Mobile monetisation – Are all $ made equal?

[Music] so everyone yeah so our older made equal this is what we're going to speak about today and a quick warning before usually when we speak about mobile monetization specifically with ads that this is the subject that I'm going to touch today we're speaking about how to optimize it better which ad formats to use where to place them whether or not to use in-app purchases and ads combined and this talk is a bit different it's about an unspoken subject if you will and it's about when ads are actually causing us a loss of revenue instead of generating it so we're going to touch on this subject so yeah my name is niala brood OE and the strategic customer director as safe DK what we do is we offer and add intelligent solution that gives complete

visibility to the publishers to the game developers and identify an alerts about issues with ads that cause loss of revenue so with mobile monetization there's a few ways to do there's the freemium model the inner purchases and the ads and all are great models if you take them alone or if you combine them it depends on the app but when you do freemium run in a purchases you have full control over what the user is going through where's where you put ads basically you're giving up control the product team and the engagement and everything like the stickiness that you mentioned are all super important parts and you're making a lot of effort making sure the game is fun and engaging and that users have a great experience but then like 10% or 20% of the time they're seeing ads and youth as a game developer has no control over what your users are

actually see usually it's a big mystery and you have no idea whether or not they have good experience with the content they see in those ads or not so when we think about ads and how they impact to your users we should keep in mind that there's a bunch of different users so if it's a 40 year old woman which is more sensitive to specific content or the the male that he doesn't care if he sees something inappropriate or the kids that can see them themselves or run up to their parents and say mommy daddy what is this so there's a bunch of ads that can impact our users in different kind of ways and I want to touch like the highlights and the popular one that we saw and your customers app and that actually impacted the users in different kind of ways either by posting better reviews uninstalling the app or just tweet an

image that their kids off in their app and create like a huge backlash so this is the first one and pretty much the obvious one we call it sa DK the customer support nightmare those are real ads from casual game news apps the one on the bottom left whether the kids asked and as you can see the logo is very appealing to kids it's a cute dinosaur and the kid is rent to his mom after he downloaded dinosaur app but excellently got into and not so conservative dating app this create a huge backlash at the specific company that it will served in so yeah I don't think anyone would want those ads in their app and we see those from all ad service providers so this is like the obvious one but there's a bunch more and they're not inappropriate but they are

at the rest loss of money and they are the cause of a really bad user experience so I want to show you real examples of a couple that we saw but there's a list of other cases where this happens so this is the web page not available as I'm sure everyone saw it on web but you would be surprised on how popular it is on mobile as well and the publisher who had this issue once he went to our dashboard he actually realized this was the fourth most served add-in is app it will serve millions of times over a very very short period of time and not only it's a bad user experience that you can all imagine how much money got lost instead of generating it so those impressions that you worked so hard on getting acquiring those users making them stick to the game they're just going down the drain so this is one example and the second

one is one of my favorite because it's two stones in one case with one bird so this is it's not only black but it also doesn't have an X button so the only thing a user can do is get out of the act so again you put all these efforts in making a great game but then this ad comes up and the user just he has to close the game he doesn't have any other choice and you know like what seems out of the game who knows when it's going to come back so this is another example that we see a lot and so we talked a bit about the bad ads that cause bad user experience but also I don't know how many of you are doing blacklist with your ad providers whether or not it's competitors that you don't want to bring users to because you're those users are never going to come back or just because the category isn't appropriate for your target audience but what we discovered

over the past few months is that almost everyone is violating those blacklist and we alert on almost 70% of the watch list that publishers are putting on our site and we still haven't been able to figure out if it's per if it's on purpose or it's just because of technical issues but we sell violations from n networks from top to bottom so it's across the board and it's a real issue so again you're asking that you're actually doing something proactive and asking your ad providers not to put specific ads they still end up popping in your ass and once you have visibility you know how big this issue is and which ad provider is responsible for it so you don't have to guess anymore so I think today when we talk about monetization would add most of the people what they look at is how big the chunk of money in their bag is in the

end of the month and they try to just like make this chunk of money bigger but what they don't look about is that they actually have a big hole at the bottom of this bag so it doesn't matter how much money you're going to put inside of it you're not paying any attention for those ads that are actually a direct cause of loss of revenue and for us the future and we see ourselves as contributor to this future is similar to the revolution that the user acquisition field when few years ago when attribution came into place we think that in monetization the future is getting complete visibility and recognizing how big is this hole from each ad provider and for your specific app and doing proactive things to actually close this hole and then if this is today then this is going to be the future once you close this hole so for example with the dashboard that you saw from our dashboard you get to see

exactly which creatives were served which SDK service how many times and how many times people actually clicked on it and can get alerts whenever a net provider actually violates your ad policy and whenever there's a bunch of other issues like ads that crash as an auto redirect the user and the list goes on and on but now you can actually do something about it and get the full picture of your monetization and all just looking at the bottom line just look at the full picture where the bottom line is it could be bigger if you don't have this hole at the bottom of the stack so this is what the future is going from our point of view and we see it already and people get started getting visibility and paying attention to this major issue and we hope that you all join this revolution and that in the next Pocket Gamer conference we would talk about like even more advanced ways on detecting those

issues and closing this hole so thank you very much I think we have time for questions if you want to hear more we have a booth would be happy to show you how it works live and show you a bunch of more horror stories that we have so yes that's it super super crosstalk and so I want to ask you things and I mean I think that you talked about ad policy violation which is an interesting kind of problem and do you think that's quite prevalent but is there something about the way that we design an ad which is an important process as well so yes is the question about stepping away from the context of our game and if we're so hopefully we're going to be served an ad that's appropriate yeah but we do we still have some thoughts we need you know have you had any sort of views about how impactful it is to choose the

way that you set up the moment when an ad is received we had the chance to look at that kind of stuff so we're mostly looking into the content of the ad and the technical side behind ahead so identifying issues were the ad redirects the users or just like cured with the example or if the ad crashes so it doesn't really matter where you place it it's a matter of whether than or not the ad is going to generate money for your users and also not cause you a loss of revenue not only because I mean even if the ad is going to get clicked on if like let's say Decatur downloaded the dating app when when this user went to his parents and they tweeted about it and it created such a major loss of money because of reputation all the company had to deal with this issue so I think from our side where we stand it's not really about where to place the ad there's a bunch of as I said in the beginning of that there's a bunch of companies that are like ad providers

that visited their specialty knowing where to place it to make more and from our point of view it's more about like making sure you're not losing money from the only source that is supposed to like bring you money yeah but it's also it's about other aspects too as well I suspect which is and you know I think like you say there's a question about make sure that you get the ads appropriately marked up and obviously there's a responsibility on the person producing the ads and responsibility on the game company to make sure they're clear on what they want and use this tools are available appropriately and do you think people are doing that now or is that still an issue so I think this is like a new it's a new space so right now there's a bunch of other solutions that are doing like sampling solutions we're the only one that are doing real users real time but we see this space evolving now and like people already took such an advanced

approach with the money to like where to place we add a bunch of like very innovative ad formats and now they're realizing that ads are not only like generating money but also creating a huge loss of money in some cases and they have to take proactive action so from our side where we stand we see this like huge need and interest from from the industry that actually need this product and telling us well we already like put resources because we we have to like the big companies we have to develop this ourselves because it's a huge issue for us and now that there is a solution like ours they don't need to do it anymore so but it strikes me that we because arm a long time ago when we when banner ads were still evolving we had mechanisms because when the first thing that people are yes how do I make sure I get ads relevant I mean assumptions about relevance here are necessarily inappropriate but even then there's there were methods where I could wipe this blacklist certain types of providers and certain types of content so those tools have been around

for a while and I'm wondering why though why you think those tools haven't been up to the standoff yes just because I don't know why the ad providers are not able to actually comply with the ad policies the or with the blacklist that the game developers are setting but the fact is and we were surprised on how big this issue we thought like let's put a water is an alert whenever there's a blacklist violation and we thought well that's cool because there is an issue but we were surprised to see how wide it is and like in from our perspective in more than 70 percent of the cases the blacklist is getting violated by all sorts of its providers so I don't know yet what the technical issues from the ad providers point of view but I know that it's a big issue and maybe it's just because up until now publishers had no way of knowing that they're being violated unless they saw themselves and now there's like the ad police so now they can actually know when it happened

and how big it is so we hope that this will change industry to being more responsible to towards like compiling without that policy make sense so the question here general special will try and repeat it back for the video [Music] which at the case conference yeah so in terms of crashing and stuff yeah we have a database we're not exposing it yeah it's probably the next step of doing so and from our point of view the next step would also be like sort of like analytics about how responsive our ad networks in solving problems fast how much they're not going to repeat those issues again because this is a huge issue with it and so the problem is getting six and a week later what do you know it's the same all over again

so so yeah I think those are the next steps probably like in the next conference I already have like a new presentation showing you like I don't but but we like to work with SDKs and at the end our goal is to make this industry better and help everyone make more money so from our perspective we would like to help those ad providers do better in in this space I'm not sure we're going to expose it but this is I mean you should take it so our CEO and Founder here and you can drop by our booth and she would be able to tell you if this is something that she wanted to later on I think one of those versus what we're talking about is a maturing of a market because one of the think on secuence is when you have a market that suddenly becomes an assault scale anything about the time frame where you know particularly with like things about video ads and you know the way that opportunity or ads work in particular has been so transformational in such a relatively short period of time I think we we were doing amplifiers video ads

like four years ago now and we will move the community as like three years ago and if you think about the time frame that's just a really short time frame for an industry to shine evolve and adapt to such changing scale so you know do you think there might be that that's a kind of fundamental question that's still there which is the industry of the home has had a lot of maturing to do very very quickly and this is just another one of those pieces that needs to be dealt with yeah I think this is like the missing piece of the puzzle that as I mentioned don't only look at the like how much money is getting in but also how much is getting out and this is the full picture because it doesn't matter how much I mean if you're making a thousand bucks in an hour if 600 of those are going out because users are uninstalling or for one bed review it's it's actually four hundred so it's important to pay attention to the four hundred and not to the one thousand and just makes me wonder again because I know we've got a little bit of time left it does make me wonder whether

there's this kind of wider question which I know is support to us which is the transparency side of things I think the ability to communicate transparently with people you know to be able to engage people share data and understand what's going on I think it's actually something that's fundamentally the half of this so whether it's about how much is being paid out or whether it's about you know whether you're serving the right ad that's about the relationship with your partner's right yeah I totally agree and and I think again I think once you have the full picture you know you know how to do like better decisions better data-driven decision just like it went liquid the user acquisition side you used to like not so long ago you used to pay for like CPM and you wouldn't know how much you're paying for a user and you want to know the LTV of those users and it was just like big budgets spans and companies actually like went bankrupt because they didn't have the full data the full picture so I

think the industry's again like you said it's maturing very very fast and this is the next step of like doing for this industry what like tribution do to user acquisition you [Music]