Margin Decline: Competition, Tools, and Pop-Under Traffic

In 2025, the arbitrage market has become much more competitive: more players are running traffic to popular offers, ad platforms are tightening their rules, and traffic costs continue to rise. All of this directly impacts margins — maintaining the same level of profitability is becoming more and more difficult.

If you work with traffic, you’ve surely noticed: tests are more expensive, funnels burn out faster, and results are unstable. But this doesn’t mean there are no prospects. In this article, we’ll break down why margins are falling and which tools help compensate for the drop in profit.

Why Margins Are Falling in 2025

There are several factors directly reducing arbitrage profitability.

Rising Competition

Popular verticals are getting crowded: too many affiliates are running traffic to the same offers. The audience gets tired of creatives faster, funnels burn out in just a few days, and the cost per lead rises. As a result, test expenses increase, while profit per conversion decreases.

Increasing Traffic Costs

Ad networks work on an auction model: the more bidders fight for impressions, the higher the CPC or CPM. At the same time, offer payouts don’t grow. It’s simple math: traffic purchase gets more expensive, while income stays the same.

Declining Quality of Alternative Channels

In the past, expensive social networks could be offset with pushes, teasers, or lesser-known DSPs. Today, these sources convert worse: the audience is exhausted, and fraud rates have grown. Clicks may still cost less, but leads don’t cover expenses, and the campaign fails to break even.

All these factors add up to one outcome: costs are rising, and net profit per unit of traffic is shrinking. Margins are dropping even for those who keep their volumes stable.

How Affiliates Compensate for Margin Loss

Falling margins aren’t a death sentence. Experienced affiliates look for ways to offset rising costs and focus not only on volume, but also on efficiency. It’s important to use tools that allow you to find working funnels faster, squeeze maximum value from every lead, and, when necessary, connect more affordable traffic sources.

Spy Tools

Spy tools are services for analyzing competitor ads. They show which creatives are currently running in networks, which offers are converting in specific GEOs, and how other affiliates are structuring their funnels.

Their main value is helping save on testing and launch funnels with a higher chance of turning profitable.

With spy tools, you can:

• find fresh creatives and adapt them for your audience;
• study competitor landers and pre-landers to build more effective funnels;
• track offers just starting to gain traction and get in earlier than others;
• see which GEOs deliver the best results for certain funnels.

Right now, affiliates most often use tools like:

• Adplexity — for native ads and pop-under traffic analysis;
• Anstrex — a versatile tool focused on push and native;
• PowerAdSpy — for Facebook and Instagram Ads;
• BigSpy — for TikTok, Facebook, and mobile apps.

The spy tool Adplexity allows affiliates to track competitor ads through a convenient interface

It’s worth using spy tools not just for copying funnels, but as a source of ideas. By drawing inspiration from others’ finds and adapting them for your audience, you reduce testing costs and keep margins intact even as traffic costs rise.

Funnel Optimization

Rising traffic costs inevitably make affiliates pay closer attention to every click. In the past, you could “outspend with budget” and break even through sheer volume. In 2025, a different logic applies: every touchpoint with the user must deliver maximum impact.

What to consider when building funnels:

• simple, fast-loading landing pages, especially on mobile;
• clear call-to-action above the fold;
• A/B testing of forms, headlines, and visuals;
• localization for specific GEOs: language, cultural specifics, local payment methods;
• additional steps to boost average check — upsells, subscriptions, retargeting.

Funnel optimization directly affects margins. Suppose you buy expensive clicks, but every second user drops off due to slow page load. Fixing technical issues increases conversions without additional traffic spend. The same applies to upsells: a well-built offer structure lets you earn more per user and offset higher acquisition costs.

This means investments in funnel analytics and testing pay back faster than endlessly searching for new cheap traffic sources.

Pop-Under Traffic

Pop-under is an ad format where a new window opens beneath the active browser window. The user sees the ad when closing their current tab or switching. Many consider this format aggressive, but it has advantages that keep affiliates actively using it even in 2025.

Pop-under ads appear in a separate window behind the active browser window

Why pop-under traffic is useful:

• low cost compared to social media and search campaigns;
• rapid scaling: you can generate thousands of impressions in a short time;
• wide reach, including in GEOs where other formats are too expensive or unavailable.

Where the format works best: gambling, adult, service subscriptions, utilities. In these niches, volume and speed matter more than fine segmentation — making pop-under a great fit.

But the format has downsides: lower traffic quality in part, high accidental click rates, and the risk of bans or complaints from users. To keep campaigns profitable, affiliates use filtering, limit impressions by GEO and device, and combine pop-under with other channels.

The key value of pop-under is that it helps preserve margins through cheap traffic buying. Even if conversion is lower, the funnel’s overall economics can remain profitable thanks to the low CPC.

Keeping Margins in 2025 Is Possible

Margin decline is an objective reality for arbitrage in 2025. Competition is growing, traffic costs are rising, and cheap channels are losing efficiency. But this doesn’t mean the market is closed. Those who can leverage spy tools, optimize funnels, and connect formats like pop-under continue to earn.

There’s also another element that makes all these tools more effective — stable infrastructure. Without reliable mobile proxies, it’s difficult to scale campaigns, test different GEOs, and protect against bans. This is where KeyProxy solutions come in: their mobile proxies allow affiliates to work safely with any traffic sources, reduce ban risks, and preserve margins even in conditions of high competition.