How to make profitable campaigns with PUSH notification traffic from Megapu.sh

PUSH notification AD format has been gaining lot’s of traction lately among affiliates from around the world, being used across multiple verticals and niches. Many see PUSH as the descendent of the POP traffic format, as that has been under scrutiny from Google for a long time … though they are still failing at blocking it and POPs continue to be served in the billions per day 🙂 But whatever happens to POPs, it’s always a good idea to test a new format, isn’t it?

WHAT ARE PUSH NOTIFICATIONS?

First of all, how do these PUSH notifications work? I’m sure you’ve seen one of those small alert windows, asking for your permission to send you notification. It can look like the one on the screenshot below…

Once a user grants this permission, it’s possible to send them push notification at anytime of the day, as often as you like… regardless of whether they are browsing the site they agreed to get pushes from or not. Obviously, they can still revoke the permission at anytime, so it’s wise to not abuse the system and keep the amount of pushes at a reasonable rate. Annoy the users to much and they will “unsubscribe”. The screen below shows what a push notification message actually looks like, both on a desktop device or mobile phone.

If you want to start working with this AD format, you have basically two options. You can start collecting the permissions to send out push notifications yourself … for example on your own website, on your landing pages that you send traffic to etc … OR you can start buying push traffic from a traffic network that already has their own user base. The first option takes time and extra effort, the second one can deliver results instantly … and today, I’m gonna tell you how to do just that.

So how do you start buying push notification traffic? There are several traffic providers that offer this format, so you can go and signup for them one by one, or you can use a network that offers access to several push notification traffic providers at once… so a similar system to any RTB platform you are probably familiar with.

Couple weeks ago, I was contacted by Sergey Konrad, the head of marketing of such a network called MEGAPU.SH … Sergey offered me a promo coupon to test their network with … and I never say no to a risk-free test of course 🙂 I didn’t have any large expectations, but to my surprise the test ended up profitable without all that much effort and I will share the results with you here in this blog post.

FIRST SOME MORE INFO ABOUT MEGAPU.SH

As always, I sent a couple questions to Sergey so we learn something about their network and what they are up to. Here we go with the answers :

1. Hello Sergey, tell us something about Megapu.sh quickly … when was it started, where do you operate from and what do you bring to the market.

Sergey: Hi Matej! It’s my greatest pleasure to get to know you personally. Thank you for the opportunity to tell your readers about our platform. Briefly speaking, Megapu.sh is the first advertising network of push-notifications. The platform was created in 2017 in Armenia and was tested privately until it became publicly available in 2018. The network allows delivering native advertising in the form of push-notifications directly to the user’s device from all over the world. It is one of the most innovative and effective ways of promoting products on the Internet.

2. Megapu.sh is a “PUSH” traffic only network, is that right? Do you plan to keep it this way, or will you eventually start offering more traffic types?

Sergey: No, this network will always be just for push traffic. There are other projects currently under development, but those will be separate networks 🙂

3. Can you tell us more about where this traffic comes from? I know that on top of your own publishers, you also offer traffic from other networks, how many do you work with?

Sergey: We get traffic from our partner BADBOYS.NETWORK. It is a cross-service platform, engaged in the monetization of push subscriptions.

4. Tell us something about the traffic volumes you have available? How much clicks can you deliver per day and what are your strongest GEOs?

Sergey: We provide access to the traffic from all over the world. As of today, there are more than 100 million active users with more than 20 million clicks per day. Now the three most active GEOs are Latvia Lithuania, and Indonesia. But in essence, the “strength” of GEO depends more on the product that the user is planning to advertise.

5. Push traffic has been around for a while, but only recently did it start to get full attention of the affiliates. Why do you think this is the case? Does it have something to do with the attempts of Google to block POP traffic?

Sergey: I do not think that is the reason. As far as I know, not long ago everyone collected push traffic or in-app traffic by themselves. We are the first ones who created an advertising network of push traffic, which now generates more than 29 million clicks every day around the world. In addition, popularity can be attributed to the growing banner blindness that push traffic overcomes with ease.

6. When you look at your numbers, is the available volume going up, down or showing stable numbers for the past few months? In other words, is the future looking bright for PUSH traffic?

Sergey: I think the future definitely looks bright. At the moment, the volume is growing every day and the limit has not been reached yet.

7. You see all the ads that affiliates run through your network, can you tell us what are the most popular verticals promoted on PUSH traffic?

Sergey: Megapu.sh allows creating campaigns on a huge variety of verticals. At this moment, the most popular ones are products, dating and sweepstakes. А little behind are gambling and cryptocurrency.

8. Any tips you would like to share with affiliates who would like to test your platform?

Sergey: A couple of simple tips for those who are just starting to work with push traffic:

1. Mobile orientation (I would even suggest focusing on android)
2. Focus more on the “title” rather than on the “description”.
3. More campaigns and more creatives! The creative creation process is not difficult and it’s better to create more, because not all of them will pass the moderation stage. For instance, create 50 campaigns and test all of them, by setting a minimum bid and limiting the daily budget. Do not rely on just one campaign.
4. Do not only send notifications to the “closest” countries. Send them as far as possible =)
5. Focus on a small icon, not on a large image.

Thanks for the answers Sergey!

NOW BACK TO THE CAMPAIGNS I TESTED WITH MEGAPU.SH :

There is one thing I like about this network, they allow to run border-line adult stuff, so also dating that I do promote actively. There is one condition though, you have to keep your creatives toned-down, so no nudity or strong language. There is still enough room left for our creative minds though, and using seductive imagery is allowed too.

I had some UK dating campaigns running, with solid payouts, so decided to give it a go with push traffic. First think I did, was to look up the available volume on their volume tool : https://megapu.sh/#geoVolume

There was about 100.000 clicks available per day and that wasn’t bad at all. Some GEOs have way more of course, but I wanted to go with UK, since I had solid landing pages for that GEO.

Next step was to create a campaign, which is fairly easy with Megapu.sh … there are no deep targeting options to use, so I just specified the GEO and device … there are more options of course, but for the sake of the initial test, I didn’t want to target anything else. But for the future, on top of GEO and device, you can also target ISP, browser, operating system or use IP ranges. You can also select the feeds to buy from, which are actually different channels megapu.sh gets traffic from (this is the other networks and partners Sergey mentioned in the answers).

Once you setup the targeting, you also need a Title (30 chars max) and a Message (45 chars max), plus an image (492×328) and an icon (192×192). They have a crop tool available, so don’t lose time with trying to resize the images before uploading them 🙂

For the initial text, I used this :

Title : 18+ only, no minors allowed!
Message : Local ladies looking for casual encounters.

Both the Image and Icon were made from the same photo of a busty lady in a car, check the screen below :

Megapu.sh works on a CPC model, so set the bid with this in mind … don’t get confused by the sytem they have in place, so when you select 5.00 that means 5 cents per click. It got me confused at first, I thought it was 5 bucks 🙂 OK, so my bid was 5 cents and I started the campaign.

And this was the initial result :

And here a screen from Megapu.sh … I didn’t report leads back to their platform, thats why you see 0 revenue and sales there.

First of all, note that there was a very high discrepancy between how many clicks I was billed for and how many voluum recorded … There is certain timezone difference, but still, voluum showed multiples of what megapush billed for. Hard to say what caused this, it might have been some BOTs that megapush identified and didn’t charge for… or maybe it’s normal with this type of traffic, don’t have an answer for this yet. But I don’t care about it to much either, since what matter is the ROI and that looked pretty solid.

I wanted to test more ADs and also more offers and LPs … in most push notification sources, it’s not possible to rotate images/icons within a campaign, so in order to test more, you need to create new campaigns at the source. So that’s what I did, I created 5 more ads with similar texts and different headlines/messages.

Check the screen below :

I kept the same bids pretty much, just tried some with a cent less, but the volume went down that way. When testing new ads on the platform, don’t forget to pass some token to your tracker, so you know what ad performed the best. Since it’s always 1 ad per campaign, you can use their campaign id token : {camp_id}. I left it running till the test budget ran out, optimizing on the way … pausing some LP’s on the way and also adding some new offers in the mix. Once I spent about $190, I paused the campaign to analyze what happened.

The final screen are below :

Total spent on Megapu.sh :

Overall campaign results stats from Voluum, sorted by most profitable offers :

Overall campaign results stats from Voluum, sorted by the best performing LPs, as you can see I paused 2 and only left 1 running, since it was a clear winner :

And here is the final result … almost 25% ROI, not bad cosnidering it was a short test with a limited budget.

THE TAKEAWAYS:

… there is a rather large click discrepancy between what Megapu.sh is billing for and how much clicks a tracker records. In my case it was 4651 clicks billed and 29119 detected by voluum … Keep this in mind when setting the CPC in the tracker and doing optimizations.

… due to the nature of the traffic and how push notifications work, you will be receiving clicks quite large even after you pause a campaign. This is because the notifications are already distributed to users, but some react later on as they didn’t notice them initially.

… the ROI is going down as the ads age … I have the best results when it started, then it went down slowly. The solution is to refresh ADs frequently, the more often the better actually. These ADs get saturated quickly.

Based on my tests, PUSH notifications are a great option for new affiliates, the traffic is very cheap and available in solid volumes and it converts surprisingly well. Keep an eye on the quality though, PUSH is lower quality traffic type by it’s nature, so make sure you talk with your affiliate managers FREQUENTLY! Do not scale to fast and never without the permission of your affiliate manager.

In case you want to give it a go, feel free to start testing with Megapu.sh and signup on their site : https://megapu.sh The volumes they have available in TIER-2 or TIER-3 GEOs are tempting, and that’s exactly the right playground for newer affiliates … but as you have seen, it’s also possible to attack the more developed GEOs if you have solid offers available, like I did.

That’s all for now, if you have questions, leave them in the comments please.

Good luck with your campaigns.

Matej (Matuloo)

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