Promotion School: advertising networks and the basics of working with them
What are advertising networks, what are their pros and cons, as well as what is important to remember when working with them, – says Ilya Seregin, FeedWise project manager at Mobio.
Ilya Seregin, FeedWise Project Manager at Mobio
An advertising network is a network with offers from various direct advertisers or other advertising networks.
It acts as an intermediary between various advertisers (advertisers) and partners (publishers).
The interaction scheme usually looks like this:
- the advertiser wants to get traffic to the application, he has an offer;
- the advertising network collects different offers from different advertisers;
- the partner enters the advertising network and searches for which offer he wants to deliver his traffic to.
From the partner’s point of view, interaction with the network occurs as follows: registration takes place, an attached manager is appointed, then in the partner’s office the partner looks through the available offers, selects suitable ones for his traffic and coordinates the launch with the manager. In the future, the manager tells which sources work best, which ones should be suspended, warns about changes in conditions, coordinates creatives and helps the partner with possible questions both on the business side and on the technical side.
Positive and negative aspects of working with advertising networks
Advantages:
– The advertising network provides an assortment of various GEO and verticals: you can choose those offers that are suitable for traffic.
– Getting started is easier than going directly to the advertiser, because usually the advertiser subscribes only with proven grids that he trusts.
– If you are on good terms with the grid and pour high-quality traffic, then an unreasonable rejection (refusal to cooperate or pay) from the final advertiser is likely to be compensated by the grid itself (at least partially), which reduces the risks.
– An adequate network is interested in ensuring that you deliver the most relevant traffic, therefore it helps to optimize sources in a timely manner.
Cons:
– The payout per conversion will obviously be less than from a direct advertiser. The more redirects (other grids that lie on the way to the final advertiser), the more the offer rate will be cut (in other words, the less the partner will earn from the sale of their traffic).
– Sometimes the offer can be “broken”. This means that the redirect will break on the way of the click and the traffic sent to the offer will be wasted. We at Mobio solve this issue using Offertest. This system automatically clicks tracking links with the desired GEO and OS, checking whether the link leads to the store to the desired application. If not, the offer stops. Such solutions are the key to eliminating this disadvantage.
– If the grid does not provide timely reports, it is difficult to understand which traffic source is suitable for the offer and which is not. Therefore, if you refuse to pay in accordance with the KPI, you risk losing payment for traffic coming from an unsuitable source.
Working with advertising networks is a good way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your traffic and optimize it, as well as establish yourself as a proven source of good traffic. Such experience will help you in the future to receive high-quality offers and go directly to customers.
Tips for working with advertising networks
As an employee of an advertising network, I can give the following recommendations for working with advertising networks.
What you can and should do when working with an advertising grid:
1. Maintain a good relationship with your manager. The manager is the one who will defend your interests and help you. He is the same person as you, so being a friend to your manager is always great.
2. Request reports to optimize traffic. If suddenly the manager forgets to send a quality report (as we remember, he is also a person), it is better to remind him about it yourself. In addition, this way you show interest in optimizing your traffic for the offer.
3. Check your traffic for fraud and filter suspicious activity. A good grid will definitely have its own anti-fraud system (for example, we prefer FraudScore). The manager will definitely inform you that some of your sources should be reliably studied or turned off (if there is reason to suspect it), but it never hurts to be safe and independently clear your traffic from possible fraud. This also includes CR analysis. If it is too high, then it is worth checking whether the motive is coming from the source (of course, this does not apply to incent offers, but pouring such in 2018 is already a bad thing).
What not to do when working with an advertising grid:
1. Pull the manager in the middle of the night or on weekends. The exception is a serious bug. But if we are talking about the fact that you want to ask for an appruv for an offer, then it is better to wait until business hours. Also pay attention to time zones and national weekends/holidays, especially when working with foreign grids (for example, in Israel they work on Sunday, but rest on Friday).
2. Do not pay attention to quality reports or find fault with them. If we are not talking about a project, and the manager simply says that one of the sources is not suitable, you do not need to try to arrange an interrogation with partiality. It is likely that the final advertiser simply ordered the source to be stopped without justifying the reasons. Then you can understand thoroughly, but first of all you need to suspend traffic on request so as not to risk your reputation. And, of course, you can’t ignore the reports. The network manager helps you avoid rejections and build a good relationship with the advertiser. This should be appreciated.
3. Pour fraud, mislids, uncoordinated creatives and other prohibited. This is not discussed at all: trying to deceive a manager is digging a hole for yourself, your payouts and reputations. It’s one thing to accidentally miss a fraud from the source (we all make mistakes), another is to deliberately try to pour bots and motive. This is a serious violation of the rules of work. After this, do not expect that they will want to work with you at all in the future. The mobile market is small.
Using the above tips, you can easily build a good and stable work with advertising grids, enjoying good payouts and exclusive offers, as well as pleasing the network and the direct advertiser with high-quality traffic.
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