Mobile app promotion can be either just another campaign type or your secret traffic bomb, but only if treated right. Luckily, we have something to offer: our expert’s guide enriched with tips and tricks for your guaranteed success. Feel free to educate yourself and learn how to cooperate with Adsterra in mobile app advertising.
Head of CPA
With several years of experience in app promotion, I’ve navigated the dynamic world of digital marketing, honing strategies that effectively drive user acquisition. In this article, I’ll share insights on how to kickstart a successful ad campaign using a reliable traffic source — Adsterra.
From choosing the tracking solution to crafting compelling creatives, I’ll walk you through each crucial step. Whether you’re a beginner or looking to refine your approach, this guide is designed to help you maximize your campaign’s impact. Let’s dive into the essentials and set the stage for your app’s growth.
What is mobile apps advertising?
In this article, we will discuss how to successfully advertise smartphone apps. By apps, we mean programs that can be installed on your phone: from a food delivery app to a flashlight. Popular niches in our network now include VPN, antivirus, video apps, so we will primarily focus on them.
How is mobile apps advertising different from in-app ads?
It is vital to draw your attention to the fact that we are not talking about in-app traffic, which is advertising placed within applications. Consider that Adsterra provides web traffic from our direct publishers, and in-app advertising is not included in our inventory.
In this article, we will discuss the intricacies of attracting new users, traffic optimization, talk about creatives and ways to make your campaigns as profitable as possible.
Adsterra offers a lot of formats for almost any type of monetized advertising on various topics, and mobile applications are one of the hottest options. We will be glad to see you in our ranks: we have something to offer your application.
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Mobile app advertising specifics
Mobile applications are a colossal niche in all respects. Given the possibilities and volumes, there are enough statistics to single out the favorites among the primary settings.
Devices
Applications can be divided into two main types based on the operating system for which they are designed for: iOS or Android. In most cases, your landing page will be a link to the application in the App Store and Google Play respectively. For Android, it is also possible to distribute applications by downloading the .apk file directly.
GEOs
Applications are popular all over the world. Nevertheless, it’s worth paying attention to the following targets, as they are currently the most popular in our network.
- Android US, IN, BR, ID, MX, SA, GB, NG, PK, ZA
- iOS US, GB, CA, MX, AU, SA, JP, BR, DE, TH
For VPN on iOS, the absolute leader is the US, which is a very popular target with high competition. Video applications like TikTok are currently very popular for the Android OS and are actively advertised to users in various Asian countries.
To Contents ↑Creatives
To prepare for promotion in advertising networks like Adsterra, we recommend preparing prelanders and creatives for Social Bar (In-Page Push precisely).
Prelanders are pages that precede the redirect to the store. They are necessary to warm up the user’s interest in your product.
Based on the experience of numerous launches, campaigns that lead directly to a page in the store show a much lower CR than campaigns with a pre-lander. Therefore, we recommend taking the time to prepare several prelanders, as well as conduct A/B testing. If you have such a technical capability, you can set up rotation of prelanders in the tracker. Prelanders with the lowest CR from impression to install can be disabled, thus leaving only winning creatives.
You will also need creatives to launch the Social Bar format. Social Bar includes many options for customization, from simple In-Page Push to Interstitial. To launch such advertising campaigns, you will need images of different sizes, texts, and icons.
Social Bar can be easily launched on our SSP (Self-Serve Platform), there you will find many templates that will help you put together the most winning creatives.
- In-Page Push creatives — OS templates, as well as Custom Widgets, — Icon, work especially well for applications.
- Interstitial shows the highest CR, and it can also be launched in SSP for CPM and CPA.
If you don’t have prelanders or creatives for display ad formats, don’t hesitate to contact your account manager for assistance. Adsterra has a dedicated team of specialists focused on developing and testing various prelanders and banners. If our team sees potential in your application, we’ll be happy to take it for “managed” testing and select the best creatives for your offer.
Mobile app promotion with Adsterra
Any campaign requires a strategy, even the most basic one. If you are just entering this niche, we really recommend doing some research. This will help you learn from others’ experience and make your first steps much more effective.
Start with a superficial study of competitors: your application probably has successful analogs. It would be wise to observe their audience, as much as possible in open sources, look for their pre-promotion campaigns. Only you can do this part of the work, and it will really immerse you in the market and prepare you for the following process.
Adsterra will help you make the next steps the most successful. You can always rely on the articles in our blog and onboarding in your Personal Account: just join and start today, and we will tell you where and how to move.
To Contents ↑Adsterra opportunities for mobile app advertising
We recommend launching campaigns for applications using CPI/CPT models (cost-per-install, cost-per-trial). To launch any CPA campaign, the first and perhaps most important thing to do is S2S integration.
Token, Pixel, SUBID, Click ID, etc. are all one name for a unique set of signs and symbols that we pass to the advertiser in the URL, and which they return to us if a conversion has occurred. This is a kind of unique “label” of the visitor. We generate this unique character set for every person that passes through our system.. Each token contains encrypted information about the user (country, operating system, browser, etc.)
To correctly set up a postback, you can use the conversion tracking page – you can also perform a test conversion there. Or you can contact your personal account manager for help.
Adsterra already has integrations with many platforms, which greatly simplifies setting up a postback for the application owner. For example, we already work with the most popular platforms, such as AppsFlyer, Adjust, Kochava, Singular, Branch.
By the way, as Adsterra cooperates with many friendly related service providers, we offer many unique freebies and bonuses you can get as an Adsterra member. That’s an extra pleasant reason to join our network, isn’t it?
To Contents ↑Short actions
Next, you need to decide on the conversion flow (CPI, CPT) and prices for the desired action. Why do we recommend focusing on short actions? Installing an app or starting a free trial are considered easy to medium flow and are performed by users quite often. As a result, campaigns generate a stable and consistent eCPM.
Our system is an eCPM based auction: the higher and more stable the eCPM, the more traffic you will receive. If the target action is performed too infrequently, there is a high probability that the sources will have 0 eCPM and be removed from the campaign.
Decide which action is convenient for you. Generally, the simpler the action in the funnel, the higher your conversion rate (CR) will be, and consequently, the lower the cost per conversion.
For guidance on competitive payments, you can contact support or your personal account manager. It’s important to enter the auction with well-selected rates. Avoid overbidding to prevent losses, and on the other hand, don’t bid too low — it will affect your eCPM as well as the quality and quantity of traffic.
To Contents ↑Ad formats for mobile app promotion
We recommend always starting testing your app with a Popunder. Pops are the format with the most traffic in our system. It is also the top format for most apps and most geos.
To understand how well your app is performing, after the test period, compare the eCPM on your campaign with the CPM that our system recommends for launching a Popunder campaign. The closer you are to this value (and even better, if your eCPM is higher than it), the stronger your campaign is in our league table.
Also, as we said above, the Social Bar format is a great way to get more traffic to your app. We recommend testing as many creatives as possible, and, similar to optimizing prelanders, turning off unsuccessful ones/scaling the buyout on creatives that perform better.
Successful CPA campaigns launched on Popunder can be scaled to other advertising formats. The Adsterra team regularly inspects the ad feed in search of well-performing ad campaigns. We can copy a campaign with an eCPM higher than average in the system to other ad formats (with your permission, of course). Therefore, I advise you to always be in touch with your account manager.
To Contents ↑How to make mobile app promotion of the highest effectiveness
Promotion is indeed a process to continue. So if you aim at a long-lasting result, get ready for a consistent work. The good news is that the effect of it is defintely going to inspire you to go on and on.
Optimization
Campaign optimization is a critical process. Don’t be surprised if your ROI is lower than desired during the testing period: always set aside a separate budget for testing. During the tests, you will determine which traffic slices/targets show the highest profit for you, and which ones may be worth disabling.
Placement ID Tracking
One of the most important points in campaign optimization is placement ID tracking.
Your campaign URL should contain a Placement ID macro. This macro forwards the ID of our sources = site ID to the tracker. Adsterra works with 35k+ publishers from all over the world, so the list of placement IDs will be quite large and will be constantly updated, as new publishers appear in the system regularly.
Analyze Placement ID statistics and see how users who came from a certain site behave. Let’s say a site brought you a lot of installs and free trials, but then they were followed by a high percentage of trial cancellations and a small number of purchases.
What conclusion can be made about such a site?
Most likely, users who came from this site are not interested in your application. A source with a large number of installs and a low percentage of purchases should be excluded from your campaign, in other words, add it to the blacklist.
To Contents ↑Extra hack: open a separate whitelist campaign for such a source, but lower the rate and set a limit. This way you will preserve your ROI and give the source a second chance. Perhaps with a lower rate it will not be unprofitable.
Sorting
For sources with a high percentage of purchases (or other actions in the funnel of your application), we recommend creating whitelist campaigns with an increased rate or using the Custom bid function within the original campaign. For your convenience, use the macro ##COST_CPA## to pass the price directly to your tracker. Consult with your manager to check the top eCPM required to win the first impression on the preferred source. Based on the eCPM, you can calculate the CPA needed to win the auction. It’s a bright example of the CPA/eCPM concept.
To Contents ↑OS & Browser
An important aspect of optimization is the consideration of the most successful versions of OS and browsers.
It is vital to disable versions of OS on which the application is not supported, otherwise users simply will not be able to install it. You can as well turn it off for OS versions, whose users show the least interest in your application.
The same with browsers and their subversions: exclude unsuccessful ones, leave good ones, scale excellent ones. We recommend paying attention to the Facebook and Chrome browsers when launching Android applications. Same applies to iOS: Facebook browser shows great results, as well as the default iOS browser Safari.
To Contents ↑Creatives
Don’t forget to optimize creatives and test new ones from time to time. A good idea would also be to make creatives for important world events: for example, for sports events. If you have any seasonal promos within the app such as Christmas sales or Black Friday discounts it’s a good idea to customize your creatives accordingly.
GEOs
If your application is available for many different GEOs, monitor their performance separately. Best practice is to launch a separate campaign for each GEO and optimize each slice, which takes a lot of time, but brings the best results.
Also, for some GEOs, optimization by region/state may be a good idea. For example, this is a common practice for campaigns targeting India.
Media buying is painstaking work and you need to devote a lot of time to campaign optimization, but trust us: it’s worth it 😉
Conclusion
On the one hand, mobile apps are no different from any other product type: they’re completely advertisable and have plenty of app promotion gross perspectives. On the other hand, the best results can be achieved only due to the special approach. Luckily, we at Adsterra know for sure what to do with your app to make it grow big, gain audiences, and receive tons of traffic. All you have to do is follow the expert instructions: make preventive research and never skip the optimization step. Any related questions left unanswered or you’re just already struggling to start advertising ASAP? Join and begin!
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FAQ
Making an app is just a step, although a vital one. Gaining a loyal audience is yet another one, and not less vital when it comes to making money via your app. So, mobile advertising, as we describe here, is the legit way to promote your app through relevant, trustable platforms, i.e., placing your app’s ads on websites, etc., to let you get as many downloads as possible.
Our network connects 35k+ publishers with 15k+ advertisers to give the best traffic matches. All you have to do to drive traffic to your app is join and launch a campaign with all the settings you consider needed. If it’s your first time, no worries: our managers are always ready to consult you on what best suits your app type.
It takes time anyways, but you can boost the process by buying top-quality traffic. Adsterra offers tons of opportunities for your app to grow the audience faster! We stand for only pure high-converting traffic from our publishers, so the result won’t make you wait long.
Sure! The scale of the app for sure makes the difference in regards to profit, but even small newbies can make money, if they have an audience. So as to gain it from scratch, we invite you to join Adsterra, where your freshly baked app can get a slice of the traffic pie!
