RUNative Review: Newcomer Ad Network to Increase Your Revenue

RUNative was acquired by TrafficStars. However, you can still buy traffic on RUNative, which is delivered by TrafficStars.

Introduction to RUNative

Push and native ad formats have become increasingly popular among affiliates in recent years.

The reason?

They’re an extremely effective way to funnel high quality, converting traffic to your offers.

In this RUNative review, we’re going to look at one of the top programmatic push and native ad networks.

In today’s rapidly changing social and political landscape, affiliates are rightly looking for an ad platform they can trust and that gets them real-world results.

Why RUNative?

RUNative is a team of online marketers with years of experience in tech and affiliate marketing.

They built the network from the ground up, using an in-house team, and now have offices in Barcelona, Montreal, and Limassol.

Unlike competitor native ad networks, RUNative is focused on high-quality traffic and offers which benefit both the advertisers and publishers.

This makes them an ideal ad network for affiliate marketers, who are looking to find rich and untapped traffic sources and sympathetic publishers for their offers.

Here are just a few of the reasons why you might wanna join RUNative:

• Fully self-serve platform: Advertisers retain full control over their campaigns and where they run their ads – right down to the granular level;
• Native and Push ad formats: Choose from RON or Premium ad spots and high performing Push Notification placements;
• Standard Banners format: This ad format is available for quick converting publishers in popular niches such as Gaming, Dating, and Sweeps.
• Easy deposits and fast payouts: Affiliates can get started with a deposit of just $100 – and publishers are rewarded with weekly payouts; and
• Full account manager support: You’ll be assigned your own account manager, to offer you support and expertise, optimize your campaigns, and increase performance on the network.

Plus, the platform has advanced algorithms that match the type of offer you are running to the appropriate publisher.

This gives affiliates full control over where they choose to place their ads and provides access to publishers who are best suited to their campaigns.

New advertisers or those looking to find new opportunities can click the Marketplace tab from the Advertiser drop-down menu.

This gives you a neat overview of premium ad spots on top-performing domains, for both native, push and standard banner ad formats, along with a daily impression count.

RUNative’s Ad Formats

Native Ads

Native ads are designed to seamlessly fit the content of any website which makes them a highly converting and fully compliant ad format.

Their native widgets are fully customizable and responsive, consisting of an image, brand name and headline. The CPMV (cost per 1000 views) algorithm means that advertisers only pay for creatives that users actually see and publishers get paid for each and every thumbnail that is viewed.

Push Notifications

Their second most popular ad format is Push Notifications, which are sent to all devices, including desktop, mobile, and tablet, to users who have subscribed to a publisher’s website.

This format consists of two images, a brand name, and a headline.

Standard Banners

The Standard Banners are matching these proven ad formats to their premium inventory of quick converting publishers for Gaming, Dating, and Sweeps.

Standard Banners are provided with 100% fill rate and worldwide coverage for all popular formats (250×150, 300×250, 300×100, 315×300, 728×90, 900×250).

You can even click through to the website, to see if it’s a good match for your campaigns.

You can then click to buy the ad slot you want your campaign on, and the platform will automatically populate the Spot ID list in the audience tab for the selected publisher, or, you can enter the ID manually using the Spot ID next to the publisher domain.

In-Page Push Notifications

On RUNative, you can now choose between classic Push Notifications and In-Page Push Messages.

Unlike Push Notifications, In-Page Push messages do not depend on a Browser and they are available on all Operating Systems.

They also don’t require a user subscription to show the ad, which allows them to reach a broader audience and get higher conversion rates.

The benefits of their In-Page Push Notifications include:

• A powerful combination of benefits of a Native-like ad and the exposure of a Push Notification;
• Availability on all Operating Systems;
• Easy and fast set up;
• Available on the CPC pricing model;
• Doesn’t require a user subscription;
• High CTR rates.

Video Ads

Explore this unique advertising channel that instantly delivers your brand’s message across any device and reach only the highest conversion rates!

They offer two different options: Video Pre-Roll and Video IM slider. Both of these ad formats have the same technical recommendations and compliance guidelines.

Video IM Slider

Video IM Slider appears as an instant message dialogue box, containing a 30 seconds video ad.

Video Pre-Roll

This promotional video ad can play up to 30 seconds prior to the start of the video, on both mobile & desktop. It includes a clickable link and a call to action, to ensure the highest conversion rate.

Video Pre-Roll also has a Follow-up Banner which includes a brand name and a product logo.

Multi-Format Ad Spots for Publishers

As for publishers, they have a great feature that combines the proven potential of Banner demand with the high revenues of Native campaigns, the Banner-Native Multi Formats.

This feature allows their Publishers to set up one placement that serves both, Native and also Banner ad formats.

It’s simple! Create one ad spot and benefit from the potential of both, highly demanded ad formats.

And that’s not all!

Thanks to an algorithm that analyzes the inventory and picks only the offers with the highest CPMs, your ad spots are constantly gaining higher revenues. Easy, fast, and with guaranteed success!

If you’re a publisher, get in touch with an Account Manager, who is always ready to help, and try their Multi-Format Ad Spots to reach unmatched revenues.

All in all, You’ll find there are some neat features that other native ad networks don’t have, such as the ability to upload unlimited creatives to your campaigns and select a frequency cap for each one.

You can also adjust bids for individual ads at the ad spot level, giving advertisers full transparency and control over their ad spend.

But more on this later!

For now, let’s look at how to get up and running with RUNative and create a successful campaign in record time.

How to Create a Successful Campaign on RUNative

First, you wanna sign up on RUNative.

This process takes just a few minutes, and once you receive the activation email, you’ll be good to go!

After this, make sure to fill out all your profile details and fund your account using the options provided.

At the time of writing, you can choose from the following payment options:

• PayPal
• American Express
• Discover Network
• Paxum
• Visa
• Mastercard

It would be good to see some additional payment options offered in the future, but most people should be able to deposit funds with the ones provided.

The first thing you’ll see once you’ve completed the setup is the dashboard.

This gives you a real-time overview of your daily stats and campaign performance at a glance.

It’s also complete with a news feed, giving you an insight into the latest developments and publishers.

It’s worth noting here that if you ever get stuck you can select the support link from the drop-down menu under your name in the top left corner, or click the chat icon to get support in real-time.

This is a huge time saver for affiliates who need a fast response.

Tracking

The other tab you need to be aware of before going on to create your campaign is the Tracking and API tab.

There’s a bunch of parameters you can use with your landing page URLs and tracking software, which I have listed below:

• {click_id} Randomly generated unique click id used for s2s tracking
• {campaign} Campaign Name
• {campaign_id} Campaign ID
• {creative_id} Creative ID
• {device_type} Device type
• {device_type_id} Device type ID
• {os} Operating System
• {os_id} Operating System ID
• {browser} Browser
• {browser_id} Browser ID
• {referrer} Referrer
• {site_id} Site ID
• {category} Categories detected
• {category_id} Category ID
• {carrier} Сarrier
• {carrier_id} Carrier ID
• {keywords} Keywords collected
• {geo} 2-char country code
• {lang} 2-char language code
• {format_id} Creative format ID
• {pricing_model} CPM, CPC, etc
• {cost} CPM price, CPC price, etc…
• {ip} User’s IP address
• {site_host} Site URL
• {ecpc} ECPC
• {adspot_id} Ad spot ID
• {adspot_name} Ad spot name

The platform also supports S2S tracking for postback URLs and offers a retargeting tracking pixel for advertising who wish to retarget users who have previously engaged with their campaigns.

If you need any help with this, you can visit the tutorial or contact your account manager.

RUNative will work with all popular trackers, but one thing I would like to see is a tool for setting up your postback URL on the platform itself, as this feature seems to be lacking.

Additionally, make sure to include the click ID {click_id} in your S2S tracking URL, as this value is dynamically replaced by the platform, allowing you to see which click resulted in a conversion.

Conversion tracking enables you to track sales and identify high performing traffic sources and creatives.

Create a Campaign

Now that you’ve got a clear understanding of how everything works, it’s time to set up your first campaign.

This is where all the magic happens!

Go ahead and click on the +CREATE A CAMPAIGN tab.

One of the best things about RUNative is how the networks in-depth bidding system allows for precise optimization for every ad spot.

To help you visualize how this works for a live campaign, We’re going to draw from a successful campaign which the Mobidea Team team tested on RUNative recently.

Not only will this take the guesswork out of how to populate each section, but it will also give you a feel for how the platform works in practice.

One other worthy mention is a unique feature of the platform, which enables advertisers to use a retargeting pixel.

This works by including the retargeting pixel found in the tracking section which allows you to drop a cookie on all the users that visited your landing page.

You can then retarget those users in a separate campaign!

The best thing about this is that you can get high-quality traffic for your offer at the lowest price and boost your conversions!
Want even more control over your campaigns?

Check out the fully integrated API designed and built by the RUNative team.

This granular API allows advanced advertisers, not only to pull all the stats in real-time, but also allows you to control your campaigns if your tracker or platform is able to do that!

Simply enter your API authentication details into your compatible tracker to get started.

If you need any help with this step, you’ll find full documentation in the RUNative knowledge base.

Settings

Campaign Name: For this test, we chose a French offer in the gaming vertical and set up the campaign name to reflect the offer and targeting options.

Ad Format: Here you can choose between Native, Banner, Video, Push Notifications and In-Page Push ad formats. For this campaign, we selected the Native ad format.

Countries: Although the offer is targeted at French language speakers, we chose to target a selection of Tier 1 countries, including English and German-speaking ones.

Then, in the second targeting tab, the advertiser selected French as a language.

Tip: What this does is target everyone in those countries with French selected as a language in the browser settings. Most times this is a great way to target ex-pats, who are a high-value target audience.

Regions: This is a NEW feature from RUNative that enables advertisers to create campaigns that are super-specific to their target audience.

Once you have your chosen country selected, search for the appropriate region you wanna target and your campaign will only be shown to people within that region. Neat!

Ad Group: This wasn’t used in the test campaign, but it allows the advertisers to classify campaigns by groups, which could come in handy for reporting purposes.

Targeting

 

 

Language: As this was a French-speaking offer, the French language option was selected.

Devices: This campaign is just for mobile and tablet devices.

Device Brands & Months Since Release Date: RUNative provides the possibility to target specific devices by their Release Date. All you need to do is to indicate the number of months since the release date. Example: If you want to target a concrete device that was released no later than half a year ago, you should enter 6 in the “Months since release date” field.

Model Price: You have the ability to target specific devices by their original Retail Price Range (from the day they were released). For example: The current price of the iPhone X is 500€, but on the date of its release the price was 1000€. If you’d like to target the iPhone X, you should set a model price range that will contain 1000€, like from 800€ to 1200€.

Operating Systems: The offer does not convert on iOS, so both desktop and iOS were excluded.

Browsers: You can specify which browsers to target here. In this offer, we left it at the default option.

Carriers: Select specific mobile carriers from around the world.

IP Ranges: Target specific IP ranges if required.

Scheduling

Dayparting: After running the campaign for a few weeks, the advertiser realized that the late hours of the night were not converting the best, so they were simply excluded.

Start / End date: Specify a time period for the campaign to run.

Tip: You’ll need some time to assess what’s working for your campaign.

If you have a restrictive budget, try to focus on different hours or days rather than all hours.

Alternatively, run the campaign at a reduced budget across all days and hours, and then exclude times that didn’t result in conversions.

Tip: It is recommended to select a start and end date for your campaign so you can see how well it performs.

Later, once you have a successful campaign running, you can extend the running period for a longer duration.

Audience

Traffic selection: Select either RoN (run-of-network)or Prime ad spot inventory. You’ll not be able to edit this option once the campaign has been saved. For this campaign, we chose RoN.

Site ID list: Remember how I said you could see the top-performing ad slots and domains? You can add sites by ID here to run ads on domains that are highly tailored for your campaigns.

Spot ID list: RUNative allows advertisers to Blacklist and Whitelist site ids or spot ids. Here the campaigns are targeting a whitelist suggested by the account manager.

Tip: Check your reporting stats to see which ad spots are working best for your campaigns. You can then edit the Spot ID list to Whitelist the highest performing ad spots.

Currently, it’s not possible to use the Whitelist and Blacklist features concurrently. So, if you want to Whitelist sources that are performing well, while also using a Blacklist on your low performing ad spots, you will need to set up a second campaign to enter your Whitelist IDs.

Alternatively, you can use the manual budgeting feature, so assign more ad spend to high performing ad spots.

Lookalike Audiences for Advertisers

This feature was designed to help their Advertisers to extend their audience reach and increase the revenues. If you are already familiar with the Lookalike audiences from Facebook, you will probably know what this is about.

Their Lookalike audience is a great feature that helps you to extend your audience reach by finding and suggesting you new ad spots with similar quality, number of impressions, clicks, and CTRs.

On the platform, this is done through an algorithm that analyses your campaign’s performance and identifies prospering ad spots. These are then used as an example for finding new spots, with the same performance potential.

You can target these new ad spots through a new identical campaign, which you can create within a matter of a few clicks, or simply by adding Lookalike audiences to your whitelist in an already existing campaign, to improve its performance.

Pricing

Advertising model: Select CPM or CPM. Keep in mind, that with Push ad format, only the CPC pricing model is available.

Tip: Please be aware that due to the nature of the push format, a high bid with a low budget or a wide targeting may result in overspends!

Max CPC: This campaign was set on a dynamic CPM of $0.08, meaning $0.08 is the maximum bid that the advertiser will pay for each spot.

Daily Budget: The daily budget was set at $30, with an even distribution, meaning the budget is being spread out throughout the day.

Tip: Depending on your budget, you may want to start with less than $30 / day. Then after the initial campaign period, you can scale up your ad spend after optimizing your campaign, based on the performance data.

Distribution – ASAP / Even.

Tip: We suggest to use Even distribution unless you specifically want to spend your budget as soon as possible, as you may end up paying for less than favorable times, ad spots, etc.

Ads

Brand name: The ad brand name

Headline: Your headline

Tip: You can include the following macros in your headline or brandname and they will be automatically replaced with data relevant to the user:

• {country}
• {city}
• {state}
• {device_type}
• {platform
• {dayofweek}

For instance the following headline:

“New Internet Sensation Creating New Millionaires in {country} Every {dayofweek}”

May become:

‘New Internet Sensation Creating New Millionaires in France Every Tuesday!’

URL: Enter the landing page URL, including any tracking parameters you added earlier.

RUNative allows advertisers to upload as many creatives as they want, which is great for testing.

What is also great in the creatives section is the option to be able to set a different frequency cap on a creative as well as a priority.

Tip: When dealing with high converting creatives, this allows us to optimize each one of them and almost never having to completely pause any creatives.

This gives the advertiser greater flexibility and control over their campaigns.

Notes

Add any notes you want for the campaign in this section.

Once you’ve got this far, you’ll have successfully created your first campaign on RUNative.

Campaign Listing

Next, select the Campaign Listing from the Advertiser tab.

Here, you’ll be able to see stats from any of your live campaigns, plus any campaigns pending approval.

Campaign Approval

Once you have created your campaign and your account is funded, the Compliance department will check it, and if approved, the campaign will automatically start running and receiving traffic.

One neat feature here is the option to clone a campaign as primary, so you can save time if you want to test the primary ad spots alongside RoN.

You can view stats by:

• Date
• Adspot
• Country
• Creative
• Devices
• OS
• Browser
• Language
• Carrier
• Custom

One of the best features of the RUNative platform is, not only being able to see on which publisher websites advertisers are placing their ads, but also the flexibility for advertisers to set the bid at the ad spot level.

As we can see here, our advertiser has set a different bid for each ad spot the campaign is targeting, and these bids often end up being higher than the initial campaign bid allowing the advertiser to get maximum traffic for high converting spots.

What we can see here is that while the campaign was not profitable on day one, the campaigns quickly reached profitability and reached 49% ROI in just over a month!

It’s also easy to see daily conversions at a glance, which offers good support to your tracking software.

Tip: You can also revise the campaign bid from this section and pause ad spots from this section.

Sort your results by CTR, eCPM, Leads, Costs, and Earnings to see which are performing best.

You can then choose to increase bids for ad spots that have a high CTR and ROI while reducing spend on ad spots which have a high eCPA value and low ROI.

You want to aim for the ads which give you the highest earnings and low eCPA values but which are also attracting a high number of clicks.

The reporting system is highly intuitive to use and makes optimizing your campaigns a piece of cake!

Offers & Verticals

Ad Types: Native, Push and Standard Banners.

Cost Model: CPC and CPM.

Offers Verticals: Gaming, PIN Submit, Sweepstakes, Dating, Betting, Gambling, Crypto Offers, Binary Options, Desktop/Apps.

Funding Your Account

Minimum Deposit: $25 only.

Payment Methods: PayPal, American Express, Discover Network, Paxum, Visa, Mastercard.

Support

Personal Account Manager: Yes.

Support Response Speed: A few minutes to 2 hours* Check.

Support Rating: Excellent.

Contact Methods: Online chat, Email, Help Center.

RUNative Verdict

Pros

• Excellent quality of traffic.
• It offers a fully self-service platform allowing you to run the show while backstage, while data-driven AI does the thinking for you.
• All RUNative innovations are designed and engineered in-house.
• Anti-fraud systems.
• Big volume, especially for a range of GEOs.
• It can retarget users.
• Professional and timely support.
• User-friendly reporting system.
• A lot of options for optimization.
• A lot of options to deposit accounts.

Cons

• No in-built tracking tool maker.
• You need to check the policies on publisher ads and will need to read the guidelines and check “flag” in your campaign settings to make sure that your banners are not limiting your traffic sources.

That’s all!

All that’s left for you to do now is to create your own campaign and start making bank!