Hi everyone! Today is an interview with Dmitry Ivanov, head of the Tapgerine.com affiliate network. Follow them on Twitter and Facebook. They work mainly with installs, but also add other mobile offers. There are several perks; I will not explain them in detail because Dima will tell you himself. I will add only that I successfully received payments from the network, everything is fine, and I recommend it.
— Tell us about yourself. How did you get into mobile, why an affiliate network right away, who are you there, and what do you do?
— When I started making money online eight years ago, mobile did not exist yet. Mobile began emerging about four years ago. At international conferences, pioneers showed their products while everyone watched with distrust and smiled. Now they are multimillion-dollar businesses. We entered mobile three years ago, spent a year developing our own products and doing outsourcing, then switched to advertising, where the big money is concentrated. Why an affiliate network? 🙂 I became convinced of affiliate marketing’s potential long ago. With proper management and relatively little starting capital, it is a good way to earn steadily. In my networks, I start out providing support to affiliates and advertisers and working as a business-development manager. As employees gain experience, I step away from operations and focus on strategy and finance.
— How are affiliate networks created at all? Did you just decide, “We’re doing this”? Did you find investors? What did you promise them? How does anyone reach that decision? 🙂
— Launching a network from scratch used to require at least a year: write tracking and statistics, test everything, and keep enough programmers around to maintain the system. It is much easier now. Platforms you can rent and customize changed the market. It took us only two months to go public with a finished product. Though, jumping ahead, I admit that we are already working on our own system. As you grow, the platform’s features become insufficient and rent becomes very expensive. The investors are my partners in the US; we have worked together for eight years, and entering mobile was a joint decision. Since we already had mobile development experience, we did not doubt the affiliate program would succeed.
— Installs are usually considered a very clean and fluffy market. Tell us about the ugly shit that happens there. Who fucks over whom, and how? What setups have you run into?
— Compared with clicks, performance marketing really can be called a fluffy business. At first, before you have a name and experience, everyone tries to fuck you over: networks and publishers. They do it in different ways. Some brazenly send automated installs through proxies. Some mix incentivized with non-incentivized traffic. Others write sophisticated bots that fill forms and register. With experience, we learned to spot fraud quickly, connected an anti-cheat system, and put a dedicated team on traffic monitoring. Every advertiser also sends a report twice a week for each traffic source, which lets us optimize campaigns. Unfortunately, publishers are not the only ones cheating. Some advertisers practice refusing to pay for traffic. We immediately expose them publicly, and many lose the urge because other networks stop working with them.
— What happens to the publisher’s commission then? Do you reimburse it, or is it their risk too?
— If the publisher is not at fault, we reimburse it fully from our own pocket. If the advertiser proves the quality was very low, we compensate for approved campaigns and may add some perks. But of course we will not compensate fraud. If the problem is conversion, we mostly take the loss ourselves.
— Tell us about Asian bot farmers and the others. How much bot traffic is there?
— The kings of obvious cheating are Vietnamese publishers. Without embarrassment they ask for daily payments, promise 10,000 conversions a day, and run installs through proxies and special software. We catch them on the first conversion. Actually, they do not even pass approval. Ninety percent of bot installs are on Android. iOS is much more protected in that respect. Ad networks have a lot of bot traffic. When we want to buy clicks from them, we first get to know the managers closely and explain that we have large budgets we can spend, but if they deceive us and pour bots, we will see it and the cooperation will end. It usually helps, but there are still plenty of bots.
— Tell us more about incentivized traffic. What is it, what types are there, how often do publishers send it to clean campaigns, how quickly can it really be detected, and when would an advertiser be happy with it?
— Incentivized traffic is when the user is promised some perk for an action. In our business, for example, a user is promised a Google Play or Amazon gift certificate for a certain number of installs of different apps. Or they are playing a game, need 1,000 gold to kill an enemy, and are offered the gold for installing an app. There are many variations. Some publishers mix in incent. If the amount is small and they know how to bypass monitoring technically, it is hard to notice.
— This is not exactly about an affiliate network, but information like this once helped me understand what was happening in the market. What is an offer’s, or app’s, lifecycle? Developers build it, a publisher decides to promote it. What happens next? Which stages exist, where is incent needed, where is quality traffic needed, how does payout depend on the stage, how long does each stage last, and so on?
— Well, next they come to us. They state their goals and budget. Based on experience, I would identify three lifecycle phases:
- Continuous stable user-base growth. These campaigns run steadily from several months to a year and pause briefly for technical work. AnastasiaDate, GameTwistSlots, and Mobogenie are examples. They are the most pleasant campaigns to work with: close cooperation with advertisers, timely traffic-quality feedback, stability, and minimal chargebacks. Only non-incentivized traffic. Budgets are usually limited, for example to 300-400 conversions a day per source, so optimization can happen in time.
- Calm user acquisition over a fixed period. These campaigns usually last one or two months and resume with the best sources after ROI is evaluated. Both traffic types are used, but in separate campaigns. Average advertiser budget is 40,000 USD.
- Burst campaigns that push apps to the top of stores, usually for one to three days. Reaching the top in a short time generally requires incentivized traffic. The budget is announced as unlimited: the more, the better.
— What budget does it usually take to reach the top 10 or top 100 in Russia and the US?
— Huge. To reach the US App Store top 10, where competition is highest, for example, you need 80,000 downloads over several days; Russia takes about 20,000. Calculate the budget if an install averages 2.50-3.50 USD.
— How stable is the install business? Where is the money: stability, or pouring 50,000 USD of traffic for a week and then launching another offer?
— Installs are very stable if you work honestly and have good sources. Some publishers work with the same advertisers for many months, and those advertisers buy their traffic with enormous pleasure.
— I used to be interested in approval. Will they accept you into a network? What should you write? How do you check people, whom do you disapprove, and who decides?
— Networks as companies have no approval problem. They are disciplined, answer every question, and provide all information. Individual publishers are harder. We introduced special questions that help assess an applicant’s motivation. Managers decide if they are satisfied with the answers. We are starting to call publishers, which is very effective. About 15% are declined. Some put “Huy Vam” as their name and “[email protected]” as their email. We delete those applications immediately. But most people treat registration responsibly and even call support themselves to get approved faster. 🙂
— What do you look at first when judging traffic quality from a new publisher?
— No matter how different campaigns are, every advertiser has one criterion: ROI. If traffic costs more than it earns, the sources are shut off. Naturally, global ROI cannot be calculated in a couple of weeks, so each campaign has its own little trick besides the install for measuring quality quickly. In games it may be passing levels one, two, and three; in dating it may be registration. Besides the install, we see every action performed by each publisher’s users.
— What gets you banned from the network? What do I need to do for you to ban me? 🙂
— Send even one fraudulent install and it is a lifetime ban. 🙂 We also ban for mixing in incentivized traffic.
— What do you do when conversion rate is high and the advertiser complains, while the publisher shows a traffic account and everything looks clean? I like pushing CR on clean traffic through optimization and landing pages. But I do not work much with installs because my clean traffic can look incentivized by rate. What do you do, and should a publisher lower CR?
— This can only be solved case by case. CR both is and is not a sign of incentivized traffic. A few days ago one publisher ran a campaign at 40% CR. First he got it from me, then I got it from the advertiser. Then the advertiser called back and asked to turn that publisher on again with a six-figure budget. But advertisers’ first reaction is the same in 100% of cases: “Why are you sending incentivized traffic?” We often face situations where I ask publishers to lower CR artificially because a manager at a large American advertiser has an instruction saying CR must be no more than 7%, and nobody gives a fuck about anything else.
— How often do you kick publishers and ask them to show where and how a campaign will run? Who gets kicked, at what stage, and why?
— New publishers with high CR. 🙂 If a publisher openly shows the source, we try to explain to the advertiser that they need to look at user behavior. That resolves the problem.
— Do you spill angles to publishers? What do you tell them? Do you leak information about other publishers?
— We spill offers with great conversion and open budgets. We tell only how well each offer runs. We never leak information about other publishers. Cheating is the exception. We help newcomers: show them where to get traffic and where to send it. But in general we give them a blog to read before starting, www.barsag.com. Know it? 🙂 It explains everything so well. 🙂
— Ha ha, I know it, thanks. Do publishers ever snitch on competitors, like, “Look, he is running a bad banner”?
— That has never happened to me.
— Where do installs mostly come from? Where would you recommend running in Russia and in Western markets?
— Oh, it varies and depends on the publisher. Some have their own apps with 300,000 users. Some have social-media communities with the same number. Many work with networks and know how to convert clicks and impressions into installs properly. It is hard to give one specific recommendation. Media buying is hard work where success comes only through experiments. In any case, if the manager knows an offer works well on Target@Mail, in communities, or somewhere else, they will recommend it.
— How many publishers do you have? What percentage sends any traffic? What percentage generates the main turnover? What was the highest daily turnover from one publisher?
— Three-plus publishers. As for who sends traffic and generates the main turnover, know the Pareto principle? They told the truth in the first year of economics. 🙂 “Twenty percent of effort produces 80% of the result, while the remaining 80% produces only 20%.” Once we had 10,000 USD in a day; that was the maximum.
— And now the promo question, because where would we be without it. Tell us about the network. What are your main perks? How and when do you pay? What bumps do you give? How do you communicate with publishers, and what will you do for them?
— We are more than a year old and growing very dynamically. We focus exclusively on mobile. Inventory is now mostly app installs; we are adding subscriptions and negotiating with new advertisers. We pay by WebMoney, EPESE, PayPal, and wire. We also arrange Payoneer cards for our publishers. Right now we pay on the 2nd and 16th of every month. People who work steadily are paid weekly or on request so they always have working capital. We even have partners on daily payments.
Several new tools will be available next month: a TDS for redirecting traffic to suitable offers, a tool for managing banners on sites, and so on. We plan to remove the 100 USD minimum payout to attract newcomers, since 90% of active publishers are now experienced webmasters, and to develop the blog.
Support works twelve hours a day with a minimum number of days off. Real 24/7 support is planned for the near future. In general, we take an individual approach to every publisher. Where we can, we raise payouts. Sometimes we pay early if someone asks. Overall, we try to make every possible concession.