Choosing an ad format is one of the stumbling blocks for affiliate beginners. PropellerAds has prepared a guide on their two best-performing formats — Push notifications and Popunders — laying down the basics and explaining when it makes sense to choose either of them.
This 101 material will be helpful for affiliates who are at an early stage of their career.
Push notifications
Push notifications are small alert messages that you can see on your smartphone or desktop device. They can be sent by your operating system, then these are system messages; an app installed on your device, or a website that you visit.
Many advertising platforms, including PropellerAds, allow affiliates to launch Push campaigns. It means that an affiliate can send push notifications with ad messages to users who visit websites from the platform's inventory. The technology works in such a way that a user needs to consent to receive those messages first.
This is a great way to deliver an ad message as it reaches the user directly on their device. And since they consent to it first, it is a friendlier, less aggressive source of communication.
Push ads are also highly customizable: the text, the image, the general style — all of the parameters can be adapted to the audience preferences. And due to their native look, push notifications are very clickable.
Onclick or Popunders
Popunders are web pages that open underneath your main browser page when you visit a website. Depending on the settings that an affiliate chooses, a Popunder can appear once the user enters the website or if they perform any action, for example, click in any area of the site.
Popunders have been around since the '90s and each year various voices in the industry predict its imminent death. Yet, to this day, popunders continue to be effective in the right hands. According to a report by PropellerAds, this year popunders are in fact anticipated to perform at even higher rates than ever before.
Why Choose One or the Other?
As a general advice, PropellerAds managers recommend rookie affiliates to consider a series of factors when choosing between Push Notifications and Popunders.
#1 How you're going to engage with your audience
Push notifications require consent. That is, an affiliate can only send push ads to those users who tick Yes when asked if they want to receive them. This provides a solid rate of engagement and at the same time — to a certain extent — eliminates the risk of bot traffic.
Users can unsubscribe from push notifications at any time, so affiliates need to stay vigilant and refrain from overwhelming users with too many ads. This can be done by limiting the number of push notifications that the user receives per day.
On the other hand, popunders appear automatically when the user performs a triggering action. At this moment, the user sees the landing page in full, which means if they move through the funnel, you will get an informed lead who knows what to expect from the offer.
#2 Define the purpose of your ad: to capture or to inform
There is one main difference between Push notifications and Popunders — it's the size.
A push ad is a small text message with a little image. A popunder is a complete landing page with room for texts, images, videos or any other content you need to include to warm up a lead.
In other words, push ads are more suitable to quickly capture the user's attention and make them react. Popunders work better when you need to showcase the product right away providing the user with information to make a decision.
#3 Consider your skills and resources
Obviously, it's easier to design a short message rather than a complete pre-lander or landing page. Consider your resources and skills.
In PropellerAds, you can customize a Push notification entirely, from the title, the description, icon, banner, to the buttons you want to feature.
Popunders shine brighter but require a constructor to build and at least basic design skills. Consider the fact that you might need to outsource this task.
#4 Targeting capabilities
Both Push notifications and Popunders allow affiliates to reach users with a variety of targeting settings. Here are the main ones:
In addition to the above, Popunders allow affiliates to target users who use specific OS versions and devices.
Push notifications, on the other hand, help narrow the targeting to a specific city in which the user is when receiving the message. This is ensured by the use of Dynamic Tags.
The difference in mechanics
When it comes to the mechanics, the difference between the formats is striking.
Push notifications have two major types: classic push notifications and In-Page Push. As mentioned before, classic push ads need the user to subscribe to receive them. However, the user is also free to opt-out from receiving them at any given moment. In-Page Push ads are push messages that the user receives when visiting a website. The difference here is that IPP don't require an opt-in and are visible on iOS devices — the limitation that classic push notifications can't overcome.
Popunders are shown to all users who visit a website unless they have ad blocking software installed.
In terms of engagement ratio, Push and Popunders work relatively similarly given the campaign has been properly optimized.
Ideally, affiliates should use both formats simultaneously. This way they get to reach users from various perspectives ensuring their message gets through the ad blindness.
A few words on optimization
Now that the differences between these two ad formats have been laid down, let's talk optimization.
In PropellerAds, there are two ways to optimize campaigns. The easiest one is to automate everything. The more time-bound way is to optimize them manually.
Not that long ago, PropellerAds released a guide on auto-optimizing Push and Onclick campaigns with their AI-driven bidding model, CPA Goal.
The bottom line is that on their platform there are two auto-optimization options:
#1 CPA Goal optimization
The optimization with CPA Goal is fully automated. The model adjusts the bids so that inefficient ad placements are eliminated from the campaign and the ones that bring conversions receive more volume.
Setting up the pricing model optimization
If you're familiar with launching campaigns in PropellerAds, you might benefit from noting that Push notifications feature a CPC pricing model instead of the Smart CPM. The case is different for Popunders where the CPM model doesn’t come with any level of Auto-Optimization.
#2 Smart optimization feature
The Smart auto-optimization feature excludes inefficient traffic shares that do not provide a desired price per action. That means, that if you specify how much you're willing to pay for the conversion, all the traffic that doesn't match the condition will get excluded from your campaign.
When it comes to Push notifications, you can also use the Target CPA auto-optimization extra feature for the CPC and CPM pricing models.
Activating the smart auto-optimization feature
If going for manual optimization, make sure you know the testing drill. PropellerAds' Campaign Analysis checklist can be of help to you at this point.
Choosing the right verticals and conversion types for Push and Popunder campaigns
People process ads differently based on what is advertised. When translated to CPA-world language, it means that some verticals perform best with certain conversion flows.
PropellerAds' Account strategy team has put together a list of the top-performing combinations. Check this out:
Push Notifications | Popunders |
Dating / CPL, CPI, deposit
Crypto / CPL, deposit
Sweepstakes / CPL (SOI-single opt-in, DOI-double opt-in), CC-submits
| Utilities / CPI, Free Trial, CPS
Pin Submits / 1-Click, 2-Click
iGamming / CPL, FTD’s
eCommerce / CPS, CPI (e-com apps), CPL
Games / tutorial, CPL, email confirmation, first game login, first match/game played, deposits
Software / Purchase, trial, install, registration |
Keep in mind that these recommendations aren't carved in stone. If you choose to play things differently, you might still see a decent result. For example, Utilities (like VPNs) work just as well with Push notifications, but their performance might not be as high as with Popunders.
What’s next
For some extra help, here are two useful video tutorials, also prepared by the Propellers, that will thoroughly explain:
We hope this post made it clearer for you when to "push" and when to "pop", so to speak. And your questions in the comments down below are more than welcome.
Find more in PropellerAds' blog!
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