Exclusive: Interview with Trademob

Last week we started a series of materials about companies selling traffic. A sequel is coming out today. This time we talked to Trademob. 

The questions were answered by Artem Makarov, a representative of Trademob in Russia.Artem Makarov

Hi!

Please tell us what Trademob is doing today, what it specializes in, what it offers to mobile developers?Hi!

Trademob is a marketing platform for optimizing traffic sources for advertising campaigns. 

Our main focus is the advertising of mobile applications on smartphones and tablets, including the display of applications in the Tops of stores. 

Many advertisers are asking questions: where to get high-quality advertising traffic, how to work with foreign mobile traffic networks, which networks give the best conversion at a lower cost, how to work with several networks at the same time and be sure that you don’t bet on traffic against yourself? The Trademob company helps to answer these and many other questions.

Initially, advertising networks are in a more advantageous position in the market: they have a valuable resource, traffic. For them, customers come and go. In other words, the quality of the services provided may be greatly underestimated, while the price is overstated. Trademob is an intermediary between mobile traffic networks and advertisers, which defends the interests of its customers. For us, advertisers are a strategic partner with whom we are building long-term relationships, and mobile advertising networks are a tool to achieve this goal. Thus, using healthy market competition for the benefit of our customers, we try to provide the best quality of advertising traffic at the lowest possible price. 

We cooperate with more than 210 advertising networks around the world. 

Isn’t it better for companies to work directly with advertising networks than with an intermediary? Why not?Very often advertisers are faced with the fact that in order to fulfill an advertising plan they have to work simultaneously with more than three mobile traffic networks.

At the same time, human resources for launching advertising campaigns, their round-the-clock tracking and data analysis are severely limited. Our practice shows that without technological optimization, one employee effectively copes with only 3 advertising campaigns at the same time. Trademob has a significant staff of professional employees and a unique technology for tracking the effectiveness of advertising channels in real time.

Our clients, such as eBay, Wooga, Universal Music and many others prefer to launch their advertising campaigns on the Trademob advertising platform, significantly saving the company’s resources and gaining access to the most innovative technologies in the mobile advertising market.

In the summer at WNCONF, you talked a lot about RTB. But how is this implemented on your platform? Is there an RTB for each individual grid or a shared one?We are developing mobile RTB (real time bidding) technology simultaneously with classic advertising campaigns on mobile devices.

The idea is similar: to enable advertisers to access the entire world RTB traffic in one place.

You are promoting not only in Europe, but also in India, the Philippines and Singapore. These are small markets. As far as we know, they do not need a large number of installations to get into the top. But how profitable are they today? And with what dynamics are they growing?Even small markets are profitable today.

Naturally, the level of profitability varies from country to country. At the same time, it depends on two main factors: the general economic state of the country and the existing socio-cultural norms.

The first factor affects the purchasing power of the population, which answers the question about the dynamics of market growth. If the purchasing power is good, then the number of gadgets in the country increases, which, in turn, contributes to the active development of the mobile advertising market.

The second factor affects the type of mobile apps that will be popular (or unpopular) in such countries. There have been cases when games that failed in Europe were enthusiastically received in Indonesia, and vice versa, Western European hits were very coldly received in Asia.

Thus, it is impossible to say unequivocally how profitable the promotion in emerging markets will be. Here we recommend testing country by country, constantly increasing the size of the user base and tracking the statistics of the mobile application.

Recently, Istanbul-based Peak Games boasted a total DAU of 11.8 million in the Middle East alone. Is this really such a delicious market? Does it make sense to go to it?Yes, we are also recording an increase in demand for mobile traffic in the Middle East, especially in the Arab Emirates.

This market today has a number of advantages. On the one hand, the countries of the Middle East are not yet very popular among advertisers, and, consequently, the rates there are kept at a low level, on the other hand, the purchasing power is quite high.

However, everything will depend on the specific mobile application in a particular country.

How long do your advertising campaigns last? For example, we know that to get to the top on Android, you need to pour traffic from 3 to 5 days. Can Trademob offer similar services?The duration of the advertising campaign depends on the goals set by the advertiser.

To get into the Top on iOS, it is enough to purchase a large number of traffic during the day, when for Android it needs to be done for up to 5 days. If the task is to stay in the top positions for as long as possible, then such campaigns on average last up to 7 days on iOS and up to 3 weeks on Android. After that, they become economically unprofitable.

The longest campaign we launched lasted 16 months for the Booking company. At the same time, there was no task to break into the Top of a particular country.

The advantage of Trademob is the extensive experience of advertising campaigns, especially when it comes to getting into the Top lists of app stores. We call such a product smartBoost and launch it on average once every two days. At the moment, smartBoost is available in more than 34 countries.

How fast are you able to start a campaign. In other words, if I have a game coming out, for example, this Saturday, is it enough for me to contact you, pay the necessary amount to get the necessary traffic this Saturday? Or do I need to apply and book in advance? If in advance, then for how many days at least?Everything will depend on the type of traffic you want to buy.

To start CPC and CPI campaigns, technically we need 2-3 days to prepare, while smartBoost campaigns need to be planned strongly in advance. In Germany, for example, the queue for smartBoost can be up to 5 weeks (depending on the time of year).

Moreover, many problems arise at the stage of approval and signing of papers. Our love of bureaucracy, inherited from Soviet times, absolutely does not help us in this.

Thus, I would lay an average of a week or two to prepare an advertising campaign.

Another hypothetical situation: 10 companies (each of which is your strategic partner) ask you to provide a very large number of downloads in one day. You can’t provide all of them with downloads in total – what would you do in such a situation?You don’t have to go far for such situations.

Sometimes a large release from one company is enough to select all the available traffic.

In the case of high competition between advertisers, mobile traffic prices are growing strongly. Everyone understands this perfectly well and sometimes it is easier to agree to postpone the release in time than to use the advertising budget inefficiently. We always make a preliminary calculation of traffic before starting an advertising campaign so that the advertiser understands what he can expect. These are the consulting services that our clients receive as a pleasant bonus.

How is retargeting built?Retargeting is working with an existing customer base.

Many advertisers carry out retargeting using pop-up windows in applications, or push notifications.

Unfortunately, these technologies have a significant drawback: users are annoyed by such intrusive advertising and can disable notifications in the settings.

We have gone much further in the organization of retargeting. Working with end users, we advertise applications in the form of standard advertising banners. Thus, the user sees a reminder and a call to action addressed to him personally in free applications connected to our network. A nice feature is that such advertising cannot be disabled by the user. 

Practice shows that retargeting technology allows reactivating a “sleeping” user for only 20% of the cost of attracting a new user, which spends the advertising budget much more efficiently.

Thanks for the interview!