How to maximize ad revenue in Tier 4 geos (+Japan bonus) by Felix Braberg

How to optimize a mediation setup in Japan? So, Japan population of 124 million people. And this is probably one of the highest LTV geos in the entire world. These users in Japan, they love to spend on subscriptions and IAPs. And they have crazy usage if they actually vibe with your game, right? One of the biggest things and insights for me
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Okay, real talk before we start. This episode is brought to you by Potensic. And if you're a mobile game publisher tired of leaving money on the table, then listen up. Potensic is a premium ad network built by people who have actually been on both sides of this industry. Game publishers, agencies, successful exits. So, they get it. Here's the thing. Potensic has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. It's not programmatic. It's direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs, no middleman tax. And they handle everything with their in-house team in terms of the creatives. Plus, they've partnered with playable maker, Vungle. So, they will take brands' YouTube videos or static images and actually

turn them into playable ads or even video. Proper interactive format built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming-native creative, publishers are getting a higher CPMs. Everyone wins. Head to potensic.com to get started or check their creative portfolio in the link in the show notes. Thank you very much, Potensic, for sponsoring this episode. Hello everyone and welcome to another solo episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast where you can stay two and a half steps above the mobile gaming industry. Normally, we focus on game design, ad monetization, and user acquisition. But today, it's only me, Felix Broberg, here. So, today we're going to focus on a ad monetization topic that I've getting quite a lot of questions about that you can actually do a lot of optimization around and actually earn a lot more ad revenue. And that is, how do you set up your mediation stack for success in tier four

geos? So, to begin with, what are tier four geos? Tier four geos are essentially any geo in the world that has a huge population where LTVs tend to be relatively low. So, the ones that I usually think about here are India and Indonesia are usually the ones that come to mind first. Massive populations, very low LTV, and very hard to get a high eCPM and high fill, particularly for banner ad units. But there are actually a couple of things you can do on the mediation setup to actually increase your revenue quite a lot from ads from users in these geos. And that's exactly what I want to talk uh with to everyone about today. So, here's our little agenda for this 15-minute crash course on how to maximize your ad revenue in tier four geos. First, I'm going to talk about one of the killer features that has actually helped me the most uh

maximize ad revenue in tier four geos, and that is ad loading. How should you think about ad loading and who should you exclude and what should you do here? That's the first thing we're going to talk about. Then, I'm going to go over best practices for mediation setups in India and then also in Indonesia. And then, I guess since kind of in this whole thing we're moving from India to Indonesia, I also wanted to give a little bit bonus one on Japan, which of course is not a tier four geo, but thought I'd just share the knowledge anyway because you can definitely, using this little Japanese tip, you usually are able to increase your Japanese revenue by 15 to 18% on the revenue basis. But let's start with ad loading. And hopefully, like the weird picture behind me, we can use this to kind of tip the scales, like Big Bird behind me, into the favor of the publisher and the weird picture behind me. So, how should you think about ad loading? So, ad loading is one of these topics where you there's not too much documentation

because people actually experiment and this tends to keep it to themselves. So, me, when I work with publishers that have a large user base in tier four geos, this is a very, very hot topic. So, the thing to know about tier four geos is that there are a lot usually of low-end Android devices in these geos. And if you have a huge DAU in a tier four geo, like for example India, this can really mess up with your Google rankings. So, the first thing that usually you do if you have a big user base in India is basically you want to tend to avoid ANRs as much as possible. So, the first thing that's usually done here is that you move the ad loading event away from the first app open and basically pushing it on into later in kind of the user life cycle of the app. Why is that? So, when you're doing a first, like, opening of the app, what

happens is that all SDKs in the applications get initialized and this is usually when your application or game uses the most amount of RAM. And this is also where you can crash and cause ANRs the most. So, if you think about it, if you actually are caching ads on first app open on low-end devices, this is usually when they tend to crash or cause issues. So, what this means is that in these geos, you want to start caching ads after the SDKs have all been initialized and all the startup procedures have been done. Also, when you're doing this, you want to avoid loading multiple ad formats in parallel. So, think about it. If you have a game that's, let's say, a puzzle game that's big in India and you are monetizing with interstitials, rewarded, and banners, you want to hold off and basically push that on, like, push those uh caching of those ads not at first app

loading and not doing it at the same time, right? Because that strains resources. So, you want to preload interstitial and rewarded ads right before, like, quite kind of before trigger points. And usually you want to show these ads at natural breaks, right? And usually a pro tip here that I've done a few times that actually helps quite a lot is before calling any ad load, basically you want to insert a check for minimum device requirements. So, what tends to happen is that all your crashes or ANRs tends to be clustered around certain devices. The device that sticks in my mind is Redmi B something I've had to ban a bunch of times because these devices just have low RAM. So, this is a short list things that I've done to basically outlaw or basically skip over ad loadings for certain devices. One of the things I've checked is Android version. So, only

show Android I only show ads on Android 8.0 or above. One other thing which I think is probably one of the best methods to do the bare device requirements is looking at RAM. So, for example, only loading ads on devices that have at least 2 GB worth of RAM. And I've put a little code snippet here in the slide. This is exactly the code snippet that I've used before to basically take away ad loading for devices that have Android devices that have lower RAM than 2 GB. Also, you can do the same thing on CPU type or speed or screen resolution. So, if the screen resolution is really low, that's usually an indicator that it's a low-end device and you should probably even think about skipping ads on this device because yeah, it's just going to crash and ruin your Android rankings. So, that takes care of how some best practices on how to do ad loading in tier four geos, which brings us on to mediation tips for

India. So, the thing to know about India is that the population is absolutely massive, right? It's 1.45 billion people. So, nearly a billion and a half people. And the thing to know about this user base is that LTVs are relatively low. These users don't necessarily often convert on IAP, but they spend a lot of time on devices and play a lot of games, right? But since it's such a big user base with a relatively low income, this means that fill rate in India is a constant issue, right? So, as we know, ad revenue is eCPM plus fill. So, in India, it's basically both sides of the coin is having an issue on the ad revenue side. eCPM tends to be really low and fill rates tend to be relatively low. There are some best practices that you can do to maximize ad revenue in India and they

are as follows. The number one rule I always say if you have a large Indian population in one of your mobile games or mobile apps is that you want to have for sure InMobi inside of your ad stack as a bidder. InMobi is an ad network that's actually headquartered in India and they have tons of direct sources that advertise in India, meaning that InMobi is a very very very strong ad partner inside of India and a little known fact that's actually true about InMobi that a lot of people don't know is that you can still monetize with waterfall placements inside of most mediation platforms. I know you can set it up in MAX, I know you can set it up in AdMob. The trick to actually getting waterfall calls inside of InMobi waterfall calls is that you need to email their support email. Have them create them for you cuz you can't actually make it on their login

page anymore. So, what this does is that you have InMobi on a bidder, so it's in the main auction, but then also you give a second test or a second turn that InMobi which also forces more inventory from InMobi. This will help you to maximize fill in India. So, be a bit careful with this because it's a bit of a double-edged sword, right? Because you're also adding quite a lot of latency when you're adding waterfall placements. So, I'd only recommend to have them on for example in these geos where fill is an issue and I would probably not go more than two or three and basically put those call limits quite low. Bit word of caution in India as well, right? Is that interstitials and rewarded can still get decent fill as long as you keep it below like five impressions per DAU. But banner fill in India is a constant battle that's very hard to do and hard to fill. So, usually if you have 18 to 30% fill rate on banners in India, it's

considered quite good and there's not that much that you can do to actually increase it further. So, the third best practice for monetizing users with ad ads in the India is to work with at least one to three Google Ad Manager MCM resell partners. So, what is a Google Ad Manager MCM resell partner? So, if you don't know, Google is one of the largest ad networks in the world and it's basically split up into different fiefdoms, you can say, right? So, you have AdMob, which is pretty much told that it's supposed to go after only mobile apps. And then you have Google Ad Manager that's supposed to go after only or mediating with websites. However, a little known fact is that both of these Google products, they get all of their Google demand from something called AdX, which is the Google Advertising Exchange that sits on top of this and basically

funnels down Google demand to both AdMob and Google Ad Manager. So, this means that if you're mediating with, let's say, Level Play or AppLovin MAX, if you plug in both Google and like two or three Google advertising or Google Ad Manager partners, it means that you're actually maximizing AdX demand from Google because essentially what happens is if inside of the stack Google doesn't know it's competing against itself. So, basically they're bidding up the price and you get more exposure to AdX. This is why MAX in my experience has tended to perform the best for me inside of India because of the fact that on AdMob, for example, you can't monetize with an MCM partner because it's against the Google policies and you can kind of understand why, right? Finally, the fifth best recommendation I have for you to maximize your ad revenue in India is to work with at least exchanges. So, what is an exchange? An exchange is

different from an ad network because it doesn't have any direct inventory themselves. It's usually an amalgamation of several DSPs that are bidding into demand sources. So, usually here what I recommend is if you have trouble with filling in India, you should plug in BidMachine, Digital Turbine and then most mediation platforms also has their own exchange tied to them now. You have ALX on MAX. You also have IronSource Exchange on Level Play. So, here is the final sixth pro tip that I've done and this I've kind of done on a world setting, but in India, there is a lot of languages that are being spoken, but the devices that I've noticed that tend to have the highest eCPM are usually the devices that have English as the default device language to it. So, what we've actually done if you have a really big Indian user base is you set up a separate ad unit that essentially segments users based on

device language input. So, if a user has the device language setting on English, what you do then is you put it to this ad unit and you put a very high bid floor in it to actually push up the price. Also, one word of caution here and I don't want to call it a black swan event or anything like that. I guess it's just something to really know that India is absolutely crazy about cricket and when the Cricket World Cup comes along, I think it's every four years, the demand in India absolutely spikes. So, actually like let's say if you're getting maybe three or four dollar eCPMs on interstitials or rewarded, during the Cricket World Cup, this will be closer to six. So, it's a huge increase, but it's only during the Cricket World Cup because Indians just go bananas when it's Cricket World Cup and there's a lot of advertising spend. So, what you can do to capitalize on that is actually

adjust those InMobi calls that we talked about on the second tip on this slide and actually put them a bit higher, but it's just something to be very aware of. So, that sums it up for our tips on how to set up your mediation setup in India if you have a huge large user base there. So, let's move on to Indonesia. So, Indonesia is also one of these geos with a huge population. There's 288 million people in Indonesia and just like in India, LTVs are relatively low. They're a bit higher than India. There's a lot of soft launching of mobile games in Indonesia, so eCPMs are higher and fill rates are not as big of an issue as they are in India. But in Indonesia, the first best practice to know is that Mintegral and Pangle are the top ad sources usually in this geo. So, on iOS and Android devices, if you don't have if you have a large Indonesian player base or user base and you don't have

Mintegral and Pangle set up, that is costing you probably about 10 or 15% on a ad revenue basis, right? Also, a top tip here, which is kind of sad, but is being outlawed on both MAX and Level Play, but if you're still on AdMob, you can actually email Mintegral and ask them to turn on waterfall placements in your Mintegral dashboard, which absolutely helps getting more and more fill, particularly in these geos. Also, if you're monetizing with banners in Indonesia on MAX, one thing that I've found here that can help boost fill rates quite a lot is if you have all the networks turned on that you're working with on banners, but also if you go into your MAX dashboard and you see that you have, for example, here Mintegral and Mintegral native, turn on also the native formats and essentially what this means is that you have both the banner standard and you have the native demand as well. And native is essentially when

advertisers upload a bunch of creatives in different colors to essentially match the theme of your app or your game. And this is usually a completely different source of demand. So, what you can actually do is sometimes even increase banner fill rates nearly by like 20% or you can increase the overall revenue cuz there's more demand competing for it, right? GAM partners here, just like in India, can boost your performance quite a lot. But one of the things about Indonesia is that you have to be super aware of how much your servers are costing you for all these user bases and how much you're actually earning from it. I've actually worked with a client once where we turned off Indonesi- our app or game in Indonesia because we had, I think, something like 800,000 DAU and simply was not worth it because we were losing too much money on server costs to keep all those 800,000 users in the game, right? So, that sums it up for India and Indonesia.

So, now I want to move on to the bonus slide, which has absolutely nothing to do with tier four monetization, but I just wanted to include it because it's so good. So, what is that? This is the bonus advice, right? How to optimize a mediation setup in Japan. So, Japan, population of 124 million people. This is probably one of the highest LTV geos in the entire world. These users in Japan, they love to spend on subscriptions and IAPs and they have crazy usage if they actually vibe with your game, right? One of the biggest things and insights for me when I was working as a head of AdMon at Tetris was that inside of Japan, they love Tetris in Japan for some reason, but we were partnering on MAX and MAX was pretty much the largest ad source until we started working with a local ad network called LINE. And LINE is essentially the biggest ad source inside of Japan. So,

think like it's like the Google of Japan almost. And the crazy thing is if you actually turn this on inside of MAX, usually what will happen is that LINE revenue will eclipse, and I mean eclipse, the revenue from Meta, Google, and AppLovin giving you about a 10% boost on revenue inside of Japan. So, a bit of word of warnings with LINE is that the UI inside of LINE is absolutely terrible. It's everything in Japanese. You can speak to account managers, but the crazy thing is that they only will speak to you in Japanese. So, you have to translate emails and use it. There's also a lot of social, I guess, faux pas that you can do and which will result in your account manager ignoring you. You have to be very respectful and nice. If you do get approved, LINE is only active inside of Japan, but is absolutely massive. And it's a must if you have a huge user base on ad revenue inside of Japan. So, that

summarizes my little 20-minute presentation on how to optimize ad revenue in tier four geos and inside of Japan on the mediation side. If you have any questions, you can reach out to us via email. Yeah. If you have any other questions, leave a comment here at love to answer your questions. But, if nothing else, I'm going to end it here. This has been another fantastic and insightful session uh from the Two and a Half Gamers podcast on how to win on the mediation setup in tier four geos. Tune in for more content and let us know if you need anything else. Take care. Bye-bye.