Promotion tool

MGID native ads

MGID is a native advertising network. Publishers who run CPA offers use it often, because the ad unit is a teaser: a title and an image in a recommendation widget on content sites. The click is inexpensive to set up and easy to point at a tracking link. That habit does not make MGID a special class of traffic, and it does not relax the offer. A network that media buyers know well can still send a click the advertiser will not pay for.

Maxlead does not own MGID. MGID is a separate company. Maxlead is a CPA performance network that has operated since 2015. You buy the visit on MGID. You are paid on Maxlead when the action on the offer is approved. Approved earnings are paid every week. Clicks, pending leads, and rejected leads are not paid as if they were approved. If you remember only one rule from the fact that “CPA publishers use MGID,” remember this one: the offer still has to allow the source, and the country still has to match.

What you are putting in the widget

A teaser is small. The title is the argument. The image is the reason someone looks at the title. There is no paragraph under it in which to explain exclusions, countries, or what the form will ask. The page after the click has to carry that weight. Read the advertiser page with the preview control on the offer, then write a title that describes that page. Do not send the MGID click to the preview address itself. The preview is for your eyes. The visitor gets the tracking link.

Native inventory is not one quality. Widgets sit on different sites, in different positions, in front of different readers. Some placements will produce curious clicks and no completed action. You will not see that split if every teaser and every placement shares one sub ID. Where the platform lets you tell campaigns, teasers, or widgets apart, pass that distinction into s1 through s8. Maxlead stores those values on the click and shows them on the performance report and the conversion report. That is how a small test stays small instead of becoming a blur.

MGID’s price for a click, a widget bid, or a daily budget lives in your MGID account. This guide does not invent those numbers, and it does not invent a click-through rate that says a teaser is “healthy.” Healthy, for a CPA campaign, means approved conversions on the offer you are allowed to run. The ad account can only tell you that people clicked and that you were charged under your agreement with MGID.

Match the offer before the test

Open the offer on Maxlead. Check three lines before you create a teaser. The source must allow native, or must allow MGID by name if the offer lists sources one by one. The country you will target must be on the offer. The action that pays must be an action the teaser honestly points at. If any of the three fail, do not run the campaign. CPA publishers get rejected on MGID traffic for the same reason they get rejected anywhere else: the click broke a rule that was written on the offer.

A public offer can be used after your publisher account is approved. An offer that requires approval is not approved because you can see its name. Wait for the request to be accepted, then copy the tracking link. The link includes your publisher id. Add s1 through s8 on the offer page before you copy. A link you retyped, a link another publisher sent you, or a link that drops the publisher id may not count.

Read the cap for today. A small test can still hit a cap if the offer is tight or if other traffic of yours is already on it. When the cap is full, stop. More teasers will not create more payable conversions. If the offer pauses, stop the same day. International offers are common. Each one still has its own country list. A teaser aimed at a country that is not listed does not get saved on that offer.

Incentive traffic is a separate ban on many CPA offers. A native teaser is not automatically incentive, but a headline that promises a reward for completing someone else’s offer, or a placement that forces the click, can fall into a forbidden bucket. If you cannot tell, ask the account manager on the Maxlead account. Do not discover the rule from a stack of rejected conversions.

Keep the first campaign small

Small means one offer, one country, and a short list of teasers you can name. It does not mean a secret dollar amount. Put a limit in the ad account that you can afford to lose while you learn, and stop when the Maxlead report can be read. Do not open five verticals because MGID will accept the campaigns. You cannot compare EPC across offers if you also changed the country, the promise, and the page in the same afternoon.

Label the link. A useful pattern is s1 for mgid, s2 for the campaign, s3 for the teaser title, and s4 for the image. If you can pass a widget or placement identifier, put it in s5. Those eight slots exist so a media buyer does not have to hide every detail in one string. Use them. Keep the values short and obvious. Do not store private data in them.

Point every teaser at that tracking link, with its own s3 or s4. After the click, the visitor is sent to the advertiser and the click id is what a later conversion uses. Save a postback if you want your tracker to hear the result. Global covers the account unless one offer has its own URL. The postback fires on approved and on rejected. It does not fire while the conversion is pending. The status token is the word you must read. Approved can be credited in your tracker. Rejected must not. Neither status is the bank transfer. The weekly payout pays the approved earnings only.

EPC on the dashboard is earnings per click, and earnings are approved payout. CVR is approved conversions divided by clicks. Both numbers, for the test, should be read on the sub IDs of this MGID campaign, not on the whole account mixed with email or with another native source. If s1 is the same word for every source, you gave up that reading before the first click.

A worked example

A publisher runs CPA offers and has used MGID before on other networks. They open Maxlead, get the account approved, and request one nutra offer that accepts their country and lists native as allowed. They do not request ten offers “to see what sticks.” The manager can talk about the one campaign. The offer page shows the payout, the countries, the cap for today, and the recent CVR of the offer itself. That offer-level CVR is not their EPC. It is context. Their result will be their own clicks and their own approved conversions.

They preview the advertiser page. It is a product page in the language of the country they will target. They write two teasers that describe that product, not a fake news scandal and not a prize. Teaser one uses s1 mgid, s2 country-nutra-test, s3 title-morning, s4 image-bottle. Teaser two keeps s1 and s2 and changes s3 to title-routine and s4 to image-kitchen. Both URLs are the tracking link. Neither URL is the preview.

They start the campaign and leave it alone long enough to gather clicks they can sort. MGID shows spend and clicks. Maxlead shows, on the performance report, which s3 has approved conversions. title-morning has approved conversions. title-routine has clicks and none. They pause title-routine. They do not increase the campaign because the widget spent its budget quickly. They look at EPC for s3 title-morning: approved earnings on those clicks. If that EPC, set against the cost they see in MGID, is not something they want to keep buying, they pause the campaign even though a teaser “got leads” that are still pending. Pending is not earnings.

A day later one approved conversion is rejected. The postback status says rejected, and the weekly payout will not include it. They do not argue with the ad platform about that rejection. The ad platform did not buy the lead. If they disagree with a rejection, they take it to the account manager with the click id, not to a widget bid. They also notice s5, where they passed a widget label, shows one widget with clicks and no approvals. They cut that widget if the platform lets them, or they stop sending it by changing the campaign. The label only helps if they act on it.

They do not add a second country the same day. They do not point the winning teaser at a different offer to “use the traffic.” A new offer is a new link, a new s2, and a new check of the source rules. The winning title on one advertiser page can be a lie on another page.

Approved conversions are the only score

CPA publishers sometimes watch the ad network’s conversion counter, especially when a pixel was pasted from an old checklist. That counter is not the Maxlead balance. If you want a number in a tracker, take it from the postback and honor the status. If you want the number that will be paid, open the conversion report and the payout page. Activity can show the click id, the country, the device, and the sub IDs, and it can show which clicks have converted. Use it to reconcile. Do not use it to invent a payout the offer did not approve.

Pause losers inside the small test first. A teaser with clicks and no approved conversions, next to a teaser that has approvals on the same offer and country, is a loser. A teaser with a handful of clicks is unfinished. Do not scale the campaign to “force a conversion.” Scale only after approved conversions exist on the sub ID, the offer still allows native, the country is still correct, and the cap is not full. Scaling a forbidden source does not average out into an approval.

Caps, countries, and sloppy geos

Set MGID’s country to the offer’s country. If the offer accepts several, you may test one of them first so the report is readable. Adding every accepted country on day one hides a bad geo inside a good one unless each country has its own sub ID. s2 or s6 can carry the country even though Maxlead also stores the visitor’s country on the click. Your label is still useful when you export and when you tell the manager which campaign you mean.

A click from outside the allowed countries is not saved on the offer. It can still cost money on MGID if your targeting was wider than the offer. That gap is a setup error, not a tracking failure. Tighten the geo and confirm the link. Device can matter the same way: a page that is painful on a phone will show up as clicks with a poor CVR. You do not need a guessed percentage to see “no approved conversions.” You need the report.

The weekly payout will not reimburse the clicks you bought while the geo was wrong. It pays approved earnings. Plan from that balance. If it sits below whatever payout minimum the desk shows on your account, it stays until it qualifies. Do not guess the minimum here. Read it on the payout page.

Mistakes CPA publishers still make on MGID

The common mistake is trust by reputation. “Everyone runs CPA here” is not an approval. The next mistake is a large campaign on day one, with ten teasers and no sub IDs, then a complaint that tracking is unclear. The next is the preview URL in the teaser. The next is a country the offer does not list. The next is counting a pending lead as EPC. The next is ignoring a rejected status in the postback. The next is leaving a capped offer live because the widget still has budget. The next is copying a Taboola or Outbrain winner into MGID with the old s1, so three native sources become one row. MGID gets its own sub ID even when the title text is reused. The last is asking the ad platform to pay the CPA. It cannot. Maxlead pays the approved conversion. MGID sells the click.

Where to take the link

Use MGID as a native source only when the offer allows it, only in a country the offer accepts, and only through a Maxlead tracking link that carries your publisher id and a fresh set of sub IDs. Keep the first campaign small. Pause teasers that do not produce approved conversions. Ignore any revenue number that did not come from an approved status. When you are ready to copy the link from your account, start at the Maxlead homepage.