We talk a lot about different kinds of advertising networks here. Today I’m going to do an overview of push ads and push notifications. I’m going to be walking you through a push ads tutorial and go over how they work, and how affiliate marketers and media buyers can use push ads to further their campaigns, get conversions and make money.
You’re about to get an inside view of one of my ad accounts. For this campaign, I’m using Propeller Media. You’re going to see how it works behind the scenes. And don’t worry, I have plenty of examples to show you too!
Are you someone who prefers to follow along with a video? I’ve created a YouTube tutorial on the same topic, Push Ads Tutorial – How to Easily Make Money With Push Ads. If you haven’t seen it already, I highly suggest that you check it out, and subscribe to my YouTube channel, DayJobHacks.
If you search Google for push ads, you’re going to see tons of ad networks that are available for us to buy ads on. Some of the popular ones are RichPush, Hilltopads, and MGID.
Table of Contents
Why Push Ads?
In this tutorial, we are going to focus on PropellerAds.
When you see what’s inside PropellerAds, you’re going to see that there’s a lot of opportunity to scale campaigns using RichPush and HilltopAds and all the other ad networks. It’s actually a really good traffic source, especially for new affiliates who are having trouble getting their campaigns approved on Facebook or Google.
Facebook and Google both require a little more advanced media buying strategies. You need to use white hat offers in order to keep your accounts alive.
The reason why people like to float over to these native ads and push ads is because of the fact that they’re a lot more lenient for affiliates. The trade-off is that the quality just isn’t there and the targeting options aren’t either.
It’s definitely a great place to start out because the cost per click is so low.
Let’s talk about what push ads and push notifications are. Basically, a push notification is a notification that you get on your phone. The reason you get these notifications is that you visited a site somewhere on the internet where you’ve agreed to get notifications.
For example, after three to five seconds of you visiting my blog DayJobHacks.com, you probably got a little pop up in the corner that said, “Would you like to receive notifications from this site?”.
You’ve probably seen that on many other sites. You’ll see these types of things everywhere you go online. What’s happening is that people who own websites are actually building themselves a push notification list as a way to monetize their website.
OneSignal – Build Your List
To build their list, they’re using a tool like OneSignal.com. You can see my dashboard for this site, which doesn’t show a ton of traffic, as it had only been running for a week at the time of this screenshot. If you subscribe to my YouTube channel, you’ll see that this project is part of a case study. In that study, I’m showing you all the inner workings as I build this site, DayJobHacks.
One of the elements that I’ve added recently is OneSignal, which is a WordPress plugin. OneSignal allows me to collect push subscribers. Once I have my push subscribers in my OneSignal account, I can then start sending these subscribers actual messages. I can send a push message anytime I want to these people.
I can monetize my push list by giving them content or giving them offers.
As a website owner myself, I set it up so that every time I publish a blog post, a message is automatically pushed out to the subscribers. I don’t use it for any other purpose.
Monetizing Your List With PropellerAds
However, some people who have websites want to monetize their push lists, but they don’t have time, or they want to outsource it to another service. In this case, they will become a publisher on an ad network, such as PropellerAds.
All of their push subscribers will be monetized through PropellerAds. The ad network will give them a cut of whatever revenues are generated through the push subscriber list.
Media buyers and affiliates that are buying ads are essentially paying Propellerads, who is also paying the website owners who have built these push lists.
When you visit websites and subscribe to these push lists, you may see little ads or little popups periodically. If you have a mobile phone, you’ve probably seen these before. These are actual advertisements.
If you download an app, for example, sometimes you’re agreeing to these notifications and you don’t even know it. This is another way that people are getting these notifications to you. You’re installing a free game or free app and all of a sudden, now you’re getting these notifications.
Push ads aren’t confined to mobile only. You’ll also see these on your desktop.
Push Ads – Do They Work?
Now that you know how the technical side of push ads work, you’re probably wondering “Do they REALLY work? Do they convert?”
Yes! The ads do work, and they do convert. They’re actually very difficult for bots and fraudulent traffic to manipulate – much more difficult than native ads.
However, the quality is not going to be as good because people are just not as engaged with these popups as they should be. The reason for that is because most of the time, the user is highly engaged when they initially agree to receive the update, but after some time these notifications become old news to people.
They don’t want to click on them anymore. They’re just not interested. The goal is to get these users early, when they’re more like to actively engage with your ads.
A Real Case Study
That’s why the cost per click is super cheap. Let’s take a look at some numbers inside my training platform, PowerhouseAffiliate.com. In our private members area, we do live case studies all the time. This case study that we started was the Propellerads case study where we’re doing a fresh campaign.
You can see this campaign started roughly seven days ago. We started with Germany as the country.
If you are interested in seeing all the ads and the landing pages for the campaign, check out the case study on PowerhouseAffiliate. You can join for free and check out our forum and all the other great material there.
For the first three days of traffic, we had the bid set at about 2 cents, and then we went up to 3 cents. You can see that for $44 we got 2000 clicks. The cost per click here is extremely cheap for push ads, which is great. That’s only 2.2 cents per click!
What Types of Campaigns Work Well With Push Ads?
So, what kind of offers work well with push ads? You’ll see a lot of people, especially new affiliates or even experienced affiliates are running sweepstakes style offers. These are the offers with the email submit single opt in, offering a free iPhone or something similar.
They are setting up campaigns right inside the Propellerads account. Then they’re running ads in there and they’re tweaking it. As you can see, with this German campaign, we’re getting $4.50 per lead. So, this one is breaking even.
Time to Scale Up
We decided to copy this campaign and scale it, opening it up to allow all traffic. But, as you can see, it’s not quite as profitable. In fact, it’s losing money, but it’s not losing a lot of money. It’s just kind of giving us a sense of how the traffic works.
If you set up your conversion tracking with PropellerAds, you will see where you’re spending your money and where the conversions are happening. So immediately we can come in here, look at the data and you’ll see which ones are profitable and which ones are losing money.
Trimming the Fat
I see that I got two conversions. Now these two properties, which are zone IDs, are actually profitable. I could leave these running. Now if I go to the cost column, I see one zone ID where I spent $10.42 for 700 clicks and no conversions. I need to immediately exclude this zone ID, and my ads will no longer appear on that property.
I will do the same thing on the second property which has cost $7.34 and converted nothing.
Now I’m also testing three landing pages. I’m also testing a bunch of ads. I can see these creatives and ads from within the dashboard. I don’t show them here, but all that information is available in the case study on PowerhouseAffiliate.com.
Great for Newbies
This is a great traffic source for people, especially people starting out, because you can come in here and get really super cheap clicks. If you are running some really easy converting CPL offers you can actually start seeing results immediately.
In fact, when I started my first ad on this PropellerAds case study, my traffic was running within 10 minutes, which is actually amazing. Once I get this campaign profitable, I will jack up the bid if I can, or duplicate the campaign and try to find ways to scale this further.
Now, eventually you can also take these campaigns to your other traffic sources. Like I said earlier, you’ve got RichPush, which I’ve heard people are having some good success with. There is also Hilltopads. I’ve met those people in Barcelona for Affiliate World. I know that there’s good traffic there as well. MGID is another example. In fact, if you want to start on MGID, we do have a promotion, where you get 25% returned on your first deposit.
If you go there and deposit the minimum $200, you would get $250 of ad spending. You can go up to $5,000, which would give you $1,250 of free spending.
Final Thoughts
Push ads are the hot new way of delivering your message to users. They’re different from many traditional advertising programs because users have agreed to opt in to receive the ads. They’re also incredibly cost effective, which makes them perfect for testing out new campaigns without blowing through your marketing budget.
Do you use push ads in your business? What kind of success are you seeing with them? If you don’t use push ads, are you considering starting? Join the conversation and let us know what you’re thinking!
Thanks for reading!
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