Financial offers and Influence traffic

Influence traffic is becoming an important trend in affiliate marketing. It's the opportunity to "softly" promote offers, work with a loyal audience, and most importantly, bypass the moderation of almost all major advertising platforms. In our new article, we tell you everything you need to know about influence traffic: how it works, how to choose bloggers for cooperation, and what metrics to use to evaluate advertising campaigns.

What is Influence traffic?

In affiliate marketing, influence traffic refers to users who land on the advertiser's landing page from a blogger's platform. These can be social media accounts, vlogs, Telegram channels, etc. The advantage of this type of traffic is that it allows you to promote any offers: finance, gambling, dating, etc.

In affiliate marketing, influencers are typically divided into groups based on the size of their audience:

• Microbloggers — authors with an audience of 5000 to 30000 users.
• Bloggers — authors with an audience of 30 000 people.
• Opinion leaders — accounts with over 300 000 subscribers.
• Media personalities — celebrities with an audience of over 600 000 subscribers.

Typically, the highest level of engagement is found in accounts with up to 30 000 subscribers (12-16%).

Sources of Influence traffic

Any blog on any platform can be a source of influence traffic. Instagram* is considered the most popular platform for promoting bloggers. Although the social network itself is banned in Russia, cooperation with influencers is still an accepted format of work.

Telegram, YouTube, and Twitch also convert well. However, Twitch primarily attracts a gaming audience, so financial offers are better adapted to the gaming niche. For example, you can promote loans for gaming computers and consoles.

The essence of working with influence traffic looks like this:

1. The influencer publishes a promotional post with a link to an external resource. This can be the advertiser's landing page or the webmaster's landing page.
2. The user clicks on the link and performs a target action on the new page.
3. The webmaster processes the traffic, verifies the leads, tracks conversions, etc.

How to choose an influencer for financial offers

You can find influencers for financial offers either independently or through specialized agencies. There are many platforms on the market for this, such as LabelUp, Perfluence, Getblogger, and so on.

If you don't have experience working with influence traffic, it's better to work through agencies. For a small commission, they’ll help you find a suitable blogger, analyze the market, and formalize the contract. Many services act as guarantors and can refund your money if the influencer fails to fulfill their part of the agreement.

Rules for working with influencers

If you are planning to find and establish contacts with influencers on your own, be sure to follow these rules:

• Consider the influencer's reputation. Financial offers require a high level of trust from the audience towards the blogger.
• Check the blogger's account for fake followers. Focus not on the number of followers, but on their quality and level of engagement with the content.
• Analyze the blogger's target audience; it should be relevant to your financial offers.
• When choosing a blogger, focus on your target audience profile rather than the blogger's niche.
• Before starting cooperation, ask the author for recent account statistics.
• Create a detailed technical assignment for the influencer. Involve the blogger in the process of creating the assignment to better address the pain points of your target audience.
• Check reviews from other clients. It's great if the blogger has reviews from advertisers in your niche, but it's not essential.
• When working with major bloggers and large sums, split the payment into "before" and "after".

Methods of working with Influence traffic

The primary method of working with influence traffic is direct cooperation with bloggers. However, many webmasters go beyond traditional formats and start their own blogs. In this case, they themselves act as influencers.

Personal blog

The most expensive way of working. The webmaster starts a channel on any platform, builds an audience, creates unique content, and gradually begins to monetize the channel by sharing links to offers.

Fake account

This is a quicker way to monetize, but it’s less suitable for financial offers. The idea is that the webmaster creates a fake account showcasing a luxury life, where they share how they achieved such success. For example, they took out a loan from bank X to create their own coffee shop.

Content copying

This is the cheapest, quickest, but unethical method. The essence of the method is that the webmaster creates a fake account and copies posts from a real influencer into it. Then they start posting advertisements for their offers. However, since copying someone else's content without the author's consent is considered a violation of the rules on all popular platforms, such accounts are quickly banned.

How to formulate a technical assignment for a blogger

A detailed technical assignment simplifies the work for both the webmaster and the influencer. This way, the blogger understands what content is expected from them, and the webmaster won't have to make 40 revisions.

To ensure that working with the influencer brings maximum profit, create a technical assignment according to the following rules:

• Don’t write content for the blogger, and don’t limit them in creating content. They know their audience best and understand which formulations will have an impact.
• Specify the goals and objectives of your advertising: what you want to achieve, how many link clicks, loan applications, etc. The influencer should understand the minimum expected from them.
• Describe the offer in detail, specify its unique characteristics, bonus features, for example, "0% commission when applying for a loan by the end of the month". Specify any conditions from the advertiser that may affect the influencer's work.
• If you already have some developments on triggers, include them in the technical assignment and ask the blogger to focus on them.
• If you plan to "buy" one post, try to combine engagement and recommendation. That is, first talk about solving the problem, and then tell the user story.

Pros and cons of working with influence traffic

Influence traffic works well with any niche and on any platform. There is no strict moderation and serious restrictions for advertising campaigns. In addition, influence traffic means:

• loyal audience;
• repeat monetization of traffic;
• high ROI;
• technically simple method of traffic generation.

The main drawback of this type of traffic is delayed results. Unlike targeted and contextual advertising, leads can come even a month after publication. Other cons include:

• constant search for new bloggers;
• promotion mostly occurs in the funnel;
• some advertisers don’t accept influence traffic as they consider it scheming. 

How to evaluate the quality of Influence traffic

When assessing the effectiveness of influence traffic for financial offers, you can use the following metrics:

• Conversion rate. Helps evaluate how many users who visited the landing page completed the target action.
• Cost per acquisition (CPA). Calculated by the formula: total advertising costs with the blogger / Number of conversions.
• ROI (Return on Investment). This metric helps understand how much money you earned relative to the costs of influence advertising. It can be calculated by the formula (profit - expenses) / expenses * 100%.
• CTR (Click-Through Rate). Shows how effectively the influencer influenced users' decision to take action, such as clicking on a link, applying for a loan, etc.
• Reach and impressions. Reflect the scale of the campaign and the visibility of the influencer's content in the news feed.
• LTV (Lifetime Value). Indicates the long-term profitability of the acquired lead. For example, how often they apply for a new loan or credit.

Conclusion

Influence traffic is an excellent way to attract a warm, loyal audience. The main thing before starting cooperation is to check the reputation of the blogger because for advertising financial offers, a high level of user trust is needed.