Promotion School: what is an offer?

We analyze what is meant by the word “offer” when it comes to advertising mobile games and applications. Helps us in this Ilya Seregin, project manager at Mobio.

Last spring, together with devtodev, we launched a series of publications “Game Performance Indicators“. In it, we talked about the metrics that developers face when operating their products.

This year, together with Mobio, we are launching a new regular cycle of materials “School of Promotion”. He continues the “Indicators” ideologically, but his task is different: to highlight the terms and concepts related to the promotion of games in as much detail as possible.

On the basis of both cycles, we collect a “Game Developer’s Dictionary“. This is a unified knowledge base in which you can find detailed information in Russian about all the quantities that both those who create and those who promote digital products work with.

The first article of the new series is devoted to offers.

Ilya Seregin, Project Manager at MobioThe concept

An offer is information about which application is being promoted and under what conditions. This is the basic essence in mobile marketing.

Usually the offer is created by the client in the agency tracker (in the service of the company through which he decided to buy advertising). This is done so that the agency’s partners and its internal buyers can then work with the offer, so that incoming clicks are processed, postbacks (data coming from the partner program to the tracking solution) are correctly filtered, so that information about the conditions is visible, the offer is stopped in a timely manner, and the achievement of caps (restrictions of the advertising campaign) would block traffic.

What do you usually need to fill out when making an offer?

Name

The name of the offer often duplicates the name of the application, and also contains information about the GEO and operating system (Android, iOS) for which the offer is relevant. This allows you to quickly see if the targeting offer is suitable for a particular partner.

Key performance indicators

The key setting within which the requirements for the metric characterizing the quality of the offer are specified. For example, 5% of attracted users must make a purchase in the first month.

Traffic types

When making an offer, you can specify the permitted and prohibited types of traffic (by source). For example, a client can prohibit pouring traffic from a source if his own buying team is engaged in it.

Creatives

When forming an offer, the client can either offer or even upload his own advertising banners, or give this task to the intermediary.

Preview link

Here we are talking about a link that leads directly to the app in the app store. It is needed, among other things, so that the partner can study additional information about the offer, reviews, key features.

Tracking link

It is important not to confuse it with the preview link. It is the tracking partner that pours traffic. The usual link to the application is not suitable, because it does not allow the tracker to correctly identify clicks and transmit information about them further to the advertiser.

Type of payment

When creating an offer, it is also always indicated what the customer will pay for in front of the advertising network.

Usually, the type of payment is CPI (payment for installation) or CPA (payment for any action inside the application, be it registration, purchase, etc.).

Sometimes there is a revenue share (revshare) format. This is when the payment is made as a percentage of the amount of the user’s expenses in the application.

For example, revshare 10% from the first purchase means that the partner will receive 10% from the first purchase of each user.

Availability of the offer

There may be situations when customers are not ready to give a specific offer to all partners of an advertising agency (there may be many reasons). Therefore, services usually allow publishers to determine the availability of an offer.

Some offers may be available to everyone, others may require a preliminary request from the partner and approval with the manager (then instead of a track link, the partner sees a request button), others may not be visible at all until the manager independently grants access to the partner.

Payout amount

There are usually two of them.

• Revenue — payment from the advertiser to the agency (the partner, of course, does not see it);
• Payout — payment from the agency to the partner. In the case of CPI and CPA, these are just numbers, and for revshare, a percentage of the payout amount is indicated.

Caps

By caps, as we have already noted a little above, they mean restrictions on the budget or on the number of conversions.

They can be set for a certain time period (for example, no more than 100 installations per day) or for a general period (the budget for the offer is $ 10 thousand). They can also set general caps (for all partners) and individual caps (for each partner separately).

When the cap is reached, the reception of traffic to the offer is suspended. If the cap is temporary, then when a new period is reached, traffic reception resumes.

In addition to strict restrictions on the budget and conditions, caps are a great way of risk management. If the agency is not sure that the partner will cope with the KPI, it makes sense to issue a small cap for the first time, so that in case of a rejection from the advertiser, it does not spoil relations with the partner.

Lists of sub-parameters

There is also a more fine-tuning of offers. It allows you to block sub-sources for a partner. For example, if the partner is an advertising network with diverse traffic, then you can register sources that are not suitable for the offer in the blacklist. This requires analytical data on the partner’s sources.

In addition to these parameters, when making an offer, in 99% of cases, the GEO (regional binding of the advertising campaign) and the operating system of the advertised game are also indicated. Sometimes the device type is also specified.