Home > The Newbie Zone > Questions and Answers

---

"Download" Banners & Direct Linking to Arbitrary Offers? (12)

---

I'm no expert but here's my understanding of it.

They are used to generate accidental clicks when using a CPM based traffic source. They generate a lot of accidental clicks because people confuse them for an actual download or play button.

Since the banner doesn't convey any actual information about the offer, and the user does not want to click on an ad, but does so because they confuse it with the actual buttons on the website. I would think these type of banners would perform similar to pops since it is an unwanted advertisement.

You probably wouldn't want to use these type of banners on CPC sources since accidental clicks would cost you money.

---

Hey bro, welcome onboard

The reason why there is so many of them is simple - because they work.

OK, now you are probably asking yourself how the hell such non-aggresive banner could work.
The reason is simple - because it "surprises" user.

User wants to download or watch something, misses "real button" on the website clicks your banner and then boom "alert alert You have a virus!!" or "You have won iphone 6"
It is far more "beliveable" than if user clicked on "win iphone here".

---

The whole purpose of generic banners like that is to draw a high CTR and generate cheap clicks. With these kind of banners, the whole conversion funnel comes down to the LP having a generic / broad appeal.

---

As has been pointed out, basically these kinds of "generic banners" are used to turn banner traffic into pop traffic, by making the CTR as high as possible.

This can be a great way to quickly test certain offers without having to spend time making customized banners and landers for them. A couple points I want to make though:

-The offer page will be doing all of the selling due to the lack of a relevant banner or lander. So you can only test offers that have broad appeal (as fjk87 pointed out) AND don't require pre-selling to convert.

-More and more traffic sources / mobile exchanges are rejecting this type of banners.

I have profitable campaigns running using generic banners direct-linked to offers. The key is finding the right offers.


Amy

---

I've been redirected here by Adplexity after I asked why high CTR banners have landing pages that have nothing to do with the banners' angle (for example a "watch video now" banner leads to a "update whatsapp" landing page/offer) and I'm glad I found an answer

I have seen that many offer pages used with these high CTR banners are sweepstake and Pin/Zip Submit (and they run for weeks, so I suppose they are all profitable campaigns!). It all looks too easy for me: direct linking with these simple banners, what am I not seeing?

Excuse me, what do you mean with "right offer" here? Looking at the landing pages offer in Adplexity they seem to me simple pin/zip submit pages for sweepstake

---

Some are profitable, some are not. You never know who you copy That's one of the problems with spytools. I can tell you for a fact, that this technique is not working as well as it was just a couple months ago. It still works, but you have to narrow your targeting down a lot. It really was very easy to run this way some time ago, but you missed the train this time. It still works to some extent, so feel free to test away.


This technique is based on users not paying attention to what they click on from a large part, it isn't the whitest biz of them all ... the right offer means an offer that either looks like the site the click comes from, or mimics some known layout that the people are used to trust (whatsapp, facebook ...) or looks too tempting (pushing the adult approach - sex sells) ... or it flat out lies to the user because some advertisers simply don't care ...

---

I've seen this type of approach to work for sweepstakes, but only mobile carrier subscription, 1/2-click type offers. So you've seen this work for pin/zip submits as well? Interesting!

The basic criteria for offers that would work well with generic banners, is that the offer page needs to be attractive enough to sell itself - because generic banners will not do any preselling for you.


So the types of offers we're talking about are for example:

-gaming (individual games / subscriptions to multiple games - think gameloft/EA)
-video subscriptions
-appwall
-whatsapp wallpaper download
-"cleaner" type apps/software
-"update your [software/app]" type offers


If you're used to running pop traffic, it wouldn't be a bad approach to direct-link to offers on pop traffic to see which ones will convert well, then test them on display sources using generic banners (start with a low bid and increase as necessary and go from there). Promising offers with good profits potential may be worth making and testing relevant/customized banners for to increase ROI and profits.

It's worth mentioning that using generic banners to DL to offers on display traffic, is essentially equivalent to turning display traffic into pop traffic - you're trying to maximize eyeballs on the offer page, and counting on that to sell itself.

Hope that helps!


Amy

---

Thank you guys!

@matuloo:

Of course . Anyway I suppose that if a lander is running/has run for days it could mean that it is/was a good one

@vortex:
Yes in fact those offers types you mentioned are those I saw . I like the fact of turning the pop traffic to display. I think I'll try to test some offer in that way

Could you mention some TS/mobile exchanges that allow them?

One last question about Adplexity and Landing pages research. Say that I have an offer on a classic sweep for Iphone. I've found banners about it but those banners have the "problem" that they lead to landers that have nothing to do with them (for the reasons we've just discussed). So do you have any tip on how to find related Landing pages? Just checking the banners and their redirect chain?

LP are my weakness 

---

Mopub and Google don't allow them, but the rest will allow them to various degrees - just upload a bunch of generic banners and you'll see which exchanges will approve what types. This will depend on the individual reviewer as well.


Why not just do a search for relevant landers directly? e.g. search by keyword "iphone 7".

The case you're describing sounds like they may be cloaking. This is one of the reasons why reverse-engineering camps from adplexity is hit-and-miss (although this doesn't make the tool any less powerful).


Amy

---

That's what I did but I got those results I told you . What technique do you use? If you want to tell me

I see, but I found it very common especially in some GEO like South Africa.

---

What I meant was: Instead of search for BANNERS and checking the lander pages they lead to, you should search DIRECTLY for relevant landers.

Try this in Adplexity:

1)Set date filter to something reasonably recent (last 7 days or last 30 days will do fine).

2)Set "Ad Type" to In-App and Mobile Web.

3)Set other filters as you like - for example for Countries and Affiliate Networks.

4)Also set the filter on the upper right to "Received Most Traffic".

5)Enter the keyword "iphone 7" into the field at the top for "Keyword -> On the lander page".

I just did that for South Africa and found some results that had landers:

https://mobile.adplexity.com/ad/4625147
https://mobile.adplexity.com/ad/4607810

But I do see your point - there aren't that many results. Here are a couple of tips to get more results:

1)Pick more countries that speak the same language - if your target geo is South Africa, then pick more English-speaking countries - there are tons of those available in the Country filter.

2)Instead of choosing In-App and Mobile Web for "Ad Type", use Popup and Redirects. You'll get a TON of iphone 7 landers. An important note here is that mobile display sources are a LOT more strict than pop sources, so unless you're cloaking, you'll need to modify pop landers before you can run them on display sources.


Hope that helps!



Amy

---

Thank you Amy! There are much more results .

The way I was doing before it looked like there were only the usual high CTR banners and their landing pages. Thank you

---

Home > The Newbie Zone > Questions and Answers