Adf.ly review - Advertisers side of business (1)
This analysis aims to review Adf.ly, the mainstream ad network, and this time we focus on advertisers side of the force!
[Disclaimer: This post was originally published on mobidea Academy. All the missing information can be found in the full version.]
In reality, Adf.ly is not a network, since the main service provided is a URL shortener tool. But Adf.ly is more than that! By using this shortener, publishers can earn money according to the users who visit this specific link.When users open the link, they see the advertisement for at least 5 seconds.
Only then can they skip the ad and go to the shortened URL.
This ad format is called
Interstitial Advertising.
Here’s the example of a
Then, on the top of the page, you’ll see the following bar:
Apart from the Interstitial format, Adf.ly has Pop and Banner traffic. However, it’s not that clear where this traffic is coming from, since the main concept of Adf.ly is the transitional page which has the interstitial format.
According to the feedback from the support, some publishers who use their shortener prefer to display banners and pop ads instead of the interstitial.
Campaign Creation
First of all, we must say that Adf.ly doesn’t present you an amazing world of possibilities in terms of campaign targeting. Indeed, there’s no special tracking postback or anything readymade on this ad network.
On the top menu, you can see the “Create Campaign” tab, which is why we’re here!
The first step of the campaign creation is selecting the ad format you wish to run.
The interstitial is an ad that’ll show your offer page to the end user for a period of 5 seconds.
On Adf.ly, Banner traffic is available in the 728 x 90 banner size or in smaller sizes, even though the platform warns there’s “Limited Availability of traffic.”
In case you’re looking for more interesting campaigns, your best options will probably be the Interstitial and Pop.
The final traffic type is the Pop, which is displayed on the websites of Adf.ly’s publishers.
The next step
After selecting the ad format you’ll see that the minimum prices per GEO will change, depending on the ad format.
Select the GEO and amount of traffic you wanna buy – the list is organized by the price of 1000 visits to your offer link.
Plus: as you may see, you don’t have all WW GEOs available, which means you may not be able to run that crazy campaign you’ve got on that unusual GEO.
You may have noticed some red warnings such as in the image above.
These are comments about the traffic availability and price.
Don’t forget about the baseline to purchase traffic – 5$ – which can be combined in different GEOs.
Since the platform is not that clear in terms of campaign creation, we’ll now go through the steps. The Previous Website refers to a previous campaign you’ve set up and that you can aggregate together on the same tab.
The Website Name will be the campaign’s name, so make sure you’ve identified it clearly. The Website URL is your offer URL, which we’ll analyze later. In terms of targeting, the remaining possibilities are very limited. Indeed, you can only select Desktop or Mobile traffic – no distinction between types of device or brands.
You can select two Operating Systems (iOS or Android) and select different carriers (all carriers will provide 3G + Wi-Fi traffic).
The other options available and which are common to all types of ad formats are the Max daily budget function to include traffic from other Partner Networks, and the Auto Topup. We’ve noticed that, by removing the Partner Network option on the banner and pop campaigns, the amount of traffic was disappointing (even though we were in the first position.)
In campaigns in which you use the traffic from these partner networks, you’ve got the ability to track the Partner ID using the token ?adfly_partner=xxxxx , where xxxxx will be the id of the partner ad network. Even though you can track it, we didn’t spot any place where you can choose the Partner Network. Therefore, tracking it seems pointless.
Regarding the Auto Topup option: it’s basically an automatized fund refill to your campaigns that’s transferred from your wallet to the campaign. The other options shall remain unexplained, since they’re not relevant for media buying purposes.
Out of Curiosity
Since we were interested in that Banner Ad format, we decided to give it a shot. We launched a banner campaign – size 728 x 90. However, when we tried previewing the banner, it wasn’t displayed correctly.
The original banner:
The banner on Adf.ly’s preview:
As you can see, the banner is not displayed correctly at all. This meant we couldn’t figure out how the banner is actually displayed and whether or not it’ll be correctly displayed.
Now that you’ve read this article you’ve probably been able to gather something super obvious: Adf.ly isn’t exactly the kind of network we usually work on.
The traffic is coming from the users who see the offer for 5 secs and can then skip the ad.
Most of the traffic is interstitial, but we also managed to find some pop traffic in several countries.
If you want to know about Optimization, Tracking, Payment methods, and more tips about this platform, read the full original article in Mobidea Academy!
Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Mobile