Traffic Types Definition - #2 - MOBILE (12)
Welcome to the 2nd part of my mini-series that should help you understand the various traffic types you can work with as an affiliate marketer.
The first part dealt with POP traffic and you can read it here : http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...inition-1-POPS
When we look at the forum sections, the one with the most people viewing the content, is pretty much always the MOBILE section in “Traffic Sources”. So let me focus on Mobile traffic in this post.
So what is actually Mobile Traffic?
Simply put, its all the surfers who browse on a mobile phone or tablet. The term “Mobile Traffic” no longer stands for one single type of traffic tho, but it was like that at the beginning.
HISTORY:
Let me go back a few years, the first mobile devices that were able to browse the internet for real, were the so called “feature phones”. There were some attempts before with those palm devices and digital diaries, but it wasnt real surfing until the feature phones entered the market. Im sure many of you had one of those NOKIA phones with colored display, those were the typical feature phones and NOKIA really dominated the market at that time. This is how MOBILE traffic was “born”.
NOTE: Feature phones are still very popular in many 3rd world GEOs, but they are on the decline, leaving the market for grabs to the low end smartphones.
Mobile traffic was quite a pain for any website developer when it all started. Each phone had a different screen resolution, different browser variation, controls etc … we, the site owners, had no idea what to do with those people so we did the most easy – REDIRECT them to some mobile optimized site. This marked the beginning of a mobile gold-rush and the birth of probably the first type of mobile traffic you could buy : MOBILE REDIRECTS.
At that time, whoever mentioned mobile traffic, it was pretty much always mobile redirects. All traffic networks quickly spotted the opportunity and started to buy/sell mobile redirects, offering insane rates for 1000 redirects so everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Paired with aggressive “premium SMS billing” in an unregulated market, mobile redirects could yield unmatched ROI and produced many millionaires – but also unhappy customers as the phone bills could look nasty at times 
The principle of mobile redirects was very easy, and its the same until these days : a simple script is placed into the code of a site and as long as a mobile user is detected, it is redirected to the buyer, without even loading the original site. There are two issues the site owners face here : google and other SEs don’t like the redirects and many sites were punished for doing so. The second problem is that once redirected, the surfer is gone. This is why a lot of the redirects you can buy these days, are actually popunders that are resold as redirects. The site owners do this to still keep the surfer on their sites and to avoid google penalties, but technically its fraud and unfortunately hard to detect. This is especially popular with adult sites.
With the rise of smartphones and related operating system, especially Android and iOS, the battlefield totally changed. What started with redirects of “unwanted” traffic, is now bigger than desktop traffic and the trend continues. The evolution of mobile browsers also brought new possibilities so what was once a single traffic type, now covers a wide range of ad delivery methods. Whoever wants to start with mobile these days, should be aware of the various types and actually decide which of them to start with, so let me address them one by one.
Before we move further, there is one thing to realize about mobile traffic – the connection type. Simply put : It can be either WIFI or 3G. If you want to push Carrier Billing offers (also called PIN submits), you absolutely need to look for 3G traffic as in 95% of cases, wifi will work poorly due to the technical setup of such offers – wifi users need to go through extra registration steps which will kill the CVR.
Let's take a look at the various traffic types now :
1. REDIRECTS : I already mentioned redirects, those are still here and still work. These are usually used for PIN submit offers, so you need to be able to target by carrier. A lot of these will be from adult/torrent/streaming sites.
2. POPS/POPUNDERS: I already wrote a separate thread about POP traffic, but lets mention it here too. There is one specific thing to note about mobile popunders compared to desktop – they are often left unnoticed as the mobile browser don't have all the tabs visible in the header like we are used on desktops. This is why you will see conversions coming from these even days after you bought the traffic – this is not so true with tablets, bigger resolution and screen size mean different browser layout so the tabs are more visible.
3. MOBILE DISPLAY: This means banner traffic. You can divide this further into “mobile website” and “in-app”. “Mobile website” means mobile traffic coming from websites, which can be optimized for mobile devices or not. Mobile optimized sites will usually have higher CTRs than unoptimized as the banners on unoptimized sites can be outside of the visible area for example. IN-APP traffic means traffic coming from banners placed within actual apps (mostly android or iOS apps). In-app traffic will be generally showing lower CVR due to accidental clicks but also higher CTR because of the same reason. This is especially true with game apps where the kids miss-click more often than not
There are 3 most popular banner placements on mobile optimized sites. One will be usually placed in the header and will be smaller in height, the size will be something around 300x50 or 300x100 with a decent amount of variations like 305x99, 320x50 etc … The second most popular spot is the footer, usually sized around 300x250 or similar variations. Many sites, especially the “long” ones, will also have one or more “middle” placements, usually using the same sizes as the footer.
The best quality traffic is usually from the header, followed by the footer and then the middle spots. This is my personal experience, so don't take it as 100% given.
In-app traffic has a bit different banner placements, but its usually the same size as the header ad on mobile websites – so 300x50, 305x99 … You will find these in the header or footer of an app. Then there are interstitials in form of “full page ads” - these have the highest % of unintentional clicks I have ever seen.
We need to address one more thing here, the difference between tablets and mobile phones, as both still fall in the mobile traffic category (thou I think they shouldn’t). Tablets have bigger resolutions, so some networks offer the possibility to upload bigger banners to show to tablet users. Those that don’t, will simply upscale the banner which might mess it up – so if you are targeting both tablets and mobile phones with the same creatives, make sure you keep them at high quality so it looks good even if scaled up.
You can access both mobile web and in-app traffic through the various mobile DSPs and expect to meat pretty heavy regulations. Especially when targeting in-app traffic through admob (google). If you want to try mobile display with less regulations, look at adult traffic, there is a ton of it available. Since no major app store allows adult apps, pretty much all the adult traffic will come from mobile websites. Low regulations mean more players so prepare for mega competition, especially in case of 3G traffic.
3. There are more mobile traffic types but these would require separate threads again. Moreover, this thread is already too long so let me just address the rest with one sentence each:
The biggest ones are SEARCH – so organic search engine traffic from google and bing mostly; and NATIVE - so the bombastic stories on viral sites, usually placed at the bottom of those sites in the “related stories” sections. I will also be writing one BIG thread on ADULT TRAFFIC as that requires proper analysis again and mobile has taken over that market too from obvious reasons
Just like in the first thread about POPs, I would like to add a few poins/facts to keep in mind when working with mobile traffic :
- Loading speed is more important with mobile traffic than it is with desktop traffic, especially when running carrier/3G traffic.
- Tablets are not equal to smartphones. I would say tablets are closer to desktops than they are to smartphones. There is also way less 3G traffic in tablets than in smartphones. You might also need different LPs for tablet and smartphones due to the screen size/resolution.
- The top OS are Android, iOs and Windows phone. They represent different types of customers and also perform differently both in terms of CTR and CVR, dont mix them when testing. The bids will be different too.
- Mobile website and inapp traffic is not equal either, the differences in CVR and CTR can be huge. Test each separately whenever possible.
- WIFI and 3G traffic is not equal either. 3G always has higher bids so DO NOT mix them when testing. Some offers are not suitable for WIFI traffic so dont send it there (mostly PIN submits).
I think I will end here for now, if anyone has questions, just post a reply or PM
This is great! I love how you break it down into the specifics. Please keep them coming!
Originally Posted by avantall
Another channel within mobile that is huge is incentivized traffic, also called virtual currency, also called offerwall traffic.
This is traffic whereby the user gets coins, credits, pearls or any type of "currency", usually used in gaming apps, to advance faster within the game. The user is not per se interested in the offer so quality is lower, but this gets compensated by the lower payout and the huge volumes that come with it.
To get a deeper understanding of this subchannel (incent) - that exists both on desktop and mobile, I happily refer you to an article I wrote on this a few months back. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/incen...mp-reader-card
An image says more than a thousand words so here is a screenshot of how an offerwall looks like - i'm sure most people here are familiar with it.
Originally Posted by cbrughmans
This is traffic whereby the user gets coins, credits, pearls or any type of "currency", usually used in gaming apps, to advance faster within the game. The user is not per se interested in the offer so quality is lower, but this gets compensated by the lower payout and the huge volumes that come with it.
To get a deeper understanding of this subchannel (incent) - that exists both on desktop and mobile, I happily refer you to an article I wrote on this a few months back. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/incen...mp-reader-card
An image says more than a thousand words so here is a screenshot of how an offerwall looks like - i'm sure most people here are familiar with it.
However, since I dont have experience with it other than the basic understanding, I dont want to write anything about it as of now ... maybe later on Thanks for the link, gonna check it out.
Sure thing!
Other things in mobile marketing that are big are SMS marketing and push notifications - Airpush is the market leader in this lastly mentioned niche
Originally Posted by cbrughmans
Not sure how much future there is for this traffic type tho.
Please have also Email traffic in your mind. A lot of Emails will be checked on there smartphones. So the templates and also the landingpages needs to be ready for that.
I
SMS has seen a major growth in recent years as other marketing channels are becoming saturated and mobile is everywhere.
In SMSEdge specifically we saw a rise of SMS marketing with a link inside the SMS which leads to the funnel (wasn't that common a few years back).
With that if you send a unique link per SMS (abc.com/a, abc.com/b..) you can easily track CTRs, leads and sales per SMS.
My 2 cents.
Originally Posted by SMSEDGE
@matuloo I am new to native what do you advice me to start testing on mobile or desktop given that I will bidding on cpm basis
Originally Posted by dseopro1000
There is more volume in mobile these days, the trend is pretty clear so choosing mobile might be better for the future. On the other hand, I find desktop to be more stable. Then again, some offers only accept mobile traffic.... see what it's like? There are pros and cons for both.
Maybe if you tell us what you plan to promote, you could get more precise answers.
Matej.
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