This is a guest post from Monseur Marty (mobile affiliate marketing park ranger at Neverblue). I nearly said no to publishing this post because of certain tips I didn’t want published. But since he’s been great help to me so it was only fair to let it go.

Marty: Remember WAAAY back in 2007 when Affiliate Marketing was the ‘Wild Wild West’?  When the golden brick road heading towards ‘Stacks of Cash’ was lined with high converting Acai berries, government grants, and zip submits?  When clicks on Google cost a shiny nickel and Facebook opened their self service platform with a goldmine of untouched inventory?

Well, those days are long gone, and mining for gold on the internet has become more like wandering the desert in search of water.

Mr Green: Agreed, there is a rising population of parched lips in this affiliate landscape.

Marty: Yup, we now have compliance departments hanging around and advertisers understanding what is backing out for them.  Google and Facebook are charging an arm and a leg for traffic.  What was once the ‘Wild Wild West’ now resembles a boarding school.

Well there is a new hero on the horizon for affiliates.  Where clicks can be bought for just cents and conversions are flowing like streams of wine (or beer, if that is your beverage of choice).

Mr Green: Captain ROI???!!

Marty: Nope, this new knight in shining armor is known as Mobile Marketing!

Mr Green: Hmm not a very catchy name…he should work on that one.

Marty: Right…anyway the problem with being a leading edge of pioneer technology is that there is so much unknown landscape… the same is true for mobile marketing:

• There are hundreds of different devices divided into multiple categories:  Smart phones, feature phones, tablets, etc.  Which convert for which offers?  …And how do we know?
• Along with devices are different operating systems.  Which is better for your offers, iOS or Android?
• What’s it like to fill out a long form registration on an old-school 12 button phone?  That’s an easy answer.  Not fun.
• How can we track this information, and make it readily available to us?

The answers to these questions are here in the form of Neverblue Analytic Reporting. Let’s take a look on how to get some stats out of the reporting, and how to use these stats to your advantage:

Mr Green: Hmmm do I smell blatant promotion Mr Marty? No but seriously, I agree, your reporting platform is sick and unique!

The Neverblue Platform. It's Sick.

Marty: Damn right Mr G! I’d also just like to note that our affiliates are doing $xxx,xxx/month on mobile, so this is no small time playground. Anyway let’s assume we have run a small test on an offer called “Mobile Expressions”.  We put $100 down on a test run and now we want to see where our conversions are coming from. We want to be able to analyze what devices are getting the best/worst results.  How can we get this information?

1. Login into your Neverblue account.
2. Click on the “Reporting” tab on the menu bar.
3. Click on the “Advanced Reporting” tab on the left column.
4. Select options you would like to aggregate e.g “mobile device and campaign”

Click “Run Report” then BOOM!

Click on the image to enlarge. DO IT!

You can see in the example shown that the user has sorted by conversions, and immediately you can see which mobile device is getting better conversion rates and EPCs.  With this example, we are getting the most conversions (13) for the Motorola Droid-X, but the Huawei M860 is converting at 17%.

Mr Green: Oooweee licking my lips (less parched now).

Marty: I’m glad you are a little more hydrated… So what this allows us to do is go back to our traffic source and filter by the phones that are giving us an EPC that makes this a winning campaign.  And it’s not just limited to the devices. We  allow you to optimize your mobile campaigns based on carrier, web browser and many other variables.

As you can see with this simple example, the Analytical Reporting ads a tremendous amount of power to your mobile campaigns.

This should give you a good place to start with your mobile offers.  It shows the benefit of what mobile tracking and reporting can do to make your campaigns successful.  Please feel free to contact me (Martyb@Neverblue.com) on how else I can help you become a mobile superstar!

Mr Green: Damn Marty that is awesome!

P.S. guys Marty just showed you a working campaign, with the exact offer to run, and which handsets convert. All you need to do now is test creatives. You ain’t going to find any other data like this for free!