What skills do you need for search arbitrage?
Comfort with numbers comes first: margins, ratios and spreadsheets. Then advertising platform skills, plain and accurate copywriting, basic tracking and data handling, and close reading of policy documents. Discipline with money matters as much as any technical skill. These transfer well to performance marketing, analytics, ad operations and traffic-quality roles.
Break it into four areas. Analytical: Unit economics, A/B testing and reading noisy data without over-reacting. Platform: campaign structure, bid strategy and how ad review works on each traffic source. Technical: a tracker, postback set-up and enough understanding of an API to check that numbers reconcile. Compliance: knowing RSOC policies and consumer-protection basics well enough to spot a risky creative.
People who know both the buying side and the quality side are in demand beyond arbitrage, at ad networks, feed providers, agencies and fraud-detection companies. If you are learning, practise the maths with small budgets, and build a habit of documenting every test.