How to Crack the Mobile Display Ads Nut

On mobile display ads: Go2mobi dives head-first into mobile display, which represents one of the biggest opportunities in the performance space. In this entertaining and illuminating talk, Eric Dyck, Director of Marketing at Go2mobi talks with Yannick Van Osselaer, one of their largest affiliate advertisers, to reveal the tools, strategies, and tactics to drive scalable ROI on the Go2mobi platform.

Eric and Yannick will share best practices and examples around traffic/offer matching, campaign testing, creative strategy, and optimisation tactics. Eric and Yannick will further unleash mobile’s potential by demonstrating some interesting uses of Go2mobi’s Total Control API to create customised workflows for testing and optimisation, providing the API tools themselves to all AWA attendees.

Speech by Eric Dyck (Director of Marketing, Go2mobi) | Yannick van Osselaer (Affiliate Marketer)

Eric Dyck & Yannick van Osselaer Speech Transcript

Okay so, once we get our presentation up here. My name is Eric Dyck, Director of Marketing at Go2mobi. And we’ve got Yannick, our top performance marketer on the platform.

Today, we’re in the Mobile Unleashed panel. And we are learning how to crack the mobile display nut, along with lots of tips about mobile display.

We’ll have lots of great monkey, squirrel metaphors. It’s gonna be a good time.

So, again, I’m Eric Dyck, as Marketing Director at Go2mobi, my main job is marketing to marketers, which can be confusing sometimes. And as I say, we have Yannick van Osselaer, our mobile display top guy.

So well, I’m trying to figure out always how to help affiliates crack the nut. He’s the one that has them.

Go2mobi: The Platform

Go2mobi is a mobile DSP that was built by performance marketers for performance marketers.

We recognised this opportunity early that, obviously, there’s just this huge amount of inventory available. But our founders sort of realised that it was very difficult to get the information that they needed to be able to run the campaigns as successfully as they wanted.

They weren’t getting the publishers exposed properly, they weren’t getting all of the details they needed. And, they weren’t able to really dive into the data and pull out the most profitable pockets in an effective enough way.

So, they set about to built this platform to do just that.

Transparency and Granularity

Our main tools for nut-cracking might appear like overkill, but we built a system that’s all around the two principles of transparency and granularity.

We expose every bit of data that we have. And then we give you the ability to act on that data in any fashion that you want.

Then, of course we have traditional nutcracker of customer service. We put a big focus on making sure we get we get timely emails responded.

The Opportunity

Just running some numbers on our inventory tool, which is part of our transparency promise, where we allow you to research the traffic ahead of time.

We just pull up simple numbers that there’s 45 billion daily impressions, which is pretty ridiculous. It’s pretty huge nut there.

A Tough Nut To Crack

So, it’s a massive opportunity for people that are able to crack it. But it’s a tough nut to crack because there’s so much traffic. And there’s so many different parameters within there.

You need a really big nut cracker. That’s Drake for scale, if you were wondering.

Where to start? There’s so many different offers, so many exchanges, so many publishers. And then, there’s millions of placements.

How do you go about finding the right placements? What’s important when optimizing? Compliance is always an issue in the mobile DSP space.

So, how is it best to think about compliance, how do you set yourself up to have a good relationship with compliance?

And then, once we go through, you’ll be like, “Eric that’s a lot of clicking, that’s gonna take me a long time.”

Well, we have some solutions for that, where we’re gonna be here talking about our API, which allows you to do all sorts of massive changes at scale. And, really kind of make your campaigns more efficient.

So, we have Yannick here, our top affiliate. He has run hundreds of thousands of dollars on our platform. And he’s our favourite client because he uses the platform really as it was intended to do.

He uses all of the features, he does a lot of research. And, he puts it all together.

Q&A

Eric:

So Yannick, when you’re deciding what campaigns to run, what are some of the thoughts that you have? What do you think about when you choose your offers to run on Go2mobi?

Yannick:

What I like to do is focus on verticals and country combinations. Definitely, if you’re starting out on Go2mobi pick one or two and focus on those. We’ve listed a few examples of things that have worked pretty well in the past. Anyway, when you choose a combination, always test like anything you can find within that vertical. New things, old things, ask your advertisers to create custom pages, everything.

Eric:

Nice, and so you generally have a global focus. You’re not really focusing too much on the United States or the UK, it’s really sort of an international focus?

Yannick:

I think most of the revenue is done outside the US.

Eric:

Nice, it’s gonna be on things like antivirus, sweepstakes, and mobile content?

Yannick:

Yeah that’s for like, typical things that we run on Go2mobi.

Eric:

Exactly, and then you always build up a good relationships with your affiliate managers. Ask what’s working best and be willing to test almost anything.

Yannick:

Yeah, just talk to your affiliate managers and talk to your advertisers. What’s working with between the verticals and test those.

Eric:

Nice, so what is your sort of overall philosophy? What’s the most important thing you need to be thinking about as you’re setting up your campaign that you’re thinking about what you want to do?

Campaign Optimization

Yannick:

Well, the main goal is to find that perfect combination of your offer, creative and your landing page. You want to start doing that by testing on a few small placements. Don’t test in any placement you can find, just keep it limited. And when you find a winning combination, you scale to do as many as possible./dd>

Eric:

Do you have specific placements that you set aside as testing placements? Or does it vary by campaign?

Yannick:

I have testing placements for each vertical and a country that I run in. I always start on those.

Eric:

Nice and that’s because they’ve worked for you in the past and they have a high enough volume in order to get you statistical significance pretty quickly?

Yannick:

Yes they’re perfect for testing out new things.

Eric:

Nice. You create a white list of those so you can just kind of run them when you’re starting your campaigns?

Yannick:

Yeah, always use white lists.

To Crack The Nut, You Must Understand The Nut

Eric:

So you know, in order to crack the nut, you must understand the nut first. How do you go about researching the placements that you’re gonna run these campaigns on?

Yannick:

So the inventory tool is always very helpful. Every time you start running something, you do your research. They have many different exchanges with many placements, operating systems. I always start with researching those and try to find a match between your vertical and your placement.

Eric:

Nice, so that’s the one thing that the inventory tool does, is it allows you to set the different parameters that you’re looking for. You can set your country, you can set your operating system, you can set your creative size. Hit enter and it’ll just tell you exactly all the available inventory. So it’s a way that you can go about building your white list ahead of time for when you launch these campaigns. And have a good sense of the scale you’re going to be able to achieve. You don’t want to set up a campaign, go to a lot of work of thinking about all this, and then realise that you’ve picked placements that don’t have scale. Which is why this is a valuable tool.

Campaign Setup: Divide And Conquer

So we talked about your overall philosophy on campaign setup, which is divide and conquer. When you’re dealing with this much inventory, this many placements, is your approach to cast a wide net and figure out all the different granular aspects ahead of time? Or do you like to basically set up campaigns that are broken out in a very divided fashion?

Yannick:

So I like to break down my campaigns as much as possible. The first step to start is always find the best placements. Now most people, they like to do a run of network. Problem with that is you’re gonna spend a lot of money on our placements that don’t have any potential. I would suggest you focus on the big placements that are out there. And put all your testing on those. You can also try to only test placements that belong to the same type that match your vertical.

Eric:

Now with Go2mobi, you can access all sizes of mobile display, as well as native. Do you break those out individually? Do you test all different types? And, do you run native as well as mobile display?

Yannick:

Yeah, we run native and just normal banners. This for example, like campaign-naming convention that you can use. You want to break down at least operating system and creative size because they all perform completely differently. They also have like different CPM rates. And you can you can divide even further by carrier or devices, but I will do that in a later stage.

Ad Size

Eric:

What would you say is your favorite ad size? Do you have one or you just really let the data tell the story?

Yannick:

They’re all good but you will notice that some verticals work very well in small ad sizes, and some work very well on native ads.

Eric:

And it’s just a case-by-case basis or are you able to know ahead of time as you set up a campaign, what you think it’s going to do?

Yannick:

After a while you start to know like what will work or not, but you can’t make too many assumptions.

Settings For RON Campaign

Eric:

Okay, so when you’re setting up the tools of trade, like this Hedgehog here is really good at cracking nuts with this sweet bluetooth headset. When you’re setting up these campaigns, especially a run of network campaign, where you want to test a lot of different kinds of traffic in order to see what works best. What are the settings that you use?

Yannick:

There’s a few important settings. Mainly the bids. If you’re doing run over network, start with the auto-bidder. And later, when you have something that’s working, you can start testing at different bids on a profitable placement.

Eric:

So the auto-bidder is designed to test as many placements as possible. And it’s designed to alter your bid per placement, in order to try to win about 30% of the traffic on any given placement. So that allows you to test a lot of inventory without spending too much or too little on any of the placements. Yannik’s let us know that it’s not a way to run campaigns permanently, because he feels it actually it over bids in cases. So that’s something Nick, Nick’s in the office, we’re gonna work on that. It’s a good way to test a lot of things, but then you’re saying you want to go in and override those with actual custom bids that really reflect what you’re able to do with the inventory.

Auto-Bidder

Yannick:

Yeah, most of the time the auto-bidder is bidding like very high. You can get the traffic cheaper, just you have to test like multiple bids.

Eric:

Nice and how do you stop big volume placements from blowing all your budget?

Yannick:

So when you when you start out for like a run of network campaign, you set your daily spins for each placement as low as possible, because some of these placements have very high CPM rates. They will never work for your low payout offers.

Eric:

And if you just let them run, all the top volume placements are going to eat up 90% of your testing budget?

Yannick:

Yeah, it depends a bit, yeah.

Eric:

So this per placement cap, do you have a number that you generally set it to? Do you have a rule of thumb?

Yannick:

Like a dollar, maximum.

Eric:

So pretty low.

Yannick:

Yeah pretty low.

Eric:

Is it depended on the payout at all or is it just based on the dollar?

Yannick:

No, just very low, because sometimes you will have placements with like $1 clicks and that will never work with like a $2 offer. So I put it very low.

Eric:

So with $1 for a per placement cap, what are the first things you’re looking for from that placement in order to know if it’s a good one? Do you want to know that you profit on that or do you have sort of proxies that you’re able to sort of use like clicks? Are you looking for higher click-through rates or is it just straight conversions per placement that you’re looking for?

The Costs: 2 or 3 times the CPA

Yannick:

The first thing I look for is at the costs to make sure that it’s not too expensive. And then I just spend like 2 or 3 times the CPA.

Eric:

Two or three times the CPA, good rule of thumb. One of the things you talked about was having different bids on the weekday versus the weekends, which I think is really interesting. Why do you do that?

Traffic On Placements

Yannick:

Yeah, there’s 2 reasons. The traffic on placements, it depends on the day of the week or in the weekends. Some placements have very limited traffic in the week but in the weekend they can like blow up. And also the performance will be totally different. So when you’re testing out, always the test in the in the week but also at least one weekend day.

Eric:

And you set up separate campaigns for that? So a weekday campaign and then you clone it and then you run it on the weekends as well?

Yannick:

No, I just do one campaign for both. Yeah.

Eric:

Nice. Do you ever do day parting? Did you ever find that campaigns perform better at different times of the day?

Yannick:

Most of the time, it’s similar. Sometimes they will break-even during the day and the evening become profitable. So you want to keep it running as much as possible to increase your revenue.

Eric:

Nice. Okay so, you know, Go2mobi prides itself on having like I say, the most granular optimisation capabilities. We have multi-level optimisation, where you can optimise your placements. Then, you can optimise your devices on each placement. And then, you can optimise your carrier’s on each device, on each placement, which as you can see is a lot of clicking. But Yannick, what are the three most important factors when it comes to optimising campaigns on DSPs like Go2mobi?

Three Most Important Factors

Yannick:

So campaign optimization, that’s something many people are a bit confused about. What is the right order to do things? It depends on a traffic source, mostly. So for Go2mobi, my 3 main optimisation factors are the Placements, the Offer, and the Angle that you’re using. After that, you have your creatives and landing pages. I always suggest you use proven creatives for each vertical when you start. So, you don’t have to worry too much about that and you can put in your efforts in your placements and your offers. And after that, you have carriers and devices. Most of the time, you will only do like black listing on carriers that totally don’t perform at all.

Eric:

Do you have any universal black lists that you just know there’s certain placements that you just stay away from, that you blacklist from all your campaigns?

Yannick:

Yeah, for every country you have like carriers that will not perform at all. Depends a bit on the offer in the same like devices.

DSPs and SSPs

Eric:

He regrets nothing. So, you know, DSPs and SSPs are sort of locked in an eternal dance of compliance, where SSPs are updating and evolving their regulations all the time. DSP sit in the middle of the affiliate and the SSPs and we’re always trying to appease both parties as well as possible. With compliance, what’s your basic philosophy about working with compliance?

How To Think About Compliance

Yannick:

So compliance, I always suggest when you start out, you test a very clean campaign, almost branded. And, you compare it to like a more aggressive campaign. You will notice you will get access to different placements. You don’t have to run like that aggressive on quality placements, you can go quite clean and still make a nice profit on it.

Eric:

So you’re saying you actually get access to different placements, depending on the offer you’re running. You start with as white, as sort of non-aggressive a campaign as you can, in order to see what works. Do you then ever go back and try to tweak it backwards and make it a little bit more aggressive in order to raise your profit?

Yannick:

Yeah, you can do that. You should split test like a few clean, and a bit more aggressive, and more aggressive. And see what works best and what keeps running because sometimes the placements might block you after a few days or they might block your whole vertical altogether.

Eric:

Which is not worth it for anyone. Nice.Ookay so this is Mobi here, he’s our chief of compliance. Your overall philosophy, when working with compliance to make sure that you don’t end up with a situation with scumbag compliance. You don’t want to have these people, you don’t have compliance banning successful campaigns. How do you get out in front of that and make sure that you don’t have a bad relationship with compliance?

What’s Allowed, What’s Not Allowed

Yannick:

For compliance, they really know what’s allowed and what’s not allowed on each exchange. So, you can just send them all your banners and your pages and they can review and tell you, “This will this is allowed on mo-pop but not on a smart offer” for example.

Three P’s: Polite, Proactive, Patient

Eric:

Nice. So, really being proactive, maintaining a relationship. I made up the three P’s. Yannick never said that but polite, proactive, and patient because you gotta give them some time to get back to you. But you want to make sure that they’re not scumbag compliance, that they’re good guy compliance, that’ll work with you to find solutions that work for all parties. Good guy compliance. We don’t smoke weed with that dog. So Yannick, he has given us a lot of great tips today but what would you say is your number one pro tip? This is an interesting one, because it’s not the most sexy thing, it’s not the most sort of like riveting tip, but what’s your pro tip number one to crack the mobile display nut?

Protip #1: Document Everything

Yannick:

My pro tip is very simple, is just document everything you do on Go2mobi because to require a lot of testing to get something working, so you want to have a good overview of all your campaigns, all your optimisations, the offers you are running, the placements you’re testing on.

Eric:

So you do this in a small notebook that you keep beside your bed or you do it on a spreadsheet?

Yannick:

Yeah I used to do that but now use Excel.

Eric:

Nice, not Google Docs? Okay, just want to clarify. Okay, so this sounds like a lot of work, especially when you think about optimising that many factors, split testing that many different options, that many different offers, and that many different geos, is there anything we can do to make this a little bit more automated?

Can Any Of This Be Automated

And, the answer is, yes. We’ve just launched, we have a Go2mobi.com/API, we’ve launched our total control advertising API. It essentially amounts to an automatic, nut-cracking machine because it allows you to basically do everything that you can do on our DSP by just circumventing our UI entirely.

And, allows you to really unleash the potential of our platform. Allows you to test thousands of campaigns at a time. Create simple rules that then allow you to go back and make sort of rules, white list, black list, you can make them programmatically based on the results of the campaigns.

We have some advertisers seeing some great results with it. It really helps you achieve scale with a lot less clicks.

Three Things That The API Does

The three things that the API does best are query. First of all, you can pull any report you know, any level, any level of depth within this report, then you can create.

So, you can create campaigns and then you can update them. So query, create, and update. And then, you can also do fun things like you can integrate third-party data feeds, which is an interesting one.

We’re over there at B25. Ken and Nick, the guy whose passion project the API is, are both over there.

We’re really interested in working with performance affiliates to help them scale their campaigns quicker, help them get better results.

And, there’s some cool, Ken has actually built out, Ken is not a technical guy but he’s built out some simple things using spreadsheets that allow you to do all this stuff.

We’re giving all this stuff away if you just contact support at Go2mobi.com.

So, here are the slides that he’s made up.

You can basically get a look. This is a Google Doc that simply allows you to list all the campaign IDs, list all the data. And then you can quickly apply split test targeting and update campaigns very quickly and easily.

You can do up to a thousand campaign updates within one minute or within minutes, in about 15 minutes. Overall, it just really reduces the amount of time it takes to run campaigns at scale.

We just uploaded a video on YouTube, Go2mobi.com/YouTube, that literally walks you through step-by-step, exactly how to use the API, exactly how to set up your Google Doc sheet in order to to make this work.

Extending DSP Functionality

So again, I’ve seen this in action where it’s literally creating thousands of campaigns in minutes, which is a really impressive thing.

There’s a squirrel there.

And this is a neat one where I’m interested to see if performance people can make this work. This is something we use on the agency-side of the business a lot.

Go2mobi specialises for brands and agencies. We do this thing called mobile moment targeting.

For instance, we have campaigns that are triggered by weather, so if we’re advertising for Baskin Robbins, for an ice cream company, they only want to have their brand associated with sunny days. They found over the history of their campaigns that they have better results when it’s sunny out then when it’s rainy.

We were able to quickly integrate a weather API, weather feed, a global dynamic weather feed that allows us to trigger campaign events by that.

Basically any external API feed, we’ve made it really simple to be able to tie that in for your campaigns.

I’m really interested to see if there’s any affiliates out there that can come up with some really creative ideas for how to make this work. And maybe we can talk about it next year.

So yeah, basically we’re here. We want to talk about the API. I know there’s only a couple hours left in the show but we want to, you know, we’re really looking for people to test this out.

Go2mobi.com

You can send us an email at Go2mobi.com, [email protected] with any questions.

You can access this API, it’s all there. It’s super well-documented. And as I mentioned, it literally covers every aspect of our service, everything that you can do on the Go2mobi platform, you can also do via the API and a lot more as we’ve talked about here.

So we’re running a little short. That’s basically the end of our presentation.

We’ll just slowly back off the stage now like Homer. If you want to get in touch with me I’m [email protected] and [email protected], if you have any questions for him.

But we’re here until the end of the show. We love to chat about this. We’re here to chat about video arbitrage we’re doing a lot of that, as well as anything mobile display related

So thanks very much.