What is Display Rate and how does it affect the income of your application?

Rewarded Video or watching video ads for a fee have become a full-fledged part of the monetization strategy for mobile applications. No one doubts the effectiveness of this advertising format - Soomla reports that rewarded videos increase revenue by 20-40%, and Facebook announced the connection of Rewarded Video to the Facebook Audience Network. However, working with Rewarded Video is not always as easy as it sounds.


When using Rewarded Video in an application, you need to pay attention to Display Rate - this is a metric that displays the ratio of displayed ads to loaded ones. Display Rate values ​​differ for each of the ad formats: about 90% for small banners and 60-70% for Static Interstitial (“intermediate” full-screen banners), according toAppodeal .

In the case of Rewarded Video and Video Interstitial (full-screen videos between application screens), sad statistics appear in the statistics - 10-20%, or even 1-5%. This means that out of 1000 downloaded videos, only 100 were shown. This situation does not benefit anyone: neither the advertising network that provided the advertisement, nor the developer, since the advertisement remains unworked and unpaid. In other words, you will not get income from it.

Low Display Rate and, as a result, revenue loss is the result of an ill-conceived download of video ads. The golden rule of working with Rewarded Video: do not upload the video if you know that you cannot yet show it, but in many cases you can find out in advance.

Many developers download videos immediately when starting a new application session, along with other formats. For example, if the auto-cache option is enabled, the video is loaded at startup, along with banners and full-screen advertising, and is waiting in the wings. This process is an extra load on ad network servers. Networks receive unfinished advertising and because of this, they cannot evaluate the real potential of the application. The application loads ads much more than it can show - of course, this leads to poor Display Rate and reduces the developer’s income.

Consider the first example where the video loads too early. Suppose, after the fifth level in your game, the user is prompted to open a chest with a reward. In order to receive this reward immediately after the fifth level, the player can watch Rewarded Video. If the user does not want to watch the video, then he will be able to open this same chest, say, only after two hours. Most likely, the user will want to watch the video - then the downloaded (prepared in advance) video will really come in handy.
However, to reach the fifth level, the user may need several game sessions - for example, ten. All ten times that the user enters the application, but does not reach the fifth level, video ads are reloaded due to automatic caching and go into oblivion unshown.



Now let's look at a more elaborate scheme of working with Rewarded Video in the same application. Let's say that we divide users into two groups: those who are most likely to watch the video, and those who have not yet reached the time of the show.
In the game discussed above, you should not preload a video for a user who is still playing at the third level. This player can launch the application several more times before reaching the fifth level with Rewarded Video and the proposed reward. As soon as the user approaches the event of presenting the chest - for example, to the fourth level - you can prepare a video for display. The probability that it will be viewed is much higher. In this case, we turn off the auto cache for Rewarded Video, focus on the course of the game and switch to manual caching for Rewarded Video. We postpone the moment of loading (preparing) the video for the fourth level event. Thus, the video is downloaded in advance, but not too early.
It turns out that the best, albeit the most obvious way to avoid trouble is to work with the audience and analyze its behavior in the application.



Of course, the gameplay may not imply a clear plan for the distribution of chests, and the chests themselves may not be in the game. For example, for Rewarded Video you can get in-game currency. In this case, you should focus on the application statistics and track when users go to the game store. Perhaps, according to statistics, it will be seen that in the first 3-5 minutes, players try different heroes or solve simple puzzles. In these first minutes of the game, the in-game store may not be of interest to them. According to statistics, you can find that no one opens Rewarded Video earlier than after 4 minutes - then it makes no sense to prepare a video from the very beginning, but you should start loading it 3 minutes after the start of the game.

We looked at some common examples of dealing with low Display Rate due to the thoughtful download of Rewarded Video. Of course, there are many possible strategies, depending on the genre and audience of the application. Study your users, look at the application through their eyes, and everything will be fine.



In addition, there are many ways to increase Display Rate by encouraging players to watch videos for a fee. Pop-up notifications will help in this: they will inform you of a running out currency, the end of the level, the need to update the hero, and so on. Notifications should be as transparent as possible - the user wants to clearly understand what reward he will receive for viewing, and why it will be useful to him.

Despite these nuances, Rewarded Video is a clear trend in advertising monetization, and it is only gaining momentum. Users are loyal to watching videos for a fee - such advertising annoys them much less, so experiment and analyze the results of
working with this format.

Read how to make users watch your ads in our previous post..