Will Targeting Specialists Replace Affiliates? Q&A with Targeting Specialist Roman Korchak

Hi! Affiliates started coming around 2019, when the betting niche really took off. Sports betting was trending hard back then, people were actively placing bets. I was driving traffic to Telegram channels for them, and they in turn worked with the audience, funneling them into affiliate programs, collecting bonuses, and so on. 

Of course, they set KPIs, but mostly around budget — they allocate a test budget. I run the test, then we move on to proper terms. There are usually no KPIs on conversions, because the people who come to me already have some understanding of how advertising works. If the quality is poor, we discuss how to improve it.

I call solo webmasters who come to me direct advertisers, because they handle their own product independently — they buy traffic themselves, run it themselves.

There was also a large buying company where I was a team lead. There I worked on a percentage of the budget. My main responsibility was traffic quality and volume. They came in with a ready-made working bundle, and I just had to scale it together with the buyers.

Most people come to me for nutra and e-commerce, but I've run everything you mentioned. Nobody asks me about other traffic sources because I'm focused on Facebook.

I don't work with black-hat stuff and scam. When it comes to offers, I only take legitimate ones — so I can sleep at night.

I usually work on a flat fee + % of budget. It's clear and transparent — more work means more pay, and we always discuss quality upfront.

Creatives are usually made by the affiliates. I provide a brief, and they either order from designers or share contacts. Sometimes I'll rework someone else's creative when I see it's a mess.

They can't make it work because they're not running big volumes (laughs). Those who run big volumes and know how to work across different verticals, who understand how marketing works — they don't whine or complain about "the Tsukervs." People come to me because I know how to build a team around their needs.

The best case was $70k in spend in a single month. I was working on a percentage of spend. It was a crypto infobiz project — no scam involved. Actually, a pretty interesting niche in affiliate marketing. The client mentioned he was an affiliate himself, just not running traffic on his own anymore.

The longest case — I worked on nutra/supplements for about a year, back before the full-scale war. And for the record, it was a real product, with certifications.

If the entrepreneur has a solid budget, those are exactly the kind of clients I enjoy working with. The main fear entrepreneurs have is that a single buyer won't be able to handle their budget.

Though I did have a client where we were spending around $250 a day — yeah, modest numbers, I'll admit. But he was thrilled, because before that he'd been working with an agency that couldn't properly scale the creatives. We ended up generating 6,500 leads at under $2 each on average.

Look, I honestly can't say there's much of a difference between these two terms. I always describe myself as a media buyer with an analytical mindset. And I know exactly how long it takes for a business to start performing and so on.

I don't really see any downsides to the collaboration itself — except for greed and a lack of understanding of the process. I always enjoy working on something large-scale.

A failed case is when someone came to me thinking that paying 10% of the budget covered all the costs — but that's only my service fee. I can't pay for agency cabs or cards out of my own pocket; that makes no sense. Now I warn everyone upfront and spell everything out.

On top of that, I've often run into greed and walked away myself. I really don't like being presented with a fait accompli. There was one case with a KPI on leads — the budget ran out and instead of 1,000 leads we delivered 950, because the cost per lead came in slightly above expectations. And they told us to keep running traffic at our own expense, even though no one had set a KPI on the cost per lead. We still managed to negotiate, topped up the budget, and parted ways with them.

They need to understand that the media buyer has to be experienced, and the affiliate also needs to have a grasp of the general processes — not just assume they'll be in profit by tomorrow. If they're ready to invest in advertising, they simply need to be on the same page. The main thing is to understand that affiliate marketing is a business.