By Sam Sim, Co-Founder, Guppy Media
It’s crucial for performance/direct-response-based marketing that you adequately and thoroughly manage your overall click-to-conversion rates and earnings per click (EPC). Oftentimes, advertisers and networks have a tendency to get frustrated when there are substantial clicks within a certain time period but the actual conversion rate of the CPA-paying campaign is minimal. In many cases, normally I would shut off all campaigns that retain an average EPC of less than $0.05. In these cases, several revenue-generating opportunities could and do exist. Here are a few tips to ensure that you are maximizing your revenue and overall eCPM by taking advantage of all of the monetization options around the click.
1) International redirects: Always look up the geos and country IPs of the primary traffic and do a look up by top 20 geos. I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that in many cases, and even unintentionally, international traffic is delivered to a domestic (Tier 1) campaign. In this case, you will want to have a proper click-redirect solution in place. The proper solution should geo-rotate to appropriate campaigns to match the region of which geos the traffic is being referred from. This, of course, ensures you are monetizing all geo clicks coming into a geo-targeted campaign.
2) Unresolved or error pages: In many cases, many geo-targeted campaigns also maintain IP filters and frequency caps. These parameters are placed within campaigns (particularly characteristic of download campaigns) to essentially protect from fraud (IP and script fraud). On unresolved or error pages, you will always want to be prepared to automatically show a redirect offer that is comparable in conversion method as well as payout to the original source campaign. This solution should start to lift revenue immediately.
3) Mobile-optimizing campaigns: These days, when I take a snapshot of the traffic types that are hitting our current download campaigns, at least 20-30 percent of total traffic is now being referred by smartphones and other mobile devices. What this means is that if your campaigns are not designed to be smartphone browser/mobile-optimized, then they will not resolve correctly when being accessed by mobile devices. Hence, there is a loss of conversion. Many modern-day tracking solutions (e.g., LinkTrust) now offer an option to turn on a mobile setting. This setting enables campaigns to automatically revert to mobile-optimized pages when mobile devices try to access them.
I hope you can apply some of these tactics and principles, assuming you haven’t already. It is as a direct result of implementing these variables that Guppy has a seen a significant lift in overall eCPMs based on the same click volume being delivered. It is important to ensure that you are monetizing your redirected clicks in all facets possible.
Sam Sim is co-founder of Guppy Media and is an online and mobile media veteran with more than 10 years of direct-response and interactive-advertising experience.
Established in 2004, Guppy Games and Guppy Media are the premier online, mobile and social media agencies and developers with a presence in more than 50 countries, as well as hundreds of direct relationships both on the supply and demand side of direct-response marketing as a whole.
