Introducing the Zorka.Network: the solution for mobile traffic monetisation by Zorka.Mobi. The network is known for its direct cost per install (CPI) offers and a huge variety of high-converting offers via SmartLink/API. The offers cover the various verticals: games, shopping, gambling, services, travel, utilities, entertainment, education, etc. Affiliates using the network launch plenty of profitable campaigns daily and some of them are ready to share their experience with other affiliates.
Below is a case study presented by one of the affiliates who prefers to stay unknown. For reference, we’ll be calling the affiliate Christopher in the article. He has earned a good commission, and you can follow his example.
Campaign Offer – Heroes of Alterant
Spend: $12,557
Earned: $20,907
Profit: $8,350
ROI: 66%
Commission: $0,78
KPI: 4% of users who made a purchase inside the app on the first day
Period: April 01, 2018 — May 31, 2018
Traffic source: video in-app networks
Affiliate network: Zorka.Network
Christopher has been working with Zorka.Mobi since 2015. The affiliate always works with gaming offers and has admitted in testing around with different networks. Zorka.Network is Christopher’s favourite one because of the network’s high quality of service and good reputation. Mainly he sends traffic to mobile apps from Facebook, Google and myTarget.
The affiliate manager informed Christopher that a new gaming offer “Heroes of Alterant” with a $0.78 commission for Russia was added to the network and this encouraged him to run a campaign to see if he would be able to earn on it.
Once he started testing the game “Heroes of Alterant” it appeared that the previous sources didn’t work. Neither Facebook nor Google could reach the KPI goals. Then Christopher had an idea to try in-app networks. As it appeared later in the case study, the idea was pretty good.
Video creatives
Christopher used the advertiser’s video creatives and made a couple of videos himself. There were several approaches. The videos with the brightest and most colourful visual effects displaying the gameplay worked best of all. All videos were no longer than 15 seconds, and also some static banners were used.
You can see the most converting ones below.
Video example 1:
Video example 2:
The two videos above did not appeal much to the users. They didn’t show the game’s spirit. click-through rate (CTR) and conversion ratio (CVR) was low, so the cost per install was only $1,50 and the volume was 20 installs per day.
Video example 3:
The given video creative above brought the best CTR and CVR. That’s explicable as we see the gameplay colourfully integrated into the video. These installs cost $0,46.
Campaign setting
Geo: Russia
Source: video in-app networks
Gender: Male, Female
Age: All ages
Bid: $0,46
Payment model: CPI
Delivery type: Accelerated
Process: whitelists and blacklists
Christopher tested around 10 campaigns with different video creatives. The quality of the first traffic flow was rather low, it seemed impossible to achieve the 4% KPI. Some video creatives had low CTR and CVR.
Christopher had to do something about it, so after analysing the campaign’s results, he selected the best placements and created the whitelist. Correspondingly, “bad” placements had to go to the blacklist. He also stopped the campaigns with non-converting video creatives.
As a result, only one campaign delivered positive results: the cost of traffic flow dovetailed lower than the commission in the network. The quality increased significantly and the conversion into the purchase went up to 26%. The affiliate kept sending traffic through this campaign constantly filling up blacklists and whitelists. Christopher then increased the daily budget from $300 to $2000 – as it appeared, bigger daily limits lead to the more traffic, though the budget wasn’t entirely spent during the day.
Christopher went on managing these campaigns in the same way for two months till the time when the offer was stopped.
Conclusion
From running the campaign, if you see that the traffic source you normally use doesn’t work, you don’t have to change the offer. Test around with other sources which could prove crucial in the long run.
The pros of working with in-app traffic are that you don’t have to constantly farm accounts like on Facebook, you don’t need cloaking. However, there are some cons. It’s difficult to create a good video ad. Also, you’ll get a small amount of traffic if your balance is $2000-$3000. And finally, it’s a necessity to create whitelists and blacklists.
We are grateful to Christopher for sharing the case study. Currently, the offer is still stopped. But there’s a list of all active offers with various geo-locations such as Russia and many others.
Choose an offer and run profitable campaigns.