pin submit

What is a pin submit affiliate offer?

Pin submit offers are affiliate performance offers, usually targeting mobile devices that enable users to use their phone billing services to pay for subscriptions, products, and services directly on their mobile phones without pulling their credit cards out of their wallets. 

Pin submit offers facilitate a better conversion rate by taking the billing factor out of the conversion funnel. Users simply need to input their phone number, receive an SMS and confirm the code they received and then they are able to purchase mobile content directly from the content provided. The bill for the service will arrive at the end of the month along with the user’s phone bill. 

Pin submit type offers solve any user privacy concerns due to the fact users don’t need to input any credit card or personal details at all to be able to complete a mobile content purchase. 

Table of Contents

Pin Submit: Definition

As mentioned in our intro, pin submit offers are simply offers that take in a phone number and provide the user with a code that they receive by SMS to verify their identity.

Once users verify their identity by text message the conversion will be complete and payable.

Pin submits are also called ‘Value Added Services’ or (VAS offers). Which mostly include games and sweepstakes with carrier billing on a subscription model.

The product companies that provide pin submit offers work with phone carriers to sign contracts that allow them to use the billing infrastructure of the phone carrier to charge the users for different content. 

Pin submit used to be way more popular 10 years ago when ringtones and wallpapers were still a part of our conversation, today with the advent of smarter phones and content you usually wouldn’t think to buy a ringtone or picture, but the thing is, we’re not talking about you! We’re talking about millions of users that are usually located in T2 or T3 countries, that might have access to a lower-end phone, and have a working phone connection. 

How do Pin Submit Offers Work?

Firstly the user arrives at a page that explains or teases the product, then when the user is ready to proceed he is presented with a phone input box, where the user is required to enter a phone number. 

Once the user submits his phone number the user receives a code by SMS which once received needs to be copy-pasted back to the product page. 

This allows a ‘handshake’ between the user and his phone carrier company and allows the phone company to approve a purchase on the user’s behalf, and be able to charge the user for that content at the end of the month. 

All of this flow can happen in a couple of minutes, it’s very easy to convert users with the pin submit funnel in comparison with asking the users to provide you with their payment details online. 

What type of pin submit offers are there?

There are a couple of methods to subscribe users with pin submit offers:

  1. MT Flow: In this flow, users will get a pin code when they submit their phone number on the offer landing page. Once the user receives the pin code he needs to visit the product page and submit the received code. 

  2. Direct Billing: May also be known as wap click offers, this flow provides a more technological approach to processing purchases from users, instead of asking the user to participate, the product page is already integrated with the phone carrier which will automatically detect the user’s phone number and bill the user automatically without any SMS confirmations.

  3. Mobile Originated Flow: similar to the first method but includes more steps as the user would need to visit a landing page to submit the code in addition to submitting the phone number initially. 

Those are the main funnels mobile content developers use to process payments for their products using the help of phone carrier companies.

Flip the Bottle Madness

How to choose the best pin submit offers?

If you’re not sending organic traffic your website receives, which means you probably know deeply how your organic traffic behaves and what works best with it. So if you’re simply buying traffic for an offer from DSPs, ad networks, and publisher platforms, there are some things you should check before launching a campaign to convert pin submit offers. 

The Source of traffic

Consult the ad network’s manager you’re working with to find out what experience the ad network has with converting pin submit affiliate offers and if he has any recommendations on certain GEOs that work best or preferred targeting configurations that would give you a better start. A quick conversation with your account manager usually yields a lot of value which you can instantly apply to your pop and push campaigns. 

Choose an ad network such as EZmob’s self-serve advertiser platform, with a proven record of converting affiliate offers and also a network that provides you with the best pop traffic and for your demand. 

The Ad Formats Used to Convert Pin Submit Offers

The most effective ad format for converting pin submit offers are popunder ads. For the min. bid that you can place to start seeing pop ads inventory and with the huge volume of ad requests that pop ads generate, usually, pop is the way to go with performance offers in general. 

Another great alternative to pop ads is push notification ads and in-page push ads. Both are CPC-based and bids can start with $0.005 which is half of a cent per click. This gives you a lot of room to explore prior to optimizing your campaigns.

Which affiliate networks promote decent pin submit offers?

There are plenty of affiliate networks that will provide you with decent VAS or mobile content offers to run, although, you should choose an affiliate network that specializes only in VAS offers or is a developer or owner of its VAS products. 
A few recommended affiliate programs we see good offers coming in from are: 
1. MyLead
2. Zeydoo
3. Alfa Leads
 
You can also use services such as Aff+ or OfferVault to search for a relevant offer. 
pin submit affiliate offers

What should you check before you run a pin submit offer?

As we mentioned, there’s a lot of variety with mobile content / VAS offers, and finding the right offer that has the potential to succeed with the traffic source you choose to run with. 

Is it a direct offer?

Use the AffiliTest path tracking tool to ascertain how many redirects a user will go through before arriving at the original destination. The fewer redirects a user experiences on his journey the better conversion rate and the payout you should expect. 

Not familiar with AffiliTest? read our review here

How high is the payout for the offer?

Compare your offer’s payout with similar offers in the same country. Don’t simply launch the first offers with a decent payout you see. In many cases an offer with a lower payout might have a better conversion rate, the logic is that since the offer converts so well then a lower payout will still yield the affiliates a huge ROI.

Which carrier is suppported for the VAS offer?

Once you find an offer that is targeting a specific carrier, research that carrier and see how popular it is in that country, if it’s a small carrier that has single digits market share it may be very challenging to scale that campaign. 

What type of devices are supported?

If your offer is targeting only iOS users it should have a higher payout than the same offer targeting android users, there will also be less inventory to buy, and at a higher price for iOS users than android users which usually is a cheaper traffic segment to buy on pop ads.

Does the affiliate program provide any restrictions on the pin submit offer?

Some advertisers will restrict the type of traffic they receive, any contextual elements in it, or verticals of traffic being used, therefore, make sure you thoroughly check the offers restrictions before setting it live and assuming the risk of deductions.

The bottom line

Pin submit affiliate offers are great to run, they’re easy to traffic, they work with both mainstream and adult inventory, and once you find a good source for them you can easily scale your offer by finding more similar pop traffic sources. 

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