Push traffic. The main trend of 2018. The ultimate guide. Part 2

Hello, ZorbasMedia speaking once more.

We’re publishing the second part of our push-traffic guide. Today you’ll find out the best way to monetize your user base, and how and where to buy traffic in advertising networks. Also, you’ll see our profiting and failing cases, each tackled separately. Let’s do this!

How to monetize push-traffic?

As mentioned before, you can gather your own user base and start working with it directly, without any advertising networks. Let’s look into the particularities of this method.

Pros:

1. 1. Your base — your rules. You can promote what you want and however you want, except for those instances where that isn’t legal;

1. 1. No resales. You get users for the exact price you paid to get them;

1. 1. It’s easier to spend more money when it’s on yourself. Several views a day at a certain time will let the audience “deflate” quickly, getting used to your push, thus the involvement will be much greater.

1. With a correct flow set up, one user can pay off several dozen times.

Cons:

1. 1. Unlike advertising networks, where they update the base constantly (meaning you’ll be working with a “circulating” audience), you’ll have to update the user base yourself, i.e. introduce more working capital;

1. 1. You bear full responsibility for supporting the infrastructure;

1. There’s a risk that the audience won’t convert well, and you won’t be able to get your spendings back.

The second option is buying traffic in advertising networks.

There’s more and more advertising networks that are actively developing push-direction. Among them are PropellerAds, MegaPush, Adsterra and many more. We tried each of them, and can confidently say — they can all work, if you approach the matter correctly.

Which verticals are best suited for push-traffic?

Push-notifications in itself is quite an interesting type of traffic. We’d call it a mix of existing, established sources. Why?

1. 1. Push-notifications don’t let you target a narrow audience. This is similar to display and popunder-traffic, where ads are shown to everyone;

1. Despite of this, you only get landing clicks, like with teaser ads or social networks. It’s much more likely that the user is interested in the promoted product or service, which means he’s more valuable.

Unfortunately, because the targeting is too wide, push-notifications don’t provide the opportunity of testing large-scale hypotheses within one campaign. Going in “blind” can lead to big losses.

Advice: test creatives and landings with different sources of traffic, if you can. In the future transfer them to push-notifications — this way you’ll be able to get the biggest response from your audience.

Push-notifications work well with easy flows (best creative — best pre-land — best offer), and can go on for a very long while. It’s not uncommon for a campaign to function without breaks for a few months and bring stable income — that happens because the base gets updated. However, the primary creative (the one that users see on their screen) sooner or later will stop attracting attention. That’s why it needs to be updated, although it’s not necessary to change it entirely. Try to add a new button, emojis, play with the text. Don’t forget that creatives should be tested when the campaign is profiting, and not when it’s been three days since it brought any leads.

It’s hard to say which leads will definitely not work for push-traffic. All verticals work differently on certain platforms, which is why push-notifications are a huge opportunity for testing.

When choosing an offer for push-notifications, pay attention to the popularity of this vertical at the moment and a geolocation that hasn’t been overworked yet. It doesn’t mean that a virility cream won’t convert in Russia, it just means that you’ll have to spend much more money on testing.

Keep in mind: with push-notifications, a flow can work no matter what. It all depends on perseverance, patience, and your starting budget.

Case: “Sweepstakes on Europe with 300 profit, no optimization.”

To “feel out” the traffic, we tried to spend a small budget and check if there’s any opportunity for profit. It turned out there is.

The advice of a partnership’s manager determined the geolocation. Offers — sweepstakes, and at that with different payment options:

Sweepstakes are allowed in all advertising networks, so there were no problems with moderation. Our creatives were simple. “iPhone XS for one euro? Latest news”, “France is in shock! How residents are getting a phone with a 99% discount”, etc. Overall, around 20 creatives were tested, a lot of which almost immediately brought profit.

Here’s the best one in France:

And here’s the best one in Germany:

Targeting, with the exception of geolocation:

• • Devices: smartphones, tablets

• Browsers: Chrome

A bid should always be medium if you want to get a lot of traffic consistently. Pre-lands were quite primitive, downloaded from Adplexity:

Here’s some numbers.

For the entire period (3 days in a lazy format), we spent $662 and got $970. Thus we have $308 of profit, and 46% ROI.

And to remind you, there was no optimization, the campaigns sent themselves. At some point we even thought it’ll always be like that, but the convert got less and less profitable, so we stopped our test.

A Binom tracker screenshot:

We took offers from several partnerships: Clickdealer, Yepads и Gotzha (by the way, we just released a cool interview with Gotzha’s managing partner, and it contains a juicy bonus for new affiliates.)

What did we learn by the end of directing traffic?

1. 1. Push-notifications work.

1. 1. Creatives are the most important part of a flow.

1. Potential profit from push-notifications exceeds $x,xxx a day.

But it’s not always as smooth as we just described. While testing on other campaigns we made a few serious mistakes that ended with losses. More information in the anticase.

Anticase: “How we wasted $600 on Italy. Analyzing mistakes.”

Inspired by our colleagues’ success with gambling in India, we thought we could do this too, and tried our hand at it. Worked with the same scheme — stock landings, top offers (not with payment for a deposit, but for registration), accessible creatives. And…went wildly under-budget. How come?

Mistake №1. The start was too steep

In MegaPush network we launched 10 campaigns at the same time, medium bid. An hour later we were already out of money, and clicks kept coming in until the next morning.

Here’s what we got:

We were surprised with the lack of any leads, especially because we had a lot of creatives and expected at least a few of them to profit. Then it got clear — our test was too large-scaled. That was our mistake №2.

Mistake №2. The test was too large-scaled

Despite the seemingly low cost, push-traffic is very expensive. First of all, due to everyone’s current interest, the traffic rates are starting to climb. Second of all, due to a lack of detailed targeting there’s a lot of misclicking. So my advice for everyone: if possible, always test your flow with another source, the one you’re already fluent in.

The first test had us feeling slightly euphoric; we decided that it’ll always be like this. The biggest delusion an affiliate can have is the feeling that money will just magically appear in your pocket. That’s the third, and biggest mistake.

Mistake №3. Unrealistic expectations

Push-notifications is the same type of traffic as all the others. They have their own particularities, but the principle is the same — to earn money, you have to work a lot. We ourselves wanted to know if it’s possible to earn millions without lifting a finger — turns out, it isn’t. Same goes for creatives, landings, and offers. With these things, push-notifications are neither a cure-all solution nor an innovative method of gaining profit.

Nonetheless, even from these money we got a result we can work with in the future. A few days later we transferred a similar flow to Ireland, and got the following statistic:

If only there were as many clicks in Ireland as there are in India…

Conclusion. Summing up what we’ve discussed.

We offer you to properly figure out pros and cons of push-traffic, and also to listen to the opinions of the industry’s leaders.

Pros:

1. 1. A new type of traffic, a breath of fresh air in the affiliate world;

1. 1. With the right company set-up, there’s an opportunity to get relevant clicks for a small price;

1. 1. A relatively good starting point for newbies, loyal moderation and low entry threshold;

1. 1. An opportunity to practice in making creatives and in optimization before going into more complicated sources in the future;

1. 1. A limitless space for creativity, every vertical can succeed;

1. An opportunity to fill a niche and become a professional.

Cons:

1. 1. An impossibility of narrow targeting, retargeting;

1. 1. This format is becoming more and more popular, so traffic prices are climbing swiftly;

1. 1. To keep the campaign in good shape, it’s necessary to update the creatives consistently;

1. A lack of learning material and useful ideas on working with push-traffic, not enough knowledge available to the public. However, we’re working on it. Don’t forget to subscribe to us if you’d like timely and relevant updates from the affiliate world.

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