PropellerAds is an excellent marketing platform for Push, In-Page Push, Popunder, and Interstitial campaigns, but success still very much depends on how you are going to set up your ads and make them irresistible.
To get you started, here is a quick guide and a few helpful tips on how to make successful and profitable push campaigns with PropellerAds.
Make an offer users can’t say ‘no’ to
Before we jump right into creating your campaign, you should first think about what you are going to offer to your market, and it should be something that not even you can say ‘no’ to! Are you giving away prizes and freebies? Huge, jaw-dropping discounts? Limited edition items that people would sorely regret not getting?
Once you have decided and you are fairly certain that your offer is too good to pass, then let’s get on to creating your actual push campaign.
Tip: I use my favorite spy tool, Anstrex, to check out other campaigns and from there, I can easily check out other push ad campaigns that are running on different countries and platforms. You can even view their landers or check out their ad strength or their Alexa rankings.
Just FYI, adult content on PropellerAds is prohibited. Propeller makes sure their publishers and advertisers get the best of quality traffic and content
Invest in attractive creatives
The way your ads look is a huge and important factor in ensuring the success of your campaigns. While there are other details to consider when making them, such as affiliates and audience activity, trust us when we say that the creative side of your ad is going to be the deciding factor on whether you will make it or break it. It has to look good to be able to catch those few seconds of attention.
The creatives section is where you can input the title and description of your ads, as well as upload the photos that you will be using for the campaign. Remember to create multiple creative IDs and test out different combinations of all your ad ideas. This way, you will be able to know which titles, descriptions, and photos are effectively catching people’s attention and making them click on your push notification.
If you have a lot of creatives you want to use, I suggest that you organize it well or even list it down, if you will. This will substantially help you oversee which combinations are more effective than others or apply minor tweaks to if you have to.
This is a good opportunity to test creatives and optimize your Push campaigns using Smart Rotator. It's a PropellerAds tool that allows you to upload up to 8 creative ad sets in one Push campaign. In other words, you don’t have to create 8 different campaigns.
Just a quick rundown of what you should remember when uploading creatives for push campaigns:
- Upload files in JPG or PNG format
- Max upload size: 200KB
- Icon size: 192 x 192px
- Large image size: 360 x 240px
- Heading: 30 characters
- Description: 40 characters
Tip: To avoid ad burnout, refresh your ads at least twice a week. When creating your ads, you can easily utilize Propellers preview to see how your ads will look on desktop and mobile.
Mind your CPM
The CPM or the cost per impression is something you should carefully consider. You would not want to act like a cheapskate and hold back by bidding too low unless you are aiming for underwhelming results.
At the same time, bidding too high might make you lose more than what you originally bargained for. Weigh the pros and cons, look at your audience activity, and adjust your CPM bit by bit depending on the results you are getting.
If you are still having a hard time setting a bid, do not worry because PropellerAds will show you a recommended and maximum bid you can place that is based on your targeting and your CPA goal.
If you want to launch a CPC campaign, but are unsure of your optimization skills, use the CPA Goal. All you need is just to set the desired conversion price and the tool will optimize the bids and ad zones.
If you prefer to optimize CPC campaigns manually, try Custom Zone Bidding. This PropellerAds feature allows you optimize bids by zones without wasting your time on creating White List campaigns
Finding the right timing
PropellerAds will let you decide when you want your ads to appear. Do you want them to show up in the mornings, the whole day, or late at night? Do you want them to pop-up during the weekends or every day of the week?
Nevertheless, the best way to decide your ads’ schedule is for you to know your audience and audience activity. You would want to release your ads at the time of day when your targeted people are active and responsive. Still, results may vary and it will take a few runs and tests before you can identify the perfect schedule for publishing your push campaigns.
Finding the right timing isn’t just about time but advertising the ad to the user who were active. This is where you can utilize Audience 2.0 within Propeller.
With it, you can collect custom "by interest" or "by vertical" audiences using your own campaigns. Collect an audience of users who clicked in your sweepstakes campaigns, and use this audience for promoting other sweepstake offers. You'll be surprised by increased CTR & CR.
Essentially you are growing a more active user base which you can re advertise later on
User Activity is not the only key
One super important factor is determining the user activity. For example, with low activity you can get as many conversions as with high and medium ones. But you need a proven creative for such results. Due to the huge volume of cheap traffic, the low user activity targeting can bring very good results. You just need to have proven creatives which is why it is important to refresh and test multiple creatives in a campaign.
You might think that the user activity will pave the way for your campaign’s success, but we beg to differ. In fact, while it still affects the performance of your ads, setting the user activity to high will not automatically give you the results that will exceed your expectations. Also, keep in mind that by selecting high user activity, you will also be paying a higher cost.
So what do we recommend? Opt for medium user activity. You can expect more favorable results without having to unnecessarily spend too much at this level, especially if you are just starting and testing out a new campaign. This way, you also have more flexibility to work on different variations of your campaign.
Narrow down your target
You can’t have everybody on your campaign or else, you’ll lose more than you can earn! So, with that said, we are going to be more specific here with our targeting. In this part, PropellerAds will give you a bunch of options that will allow you to be more in control of your campaigns.
This goes beyond just the time schedule and audience activity because in the Targeting section, you can further segment your target user by location (GEO), platform, types of internet connection, operating system (OS) and versions, devices, ISP, browsers, and even browser language. That seems to be a lot at first but the extra effort of providing these pieces of information can help you make the most out of your budget.
I personally start broad as it is better to cast a wide net and filter out the bad. Collecting data with any type of arbitrage traffic is critical. You find out which browsers are working, which publichs are solid, and even what devices might be converting better.
Narrowing it down even more, maybe you just want to target a capitol or several smaller cities because they resulted in more conversions. This is the power of segmenting and narrowing your audience.
A quick tip is to segment countries, it isn’t good to bundle 1 campaign into for example an english speaking campaign. I personally would do it by country such as UK, USA, CA etc.
The only audience you cannot reach with push campaigns is iOS users. But this problem can be easily solved with In-Page Push traffic.
While In-Page Push notifications look exactly like traditional Push Notifications, this feature provides you with the ability to target more platforms and iOS types. So if you suddenly feel that your push campaign’s audience is too narrow or just running out of juice, you can expand the campaign with this traffic.
Test, optimize, and then TEST AGAIN
The real key to success in making campaigns is non-stop testing. The logic behind it is simple: the more tests you conduct, the more information you are able to gather, and that data will help you better optimize your campaigns!
For instance, when you first created your push campaign, you cannot say for sure which pictures, titles, and descriptions will make for a compelling ad. Furthermore, determining the schedule by which day or time is best to run your ads is also more or less a guessing game at first. But after a series of runs and tests, you will be able to gather enough data to make reliable and accurate decisions that can wield promising results!
There’s no fixed formula for this, just test, test, and test. Take advantage of what the platform has to offer, and optimize until you achieve the best version of your push campaigns.
Learn from PropellerAds channels
You can find a lot of useful insights about running campaigns in the PropellerAds blog, Quick Start Guide, and emails.
It should also be noted that PropellerAds has a benefits program for advertisers - Propeller Priority. The program works to reward repeat customers. Besides, in their Telegram-chat PropellerAds gives out bonuses to the most active members every month. Don’t miss out on these benefits!
