Tapgerine: now it's not enough just to pour 50 thousand installations

What is the difference between affiliate networks and adnetworks, why it is important to do ASO now, and we talked about many other things with Tatiana Gripachevskaya, Director of Business Development at Tapgerine.

Hi! To begin with, tell us a little about the company, what does it do directly?Hi!

We are engaged in the promotion of mobile applications, bringing them to the top, retaining and providing new, active users (not just those who install, but also will play and pay). But I want to say that we are a little more than just an affiliate network. A little more because together with the main activity as an affiliate program, we have added several tools to the project. 

Tatiana GripachevskayaFor example, we do not just work on CPA, providing downloads to advertisers, but also optimize the quality of traffic, bringing it to the optimal level in terms of ROI and retention, while scaling the volume to provide the maximum amount of active and paying audience to the publisher.

We also have our own media bay department: the guys buy traffic from all kinds of sources while respecting the price set by the advertiser, i.e. here we reduce the possibility of a non-target audience getting into the project, since the user consciously clicks on the banner and installs the application. 

There are many types of mobile advertising companies on the market today. It is often difficult to understand this variety of types. Here you can be attributed to the affiliatenetwork. How do such grids differ from, for example, useracquisitionmarketplace? There are essentially only three types: affiliate networks, adnetworks, mobile agencies (this includes user acquisition, cross-promotion platforms, promo agencies, etc.). All other types are just speculation by names.

The difference between user acquisition marketplace is that when there is not enough traffic, they go to affiliate and adnetworks. We have completely different volumes.

What types of mobile advertisers are also present on the market? And how is the affiliate network better than the others?It’s hard to call it better or worse.

It’s just different directions. There are a lot of mobile advertisers, but not enough good traffic, many skip black methods..

Your website says that the service automatically finds “optimal CPC, CPM, CPI and CPA”. What is meant by “optimal”? What is the criterion? Well, for example, for site owners who send us mobile traffic using only one link, this is the so-called TDS, which helps to find the optimal exhaust for traffic by analyzing several campaigns beforehand.

The optimal one is with the highest eRPC (for publishers), with the best quality (for advertisers).

Since we’re talking about numbers, then, according to your estimates, how much does it cost to get into the American free Top 10/25/50/100 (overall/games)?I can of course repeat the Fiksu or AppAnnie data, but why?

On average, about 100 thousand installations are needed to get into the TOP 10 of the USA. The TOP 25 will cost about 50-60 thousand. 

We are engaged in campaigns of promotion to the TOP only at the request of the advertiser, helping him to choose a promotion strategy. The value of the Top is very much overestimated. No one can guarantee the number of organic users, how effective the campaign will be. In addition, boosters are made by users who have already installed the application for the first time (or even earns on it), they are not interested in the next advertised application. This means that only an application with a very exciting gameplay will be monetized. At least, it is fascinating on the first screens of the game, while the user opens the application.

The increase in organic installations from push is more influenced by the correct ASO (apple search optimization) strategy. Now it’s not enough just to pour in 50 thousand installations, stay 3 days in the top and hope that the organics will pour in. It’s easier to take the right measures for ASO, pour in the same 50 thousand, get an organic boost from behind the top, but then also enjoy free installations from the search. And, as you know, this is the target audience, those who found you themselves, and not those who just liked your icon in the top. For example, we do not do all ASO, but we prepare applications for push to the TOP with specific measures to increase the output.

Organics, of course, will also pick up and will help to keep the push. Therefore, usually everyone does push by this method: the first day, the maximum number of instals, for example, 100 thousand, in the second – this figure is already at the level of 70 thousand, well, and on the third – 30-40 thousand. Thus, the growth of organic matter compensates for the incentive reviews and the push becomes cheaper. Well, you just have to hope for the feature, alas, you will not affect Apple in any way, but if the application is good, then you can do some tricks that would help Apple notice your product

Going back to Tapgerine: how is the work with you carried out? Do you have your own admin panel that demonstrates in real time how much the product earns from which source?Yes, we work with Hasoffers as standard, which covers 65% of the features that we require.

Plus, we use our own in-house, which covers the remaining 35%: additional anti-cheat, TDS for webmasters, we filter out fraud traffic (i.e. bots), we also introduced the ability to see which devices, operators, at what time the installations came, so it’s easier for webmasters to optimize their traffic without buying which ones-then additional tracking, and the advertiser can see what he is targeting, or on which devices their application is not running. Within 2 months, we will completely switch to our in-hois platform, which will allow us to give our publishers what they lacked in HasOffers.

Which of the gaming companies are you currently working with?From gaming we work with Gumi, MyLands, Tap4Fun, uCool, Disney, my.com .

Now we are starting cooperation with Playtica, it’s hard to list everyone, but there are a lot of them, we have worked with everyone who is in the top of the grossing one way or another.

From utilities: OLX, Anastasia, MInimob, Anews, ApusGroup, Flipkart

Can you share a real case with figures/examples?With Anastasia, we worked on the standard CPI model, but with constant optimization of sources.

As a result, the conversion from installation to registration was brought to the level of 65%, sales were from $200 – $5000 (large amounts due to the specifics of dating applications)

Every month we made from 15,000 installations on unmotivated traffic for this advertiser.

With Gumi (this is Brave Frontier) in the US,UK,AU, DE, RU markets, we brought the RPI (revenue per install) to $3.5-4 at an installation price of $2.5 for Tier 1 and $1.5 for RU.

Also for the Whaff Rewards campaign (US, SG, KR, FR, DE, RU markets), we worked on the Cost Per Engagement model with an additional action in the form of registration after installation. The performance indicators that we have achieved, according to the advertiser’s requirements, after optimization:

• Average $2 revenue per registration;
• High retention rate: About 70% – 80%.

And the last question: how much, on average, do your webmasters earn?This is always a very interesting question.

Our top webmasters earn $20-30 thousand weekly, so the volumes are quite impressive.

Thanks for the interview!