Affiliate marketing is a very competitive sphere, so it does matter where you will start, especially when working with paid traffic. You’ve probably heard a million times about so called tiers and the way they divide all the available GEOs.

One more thing that you’ll meet almost everywhere is that you shouldn’t start your way in the industry with tier 1 countries. It sounds reasonable, but is it always like that?

Let’s take a close look on different GEOs to understand why they’re divided into groups and how to work with them with affiliate programs.

How to choose right GEOs when you deal with paid traffic?

If you want to buy traffic for your affiliate campaigns, you should decide in what tier or tiers to work. There is a couple of ways how countries can be divided into groups. Various industries have developed their own approach to this.

Though, for affiliates it’s common to define 3 tiers. Every group of countries has some characteristics that put them all together. The most important here are the citizens’ purchasing power and available payment methods.

As you understand, tier 1 stands for countries, where citizens have high purchasing power and all the methods of payments are available for them. They are the USA, EU developed countries, Japan, South Korea, Canada etc. It’s the most pricey area to work with paid traffic, but the payouts are also very high here.

In turn, citizens in tier 3 countries have low purchasing power and less payment methods. Though, some of them work better than in any other region. For example, it might be carrier billing. A lot of affiliate programs have such kind of offers, which work pretty good in tier 3 countries.

If we talk about tier two, it’s somewhere in the middle. Medium purchasing power and most of payment methods available – that’s what you’ll get here. It also will be fair to say that the world is changing constantly and countries migrate between tiers from time to time.

Why you should first focus on lower tiers?

Well, there is a couple of reasons why you better start in tier 3 or 2 to than in tier 1.

The most important are:

1. You deal with paid traffic arbitrage, which means it’s crucial to spend money wise. In low tiers you’ll get much more volumes than in tier 1 for the same money. And the volume does matter. More traffic means more possible conversions and higher profits in the end.

2. “Big fishes” do not hunt here. Most of them believe that low payouts won’t deliver any decent profit. But they’re wrong, so use it in your favor.

3. Low tiers grow very fast. Every day emerge new users that are hungry for everything new in the Web. Be wise to hook them right and it will result in tons of conversions for you.

4. If you want to buy traffic for arbitrage, volumes are really important. Think about the amounts that such countries as India, Brazil, Mexico can give you. That’s almost unlimited source of possible conversions for now.

5. The market is low-regulated here or is not regulated at all. It almost always means more conversions. But it won’t last long, so use this as your privilege.

6. The market is rather young in low tiers and the competition isn’t sough tough. You’ll have a lot of free space where you can test, make extraordinary decisions, try something different etc.

What about tier 1 GEOs?

There are few reasons why it’s harder to work with paid traffic in the top tier.

Here are some of them:

1. You’re not the one in the industry who wants to make high profits here. There are a lot of affiliates, who are much more experienced. They’ve worked in this area for years and know a lot of tools and tricks that you don’t.

If you start as a newbie here, your campaign will be 99% ruined. Moreover, there are a lot of branding advertisers, who are almost impossible to compete with.

2. The rules in the 1st tier are more strict than in the others. It’s a high regulated sphere, so you won’t have a possibility to use any tricks that work in other tiers.

3. When you use paid traffic, you expect to get a good conversion rate for your money. Though, here the audience consists of experienced internet users. They’ve seen all these ads years ago, they often ignore banners and they’re very hard to surprise.

The market is full of CPA networks and thousands of offers, but you have to be wise to choose the right one for your current abilities as an affiliate. If you want paid traffic, start your way in lower tiers and then come to the top one.