market trends and knowledge of the best tools. When you know what to do, sincere trust arises between the CPA-network and the team, and then top results are not far off.
