MGID Ads – The best way to start learning Native traffic

If you’ve been an affiliate for some time you have probably heard about native ads. It’s easy to get started with PPV traffic or also hear about people running affiliate offers on Facebook, however, there’s a ton of traffic and conversions available if you work with native and you don’t have to sweat it as much in terms of restrictions and guidelines compared to Google or FB.

Today we’re going to talk about MGID because it’s the easiest and fastest way to get started running native ads. MGID has been in the industry since 2008 and you might not know it but it’s highly probable that you’ve seen many of their ads in the past without knowing it was them.

With more than 1 billion impressions per month and offices in U.S.A., Europe, and the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region, MGID has a ton of traffic in key regions including Asia and Latin America, whereas other networks seem to focus on regions like North America or Europe only.

MGID – How do ads look like?

Most of MGID ads are placed in news sites and blogs like this one that can be seen in the right sidebar:

The main difference between a native ad and a regular banner is the way they look as it seems like they are part of the website. For example, this is the most used widget at the end of a post:

As you can see, the ads look like related posts from the same website, especially if it’s a news website so the CTR is higher than regular banners. When viral sites were the rage a few years ago it was easy to get lost in all the weird stories and interesting banners that took you from one article to another.

MGID – Account and payment methods

Signing up with MGID is easy. You just need to go to this link and sign up as an advertiser:

If you sign up through this link and deposit anywhere from $500 to $5,000 you will get a personal account manager and you can ask for an extra 25% bonus to increase your ROI 😉

When you create an advertiser account with MGID you also get access to the publisher’s panel, in case you have a site with traffic and you want to monetize it with their ads.

To fund your account, you get several payment options including CC, PayPal, WMZ, and others. The minimum payment sum is $100 USD although it’s recommended to deposit $500 to really start learning the ropes and also to get a dedicated account manager:

MGID ads – Launching campaigns

Creating campaigns on MGID is also quite easy and straightforward. You just have to fill 1 form with your campaign name, campaign type (here you can also select push notification ads as those were added a year ago) and select a language.

After that, you select the targeting including Geo, Browser, OS, and browser language and your campaign is ready to go:

Later you will be asked to upload your creatives and campaign link and the campaign will go to approval mode. So far, I have seen campaigns on MGID can take a few days to get approved. If you get an account manager it can speed up the process but to be honest campaign approval seems to be somewhat slow in most native ad networks (you can try Voluum’s DSP if you want to reduce that time with some networks).

If you want to have a look at what’s working and which geos are hot, you can check the traffic insights tab that will show you the best performing geos, the lowest competition geos, and also if there are any recent hot opportunities.

In the chart above, you can see how some interesting tier 3 geos with a ton of volumes like Viet Nam, Romania, Thailand, and Malaysia are some of the best performing geos in the network.

The top-performing verticals at MGID are:

• Nutra
• Gaming
• Dating
• Finance

To optimize your campaign, you want to use a tracker and set up the tracking macros to analyze data.

Here’s how I set up my dynamic tokens with Voluum:

This will help you get data like click prices, which ads, widgets, and categories are performing the best and besides that, you can also optimize based on the targeting available like OS, Browser, Geo, etc.

I always recommend you to create separate campaigns for different geos, devices, and OSes as the bids can change drastically from one to another.

For example, for geos, I’ve seen the prices change based on the tiers. You can expect something like this to happen (although it could be different according to your geo and settings):

• Tier 3 geos – CPC from 0.01 to 0.05
• Tier 2 geos – CPC from 0.03 to 0.10
• Tier 1 geos – CPC from 0.05 to 0.2

There are of course a few times where some tier 3 geos are super hot and convert really well, thus driving the CPCs up and the same can happen for a tier 2 geo that is not performing that well and therefore the clicks get cheaper, but you get the idea.

MGID works with a lot of publishers worldwide. You can find some of the biggest websites on the web using MGID ads as they are one of the top networks to work with.

I have found a lot of sites in the streaming, downloads, and dating niche also using MGID so make sure you do your diligence and do some market research before selecting your offers blindly. Most offers running on native ads have mid to high payouts, so you require a decent budget to get started and at least a few thousand dollars to learn the ropes.

It’s important to get to know the audience of a traffic source to understand it better and see why some offers perform while others don’t.

With 850 million visitors per month, MGID has more traffic in Latin America than North America, and it’s got more traffic in the Asia Pacific region and the Middle East than Europe or India.

As for the users, 77% of the traffic comes from smartphones and tablets, while only 23% of the visits come from desktop and laptops. This is the main reason why I tend to focus a lot on mobile traffic as we want our campaigns to scale as much as possible.

Also, 57% of the visitors are men while the other 43% are women. The average age ranges from 18 to 54 years old, with 25-34 being the biggest segment.

I highly recommend using Anstrex Native to get data about native ads as it’s the most affordable spy tool out there. That should help you get started with a few winning offers and a mix of landers/banners that performs better than average. Generally, we try to start our campaigns with at least 6-10 creatives to gather data and at least 2-3 landing pages.

Remember to sign up through this link and deposit anywhere from $500 to $5,000 and you’ll get a dedicated account manager plus a 25% bonus in your first deposit!