010 - Search Arb Profits on Autopilot (How to Start)

Interview with Besmir Bregasi, Founder  TheOptimizer.io - The Automation platform for Native Ads / Facebook Ads / Tik Tok Ads / Google Ads / Search Arbitrage / Content Arbitrage

Get your copy of the Search Arb Bible here: https://theoptimizer.io/guides/searcharb

0:00 Intro
4:20 TheOptimizer presentation
5:19 Automations
5:52 Notification system
6:19 Creative Library
6:50 Campaign Launcher
7:05 How many search arbers use TheOptimizer?
9:40 The Search Arbitrage Bible
10:48 Is TheOptimizer mainly useful for native buyers?
12:05 No-brainer actions for Meta/TT
14:37 Is it risky to connect several business managers to the service?
15:45 Auto budget rules in practice
17:35 The future of arb, bright or gloomy?
18:42 Where to start buying traffic currently?
19:32 Besmir’s change from media buying to Saas
22:01 Keyword optimisation
24:20 Clickflare introduction
25:20 Why choose Clickflare over Voluum
26:48 Where to meet Besmir

Transcript

Martin: 0:00

today I'm here with Bezmir. Welcome to the show. Happy that you're here. When I was thinking about our session, there's just so much that we could talk about. It's like a matrika doll of, of topics'cause you've, you've done quite a lot. How about, how about you give us a little intro for the people that don't know who you are?

Besmir: 0:22

Sure. Sure. Sure. So my name is Vesmer. I've been part of the affiliate marketing industry since, I'll say 2008. So it's been quite a while, like six, yeah. 16 years. So I've started back in the days where everyone was running Google ads with ringtones. And from there it switched to Diet, Nutra, and I think I've been in every major wave. Is that so from the old PPV days, the toolbars, then when Facebook ads get released, I was one of the first to run on those adult dating, which was huge back in like 2011, 2012. After that mobile app installs. I'm not sure if some of you remember the days where everyone was running mobile genie and all these app installations, which were doing crazy volume. After that, we moved to native ads. I think we were one of the first to, to smash those. And we ran that for quite a few years and that's how,

Martin: 1:25

network was your first?

Besmir: 1:28

ref content. And then from there we moved to tabool, tabool, outbrain, MGID, ad skipper and every smaller one. I think there were, I don't remember the names now. There were a few smaller ones that now they're not even existing anymore. I think it was Engagea and ContentAd, ContentAd for sure.

Martin: 1:46

I remember Revcontent, you know, in the days when everybody was just trying to do as clickbaity as possible, I think Revcontent had the best ones. They had these mountains of money, and these, like, millionaires don't want you to see the secret trick, and so on. So, has a special place in my heart, Revcontent.

Besmir: 2:07

especially the info product on ClickBank. They were working really well back then.. So yeah, like I said, natives. We were doing quite a bit of volume. That was one of the reasons why we started developing this internal tool to help our media buying, which later turned into the optimizer, which some of the people who listen to the show probably know about. And then from there, our journey kind of stopped there of media buying, because we decided to focus on building the SAS products and from the optimizer. And the tracker came out, click flare, lender lab, and so on. And this is my affiliate marketing journey. Then on the side, when I was running campaigns me and two other guys, which, you know, Lorenzo and Jordan, we started STM, which used to be like the biggest paid forum for affiliate marketers, which grew into conferences of affiliate world the online one, ad world, and many more things related to that, like ice tech training, et cetera. So yeah, this is like a short intro of everything I've been involved in the marketing space, which It seems like it's been like forever. Yeah.

Martin: 3:10

And it brings back memories because when I started buying on Facebook, then I thought like, why don't I buy a guide, something to hold on to. And it was actually an iStack. Facebook tutorial. Yeah, that, that I bought just to like have a reference and help me, help me get going. So yeah,

Besmir: 3:32

Yeah. It's so funny when we, when we go to events and so many people I meet, they got their start either from STM or from a guy who posted or from a course because we released a few, so it's very nice to see, especially some of these guys that now are like totally smashing it, are doing so well, they got started because somehow they got into the industry from one of our articles or forum posts.

Martin: 3:56

But would you say that your main, your main baby now is the optimizer? Is that fair to say?

Besmir: 4:03

Yeah. 100%. Yeah. I mean, optimizer and the other products, but the SAS products are, are bread and butter these days. And that's all we do.

Martin: 4:10

So I think most people that view this know of the optimizer, but for the people that are not yet familiar with it, what's, what's like the elevator pitch about the optimizer?

Besmir: 4:22

So the optimizer is a tool that allows you to scale campaigns effortlessly. So basically you need less media buyers to do the same amount of work and more accurately. So the first thing it does, it aggregates all your spend and revenue data in one place. So wherever you're running, if it's like natives, Facebook, TikTok, you can see everything in one dashboard and you can see accurate data at the campaign level because it matches automatically on an ad set level and on creative level. So you always know how much you're making or losing on a certain campaign. The second thing is because a lot of people have no idea, like until they do their Excel sheet at the end of the day and like, Oh, like I'm losing money. Well, with optimizer, you know, like every 10 minutes, because it matches all the data real time.

Martin: 5:07

And that, that can take quite some time. In my early days, then there was also Excel sheet tinkering and matching up stuff. And so that's, that's of course handy when, when you don't have to do that.

Besmir: 5:18

definitely. The second thing that it does is automation. Which means that you can create strategies or automated rules that run 24 seven. So you don't have to keep refreshing your campaigns every 10 minutes and stopping, you know, things that are wasting your budget or underperformers or vice versa, scale profitable campaigns or ads that can make more money if you increase the beans or the budgets. So this is done via rules. They run every 10 minutes and you can be saved that, you know, nothing will go to waste from your budget. And the third thing is a notification system. So basically you can get notification on your phone, on your slack, on your email when certain things happen. So if an offers, you know, suddenly stops performing, or if a publisher is eating up all your budget, or if the spend is going too fast, like whatever you want to set the conditions, you'll get notification. Which is handy because even if you're not in front of a computer, you know, that something is not going well and you can take action. And the last thing is it has a creative library. So it's a central place where you can manage all your creatives across all traffic sources, like Facebook and Tik TOK and native ads. So no more need to, you know, to have all the shared Dropbox folders or Google drive folders. If you want to look for certain creative you use in the past, you can go to the library, you can go find it across with all its lifetime statistics. Even though that Facebook account, maybe it's banned and you don't have access to it anymore. It has all the data that creative, so you can start deploying it like right away. And the final thing, it has a mass campaign launcher. Which basically allows you to launch multiple campaigns very, very quickly across multiple traffic sources. We have it for natives and it's getting released for Facebook this month. So you can save a couple hours a day of manual campaign creation. This is like the main idea.

Martin: 7:05

Of your customer base, like roughly how many of the customers are search arbitrage guys? In percent,

Besmir: 7:13

I'll say these days, it probably like 40 or 50 percent these days because search art has had a huge surge, as you know, especially last year, I think we played a role on that when we did the meetups, which we made a bit more popular, but it's been growing people are making lots of money because it's something that can, can be, you know can be made into a process. If you know what you're doing and it's doing well, and from what I hear, it will do well also, at least for this year.

Martin: 7:47

Yeah. I mean, yeah, hopefully. Hopefully for a bit longer.

Besmir: 7:52

Of course, of course, of course, but because I hear people thinking that, you know, everything is crashing down, you know, and no, the sky is not falling back, especially now with the new engine. Now, I think it's, I mean, you, you, you can tell for yourself how long you've been doing search arbitrage.

Martin: 8:08

Yeah. Since 2009, man. And the feeling has been a constant one, that, oh, how much longer can this be running? So it's nothing new. And I'm not surprised that people that have gotten into the field recently, that the question pops up. But I try to encourage people whenever I can, just have, have trust in it. It's, it's been around for a long time. And I believe it will be around for a surprisingly long time. Still, of course, if you do it properly, there's many different ways to do it. There's of course always a temptation to cut corners, to be a little bit too aggressive. And then of course you can step on mines and you can experience clawbacks, but there is for sure a way to run it in a stable way over long period of time.

Besmir: 8:59

Even when we started, you know, when search arbitrage started increasing on our platform, which was like two to three years ago, everyone was saying, this is the last year it's dying. The more people they know about, but actually I don't see it going down. Actually, I think it's, it's going up speaking to the search feeds, speaking to the networks. And I even think that with the newest like changes that Google is making with our soul. It makes it more compliant and more user friendly. So I can only see it going up instead of down. So I wouldn't really be scared or surprised to see it for another 10 years.

Martin: 9:33

Oh, and one, one thing that I also wanted to lift up about. The optimizer is you have a guide that is pretty handy, like a pretty ambitious guide, like a 200 page guide for that like lists all the, all the different monetizers, how to set them up and it lists what's what can be done with your platform. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna put that in the description so that people, people can sign up for that,

Besmir: 10:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's a 200

Martin: 10:03

quite handy.

Besmir: 10:04

page guide. Yeah. I can send it, but it's a big one, as you mentioned. That's why we call it the search arbitrage Bible. It covers everything you need to get started from setting every feed up, tracking, automation, everything. And it's free. So you can just kind of read.

Martin: 10:23

Yeah. So, so the history of the optimizer is that it started out, you came from native, right? And then you expanded onto the other by side platforms.

Besmir: 10:36

Yeah. Yeah. So exact.

Martin: 10:38

would you say, because there's people watching that are heavy on, on native on each of the by side channels is the Is the utility, is it bigger for a certain by side channel than for others?

Besmir: 10:50

It depends. It depends. I think it's useful for all the channels, but in different kind of features. So not the same features that are useful for natives are useful for Facebook, for Tik TOK and Google ads and, and vice versa. So as you know, for native ads, there is a lot of traffic spread across multiple publishers and widgets, which can burn money very quickly. So the main use there would be. Having rules and automation. So you can pause this quickly and obviously when you can, you know, scale up the winners also as quickly because they don't stay out forever. So the main news there is the publisher blocking, creative blocking and campaign starts to pause. And also the mass campaign launcher, because on natives, people running search, I would create a lot of campaigns. So having a tool that automatically creates variations and combines creatives with headlines and different targeting options, automating that makes a difference because you can save a couple hours a day. So this is the main news.

Martin: 11:51

I was about to say it's a no brainer to run the source blockings without you're gonna, you're gonna be burned pretty badly.

Besmir: 11:59

yeah, yeah.

Martin: 12:01

Are there, are there equal no brainer automations for Meta or TikTok

Besmir: 12:08

Yes. So, as you know, we have the same rules for Meta and TikTok, but it's not really like a best practice. To really touch our campaigns often in Meta and TikTok because they do most of the optimization. So while you can start and stop campaigns via rules, which is handy because an optimizer, you can see not just the spend, but also the actual revenue from the search feeds, which help to make better decisions. So you can start and stop campaigns. I wouldn't suggest changing bids too often or budgets too often via rules. So this is not like the main use case, but. We have a certain kind of rule, which is called a cloning rule, which is not available on Facebook, which allows you to quickly scale winning assets. So for example, like if a campaign has a profitable ROI and daily budget, you know, hasn't been spent, you just replicate, replicate, replicate your rule. Or anything that's basically is winning. You give it more chance by replicating. So maybe it gets other placements and other pockets of traffic, which can be better. So this is one use case. And the second one, which is a big problem for everyone running meta is mass campaign creation, which we're releasing this month or hopefully by the end of February. And this has been like the most requested feature by our users, because. I heard from many, many people with media buying teams that they waste two to three hours a day just creating campaigns, because as you know, like on metal, the, the, the name of the game is. Finding your stuff and just uploading them quickly and testing, testing, testing, testing.

Martin: 13:45

Yeah.

Besmir: 13:46

on TikTok, when we'll be releasing like the campaign creators, also the same importance because as you know, on TikTok, there is a high burnout of creatives. So you need to like Produce and upload quickly.

Martin: 13:59

Yeah.

Besmir: 13:59

This is what we've been working on. And the last thing for Meta is the fact that a lot of people that have multiple accounts for many different reasons, and they don't want to connect them together. They can see everything under one or four optimizer and they can change everything from there. So I don't need to log into like VPS or a hundred different tabs and like remote desktops, et cetera. They have everything there. They can start, stop campaigns, change beats. So basically all the campaign management is done under the optimizer roof instead of logging separately, which is a big benefit for people handling multiple accounts.

Martin: 14:31

Yes. A hundred percent. And for people that are worried about, say they have several business managers and they're worried about that Meta might see a connect between the business managers, if they're all imported into the optimizer, is that a valid? Thing to worry about.

Besmir: 14:52

No, because from experience, this is one of the reasons that white people also use it because there was never an issue and maybe they had issues, you know, by maybe logging in by mistake without connecting to a remote desktop or a VPN or something. But with optimizer, we never had that issue. So I'd say it's really safe. Like in three years that we had Facebook meta, we never had one case saying, okay, like I got banned because it made a connection.

Martin: 15:21

We talked about bare minimum of optimization, roughly for, for native and you mentioned that perhaps optimizations are not, it's not the same game on, on TikTok or Or meta. Instead it would be that you clone campaigns that, that are, that are successful.

Besmir: 15:43

You can, you can always scale budgets on that on tick tock via rules, which is also important. For example, like if the ROI is bigger than 20 percent and the spend is not. Reached like the campaign budget, then you can double your budget. You can double your visa increased by 20%. So all these kinds of scaling rules are really useful and you cannot really do this on Facebook rules natively because you don't have the revenue data on the feeds match accurately.

Martin: 16:12

When I managed campaign managers in the past, that was like one of the most common things to that I had to like be on them about like, Hey, this is a winning campaign. Please make sure to scale it. You're leaving money on the table. Or the other way around. It's also good with hard rules. If you're losing money, that you that you stop the campaign on time. It's super easy to like get attached to a campaign and think like, Oh, maybe next update, it will be better. And then you just end up losing money day after day.

Besmir: 16:38

No. And I also suggest to people to kind of have like a strategy before even starting the campaign. Like for example, the same as a stock market, when you buy stock, you need to have like a stop loss strategy. Like if it goes to this level, I'm selling it no matter what, when you are actually called and not attached to the stock or campaign. So just, you know. When I launch a campaign, I'll create the rules on whatever platform doesn't have to be optimizer. So you have some key metrics that you have to stand by, then no matter what happens, even before launching the campaign, you know that when a campaign reaches this status, it's going to either get paused or scaled automatically. Or so you don't, you know, as you said, get attached to it and just end up burning a bunch of money that you don't have to.

Martin: 17:17

yeah. It sounds like it's an easy process, but I see a lot of people failing that yeah, they hope for something to change. So, okay. That's, that's really good. So you touched a little bit about, we talked about this, that there's been a vibe like, oh search orb, how long, how long will it survive? And maybe it's not as good as it was in the past. What's your take on it?

Besmir: 17:40

To some of the people on our platform that I talked to, which are really big users, which are spending like over a million a month on the various ad networks. I mean, they said December was their best month ever. So it's really surprising because usually it isn't. I see more and more people, not just joining the optimizer and using it, but actually like spending quite a bit. So it can not be a bad sign. People are spending money and making money. Like I definitely don't see it dying anytime soon. Plus, as I said, like with introduction of RSOC, it feels like it's way less spammy, like, or better. It provides better user experience. So it should do the opposite actually. Increases it's life, it's life expectancy because it's more user friendly. There's content on the page. There's value being provided. So as I said, I see being here for a long time.

Martin: 18:33

If you compare the different bi side channels if you would recommend someone, like, that wants to get into the game

Besmir: 18:41

Yeah.

Martin: 18:41

what would you recommend that they start?

Besmir: 18:44

This change very often, but when search arbiters start first started getting big, big, at least on the optimizer, it was mostly like native ads. Like everyone was doing native ads now native is still a big chunk, but there was a shift. Let's say six months ago towards Facebook Meta and Tik Tok. And now the last two months, it seems it's mainly Meta and Tik Tok. It's still there, but there is a very high creative burnout rate. So you need to like refresh creatives very often, which means you need to have a good and efficient designer team to pump them out like fast so you can test them quickly and replace them.,

Martin: 19:28

How did you go from, you run your own campaigns, and you have the thrill of the ups and downs, to coming to that decision that, no, I'm gonna, I'm going to provide tools instead. I'm going to step out of the game and I'm going to provide tools. How, how was your thinking there?

Besmir: 19:45

I mean, for me, since I've been in the marketing game for many, many years. At a certain stage, it wasn't anymore just about making money and don't get me wrong. Like money is very important, but after so many years of just like going wave after wave after wave, I just want, you know, to test myself into something different because I like to challenge myself from time to time. So it was a marketing. We did, I stuck in the conference on the side, which is a business we exited. So I said, okay, I want to try now the SAS game and see if you know, I can provide value there and build a good company. And. That decision automatically came with the other decision that I cannot run campaigns because there'd be a conflict of interest if I'm building a SaaS that all the marketing industry is using. And you know, it wouldn't be just fair that I'd also keep running campaigns on the side when I have, you know, information and I know the trends, et cetera. So there we made the decision with our team. So, okay, we're switching a hundred percent from being affiliates to being service providers. So we're going to develop these three products, which are still in the internet marketing scene, and we will try to build like, you know, like a big proper company out of this. And that's how it started when it was like five, six years ago. And since then we haven't touched any campaigns apart from, you know, test campaigns to test the tool. And that's about it.

Martin: 21:06

That must have been difficult.

Besmir: 21:09

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. From time to time, like I run, because we run Facebook campaigns for our tools. And I do like some little split tests and it sparks the thing in me. Ah, this is so nice. Seeing like just one headline, what a difference it makes. And we ran quite a few on our internal tools, which I'm probably going to share like on the email newsletter, like some very simple ones, but it's insane to see the difference, what a headline and four emoticons just made. It was like 50 percent increase in conversion rate, just adding little things.

Martin: 21:37

Yeah, I love that. I love that. I love, and that you, you know, you can build a hypothesis and then the next day already you see, were you right or not?

Besmir: 21:46

Like immediate gratification. You get to know right away if it's going to work or not, like in a couple hours in a day.

Martin: 21:53

yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We spoke recently and then you touched on keyword optimization a

Besmir: 22:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Martin: 22:07

would you like to expand a little bit? Is that a part of the, the optimizer or?

Besmir: 22:11

Keyword optimization is one of the main things that people do to optimize their search arc campaigns. And this is a feature actually not on the optimizer, but on ClickFlare, which is a tracker that It really integrates with every major search field there and everyone that is running search, I think every major players using it from what I see. And we added this feature, which is automatic keyword rotation. So what it does, it automatically rotates keywords for you, a bunch of curious to enter, so you can see on the tracker side, exactly which one is really like, you know, working. And probably again, at the end of February, we're going to release also the automatic optimization, which will automatically, you know, Optimize which keywords perform the best. So you don't even need to touch it. And this is one of the things that one of the main reasons that a lot of people actually use click there just because, you know, they don't want to spend time, do it manually, append on the URLs, encode it, decode it, adjust it on a text box. It'll do everything automatically.

Martin: 23:17

And that's another thing for people running a team

Besmir: 23:21

Yeah.

Martin: 23:21

I, I see. They also have to hunt after the campaign managers to remind them like, when did you do the last keyword rotation? Unless you have an automated tool. How are the, how are the keywords ranked, are they ranked on, on RPC or RPM or, is that a secret sauce?

Besmir: 23:40

Yeah, I mean, on the, on the automatic weight one, we are doing something internal, which we have basically used something that we've learned from seeing like many. You know, years of data, how, how it's been done, like in the best possible way. So it's going to be like an internal thing, but yeah, all I can say, it works pretty well and

Martin: 24:01

mm,

Besmir: 24:02

apart from the fact that you don't have to remind your account managers, it just like, it just works.

Martin: 24:08

yeah. So ClickFlare, is it fair to say that ClickFlare is a, it's like a competitor to Volume? Yeah,

Besmir: 24:19

a full blown tracker for affiliate marketing and a lot of people these days are using it for search arbitrage just because it's the only tracker in the market that integrates natively with the search feeds. It has a keyword rotation feature. It will have a keyword automatic optimization. And it, we keep adding search arbitrage related features because we are so deep in the field and we know exactly what people need. So we are the first to add things and maybe like other trackers and we'll try to add them later on. But yeah, we are basically like, yeah, leading into innovation because we have a deep knowledge. Of search arbitrage, but a lot of people just use it for basic affiliate marketing. No need. It's not just a tracker for search arbitrage. It can do everything. Like if you run diet or lead gen or e commerce, it works perfectly fine.

Martin: 25:08

And someone that's thinking like, Oh, should I, should I sign up for volume or for click flare? What would you say? What's the

Besmir: 25:15

I mean, I am biased here, but first thing I, I'm not sure what volumes latest pricing is, but I think. You save quite a bit of money with using QuickFlare and it has the same features and a few more so you get all the search arbitrage integrations, you have the keyword rotation, and another thing that QuickFlare has that no other tracker has is It's a built in tag manager. So if you are familiar with Google's tag manager, you can do everything from within QuickFlare. So you put our script and then you can rotate scripts. You can catch via JavaScript, any kind of event or elements. So let's say like you want to track, I don't know, like a form submit or a link click or a page scroll. Which is by the way, it's very, very useful if you want to, if you're running native ads and you don't want to wait for a lot of time to gather like conversion data, because it can spend a lot of money, what you can do is. Optimize based on time spent on site or scroll depth, which are very important metrics, and it will cost you less money because you will gather this info quicker than on, on less amount of money spent compared to waiting for conversions. And let's say if you're running, I don't know, e commerce or like diet, which conversion is like 80 bucks, a hundred bucks, you would need to spend like over like 80 bucks per publisher, which is not sustainable, but if you combine a mix of landing page CBR, scroll depth, time on site. Which you can get this data from Qwikflare, we have a tech manager. Then obviously you will make faster decisions and save quite a bit of money.

Martin: 26:48

If people want to, like, hang out and get to know you, are you going, going to any of the upcoming conferences, sir? Mm

Besmir: 26:56

going to Dubai, which is end of February, I think. And going to be there for a couple of days. So yeah, I'll be happy to. Meet anyone that's coming. If you're coming, it'd be great to meet you also.

Martin: 27:09

have a beer. We'll have a beer in

Besmir: 27:10

Yeah.

Martin: 27:11

Pretty sure I'm coming. Yeah.

Besmir: 27:13

Cool. And yeah, I'm thinking about next one in Budapest, but yeah, it's in June or July, so still some time left, but I think I'm going to be there too.

Martin: 27:23

I don't like to plan a hundred years ahead. I often decide like a couple of weeks before if I go or not.

Besmir: 27:30

same, but I have a tendency to go to the affiliate world because like there is this. Emotional connection because we created these conferences, we founded them. So I, I enjoy going there and just like meeting people,

Martin: 27:40

Yeah,

Besmir: 27:41

the staff, et cetera.

Martin: 27:44

Cool. Hey, this has been super nice and I think quite very useful for, for many of our viewers to get to know you a bit better, to get to know your services a bit better. It's also always great to get High level view of what the industry as a whole where it's going and like the success that still takes place and will most likely take place in the future as well.

Besmir: 28:06

for sure. For sure.

Martin: 28:08

And and, and also I think it's also great for people that are relatively new to see that there are people like you and me that have been been around for many, many years. There are for sure there are waves, but just because there are waves, it doesn't mean that. that it's going to end or so, you just have to ride them and find a way to, to get, to have success despite the ups and downs, and maybe even to learn to like the ups and downs that are there. Yeah.

Besmir: 28:36

should just accept that this is part of the game. It's totally normal. Even like the super affiliates that sell courses or they've been around for 20 plus years. It's the same for everyone. There are ups, there are downs, but the key is just to stay consistent. Be on top of it. And something always comes out. I mean, it's, it's a huge industry. People think it's like so small, it's a niche affiliate marketing, but it's huge. I mean. See being for so long and also seeing data and optimizer, you'd be amazed at the amount of people that's consistently spent over like a million, two million months for years, not just a month or two, a few good months. So it tells a lot.

Martin: 29:13

A hundred percent. So Besmir, thanks again. This has been great. And perhaps we'll do it

Besmir: 29:18

you, Martin. Happy to be here.