Affiliate Marketing Projection for 2023

Hello,

Dear Pushground friends.

Many of us have had a hard time in the last few years. The future of affiliate marketing is bright despite the global Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the inflation and gas crisis in Europe in the past year. It appears that living in a war and post-pandemic time brings new difficulties to how we live and work, which has led more people to work in the affiliate marketing industry.

The affiliate marketing trends are changing, so you need to keep up with them, or you might be left behind.

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The amount of money spent on affiliate marketing is increasing

Higher payouts and more traffic costs are something we can expect in 2023. Affiliate marketing is expected to grow in 2023, which will lead to higher budgets from advertisers and larger campaigns. The US affiliate marketing industry will be worth around $8.2 billion by the end of 2022, an increase of more than 10% compared to 2021, according to some information. If the trend continues, we can expect $9.0 billion spent on affiliate marketing only in the United States in 2023. Almost 80% of businesses in the US use affiliate marketing in some way.

In Pushground, we have observed that the average spend per top-up and the CPC prices are increasing compared to the last few years. It looks like media buying and affiliate budgets are growing.

Pro-tip: In 2023 you can test higher CPC prices on your campaigns, 10%-15% higher. Especially for the Tier 1 & Tier 2 Geo. The higher CPC will be compensated by higher payouts and future rate bumps. 

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What are the repercussions for media buyers from larger budget allocations?

Bigger budgets mean more opportunities. This means more media buyers and publishers, more revenue, more competitive offers, and more affiliate marketing agencies. 

Most probably in 2023, you will pay more for traffic. Nothing to worry about. Pushground has a feature that helps affiliate marketers avoid the risk of spending their whole budget within minutes, ensuring that their campaigns continue to run smoothly. 

How this feature helps your paid push ads campaigns? It prevents your campaigns from getting too many visitors at once and from spending too much money too quickly. You can leave your campaigns to run without anxiety because you are covered.

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Media buying and affiliate marketing will be changed by automation and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence and automation have helped businesses make big leaps forward in innovation. It saves media buyers and publishers hours of sorting through data. The list of affiliate marketing trends in the year 2023, includes automation as a useful addition for many businesses.

Pushground offers rule-based optimization for media buying campaigns, which you can use to make your campaigns profitable faster. 

You will be able to take control of your campaigns once you set up a few rules. 

You can stop your campaigns from burning your budget and still make money while you sleep. Pushground can help you scale your affiliate marketing business in many ways and automation is just one of them:

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In the screenshot above you can see different rules examples – change them according to your needs, budget, and offers POs, or add your rules that are appropriate for the given campaign. 

Automatic rules can help a lot, but they can also hurt your campaigns if they are not set up properly. If this is your first time setting up auto-rules, we recommend starting with a duplicate test campaign. This will ensure that you don't accidentally pause all your feeds. 

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What are the best practices for using auto-rules and auto-optimization?

1. It is easy to cut off too much traffic when testing a new rule, so we recommend you check to see how much traffic has been cut off.
2. Use conversions, ROI, and spending to stop poor-performing offers automatically.
3.  Poor-performing supplies, user age groups, and offers can be blacklisted using spent, conversions, and ROI. 
4. You could increase your bid for high-performing supplies using win rate combined with spent or ROI.

More examples of winning automatic rules can be found here

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What are the places where you can learn and expand your skills in affiliate marketing and media buying?

A business conference, friends, affiliate websites, and even those loud guys on YouTube bragging about how much they made this month, are just some of the places we've heard about affiliate marketing.

There are many places to get information about the topic of affiliate marketing, even if you first learn about it:

1 Our blog is the best place you can start and receive free lessons and useful tips and tricks.

2 AffiliateFix forum is a great place where you will learn the basics for free

3 You can learn a lot from your own past campaigns' mistakes.

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Which tools will media buyers and affiliates need by 2023?

“Which tools do you need to be successful?” is a question we are often asked by our publishers.  The answer is simple: you only require a few tools to keep the profits coming in.

Without an affiliate ad tracker, you are unable to track why your campaigns are losing money or where you are making money. We recommend to any media buyer use a tracker. An article about why using an ad tracker is mandatory for our business was written by our partners from Keitaro tracker. 

If you learn what works well for your vertical or niches, you can use it to create winning formulas, or even automate to bring you more successful campaigns. However, without access to an affiliate ad tracker like RedTrack or Keitaro, you would be unable to understand why your affiliate marketing campaigns are performing well.

In addition to the tracker, you should research whether you would benefit from using a landing page builder, a spy tool to take a peek at your competitors, and possibly some creative tools for improving ad copy and creatives.

You will need to decide for yourself what is best for your affiliate business after your first campaigns. 

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Affiliate marketing will continue to grow in importance in the coming years, and here are the verticals you should keep an eye on.

One of the most sought-after answers in the affiliate marketing industry is “what's working?”

Thus, we made a list of niches that are working for Pushground publishers in 2022, and we think they will continue working in 2023:

1  Antivirus vertical – it’s always popular among our publishers. Read more if you want to try it.

2 Gambling (including Casino and Sports Betting) – maybe one of the best verticals to make money with. It is the perfect time to start with sports betting because of the FIFA World Cup 2022. Read here how to craft your winning campaign.

3 Dating (Mainstream and Adult) – for sure, the dating vertical is evergreen. Plenty of media buyers bank hard with it. Have a look at the best Geos for starting dating campaigns. 

4 Sweepstakes  – one of the best verticals for new media buyers. If you don't know how to promote them, learn some tips and tricks from this material

Of course, these are general niches and a micro niche could be found for many of them. These are the best niches for a new media buyer to use, and they are the fastest way to be profitable with paid push ads. 

By looking at what has worked in the past, we can predict some aspects of the future of affiliate marketing.  Some trends of the media buying business will fade, but we are sure traditional ad formats such as push continue to make profits for affiliate marketers.

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