Home > Mobile >

---

Crushing Spotify - Mobile App Install Case Study (34)

---

Sadly, were unable to attend the BKK meetup. We offer solemn penance to STM in the form of a Mobile App Install Case Study.

We hit this offer hard for 100k+ for a few short days (~5) around Christmas time 2013 before the advertiser yanked it. With some scrambling and perseverance, and despite every single network telling us they couldn't get budget, we crushed it again during a few weeks of February, doing around 5k/day in profit (on a limited cap).

The best part was it was all direct linked advertiser supplied creative...

Key Insight:

• Look to promote apps that are in the 100 charts on Google Play or Itunes. They're branded; put the app in front of people and they will do the rest.
• Direct linking CAN work
• there can be small windows of opportunity. Your advantage as an affiliate is you can move much faster than larger companies or networks
• Keep your finger on the pulse: the landscape is ever changing in the mobile world. Look for new apps coming out from the big boys (King, Supercell, KS Mobile), apps rocketing up the charts backed up by VC money, big paid apps switching to free, anything viral etc...
• App companies are constantly chopping and changing rates and caps. Don't rely on just odigger/offervault to see an offer's availability and cap. Get on linkedin, go to conferences, mastermind, and start networking.

The Offer:

Here's the original email from our AM at glispa notifying us to try out Spotify, as well as the actual offer page itself.





A simple app install paying out $3.55 - a fairly hefty rate and uncapped at that. Spotify is of course a music streaming service. Now AM's are obviously notorious for pushing anything and everything in to your inbox, but this one stood out:

• we have a good relationship with this AM. I trust his advice
• some recon on appannie showed Spotify was hovering around the 60th most download app in the US at the time. So it was (and is) a well known brand.
• a quick google news search showed spotify went free for mobile devices just a few days prior.
• christmas time; good window of opportunity. Affiliates are lazy. Networks are on holidays.
  

Below is a screenshot of Spotify's download performance during Dec & January. You can see around Dec 10 their ranking shoots up from 60th into the top 5ish on the back of a burst campaign. Around Dec 25, it drops down after the offer is pulled from affiliate networks. Performance holds steady until late Jan when the offer goes back live again, and downloads push back up albeit less dramatically than before (as a result of less network availability & cap)

How many downloads we talking for this sort of jump? For an app in the U.S. App Store to reach the top 50 free chart, the app needs to be downloaded 25,000 times per day. For top 15, it requires 60,000. I assume top 5, is exponentially higher....



Initial Setup and Results

We set this up the day we received it on a couple of our go to' traffic sources for testing. In addition to the standard in app/mobile web cpm setups, we always try to do a CPI setup wherever allowed. Without giving too much away I can say:

• We direct linked the advertiser supplied creative
• The CPI campaigns went mental. The network ECPMs were about 4 or 5x higher than the top cpm bid. These were quickly converted to CPM at top bid. For CPI (& CPC for that matter) the traffic source is still calculating everything via an eCPM. The higher your eCPM, the more traffic you get. The higher your eCPM, the better traffic you get.
• We had success with pretty much every traffic source we tried, including redirects. (*hint: one has a long thread on the forum)
• ROI was very high, but offer was pulled after a few short days before we could scale further

Relaunch & Perseverance
We sent bi weekly enquiries to our reps, but everyone came back with the same response: Spotify was still working on their budgets, and hoped to launch *next week. Which dragged on for a few weeks. Finally, in late January it relaunched on Mundomedia:



And then was abruptly pulled 3 days later. Fortunately, we had pursued other means (namely Linkedin) and found the offer through a company we had previously never heard of. Here's the initial communication, a result of a simple post on some mobile groups on Linkedin.

This simple exchange allowed us to secure a large cap on Spotify that lasted for several weeks. All while Mundo, Glispa, Neverblue, etc etc were unable to get any....




Current Situation & Opportunity



You can see Spotify is currently sitting at 35th on the charts. As a CPI it's not readily available on any affiliate networks (as far as I'm aware). But who knows what the future holds? They got another 250 Million in funding a few months ago, and are trying to aggressively expand their international presence...

A quick eyeball of the US charts shows several other apps in the top 50 that can currently be promoted via CPI. There are a couple of big games from King (Farm Heroes at a very solid #16 and Candy Crush at #36), Supercells absolute monster Clash of Clans at #31, a shitload of Flappy Bird clones, and some well known services/comm like expedia and whatsapp.

Using Farm Heroes as a further example of the opportunity. It's ridiculously branded and backed by some serious $ that extends beyond simple web advertising. I'm in the UK at the moment, and there are TV ads for crissakes on prime time. Offer vault shows the US iOS version at a street of anywhere from $1-4. Via linkedin, we were able to get it at $6...

- D

---

We missed ya in Bangkok Mr Rat. Is your Danish girl keeping you too busy :P?

Good job getting that deal for weeks after it was taken off networks, I was hunting after it too. Did they give you any reasoning why they pulled it?

---

Great tips man.

Eye watering potential with these offers. If you get them to work, they work big.

---

Very nice post, but I just got one question. How can you trust these guys on linkedin? What if you don't get paid after driving tons of traffic to their offer? Isn't that too risky?

---

Good to see some simple but effective stuff happening.

You are always impressing the hell out of me.

---

Post of the week! I too hammered spotify for a couple of days on Glispa and it performed amazingly. Regret i hadn't chased the offer when it went down too

---

Glispa is a great network. I know the vp dora personally and thibault. They are very good and trustworthy.

---

Wrong Rat. He's gallivanting in San Diego. This is the other one. I'm in the midst of a move. Never really got a clear answer from any of the networks. My sense was Spotify got the initial surge they wanted a lot faster than they were expecting. And someone up the chain got gunshy?

Yeah. Also a whole lot easier to explain to your friends and family than "dating"

There's always risk associated especially with a network you have not worked with previously. We did our best to mitigate risk by asking around, getting on the phone, getting expedited payment etc. But definitely had to balance risk vs. reward.

Thanks

There's always another diamond in the rough...

Yeah, agreed. I think anyone who was lucky enough to have Dora as their AM can attest that she was the best in the biz by a long shot, and well deserving of her VP status.

---

Posts of RAT gives me Motivation Right of the Bat.
Dont be a Lazy cat is a way to bank money Fat.

---

Nice to see someone smashed Spotify - I saw it pop up (on F5 maybe?) but it was ephemeral. I knew somewhere someone would be making a tonne from it since it's so branded and is actually a fantastic product. I didn't know their app went free on mobile devices, definitely pays to survey the marketplace!

---

Nice case study! That offer was huge for a while

---

Very inspiring thread, thanks!

What do you mean by "network ECPMs" Ad network, or Aff network, or something else?
How come such a huge difference in eCPM? What are the factors influencing that?

---

Network eCPM means that they were paying the ad network 4-5x more than the current top CPM, due to the offer converting very well.

This allowed them to buy tons of traffic.

---

We share the same VC investors as Spotify.

This is kind of off topic, but the founders of Spotify actually come from a very strong performance marketing background. They were founders of Tradedoubler, one of the early European affiliate marketing networks.

---

One of my best mates, works as PR in the music industry here in UK, was looking after some UK PR for Spotify a few years back.. I remember him saying at the time that it was going to be huge, and the guys behind it were proper switched on. Didn't realise it was Tradedoubler!.. lol.. I used to run stuff from there back in the day.

---

Awesome case study!

Would love to get more insight as to how you guys (or anyone else for that matter) uses LinkedIn to get direct deals worked out, I don't think most AM's use it as we are all CEO's of our own companies

---

Wow wow wow another gold nugget dropped by Mr Rat! Awesome and appreciate your kindness on sharing this.

We received the email on Spotify in January too, but it went down just too fast. There is a very big opportunity in this app indeed. It's interesting that you guys nailed it by direct linking.

Agree with Tim, we are interested to find out how did you guy secure the deals via LinkedIn. I hope it's not too confidential to be shared out

---

Cheers, latest I heard was that Spotify was not anticipating another high volume push until May/June, so keep your ears to the ground...

Thanks Jordan.

Cheers Besmir.

That's very interesting. We also did some stuff with tradedoubler a while back - I seem to recall they were one of the first to get edates onboard. Anyway you can set up a direct line?

Tim / Benjamin: I'm not sure if you're on Imgrind. I'm no rabid fan, but they've actually got some very good tips in regards to Linkedin. Here's some stuff I can say:

Profile - get it fleshed out properly. Should be tons of reference out there.
Get connected - start with the obvious. Network ams, vps, other affiliates etc. Connections show you have credibility.
Groups - this is where we were really able to leverage Linkedin. Take look at other people's profiles to see what they're part of, or do a search for affiliate / mobile / install terms & you'll get quite a few options.

We simply posted in a couple groups with a bit of background (we are currently doing X installs/day, what we're having success with) & exactly what we were after (we want direct or exclusive offers. high vol potential, large budget etc). This resulted in a ton of leads. One thing I would add however; make sure you provide specific instructions on how you want to be contacted otherwise you will end up with a lot of people simply saying 'add me to skype, let's chat'.

Specify that they send their top 5-10 offers, rates, caps, insight right off the bat

One more tip - if you want to go 'direct' - do a search for "User acquisition" in titles - most big companies have a person specifically dedicated to this.

---

I'll do a write up on leveraging Linkedin. I've been bombing it like a mofo in the past few weeks especially, got myself into a few awkward situations at the same time.

---

Quickie...

---

hearing rumblings Spotify is planning another big push soon...

---

Hey there,

Apart from getting access to the offer, was there anything about the campaigns you ran on behalf of this offer that is worth sharing?

---

Not sure I understand the question?

---

Roughly translated:

"give us some more info so we can make money on it too"

---

What I mean is, were there any particular insights from how you ran the campaign that is also worth sharing.

---

Without revealing specific traffic sources; not really. But it was as simple as launching as quickly as possible in as many places as we could. Beyond that it's a matter of keeping an eye on when Spotify does another big push and jumping on board.

---

So, why are you outing all this? Call me sceptical, I don't see why you would first tell us your successful actions then alert us as to the upcoming release.
What do you stand to gain here?
Sorry to sound negative, but I just don't get your angle? Can't be stupidity. Showing off perhaps? Or some affiliate deal with Spotify?

---

We are like the mother theresa of IM. Benevolence is our motto. And showing off. We have a lot of mottos, but those are our main ones.

---

---

Lol, that's a witty reply

---

would u mind sharing wether this was DL or LP?

---

"The best part was it was all direct linked advertiser supplied creative..."

---

ahh, missed that, thanks!

---

Damn man I missed this one too, this is great great stuff man!

I heard there was some MONSTER volume to spotify for a while, this is so awesome love these shares mate!

---

Home > Mobile >