Archive for April, 2009

Offerpal’s Commitment to Our Advertising Partners

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the value of a lead stemming from an offer on advertising platforms such as ours, mostly in support of  the channel but somewhat cautious about its future given our tremendous growth curve and looming challenges. Jay Weintraub, a prominent blogger and the organizer behind the popular LeadsCon events (as well as somebody we respect tremendously at Offerpal), was the first to give it a really analytical eye, with Jeremy Liew and Virtual Goods News both providing valuable insights as well.

And while we have our own perspective on the future of the industry and what must be done to overcome its unique challenges, we cannot disagree with nor ignore the fact that those challenges exist. Instead, we’d like to take this opportunity to explain the measures we have taken to date to deliver the highest lead quality possible and outline the key solutions to ensuring the long-term success of the channel.

(For those looking for a little background, Offerpal Media is the leading advertising solution on social networks and applications, online gaming sites, virtual worlds, mobile apps and other social/gaming publishers. We enable consumers to earn virtual currency, redeemable with these partners, in exchange for taking part in any of our 2,500+ targeted, relevant advertising offers such as free trials, big-brand discounts, online surveys and more.)

In online advertising and media circles, the value of a lead is directly correlated to the intent of the user, so that search engine leads, where the user actively seeks out information on a particular product or service, are among the highest quality leads, and so-called “incentivized” leads, where users are only submitting their information to get something else completely unrelated, are among the lowest quality. In the worst of theses cases — the infamous “Win a free iPod” offers of the early 00′s  — the incentive was so unrelated and the lead generators so irresponsible that many advertisers were burned by the channel after spending millions of dollars on completely unqualified leads.

The whole episode ultimately led to SEC intervention and advertisers becoming overly cautious of any leads that involve so much as a whiff of incentivization. This despite the fact that “soft motivational sells” such as those involving airline miles, loyalty cards, reward programs, etc. have proven immensely successful as a marketing tool for companies spanning a broad spectrum of industries. The motivation serves as an effective way to get the consumer’s attention and begin to engage with them, but it alone does not determine the quality of the lead that that consumer will eventually turn into. The quality is more determined by what happens next.

Unlike the “incentivized marketing” providers of several years ago, Offerpal Media is 100% committed helping our advertisers succeed, and we hold ourselves entirely accountable for the quality of leads coming from our platform and the sustainability of our channel. Below is a list of ways that Offerpal Media is actively managing lead quality on behalf of our advertising partners.

1. Tapping into social engagement

First and foremost, lead quality begins with the consumer’s engagement with the application or web site. Our users feel a very strong affinity to and bond with the apps they use and games they play, often spending hours at a time there and returning with great frequency. By tapping into this connection, it helps assure that consumers are more willing to honestly and openly interact with the advertising offers presented to them.

2. Targeting consumers with demographically and behaviorally relevant offers

This is the most obvious way for Offerpal to improve lead quality, and the area where we have made the largest investment. Our proprietary, patent-pending algorithms were engineered specifically for the social environment to ensure that consumers are presented with the most relevant and interesting ad offers based on their demographic profile and social activities. We currently have PhD’s from Yale, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and other top universities working on our algorithms, which get smarter and smarter the more they “learn” about consumer behaviors and attitudes towards specific offers.

When you have over 2,500 advertising offers like we do, chances are practically 100% that there are several, if not hundreds, of offers that any single consumer would be interested in completing. The key is surfacing those offers to the first page of our I-Frame so they are easily accessible. It’s the same principle that makes it so important to rank on the first page of Google’s or Yahoo’s search results. By identifying these top performing and most relevant offers for specific demographic audiences or based on the specific usage within a game or application, we are able to dramatically affect lead quality by matching advertisers directly with their core audiences.

3. Articulating clear and tight offer completion instructions

In the “Win a Free iPod” days, consumers were simply asked to fill out a form in order to win the free iPod. It turned out that they had to jump through several more hoops and take part in several more offers before they were even entered for the chance to win the iPod, leaving most consumers as burned by the whole experience as advertisers would later be by the lead quality.

We take an entirely opposite approach. We spell out right up front, in no uncertain terms, all the requirements for completing an offer and receiving one’s virtual currency. If a purchase is required, we say so. We let them know if the use of a credit card is or is not necessary. And we warn them that virtual currency will only be delivered upon receipt of valid information and completion of specific actions. We also reserve the right to ban users who try to game the system, and to revoke their currency in such cases. Here’s where their bond with the app or game prevents most people from abusing the system.

4. Preventing fraud

Despite that bond, there is still a small percentage of users who will attempt to game the system by completing any random offer strictly in order to get the virtual currency. To combat these users, we have implemented a number of fraud prevention mechanisms to quickly identify fraud and alert us to it so we can take swift action to stop the fraud and, in many cases, prevent the lead from ever getting through. We also have a manual process to provide oversight on this area, looking for oddities or abnormalities that stand out from our normal usage patterns.

5. Validating data

Whenever possible, we validate the data collected on submission forms before passing it on to our advertising clients. In some cases we validate the user’s phone number or their postal address against publicly available databases. In others we validate that they have entered a valid email address or that they have not used a fake name like “Mickey Mouse” or “asdf hjkl.” These measures go a long way towards removing fake or insincere leads before they are delivered to the advertiser.

6. Getting feedback from advertisers and taking corrective measures

Another critical way we can improve lead quality relies on the advertiser to send us feedback files on how our leads converted for them. This information allows us to optimize  future campaigns by delivering more leads from high quality sources for a particular offer and less leads, or none at all, from underperforming sources. It also provides us with the ammunition we need to take corrective measures such as banning certain users from our system or revoking their currency. A handful of our advertisers are currently delivering feedback files, and the lead quality for these campaigns has greatly increased over time as we learn more about where to find the best quality leads for a particular advertiser or ad offer.

7. Promoting unique, custom offers

For a number of reasons, our ad platform is unlike any other on the Web: our users are more engaged (both with the social/gaming experience and with the ad offers themselves), the rich profile data we’re able to collect gives us much better targeting capabilities, and the immersive nature of our publishers opens the door to a broader array of advertising opportunities, just to name a few. Combined, these factors allow us to work with our advertising partners to come up with customized offers designed specifically for the Offerpal community.

Let us give you an example. Movie studios often promote upcoming films by running display ad campaigns that attempt to drive users to a page where they can watch a trailer for the film. In this case, many dollars are wasted simply trying to get non-targeted users to the view the trailer, and many of those people never watch the full trailer anyway. With our platform, not only can we target users based on their demographics and social activities, but we can ensure that they watch the entire trailer by withholding their virtual currency until they have done so. We can even recreate the movie experience by working with the developer or publisher to create a virtual movie theater where the user can munch on virtual popcorn while viewing the trailer. But we don’t stop there. Because we now have that user’s data on file, and we know that they watched the trailer, we can go back to them 90 – 120 days later to offer additional currency for ordering the DVD of that same movie.

Where do we go from here?

The reason why our channel has come under such scrutiny lately is that it has proven to work so successfully, at least from a volume perspective. But, as noted, with volume comes quality challenges, so we must continue to tackle those challenges head on, and rest assured that we are. The measures mentioned above are just the beginning. Later this year we will be announcing significant improvements to our “Managed Offer Platform” specifically designed to even further improve lead quality.

In the end, we are confident that our deep integration with publishers and the unique consumer service we deliver will ultimately prove our channel as capable of delivering high quality leads that effectively convert into new, high-value customers. And this sentiment seems to be shared by those who have recently turned a critical eye towards it, such as when Jeremy Liew notes that “The future is bright for these platforms,” or when Jay Weintraub says, “Ultimately, the platforms have an incredibly valuable asset that assures them a role in the barely developed world of social media monetization — access.”