Whitelists and Blacklists - When to use them

As you might have noticed, in the past sections of this course we talked about optimizing campaigns and filtering out variables that are not working for us while buying traffic.

The process of filtering out or blocking variables is known as blacklisting. The initial idea is to launch a RON (run of network) campaign where you start buying traffic from all sites available that meet your conditions and then start blocking and filtering out anything that doesn’t make you money.

This process is simple and makes sense because you want to maximize the volume of traffic available in each network and keep working with as many websites as possible.

Also, by running RON campaigns, you get to test new websites that are being added to the traffic source every single day, to keep discovering new placements that work for your offer.

The downside is that you’re going to need big budgets to keep testing RON traffic all the time and some networks keep adding dozens of new sites daily. If your campaign’s performance isn’t great, you’ll have issues with this approach as it requires more money to spend.

The other option is called whitelisting.

By whitelisting campaigns, you essentially just run the traffic in placements or segments of traffic where you already know it’s going to perform well.

For example, if you start a RON campaign for an mVAS offer in Brazil and after spending $50 you realize your offer only converts on a couple of dozen websites, and for users with Android 8+ and Chrome browser, you could create a new whitelist campaign that only targets those websites and traffic segments.

As you might have noticed in this example, for you to have enough data to create a whitelist campaign, you first need to run a blacklisting campaign targeting all websites (RON) and segments.

A blacklist campaign feeds you with data to create whitelist campaigns.

Here are a few advantages of running whitelist campaigns:

• Your performance should stay solid as the variables are controlled and you’re not adding new websites every single day
• You can adjust bids in a more precise manner, as you’re just working with a hand or maybe a few dozen sites
• You can still blacklist sites from your whitelist campaign if something doesn’t work or stops working at some point
• Traffic is more controlled, daily budgets aren’t spent within minutes

However, dealing with whitelist campaigns can also have some disadvantages and they are kind of a double sword edge. Here are a few things that come to my mind based on my years of experience running CPA offers:

• Volume is limited. Your RON campaign could be spending hundreds per day but your whitelist campaign only spends $20 per day.
• Unless you keep running the blacklist (RON) campaign, you won’t see any new sites that could potentially be profitable for your offer as well
• Higher average bids as you’re targeting profitable pockets of traffic that could also be profitable for other media buyers
• Optimization is difficult when you have limited data

Overall, you can use both whitelist and blacklist campaigns in your strategy, but you will always need to get started with blacklist campaigns to get enough data.

In many cases, running a blacklisting campaign and keeping optimizing it every few days is better than running whitelist campaigns because you have more data to work with and enough volume to make your daily profits worth the hassle.

However, there are some times where you simply can’t make a blacklisting campaign profitable and in that case, it might be worth giving whitelists a try.

You can also use both strategies at the same time, one feeding the other. An advantage of a whitelist campaign is that it tends to last longer and requires less maintenance. And if you’re targeting sites with good volume, whitelist campaigns can be a very powerful strategy in your affiliate journey.