What should marketers know about search and content arbitrage heading into 2025?
A recent Affiliate World panel that included Attila Odri, Haran Rosenzweig, Harnur Virk, and Hen Kinan shared answers and insights on this topic, including the latest tricks and tips to make it big in this vertical as you prepare for the new year.
What’s the Difference? 🕵️
Search arbitrage and content arbitrage are similar, but the distinctions are important.
Search arbitrage is a model where you capture lead traffic from display traffic, which could be any placement ranging from native to social platforms to search pages. This is closer to what most people think of when they think of online advertising — you run an ad, someone clicks on it, and they are taken to a landing page. Advertisers have specific budgets and bid amounts for specific keywords and verticals.
Content arbitrage, on the other hand, focuses on creating viral content that leads users from social or native placements to monetized sessions on a website, where you make money based on impressions by showing ads alongside more interesting content.
Emerging Trends 🔥
An emerging trend in search arbitrage is that advertisers are moving away from arbitrage from domains (AFDs), which monetizes traffic that is redirected from search result pages. Instead, affiliates are turning to related search for content (RSOC), which shows relevant search terms on website owners’ content pages. Google has gotten quite strict, and the traffic sources have been more welcoming toward RSOC.
Another trend that continues to emerge is the use of AI tools to improve and streamline processes.
Tools like Picsart and OpenAI’s Sora can be useful for generating videos or images, for example, but AI is even more beneficial for less glamorous tasks like keyword research. Prompting ChatGPT to provide the best long-tail keywords for generating click-throughs is a simple way to reduce research time and increase bandwidth for more impactful tasks.
That said, advertisers should beware of over-reliance on tools, including AI, that could create compliance issues.
One emerging issue is affiliates who are using competitor research or “spy tools” to copy high-performing ads and run versions of them as their own without proper vetting. Search arbitrage channels are constantly reviewing ads to ensure that they are in compliance, and if you copy and run ads that are non-compliant as your own, you face challenges with future placements that could include potential blacklisting.
Scaling Horizontally 🚀
Scaling horizontally is proving to be a successful strategy in search and content arbitrage.
In this method, advertisers create dozens of campaigns for one keyword, even duplicating creative across accounts to saturate the niche. Spreading budget across these campaigns makes it easier to identify winning assets and user segments, and monitoring those campaigns makes it possible to seize opportunities when they arise.
Winning Content ‘Translates’ ⭐️
Identifying winners cost-effectively is a never-ending challenge for marketers, and one successful technique in both search and content arbitrage is testing winning creatives in markets that speak the same language to see if they also work in those placements.
If a video asset converts well for audiences in the US, for example, it is also likely to work in other English-speaking countries like the UK, Australia, and Canada. Similarly, if a German-language video is generating revenue in Germany, the same video is worth testing in markets like Austria and Switzerland with minimal changes to the asset itself.
