How the cold start effect impacts growth potential

Trust and transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem are being eroded by the presence of fraud. It isn’t uncommon to see mobile app advertisers changing their ad networks frequently due to the lack of trust and confidence in the quality of traffic being supplied. But every time you replace an ad network, knowledge and optimisations are lost. And when you bring on a new ad network, your campaigns are starting cold. Before you can even contemplate growth you:

• Invest time getting IOs signed and bringing your account manager up to speed
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• Manage tediously small test budgets
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• Wait for traffic to scale and optimisation of traffic sources
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Every cold start begins with these time-consuming tasks that delay growth.

Wouldn’t it be good to have stronger partnerships with your ad networks so that you can build on the successes and learnings of every campaign for faster growth? How do you give each campaign a running start?

Fraud and quality are usually the causes of lost trust in the advertiser/ad network partnership so by addressing this problem, we can build sustainable partnerships that drive growth.

Ad networks often lack the required visibility into traffic quality to effectively optimise fraud out of their supply. To facilitate this process, there are a few things that brand and app advertisers can do.

• Rather than reporting volumes of invalid traffic to your ad networks just at invoice time, by sharing traffic quality with your ad networks earlier, they can make faster optimisation decisions. This can help not only reduce fraud, but also to drive overall campaign performance
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• Better still, provide ad networks access to dedicated reporting dashboards where possible. If you are using a tool for detection or mitigation, see if real-time reporting can be accessed by the network where they can see just the traffic they send to your campaigns
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• Verify install attribution before ad networks are attributed. This will ensure that when it comes to invoice time, both you and your ad networks have the same numbers of valid traffic. This mitigates the need for time consuming, error prone invoice reconciliation giving everyone more time to focus on growth. And more importantly, verified attribution helps keep everyone on the same page so that you can build a sustainable partnership that drives growth for both businesses

The process to onboard new ad networks takes time – time away from activities that could otherwise be spent on building strong working relationships and developing strategies to drive growth. And every time you drop an ad network, you lose the time invested along with all the knowledge and optimisation. Like trying to rev a cold engine and expecting the car to perform at its best, the cold start effect will slow and delay business growth.

Using fraud real-time prevention and sharing intelligence with your ad networks helps ensure that fraud can be optimised out and your partnerships strengthen. It also means that each new campaign benefits from a running start, with experienced and knowledgeable partners.
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To read more about how to choose a comprehensive ad fraud solution, read our Ad fraud prevention Buyer’s Guide for mobile apps.

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