The 7 Deadly Sins of Mobile Performance Marketing

Reliable measurement is non-negotiable. Without it you’re definitely committing one of these 7 deadly sins of mobile performance marketing that could kill your network. Get the entire playbook for free.

First, the bad news: Without an accurate and reliable measurement platform, advertisers won’t work with you, you can’t build relationships with publishers, and your chance at succeeding slips away.

But, here is the good news! Because we’ve worked with thousands of ad networks, we’ve been able to see what works and what doesn’t. We’ve become pretty good at pinpointing the most common mistakes made by mobile ad networks. Avoid these seven frequent pitfalls that keep mobile ad networks from being successful:Why does device targeting matter? It ensures your offers are targeted to the traffic you and your advertisers care about. If you aren’t using it, you could be bleeding money.

Android and iPhone users have different tendencies, and it’s important that campaigns use the appropriate parameters, like device type to ensure that you get the best possible performance. Performance marketers need to become familiar with advanced targeting, which will allow you to create specific rules based on how to target preferred audiences. Whether targeting by operating system, device brand, or custom defined rules, you need to get into the nitty-gritty of targeting to get the most bang for your buck. You can even get as precise as only accepting clicks from specific sub-publishers based on the IDs passed in by your publisher.

Using client-side cookie-based tracking for mobile campaigns is just asking for trouble. In the mobile world, cookies are extremely unpredictable—they can’t last across devices and their ability to be blocked continues to grow with ad-blocking technologies built into the hardware devices.

So what do you do now?

Well, if a user travels from app to browser, the cookie won’t follow, and the conversion won’t be tracked. Loss of tracking means credit doesn’t go where it’s due, and the publisher and advertiser lose money. Yikes.

Solution: Server-side tracking with a unique identifier.

Using unique identifiers for server-side tracking enables tracking to function across multiple device types and eliminates the downfalls of client-side tracking, such as blocked cookies and single device tracking. HasOffers has a unique identifier called transaction ID that our adserver generates on click to facilitate server-side tracking. We do all the hard work for you!

Post-install events are the present. Forward thinking networks that are serious about growing need to be measuring which traffic sources drive users with the highest LTV. If you do not optimize your traffic for this, you are providing a less than ideal experience for your clients and advertisers.

Setting up offers but not tracking post-install events is leaving money on the table. If advertisers want users to continue to complete actions after they download the app (isn’t that the point?), offer goals must capture and track these events, and then pass payouts to publishers.

Post-install events can be in-app purchases, upgrades, progress milestones, and other events.

Get the playbook to see the rest of the 7 deadly sins of mobile performance marketing.