Every network seems to organize their carriers a bit differently, and having trouble taking my STM tracker results at times and optimizing properly within the ad network.
Here's a scenario:
airpush may have 40 carriers listed for a country while leadbolt will only show 4 and "other".
My leadbolt campaign doesn't contain "other" - just has the 4 carriers. But my STM tracker results still show 20ish carriers for a country. So the ad network must be grouping these under a carrier - maybe they bought them out, maybe other reasons. I don't really know.
So I Googled the names from my STM list of carriers and appended the carriers names from my leadbolt campaign. This turned up a couple matches, but there are still a bunch of carriers on my STM list where I don't know what they are called in leadbolt.
I just use leadbolt as an example - I see this across pretty much ad network. Most list very few carriers. I don't want to cut the wrong pieces but carrier really seems to come into play more than handsets on what I'm running these days.
So what do you guys do to identify all these little what I"d call "sub-carriers" that have their own name in the STM tracker but a network may group them under a parent company?
Is there a massive list of these? Do you guys hit up your ad network for this info & if so did you have any luck getting answers? Hoping there is a more comprehensive/one-off solution because working in a bunch of different countries, I could see this being a huge time suck (investigating each of these with spotty results) or money suck (day lost waiting for network support = $, or $ lost cutting wrong pieces).
There isn't a solution unless the ad network allows passing of the carriers through tokens, which most don't.
Most DSPs are more transparent and you'll be able to see these things. But if you choose to work with the ad networks, you have to work with them to get that information passed and work with them to block certain carriers. Those are services normally reserved for higher budgets.
-Tom