Monetisation from the trenches – Lessons from the fight to maximise ad revenue

[Music] [Music] good morning everyone my name is Robert May I work in this development for Hyper m/s we are all granddad's advertising platform headquartered in New York City we bring fortune 500 advertising campaigns from advertisers like McDonald's Intel and Toyota and deliver those campaigns across publishers like pocket gems glue and Zynga the theme of today's panel is monetization from the trenches so by design this is not a panel comprised of c-level execs to pontificate on the future of ad tech but rather this is a panel comprised of ad monetization

experts who've been spending years in the trenches fighting the good fight to maximize ad revenues for their games today we're going to hear some of their war stories and perhaps some battle scars the format or this panel it's a speed panel so what I'm gonna handle introductions we'll get through that quickly and then the panelists I asked them all to provide me with their answers in advance and will show the question and the answers and then I'll pick an answer recipient answer to the answer to one or two of the questions so let's get started with the introductions so first we have Victoria Lynn from said joy next we have Matthew brown from congregate and next we have Adam Kerry from Sega so onto the first question this is a pretty basic question and it's in keeping with our theme of being in the trenches what is your greatest

monetization challenge of 2018 and Victoria your I found your answer to be particularly interest your challenge is balancing intrusive ads with CPM can you expand on that one for us please the more intrusive ads are the more of the higher CPM that we look at so um from banner interstitials now we move to videos and playable ads so we need to balance the user experience and our ad revenue so the more intrusive ads usually our retention rate will be lower but we'll go see higher ad revenue so we need to balance that okay my second question has to do with ad formats and the inspiration for this question has to do with a classy Road which was very revolutionary with disused awarded video

and and it was such a good implementation that I thought interstitial was a goner it was going to go away for good and then lo and behold a year after the game launches they put interstitial on the game so I don't think it's going away anytime soon so Matt why don't you comment on this one or the video it's great user experience users have choose to engage with an ad they get something in return and we also use our walls pretty extensively I know people thought they were kind of falling by the wayside but we tended a lot of success when it comes to interstitials and you know obviously that makes sense for the more casual titles we've also explored rewarded interstitials so we target them specifically to non-paying and engaging users engaging being watching a rewarded video ads so if they've been

game for seven days and they have whatsoever I will show them and it official act and usually can put it to per user for 24 hours and then also give them a reward for watching that app and it's a pretty new format that we've used but we are rewarded video champions or at least I try to be there's a boner bonus answer for this particular question which is it so it just a purposes so I got some cases paragraphs in the response very passionate answers of course I had a pair of crazies down to like seven or eight boards so Adam you had written in all caps that rewarded video is your favorite ad format of the last twenty years of your career could you please comment on that well first I want to point out that you said own a question which seems really approve of my sense

of humor which is what I did yeah rewarded video is just so fantastic I've been doing this for 20 years but I'm actually relatively new to the United space I'm a 10 10 months old and I've never seen anything as good as award a video in terms of video complete rights ctls engagement it's just amazing in terms of you can't have one hour format necessarily be the only way that monetize your users to your point I think that not everyone is going to click and engage and activate a rewarded video so how do you monetize those other people if they're not purchasing to AP so we still use interstitials for those people and we still have banners which we need largely to keep on sort of flight navigation screens so the ad format is really determined by the structure of the game good so for my next question it has to do the CPM for their their useful tool and you can get great results great

performance if they're used well but you can also take it too far and get no revenue so Adam you had written that you use floors regularly to monitor Phil what do you monitor and how oh okay um we probably have too many floors when I joined actually that was apparent to us we had some flaws we obviously were very optimistic that we were going to get 75 or $50 CPM and we quickly looked at that I looked at that and realized that you know the Phil was probably the technology cost rate the cost of latency and the cost of lost impressions so we ended up carving those out so we really tried to look we have 30 plus games so it's not always easy it's not like we have one or two titles to operate on but we really try to pay attention to our largest titles and look at the flaws in

terms of you know what the CPM and also the film and to make sure that they've sort of optimal for that and to use that to overall drive CPM and yield out there as time goes on we also like to use forwards we basically don't pull anybody out so we use irons first for mediation we don't pull anybody out of auto optimization into manual priority unless we have some sort of an eCPM guarantee and almost always a film guarantee to go along with that so you know it's great if you get a fifty dollar CPM for first fill but if they're only serving one impression you know for every four users that doesn't do anything for you so you want to get you know even a lower CPM say 2530 dollars and you want a package first second third fourth fifth if you can into that $30 CPM or you could get something like hey you know they have first filled $22 but you have to serve

75 percent of 100 all the impressions that you have the opportunity to so that's what we do as well the CPM is you're gonna give me $100 CPM you can have one impression but if you want to give me a $25 CPM I got a need like four and then also you know that depends that also impacts what your deal for a second is going to be in third and so on and so forth so this next question has to do with getting developer resources so I don't think I've ever counted a game company that had an overabundance of DEP resources and most developers and producers will place ad tech updates at the bottom of their list of priorities so my question for the panelists is how are you negotiating to get any dev work done for your

priorities and Adam you wrote never operate on faith package guarantees is there a Battlestar to associate it with this one I think the battle scars were lots of faith among them one of our Studios we can you know hurt the relationship like with admin right you guys are over here and your devs are over here and I'm used to that from a sort of editor perspective or I've worked at the community site too and so there's always that sort of like church and state so the way that we solve this is to be blatantly honest really like put ourselves any deal coming in make sure we really work the numbers and that as OSes damn it I you know I feel like this is what the goal is this is how much we're gonna make you get guaranteed run rates get integration bonuses and then present that to the studio and if they don't

want to go I respect that decision and then hopefully I've made a compelling case so that it's sort of like flows through and my numbers are right and they don't come back to me like that money is super good at convincing developers what makes our developers I actually need to show them what the upside is like how many daily revenue I can actually bring so my next question is a question that I'm often asked by developers which is how many SDKs should I put in my game so that's just I can't jump of course on their site so so let's just go round-robin down here start with you Victoria we have worked with and have very well so it just those the and networks plus

won't you the ones that specialize in search on vertical I would say really as many as you can fit it's often an issue on Android with the whole text limit of five thousand but now there's multi next thing at different workarounds for that but yeah as many as you can fit in there we have preferred ones that we say these are we strongly encourage you to use these ones but hey why not throw eyebrow max in there for Robert I wish I could respond as many as would fit I've taken approach if we now have these base decays like basic add integration SDKs so there's going to be about five to six of those now that go into everyday and so a developer one of our studios knows when we launch a new game our expectation and their expectation is that at least this is the minimum step

and this minimum SEC kind of follows the 80/20 rule right there's probably eighty percent of our revenue there and then specific to the title based on geography or ad formats will layer in other SDKs as necessary and I'm also looking outside of SDKs one of the biggest challenges here is you know being able to use tags and then you know Heather pinning as this comes in be able to get more of the demanded not just through an SDK solution okay so this next question has to do with managing your time and your priorities as we know in the world of ad monetization you could be checking ten different dashboards every five minutes and still not be caught up on work so and it perhaps there's too much optimization or optimization or too little how do you find that right balance how do you see on top of your priorities let's just go down the panel Victoria so I'm pretty lazy side-door 8020 rule so I just basically keep the big final

words of the impressions smaller and networks mediation platforms are great for saving you time so you don't have to go to every Network dashboard and individually check to see PM's and fill and but you know you try to give them every game as much attention as you can but if you look at a game it's only doing you know seven hundred dollars a day and answer it's not a ton you can do for coat of its making $10,000 a day and ads you know you spending two or three hours trying to get deals and optimizing will have a much larger impact coming from the desktop side it was a lot easier just to talk to a demand partner and strong in a tag and see how it didn't turn it off turn it up will turn it off that is not as easy and so the playing checkers Ian's app business is more like playing chess you have to really know sort of five to seven moves

ahead where you're going to go so a lot of my time at Sega has been spent identifying our challenges whether they're Geographic or ad format whatever Copa fill and then figuring out who the right partners are and focusing on those conversations I will also say there's a ton of distraction of people who want to talk to me usually about you a and my answer is I don't do you a that's another guy and now I can't a years name and I guess I would add to that too don't don't be afraid as for the developers here don't be afraid to lean on your ad networks a bit and and also yeah I would check in at least every six months because an ad networks serious competition they're always working to to optimize and improve their systems and you might be using an old form of optimization that's no longer valid and also your account managers and networks are experts at their platform as well

you can put them to work or you can lose ask them for advice and how they would go about optimizing so this next question is for the developers in the audience are just getting started with ad monetization and I asked each of the panel's here to provide advice to this new developer why don't you start Victoria smaller ones I think probably focus on vertical and once you've gained your partner's trust you can so I used to work at and I work when they first started they just put this on casino that they expand to casual games ecommerce and now they're like focus on one more to go then expect I would say

two main things don't just throw ads in at the end when you have a fully complete product you want to think about ads during the entire process of you building your game that's how you're gonna get a good added invitation and and then also I mentioned that we like to use mediation platforms one thing that we don't like to use is their auto optimization algorithms apologizes to anybody in the audience and but don't rely on that because it's not gonna maximize your revenue and you want to interface with the network's directly and trying to get guarantees for revenue bill CPM etc don't just let everything run an auto optimization I got distracted by my team walking down the steps all the coach actually I won over echo the that's common getting in designing the ads an ad experience and

IX along with the game and getting it into the core loop is the best thing you can do don't have it be a bolted add-on that's though it won't be effective and you know I think there may be some developers who don't really want to add ads they they they they just want to do I appear and that's a very worthy thing and advertising be a really nice icing on the cake but if you think of it as a secondary thing the revenue is always going to be a very secondary thing take it in early and they could even thoughtfully and your users will accept it they won't pay all just because you have a few ads in we live in an advertising driven Society okay so this next question is for those in the audience who work on the service providers side of the business whether it's ad network or an attribution company so you know there's a good chance that you may have email with these panels once or twice and maybe not gotten an answer so my question is what

ice do you have for the service providers oak here in the audience service provider so show me that you can provide value for our developers again money doesn't hurt it only helps so you want to write a check for 20 grand like hey that's our and but also I mean you know we're all familiar with most of the ad networks and we can tell who's gonna provide value who is it and also networks are integrated with a particular mediation platform that is a huge help as opposed to integrating one-off SDKs it's yeah patients have patience with with us we get inundated

with emails and inquiries to Matt's response we kind of know who you are two publishers talked to each other as well and so you know who does well it's really hard we can I would love to work with way more demand sources but there's only so many SDKs I am allowed to put in and so I have to really pick and choose what I've gotten better about doing in the last few months is being very transparent and saying hey I can't talk to you for another two quarters I'm watching TV PR this other stuff touch base with me then and then maybe things will have changed in the in the structure of Sega and there'll be an opportunity so I don't forget but it doesn't mean I can I can keep talking to you all the time and there are differences between their companies right so so Matt you're congregate and you you publish games and then and and Victoria you guys develop your games

in-house and it's different for you Matt right I mean you you you have to convince a third party why a particular network education integrated you want to speak to that difference developers that we work with third-party developers aren't you know they're not super familiar with all the different ad networks and so they generally go with our recommendations and we like to use ones that we've had success with before but you know I hate to be the money guy up here but it really helps if it's a small dev team say like you know two people working out of Uruguay a network wants to give them $5,000 to integrate that Network specifically without any strings attached that is really going to help them yeah so even though we have owned and

operated Studios one in Boston and one on the UK still very much almost like third party is having to prove the case that go back to a previous answer right having to be very clear-cut this is the revenue expectation trying to set guarantees trying to get an integration bonus to do the heavy lifting that developers have to do it's not it's my easy job to put those things in and it's not an easy job to maintain certainly comment on that it is really it's difficult to get you know eCPM and fill guarantees before a game has launched and they've never you know they don't see how well your traffic is and the words actually do so for us we actually want a long-term relationship so if you are losing money by having the deal with us we don't actually want that because we want a sustainable long-term relationship

that's what we like to hear in myself in business so we have a couple minutes remaining would anyone like to ask a question I have a microphone once going twice hello question is do you often work with networks that have automatic added surfing if you do so yeah actually one of the things I did when I joined the Segre was I decided with the partners that we have we were talking to a lot of people and I felt

like there was a lot of distraction there there was always a new partner and instead I wanted a pebble down with the ones that we had so we have a very good very high touch relationship with most of our providers so when we have issues say with an iron sorcerer I talked to Terry over iron source you know multiple times a week I talked to Joe over there you know multiple times a week so that's one way that we solve it we're also looking at specific solutions like safety Kay and up guard to see you have technology help us sort of solve where is this coming from because it's so difficult especially if you're getting a bad add or a rush of air that say you know in Brazil and it's very hard to reproduce and replicate those we hear about them from community we hear about them from our users but it's very hard you know so needle in a haystack this has always been a problem in the internet in digital advertising but technology should be able to solve this take a bit

yeah I guess just what I'd add to that is I'm often asked like which mediation company should I use and I think my answer is more it's not which company uses really which account team at that mediation company do you have to trust them because whether you're having crashes that are coming from an unknown source or a bad ad that you need to chase down if chances are you're gonna be really heavily on that mediation provider to help chase down that issue so so have a good account tape but it's got your back so that's it for our panel thank you for joining our session today and have a great day [Music]

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