005 - Mastering Search Arb with Voluum: Tips from a Seasoned Pro

Voluum is a cloud-based performance tracking software that many search arbitrage actors swear on. It tracks, optimizes, and scales all your ad campaigns in one place. TheChopShop's very own Matthias Müller has sent hundreds of millions of views through the system and breaks down the pros and cons and what he thinks are the best search arbitrage use cases for the tool.

Transcript

Martin: 0:00

okay. so you notice that this time around I'm not chatting with Henry. I'm chatting with my very dear to me business partner, Miller. Good to have you on the show,

Matthias: 0:13

It's my

Martin: 0:14

I brought you on today because you know your way around Lum and I thought, why don't we share your extensive knowledge on this platform to people that are on the fence about if they should use it. Maybe it would be good to first define if there's someone watching this here that doesn't even know what loo is. How would you explain it?

Matthias: 0:36

It's a tracking platform. And what does that mean? It means it gives you an interface where you can see. All sorts of information about the campaign that you're running, about the traffic that it gets, about the performance that it shows. You can break it down in nice reports and you have like a cockpit if you a campaign cockpit where you can track and therefore manage your campaigns. Which is handy. But again, you don't have to do it that way because you already have your campaigns in say, Facebook, say TikTok anywhere you want, you already have'em there. You don't necessarily have to send them through something else. But to make it more straightforward, it's a good idea to send it through a tracking platform and like we've come to appreciate vol over time.

Martin: 1:28

So when you introduce Lum, you send the traffic through a tracking domain, which then redirects it to your end destination, IEA part page. If you are into search arbitrage, and by going this extra route. You're gonna get extra information about your traffic that you wouldn't get otherwise if you don't have something measuring the whole thing.

Matthias: 1:52

Exactly.

Martin: 1:53

Also, Lum it has two parts. There's also the DSP business where you can buy traffic from Lum. This is outside of the scope of today's session. We're just talking about how to use the vol tracker for search our purposes, what pros and what cons. There basically and how to use this extra information that you get through the platform. So yeah. So what would you say, what's the, what are the major benefits of introducing vol practice? What did you like the best?

Matthias: 2:31

ease of campaign analysis because you will have one place where all your campaigns live, by the tracking mechanism. And you'll see'em all in, in one place in a nice reporting view. Imagine, you have, you're on Facebook traffic, you're on TikTok traffic, you on native traffic. You can also see all your campaigns there, but you have to log into three things. You have to keep three things open. Maybe you don't wanna build a dashboard. For yourself. Might as well plug everything into balloon and you'll see all your campaigns and you'll see all the results and a ton of more a ton of additional useful information And all that for a moderate monthly fee.

Martin: 3:16

I would say, if I would just list one advantage, my main advantage versus going like direct without any trackers is that Lum allows you to send the traffic to several different parking providers within one campaign and it allows you to change the waiting. Of the traffic between providers because say that you're a customer at CDO and at Tonic, we found that the performance for whatever reason, is not always constant. Sometimes historically, CDO has won. Sometimes tonic has won, or if you introduce further, of course the picture just gets broader. And if you have hard coded into your campaign. A domain that points to a specific parking provider. It's much more tedious to make changes quickly if you see performance tips. And also you won't be able to continuously measure the performance of the, like the different providers for your campaign. So you could, for instance, if you find the winner. Say that tonic is the win winner, you could still send 5% of the traffic to see though, just to keep your finger on the pulse and measure. Have they improved their game somewhat. That's something that gives me peace of mind if I know that I can act quickly. This is for people that run a lot of campaigns. Of course, if you just run a handful, it's manageable. Also when you go. Direct,

Matthias: 4:53

Yeah, but like the, some people would say, yeah, I do that in a more aggregated way by, just, pointing five total campaigns in a certain area to CDO and one campaign. Very similar campaign. I'm pointing to tonic and then I don't need the, I get that, the breakdown on the campaign level. I guess the real the real use case is that it makes it easier, especially when you run a lot of campaigns and also especially when you have, campaign managers, at least a few additional hands working on those campaigns so that these people can log into a central place where everything lives. And not everybody has to log into the TikTok account all the time and so on. And that's where it gets really handy. So if already, if you're two people, it will pay off because it's much easier for two people to see and handle things in loo rather than going into, logging into Facebook, TikTok, and friends all the time.

Martin: 5:52

And what about the extra data that you get about your traffic? What kind of data points have you found the most valuable?

Matthias: 6:00

I like the geo data that you can, in Then here comes like first example of of an additional of additional information that can be very useful. Say you're on a campaign in the us and you're on all 50 50 states. Voluma allows you to set up a rule, whereas it, it can detect which state, like it allows you to set rephrase. It allows you to set up a rule that depending on which state the traffic comes from you can determine where that user is being redirected to, right? So you can have, you can easily have a different lander for every state. And Velum does all that for you. And all you have to do is, click through the states one by one. So you have to click 50 times. Yes. I don't know what comes first? Alabama. Alabama. oh, here's the redirect link I want to use for Alabama. And then what's next? Alaska. Oh, here's the redirect link I want for Alaska, and then probably Arkansas. You do that 50 times and boom, you have a campaign. That is geo-targeted, it took you five minutes to do.

Martin: 7:09

So maybe some listeners of viewers will wonder, why would you go through all this work? What's the benefit of going more targeted by state?

Matthias: 7:20

Of course, you can have then on your lander, you could have, state specific ads or state specific offers. You can have on your land, if you take the New Jersey traffic then you can have the offer for New Jersey on your land. But you don't have, what you do not have to do is in TikTok, you don't have to go to TikTok and say, oh, gimme New Jersey. Only because. That's just gonna

Martin: 7:42

Hey, you don't wanna do that?

Matthias: 7:44

just gonna confuse the TikTok algorithm. And if you go to the Facebook and say, oh, please segment it for me though, they're just gonna charge extra on your traffic because that's, that's how they make money by every little feature that you add. And I think that's, one of the greatest things that Martin and me here, that what we have seen and continue to see in this industry is that. if you keep it really simple, you have a very good chance at success. And by really simple, when you make a campaign in Facebook, you don't, you don't choose or activate anything. You just go, Hey Facebook, here's the campaign. Here's money, here's the URL. Run Wild. No, I don't want any targeting. Just gimme anything you want to give. Me and the same goes for TikTok because.

Martin: 8:34

That's a great point that you make because I attended a. A mastermind about search arbitrage in Barcelona. And then I heard, yeah, people exchanging thoughts on how to run campaigns and the main thought I had was like, oh my God, you're making it so complicated. Everybody's trying to be like Einstein of arbitrage and introducing 50 different variables. I was just thinking of myself, if you do it new, how? We run stuff. And what volume? It's crazy. It's that's something that it takes courage and discipline to keep things simple. I would I would, that's, yeah. I Roll with your recommendation. That's, try it.

Matthias: 9:14

Yeah, so

Martin: 9:15

that. It has worked out for us to keep things simple.

Matthias: 9:18

Yeah. And then, we've even like a, we don't use it that much anymore, but I I had this idea in my head for a long time, and it's there's this, there's three questions I have to ask myself and be able to answer positively. Whenever I'm doubting, about what I do and the meaning and everything. So

Martin: 9:35

I love it. We get philosophical.

Matthias: 9:37

get,

Martin: 9:37

It's not only about.

Matthias: 9:38

Yeah. It gets. Yeah. If you run an online business, anything, first question you should ask is, does it make money? And then, second question you should ask is it easy to do? And the third question you should ask is, does it make money? Because the second, yeah, you're laughing. The second time you're asking, does it make money? That means. Does it make money at scale? First it has to make money. So you even go okay, I consider exploring. Then it has to be real easy to do, but it makes sense to explore further because if it's difficult, look, anybody can do difficult things, right? And then the third point is after you've established as it makes money and it's easy to do, the third is like you have to reestablish that. It makes money at scale, and then you have a wonderful business.

Martin: 10:31

Yeah.

Matthias: 10:32

And it's good for people who are like me, like who are not like hyperactive because it allows me to say no to most things. Out of a thousand things I hear, I probably say no. 999 times.

Martin: 10:47

Yeah that's a good, it's a good approach. I agree with that. Maybe that's our business partners I just wanted to get back to this tip about going state-wise. I wanna make sure everybody understands the idea that say you run a dental campaign and you need to set your Rs or your keywords, whatever you call them, on the part page, if. If you set dental implants, you're gonna make some money. But if you set dental implants, New York for instance, there's gonna be advertisers ready to pay more for that because that's of course a signal for the advertisers that, ah, here's a customer that's willing to buy my product. That's also in my area for dental implants. It's quite important, right? You can't take a customer from California if you're a dentist in New York, or you can, but there's a lot of hurdles. It's not so likely that you close. Close the sales, so you're gonna make more money with localized keywords like product specific sometimes. And of course you could use wild cards at tonic, for instance. You can introduce wild cards. But then you're, you can be more granular because the top keyword with a location might be different in New York than it's in Texas. I. On the topic of keeping it simple, I would maybe not recommend take all the states, but maybe take your top five or top three and see what happens with with your RPMs and you can then send them to, to a separate domain so you can really see what's the difference of the PM that I'm getting. Is it worth it to to do this?

Matthias: 12:23

Yeah. On that on that topic. Also here, if you want to keep it super simple and you don't wanna overanalyze things like say you have dental implants or senior living whatever it may be something that has a local, where the advertiser should have some, a local aspect, right? Like, how much work is it? Say you work with C, even if you work with cdo, like to register 50 domains, it's not a lot of work. It takes what? It takes two minutes. You enter the domains, like you have a, you add it at the end of the domain and that you choose, you add the state name, then you have your auto settings in the registrar. Go to cdo, right? That's it. And then you just set this up in vallum. As I said before, every state gets a different link. and then you get it. There's no, there's not gonna be any gray zone. It's black and white. You will see from this state, I'm getting this result from that state. I'm getting that result. And it's just, you have broken down it to a campaign level and after three days you're gonna say, okay, look this makes a lot of sense for the bigger states, maybe, right? For the smaller states, it doesn't. I might as well just pause traffic from the smaller states or lump it all together. Do something like that, and you have very easy, a very easy analysis without having the wrong, complicated reporting.

Martin: 13:47

Dude here's another thing. There's some campaigns out there where you can make money by just buying globally. Facebook likes it when you give the algorithm free hands. So you could then buy globally and then use velum to put the proper keywords for each of the, OR to begin with, to see which geos to even get

Matthias: 14:09

Yeah, exactly.

Martin: 14:10

and then adapt there. There. I think it would make a big difference to adapt the

Matthias: 14:14

Yeah. But that is the exact case that we were describing. Remember, like we said, we do not want to ask Facebook to break it down into 50 states. No, we buy global. Then Vol Balloon breaks it down for us. And we see the result. Like then we see, okay, in New Jersey we get this in Alabama, we get that and so on. And after that we can make up our mind what happens if we lump all the stuff that we're not even interested in. Maybe we lump it together and if it, if we lump it together and it breaks even like who caress, then you focus on the stuff that

Martin: 14:45

No, I meant even

Matthias: 14:45

Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Country

Martin: 14:47

specific.

Matthias: 14:48

Yeah.

Martin: 14:48

Then then the RS difference or the need for specialized RS is higher. No. Lovely, lovely. What else? Yeah, you can, you get to see what time of day you are, you're getting the traffic you get to drill down into the different OSS and devices, what's your desktop and mobile and so on. And that in. The more info you have, the better. Then dependent on where you're buying from. If you buy from Facebook, you're. Quality traffic, but there's sources, especially if you're in the affiliate game, then where some are completely worthless and that helps you identify also which ones should you cut. Yeah, it gives a bunch of extra insights into what you're buying What would you say are the main drawbacks with using balloon?

Matthias: 15:37

It's an extra step. You'll have to, you'll have to manage it. But I think there are the workload that goes into it outweighs the the results that you get out where is a little bit of extra work that you have to do.

Martin: 15:51

Yeah.

Matthias: 15:53

Then, you could say, okay, velum is in the same holding company as as tonic. Tonic is more of a, like a German invention. Velum is more like a Polish invention. They shouldn't really exchange anything because that's, there's a privacy privacy issues. Some people are paranoid. That's there. And then, more fundamentally I think is that there are still instances where traffic sources give you a bit of a bonus if you don't run via tracking, where, you know, if you put the endpoint as the. As a designation, URL, you get a, they like it. The algo likes it often.

Martin: 16:40

We bought from Facebook for a long time and the vibe from Facebook is different at different times now. It's been calm for a long time, but there were times, say the Cambridge Analytica scandal for instance, where there were very. borderline paranoid with their advertisers. And yeah, there were times when we felt like let's just keep it again as simple and straightforward as possible and remove the tracker in order to avoid getting shut down. So in this game, you never get the 100% proof or receipt like, oh, this was a good choice. Facebook likes it, or, we just thought let's be extra

Matthias: 17:19

Yeah, but I think you can, if you take For argument's sake, you say there's three major components of the business process. It's the buying at the source, it's the redirection to the sale and it's the sale. I think, in the cycles that the industry goes through, there are times where it's all about the buying and it's all about, say the creative work. And I'd say right now we're in a phase like that. It's all about the creative, right? And the more it is on about the creative, then, the less it is about how does it get redirected and how does it get sold. But there were also times where it was not so much about creative, it was all about how do you sell? If it's like that all the redirection already, becomes a little more interesting. right? If you want to know, if you need to tweak more how to sell, the more you need to know at the end of the process the more the middle of the process becomes

Martin: 18:22

Yeah.

Matthias: 18:22

interesting. So best to know all the aspects, right? Like we're sitting here today and we can say, okay, like right now we're in this, we have a, like the simplicity of the process right now, rules again. There were times where even we had to maybe we should make it a, like we should look at adding a little bit of complexity.

Martin: 18:42

Yeah.

Matthias: 18:43

so it comes in phases. Right now it's the creative is king. As long as you have the right creatives, it does not matter so much how you redirect. But there will come a time,

Martin: 18:55

true.

Matthias: 18:56

there will come a time where it's gonna be more about. Where and how you sell. And at that point, because you're at the end of the process, then the middle of the process becomes really interesting.

Martin: 19:07

Yeah. It if you're not familiar with a tracker and you, in search arbitrage, I would definitely recommend trying it. When, if we reach a stage where more knowledge and more splitting of, more like where the redirection of the traffic gets more advanced. That's a good point. And there's not only vol out there, there's click flare for instance is is a similar tool. We haven't worked with it. From what I read and here seems to be doing the job as well just to lift up another tool in case you would wanna try that. What? What else? What else should be, should said about using it? Oh yeah, here's a point. We've been talking. Again, the theme is keeping things simple. We are talking about a case where we buy the traffic and send it directly to a park page, directly to the search ads. There's a lot of people out there that by with an interstitial in between it's lovely business model can also work. We do it as well. We've done it a lot. And if you use a content page slash interstitial, call it whatever you want, then I find the use case for Loo goes up because it lets you dependent on the campaign that you're buying from it. Like several campaigns can then share the same article and it will inject on the fly the links into your, redirection buttons to the to the park page. If you don't have it, like a very rudimentary approach is then to duplicate the page again, with hardcoded links to each parking provider, much less elegant, much more work. We've done it. But with Lum, you can then, for every campaign that uses the same article, use the same page and just let Lum do the work to. The right link for each session.

Matthias: 21:18

Yeah, that's very true. I think that's a good point because it shows that once you add just one level of complexity in your General, business Immediately you kinda, you see how useful it can be to actually rely on added technology to make your life easier, right? For us it was always a bit of a it was a step that we had to, willfully consider, because we wanna keep it super simple. But as soon as, and that's, I think it's a really good example as soon as you're leaving the realm of mega simple, Okay, then we have to think yeah, then things are getting complicated Yeah. And and I, trust me, I don't ever want to leave the realm of mega simple, sometimes it happens. And I know there's a lot of people out there who have never entered the realm of mega simple. But yes once you have an additional step in the funnel it does make your life easier because you don't want to set up a hundred different digitals with all the linking and, to combine it into one campaign and to be able to manage the several paths that the user can take on the interstitial, you don't want that. So for that, I think that's actually the. The best example of where Vol balloon can shine. It's when you have something in between the source and the endpoint. Because now looking back at our conversation, if you keep it mega simple then you don't really need to look. You can use it if you want to.

Martin: 22:50

it's not a must. It's not a must, but, you'd still, you should still have knowledge about the tools out there because times are changing in the ARB landscape. It's different now than it was a year ago, and it will be different next year. That's for certain that there will be change, constant change. We don't know exactly how, but might as well be ready so that you have all the tools at hand if there's ever a need to get more granular. For sure.

Matthias: 23:19

Yeah. And There doesn't, I think I wanna stress one more thing. It's that we've always liked Vol Bloom because it really had a reasonable price tag. And I think it still does, right? Is that, that when we were first looking at trackers like a long time ago, so there were products out there, they would charge you like thousands a month. Like for what? then you could have, and you could have loom like a simple balloon plan that, it's in the low hundreds or something, right? So it's like it's very reasonably priced. All right. And if you're not a purist of oh, I, all my data has to be in my shop all the time, and look, that also comes at a cost. So if you are, if you can be flexible and appreciate and embrace the fact that our industry is volatile and ever changing, and you better move forward than trying to, look what has been just give it a go. Try it out. And you'll see very quickly whether it adds value and it's not a, it's not a huge investment at all, and it's simple to use.

Martin: 24:22

Here's another use case. So people that don't wanna keep it as simple as possible. say you want to test a hundred keywords, which would would make sense to test a lot, right? Some verticals have a lot of interesting keywords. You can do that with lum by duplicating the offer and just changing what keywords you pass. So that's one way. To introduce complications, but it could very well pay off in the beginning at least. So you research what, what actually gets clicked, and you could also experiment with in what order or the keywords displayed, which also is relevant and might bring performance boosts to your campaign depending on how deep you want to go.

Matthias: 25:07

And if you're open with, with your data or at least you don't care so much. Who sees what you're doing is, I think you shouldn't care because it's ever changing anyways. You can make, loo can be your, fully fledged reporting system because you can in, you can insert via a parameter on your source, URL. You can, you know where the traffic comes from. You can insert the price that you paid for that redirect. And then at the same time, like plugging in the conversion tracking from the sales side, it either or tonic. You can have The the RPC value or whatever you want to calculate on how much revenue you're getting for that redirect. Those two can come together in vol and you have your reporting system.

Martin: 25:51

That's right, dude. I think I think we made a nice little intro too. Is there anything you'd like to add apart from that?

Matthias: 26:04

No, I think it's, I think it's a very useful thing.

Martin: 26:07

Good, good. So if you, found this this episode helpful, entertaining, or terrible, whatever it might be. Let us know on YouTube. Comment down below if if you're there already, if you're not, just search for this name and subscribe to us so you don't miss out of all the search or knowledge that we have gathered throughout all those years that we've been active. Some people call us crazy that we share all this incredible knowledge with you, but hey. We're here only to make money. We're here to give back also. So join us and let us know that you're here'cause it makes us very happy.

Matthias: 26:43

we're happy to contribute to the good Times, Ciao.