The latest in-depth Adcash Analysis!
This Adcash review aims to give you an overview of the platform as an ad network and traffic source. This is another one from our ad networks reviews, and it’s mainly an analysis of its structure, traffic, and specifications.
By the end of this article, you’ll get great insights into the Adcash’s online advertising platform as well as the technical setup, such as goal tracking and reporting.
Finally, I’ll also give you some info about my own personal experience, regarding issues, qualities and my own rating of Adcash.
Overview
Adcash is an advertising platform focused on mainstream traffic. In the beginning, it was a managed-only platform. This basically means every user had a personal account manager who helped in pretty much everything regarding campaign set up, segments, optimization, etc. You name it, they’d be there for you.
Now, Adcash also has a self-managed platform that lets users set everything by themselves, just like you’d usually do on other networks.
With their easy-to-use platform, you can run, manage, analyze and control all your campaigns in one place. It takes less than 3 minutes to set up your campaign and you can choose from different ad formats including Pop-Under, Native Ads, Push Notifications, Interstitials, and Display Ads. Plus, Adcash receives around 200 million ad requests every day from their exclusive supply and 200+ trusted RTB partners.
They still offer dedicated account managers if you need extra help and guidance from their team. For high spenders, it can become further flexible in many aspects to fit your needs and even allows you to create landing pages and banners for free.
Once you feel your activity on Adcash reaches a high level of activity, request from their customer support, an introduction to a Sales Manager. They speak different languages and are most of the time available 9 am – 7 pm on UTC+2.
The best thing about this? In case you wanna make a change on your campaign, you don’t need to wait for the Account Manager to do it for you.
The platform has two main types of traffic: Desktop & Mobile Web. You also have 2 campaign creation wizards: Express & Advanced.
Both offer the same features, but the layout is different:
- Express: a 1-page campaign creation wizard for a specific ad format that you initially choose to create a campaign for.
- Advanced: a 5-step campaign creation wizard which allows you to run your campaign across all their available ad-formats (obviously, the bid type you will choose later will matter: you could not run all ad-formats into 1 campaign if you choose to go CPC, which is not available for Pop-Under).
Once your advanced campaign is active, an additional “Performance” step appears for you to monitor your campaign performances, including metrics such as ROI, number of auctions your campaign participated in, and its win rate.
A few features worth mentioning, available on both campaign types, include:
User Interest Feature
First of all: what’s that all about? What the heck does “user interest” mean?
Simple: user interest targeting will display your ads and offers for users that have shown interest exactly in what your offer has to… well, offer.
For example, if you’re promoting a game offer, whenever the users visit a site, regardless of the site’s theme being gaming or not, your ads will be shown to them.
This is different from contextual targeting, which targets the site’s category (a standalone feature), where your ads would be displayed on gaming-related websites only.
How does this work?
This tool can help you create campaigns that are super detailed, mega concrete, and highly targeted! This – as I’m sure a player of your wealth and status already knows – is gonna lead to higher margins and ROI, as they decrease the spending on unnecessary and uninterested users.
What do higher margins mean? Simply put? You’re gonna make it rain like a master who spends money faster!
CPA Target Bid Type
Another feature that deserves special mention is the CPA Target Bid Type.
This dynamic and automated CPM bidding type allows Adcash to know your CPA goal, set up the necessary tracking protocols, and allow the platform to do the rest. It’ll find converting segments for you, focus on them and automatically stop/lower the bidding on non-converting or too expensive ones.
Essentially, once you’ve created your CPA Target campaign, check if it starts to convert after a couple of days and if so, sit back and relax.
Advanced Campaign Performance Tab
And lastly, this Advertising platform just went from awesome to exceptional, with the Advanced Campaign Performance Tab.
Now, advertisers can cut their optimizing time in half with the integration of new tracking metrics.
Auction/Win Rate: An indicator of how many auctions your campaign participated in and how competitive your bid has been versus the competition.
ROI: The overall success of your campaign
NB: To access the ROI metric on the advertising platform portal, you’ll need to indicate the value of each conversion (i.e, the revenue you expect to make). To do this, you’ll need to enable the “value=” parameter in your postback tracking URL.
Campaign Creation
Creating a campaign on Adcash has never been easier!
It’s easy and cool since the platform has a pretty good interface. Plus: it’s all very intuitive, even if you happen to be more used to the targeting aspect rather than the tracking options.
Anyway, the setup options are quite good, so let’s get to it quickly!
Creative URL and Goals Tracking
First things first: you’ll need to have your “creative URL” ready. This is the URL of your offer or your tracking code from your tracker. Below this field, you will see the list of available macros Adcash allows you to use.
Therefore, when configuring your URL, you should include all the macros which are relevant for your activity. Moreover, you should pay that sweetly special attention to the clickID.
Now, if you’ll run your campaigns with CPM or CPC, I still recommend letting Adcash track your conversions with their pixel, so you’re able to track your campaign’s performance. If you can configure tracking and especially if the offer you run has an action to track an action (signup, download, install, purchase…), then you could use the powerful CPATarget bid type for full automation and the only effort you are left with, is setting up the campaign (oh wait, I forgot to mention they have a campaign duplication tool!).
That being said, make sure you first configure the tracking if you go for CPM or CPC, but if you go for CPATarget, the great thing is that the campaign creation wizard will ask you to choose between three tracking methods, namely Global Postback URL (S2S) – a single setup for all your campaigns, Campaign HTML pixel – one pixel per campaign (very outdated and inaccurate tracking method), and Hybrid HTML pixel – works like Global Postback URL (S2S) but is implemented in your “Thank you page” source code.
In case you have not created any “tracking code/goal” yet, you can create one straight from your campaign creation wizard by pressing the “Create new goal” button.
You will then be able to not only get your tracking code for implementation but you will also need to “verify tracking” prior to setting your campaign live.
To create a tracking code for your CPM/CPC campaigns (you could also create additional pixels if you want and let Adcash track as much as you want), you should go to “EVENT TRACKING” on the menu and select “CREATE GOAL.” Then, choose your preferred settings.
The user interface will display the code created for you to copy it and implement it as needed. In the parameter “advertiser=”, your advertiser ID on Adcash should be displayed. In the parameter “id=”, the pixel unique ID is automatically filled by Adcash too.
As for the“cid=” parameter, you should replace it with the external ID token for your tracker or affiliate network platform. (I.e. for Voluum, it should be cid={externalid}).
What should your postback URL look like on Voluum?
Check it: http://www.pixelhere.com/et/event.php?advertiser=12345&cid={externalid}&id=abc123&type=CPAtarget
It’s also worth mentioning that Adcash doesn’t yet have a pre-built template on Voluum but it does on other tracking platforms like BeMob, Binom, Thrive, RedTrack, Adsbridge, and Peerclick.
Meaning what?
That you’ll need sometimes to add the tokens manually.
Targeting
Regarding targeting: you’ll have the common features available.
The cool thing? The parameters are usually divided into 2 options, a whitelist or a blacklist, which I think is pretty smart, simple, and useful.
Now pay attention to Adcash’s targeting options.
This is where you can click and get a dropdown menu with other options such as:
- Operating Systems;
- Browsers, Zones Lists (each “Zone” corresponds to a unique placement where your ad is being shown);
- Connection Type;
- User Interests;
- Website Categories;
- Domains,
- Internet Service Providers (ISP).
For Express wizard:
For Advanced wizard:
To better target your campaign, you should really use them!
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What about ISPs?
This is one thing that can be problematic for you on this platform. Targeting by ISP is not as straightforward as your usual carrier targeting. Indeed, you can see several options for the carrier you want, which can make it hard for you to know exactly which are the correct ones to target to get the traffic you need.
In that case, if you can’t find it in a simple Google research, you should contact Adcash’s support and they’ll help you out with that!
Their live chat is very responsive.
Creatives
Regarding creatives, you’ll be able to see that Adcash has many available: In-Page Push, Interstitial, Pop-Under, Native, and Display.
For Express wizard:
For Advanced wizard:
Budget
This is where you’ll set your bid, capping, and budget options.
You can choose as mentioned earlier, between 3 cost models: CPM, CPC, and CPA Target (please note that CPC is not available for the PopUnder AdFormat).
For Express wizard:
For Advanced wizard:
Please note that when it comes to CPM, the advanced campaign wizard offers a lot more flexibility than express campaign does.
See for yourself, CPM on Advanced wizard:
As you can see, using the advanced wizard you are able to set different CPM bids per Quality Tier per country.
Adcash’s engine is breaking down the supply/traffic by its quality using key indicators such as conversion rate allowing advertisers to set higher CPM bids for “high-quality traffic” and lower bids for “mid” & “low”.
Once again, if you choose CPA Target, which I strongly recommend, you don’t have to worry about which bid to choose.
It’s important to keep in mind that you need to give time to their AI for finding converting placements (usually 3-4 days running is enough).
Campaign Tracking (Reports)
Adcash offers you some strong stats.
You can check your reports by picking these 4 options:
- Daily spending, where you just see a summary of how much you spent along with the main indicators, such as impressions, conversions, eCPM, and some others.
- Detailed statistics, where you can see data by category, format, zone, creative, SSP, and some other parameters.
- Request reports, where you can ask the network for reports to be delivered at your email. They can be summarized or detailed; for all your campaigns, or just for specific ones.
- Reporting API.
Last but not least, as previously mentioned, you can also count on the “Performance” tab of your running advanced campaigns to get some extra insights about your campaign ROI & competitiveness against other bidders.
This is super nice!
Traffic Talks
Adcash is a good and trustworthy DSP!
It’s also got one of the best interfaces out there.
The very good points?
- The support! Even though it’s a self-managed platform, the support at Adcash rocks. Every email I sent was answered in a very reasonable amount of time and the problem was always quickly solved.
- Fraud filtered traffic: yeah, every Network will tell you they filter fraud traffic. But Adcash really fights against it. They obviously see no value in wasting advertisers’ budgets on non-human traffic. That’s a core value to the DSP. In 2018, their advanced fraud filters saved more than $11.8M advertising budgets.
- One-stop-shop: since they are connected to, honestly, most SSPs in the industry, it means you could centralize all your acquisition channels in 1 place. That’s truly amazing and convenient.
- Their automated bidding type, CPA Target. That is so powerful they deliver conversions in average 30% lower than the given goals. What does it mean? Extra ROI in your pocket!
There’s a low point worth mentioning, though:
- You really have to know which ISP is the correct one to target to get traffic. However, the support can help you with that.
Offers & Verticals
Ad types: Display (Banners, Interstitial, Native), Push Notifications and Pop-Under.
Cost model(s): CPM, CPC and CPATarget.
Verticals: Mainstream.
Payment & Investment
Minimum deposit: $1000 for the managed platform and $100 for the self-managed platform.
Payment Methods: PayPal, Skrill, Bank Transfer, WebMoney, Credit Card.
It is also worth mentioning that Adcash offers refunds for unspent funds, minus a refund fee. If you need additional information about the Finance side, check it out here.
Support
Personal Account Manager: On-demand
Support Response Speed: Quick. Usually a maximum of a few hours
Support Rating: Good. Answers questions directly
Contact Methods: Contact form on its website (for a self-service account) & email
Email: [email protected]
Make your Stash with Adcash
This is a wicked platform with great, genuine traffic. It has its limitations, but, then again, don’t we all?
Adcash is a nice option for you to buy traffic from, in case you’ve got a decent budget to start playing the affiliate marketing master game!
Once you get the hang of it, you can make some dollars to send to your fat bank account.
And, before we head out, Adcash is giving all Mobidea Academy readers an exclusive 20% bonus for new accounts!
Here’s how to use your Adcash bonus coupon:
- Create your Adcash account;
- Top up your new account with a $/€200 to $/€1000 deposit;
- Use the promo code: MOBIDEA2021, when loading up your funds.
That’s it for now, folks!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this analysis.
Let’s keep the money rolling in!
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