Ad Networks

PropellerAds Review: Is It Worth It?

Last updated on July 4, 2024 by Mobidea Academy 6 min read

Table of Contents

PropellerAds Overview

Next in line in our series of ad network reviews is an in-depth PropellerAds review.

PropellerAds is a worldwide premium advertising platform, granting users access to exclusive traffic channels alongside advanced AI-driven tools for ad delivery and optimization. It caters to media buyers, agencies, brand proprietors, and affiliate marketers alike. This is a very well-known multisource ad network and a global traffic source.

Yes, that’s right! It’s got tons of traffic for many different GEOs. Affiliates can now run ads with the following ad formats:

Push Notifications – PropellerAds push base includes more than 600 million subscribers from all over the world!
In-Page Push – This format looks exactly like a Push Notification. You can use it to target more platforms and iOS types, expanding your Push campaigns.
Popunder – Popunders provide massive reach at the lowest cost.
Survey Exit – It’s an exclusive PropellerAds ad format. Target the audience, pre-engaged with online surveys, and skyrocket your CTRs and CRs.
Interstitials – Interstitial ads are an excellent way to capture attention immediately.

But before we move along, let’s take a minute to learn some of PropellerAds’ story.

Those who are familiar with PropellerAds know that they’ve been in the advertising business for quite some time, and are experts in the space. Since its founding in 2011, the company has grown into one of the leading ad networks in the industry today.

We could say that PropellerAds started with Popunder and now it’s a multisource ad platform with 5 formats.

Now it is one of the largest traffic sources known to almost every affiliate.

PropellerAds’ reach is now more than 12 billion ad impressions per day.

The advertising platform works with all popular verticals, except adult: finance, e-commerce, mainstream dating, sweepstakes, iGaming, utilities, games, etc.

This PropellerAds review is gonna show you some of the amazing things about this platform.

Ready?

Without further delay, let’s get to it right away!

Get Started with PropellerAds

Setup

Here’s what you’ll see once you have created your account on PropellerAds:

Statistics
Traffic Chart – traffic volumes by ad format, pricing model, countries, os, platforms. Also, it includes “hot” traffic segments with the best prices, low competition & high volumes
Audiences – here you create audiences for retargeting
Tracking – set up the conversion tracking
Finance – your billing history
Add funds – go here to make a deposit and claim a promo code
Extra monetization
Insights
Help center
Special offers
Propeller Priority
Feature request – vote, discuss and share ideas about platform improvements.
Live online chat (lower right corner) – a 24/7 online support chat.

Moving on: as with pretty much everything else, the tracking setup of PropellerAds is quite straightforward.

On the platform, just hit the “Tracking” option on the left-side menu.

Here you’ll find out how to set up conversion tracking easily, an S2S postback, and here you’ll test conversion tracking.

Nice, ain’t it?

You know the drill: you’ve got the setup in place.

Now, let’s go to the actual campaign creation stage!

Signup on PropellerAds

Campaign Creation

Create a New Campaign

Let’s begin with a campaign with Push Notifications ad format.

Set the campaign name, choose a pricing model (CPC, CPM or CPA Goal*) and paste your target URL.

*CPA Goal is an auto-optimization tool that helps drive conversions at the target price you set.

Create an Additional Campaign

This option is available for CPA Goal Push campaigns. With it, you don’t have to create separate campaigns for each format. Instead, you launch just one CPA Goal push campaign, and the PropellerAds system optimizes your creatives for Onclick and Interstitial formats on its own.

Next option?

Our old, dear friend, frequency capping, so nothing special going on here. Select your capping frequency, don’t touch it to leave the default settings (1/24), or check the box in case you wanna disable it.

Now the sweet part – creatives.

Add a title (up to 30 symbols)
Description (up to 40 symbols)
2 creatives: icon (192×192) and a big banner image (360×240). Crop it!

Don’t forget to preview it on different platforms. Yes, PropellerAds has this option too!

Wanna test several creatives? Pay attention to the unique tool – The Smart rotator.

Click on the “+ Add another creative for testing” button and add up to 8 creatives in 1 campaign. Then check the detailed statistics for each creative and spend money only on the best-performing ads.

Say NO to manual testing!

Additional Traffic & Targeting Options

If you need traffic from premium websites only, choose “Leave only premium zones.”

Next – User activity targeting. It’s one more unique feature developed by the PropellerAds team.

This targeting divides users into three groups – hot, medium, and cold audiences.

“Hot” are new users who just subscribed to Push Notifications, and it’s the perfect audience for the testing of new offers.

“Сold” are users who are a bit “tired” of notifications, and you’ll need to use your creativeness to impress them.

When creating a push campaign, targeting is automatically set to all cohorts. However, by experimenting with each user activity level, you can significantly improve your ROI. It is better to test each level separately, because the results can vary depending on different GEOs and verticals.

Countries & Bid

The name is pretty self-explanatory.

This is the time for you to set the country (or countries) and cities you’re going to target and also your bid. You can include or exclude them.

Here, you can select from preset selections to target worldwide, or only a specific continent, for example.

Also, you can test the new auto-optimization feature – Target CPA. Set the desired price per conversion and the system will disable zones that don’t fit your requirements.

Advertising Budget

Your daily and your total campaign budgets.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Targeting

Here’s that nice part where you can choose your campaign’s specific targeting.

Platform – mobile or desktop.
OS – MAC OS, Android, Windows.
Browser.
Browser language.
Connection type – it can be “All types,” 3G/LTE, or Wi-Fi/Broadband.
Mobile ISP.
Zone limitation – your white and blacklists. Exclude or include up to 5000 zones.

Demographic & Interests Targeting

PropellerAds became the first company to introduce Demographic & Interests Targeting for Push ads.

You can target users by:

Interests: Sports, Shopping, Finance, iGaming, Giveaways, Dating, Utilities
Gender: Men and Women
Age: 18-29, 30-49, 50+

Rule-based Optimization

In PropellerAds, you can adjust an auto-rule for your CPC Push campaign by several parameters.

When setting up a campaign, specify all the parameters you need: CR, ROI, Time period, Spend, etc. Depending on your settings, the system will automatically increase or decrease the bid or exclude zones.

Retargeting

In PropellerAds, you have four options to collect your retargeting audience. They are based on:

Clicks (Push & Interstitial)
Engaged visits
Converted users (Leads via postback S2S)

You can create up to 15 audiences.

Campaign Schedule

Another old friend of ours: dayparting. Nothing new to see here.

That’s it for campaign creation, guys!

PropellerAds – Traffic Revival

PropellerAds is definitely a solid and one of the biggest traffic sources.

It’s got a lot of genuine traffic and a functioning platform, with lots of cool features for affiliates.

If you play your cards right, it converts faster than Ayrton Senna!

The team is open and pleasant in communication. They try to provide quality customer support and help them in every possible way: chats on Telegram, social networks with 70K+ subscribers, expert webinars and educational articles, capturing the Chinese and Brazilian regions, and establishing partnerships with leading market players.

Signup on PropellerAds

PropellerAds: Offers & Verticals

Ad Types: Push Notifications, In-Page Push, Popunder, Survey Exit, Interstitial.
Cost Model(s): CPM, CPC, CPA Goal, SmartCPM, Smart CPA.
Verticals: Finance, Dating, Sweepstakes, eCommerce, Games, iGaming, Utilities, Mobile Apps.

PropellerAds: Payment & Investment

Propeller Ads Minimum Deposit: $100 for credit cards and $1000 for Wire Transfers
Funding Methods: Debit/Credit Cards (Visa/Mastercard), UnionPay, PayPal, ePayments, American Express, Webmoney, Skrill and Advcash.

PropellerAds: Support

Personal Account Manager: For Gold and Platinum advertisers only (check Propeller Priority tab for details).
Support Response Speed: Good.
Support Rating: Good.
Contact Methods: Online live chat 24/7 in ad account, and via email to support@propellerads.com