Thursday, March 28, 2024
Web Traffic

Optimizing a Propeller Ads Campaign

Propeller Ads is a very popular advertising network that offers a wide range of services to both publishers and advertisers, including popunders, push notifications and native ads. However for today’s article, I will focus only on the advertiser’s side.

Propeller Ads Various Ad Formats

The most important task for a new advertiser will be to optimize their campaigns efficiency. Luckily, Propeller Ads uses a unique publisher ID system, that will allow you to create very precise campaigns. Once you find which sites you would prefer for your campaign, you can whitelist them and advertise exclusively with those publishers.

Aside from publisher ID numbers, there are also many secondary traffic filters that can be applied for both mobile and desktop targeting. Options include the following: OS (operating system), device type, browser, browser language, connection type, mobile ISP and zone/region limitations.

However, the most important part of the campaign design will be the whitelisting of publishers. Propeller Ads doesn’t provide a list of publisher ID numbers, so you will need to manually find them. This may sound counterintuitive, but even if your intention is advertising, you should also register a publisher account as well to get the publishers perspective. The main benefit of having a publisher account is viewing the ad tags. These ad tags are helpful to know, because they are the best way to search for publisher IDs. When I created an ad tag for popunders, it showed the domain serconmp.com and a publisher ID. Propeller Ads has many ad types, and not all of them use the same domain. When I created a test push notification ad, it used the domain sendmepush.com.

Now that you know the ad tag format, it makes it very simple to identify all Propeller Ads publishers by using website source code search engines. There are several options, but for this example I will be using publicwww.com

You can now search for serconmp to see which sites use this on page ad tag. In this example we will checkout the second website on the list called 360nobs. On PublicWWW it does show a snippet of the ad code “frame src=“http://serconmp.com/afu.php?zoneid=2915”. However, the zoneid is longer then 4 characters, so we will need to go the 360nobs site to inspect the page source. This website from our example happens to be a Nigerian entertainment news site.

As you can see on the page source code, the full ID is 2970699. This is why the publicWWW tool is very useful, because it reveals all Propeller Ad publishers, so you can verify each an every site that you are advertising on and create a whitelist of sites that are relevant to your verticle/niche. It will also allow you to see if the sites that you are buying advertising from are high quality. Once you find these sites you can also research their traffic metrics from sources such as SimilarWeb and Alexa.

To whitelist sites for a campaign, you will use the zone limitation box shown on the image below.

Josh Garber

Studied online ad networks for 10 years and conducted dozens of case studies. Formerly an e-mail marketing specialist for an ecommerce business, where I proudly helped keep 50,000+ customers up to date for 5 years. Currently expanding into developing & monetizing video games with in-game advertising. I also currently work for a local car dealership, assisting them with online marketing & sales. Last but not least, I am also an eBay marketer.