Monthly Archives: March 2012

LeadBolt Visitor Match Tracking Feature and new advertiser SDK help with Apple’s UDID change

Last October, LeadBolt unveiled the latest in its innovative new features for advertisers on its mobile ad network, the new Visitor Match tracking function, which provides a method for the tracking of mobile conversions quickly, conveniently and automatically.

This Visitor Match feature was designed to work across a broad spectrum of platforms including the popular Android and iTunes application stores, allowing LeadBolt advertisers to enjoy highly accurate tracking reports on conversion rates and match them directly to the campaign that prompted the click-thru.

Its ability to accurately track conversions even if the device ID or UDID is not present has turned out to be one of its greatest features with Apple’s stance on deprecating the UDID.

When advertisers track traffic through the Visitor Match feature, the proprietary visitor matching function identifies the source of the traffic by matching platforms, devices and a range of other non-personal information to match up the conversion with the original ad impression.

For iOS, Visitor matching is becoming increasingly almost mandatory as the mobile ad community wrestles with problems of marketplace restrictions and emerging updates to privacy policies. Present day proposals to switch to other single ID based solutions, or third party ID stores and likely to be similarly restrictive.  Our new visitor matching algorithms will be leading the way.

The Visitor Match algorithms produce an impressive 98.7% accuracy rate for the server-side and other conversion pixel events as a result of their combined technologies.

We have today made available our iPhone advertiser SDK in a non-UDID version to further assist advertisers in making the change. In this regard, LeadBolt again demonstrates its commitment to providing the best possible customer experience and most innovative high performance mobile advertising platform available today.

Join LeadBolt’s Technical Q&A Knowledge Based Community

The Technical Support Team at LeadBolt prides itself on its fast and thorough responses to all technical queries relating to the integration of LeadBolt ad types. In addition, the next best sources of information made available are the FAQs and Video Tutorials obtainable on the LeadBolt portal.

However, we understand that our Publishers sometimes need answers instantly and to assist them even further, we have released a Technical Q&A Knowledge Based Community available at http://qa.leadboltads.com to provide a suite of immediate answers to their app ad integration related questions.

This Q&A community focuses only on finding answers to technical questions relating to the integration of LeadBolt ad formats to apps. This helpful source gives members the opportunity to ask and answer technical questions, comment and vote for the questions of others and their answers.

Join our new Technical Q&A Knowledge Based Community today and gain access to immediate answers to your technical queries relating to the integration of our ad types to your apps!

AnDevCon III – Save $200 on your Conference Pass!

AnDevCon III claims itself to be the biggest, info-packed, most practical Android technical conference in the world. The LeadBolt Team will be exhibiting at this highly anticipated event in May and we would love for you to join us there as well!

Use our special discount code – “leadbolt” to save $200 on your conference pass! Simply visit their registration page, get yourself registered and apply this discount code at checkout to get $200 off your attendee pass to the event.

We look forward to meeting you at booth #306! For more information about AnDevCon III, please visit their website -http://www.andevcon.com.

Highlights at GDC San Francisco

It was fantastic meeting so many enthusiastic gaming professionals at the Game Developers Conference last week. It was an amazing three days with reportedly a record-breaking 22,500 people attending the conference this time around! We had hundreds of people visiting our stand and chatting to the LeadBolt team.

With the LeadBolt Team hard at work at our stand, once again we successfully established valuable new partnerships and alliances which are going to benefit our current publishers and advertisers. If you didn’t make it this time around or missed our stand, I am sure we will see you at the next event venue very soon.

Check out comprehensive coverage of the GDC 2012 event here.

Surely we can be smarter than traditional display advertising?


Most internet ad professionals quickly learn to get their heads around the key metrics that drive their industry and get them so much kudos at dinner parties and the like. I am of course talking about cost per mille (CPM), cost per click (CPC), click through rate (CTR), and percentage conversions rates.

As the industry has matured, we are able to benchmark performance against the increasing amount of statistics that are now available in the display advertising industry…

Google, in their online report portal, show that the best performing click through rate across all ad sizes 0.26% (that is one click for every 385 people who view the ad). For banner sizes that generally appear in mobile campaigns the click through rates are much lower. Google quotes that 300×250 banners have a 0.1% CTR and  468×60 banners have a 0.05% CTR (1 click for every 2,000 views). Admob also a Google company is on the record as clarifying their click through rate as 0.5 -1% average.

Now what gets me all fired up is that these appalling click through rates are accepted as industry standard. Can you manage organizing a party and only 1 of your 385 guest turned up. You wouldn’t be telling yourself that the invite process produced a great result. Yet, we accept these results for traditional display advertising. It is akin to inviting people to your party via smoke signals when newer and better methods are already available.

Surely we should be doing something smarter?

I’m pleased to note that things are moving and mindsets are moving as well.

It’s common sense. What’s the point of an advertising campaign that broadcasts to people who aren’t particularly interested? The advent of digital advertising was supposed to be able take us away from the mass media wastage of TV and the like, where you blast millions of people with your message and hope it appeals to a handful. It is the interactive nature of digital media that is supposed to help advertisers target, entertain and most importantly, engage the consumer with meaningful and welcome messages.

So where is traditional display advertising going wrong? Click through rates tell us a lot about user interest and engagement. The current rates tell us that this traditional form of advertising is ignoring a major aspect of digital advertising,  the user experience.

“Smart advertising” is the next stage in display advertising. It is integrated in its placement, in that it appears in accordance with user need or action. It is directly addressing the user experience – and the results are dramatic.

Great examples include overlays or functionally integrated app searches(such as our App Wall) that are available when users need them and don’t crowd the app experience as traditional display advertising does. Rich media is coming of age and provides an immersive experience that will further enhance and re-captivate advertising audiences.

At LeadBolt we have been promoting high performance ad types for some time and I see that other innovative mobile advertising companies are getting traction doing the same.

The rewards are there, in this world, savvy advertisers are achieving click through rates that are a 15 – 30 times improvement on Google’s display statistics.

I’m sure the industry can be smarter and users will be the winners.

 

Posted in CEO

Official Launch of New Marmalade Compatibility Library

I am proud to announce our collaboration and partnership with the Marmalade team and the release of the new Marmalade Compatibility Library for Android and Apple iOS systems including iPad and iPhone. Designed as a joint project between both companies, the Marmalade Compatibility Library allows app developers to integrate LeadBolt’s monetization potential into each application they create. This added functionality is expected to attract even more developers to the innovative LeadBolt mobile advertising network and the chance to monetize their applications more effectively by design.

We are excited to bring LeadBolt’s high performance ad types to this well-respected development platform. Marmalade is the platform behind some of the world’s most exciting apps and is used by many of the leading app developers of our time. We are pleased to be working with Marmalade and look forward to providing their developer community with effective monetization solutions for their apps.

Marmalade is an innovative software development kit designed to allow developers to design and program in C++ for a variety of mobile platforms including Apple iOS and Android systems. This innovative approach to app development makes Marmalade a popular choice among top-end app designers. The release of the Marmalade Compatibility Library will benefit app developers who want to program with Marmalade and monetize with LeadBolt.

With this latest partnership, LeadBolt further cements its position as the leading monetization solution for app developers on both the Android and the iOS platforms. The Marmalade Compatibility Library is designed to work seamlessly with the cross-platform functionality of the Marmalade app development toolkit, ensuring that app developers can incorporate the earning potential of LeadBolt’s mobile advertising network into each and every app they design.