What is Affiliate Mobile App CPA Marketing?
Mobile affiliate CPA is all about promoting other people’s apps on mobile networks and getting paid every time someone downloads and installs the app. This is also referred to sometimes as CPD (Cost Per Download) or CPI (Cost Per Install).
One of the main advantages to mobile app marketing is that the risk is relatively low, meaning your initial investment in promoting costs can be as low as $25 – $50. Once you find a winner and optimize your campaigns you can potentially make a great profit margin.
How Affiliate Mobile App Download Campaigns Work
Selecting Mobile Apps to Promote
Your first step is to join a mobile affiliate network and get approved.
My favorite mobile affiliate networks are Offermobi, Mobpartner and Yeahmobi
Then comes the crucial task of selecting which apps to promote.
Some apps are available to promote in multiple countries and over multiple mobile operating systems. Others may have mobile provider carrier limitations. For example you may be able to promote app x on Android in the USA on T-Mobile only. This information is important targeting information when buying traffic. After all you don’t want to pay for iPhone traffic on another carrier if you won’t get paid for any conversions made.
There is an art to selecting the right apps to promote. Both testing and experience contribute to successful campaigns. some apps convert only on iPhones while in the same county they may not convert for Android. Some countries like certain types of apps and some are just plain unpredictable.
The best kind of apps to promote are free apps, specifically games. These apps are free to download and usually contain optional in app purchases and upgrades that make the apps profitable for the App Developers.
Buying Mobile Traffic To run Your Mobile App Ads and Banners
Now that you have selected a mobile app to promote you need to buy some traffic. While there are many ways to promote an app, mobile media buying and in app displays are by far the easiest and most profitable.
Then you go out to mobile traffic networks, but traffic and if your selection was good you should see some conversions (installs). With so many mobile traffic networks to choose from you will need to test and find the winning combination of selecting the right app and promoting it on the right network to see the conversions fly in (and when it happens you will know – it is amazing when it works).
Optimizing Your Affiliate Mobile App Download Campaigns
The secret to a profitable mobile affiliate app download campaign lays in tracking and optimization. Your initial traffic buy may be more general and once you have some data you can eliminate the countries, operating systems, handset models and carriers that are not producing conversions.
To get this data you will need to apply some tracking on your mobile affiliate links!
You can set up multiple campaigns using subids for tracking or you can advance once step and use a mobile link tracking service.
Tracking Your Mobile App Affiliate Links
Here are a couple mobile tracking platforms that can work for you:
iMobiTrax
iMobiTrax is a mobile tracking platform built by mobile super affiliates for mobile affiliates. This is a paid service (monthly fee of $129). This may seem like a lot to a novice, but once you are making money, this expense is negligible and can make a big difference in your profit margins.
To use iMobiTrax you will need to host their platform on your domain. This is not a complicated procedure and can also be done for you by their team for a modest cost of $50.
Prosper202
Prosper202 by Tracking202 Inc. You may already be using Prosper202 for regular affiliate markeitng campaigns. Recently they added on Mobile tracking capabilities. This is a free platform that is self hosted. Though beware, I am always wary of free services. A healthy dose of paranoia is always a good idea when large suns of money are involved and you can’t be sure that your data is not being internally analyzed.
