The following is a repost from our founder’s blog

Every time someone clicks on your ad you have an opportunity to monetize them. But as the famous adage goes, “there is more than one way to skin a cat click”. As such I am going to go through a few of the popular ideas as well as some of the off-the-beaten-path ideas we know about. Because heck, in the ever-competitive world of media buying, knowing a few extra tricks up your sleeves can be the difference between positive ROI or negative ROI. 

#1 Get them to buy something

Probably the most traditional way to monetize your click. Using amazing copy to allure your clicker to part with their hard earned cash, because who wouldn’t want another tactical flashlight, right?

#2 Get them to view ads

“You won’t believe what happened to these 14 celebrities” or “32 dirty secret that airlines don’t tell you”…

Seen one of these clickbait titles and then proceed to scroll through a never-ending barrage of slideshows that are littered with ads? Well, that is “traffic arbitrage” in which they’re trying to spoon-feed you as many ads as possible, so that the revenue you generate from viewing ads is greater than their cost of your click.

#3 Collect Their Emails

You entice your clickers with the promise of a “free ebook” or a sweepstakes competition so they will give you their email addresses.

Afterwards you can:

  • Get paid because the page is an offer page from another advertiser
  • Sell the email to a 3rd party (because that long disclaimer that people rarely read says you can)
  • Send them emails over the course of 30 days in which you try to sell them stuff or get them to view ads…

Heck, I could probably start an article on “more than one way to skin an email” so let’s not start. But anyhow, you get the idea.

#4 Collect Their Push Subscription

If you don’t know about this already you might be living under a rock as it is one of the fastest growing segments of media buying in 2019.

Similar to the email collection process above, except you collect push subs and can monetize it in a similar way. Only caveat is that it only works for Android phones at the moment (or any desktop).

#5 Collect Their Phone Numbers + Physical Address

Phone numbers, physical addresses? Oldschool eh?

But actually phone numbers can be used for SMS and callbacks. Whilst physical address can be used for snail mail (yes, these still exists). There’s definitely a demand for this type of information (assuming you can resell them).

Anyways same concept of collecting email/push subs but just a different back-end monetization.

#7 Retargeting Pixel

Any good marketer will know about retargeting and using pixels to build these campaigns. What isn’t as common is the idea of actually reselling this information. 

So, say you’re running an ad to collect emails with a weight loss lead magnet. What you can do is place a pixel on your page so that you can retarget them with an ad on Facebook if you wanted to. But what you can also do is then rent this out to a 3rd party, such as someone selling a weight loss diet, so that they can run targeted ads to your audience or create lookalike. 

Not the most cookie cutter way and also requires more work, but if you’re driving a lot of volume, every ROI increment helps.

#8 Monetize the click to the bones

So the click came in and did what you want, such as leave their email, but what now? Are you going to just say “thank you for subscribing” and let them ride off into the sunset? Hell no.

You should try to send them to another offer, or sell the traffic off to someone else, or to a remnant traffic source which leads me into…

#9 Monetize Remnant Traffic

You set up an ad for US and somehow a click from Mexico came in – it happens. You can either send them to your standard funnel (where you’re trying to collect emails of US people) or you send them to a service that monetizes remnant traffic. That way, the one click that was originally -100% ROI might just become -90% ROI (it adds up).

Same concept goes for repeat visitors as well (since you don’t need the same email twice).

Final 2 Cents

As cats have nine lives I thought nine ideas would be a good place to end this on (also I’m submitting it this for the Binom contest as well which is limiting to 5000 characters which I am also reaching). 

My final two cents would be to try and get a good tracker that can help you track all these methods. Pretty sure there isn’t a single tracker that can track everything, but a good one can definitely make life a lot easier (and there are plenty of creative hacks you can deploy to work around these issues).

That’s all from me – until next time.

Yours truly,

Sushiparlour