noun: remnant; plural noun: remnants
1. a part or quantity that is left after the greater part has been used, removed, or destroyed.

So what is remnant traffic in the context of affiliate marketing? Remnant traffic – also called residual traffic – is any and all traffic that is coming from a traffic source you did not intent to use for the promotion of your campaign.

Every campaign has its own targeting metrics such as country, language, mobile carrier, and allowed vs. not allowed traffic sources. Apart from this, remnant traffic can also be generated by back button redirects, if your campaign gets paused by the advertiser without notice but traffic is still flowing (we’ve all been there!) or by redirecting the user when he/she clicks on the close-screen button in the browser.

In an ideal world you will only get traffic that complies with all these restrictions and conditions, but in reality a small portion of your traffic will not comply with the pre-specified campaign conditions. This can go up to as high as 10% in some campaigns but is normally only 1-3% of your total campaign traffic.

Its important to remark that the above described remnant traffic to your campaign is fully worthless to your advertiser as the advertiser does not accept this traffic, and hence will not pay for it.

Summing up the fact that the advertiser won’t pay for remnant traffic, and that this traffic can still make up a small – but nevertheless important – part of your entire traffic, one can easily see an opportunity is missed to make (more) money with your traffic and to optimize your entire A to Z revenue stream on a particular campaign.

A few companies have seen this gap in the market and can help you to monetize your remnant traffic. This can increase your revenues with 1-3% or even more, depending on how much remnant traffic your campaigns generally have.

As margins are shrinking due to increased competition in the affiliate marketing space, this can often make the difference between making money or losing money. At Chameleonads, we would recommend to work with theparkingplace.com or rookmedia.net to monetize your remnant traffic. These companies will rotate various offers on your remnant traffic and optimize them on eCPM so your total campaign revenues are maximized.

If you want to get more information about this, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email or skype.
Email: chris@chameleonads.eu
Skype: christoph_brughmans1