Tips for starting work with a new GEO
There can be many reasons for changing geos: your favorite profitable offer getting suspended, your desire to expand your horizons, or you coming across a very tempting offer in a specific and rare (for our niche) country.
Change is always a risk. You can prepare for risks and get to a new GEO without any problems! We will tell you how to do this together with invited experts in this article.
GEOs in affiliate marketing
In each affiliate network, when choosing an offer, they set a list of countries from where they accept traffic. If this information is not available, be sure to check with the manager so as not to accidentally lose your budget. Don’t be shy to ask for advice and tell them which countries you’ve worked with before. This way they will help you with the selection and tell you about the nuances of work over there.
Beginners with small budgets are often advised to start with Tier-3 countries. It is believed that the threshold to enter is low, and getting approvals is relatively easy. But you can drain your budget in any GEO. After working for some time, gaining experience and saving money, many people want to expand their horizons. And such changes have many advantages.
First of all, you get a new audience that doesn’t know the product. They are not yet accustomed to the ad campaign approaches you are working with and are more likely to show interest in the offer.
Secondly, competition is low, the bidding auction is not overheated and you can get traffic at an attractive price.
Thirdly, you can try new traffic sources that were previously unavailable.
What influences the choice of GEO
When choosing countries, you can rely on your own experience (if you have it), advice from experienced colleagues and managers of a proven affiliate program. But it’s better to start from a combination of factors:
Traffic source and budget. Make sure that you can carry out the necessary tests and that the affiliate network accepts traffic from your source.
Market analysis. Study statistics, capacity, competition, popular offers and approaches.
Target audience. Consider the country’s demographics, interests, ability to pay, cultural background, and language.
Legislation. Yes, it’s also better to check this aspect; perhaps the country prohibits promoting a niche or using your promotion methods.
Current situation in the country. Fires, earthquakes, national holidays or major sporting events can have a significant impact on traffic.
Basic mistakes
It would seem that everything is already clear, so it’s time to drive the traffic and collect the profit. But for unknown reasons, when advertising, you may experience getting close to no conversions. Then it’s worth checking and making sure that you haven’t made these mistakes too:
1. Not studying the market enough. Let’s say, you learned something about the country on a very basic level, did not adapt the ad campaign approach and launched advertising in the hope of a response. Unfortunately, even if you worked with a similar audience, the behavior of residents of another country cannot be identical. Dig deeper, adapt materials to suit your needs and take into account all current factors.
2. Wrong approach to traffic. You may have chosen an ineffective source that generates expensive or untargeted leads. Perhaps the landing page and creatives do not attract the audience due to poor optimization and lack of sufficient A/B testing.
3. Small budget. There may simply not have been enough money spent for tests, the audience didn’t have time to engage and such data was simply not enough to analyze the advertising campaign.
How to make a new GEO work
Imagine that you want to work with Austria. First, study general information about the country, look through the cases of other affiliates in your niche. Assess how popular the area of offers you want to market is, and what kind of competition there is in general. Analyze solvency, cultural characteristics, language barriers.
Note even small details for yourself. For example, the Austrian dialect differs from classical German, but this is only noticeable in spoken language. You can use German in slogans and advertising texts. 93% of the population uses the internet, even older people are accustomed to online orders. This means that drugs for joints, blood vessels, and dietary supplements for health will be in high demand here.
Go through the audience’s pain points in detail. Local production of the product is important for residents, and this is worth emphasizing. 60% of the population are overweight, the highest rate in Europe. It turns out that weight loss drugs are in demand here more than ever.
Look at what prohibitions there are in advertising. Is it possible to use celebrities in creatives? Doctors? Regarding mentality, Austrians trust locals more, but are wary of foreigners. If you use images of people in your creatives, choose their appearance especially carefully.
When you have completed the main analysis, proceed to designing creatives and running tests. Tests are the most important stage of work. Even little things can affect the conversion rate: the color of the button, the location of the text, etc. Take a look into spying services and see what your colleagues are doing.
Analysis tools
To make your work easier, you can use GEO analysis tools.
Google Trends will help you find out what your audience is currently looking for and what queries they are searching for.
Search Console Insights will tell you how site visitors find content published on it and what materials users like the most.
Country Comparison – here you can compare several countries at once, better understand the mentality and determine the source of traffic.
Semrush will analyze search results, links and advertising, great for working with the foreign segment.
Knoema is a world data atlas where you can find out all the important information about a country in a couple of minutes.
Expert view
Evgeniy Toporkov, founder of the ZeonAds agency, affiliate since 2016, owner of the “Arbitrazh iz topora” Telegram channel
Testing a new GEO is always tempting because it could potentially multiply your profits. But all this will come later, so first the tests, they must be carried out correctly.
At the start, types of tests are usually like this:
1. You know an offer that converts well in another GEO.
2. You at least know the working approaches and creatives in that exact vertical you’re choosing.
In the first case, you launch the same creatives and use the same approaches on the offer. It’s good here that you know that the offer definitely works, and so does the ad campaign approach. All you have to do is find out what the economy will be like in a given GEO. Therefore, use a calculator and your knowledge of mathematics and count the numbers, or use this sheet to summarize the economy.
In the second case, you will have to do a more extensive test and spend much more money on it to identify a working offer in a given GEO.
Take at least 3 landing pages, 3 transit pages, 3 approaches, and 3 creatives for each approach. And at least spend twice of the approved lead prices for each of these threads.
Conclusion
Success in a new GEO is the result of hard work, analysis, constant testing, and optimization. Don’t be afraid to try new things, believe in yourself, and you will definitely achieve the desired results!