How to increase mobile ad revenue
- Tutorial
The mobile advertising market is very young and dynamic. Technologies that have existed for many years on the web in the mobile market are still actively developing and improving.
Recently, many tools have appeared for publishers and advertisers that allow you to effectively manage many of the targeting parameters of advertising campaigns, which is often the key factor that guarantees the expected result. But for the sites, everything is still very sad.
In May 2014, we began searching for a platform that would allow us to increase advertising revenue in our applications and solve the following problems.
Geography
Problem : Some ad networks specialize in the Russian market, others in the American market, and others in Asia.
Decision: Before you place ads in your application, you need to analyze in which regions the users are located, select the strongest advertising networks for these regions and show ads from networks in the respective regions.
Occupancy
Problem : Many ad networks are not able to provide high fillrate. As a result, some of the impressions are simply lost. And with them, income is reduced.
Solution : Always use multiple ad networks. If one of them cannot find an advertiser for one of the impressions, send a request to the next. And so on, until we get the coveted advertiser. Thus, it is possible to show advertising to each of its users and thereby increase revenue.
Invalid Advertisers
Problem : The ad network is interested in increasing its revenue, and not in increasing the revenue of sites. Thus, the sites are not received by those advertisers who are converted in the best way, but those who have signed a contract with the advertising network.
In one of the popular networks, for example, the following mechanism is used: the higher the installation cost is indicated by the advertiser, the more often his advertisement will be displayed. At the same time, it does not take into account how long the advertising campaign is launched, what quality the banners are, and generally the overall conversion of the advertiser to installations. Often you can watch how the site unscrewed 10 thousand impressions and at the same time did not receive a single cent of payment, because not a single conversion has occurred.
Decision: Regularly upload reports from used advertising networks, with details on advertisers. Those advertisers who have not paid a single cent for 1000 impressions can safely send to the black list.
It is important to remember that what is not converted on one site can very well be converted to another. For example, an advertisement for the “Alarm Clock” application can be perfectly converted from the “Weather” application and not converted at all from a children's game.
Therefore, for each site, you need to compile and update a separate list of “wrong” advertisers.
RTB Exchange
Problem: RTB exchanges are a great way to increase revenue from your applications. Their charm lies in the fact that they have a huge amount of information about each user, and advertisers are willing to pay significantly more for a user about whom something is known.
Unfortunately, there are a number of problems due to which the average developer is very problematic to connect to the exchange:
exchanges prefer to work only with large platforms;
Solution : if you have enough traffic (from 3 million full-screen impressions per day and higher), you can try to go through the integration process with the exchange yourself. If you are a small developer, try to find among your friends those who already work directly with exchanges and agree to use their account.
As one of the quick solutions, you can try working with the RTB exchange MoPub or Smaato. The process of connecting to them looks quite simple and, after proper setup, they can significantly increase the income from your sites.
User Behavior
Problem: Some users click on everything, but never install anything. Others establish everything that you cannot offer them. Still others never click on an ad and always close it as quickly as possible.
Solution : collect statistics for each user. If you see that the user often installs advertised applications, show him the CPI campaign. If he often clicks, but does not install anything - CPC campaign. And if at all it is very passive - CPM / CPV campaigns with pay-per-impression impressions.
Abundance of New Networks
Problem: As soon as the application begins to collect traffic and take noticeable positions in the ratings, a lot of offers from advertising networks immediately begin to come. And each promises better conditions than the previous one. And I would like to try them all and compare with each other, but there are simply physically not enough resources.
Solution : find a reputable source that is engaged in objective comparison and testing of new networks. Sometimes new networks can generate higher revenue through the use of new ad formats.
As everyone does. The
survey of almost a hundred large developers who use advertising to monetize their applications showed that most of them develop mediators for themselves that can solve most of these problems and significantly increase revenue.
The standard scheme is as follows. The developer selects the ad networks with which he wants to work, and then for each country creates a list of networks sorted in order of priority. Then it goes, for example, in MoPub and builds the so-called “waterfall” from the networks for each country and for each application. A waterfall is simply a list of networks sorted by priority, each of which is interrogated sequentially until one of the networks responds.
Next, the task of the traffic manager is to keep this waterfall up to date, block “wrong” advertisers in each network and periodically connect new networks.
Sometimes these dialogs are obtained:
Denis, by the way, sells 140 million impressions per day in his mobile applications.
As we need,
We believe that developers should create unique and exciting applications. And someone else is optimizing advertising. Well, for example, we.
Therefore, from the very beginning of work on Appodeal, we kept in mind two points:
First of all, it must be said that we have already managed to solve all of the above problems:
Recently, many tools have appeared for publishers and advertisers that allow you to effectively manage many of the targeting parameters of advertising campaigns, which is often the key factor that guarantees the expected result. But for the sites, everything is still very sad.
In May 2014, we began searching for a platform that would allow us to increase advertising revenue in our applications and solve the following problems.
Geography
Problem : Some ad networks specialize in the Russian market, others in the American market, and others in Asia.
Decision: Before you place ads in your application, you need to analyze in which regions the users are located, select the strongest advertising networks for these regions and show ads from networks in the respective regions.
Occupancy
Problem : Many ad networks are not able to provide high fillrate. As a result, some of the impressions are simply lost. And with them, income is reduced.
Solution : Always use multiple ad networks. If one of them cannot find an advertiser for one of the impressions, send a request to the next. And so on, until we get the coveted advertiser. Thus, it is possible to show advertising to each of its users and thereby increase revenue.
Invalid Advertisers
Problem : The ad network is interested in increasing its revenue, and not in increasing the revenue of sites. Thus, the sites are not received by those advertisers who are converted in the best way, but those who have signed a contract with the advertising network.
In one of the popular networks, for example, the following mechanism is used: the higher the installation cost is indicated by the advertiser, the more often his advertisement will be displayed. At the same time, it does not take into account how long the advertising campaign is launched, what quality the banners are, and generally the overall conversion of the advertiser to installations. Often you can watch how the site unscrewed 10 thousand impressions and at the same time did not receive a single cent of payment, because not a single conversion has occurred.
Decision: Regularly upload reports from used advertising networks, with details on advertisers. Those advertisers who have not paid a single cent for 1000 impressions can safely send to the black list.
It is important to remember that what is not converted on one site can very well be converted to another. For example, an advertisement for the “Alarm Clock” application can be perfectly converted from the “Weather” application and not converted at all from a children's game.
Therefore, for each site, you need to compile and update a separate list of “wrong” advertisers.
RTB Exchange
Problem: RTB exchanges are a great way to increase revenue from your applications. Their charm lies in the fact that they have a huge amount of information about each user, and advertisers are willing to pay significantly more for a user about whom something is known.
Unfortunately, there are a number of problems due to which the average developer is very problematic to connect to the exchange:
exchanges prefer to work only with large platforms;
- The process of connecting to the RTB exchange takes an average of 2 months. In the process of connecting, you need to call up several different representatives of the exchange several times, tell what kind of applications you have, sign contracts, NDA. In general, not the most pleasant process;
- as a rule, RTB exchange pays money with a delay of 60 days after the calendar month (net 60). That is, in reality, you can wait up to three months to receive the first payment;
- not very stable SDKs and poor framework support. Developing a game on Marmalade? Get ready to write a plugin yourself;
- low occupancy rate. In general, 20-30% of occupancy on the RTB exchange is an excellent result;
- problematic user interfaces.
Solution : if you have enough traffic (from 3 million full-screen impressions per day and higher), you can try to go through the integration process with the exchange yourself. If you are a small developer, try to find among your friends those who already work directly with exchanges and agree to use their account.
As one of the quick solutions, you can try working with the RTB exchange MoPub or Smaato. The process of connecting to them looks quite simple and, after proper setup, they can significantly increase the income from your sites.
User Behavior
Problem: Some users click on everything, but never install anything. Others establish everything that you cannot offer them. Still others never click on an ad and always close it as quickly as possible.
Solution : collect statistics for each user. If you see that the user often installs advertised applications, show him the CPI campaign. If he often clicks, but does not install anything - CPC campaign. And if at all it is very passive - CPM / CPV campaigns with pay-per-impression impressions.
Abundance of New Networks
Problem: As soon as the application begins to collect traffic and take noticeable positions in the ratings, a lot of offers from advertising networks immediately begin to come. And each promises better conditions than the previous one. And I would like to try them all and compare with each other, but there are simply physically not enough resources.
Solution : find a reputable source that is engaged in objective comparison and testing of new networks. Sometimes new networks can generate higher revenue through the use of new ad formats.
As everyone does. The
survey of almost a hundred large developers who use advertising to monetize their applications showed that most of them develop mediators for themselves that can solve most of these problems and significantly increase revenue.
The standard scheme is as follows. The developer selects the ad networks with which he wants to work, and then for each country creates a list of networks sorted in order of priority. Then it goes, for example, in MoPub and builds the so-called “waterfall” from the networks for each country and for each application. A waterfall is simply a list of networks sorted by priority, each of which is interrogated sequentially until one of the networks responds.
Next, the task of the traffic manager is to keep this waterfall up to date, block “wrong” advertisers in each network and periodically connect new networks.
Sometimes these dialogs are obtained:
Denis: this is what Denis and I talked about yesterday
: Denis actually wrote to me from the mopab today
: quote
Denis: Also, the eCPMs for each network are the same across all of your apps. We would recommend that each app, ad unit, and network have accurate eCPMs. Have you had a chance to update these lately?
Denis: why the hell to me this hemorrhoid? for each app, for each ad unit set its eCPM?!?
Pavel Golubev: well, yes, straight to the point
Denis: bullshit
Denis: I understand that this will give an even greater increase in
Denis rhubarb : however, to update all this you need to spend a day
Denis: and if there are appas like you have 200
Denis: then this is a whole department
Denis, by the way, sells 140 million impressions per day in his mobile applications.
As we need,
We believe that developers should create unique and exciting applications. And someone else is optimizing advertising. Well, for example, we.
Therefore, from the very beginning of work on Appodeal, we kept in mind two points:
- The head of the developer should not hurt
- Developer revenue should increase
First of all, it must be said that we have already managed to solve all of the above problems:
- We ourselves will create accounts for you in all networks, prescribe the necessary settings and details for payments.
- No need to integrate each network individually. All in one single SDK.
- Appodeal automatically receives reports from ad networks, analyzes them by country, application, advertiser and dynamically builds a sorted list of ad networks for each ad request based on the expected eCPM. And then the application polls the networks one by one until it receives a response. This not only allows you to always access the network with the highest eCPM, but also solve the problem with low occupancy.
- For each application within each network, an additional waterfall is created from several units with different minimum eCPMs.
- In those networks that allow this, we automatically analyze advertisers and add them to blacklists as necessary.
- You immediately get access to the largest RTB exchanges (Rubicon project, OpenX, Nexage, MoPub, Smaato and others), which allows you to display ads with pay-per-impression impressions.
- We monitor the behavior of our users and can dynamically determine which type of advertising is more suitable for the user - CPI, CPC or CPM.