Interview with Ad Networks: Meet Matvey Schmidt from PropellerAds

Hi, and thanks for agreeing to this interview!

Matvey Schmidt

Telling all about the insides of the ad network business and giving valuable tips to the newcomers.

Head of Advertisers Department at PropellerAds

• 10+ years experience
• Advertisement expert
• Traffic pro

• Tell us a little about yourself, the company, when you started, how many people are in the team, some key milestones and achievements, etc.
• My name is Matvey Schmidt. At PropellerAds, I manage the sales department for working with advertisers. PropellerAds is the largest international advertising platform and quality traffic source. In 2021, PropellerAds celebrated its 10th anniversary. Only a few online advertising market companies can boast of this age.Over these ten years, we have achieved a lot: 10 billion ad impressions per day, more than 200 thousand advertisers and affiliates are already earning with us. We constantly have new features to increase the profits of our clients. One example of many is interest and demographic targeting for push notifications. We are the first company to have such a unique tool. In general, every year, we have new achievements, and we will not slow down.

• What type of traffic do you offer, and what do you think is the most popular? What geos do you currently have in your Network?
• PropellerAds currently offers a wide range of ad formats. Among them:Popunders;
  Web Push Notifications;
  Direct Click;
  In-Page Push Notifications;
  Interstitial.PropellerAds is the market leader regarding the number of direct publisher partners, and we provide significant traffic volumes worldwide. This allows our clients to test offers and gives the next opportunity to scale campaigns. If we talk about popularity, everything directly depends on the vertical offers our partners work with.

• Tell us, if it’s not a secret, which verticals are the most popular in your network, and for which of them do you think your traffic is most suitable?
• Due to the variety of traffic and excellent country coverage, it isn’t easy to single out specific verticals: each advertiser finds the traffic and performance that suits them. Mobile apps, sweepstakes, mobile subscriptions, and more complex financial offers and E-commerce perform well.

• What is the share of mVAS offers among advertisers now? Maybe you can share some numbers and volumes?
• More than 300 advertisers are currently working with mVAS offers in different regions from Africa to Indonesia, generating more than 50,000 mobile subscriptions per day.

• If we talk about traffic in the most significant demand for mVAS offers, what are the main formats, and which geo?
• Popunder is the most popular among mVAS advertisers, followed by Push. South Africa is doing very well. Among the countries of Asia, Thailand and the Philippines can be distinguished. Tunisia and Egypt have proven themselves well from the MENA region. In general, thanks to the excellent country coverage and good traffic volumes, you can go with offers from any country and find suitable sources.

• Are there any restrictions when working with mVAS offers?
• We have the same rules for all offers. So, we do not work with adults and scams. There shouldn’t be any problems launching if you have a clean offer with decent pre-landers and creatives.

• Since many novice Publishers will read our interview, can you give some tips on properly starting working in your Ad Network to avoid the most common mistakes for beginners?
• First, be sure to familiarize yourself with the available campaign models: many of them require postback settings. Otherwise, their work will be ineffective, and accordingly, this will negatively affect the results. So, for CPA Goal models to work, you need to tap off conversions so that the algorithms can learn and start optimizing your campaigns. In general, a postback and a tracker greatly simplify the analysis and work with traffic and open up additional optimization and launches opportunities. If there is no possibility of working with the tracker, pay attention to CPM, CPC, or SmartCPM models.Often, newcomers try to fit all countries into one campaign, but this can negatively affect them. Traffic prices in different countries can vary dramatically. If there are several geos in a campaign, then cheaper geo with a large traffic volume will unlock a significant part of the budget. At the same time, the rate may be insufficient for a more expensive country, or the amount of traffic will be too small for its assessment and further optimization.Of course, many more mistakes can be made. That is why, for novice Publishers, we have very detailed article on launching campaigns in PropellerAds.

• One of the most popular formats for working with mVAS has always been Push and Pop traffic. Maybe there are any recommendations when launching campaigns on this type of traffic?
• When working with any format, always pay attention to performance and CR, including specific sources.With Pushes, you can use Custom Zone Bidding to set CPC bids for a specific zone, thereby improving your ROI and not wasting time creating a White List of campaigns. Similar functionality is available for SmartCPM campaigns on Popunders.See the ratio of clicks to conversions on Push notifications. If there are a lot of clicks and no conversions, this may indicate a mismatch between the creatives and the offer. For performance models (CPA Goal), you should focus on CR: if there are no conversions, you should first work with the landing page and the pre-landers / push creatives used. For CPC / CPM models, it may be necessary to raise the bid in the campaign and test more expensive traffic that shows the highest performance.

• What advice would you give to a Publisher who has just registered in your network and wants to launch mVAS offers? Where to start and how to act to avoid losing the budget?
• Choose the most substantial offers you already have experience with and good results. Or you can check in the affiliate program, which offers work best. I advise you to start with the CPA Goal model, automatically optimizing all sources to select traffic for a specific offer and maintain the desired CPA result. Thus, you will receive more traffic from the most performing sources after training the campaign. In our experience, it’s better to start with mobile traffic and then try WiFi. This will increase the chances of a successful launch.Prices for traffic from different operators may vary. To see this, be sure to use the Traffic Estimator in your SSP dashboard. If the price difference is significant, it is better to split the operators’ campaigns to test each of them equally.On push notifications, always use text and images that are relevant to the subject of the offer itself. Otherwise, a large number of clicks will not bring the desired conversion. Remember that users may have time to switch from mobile Internet to WiFi between sending and clicking, and because of this, some of the clicks may no longer come from the desired operator.

• As you probably know, mVAS offer Advertisers have strict KPIs for traffic quality. How do you control the quality of traffic delivered by publishers to your ad network?
• To ensure and maintain the quality of traffic, we have the best compliance team on the market. It filters out suspicious sources and sources we cannot work (including adult, which is strictly prohibited in PropellerAds). As for the cleanliness of traffic from bots, we are working with ADEX, which monitors traffic in real-time.With the help of ADEX technologies, we check the reality of each user. In addition, we always listen to our partners and analyze each case with which they contact us. Thus, thanks to internal checks and many advertisers with whom we are always in touch, it is possible to customize campaigns as accurately as possible and improve the quality of traffic.

• Which ad formats do you think will become popular, and which ones, on the contrary, will become a thing of the past in 2022?
• I think it all depends on how the formats themselves and their approach will develop. Traffic performance is playing an increasing role. So, for our part, we are trying to give our advertisers a sufficiently large number of tools to improve the optimization and automation of the purchasing process so that they can fully scale. These innovations allow for the development of push notifications and display formats.Therefore, I would like to rephrase the question and answer that what the performance gives will be popular. Thanks to various improvements in formats and traffic quality control, this is already achieved. After all, high-quality inventory is the guarantee of the advertiser’s happiness!

• In your opinion, the mVAS vertical will grow in your traffic next year, and perhaps you will be able to offer unique solutions for it next year?
• Over the past three years, the mVAS vertical has shown stable growth and does not intend to slow down. We listen to our partners and continue to improve our traffic moderation methods, connect new traffic types (such as Direct Click) and sources, and expand the possibilities of campaign settings.

• At the end of our interview, can we also make a replenishment bonus for the readers of our blog?
• Yes, we give a $50 first deposit bonus over $200. If you haven’t worked with PropellerAds yet, this is a great place to start! The promo code is valid until 02/28/2022. You can get it from the manager at Golden Goose.

• Thank you for your time, we were glad to talk to you.
• Same for me! Thank you very much for the interview.