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Mgid - native traffic source review! (1)

08-09-2017 02:59 PM #1 Mobidea (Veteran Member)
Mgid - native traffic source review!

The MGID Network is a global pioneer in native advertising. It provides tailored solutions for advertisers, affiliate marketers and webmasters in one integrated platform.

MGID was founded in 2008 with the creation of one of the first modern native advertising technologies.

Today, it’s one of the most innovative Native Advertising Platforms. It was even shortlisted for the Native Advertising Awards in 2016.

Adding another ad network review to our collection, we are here to tell you how MGID was able to reach such a high tech level, what are its key features that help to get loyalty points from their affiliates and, of course, how to effectively work and earn money on MGID.

[Disclaimer: This post was originally published on mobidea Academy. All the missing information can be found in the full version.]

MGID: Overview

According to ComScore’s analysis of MGID’s performance in 2016, the platform is one of the leaders in native performance advertising.

In fact, the platform now reaches 850+ million unique visitors every single month! It’s got a worldwide presence!

The largest share of available traffic is present in the European region (31.2%). It’s then followed by Asia Pacific (27.2%), and LATAM (19.7%).



MGID’s traffic is suitable for mobile advertising because approximately 70% of its traffic is coming from smartphones.

MGID supports a CPC-based payment model, which means that advertisers only pay per click on the offer link.

The number of verticals which are available is impressive. It includes Arts and Entertainment, Family and Parenting, Food and Drink, Gaming, Health and Fitness, Hobbies and Interests, Home and Garden, Multicultural, News, Personal Finance, Pets, Shopping, Society, Sports, Style and Fashion, Technology and Computing, and Travel.

At the time of writing this article, the hottest verticals recommended by our Account Manager were:


However, if you’d like to be an adventurer and get all the sweet cash, feel free to test new verticals and regions. And make sure you build a close relationship with your Account Manager! You’ll get help with your affiliate banners (yes, for free!) and your Account Manager can help you go for campaign optimization based on your actual performance.

MGID’s Account Managers can adjust bids to ensure optimal budget usage and give you some awesome advice.

Important note: in order for you to get a dedicated Account Manager, you’ve gotta deposit at least $500 in your MGID balance.

Here are the advertising formats you can find on MGID: First, Native; second, Native and, third, Native Ad!

The minimum deposit required to launch a campaign is $100. It can be a deposit done via WebMoney WMZ or WMR, PayPal or Credit Card. We recommend you make sure your account has at least $500 at the beginning. This will surely guarantee you get yourself a totally dedicated Account Manager.


What are the Main Features offered by MGID?


How to Create a Campaign on MGID?

Go to the Advertiser part of your MGID account. Once you’re there, click the only green button you’ll see – Add Campaign. The campaign creation process is comprised of 7 blocks.
Each block is shown to you only when you’ve correctly filled out the previous one.


Block 1: General Info
This block starts by asking you to create a campaign name – check!

Then, in Campaign type, you’ll be asked to choose one of two options: product promotion or content promotion.
Go for the product option in case your offer is related to any actual products or services you wish to advertise. On the other hand, in case you want to get the attention of users and lure them into your website, select content promotion.

Next, it’s time to select among Campaign Categories and there are 25 of them on the list. Try to think carefully about which one of the categories best suits your offer.
Don’t forget to click on sub-categories or sub-sub to make sure you get even more detailed.

Note that there are two campaign types. This means that – if you change from one campaign type to the other – you’ll see different categories.

For example, on MGID, we tested a multi-GEO offer promoting a Workout Video and selected the “Product Promotion” type for the category Healthy Living, and for the sub-category Fitness and Exercise.

Check the Creative Guidelines and click on “MGID CATEGORIES.”



The last field in “Block 1: General Info” is Language. You can choose only one Language per one campaign. So in case you wanna promote a multi-GEO offer, you should obviously create separate campaigns for each GEO and design your creatives based on the specific language of that GEO.


Block 2: Targeting
MGID has pretty much the classic options:

Important note: there’s no option to select a mobile carrier. So this sort of targeting is not available on your Dashboard.
However, if you have IP ranges for a carrier you want to target, don’t hesitate to ask your manager to create a whitelist for those IPs.

By doing this, you can be sure that your campaign will be shown only to the users whose IPs you’ve selected. This isn’t the best way to create a single carrier campaign.
Even so, you know you’ll have a dedicated Account Manager to help you go through this step!


Block 3: Dynamic Retargeting
Ever noticed that – whenever you’re navigating a website – you tend to check ads that are related to products you were searching for before?

That’s it!

That’s called dynamic retargeting. It tracks users who’ve performed certain actions on a page which is advertised (imagine the Levis jeans website), and then go to another that’s unrelated to jeans or fashion websites.
MGID’s sensors detect that user and – the next time the user visits any of their publisher’s websites – ads with Levis jeans will be shown to them again.

According to MGID, here’s how the retargeting feature works: “Ads themselves “pursue” a user who has already visited your resource.”

The idea of retargeting is to create two campaigns:

The first campaign will be the main one and will be shown to everyone, according to your targeting. Once you’ve got enough users, you can launch the second campaign specifically for them.
This means the ads of the second campaign will be shown only to the relevant users.

In MGID, you can’t set the retargeting option yourself. Get in touch with your Account Manager and they’ll help you!


Block 4: Schedule
According to your needs, you can choose the date in which your campaign will go LIVE and the date in which it should be stopped.

Additionally, you can set a dayparting for your campaign, selecting only certain hours and days of the week in which you want your campaign to be active.

You’re even advised to choose among four default time intervals:


Block 5: Limits

The fifth block opens settings for Campaign and Daily Limits. You can limit your campaign not just by budget – as allowed by many ad networks – but also by number of conversions or even clicks.

Since MGID offers the CPC model (you’re charged only if users click on ads) it’s intelligent to actually limit your campaign by number of clicks.

In fact, this move can help you to not go over your expected budget. You can also specify the number of days during which ads won’t be shown to the users who’ve already converted for an offer.

This feature will probably remind you of frequency capping. The idea behind it is similar: To limit the number of times that ads will be shown to a particular user.
However, on MGID, you can only limit a time with a minimum of 1 day for users who’ve already performed an action – made a conversion – and not for those to whom your ad was shown before.


Block 6: Tracking Tags
This block is not your Postback tracking yet. Use it in case you need to set up UTM tags or add a click id token from your Network in the custom tracking tag, if you want to set a Postback in the next block.



Block 7: Conversion Sensor
On MGID, you can track conversions by either placing a code on your pages (you’ll need this if you have a content promotion campaign) or by using a Postback URL and setting goals for your campaign.

In case you decide to use a tracking code, there’s no need for any additional assistance from your Account Manager. Simply click on the “Get Tracking Code” button to generate your sensor code, and then copy-paste it in the source-code of every page you wanna track conversions from.

Imagine you don’t have access to the offer’s page source code. This means you’re not a direct owner of an offer and that you usually promote offers from affiliate networks such as Mobidea.
In this case, you won’t be able to correctly paste a tracking tag and use a Postback.


How to set a Postback on MGID?

Turn the Conversion Sensors ON and select “Postback” from the dropdown “Goal Type” menu. Then, set a specific event and pass on the required data depending on the actions performed by the visitor.

In case the event is a “lead” the following data will be passed on to the URL http://a.mgid.com/postback:

c=click id + e=lead (event name) + r=amount of revenue (if you’ve inserted it in the CPA goal)

For our test campaign, the Postback URL looks like this: http://a.mgid.com/postback?e=leadxxxxx&c={{EXTERNAL_ID}}

And here’s the Tracking URL: http://domain.name/campaign/XXXX%7CXXXX?tag={click_id}&cost={click_price}&webs ite={widget_id}&token1={teaser_id}&token2={categor y_id}&token3={campaign_id}



Planning to use the Mobidea Tracker to pass on conversions? We’ve already saved all the tokens/tags from MGID! You’ll only need to select MGID from the available Traffic Sources and configure rotations.

On the screenshot below, you can see the Mobidea Tokens that correspond to the MGID tokens.



The main token is {click_id} which will pass on the information about Click ID, once a conversion occurs. Among others, we’d like to mention {teaser_id} that’s responsible for the Ad ID of the click and {widget_id} which passes on the Publisher ID that sent a click.

Wanna be able to read a description for all the available tokens of MGID? Check MGID Macros Made Simple!

As you can see, the Tracking on MGID is pretty straightforward. Here’s the last detail you need to know about the Conversional Sensor: You can link your Google Analytics account to MGID and you’ll see your conversions on Google Analytics.


Wanna get more tips about Tracking, Reports, Optimization and Adding New Ads on Mgid? Check the original version of this article on Mobidea Academy!

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