We are always on the look for more information when it comes to traffic sources. Information which helps us getting a better understanding how their system works and what are their best-practices we should implement on our campaigns.
This time we asked PopCash CEO, Mr. Radu Burchechi to give us an in-depth overview on how PopCash works and what makes the a good choice.
Q1. There are a lot of Pop sources out there and often is not easy to understand why to choose one over another. What makes PopCash different from other pop sources? How easy is to get started and why chose you?
Actually, the struggle is real when it comes to choosing the right network to work with, but there are some aspects that make PopCash a better choice. Our management team has been part of this industry for more than a decade and since we started this business 6 years ago, we already knew what the industry was looking for in a traffic source. Coupling our extensive experience with the best available technologies, has really helped us provide high converting traffic to our advertisers.
Dedicated live support is another core value we offer to all our users – no matter if they are experienced or newbies, if they have invested significant amounts or just want to run a test. The fact that our advertisers can benefit of worldwide coverage and an easy to use interface is usually much appreciated, plus the focus we place on targeting and optimization processes. The world we live in is already too complicated, so we’ve decided to create a user-friendly panel for our advertisers, but we’ve made sure that, at the same time, it also satisfies the expectations of the experienced users by making all important features available in a simple manner.
In case you don’t have a PopCash account yet, click here to create one for free!
Q2. What percentage of your inventory is served from direct publishers and what from exchanges? What about Mobile vs. Desktop?
In terms of origin, 70% of our traffic comes from direct publishers and 30% from hand-picked partners. In the beginning we relayed exclusively on direct publishers, but we had to take action as the demand increased and we couldn’t afford disappointing our advertisers when it came to the amounts of traffic they needed. However, it’s important to mention that we do not have traffic from exchanges, because we value especially quality, not quantity only. Overall the traffic is split in 60% mobile and 40% desktop.
Q3. We’ve recently noticed that affiliates are more and more concerned about bot traffic. What is PopCash’s policy regarding bot traffic and what are actions are you taking to prevent it?
Our Terms of Use clearly state that we strictly forbid any kind of fraudulent activity within our network, but as you might imagine, you never know what’s around the corner. And because of this, we have developed and constantly improved our own bot detection system where a considerable amount of our inventory is being sent to. Generally speaking, the cases when we encounter such issues are quite rare thanks to the systems we have in place, but when they occur or some of our advertisers has evidence of bot traffic, that is just a matter of minutes until the fraudster is eliminated. Because of their low frequency, each case is handled according to its particularities. To make sure everything is alright, we also perform manual reviews of the traffic as part of our daily schedule.
Q4. What have been the top 5 Geos and Verticals (products) that dominated on PopCash during 2017?
When it comes to volumes, United States, India, Indonesia, Russia and China, conquered our top 5 country list similar amounts of traffic. However, no matter what geo we are pointing to we have good volumes worldwide. As a fun fact, we have traffic even from Vatican.
On the other hand, when speaking about verticals, Sweepstakes, Nutra, Mobile Installs/Apps, Dating and other Adult related products make the list of our top promoted verticals – our advertisers have seen good results with our adult inventory as well.
Q5. What’s the most used bidding strategy applied by your Advertisers on new campaigns?
In general, the majority of our advertisers begin with low bids. Once they gather and analyze some data, they start optimizing their campaigns accordingly and, if they find some ‘hot spots’, they create a cloned whitelist campaign in parallel, with a higher bid, to make sure they get all traffic from sources that convert well for their offer.
Q6. Many affiliates are either cutting a campaign too early or letting it run too long, as they are seeking to get better results. What’s your advice on how to properly test a campaign on PopCash (including run time, bidding, spent, etc)?
This is a tough one! It’s difficult to make a general suggestion in this case, because there are various factors that change per targeted vertical and geo. For example, when someone is focused on sweepstakes and/or mobile apps/installs, we recommend an initial test budget of $100, which is enough to gather enough data to be able to properly optimize the campaigns. If we talk about Nutra or Dating offers, the ideal amount would be a bit higher, around $500. Furthermore, promoting Financial or Gambling content would require a minimum budget of $1,000 (not recommended for newbies, as these are more difficult to optimize). The best bidding advice is the one you get from our Live Support team, which is really helpful, because the ‘most wanted’ sources are dynamic, they change from one day to another and as a consequence determine rates’ variations.
Q7. Once we got a profitable campaign what is the best way to scale it?
There are two kinds of behavior advertisers choose between when they have a profitable offer. Both methods are viable and used, but one is more frequently applied: 90% of the users increase the bid to receive more traffic, while 10% increase the bid and clone their campaigns to receive more non-unique visits.
Q8. We know this was not on the list, but can you give us a rough idea about your biggest spenders?
Our big spenders represent only 0,1% of the active advertisers within PopCash but since they have managed to crack down our traffic inventory, they are buying approximately more than 30% of our entire daily traffic.
Q9. Do you have any insights on what will happen with Pop traffic after February 15, 2018? Considering that Chrome makes up to more than 58% of global market share, does PopCash have any solution in place concerning these changes?
Even though this is a “mouse and cat game” for which we will constantly put our best efforts on helping our publishers and advertisers to maximize their revenue. We have already worked on a solution concerning these changes. The solution we are talking about will be deployed this week and it will help our publishers from getting blacklisted while maintaining the same traffic inventory availability with improved quality for our advertisers.
