At Affiliate World Asia in Bangkok, Benjamin Yong spoke with Ralfs Smilsarajs about 7-Figure Native Ads Campaigns.

This post first appeared on the AWC Facebook Page.

AWasia Interview with Ralfs Smilsarajs, Media Director of Mobnx

Introduction

Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Hi, my name is Ralfs. I’m 24 years old, I live in Latvia, and I’ve been making money online since I was 16 years old. For the last three and a half years, my focus has been entirely on native ads I’ve generated 8-figures of revenue running on native ads and I regularly do over 1 million dollars a month running as a one-man army on native ads.

Focusing On Native Ads And Ecommerce

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Ralfs, so your presentation is focused heavily on native and ecommerce. That’s the combo, right? What made you gravitate this way? Was this solely because it was for your presentation or do you strictly focus on these two?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yeah, that’s a very good question. And there actually is a reason why I’m actually only focusing on native ads and ecommerce. It’s because I find native ads to be very stable in comparison to other traffic sources such as Facebook and Google. Literally, I can run the same campaign on native ads for many, many months —
Benjamin Yong:
?️ And your account won’t get banned.
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yeah, the accounts don’t get banned. The ads last for a very long time and all I have to do is just rotate the images every two or three weeks and that’s it.

And why ecommerce? Well, I focus mainly on three verticals. It’s e-commerce, health, and financial, but it’s all physical product. And the reason why I do this is, these are all whitehat-safe verticals that get approved by the traffic sources and they’re also broad-appeal offers. That’s very important on native ads because you have to get as many people as you can to see your ads, to notice your ads, and click on your ads, because the CTR is one of the most, if not, the most important thing on native ads.

100% Native

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, that’s good to know. Okay… since you are doing so well on native ads right, like, I mean you have to somehow supplement your traffic elsewhere. It makes perfect sense, that’s like the next thing to do. Okay, what is your split of native, like, you know?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
It’s 100% native.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, so why not diversify to scale?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yeah, I tried this but it just doesn’t appeal to my goals.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Right and it didn’t go that well or?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
It didn’t work out, although the campaigns got approved, of course. And I spent quite a lot of money there, I just wasn’t impressed by the results I got and most importantly, the fact that I had to actually sit in front of my computer and manage the campaigns because every day the performance would be different. It would be up and down, up and down, versus native, it’s very stable and I like to have freedom.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ It’s very consistent over time.
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
It’s very consistent, exactly, that’s the word. And I like to have freedom in my life and I feel like I can achieve all of the goals that I have by working on native ads. Now to supplement my traffic, I don’t only work with native ad networks. So I go directly and work with publishers, this is the way I can increase my scale.

You actually need to know the people. In order to get your feet into that company and start getting your ads hardcoded in a big name publisher.

Average ROI in Native

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, what would be the average ROI?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yeah the average ROI is 35-45%. So the average —
Benjamin Yong:
?️ 35-45%?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yeah.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Wow.
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Even when running at a very big scale.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Nice, that is considered as very good.
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yeah, I would think it’s good.

Building A 6-Figure Native Ads Campaign

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, can you just, maybe just give us some examples or some of the things that we can do if we want you know, to be able to build a 6-figure native ads campaign?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
First and foremost, you need a broad-appeal offer. An offer that everybody, man or woman, will click on and will find attractive. Something that everyone can buy. Like a gadget, for example. Those usually do very well and you can run at a very big scale doing that and what more is, always try to get your offer out there and target global countries. For example, if your offer is only running in the US, that’s only so — that’s nothing if you, like, there’s so much scale available in other countries. Europe, for example, France and Germany are so good these days. And there’s a lot of ecommerce products you can run there.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ So you are also trying to say don’t limit yourself just to US.
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Like, outside of US, there’s a ton of cheap traffic.
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
There’s a lot of opportunities. Especially in native, because there’s a huge comp — like, it’s very competitive in the US but if you’re targeting Latin America and Europe, even you can get very cheap clicks and you can achieve even higher ROI than 40%.

Targeting Different Countries

Benjamin Yong:
?️ So like, when you are targeting different countries with different languages, do you group them together like Spanish-speaking countries is going to be one campaign or do you just run one worldwide campaign where the ad sets are in English?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
That is a very good question and you have to do both. You have to target all the countries using English ads because then your ads get shown on the websites that are in English. Like for example, a news website can have both languages, local language and English and ads will be different on each of those versions and on native ads, especially, they have different placements for English-speaking countries and for the local people. So you always have to do both because if you don’t then you’re just leaving money on the table.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ That is a really, really good tip from you.
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Thank you.

US-China

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Next question would be, sustainability. US-China tax wall is not a concern? Is it like a big concern for you?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yeah, I don’t worry about it. Right now, it still works and I haven’t seen any changes from what I do. Maybe in the future, but right now everything’s good.

Getting CTR For Native Ads

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Okay, right. How would you think that for native ads, you’re going to get a high CTR often, and in fact, that’s what you need to – or, that’s a very key ingredient for you to make it work.
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yes, exactly.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Yeah, but how do you explain the lower conversion rate?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Lower conversion rate? It’s all about the picture and the headline. So if you, the way I do this, whenever I start testing a new offer on native, I always start by testing very targeted ads and usually, if the offer is good at least, it should give you a very high conversion rate and you should be making very good money from it but with a targeted ad, you will not be able to spend a lot of money.

The way I like to do it is combine both ends of the spectrum. So I would test targeted ads and I would test clickbaity ads and then I combine them both together in order to get the best of both worlds and then I get the perfect ad that gets me both high CTR, a lot of clicks, and it converts very good and I can run it on a big scale.

Benjamin Yong:
?️ I see.

Ecommerce Traffic

Benjamin Yong:
?️ Last question. So we do know that ecommerce has been really popular, especially for the guys that put in their products on Shopify. So how would you recommend if, you know, our friends from the ecommerce industry want to try out native. Do you recommend that they send traffic directly to the product page or do you recommend them to build a bridge page, which is aka landing page.
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
Yeah, you absolutely need a landing page. You need to —
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Like 100% of the time?
Ralfs Smilsarajs:
100% of the time unless you’re doing retargeting, then you can send your traffic directly to the product page but I highly recommend you use an advertorial and send your traffic to that.
Benjamin Yong:
?️ Thank you so much for your time, Ralfs. Yeah, thanks. You did great.