Appodeal on the best types of mobile ads and what the future holds for the ad space

hey guys we're here at pocket gamer connects helsinki 2016. i am here with natalie portiere of appodeal what is it that you guys do well as you know from our slogan probably know that we are programmatic at monetization so we basically provide and we offer uh the best kind of monetization to our users um based that are based on ads so uh what our solution provides is only one account unlike other mediators so you only set up one account on that deal and we create accounts on every other network that we are using we only provide one sdk that has already integrated all of the 35 plus ad providers in it so you don't have to actually manually create and manually install every single sdk of every single provider out there so we also um perform a uh

i would just say this so we analyze each of the ad network and we analyze each of the uh at uh ad unit for your specific audience and we make sure that this unit at this ad will make you the most money so we do it before we actually show in the ad so before um so when when the app is launched you already can be sure that you are making as much money as you can possibly make with advertisement okay so one of the tricky things with any kind of ad network service is pairing the right kind of ads with the right game and with the right user who's actually playing it so how do you ensure you get the right kind of for for start the right format right so um of course there are different uh kind of formats which i put you all offers so there are native ads and there are banner ads and interstitials and videos that are rewarded and not rewarded so uh for different kind of games and for different kind of apps uh different kind of formats will work for native ads for example they almost never work with the

game unless this this uh this game has sort of a feat so native kind of ad will work with that app that has feet like facebook or instagram or um pinterest or something like that so it's rarely gaming ad format the most uh used ad format for games are interstitials which are full screen banners regular banners and videos that could be rewarded and non-promoted which are all great formats one have some some better features than the other ones but i feel personally that for me uh the banner the thin banner um is the most annoying one so right okay they also tend to drop users which is fine for some games not that not the user retention drop but uh the banner adds a point for some games but not for all of them so you have to be very careful when using this format okay however this is the good thing is that this is also the lowest

pane uh ad format so if you don't use it you won't make it you won't lose all that much um well you mentioned user retention there that can be a really tricky thing to deal with again not just keep the game keeping the player interested but the fact that when players encounter ads sometimes they can find them off-putting and frustrating and they just kind of go off and can't be dealing with it and they stop playing the game how do you ensure that you keep players and they're not put off by your advertising right yeah advertising can be really annoying as you said and it can it can lower retention rate uh significantly so my suggestion would be is not to use any of the advertisement for uh first period of um first period when you start to play the game so they gave food you know and um to offer advertisement after seventh or fourteenth day so when the person already uh is familiar with the game and everybody knows the game so well that they like it and you know for sure that they're gonna come back uh and a lot of developers with a lot of developers do to a retained user is they

use combination of ads and in-app purchases because as we know only about three one to three percent of all users actually do in-app purchases and the rest they just never purchase or the extra features or extra virtual currency whatever it's offered so it's a good thing to to use the combination and we found we find that if you use the reward videos for these extra features and the person the player uh tries and has the taste of these extra features and extra bonuses extra added things uh they are more likely to actually make this in a purchase later on when they get tired of their watching the videos which is very interesting so we personally we on our side we see that uh with help of the rewarded videos this combination of the reward videos and in a purchase you can actually uh see increase of in-app purchase after some time sounds kind of interesting a lot of people focus on the first maybe few

weeks or even the first few days because they assume the user is going to play it briefly they throw loads of ads at them quickly and then they go but you are kind of recommending a softly softly approach where give them a couple of weeks let them get into the game get them hooked then you start introducing the adverts well yes but this approach will only work if you already have a big audience so if you don't really care about making money fast if you are small indie developers and you want to make money so you can actually invest into a user acquisition it makes sense to start showing the ads right away but if you already have one or two million daily active users you don't you you don't want to drop the users right away because you know that uh the the game is good enough to retain a user so after they have especially this works for complicated games so after the person uh already is familiar with the game they would want to stay and they are less likely to drop out after 14 or 28 days okay and then you can slowly approach with it with advertising

right and if you were speaking to a new developer if i was making a game what would be the kind of one or two bits of advice you would give them if they were trying to integrate ads into their design well first of all uh find out what kind of what kind of ad formats your competitors use so if you have a small game for example that is arcade uh probably not a good idea to use uh arcade meaning that you always have to tap the screen probably not a good idea to use stained banner because you can accidentally miss uh the type in the screen and tap the um the banner i am familiar with this from games it is frustrating it is frustrating and it but it also is not good for advertiser either because they won't pay a lot of money if their ctr is really high so you have to be really careful not to go to the fraud section of the advertiser as well what is a good format to use i would recommend definitely recommend

interstitial it is very very easy format to close and it doesn't get annoying personally to me it never annoys me at all especially if you use it at the end of the level or at the end of the level if if you lost or every two to three minutes so it's not so frequently that you all you do is watching the ad and closing the ads so if you do it if you space it out and if um yeah if you space it out then the user won't won't be annoyed with it the video as i mentioned the reward video is a really good format if you do the combination with the um in-app purchase but the actual video the regular video that you can skip skippable videos we call them uh you can use in place of uh interstitials some a good combination of ads would be also interstitial plus skippable video skippable video pay more and you can skip it so it won't be as annoying as a reward video which you actually have to watch the whole 30 or 45 seconds

uh yeah and uh and video will pay more than interstitial but you don't want to you don't want to show the video of every single ad unit that you're gonna show so i would suggest every five every three to five uh ads you will show the skippable video okay so break it up a little bit bit of breathing room in between okay and what are you guys up to for like the rest of the year i mean the industry moves kind of fast of course and there are always new trends previously it was just single screens and banners and then it moved quickly to video and into interstitials and stuff where do you see it going next what's the next thing on horizon to record well it's definitely mediation there are so many players in the uh in the industry right now there's so many ad ad providers that tech members that people uh the first new developer they just they've lost they don't know what to use so most of people go to either mophob or admob or someone you know who's been in the market for a long time which creates a little um difficult difficulty to monetize their

users because these are great providers we also work with them and we love them but these providers they don't they won't provide you full fill rate and all of your on all of your geographical areas for example and they only have so many ads that they can so there will be always the same ad that's been showing over and over again so you would want to mix it up a little bit you would want to build a waterfall but for that to happen you actually have to go and see how many ad providers out there and who pays the most money and who pays the most money for this kind of audience and this and that so this is a lot of work so i see personally that um next step and that's a big step is the mediation which there are quite a few players on them on the market but who mediate they all are different and i see which is not surprising but from the objective point of view i see that apple deal offers the most comprehensive solution for the mediation nationally excellent well best of luck with that in the future and thanks for talking to us today thank you so much

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