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About the Episode
Want to know how you can drive more mobile ad revenue? Well today’s guests are from Mopub and they share why having competition for your ad space is crucial to earning more ad revenue. Also, listen to the case study of how one app drove 3 times more revenue just by showing their ad in a different spot in the game.
John Egan is Head of Channel Partnership Sales at MoPub at Twitter.
Alice Pang is the Developer Advocate at MoPub at Twitter.
Show Notes
Driving More Mobile Ad Revenue
Our guests’ advice is to use the banner ad approach. This is a better approach because it does not refresh every time the user navigates to a new page. The banner approach refreshes at a predefined cadence such as every 60 seconds. It adds to the overall user experience because it is not distracting and gives the advertiser more ad time that could imprint on the mind of the user. This approach also makes space available to multiple advertisers and they all get equal time of 60 seconds view time. Further, the banner approach also enables the app to accept more ads because advertisers are not competing for space in the app.
Why having competition for your ad space is crucial to earning more ad revenue
The concept of competition for ad space is best explained by an analogy. In eBay, for example, an item with several people bidding on it will naturally drive bids up and chances are, the end sale price is much higher than the initial price. This is the law of demand and supply. What John has done is to create the platform via this tool, Network Mediation Toolset, which makes it easier for publishers to meet and look at the data real time on how much the ad space is actually wanted by everyone. Using the same philosophy of eBay, then bidders can see the competition for desired ad spaces in certain online apps. If there is more competition, the bids will go higher as there is only so much ad space available. Thus competition among publishers isalways good. There must also be several networks so publishers can see the desirability of one against the other.
Driving 3 Times More Revenue by Showing Ads in Different Spots in the Game
Publishers in the gaming environment usually have full screen ads. The idea is to find the moment in the game which is the optimal pause point in the action. This is the best time to put an ad. If you miss this and use the wrong trigger, it can actually be counterproductive. A case in point was a study of an app where traffic is identical but an ad was placed after “Game Over” and another on the “Replay” button. The “Game Over” as most of us who had ever tried playing a game app know, is that specific pause in the game where we try to regroup – it is a real pause in the game. The “Replay” button is also what we click on when we want to go back to the game now. This is a really bad time for an ad to show up. As data proved, the ad that appeared after “Game Over” had 3x the revenue compared to the ad after the “Replay” button. The takeaway from this case study is to anticipate the user’s intent and put ads where the user can be more receptive to them. Do not add to the user’s frustration; instead respect the user’s experience.
What advice would you give to anyone looking to monetize an app through ads?
Do not add to the user’s frustration, instead, respect the user’s experience.
Show Mentions
– Fav app:
- Sunrise: (iTunes | Google Play)
- Sky Force: (iTunes | Google Play)
– App: MyFitnessPal