Traffic monetization: How to identify and select better advertising aggregation platforms?

In the first half of the mobile Internet , what people talked about most was how to quickly accumulate users and how to improve user experience to increase retention rate . The capital market also highly praised this traffic -first business strategy. At that time, you could raise a lot of money just by releasing a DEMO. If you had 18 million users, you would be a winner in life!

But in 2015-2016, the entire industry was discussing commercialization and monetization, and further to return on investment , LTV, the positive cycle of buying volume and monetization, etc. This also reflects that capital is gradually becoming more sober and returning to the commercial value of mobile Internet companies. In the previous article, I shared the ecology and model of programmatic advertising. Today, let’s discuss with you the platform selection strategy for advertising monetization.

Currently, developers face several common pain points when monetizing overseas traffic advertising, and the advertising platform is the most critical source of the problem.

When many teams or individual developers are working on advertising monetization, they often bet on a single advertising platform because they do not have the resources and manpower to invest in multi-platform docking. After being connected for a period of time, making adjustments and supplements in the face of a decline in revenue will seriously affect the normal development and release rhythm, and even drag down the overall monetization income.

Therefore, in order to achieve the most efficient app monetization, developers generally choose to use multiple advertising platforms. However, managing multiple platforms every day will inevitably be overwhelming and will greatly reduce monetization efficiency.

Therefore, it is very important to connect to a high-quality advertising aggregation platform.

Advertising aggregation platforms can obtain resources from multiple advertising platforms, but their shortcomings are also obvious. Because they only act as a middleman, they will give priority to advertisers and DSP demand-side platforms that have been integrated with their backends, and ignore advertisements outside their systems, resulting in application developers being unable to maximize their application monetization capabilities.

So, how do you identify and choose a better advertising aggregation platform?

First, the more transparent the platform solution is, the better . As an app developer, you must pay attention to maximizing eCPM when using various advertising platforms. All platforms should have the same chance of advertising , and app developers can adjust based on advertising effectiveness to publish the ads with the highest revenue. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to have a completely transparent understanding of the contribution of each advertising platform. This requires detailed data to compare advertising platforms with very different characteristics and sizes.

Currently, only a few aggregation platforms provide fully transparent data on traffic performance on different advertising platforms (performance in specific countries or specific advertising formats). The lack of transparency will make it impossible to effectively guarantee the implementation of developers' advertising strategies.

In addition, intelligence and automation are equally important . A good advertising aggregation platform must be easy to operate and can be adjusted at any time. App developers not only want the platform to provide them with useful data, but also require the platform to be able to adjust quickly to cater to their needs. In today’s age of automation, a good platform can automatically optimize waterfall flows and adjust traffic distribution.

Similarly, a good advertising aggregation platform needs to be able to flexibly arrange advertising displays based on advertising effectiveness . The highest-earning ad today may not continue to generate high monetization levels tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Sometimes, existing advertising platforms are replaced by new platforms with higher potential, and advertising mediation platforms must be able to cater to rapidly changing data and make timely adjustments.

Therefore, for app developers, a perfect advertising mediation platform must be fully automated and modular. Developers must be able to flexibly adjust the settings of all advertising formats and advertising platforms in the background, and can see the actual situation and data of advertising display in each application. Developers should also be able to add third-party advertisers outside the platform in the background, implement cross -promotion in various applications, and manually adjust the advertising waterfall flow to acquire more users.

Faced with more complex overseas markets, how should application developers adjust their platform strategies? Sanliang’s analysis of this point in his sharing on “rowing at sea without oars” is very pertinent and worth referring to.

Simply put, it can be divided into two stages. In the first stage, the user base and capital support are relatively small. At this stage, developers should rely on products from companies such as Google or Facebook for advertising monetization. In the second stage, the product has a wider impact, a larger user base, and stronger capital support. At this stage, developers should explore direct sales models, cultivate overseas sales teams, and establish direct contacts with advertisers or advertising agencies.

Google and Facebook are both investing heavily in mobile advertising solutions and are constantly building their own competitive advantages. At least from the perspective of advertisers, in the current mobile advertising market , Google and Facebook's products and services can reach more users and bring higher value.

So, what exactly are the competitive advantages of these two companies? The most important thing is that Google and Facebook have effectively solved the two difficult problems of precise positioning technology and quantifiable analysis of delivery effects.

Taking Facebook advertising as an example, Facebook provides People-based Targeting technology, which allows advertisers to clearly state the characteristics of the target audience, including gender, age, region, language, interests, etc. On this basis, advertisers can clearly choose the purpose of their advertising campaigns, including a series of quantifiable indicators such as clicks, registrations, installations, and purchases.

Only with precise positioning technology and quantifiable analysis of delivery effects can advertisers see actual commercial benefits and continue to invest .

Are there other advertising platforms you can work with besides Facebook and Google? You can try it, but it won’t account for a large proportion of the overall advertising revenue. Because the mobile advertising market is already a typical oligopolistic market, Google and Facebook have firmly dominated more than 50% of the revenue in the entire industry.

(Revenue data of the US mobile advertising market in 2016)

Of course, developers are also moving forward in exploring business models . From 2014 to 2016, many developers imitated and tried to build their own advertising platforms, attempting to transform from developers to advertising platforms. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo all have their own products and are very successful developers. However, their advertising platform businesses are often built on the basis of their products maintaining a leading position in their market segments and developing in line with the trend.

Therefore, this blind and fast-following strategy has caused many companies to suffer heavy losses. More importantly, some very capable developers have lost the opportunity to seize new product categories.

For mobile application developers, the road to advertising monetization is full of thorns, but by grasping the product as the core, using the advertising platform as a fuel, and exploring innovative business models, they can also maximize the monetization benefits!