Mobads - mobile ad network review! (1)
Have you been working in affiliate marketing for a while? Then you’ve probably come across such names as Buzzcity and Reporo, right?
What you may not know yet is that those two platforms now belong to the same company – and Buzzcity became Mobads. Mobads is the platform for mainstream traffic, whereas Reporo kept its name and remains the adult equivalent inside this conglomerate.
Mobads is all the rage now and we want you guys to know how to play it like true pros!
[Disclaimer: This post was originally published on mobidea Academy. All the missing information can be found in the full version.]
Mobads Review – Overview & Features
The interface of the Mobads platform is quite user-friendly and self-explanatory. The Dashboard has some recent campaign results and announcements.
You can check your Reports, Campaigns, Websites (if you want to work with them as a publisher) and the Traffic Estimator. One thing that’s perhaps a bit peculiar and different from other networks is the “Manage Creatives” part inside “Campaigns.” There, you’ll upload all the images you intend to use for your banner campaigns, and which are being reviewed for approval. Only afterwards will you add them for the banners inside your campaigns.
You’ll also notice the option below your main menu to switch between your Mobads and Reporo accounts. This can be useful, as your funds in the account can be used equally on both platforms.
Mobads clearly focuses on banner traffic, as it’s the most available traffic on their main GEOs. There, you can launch campaigns for several banner sizes – 320 x 50, 300 x 100 and 300 x 250 for smartphones, as well as 300 x 75 for feature phones.
Besides 320 x 50 – which usually has the most (image) banner traffic – a lot of the traffic of Mobads is actually attributed to text ads. Moreover, it’s also got pop traffic on several GEOs.
On the Traffic Estimator, Mobads states Direct (Redirect ad) as a possible option. Even so, we couldn’t find any GEO with this kind of traffic available. This estimator will give you the opportunity to check the available traffic for the last 7 days or “current” – which refers to the previous day.
You can start your traffic request on several levels within the GEO: operator, OS, browser and device. You can then drill down by clicking on the segment of the pie chart you wanna go deeper into. Additionally, you’ll also notice a little box on the right with CPM (for banners) or CPC (for pop) just like in the screenshot below.
This is the recommended bid, according to Mobads.
However, when we checked, it seemed that there’s simply one recommended bid for banners and one for pop traffic, no matter the GEO. Therefore, it won’t really give you much info – in the end, it’s all about bidding at a level that you feel comfortable with, since it’s not possible to know your bidding position on this network.
As you can see from the screenshot above, in some GEOs (such as the US, in this example) big parts of the platform’s traffic seem to lack definition, specifically for Carrier, because they’re listed as “Other”, which doesn’t allow for a concrete carrier targeting on big chunks of Mobads traffic.
Keep that in mind when checking the volumes.
If you wanna make use of all the traffic, you may wanna start out with offers where the Carrier is not so relevant (e.g. sweeps with a form submit.) Overall, it seems that Mobads is lacking. Indeed, the amount of mainstream traffic it’s got is nowhere near the huge amount of traffic you can find on Reporo, the adult side of things.
Even so, there’s no need to cry.
Indeed, GEOs located in such continents as Africa and Asia can still have some decent volumes and may be a good starting point to explore this ad network.
Coming back to the interface, if you need any more detailed explanations on the individual sections of your account, you can easily check Mobads’ Advertiser Self Service Help. That’s where you can find a detailed explanation of every single part of the interface and how to set up campaigns.
Bear in mind that some of the screenshots seem to be a bit outdated (maybe they’re from a previously planned interface.)
Campaign Creation
Now let’s go through the whole process of creating a new campaign.
First of all, you need to open the tab Manage Campaigns and click on the button Create Campaign Group. We recommend you use this function to create campaign groups per GEO, as it can help you organize your campaigns.
Moreover, you’ll have the ability to assign dedicated budgets per campaign group so as to control your costs
You can choose among 3 possible ad formats on the opened page:
- Banner traffic, which can be 300 x 250, 320 x 50, 300 x 100 and 300 x 75.
- Popunder traffic from direct publishers.
- Pop Exchange – mix of the traffic from direct publishers (that was not sold from the main Popunder format), ad exchanges, and third-party partners.
On the next page, you need to allocate a certain budget (minimum of $10) for this particular campaign group.
By default, the Auto Reload option is on. This option will insert more money into your campaign in the event that it starts running out of budget. If you want to perform a test and not to overspend, turn this feature off. On the other hand, once you’ve got a stable campaign and feel like running it until the end of time, this tool is just for you!
IMPORTANT: don’t forget to turn “Conversion Tracking” on, inside your campaign group. This will allow you to see conversions on Mobads.
The targeting settings are pretty extensive.
There is Network Targeting (Carriers, Wi-Fi, IP addresses), Operating System, Device Manufacturer, Device Type, Browser, Language, Dayparting.
After setting up your targeting, you’ve gotta choose a bid. There’s no info about top bids or any other hints about the bids of your competitors. All you’ll be able to see is a minimum bid and a recommended bid (which seems to be random.)
On the page, you can set daily limits and choose to spread the budget evenly throughout day. However, the minimum limit is $50, which is quite high.
Plus: in most of the countries, you won’t be able to spend that much per day, due to a lack of traffic.
Another important thing is that you can’t set a capping for impressions shown to each user. According to the support, with the highest bid, you’ll receive about 90% of Popunder traffic.
Regarding Banner traffic, we were told that the traffic distribution is more even. That’s all the information we’ve got, though.
Next, you need to add banner(s) and the destination URL – for Banner campaigns – or just the destination URL – for Popunder campaigns.
Mobads has relatively strict banner rules.
According to its banner compliance, creatives should include relevant branding, logo or text, where “relevant” basically means related to this particular offer. A banner that simply states “top racing games” is supposedly too vague, as you can see in the examples showcased on the guideline provided by Mobads.
When adding banners to your campaign, you can select the images that you’ve already previously uploaded (and got approved for) in “Manage Creatives”, you can upload new images that’ll still need to be approved, or create a text ad instead.
For the text ads, you’ve gotta scroll to the bottom of the page, as this option seems to be a bit cloaked and hidden, despite its comparatively high traffic volumes in many GEOs.
Mobads Verdict
After our initial tests, it’s clear that the platform is still new and – in some points – not fully perfect. For example, the recommended bids are the same for all GEOs per ad format and don’t actually add that much info. Even when we inserted a bid that’s more than 10 times the recommended one in – supposedly – one of the main Mobads GEOs (South Africa), we didn’t manage to get a noteworthy number of impressions in one of the major ad formats (300 x 250.)
More?
The capping issue is a huge handicap! Even in segments where we did get some traffic, it was always restricted to only a few zones available, making it very difficult to find a good spot and optimize.
When speaking to the support about the issues regarding the traffic volumes, we were usually pointed towards the fact that most volumes are on Reporo. This is meaningless. Since Reporo is all about adult traffic, it won’t help you promoting your gaming and mobile content offers.
In terms of carrier targeting, you can see that – in many GEOs – there are big chunks of traffic identified as “Others.” This means you might wanna try targeting by IP ranges, if you have some at hand.
Plus: keep a close eye on your tracked conversions on Mobads VS your affiliate network’s and your tracker’s stats, as we experienced some discrepancies!
The interface of Mobads is quite clean and easy to navigate, and the possibility to switch easily between your Mobads and Reporo account is cool. Moreover, the available features for campaign groups are unusual in a great way. For instance, there’s a dedicated budget per campaign group, a daily group limit, and the auto reload.
It might take some time to get used to which settings you have to control through the group and at which campaign level. Even so, once you get the hang of it, it can actually help you stay in control of your campaigns.
In terms of support, the online Advertiser Self Service Help is quite extensive and will answer all your first questions about the platform and several settings. When writing to the Support about a problem with our account, the first reply was pretty generic and we ended up speaking to them on Skype to solve the issue.
Overall, we conclude that – as the traffic source is relatively new – there’s still a lot to be done in terms of available traffic.
It seems Mobads is trying to expand, which we believe will make the platform more appealing. However, if you feel adventurous and find a great offer you wanna expand to a new traffic source, you can always check Mobads estimator and give it a go. This can be a great strategy, since competition is currently not that fierce!
Find Optimization tips, tracking and even more details on Campaign creation in the original article on Mobidea Academy!
And if you have tried working with this platform already, feel free to leave a comment below!
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