Mobile tracking: which cost model is the best investment?

Beyond cost models: Why profitability should be the driver for choosing a tracking platform

Choosing the right tracking platform for your business is never an easy task. There are several considerations that must be made to evaluate what will deliver the best results and allow you to scale your business. This raises a critical question for marketers: When does it make sense to choose a premium tracking platform? Rather than only focusing on pricing models, it is essential to learn which platform will optimize profitability.

 

Profitability should be every marketer’s priority

Although it can be challenging to choose which platform maximizes your profits, there are several reasons why this should be a primary goal. It can seem simple enough to directly compare the prices of different platforms based on cost models but there’s much more to consider to get the best results for your business. Only comparing platform prices can be misleading, failing to reveal the true potential to maximize revenues. Here are two examples of how this can occur:

  • Loss of traffic: if a platform is relatively cheap but only forwards 80% of the publisher clicks to the MMPs, you may be worse off compared to a reliable, stable platform that forwards every click for you. For example, if a customer is earning $30,000 in profit per month and is using a less expensive platform that only forwards 80% of the clicks, this means that 6,000 USD (20%) is at stake every month.
  • Instability of the platform: If a platform is relatively cheap but is struggling with tracking outages every week, this directly affects the revenue of the marketers. When you cannot track, then you cannot get a commission from an Advertiser. For example, if a platform has three hours of traffic outages every week or 12 hours in a month, this could mean that marketers leave half a day of revenue/profit on the table, every month.

 

What does it mean if a platform charges for conversions or events?

Most of the tracking platforms in the market are running on public clouds such as AWS or Google Cloud. These cloud providers charge per event, so if a customer wants to track more than a billion events per month, this will generate a 4-digit bill for the platform provider running on a public cloud.

If a platform provider charges for conversions instead of events, they run the risk of earning too little from customers who have many events but a very low conversion rate. Therefore it either needs to increase prices for the customer to pay the cost of the AWS/Google Cloud or decrease traffic. In contrast, if a tracking platform provider charges for events, it can ensure the infrastructure costs are always covered and there is no incentive to increase prices or decrease a customer’s traffic.

 

How to increase profitability through efficiency with a premium platform

Save time for your account managers

A tracking platform with innovative automation tools can save your account managers time and energy that would otherwise be wasted. This can reduce an account manager’s daily activities in half. In a positive sense, this enables your team to focus on more valuable problem-solving tasks and strategy development to increase revenue and profit.

Link tracking

You need to know that your offer links have reached the app store. On the one hand, this can come at an additional cost when using a  cheaper tracking platform because you need to source and pay for a third-party tool for link tracking. On the other, Swaarm has an integrated link tracker so that customers do not need to take their data to a third-party tool whenever they need to check if offers are successfully reaching the right destination. This empowers customers to keep their data in one place and easily perform checks within our platform at no extra cost.

 

What other benefits can a premium tracking platform provide?

In addition to the advantages of event pricing, there are other considerations that should be made when selecting your tracking provider. Here are four more examples of how Swaarm’s premium offering helps you stay ahead of the curve in comparison to cheaper alternatives.

Real-time postbacks

While we already described how instability can directly affect revenue generation (in case you cannot track at all) instability issues can also indirectly affect it. We heard from clients about stability issues related to postbacks that are not successfully sent to networks. They may eventually reach the network, but only as a batch – not real-time. If the client is using optimizations rules based on the time of the postback, it will integer with the rules and prevents real-time optimization. In the currency mobile ecosystem, clients should demand real-time postbacks from their tracking platform to meet the industry standard and not leave money on the table.

Regular API updates

Without regular API updates, publishers won’t be alerted if an offer is deactivated, which creates a potential for financial losses for the network as well as a reputational loss with its publishers. If publishers still send clicks to an inactive offer and don’t get any conversions, this creates issues for networks and publishers. It can create a damaging ripple effect: Publishers could reorient and start working with other networks who are working on a tracking platform with real-time API updates as this secures that their precious traffic does not get forwarded to a dead end.

 

Know your best performing publishers for optimization

Without knowing your best-performing publishers, it can be difficult to confidently know where to invest and who to drop. This is an example of how a lack of data insights will affect your ability to make decisions to scale your business. These insights are commonly learned by pulling CSV files from your tracking platform, which takes time and resources that could be spent on analysis and optimization.

Swaarm offers a powerful integrated data analytics tool, Swaarm Explorer, which allows clients to see data insights in real-time. You can select what you want to filter, split and measure to gain critical insights and optimize performance in seconds. For example, the Explorer enables you to learn which publisher performed best within the last 30 days in a single country based on total revenue. Moreover, clients are also not limited to any amount of data or timeframe and can view at any granularity.

 

Contact us to find out how our innovative technology can help you increase profitability through efficiency.