Does Matomy’s new Mobit platform hold the key to success in mobile performance marketing?

Israel-based performance marketing network Matomy Media Group recently launched a new mobile media buying platform called Mobit. It offers conversion tracking, campaign management, near-realtime reporting and a sophisticated analytic “Mobit Insights” function that automatically identifies the most important campaign optimization priorities.

The introduction of Mobit, described as a “smart tracking and analysis tool for mobile affiliates and media buyers,” comes during a period of rapid expansion for Matomy. It follows the recent acquisition of US-based affiliate networks MediaWhiz and Adperio, mobile marketing specialist network MobAff, and German network Team Internet. Much of Matomy’s success has been built on their expertise with mobile offers, and Mobit is a development of the proprietary tools their own mobile media buyers use in-house.

Our team spent several days recently using Mobit and talking to Matomy’s CEO, product manager and media buying team in order to find out just what the deal is.

Meet MobitFigure 1: Mobit: a smart tracking and analysis tool for mobile affiliates and media buyers.

It is hard to argue against the proposition that mobile is the future of performance marketing. The adoption of Internetenabled mobile devices worldwide has been remarkable inits speed. Whether in Western economies where tablets and smartphones are taking ever larger pieces of the ecommerce marketplace, or in emerging economies where in many cases mobile handsets have become the most prevalent form of access to the Internet, mobile is increasingly important to online marketers.

In response, performance marketing is changing and evolving rapidly. With so many different affiliates working to find the best possible way to convert offers online, our industry has filled the role of online marketing’s prototype laboratory, constantly coming up with new ideas, building sites and incentives to test and then dumping the ones that don’t work.

That is why mobile is so exciting to so many publishers and merchants. It is a new territory, where the fittest and smartest have the opportunity to thrive and grow. This is the target audience for Mobit.

Mobit began as a tool developed for use in-house by Matomy’s own media buying team. Like so many mobile marketers, they found themselves struggling to scale and optimizemobile campaigns quickly and effectively, largely because the campaign management and analytics tools available simply couldn’t handle efficiently the sheer volume of data that mobile creates.

After much internal discussion and a lot of software development man-hours, Mobit is the result: a mobile media buying and campaign management platform that offers really smart analytics. Let’s take a closer look.

Features
Mobit has been designed to provide mobile media buyers with a one-stop solution for their campaign analytics and optimization, and as such it provides a comprehensive set of features. Not only does it allow one-click set up of campaigns from Matomy’s network, as well as running CPA offers from any other affiliate network, but it also offers built-in and customizable templates to work with any media buy platform that can be set up and tracked just as easily.

The tracking and reporting functionality is deep too, allowing drill-down into any aspect of a campaign for which data is available, real-time conversion tracking and even an auto-suggest optimization tool, Mobit Insights, that claims to identify best- and worst-targeting options for media buys automatically. The system even offers split-testing and post-click redirects so that traffic can be redirected to different landing pages that have been optimized to each traffic type.

All in all, it’s a feature set designed for the working media buyer or affiliate that needs to move fast, identify what is working and then scale successful campaigns rapidly.

Getting Started
Getting started with Mobit is done by completing a simple registration process. You set up your supply platforms. A supply platform is anywhere from which you buy mobile media. There is a whole list of supply platforms that come ready to use in Mobit, so in many cases you can just pick the one you want. If you need to add a new one, there is a short web form that helps you to create a template for the tracking data you collect and post-back from/to the supply platforms, including tracking token (clickID), data collection tokens (SubIDs) and postback URL. You only need to set up the template once and then it can used for all future media buys from that platform.

Working Interface
Mobit is built around four main screens, each of which is designed to allow you to accomplish a specific task quickly and easily.

The Home screen (see Figure 2 ) presents a straightforward dashboard with a chart at the top showing trend-lines for both clicks and revenue. The chart defaults to showing the last seven days. Beneath the chart is presented a list of both your best and worst performing media-buys over the last 24 hours. It’s a

Figure 2: Mobit’s dashboards are clear and easy to read. Data can be presented graphically allowing trends to be easily recognized and acted upon.

simple layout but it makes it the work of a few seconds to check in and see if any buys need urgent attention or if all is well.

The other three primary screens of the interface are Campaigns, Reports and Line Items, each of which we will cover in more detail later in this review. For now, it is enough to say that throughout the application Mobit offers a clean and uncluttered interface that is simple to navigate and that makes drilling down into data very easy. It is responsive too – something that is an important consideration when using on-demand software.

Campaigns
The Campaigns screen is where you set up new campaigns and edit existing ones. Mobit provides solid integration with Matomy’s network so if you wish to bring in new campaigns it is as simple as typing in the campaign ID and everything gets set for you automatically. But you can also set up campaigns from any other CPA networks with just  a little more work, and Mobit will provide seamless tracking and reporting on those campaigns alongside those from Matomy.

Line Items
Line items allow you to provide post click rules to your media buys. You are currently able to split your traffic using simple A/B testing logic which means that multiple campaigns can be tested at once with a single media buy.

Reports
Reporting is the heart and soul of any tracking and optimization tool and Mobit doesn’t disappoint. The Reports center presents a clean interface (see Figure 3), with drop-down lists of your network partners, advertisers, campaigns, supply platforms and line items by which you can filter your report data. Reports can be grouped and can include any data collected from any of your media buys, campaigns and mobile specific criteria.

Mobile performance marketing is sometimes intimidating for newcomers because it generates so many different data points: device, OS, geographic and network information, and click and conversion data that is then used to calculate KPIs such as EPC, CVR and profit and loss. It is easy for novices in mobile marketing to be overwhelmed unless they have clear performance insights presented in an easily digestible form. This is where Mobit shines.

Figure 3: Reporting and analytics is a strong-suit for Mobit. In addition to detailed, near-realtimereporting on each campaign, “Mobit Insights” work in the background to intelligently identify both the most profitable and least profitable segments of your media buys.

So long as campaigns and supply platforms are set up properly – and Mobit makes those processes simpler than any other mobile optimization platform than we have yet seen – the reporting is intuitive and fast.

Mobit Insights
Mobit Insights is one of the features of Mobit of which Matomy is most proud. Essentially it is a data analytics tool that constantly runs in the background while your campaigns are being tracked through Mobit. When you see the Insights button appear (a star-shaped logo in a circle) you have instant access to a report that tells you exactly which  combinations of traffic characteristics are giving you your most profitable conversions, and also which combinations are least profitable.

Imagine you have a campaign that has been launched successfully and now you want to scale it up. What kind of media should you buying? Does it make a difference whether the traffic is coming from iPhones or Android phones? Or from Samsung handsets or those made by HTC? Or from which carrier?

These are the kinds of questions that simply don’t apply to online performance marketing, where day-parting and some demographic targeting may be all that is needed in terms of optimization. But mobile is different – carrier, device model, operating system, WiFi or 3G – all these different criteria may have a real and significant effect on conversion rates. The problem is that with so many different data points, analyzing all the possible different combinations can take days of work.

That’s the problem that Mobit Insights aims to solve, and in the short time that we had to work with the system, it seems to work extremely well. Within a few minutes it is easy to look at a campaign, identify what kinds of traffic from which sources aren’t working and then either stop them completely or redirect them to another landing page. That alone can save an enormous amount of wasted media buy. But Mobit Insights also instantly identifies the precise type of traffic that is converting most profitably, meaning that scaling up on successful media buys becomes much easier too. In combination, it means that one can very quickly stop buying traffic that doesn’t convert well, and buy a lot more traffic that does convert – campaign optimization doesn’t get much simpler than this.

Mobit Insights was developed with input from Matomy’s own mobile media buying team and it shows. It goes well beyond the standard reports available in the competing mobile optimization tools we have looked at – in our opinion it is a game-changer.

Conclusion
Mobile is the future of online marketing. It is proving to be effective in the form of individual campaigns or as part of an integrated multi-channel, multi-platform efforts. Andit only going to become more important. For any publisher, advertiser or agency seeking to succeed with mobile performance marketing, having a deep and wide understanding of mobile media buying is absolutely essential.

In our view Mobit addresses this need admirably. It is able to report on campaigns in near-realtime, it is easy to add new campaigns and to edit existing ones, it aggregatesall the available data (including carrier, device OS and particular device model, for example) into one place and can then show which media buys are least profitable and which are most profitable – the list of functions is long. And the good news is that it all works well. The Mobit on-demand platform is responsive, cost-effective and provides good user support. It makes for a simple to use but powerful platform for managing mobile campaigns.

In an industry like performance marketing, where there are literally hundreds of cookie-cutter CPA networks, it is great to see a network investing in technology in order to stand out from the crowd and to take a leading role in the development of new marketing strategies for affiliates. Matomy deserves a lot of credit for launching Mobit – we think it is excellent. Highly recommended.