ZestADZ – Mobile Advertising Blog

Qeep – a fast growing mobile community based in Germany and operating globally, especially in key markets like South Africa, US, India etc today signed an exclusive deal with ZestADZ to monetize their mobile inventory.

Qeep was named amongst the top 20 downloaded apps from the getjar app store in July 2009 – http://www.intomobile.com/2009/08/17/top-20-mobile-apps-from-getjar.html

Qeep and ZestADZ have been working together for the past year and our efforts in better results in monetizing their mobile app inventory has lead to this partnership.

Read the press release here – http://www.gomonews.com/qeep-partners-with-zestadz-for-mobile-advertising-signs-an-exclusive-deal-with-zestadz/

Email alerts is a nifty new feature that is available in the new release of ZestADZ. It enables the delivery of daily email alerts for both advertisers and publishers either reminding them of important events or sending them daily status reports.  Access Email Alerts at My Accounts -> Email Alerts.

The key alerts that are available are

Advertiser – Daily Budget Notification: This alert informs the advertiser if the daily budget has been exhausted so that the advertiser can increase the budget if required. This email is only sent when campaigns are running and the daily budget has been exhausted.

Advertiser – Daily Campaign Reports: The daily campaign reports for all the campaigns that you are currently running will be generated as a CSV attachment and sent to you as an email on a daily basis.This daily report contains the details of Impressions, Clicks, CTR and the total amount spent.

Publisher – Available ADs summary: This alert lists the ADs available to be published in your account. If your site was having an “Manual Approval” of ads, you might have to log on to ZestADZ to manually approve these ADs for publishing them on your site. This alert is sent once as an email on a daily basis.

Publisher – Daily Site / App Earnings Report: This alert sends a summary of all your earnings for your site or app everyday as a CSV attachment as an email on a daily basis. This daily reports summary contains the details of Impressions, Clicks, CTR, eCPM and earnings.

Balance Notification
Since this is an important alert, we decided to separate this out from the other email alerts. Access Balance notification at Campaigns->Balance Notification. The advertiser receive an email notification, if the balance amount falls below the minimum amount set.   With this alert, the advertiser will get ample time to replenish the funds before it is exhausted.

Send us your feedback to feedback [at] zestadz.com

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Blog By The Engineering Team
ZestADZ
www.zestadz.com

CHENNAI, India & LOS ANGELES – ZestADZ (www.ZestADZ.com) a leading performance based mobile advertising network today announced that it has started expanding its mobile advertising network to mobile advertisers and publishers in US, Europe, South Africa and in Indonesia. ZestADZ initially was focused at the Asian market. After more than a year of significant growth in the region and after having completed several mobile marketing campaigns for marquee advertisers, the company has begun expanding into these larger markets. In last few months, the company has already acquired traffic and started servicing advertisers in these regions.

Read the full press release at businesswire.com.

In our last blog entry, we had written about new features and upgrades available as a part of the upgraded version of ZestADZ. Based on suggestions received, we have chosen to elaborate on how to use one of the new features – AD Control for Publishers.

AD Approval Policies

One thing which is on the top of the wish list for any publisher is complete control – control over the ads that he serves on his site/app. We have now added this feature to ZestADZ. Given below is a run-through on the use of this feature…

Once a publisher registers and creates his site on ZestADZ, it is taken through an approval process. Although the user can start publishing ads by choosing “Auto approval” mode for ads, they won’t be able to see the ADs in the AD control tool. This is an important option that a publisher has to decide [can be changed later] while registering the site with ZestADZ.

Approval modes

Through the review, if a site has been reviwed and if no objectionable content is found, the Site is approved in about 24 hours. A site that has been “Approved” by the administrator will enable the review of ADs by the publisher in the AD control console. The publisher can then choose to approve or reject ADs based on the creatives that are shown there.

Picture: AD Control Screen with a Site that has not been approved yet.

If you do not want to wait for the Site Approval to start publishing the ADs, choose “Auto Approval” mode so that you can start publishing ADs rightaway but don’t mind the fact that you will not be able to review and reject the ADs.

Filtering ADs in the Auto Approval Mode

Using this feature, all the active ads are automatically allotted to your network unless you chose to explicitly reject the ads.

Choose the ads, you wish to reject, by selecting the ads and clicking on the ‘Reject’ button, in which case they are removed from your site/app.

Picture: Sample AD list screen in the AD Control Tool

Manual Approval Mode

In the manual approval mode, the publisher site will display ADs which have been approved by the publisher. If you have chosen manual approval, please ensure that you have approved ADs to display otherwise your inventory will remain unutilized. Reject ADs which are not suitable for your content.

Email Alerts

For your convenience, we have also added daily email alerts which will send out those list of ADs automatically approved or available for approval for your sites for you to be able to review and decide on a daily basis.

We believe that this feature can be extremely useful for publishers who want to have better control over the ADs. Remember, the ADs you choose influence your earnings, so make sure that you do what is right for your traffic. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact support [at] ZestADZ dot com

We would like to announce the rollout of a major upgrade of ZestADZ (v 1.5). This version contains major functionality and feature enhancements built with feedback from our partners – advertisers and publishers. Access the updated version of  ZestADZ (1.5 ) at http://beta.zestadz.com

Listed below is what you can expect of the new and upgraded version of ZestADZ.

Publisher Upgrades

• Simpler, Better Interface. Easier Integration – Sites/Apps can now be integrated easily through a single copy/paste of the API. There is no need to modify and site ids, as it is taken care of by the platform itself.
  
• The USD ($) has been adopted as a standard currency and all billing and reports would be available in the same, which means, that publishers across the globe can expect their payments and other transactions in USD.
  
• The much awaited ad approval tool is now in place, and publishers can approve/reject ads that they want to serve on their apps/sites.
  
• Better AD Delivery Performance.
  
• Earnings can be transferred in a single click to generate funds for advertising on the ZestADZ ad network.
  
• Our system ensures that publishers receive notification emails during most important events.
• Unified account for advertisers and publishers.
  

Advertiser Upgrades

• Simplified user interface, easier campaign creation.
  
• The USD ($) has been adopted as a standard currency
  
• Channel wise targeting and bidding replaces demographic targeting. You can bid in over 25 different channels individually.
  
• Our system ensures that advertisers receive notification emails on every important issue, such as account balance notification etc.

Advertisers and publishers will receive email communication about the migration of their existing accounts. The transition process will be completed in the next few days. We hope for a better and much more satisfied user experience form our partners, and any feedback / suggestions are welcome at support [at] zestadz.com

The last time we published a list of bad practices in the mobile advertising industry, it caused quite a flutter. The resulting consequences were bad for some companies indulging in such practices. Although, we won’t like to go into those details, here’s a round up of the Top 5 Mobile Advertising Bad Practices in 20o8.

#1 – Misleading (mostly porn) ads leading to unnecessary clicks

This is number one bad practice in mobile advertising still dominant amongst most players. Networks create a dummy porn Ad link which takes them to another page which contains several set of other actual ads. To add salt to the injury, these ads were put on adult inventory.

This practice stopped briefly after we posted the last blog entry but it has made a resurgent come back with a few smaller ad network players.

Here’s the AD screenshot taken just 3 days back.

Here’s what a user actually see’s when he clicks the ad

What is surprising is though most networks stopped this practice, several newer networks have adopted it including copying the exact ad text creative.

#2 – Advertisers getting charged for fraud clicks?

Although we’re not sure of this, there is a strong possibility that this could be happening because we’ve seen that several advertisers get very high CPA charges on a few networks. Though fraud clicks may not be the exact reason, but it could be one of them. Most advertisers don’t tend to use detailed tools to analyze their campaigns and therefore mobile ad networks can take advantage of them if they want to.  This highlights the importance of having detailed advertiser analytics – something that we will cover in another blog.

#3 – Taking user clicks directly to those pages which charge the user

Several forums were abuzz this year about another India based advertising network directly routing the users clicks to a page where they are billed for. When a user clicked on ads, content was downloaded (without the users’s permission), the money was deduced from his phone balance and a ‘thank you’ message was sent to (mock) the user! This is a classic case of misusing mobile advertising. The responsible advertiser or ad network must understand that such an event undermines the effectiveness of the medium and can have long term consequences. It is also the duty of advertising networks to check and advise an advertiser against it if he has put such a URL willingly or by mistake.

# 4- Auto Redirection to Landing Page

Another bad practice, this one by mobile publishers has come to my notice is auto redirecting the end user to an advertiser’s landing page. Recently when I was talking with a wap site publisher, he told me about this feature, some of his partner sites were using, wherein the site has a no. of ad links and if the user does not click on any of the links within a time frame, the publisher automatically takes the user to any 1 of the landing pages of the advertiser. I am not sure if such a thing is possible but if it is possible, then again advertisers and users are being taken for a ride.

#5 – Expired Ads

Some large players in the mobile ad business end up showing ads which have already expired but display “Nothing to show” when clicked. We’re not sure what is the reason why this is happening – it could be that the ads have already expired but not removed from some temp cache or it could be to create a false impression that there is inventory available where as it is not available.  This misleads publishers and leads users to a dead end.

Time to update the Mobile Marketing Association Code of Conduct?

I think it is high time that MMA take notice of such bad practices, updates its Code of Conduct, and inform all stakeholders in this ecosystem to avoid such practices.

Players in the mobile advertising ecosystem must behave responsibly otherwise the medium will loose its credibility with advertisers. Given the tough economic climate and recession in several countries, advertisers might start expecting the rates to be further commoditised or might just stop using this medium until credibility is re-established.
Publisher Team

http://www.zestadz.com

Anytime any seller offers an outlandish discount to earn a client’s business I am reminded of a few age old adages – “cheap things are not good, good things are not cheap”

What does this have to do with the mobile advertising business?

We see a number of competitors who seem like perfectly fine professionals provide asinine discounts to win new business. While providing low prices to win business is in perfect keeping with Free Market economics, one should also realize that providing predatory pricing hurts the industry overall. As we have seen in a number of industries – PC industry, Memory industry, Asian Toy industry selling products/services below cost results in poor or no innovation; poor customer services, low value for customer and unstable companies (or even worse as the Asian Toy industry painfully revealed).

The only for the industry to evolve and all parties in the eco-system – ad networks, publishers, advertisers and carriers to make a living is for us as an industry to deliver superior value to advertisers and get paid for the value we deliver.

Is good quality worth paying for? Ultimately advertisers have to make their own judgment as to whether they are getting value for their ad budgets. Rather than give outlandish and non-sustainable discounts, we at  mobile-worx have been working on the following key product attributes.

While other ad networks are focused on rock bottom pricing, we at Mobile-Worx are focused on developing highly value added capabilities to give marketing executives the best value for their money.

As they say, “The bitterness of poor quality lingers long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

Nat D Natraj

http://www.zestadz.com

It is that time of the year again  and here are our Top 10 predictions for mobile advertising in 2009

1) mobile advertising spending will grow but this is not expected to completely stabilize. This has a few implications..VC funded ad players will go through a spending binge to justify their investment and to grow their base but will see lesser ROI. This also means players like Google and Yahoo who are much larger on the web will still maintain a low profile until probably the end of 2009.

2) Globally, Android devices might add to the hype, iPhone could be the global #2 or #3 on most networks & Nokia will still lead most developing countries including India.

3) More players are expected to enter mobile advertising in 2009

4) Global rates for mobile advertising will continue to grow after some brief fall due to the economic crises. This is because low rates are clearly not sustainable for anyone and an average of $0.10 – $0.20 per click will be the norm for most developed markets

5) Many advertisers will still be trying out mobile advertising through 2009. Although 2008 did see some significant activity, actual campaigns and revenues were still too low in 2008.

6) One or two players in this space might be the right targets for acquisitions so expect acquisitions especially when valuations are right now at an all time low. So expect acquisitions in 09.

7) Mobile search might add significant traction, traffic to carrier ARPUs and mobile advertising through 2009

8 ) Expect Mobile advertising services to move beyond the regular self serve model. Advertisers are expecting more and the small budget advertisers will expect 360 degree service from mobile advertisers..leading some mobile ad companies to move up the value chain.

9) Developing markets like India / Indonesia will continue to grow in terms of real volumes of traffic with carriers like Airtel / Vodafone significantly gaining on that [especially in India].

10) Carriers will continue to try to experiment with mobile search and mobile advertising but will increasingly be insignificant or probably play a much more passive role in the global mobile advertising value chain.

Some of our past predictions and those that were right and those that were wrong..Most of these were centred around India..

– Social mobile marketing will be big in 08 – we were wrong on this..although social media traffic has grown…the large chunk of social media traffic is still not made a big dent on the mobile advertising space as such.

– SMS will continue to generate substantial traffic. WAP traffic as always is underestimated but will continue to surge with more users expected to logon to the mobile Internet. – We  were absolutely right on this…

– Major web portals will unveil their mobile portals. – we were spot on on this prediction

– Players like Vodafone could shakeout the mobile data business offering cheaper data access to consumers. Wireless data could get more affordable — we were partly right..Vodafone has got great advertisements but a lousy product portfolio in India..Innovation is not a part of their strategy yet and they’re loosing to Airtel. Though the bright side is wireless data plans are now more affordable.

– Many innovative mobile VAS applications will be launched free of cost to the consumer powered through mobile advertising. Mobile publishers will begin to take mobile advertising as a serious alternative business model - we were quite correct with this prediction, a number of mobile services (free sms, alerts etc) and apps have been launched last year especially in India and these have significantly increased users traffic usage / ARPUs etc..

– More and more advertisers will begin to test mobile as a medium for marketing. Mobile will get acceptance as the third and more powerful medium than the web. Despite that, we don’t really expect to see drastic shift in the allocation of marketing budgets just yet – we were spot on on this..mobile advertising has taken off but on the overall spending has been slow.

– Premium rates for mobile content and mobile services will continue to drop – 10/10 for this prediction…again…premium content rates are continuing to drop across the world.

– Several small and medium VAS players will move into mobile advertising – we were spot on with this prediction., several new smaller players have moved into mobile advertising and the herd mentality will continue to exist until there is a shakeout..

There have been several upgrades done to ZestADZ in the past few weeks. These upgrades enhance the overall user experience of both advertisers and publishers and add several new features to the existing platform. These include…

Upgrades for advertisers

· Bidding module – You can now bid for your campaigns. ZestADZ will auto generate a minimum bid and you can bid at the same or higher price than the minimum bid. A Better bid will ensure better placement of your ads.

· Simplified Reporting UI – To utmost advertiser satisfaction, the report console is now more simplified and includes ad-wise statistics, exportable as CSV. You can also view reports based on attributes like campaign type and period of time.

· Better click fraud filters – Better click fraud enables you pay only for the right traffic and this means a higher overall ROI and lower cost of Acquisition.

Upgrades for publishers

· Static page integration - This allows publishers to integrate ZestADZ on to their static pages, allowing ads to be displayed where server side code is not supported. This is available at http://zestadz.com/static_ad?id=<your encoded ad client id here>

· CMS integration – If you are an aggregator of traffic or have a CMS, we have a solution to integrate ZestADZ Ads for you. Write to publisher[at] mobile-worx dot com for more info on this.

· Banner only request – It is now possible to request only for banners instead of a mix of text and banner ads. Just add ad_type=”Picture” within your source code.

· Perl code – Perl code is now available for integration, within the publisher console.

We will be glad to get your feedback on the above and other required upgrades

Please send us your feedback to your respective Account executive or to support [at] zestadz dot com

Ad networks serving clicks on Porn sites
I have recently noticed that two other mobile ad networks in India were serving massive amounts of AD inventory on Porn sites masking them as porn ads (which by the way is illegal in India, in case someone forgot to mention them). This is a fraud that they do not want the advertisers to know and this also happens to generate them a lot of one time, 100% bounce rate user clicks.

Pressure from advertisers = 100% bounce rate of the Click Throughs
This issue is part driven by the advertisers need for more click inventory but hey, Sure – results do matter but are they really pertinent?. How do you check whether they are coming from a right TG?. Whether the user landing on your landing page will really generate results for you?.

Advertisers must understand it is easy to generate clicks, especially from tons of porn, irrelevant and fake clicks that most small publishers indulge in. Porn sites based clicks are irrelevant for most advertisers because they are fake clicks where the intent of the user is something else when he sees the ad and the end result is something else (therefore the user might come on your landing page but he will never ever come back again because your brand / advertiser) has somehow cheated the user.

I am sure that this click fraud will show dismal results on the long term for those advertisers and I pity them because they’re being cheated. Anyways, lets see how this works.

1. Networks advertise on Sites which are not really targeted by the advertiser under FAKE but enticing ads.

2. Networks generate a dummy page which gives no other options but a few of their own ADS

3. User clicks on to the landing page (now where the hell is that naked pic???)

Asif Ali
www.zestadz.com