Your manager has tasked you with finding the best platforms to start mobile user acquisition for your company. There’s a great paradox that you’ve just run into. Paid mobile user acquisition has become easier, yet more difficult at the same time. How is this so?
On the one hand, there is an abundance of options available for paid mobile user acquisition. There will always be places to test your ads and each platform has its differentiated capabilities that will supposedly get you to the mobile ROI mountain top.
What makes paid mobile user acquisition harder is, unfortunately, the abundance of options available. User acquisition managers spend most of their time A/B testing on different channels and trying to find the best channel on which to scale. Furthermore, setting up conversion tracking and attribution can get complicated if you’re advertising on multiple platforms. A user acquisition manager’s cocktail of tools usually consists of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and mobile DSPs.
So the question that needs to be asked is: which platform should be your primary platform for paid mobile user acquisition, a social platform or mobile DSP? Read more to find out.
Social Networks Have Become Ad Tech Companies
There is a reason people have yet to pay a single dime for sites like Facebook and Twitter. The ad model is the most popular business model for almost every social network. Instead of paying with money, consumers pay with screen real estate, as their news feeds and timelines fill up with social native ads. Almost all of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, with 73% of the ad revenue coming from mobile in Q1 2015. On the other side of town, 89% of Twitter’s revenue in Q1 2015 came from advertising. It almost seems as if social networks release more ad features than consumer-facing features. It’s clear that social networks are becoming ad tech companies, and they already have an advantage over other ad tech players.
The power of advertising on social media is that you get to leverage the social data that people are giving to sites like Facebook and Twitter. This data includes age, gender, profession, income level, behavioral data, and more. If you’re an advertiser, having deep demographic data available is the holy grail of advertising data. With this data, you can make your ads highly targeted and won’t have to make guesses about who exactly is seeing your ads.
Social, mobile, and programmatic has grown Facebook to billion-dollar prominence. Because ad tech is such an appealing way to grow revenue, it’s what every social network is doing nowadays, at the satisfaction of advertisers. However, should advertisers flock to Facebook and Twitter with their first advertising dollar? There may be a better option.
Advertising Trading Desks
There’s no question that when new advertisers want to advertise, they use Facebook and Google AdWords (search, display, and retargeting) first (and sometimes Twitter). This is the safest option, of course, being that these companies have great reputations. But there are many more ad platforms in the market to explore, primarily DSPs. What are DSPs exactly?
DSPs or Demand Side Platforms are trading desks for advertising inventory. Quoted from one of our previous blog posts, “DSPs provide advertisers with a dashboard to buy mobile advertising inventory, target their customers, and analyze campaign statistics. DSPs bid on mobile advertising inventory on behalf of advertisers.” Most DSPs have their own algorithms or decisioning engines to help you get the most out of your advertising dollars.
The market is crowded with advertising trading desks (mobile and desktop) that are plugged into multiple advertising exchanges and publishers for inventory. However, the DSP that will win the DSP race is the one who will incorporate social data the best, provide better ad formats, and even tinker with social listening and trending conversations/topics for advertisers to leverage.
Which Traffic Source Should You Use?
Now it’s time to make a decision. Which platform should you use for paid mobile user acquisition: a social network or DSP? Here’s why the answer is DSP.
You’ll get more bang for your buck by advertising on a DSP. You’ll get traffic from multiple sources (advertising exchanges and other publishers) that you can manage in one interface. Also, many newer advertisers aren’t aware of this, but it’s possible for DSPs to integrate with social networks via an API to deliver social inventory. For example, DSPs have the option to integrate with Facebook’s LiveRail and Google’s DoubleClick (AdX) for mobile inventory. Having these integrations available allows you to scale your mobile advertising campaigns faster and further than you would on one single social network.
So, if you compare advertising on one platform and getting mobile inventory from 10 – 20 different sources as opposed to getting inventory from one source, it’s clear who has the advantage. Although, keep in mind that many DSPs haven’t done integrations remotely well, so it’s important to ask about traffic sources before making your first deposit.
Another two benefits of using a DSP is customer support and campaign management. Customer support will most likely be more responsive and having your campaigns managed is even more of a possibility when dealing with DSPs. Additionally, for some DSPs, you have the option of seeing the performance of your ads per publisher and blacklisting the low-performing sites and apps, something that will probably never be available on Facebook and Twitter.
If you’re still a little hesitant to commit to one type of platform, the best thing you can do is try different platforms to get the most out of your mobile user acquisition budget and compare the ROIs across all platforms. Still, for a more comprehensive solution encompassing important targeting features and diversity of inventory, you should have one or two go-to DSPs that work really well.