🎯 Mobile Ad Monetization Checklist: From Soft Launch to Scale by Felix Braberg

If you use AppLin Max as your mediator, you also have access to ad rorowass and blended rorowass UA campaigns on AppLin, which if you monetize with ads is a very powerful tool to get scale and you don't have that unless you mediate on the dice [music] with those coins. We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew talking [music] UAD and game design too. Mate, feel shaku bringing the insight. We're rocking [music] those vibes till the early daylight. But hey kua master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace [music] skies. Felix stacks colors like a wizard in disguise. Jack craft realms with lift to the high. Two and a half gamers talking [music] smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They light the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. [music] Aha.

Aha. Aha.
Hello everyone and welcome to another special episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast. And today, as you see, it's me, Felix, your friendly local ad monetization specialist. And today for our special and very interesting presentation, I've actually put together a presentation on what you should think about when you're launching with ads. So, this is a bit of a beginner course and it's kind of designed for you that's either that either has a game or an app in soft launch and you're thinking about launching with ads or you're thinking about implementing ads. So the things that we're going to cover today, we're going to cover how to basically think about ads during your soft launch, how to choose your mediation platform, how to set up networks, how to set up adups txt files, and how to fight with networks, and which networks to work with. So we're going to cover all this

in about 10 or 15 minutes. And the idea here is basically not to make you scared of starting with ads. So you have a central point of everything you could possibly need when launching ads on mobile. So without further ado, let's start it. And I know these slides are very beautiful, but basically someone told me once that slides don't have to look good if the content is good. And we're going to put that phrase to the test today. So to start so if you are soft launching a game this is right here the only thing that you need to keep in mind right so if you're starting with ads and if you're in soft launch you don't need the big mediation to have a drag on all the things that you're doing usually what I recommend to start by doing if you're in soft launch is most people they actually start by launching first with Unity why most games are built in Unity which means that if you build a game in unity All you have to do

is go into the dashboard, toggle one of the place, one of the buttons that says Unity ads monetization, and then basically you're able to get test ads and ads from Unity only. So, this is not as good as having a full-blown mediation setup because essentially it's only one network. What that means is you're going to get absolutely your face ripped off and your eyes ripped out because basically Unity has no incentive to increase the competitiveness in your stack. So, you're going to get paid absolutely terribly when you're doing this. But since you're in soft launch, you basically won't have that many users and you won't have that many impressions. So, what's important in soft launch if you're soft launching a game is that you only want to see the ad metrics that actually matter. So what you're actually looking at in soft launch is the ad viewer rate which is the percentage of users that actually see your ad units and the impow the impressions per daily active user. So the first thing you're going to do if

you're launching ads on unity only in soft launch is basically go to unity and say hey you're going to write their support. Uh I'm going to show you how to do that later but say like hey I want to have the least aggressive ad format in my setting because you don't want to have the really long ad units. We'll cover that a bit later. We'll put a pin in that. What are you actually looking for in soft launch? So, if you want to have ads that basically have a meaningful impact on your user LTV, these are usually the metrics that I recommend that you try to hit on rewarded video. Rewarded video, of course, being the units where you actually give the user some kind of functionality in exchange for them watching a 30-se secondond ad. So, what you're looking for here is you want to have an ad viewer rate of about 45%. which basically means that 45% of users of all the whole user base basically interact with at least one rewarded ad per day. The next thing that you want to do is you want to have the impow up as close to as to as close to or about five

as possible which means that in the US that means that every impression usually when you add a mediation will add 8 to 1 cent per impression and basically contribute to your LTV. interstitials. How you want to think about this is like this is the most intrusive format, right? So, this has to be used very carefully, right? So, if you're using a mainly ad like a mainly IP driven game, it's very clever to basic probably not use these because they really are a drag on performance. But if you do use interstitial, you want to have the golden metric here to have the ad viewer rate at or as close to 70% as possible because basically if you're monetizing with ads, you want to have a wide net where basically a lot of the user base are actually watching ads. The impact that you want to have here is also close to five. Sometimes you can even grow to seven or even beyond that. But basically usually what happens is that when you grow interstitial impressions, what actually happens is you have a reduction

in retention which is not great. So this is a constant battle that you have to keep testing. But basically interstitial is really good if you have like an app that's gone viral or anything like that that doesn't monetize in any way. This is a really good way to actually get some monetization in. Then you have banners. So, I've talked a lot about banners before and essentially banners is kind of the forgotten ad unit of the last three years and what I've kept noticing is how eCPM on banners on mobile has kept dropping and the eCPM on rewarded justials kind of remained the same. And the main reason for that is that essentially all these networks, we're going to cover that later as well. All what all these networks do is they add long and hard end cards that are hard to click out of. So you get a lot of wrong installs so to say on mobile. So basically banner is the same ad unit it's been since pretty much I don't know dawn of time or you know 2010. And the issue here is that basically there's no

lever for banners to actually improve click-through rate or conversion rate. As a result more and more UA demand goes into reward and interstitial demand instead of banner demand. So if you want to use banner demand, just remember you're getting paid pretty much like nothing for banner inventory these days. But what you still want to aim for here is ad viewer rate. So overall user base at least 80% that sees it and an imp of 100 banners plus per DAU. So this is true if you're on level play. This is true if you're on max mediation, but this is not true if you're on ADM Mob mediation. So basically on level play and max you can set the refresh rate of banners to be as low as 5 or 10 seconds. But on ADM Mob the algorithms are actually optimized for 30 second refresh rates. So if this is on ADM Mob mediation or if you choose ADM mob mediation and you want to do banners this is usually around 30 to 35 I would

say on imp. So once you're in soft launch, these are only the metrics that matter and basically using only unity or one network to begin with is fine, but just remember you're going to get your eyes ripped out. So if the ad metrics look good, that's when you move ahead and add the mediation plus networks. What network should you ask or which mediation should you choose? That's a great question. I'm going to get to that right now. So there's pretty much three main mediation platforms right now that have the right adapters that you need to basically maximize your ad revenue. The first one is applo and max and essentially max is a free mediation tool that you can use and all these mediation platforms are free because it's essentially mediation platforms for these ad networks is a loss leader product which basically means that they have better access to supply for their demand inventory. Meaning that whatever network you do or mediation platform you

end up choosing, whatever met network that owns it will be your largest ad partner. What are the main pros of going with AppLab and Max? It tends to have the highest eCPM in the market right now on video inventory. This is filmed 27th of January 2026. And if you use AppLin Max as your mediator, you also have access to ad rorowass and blended rorowaz UA campaigns on app, which if you monetize with ads is a very powerful tool to get scale and you don't have that unless you mediate on max. There's pretty much no placements or waterfall work here anymore. Everything is on biders and there's a broad availability of networks. The cons here is basically that the cross promo tool that they had was deprecated a year ago now I think and apploven has some of the most aggressive video end cards that you basically need to reach out to their teams to basically get them to reduce it. The next option that you have is Unity level play. It's called now it's Unity level play and this is the

mediation platform that used to be called iron source level play but level play is the solution that is owned by unity. So unity and iron source here tends to be your largest networks. The best parts of level play is that it has the best dashboard for data manipulation and data management. decent and good rewarded video and interstitial. ECPM has a really good creative review tool for tracking your inventory which is really good and it's really easy to integrate if you build your game or app in Unity. So the cons here is that banner performance is not that good on level play. I would say it tends to be better on max or ADM Mob which we'll cover next. The cross promotion tool has actually been removed now as well. And video end card here can also be quite long and harm retention. But you can also always remove that by speaking to the account managers. So ADM mob this is from Google. This is their in-house mediation platform. So here

your largest ad partner will be Google. So basically the pros of that is that the ad formats will have the best and the least aggressive formats for your largest network which is really good. you'll end up working with Google in all of these mediation platforms anyway. So, it doesn't really matter. But the biggest pro of ADM Mob mediation is really strong performance on banners. And like I said, like I said, very good ad quality for end cards and creative length, which you can actually set in the dashboard, which is very different because other places you need to actually reach out to the account managers for them to set it. The cons is that this mediation platform was built in 20 uh 2007. So it's a bit clunky to use compared to other platforms and getting the right amount of data can be a bit longer than other mediation platforms. So once you choose your mediation platform and the main thing here for choosing mediation platforms that I got to say is you can't really when you're getting started make a bad choice here.

Right? So what we're talking about the differences between these mediation platforms might be 10 to 15% on an ad ararked out basis right so if you're earning 100 bucks a day that would be 110 so not the end of the world right but at the end of the day you can't really mess up when you're at early stages right so the next thing after you choose a mediation platform what you need to do is you actually need to set up a few ad networks so which ones to start with as of today end of January 2020 26. These are the networks that I would recommend with whichever mediation platform you go go with and this is enough to get to about $600 to $1,000 a day. So the networks I would recommend on video and interstitials would be Apploven, Google, Unity, Maloco, Meta, and Mint integral. They are really strong right now. But basically here is I pulled all the data that I've seen on my clients from the last I think it's the last year and these are the networks

uh from top to bottom by order of size right so basically once you integrate and start with these networks if you start growing just go down the next list here and integrate the next applicable network that's the largest for you right so just work your way down interstitial rewarded and banner interial and rewarded are pretty much the same thing in terms of the the largest players. So you can't really mess up. But yeah, these are the networks to start with, right? So once you set up networks, you need to move on to the next phase, which is you have to do it. It's a bit boring to do, but yeah, that is setting up your adups .txt file. So if we flash back to 2014 in mobile, it was pretty much the wild west. There was a lot of fraud. So the natabs txt file is something is a file that's basically ad standard from the IAB which is the governing body of all ads. Interesting right? So what this actually does is basically says what resellers you can work with from your ad

network. So the interesting thing here is right when you add these networks what you're doing is you're adding adapters into the mediation platforms but the second order magnitude here what actually happens is that these all these ad partners also work with something called resellers and basically they also sell the plumbing or the access to your app to basically sell demand to other parties. So these reseller demands on some networks like for example Mintrol can sometimes be as high as 50 or 60%. So if you don't set this thing up right here, you are missing out on pretty much 50 to 60% of demand. So the way to set it up is here's a example of Solitaire from Mobilityware. Very large app, right? But how it actually works is that multiple times every day all these networks have crawlers and they crawl pretty much the web and they look for iOS and Android placements or stores like this, right? And then you

essentially see down here that you have a website. So basically what the crawler does, it first goes finds the store listing, finds the website and then essentially it goes to your website and then it adds this line here. It adds dash app-ads.txt. And that is essentially where you need to put a txt file where basically you make all the entries of all the resellers that your ad partners are working with. So sounds really hard. It's actually not. How it actually works is so this is back to the page I said before where you're actually recommending the networks. So how it works inside of these dashboards you'll be able to find tabs that's called adaps txt files. So how it actually works is inside of the applo and dashboard you go and you scroll the way all the way down on the side to ads txt and basically then you copy paste everything into this txt file and basically put it on your website. Same thing for Google. You click in and you find the adups txt

extension and you basically add it there. Same thing for Unity. Maloco is a DSP. So you don't need to add it because it's only first party data and integral inside of the dashboard. You can download the whole adaps txt file. Word of caution these lists change all the time. So if you're earning significant amount of ad revenue, you should actually update these once a quarter to make sure you're earning a lot of ad revenue. So that means your setup of everything on the ads txt side. So now we get to the most frustrating part which has happened in the last couple of years. So as the fight for mobile supremacy increased and basically the network networks got more and more consolidated in mobile the end cards on video ads and the creative length have been getting longer and longer. 10 years ago a rewarded ad was 30 seconds and one click to exit. But basically what can happen now if you're starting with networks and you don't speak to anyone, you can be put on more aggressive end card templates. So the worst offenders

here is pretty much everyone except Google I would say or meta. They're quite decent. But here usually if you're working with anyone, what happens is that usually your rewarded ads can be up to 90 seconds long for users and take maybe 15 seconds to end and click out of with multiple clicks. So these are the templates that basically when you start working with any network here basically you need to reach out to them and say hey these are the template guidelines that I want to have inside of my application. Now word of warning here networks are notoriously bad at trying to help you with this because essentially if they change the end card templates they get less conversions which means that they get less margin. So this is literally like pulling, you know, yeah, the teeth from someone, right? So it's not very easy to do. So use my template guide for this because this is what works the best. So this is my template guide. So

hi everyone, I hope you had a good day, good weekend, whatever, whatever time slot fits you. I'm helping blah blah bl reviewing end cards. Currently network is the only network that doesn't let users close interstitials after 5 seconds. Can you help us set so we have par among all networks? Send this to every network and always use the word par because there's a bit of a issue with networks, right? Because they don't want to help you and be the first network that basically goes down in end card formats because then essentially they get a lot less conversions and less share revenue in your app, right? So send this to everyone and basically make sure that you're on the lowest one. Now, another word of caution here is networks change this all the time and hope that you don't notice. So, basically what you want to do is you want to constantly look at ads inside of your app to make sure that they're adhering to these end card templates they already set. So, this has been my starting with ads

checklist guide. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, my email is below or you can leave a comment on this video. And if you have any issues or want to learn anything else, I'll be happy to make a video for you. So, this has been another fantastic solo episode on the exciting topic of ad monetization. I'm Felix Broberg and this was Two and a Half Gamers. Thank you so much for tuning in. Bye-bye.