Newbie to mobile - carrier question

[dsiomtw]

Ok so I'm starting to get up to speed on mobile traffic after being away the last year or so. Quick question that is probably dumb but I just ain't getting it. Why is the carrier a big deal? People talk about it as being an important variable, and my early testing is showing that might be the case, but I don't get it.

I get that handsets are huge as different handsets are used by different demos, and they all displays ads a little different, but how is carrier that big of a deal? Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, wtf does it matter who the carrier is??

 

[eVandals]

I assume you are referring to offers that have to do with a pin submit or premium sms of some kind? In that case, there is usually a noticeable difference in "quality" between carriers to advertisers. Verizon had a somewhat antiquated refund policy for these sort of offers, and were valued with a higher acquisition cost vs. a carrier like sprint or cricket for example. That all may change though as Verizon is looking to reform that policy and bring the hammer down on a lot of advertisers who have high refund rates.

Regardless of the offer, you might as well segment the carrier as it's very possible one will outperform another. Your att traffic may be profitable or unprofitable for a specific advertiser, yet sprint/verizon/tmobile/etc does profit and vice versa. Specific handsets are also prone to convert higher than others, so capturing that information and optimizing is a good idea. Neverblue has an excellent tracking system to expose these details(one of the only networks to offer such in detail reporting for mobile), but it's not that difficult to track this information yourself.

 

[dsiomtw]

Right on, thanks for the reply. I guess when people talk about the carrier being another important variable to test, they are probably talking mostly about behind the scenes stuff that might lead to the advertiser to more or less scrubbing, more or less likely to bump your payout, etc. On the surface, when it comes to consumers, I just can't see where there is much of a difference between a Verizon subscriber vs. a Sprint subscriber etc.

Handsets are obviously huge. Teens are more likely to use certain phones, housewives are more likely to use certain phones vs businessmen and vice versa, young urban fellas are more likely to use certain phones, etc.

 

[eVandals]

You can compare the user's carrier to their demographic as well. There may not be a huge difference between the avg att or verizon customer in terms of affluence, but the difference between an att/verizon and cricket customer could be big because cricket has lower price points in their plans. Lower price tier carriers are going to have more low income customers.