A Mobango executive offered up advice to help developers, brands and marketers drive downloads of their applications more effectively.

Mobango’s Pay per Promoted Downloads Platform is a bidding system allowing content owners to bid for premium visibility on Mobango. Since developers only pay when they get downloads, Mobango claims that they are able to generate new users at a fraction of the cost of traditional cost-per-click or cost-per-impression (CPM) campaigns.

Mobile Commerce Daily’s Dan Butcher interviewed Fabio Pezzotti, CEO of Mobango http://www.mobango.com. Here is what he had to say:

What developers, content owners and publishers have used/are using Mobango’s Pay per Promoted Downloads Program?
Hundreds of developers and agencies have already used Mobango, from small developers very innovative and active in mobile marketing such as Inner-active, an Israeli start-up, and modomodo, an Italian mobile start-up focusing on bringing big brands onto mobile geo-targeted marketing and promotion, to big brands and companies such as Nokia, Skype, Carat Interactive, Fanta and Disney.

PPD has generated more than 5 millions downloads of a very innovative, high-quality mobile games developer, with an ROI of more than100 percent.

For another client, cost of acquisition for each customer, that is, each user who has downloaded its application, has gone from $1.20 to $0.80 USD, a 50 percent saving compared to the cost of traditional CPC or CPM mobile advertising campaigns.

What ad units are available as part of that program?
When a developer uploads an app on Mobango, they also upload screenshots, long and short descriptions, etcetera. Mobango makes all this information available in different formats, both on the Web and on mobile, and places it on the “featured apps” area on top of every mobile and Web page.

But having a vast community of mobile fans—more than 5 million—we also push those apps via email, sharing content with sub-group of interest of the community.

What is Mobango’s core demographic?
Our core demographic is people ages18-34, which counts for more than 60 percent of Mobango users. This group is around 70 percent male.

Top countries by usage are the United States, India, Europe, including Britain, Italy, Germany and Spain, as well as Southeast Asia.

On which handsets/carriers is Mobango’s social mobile application store accessible? What types of apps does it sell?
Mobango doesn’t sell apps, it distributes free apps or free versions of premium apps.
We believe that the future belongs to the app providers who will be first able to attract users with free products, then upgradable to premium versions.

We cover all operating systems except Apple, which does not allow downloads from third-party stores: Android, Java, Symbian, RIM, Windows, Flash Lite and almost 3,000 phones.

Everyone, from any carrier, can access Mobango, except when, unfortunately, the carrier blocks access to selected sites.

How has Mobango gotten the word out about its mobile application store and built up its user base?
Mobango has become quite famous as the service to find free resources and content for all mobile phones, not only smartphones.

Members can post user-generated content, which gets optimized for mobile usage.

The community allows sharing apps and content with friends through social networks, creating groups and chatting with others.

This has allowed word-of-mouth to work fantastically well.

Currently more than 60 percent of our traffic comes from users typing Mobango in their browser, or having it bookmarked.

The rest arrives from search engines—more than 1 million pieces of UGC and applications are attracting quite a bit of attention from people—and distribution partners.