A New Way to Monetize your Facebook Application using Virtual Points and Offers

Many developers of Facebook applications are all asking the same question: How do I drive more incremental revenue from my app?

Like other app developers, you may have tried traditional CPM or CPC banner ads – but the rates for these are low enough today that you will need a very large number of page views to drive any meaningful sales this way. You may even have tried traditional CPA networks with some limited success. Now comes a new way to integrate offers and drive thousands of dollars from your app every single day!

Offerpal Media has introduced our new “offer platform” which is a complete solution that allows you to make money by using a virtual point system in your application.

Our “Offer platform” is very different from traditional CPA networks for the following reasons:

1. Easy to Integrate: It’s a turn-key solution – you can complete the integration of the iframe into your application in one hour!
2. No Management of Offers: Offers are optimized in real time by the platform so you don’t have to worry about which offers to show where.
3. Offer Optimization: The system automatically detects which offers are most popular with a particular group of users and displays those offers at the top.
4. Unique Offers: The Offerpal platform has access to very unique offers which aren’t available in traditional CPA networks – this includes online surveys, pay-per-listen for online music, pay-per-view for online video, FB installs, and customized shopping all built into the platform. You won’t find these offers anywhere else because of Offerpal’s unique “offer engineering team”.
5. No Customer Service Headaches: Offerpal Media handles all of the customer support for you and even provides user status pages – no traditional CPA networks are willing to do this.

Here are some examples of applications which have used this approach to bring in significant revenue – it doesn’t matter if your daily active user numbers are small or large.

• (fluff)Friends – 250,000 daily active users (http://apps.facebook.com/fluff/offer.php)
• PetDragons – 81,000 daily active users (http://apps.facebook.com/petdragons/offers.php)
• FriendsForSale – 650,000 daily active users (http://apps.facebook.com/friendsforsale/offers/myofferpal)
• Speed Racer! – 4,000 daily active users (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4880534726&ref=s)

The end user fills out any offer and gets the associated number of virtual points; Offerpal Media pays you each time an offer is completed. Using this approach, you can begin to bring in significantly more revenues with a smaller number of impressions than you could from traditional “banner ads” – whether they are CPM or CPC, or even traditional CPA networks.

The steps to do this for your own Facebook application are easy:

1. Give users a point system in your application
2. Integrate an offer platform to let users earn points
3. Let it work for you!
   1. Promote the offers
   2. Optimize the offers automatically
   3. Make sure your users are happy
4. Sit back and collect real money

Here is an example screenshot of how the “offer platform” appears in a Facebook application:

Here are the details:

Step 1: Give users a point system in your application and make them highly desirable.

This is a great way to make your Facebook application sticky. An example is the “munny” points that existing on (fluff)Friends – users can earn “munny” by inviting other users, winning races, and as we show in this guide, by filling out offers.

Another application uses “gold coins” – while another uses “free races” as a points system. One uses “vampire points” – different Facebook applications use different terminology. We think of them all as “virtual currency”, because the points can be used to get free stuff.

It’s important that you have some reason that your users want points. If you have a virtual pet, the point system can be used to buy accessories for your virtual pet.

The more viral the application, the more uses you can find for points in your Facebook application.

Step 2: Integrate an offer platform to let users earn points

Offers can be integrated very easily if you use a platform like the Offerpal Media platform using a simple 5-step process. The process can be completed in one hour! Whenever an end user fills out an offer, they get a certain number of points. Offerpal then pays the Facebook developer for each offer completed. All you need to do is to put an iframe in your application, decide on what kind of virtual currency you are using, and how the currency will be translated to your point system.

You have to be sure that the offer platform has enough offers which will be interesting to your end users – and recognizable brand name offers so that users won’t fret about filling out the offers. You also need to be sure each offer is upfront about what is required – for example if it is a subscription for Netflix, this will require a credit card, whereas filling out a survey will not. The offers should be segmented by country easily – as the application developer you shouldn’t have to look at each individual offer and worry that the wrong person is going to fill out the wrong offer.

Each offer should be completely clear on what is required for the end user to get their points. An example of the Offerpal Media approach once an offer is clicked on is below:

Step 3: Let it work for you!

Integrating an offer platform is not enough – you have to make it work for your application, and this is why certain offer platforms are much better than others.

Unlike traditional CPA networks, an effective “offer platform” can rotate and optimize offers for you, and will include unique offers which are attractive to Facebook users.

1. Promote the offers. Where you put the offers on your application will make a difference. If it only takes one click to get to an offer, it will be better than if end uses have to click several times to get to the offers. At Offerpal Media, we often introduce new offers, including unique offers that aren’t available anywhere else – when this happens you can promote the offers on your home page so that users will fill out both of them.
2. Optimize the offers. Which offers are your Facebook users more likely to fill out? Rather than simply putting up a few offers – you need to be sure there are enough so that each person who goes down the path will find an offer they are interested in completing. Running your Facebook application is enough work by itself – you shouldn’t ALSO have to worry about doing A/B testing and figuring out which offers are more attractive to which users. This is the job of the offer platform and an area which traditional ad networks do not do well.
   The Offerpal platform optimizes in real time, using relevance engineering to show the hottest offers for a particular user group/ demographic at the top of the list of offers. This is important because users may only spend a few seconds look at the offers page and need to see something they might have subscribed or filled out anyways.
3. Make sure your users are happy and supported. If you integrate offers into your system, you have to be sure your users are happy. This means that they need to actually get the points when they fill out offers. Integrating offers into a high traffic application can generate a large number of customer service inquiries. Whoever provides you the offer platform should also provide you with customer support related to offers. At Offerpal Media we provide customer support and handle all incoming support issues related to getting your points. This is a VERY IMPORTANT consideration when choosing an offer platform. Offerpal Media also lets apps integrate a “user status” page so that end users can check on the status of offers they’ve filled out.

These last few touches are important – being sure that end users have an easy way to follow up on their offers, and also making sure each offer is clear on what needs to be done for the end user to earn points. This reduces customer support for you, the application developer, and allows you to move to step 4.

Step 4: Sit back and collect checks

Finally, once the offer platform is integrated, and promoted, the offer platform should automatically optimize offers over time. If your user base is more likely to fill out a particular offer, then that offer should go to the top of the list of offers. Similarly, if an offer isn’t performing but has real estate near the top, then it’s position should be adjusted.

If you choose the right offer platform, you will start to earn money right away, and get up to date reports on how the offers are performing – hourly, daily, weekly reports so you can evaluate trends.

Then just sit back and collect checks!

Many Facebook applications have used this approach successfully with the Offerpal Media offer platform, ranging from some of the top 20 traffic applications to some of the lesser-known applications.

For more information on how to integrate the Offerpal Media platform into your Facebook application, please visit: http://www.offerpalmedia.com/facebook-publishers.php or email sales@myofferpal.com.