Mobads Review: All You Need to Know

Introduction

Have you been working in affiliate marketing for a while?

Then you’ve probably come across such names as Buzzcity and Reporo, right?

What you may not know yet is that those two platforms now belong to the same company – and Buzzcity became Mobads.

Mobads is the platform for mainstream traffic, whereas Reporo kept its name and remains the adult equivalent inside this conglomerate.

Since you can already find some information on Reporo in the Mobidea Academy, we decided to take a closer look at this new mainstream platform!

Mobads is all the rage now and we want you guys to know how to play it like true pros!

First, we’re gonna give you fellows a short overview of the platform and mention some interesting features.

Then, we’ll explain how to launch campaigns and set up your tracking, as well as review the reporting provided for your optimizations.

After our review, this new network shouldn’t be that much of a mystery to you anymore.

In fact, you’ll be fully prepared to judge whether or not this could be the right choice for your traffic!

Ready?

Let’s get down to business!

Mobads Review – Overview & Features

The interface of the Mobads platform is quite user-friendly and self-explanatory.

The Dashboard has some recent campaign results and announcements.

You can check your Reports, Campaigns, Websites (if you want to work with them as a publisher) and the Traffic Estimator.

One thing that’s perhaps a bit peculiar and different from other networks is the “Manage Creatives” part inside “Campaigns.”

There, you’ll upload all the images you intend to use for your banner campaigns, and which are being reviewed for approval.

Only afterwards will you add them for the banners inside your campaigns.

You’ll also notice the option below your main menu to switch between your Mobads and Reporo accounts.

This can be useful, as your funds in the account can be used equally on both platforms.

Awesome, right?

As far as traffic is concerned, Mobads clearly focuses on banner traffic, as it’s the most available traffic on their main GEOs.

There, you can launch campaigns for several banner sizes – 320 x 50, 300 x 100 and 300 x 250 for smartphones, as well as 300 x 75 for feature phones.

Besides 320 x 50 – which usually has the most (image) banner traffic – a lot of the traffic of Mobads is actually attributed to text ads.

Moreover, it’s also got pop traffic on several GEOs.

On the Traffic Estimator, Mobads states Direct (Redirect ad) as a possible option.

Even so, we couldn’t find any GEO with this kind of traffic available.

This estimator will give you the opportunity to check the available traffic for the last 7 days or “current” – which refers to the previous day.

You can start your traffic request on several levels within the GEO: operator, OS, browser and device.

You can then drill down by clicking on the segment of the pie chart you wanna go deeper into.

Additionally, you’ll also notice a little box on the right with CPM (for banners) or CPC (for pop) just like in the screenshot below.

Related Content: CPC vs CPM: Getting The Price Model Right

This is the recommended bid, according to Mobads.

However, when we checked, it seemed that there’s simply one recommended bid for banners and one for pop traffic, no matter the GEO.

Therefore, it won’t really give you much info – in the end, it’s all about bidding at a level that you feel comfortable with, since it’s not possible to know your bidding position on this network.

As you can see from the screenshot above, in some GEOs (such as the US, in this example) big parts of the platform’s traffic seem to lack definition, as far as the Carrier is concerned.

Why? Because they’re listed as “Other”, which doesn’t allow for a concrete carrier targeting on big chunks of Mobads traffic.

Keep that in mind when checking the volumes.

If you wanna make use of all the traffic, you may wanna start out with offers where the Carrier is not so relevant (e.g. sweeps with a form submit.)

Overall, it seems that Mobads is lacking.

Indeed, the amount of mainstream traffic it’s got is nowhere near the huge amount of traffic you can find on Reporo, the adult side of things.

Even so, there’s no need to cry.

Indeed, GEOs located in such continents as Africa and Asia can still have some decent volumes and may be a good starting point to explore this ad network.

Coming back to the interface, if you need any more detailed explanations on the individual sections of your account, you can easily check Mobads’ Advertiser Self Service Help.

That’s where you can find a detailed explanation of every single part of the interface and how to set up campaigns.

Bear in mind that some of the screenshots seem to be a bit outdated (maybe they’re from a previously planned interface.)

Technically-speaking, though, it’s obvious that all the information you may need is there.

Campaign Creation & Tracking

Now let’s go through the whole process of creating a new campaign.

First of all, you need to open the tab Manage Campaigns and click on the button Create Campaign Group.

We recommend you use this function to create campaign groups per GEO, as it can help you organize your campaigns.

Moreover, you’ll have the ability to assign dedicated budgets per campaign group so as to control your costs (see below.)

You can choose among 3 possible ad formats on the opened page:

• Banner traffic, which can be 300 x 250, 320 x 50, 300 x 100 and 300 x 75.
• Popunder traffic from direct publishers.
• Pop Exchange – mix of the traffic from direct publishers (that was not sold from the main Popunder format), ad exchanges, and third-party partners.

On the next page, you need to allocate a certain budget (minimum of $10) for this particular campaign group.

By default, the Auto Reload option is on.

This option will insert more money into your campaign in the event that it starts running out of budget.

Wanna perform a test and don’t wanna overspend money?

Turn this feature off.

On the other hand, once you’ve got a stable campaign and feel like running it until the end of time, this tool is just for you!

IMPORTANT: don’t forget to turn “Conversion Tracking” on, inside your campaign group.

This will allow you to see conversions on Mobads.

We’ll tell you how to set up your tracking soon!

At this point, you’ve created a Campaign Group.

Now, you can start to create a campaign.

The targeting settings are pretty extensive.

There is Network Targeting (Carriers, Wi-Fi, IP addresses), Operating System, Device Manufacturer, Device Type, Browser, Language, Dayparting.

After setting up your targeting, you’ve gotta choose a bid.

There’s no info about top bids or any other hints about the bids of your competitors.

All you’ll be able to see is a minimum bid and a recommended bid (which seems to be random.)

On the page, you can set daily limits and choose to spread the budget evenly throughout day.

However, the minimum limit is $50, which is quite high.

Plus: in most of the countries, you won’t be able to spend that much per day, due to a lack of traffic.

Another important thing is that you can’t set a capping for impressions shown to each user.

According to the support, with the highest bid, you’ll receive about 90% of Popunder traffic.

Regarding Banner traffic, we were told that the traffic distribution is more even.

That’s all the information we’ve got, though.

The campaign is created and you’re feeling great!

Wait!

It’s not live yet!

You need to add banner(s) and the destination URL – for Banner campaigns – or just the destination URL – for Popunder campaigns.

Mobads has relatively strict banner rules.

According to its banner compliance, creatives should include relevant branding, logo or text, where “relevant” basically means related to this particular offer.

A banner that simply states “top racing games” is supposedly too vague, as you can see in the examples showcased on the guideline provided by Mobads.

When adding banners to your campaign, you can select the images that you’ve already previously uploaded (and got approved for) in “Manage Creatives”, you can upload new images that’ll still need to be approved, or create a text ad instead.

For the text ads, you’ve gotta scroll to the bottom of the page, as this option seems to be a bit cloaked and hidden, despite its comparatively high traffic volumes in many GEOs.

Note:

It’s great that you can also add a text below your image banners, which can increase your chances of luring users.

We both strongly suggest you use them!

You can technically upload banners of all sizes into one campaign.

Even so, since you’re not able to set individual bids per banner (format), we recommend you set different campaigns for each format.

Otherwise, what’s gonna happen?

In case you wanna start bidding at a relatively low level, your whole budget might be “eaten up” by less competitive and low-performance formats first.

As you can see, there are several useful tokens such as campaign id, banner id, zone id, etc. available that you can send to your tracker.

You can find some information regarding Conversion Tracking Integration in Mobads Support Center.

And more information regarding Tracking Tokens and Conversion Tracking Integration in Reporo’s Support Center.

Here’s the Postback URL we’ve inserted on Voluum (when setting up the “Traffic Source”, as Mobads is not set up as a template there yet) for our test campaigns:

http://api.mob-api.net/conversion?rcid={externalid}

And here are the tokens we implemented on Voluum:

This ensures your Voluum campaign URL will already have all the correct tokens to insert on your Mobads campaign.

Meaning?

You’re good to go!

Note that we set up all our test campaigns like this, but experienced some difficulty in tracking some of our conversions on Mobads.

Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to solve this issue with Mobads Support in time.

We recommend you keep a close eye on your stats and compare them to your tracker, so that you can react fast and contact Mobads Support for help in case there are some discrepancies.

Reports & Optimization

Just like the targeting options, the reports and optimization tools are quite comprehensive and handy.

You can see campaign stats by days, operating systems, browsers, operators, devices, and traffic sources.

Moreover, in the Traffic Sources tab, you’re able to set a particular bid for each source and exclude sources that you don’t wanna run anymore.

In order to change the campaign targeting, you need to click on the Modify button.

There’s no option to create a whitelist.

Even so, you don’t really need it.

In our case, since none of the campaigns had more than ten traffic sources, the blacklist feature completely fulfilled our needs.

Note that there are no hourly stats available on the platform.

This means you wanna make use of your tracker for more detailed reporting.

Interesting notes from our tests:

• Both the Popunder and Pop Exchange campaigns of the same segment have different traffic sources, so don’t be afraid to launch both campaigns at the same time
• It’s not a feature of this specific network, but it’s still worth mentioning: after our tests, we reached the conclusion that the 320 x 50 banners have most of the banner traffic and a much better CTR. Basically, you get better results than with the 300 x 250 banners
• As expected, adding a text below the banner increases CTR. Don’t neglect this feature! It’s gonna boost your results

Mobads Verdict

After our initial tests, it’s clear that the platform is still new and – in some points – not fully perfect.

For example, the recommended bids are the same for all GEOs per ad format and don’t actually add that much info.

Even when we inserted a bid that’s more than 10 times the recommended one in – supposedly – one of the main Mobads GEOs (South Africa), we didn’t manage to get a noteworthy number of impressions in one of the major ad formats (300 x 250.)

More?

The capping issue is a huge handicap!

Even in segments where we did get some traffic, it was always restricted to only a few zones available, making it very difficult to find a good spot and optimize.

When speaking to the support about the issues regarding the traffic volumes, we were usually pointed towards the fact that most volumes are on Reporo.

This is meaningless.

Since Reporo is all about adult traffic, it won’t help you promoting your gaming and mobile content offers.

In terms of carrier targeting, you can see that – in many GEOs – there are big chunks of traffic identified as “Others.”

This means you might wanna try targeting by IP ranges, if you have some at hand.

Plus: keep a close eye on your tracked conversions on Mobads VS your affiliate network’s and your tracker’s stats, as we experienced some discrepancies!

The interface of Mobads is quite clean and easy to navigate, and the possibility to switch easily between your Mobads and Reporo account is cool.

Moreover, the available features for campaign groups are unusual in a great way.

For instance, there’s a dedicated budget per campaign group, a daily group limit, and the auto reload.

It might take some time to get used to which settings you have to control through the group and at which campaign level.

Even so, once you get the hang of it, it can actually help you stay in control of your campaigns.

In terms of support, the online Advertiser Self Service Help is quite extensive and will answer all your first questions about the platform and several settings.

When writing to the Support about a problem with our account, the first reply was pretty generic and we ended up speaking to them on Skype to solve the issue.

Overall, we conclude that – as the traffic source is relatively new – there’s still a lot to be done in terms of available traffic.

It seems Mobads is trying to expand, which we believe will make the platform more appealing.

However, if you feel adventurous and find a great offer you wanna expand to a new traffic source, you can always check Mobads estimator and give it a go.

This can be a great strategy, since competition is currently not that fierce!

We hope this review helped you to get a taste of this new platform!

Already gave Mobads a shot?

Tell us all about it in the comment section below!

Cheers!

Mobads: Offers & Verticals

• Ad Types: Banner, Text Ads and Popunder
• Cost model(s): Standard CPM
• Verticals: Mainstream

Mobads: Payment & Investment

• Minimum deposit: 100$
• Payment methods: PayPal, Credit Card, Paxum, Wire Transfer

Mobads: Support

• Personal Account Manager: no
• Support Response speed: okay. On our first request, we got a reply within 24 hours. Following up usually took longer, but sometimes less.
• Support rating: okay. The first reply we got on our problem was pretty standard without checking our account in detail first. After following up, we got quite a detailed support and answers to our questions.
• Contact methods: email or through “Support Tickets” in your account.
• Contact: support@mobads.com or account.management@mobads.com