Session: How To Boost Your Ad Revenue By Implementing Offerwall – Best & Worst Practices.

Um hi everyone. My name is Bojan Janković. I work as a head of monetization at GameBizz Consulting. Um we're a consultancy firm for the video games industry and we have been around for several years helping game developers with all sorts of business challenges. We're based out of the Belgrade, Serbia. We have a small but capable team of 10 people and we have an impeccable track record working with our clients. Now here on the slide you can see some of the companies that we are working with that we helped on the monetization or user acquisition side helping them

maintain a healthy business. Now apart from ad monetization, which is my specialty, we are also helping developers with user acquisition, financial advisory and business development. Now the idea for today is to walk you through some of the best practices running offer walls in your games and you know, pointing out some of the best practices, how you can maximize your revenue if you're not using this format or if you're using it but you haven't really played around with it and optimized for full performance. So the first things first, I would like to start with the basics and to make sure that everyone is on the same page what offer wall is and how it generally works. Here we have example from one of one of the games in the market called Design Home and we have three screenshots from the game. The

first screenshot shows the actual game screen. Specifically, this is the store and you can see that there are different inner purchase options in the store as there usually are. And so here in the shop apart from the inner purchase options, we see a couple of ads options. One option is to watch a video which is a typical rewarded video ad placement, but the second option says complete offers, claim your free diamonds. So this is the entry point to the offer wall and this is a typical implementation. Now what happens when the user clicks on this button is that offer wall page appears and this page is pretty much now provided by the network, by the provider, so you don't really have to design this page yourself. Developers have the option to customize this page, but it is effectively not the game screen, but actually the product screen

from the offer wall. And there you can see several different offers. These offers go along the lines of let's say download this game and reach level X if you want to get some currency in the current game. And so when the user clicks on a specific offer, they get all the terms from that offer, so what they need to do, where they need to click, what they need to do in a in a second game in order to get some free currency in the existing game. So that's a typical flow. So go to a page where users have the option to enter the offer wall and then in the offer wall itself, they can actually see different offers which they can complete depending on their preference. Now here I wanted to kind of explain a little bit how offer wall differentiates from other ad formats because it is a very very specific format. So, here we have the most typical ad formats in the

industry that are used. So, banner ads, interstitial ads, native, rewarded video, and Offerwall. I don't want to go into every single one of those, but here in the slide you can see some pros and cons of using each and every one of them. For example, with banners, they're super easy to implement. They're usually static images or some animations that appear in the top or bottom of the screen. They're very easy to implement and fit in into pretty much every game. But, the biggest downside is that earnings per every single impression, so per every single ad shown, are quite low. Compared to that, we have, for example, rewarded video ads, which is probably the most used format in the industry, which is good because users choose whether they want to engage with the format and when when presented with the opportunity. They have super high payouts, so the users um are generating high eCPMs. So, for

example, in the US, you can generate anywhere between $40 and $60 for 1,000 impressions shown, of course, depending on the game and the audience. And if done right, rewarded video and ads are not producing any retention concerns, simply because users decide whether they want to engage with the rewarded video ad or not. And the biggest downside, for example, for rewarded video is that people, if they really like the placements, they really like the rewards, what will happen if you're not careful enough, you can cannibalize your inner purchase economy. Now, Offerwall has some similar features as rewarded video ads. So, the user chooses if and when they want to engage. CPMs are crazy high. High. We're talking about several hundred dollars of ECPM, for example, in the US, which is not uncommon. And again, no retention concerns because people are not forced to watch to use this format. They voluntarily decide to do so. Now, the

downsides of the offer wall or things to be careful about are that it again requires careful economy balance because again, if you're being too generous with this format, then you're going to end up end up in a situation where you're cannibalizing your inner purchases. It can result in low engagement because again, people are free to decide whether they want to engage with it or not. And unlike rewarded video, which is a little bit easier to implement in a way that it can be more visible across the game, offer wall has limited options there. It provides extremely low fill rate on iOS, although the situation is a little bit better than it used to be a few years ago. And it's difficult for users to complete. If you remember what I was mentioning what a typical offer looks like, the user will open the offer wall and there they see, for example, download this game and reach level 20. So, the user has to go through this

tiresome process of clicking there, going to the store, downloading the game, playing the game for who God knows how much long in order to get some free currency in in the original game. Now, even though it sounds you know, very difficult, still there are players who are engaging with the offer wall and offer wall can be a significant source of revenue, especially if you have economy that's that's dependent on the purchases. Now, I was mentioning one type of offers that are available on the offer wall, but I want to make sure that I cover all of them. So, typically, we are talking about three types of offers. CPA or cost per action, CPE or cost per engagement, and CPC or cost per click, which is just another type of action. So, cost per action are offers that are more simple to put it that way.

We are talking about offers such as visit this website or complete this survey or something like that. So, offers that don't require so much time from the users. CPE are the offers that I mentioned. So, download a game and reach level X or make a purchase there or something like that. And CPC are offers that are based on clicks. Now, wrapping up the basics part when we're talking about the most prominent providers in the area, there are not too many to mention, right? Unlike rewarded video ads and interstitial ads and banners even where there are many providers in the industry, here we're only talking about these three as let's say the the go-to places if you want to monetize with the offer wall. So, we're talking about Tapjoy from Unity, Digital Turbine, you might know them as Fyber as well with their previous name, and Revenue Universe or for short RevU. So, these three providers are the one that are

able to monetize at scale, provide good eCPMs, good support on a technical level, and and they're reputable companies that you can trust with your game. Now, the the second thing I wanted to talk about here is which games are good for offer wall. So, which games are suitable to monetize with this format? So, just to paint the picture of which games are monetizing, I wanted to to show show this slide with some of the examples, some of the games that you might recognize are using are using offer wall right now in their games. Now, what what I'm trying I tried to present very different genres here just to give you the idea that offer wall is not suitable only for a single, let's say, genre, but it's actually it has wide range of games that can be monetized. Now, the most important thing to understand here is that unlike let's say

interstitial ads which are suitable for games with different kinds of economies, offer walls are only suitable for games that have some in-app purchase economy. So, offer wall will not work, for example, in a hyper casual game. The reason why is the one that I mentioned before. Hyper casual games are known for simple gameplay, quick sessions, retention is not the best. So, if you have a player like that, you can't expect him to be, you know, very dedicated to completing an offer in a completely different game just to get some currency in your game when in the first place they might not even need any currency in your game because it it has simple mechanics, there's not so much progression, and so on. So, here are some examples, but it is suitable for casual games, mid-core games, hardcore games, but not for hyper casual games because of the lack of economy and just dedication from

users to actually go through the trouble of uh completing the offers. Now, we're going to talk about some of the best practices that we're following at Game Biz when we're helping our clients to kind of utilize the offer wall or introduce it for the first time or optimize it even if they've been monetizing for years. So, one of the things as with any ad format, you need to ensure that you're showing offer wall to enough players, right? Because if you hide it somewhere behind four or five clicks, uh if it's not clear for users where they can find this feature, um not enough of them are going to um to uh really interact with the feature, and then the revenue is not going to be significant enough. Uh now, the second thing um um is also about user segmentation, right? Because sometimes we see that um that developers have really strict conditions

um in terms of user segmentation when it comes to offer wall. So, they would define conditions which would be, you know, you need to play the game for a month, and you need to be this and non-payer and so on. So, they introduce too many restrictions um for which players are going to be eligible for the offer wall because they have fear that offer wall is going to cannibalize on the purchases. Uh we know for a fact that offer wall, if implemented correctly, is not going to cannibalize on the purchases. But again, if you're too strict with user segmentation, similar as with the with the with the bad placement, again not enough people will be exposed to offer wall, and then uh the revenue again is not going to be that great. Uh now, a third point, which is very, very important and we've seen developers um make um significant mistakes with this, is the exchange rate. Uh now, uh I want to elaborate a little bit on what the exchange rate is and how it works. Uh so, the exchange rate pretty much

defines how much of your own in-game currency are you willing to give to users um every time that the network uh pays to you one USD, so $1, uh for the interaction with the offer wall. So, let's say that for $1 uh that you earn net, you give 10 diamonds or 10 gems to your users, that means that your exchange rate uh is that $1 equals 10 gems. And so, um you can define the exchange rate any way you want. And the good thing about it is that it's a guaranteed payout. So, that means that for every single dollar of every single gem that you gave to your users, you are actually making money, which is not the case with rewarded video, right? Because rewarded video works um pretty much on the basis of installs. So, whenever the install happens, you're actually getting paid out, which is then averaged out into an eCPM. But, effectively, you're not getting getting

paid for every single item that you give, unlike in an offer wall, where for every single gem that you're giving, you're actually getting paid, same as with inner purchases. And that's the beauty of the of the format. However, if you're being too strict with the exchange rate, you're going to end up in a situation where um again, you're you're going to limit which offers are available to your users, um and then um again, people when they offer open the offer wall, they're not going to see enough offers. They don't have the the same level of choice as when you set up the exchange rate in a proper way, which uh is why it's so important. Uh general rule of thumb that we're using as a starting point is to use the same exchange rate as the one that you have in the shop. So, let's say that your $0.99 pack um gives 10 gems, then that's exactly what you're going to do in the offer wall. So, $1 equals 10 gems. The good thing is also that for

pretty much uh because um the the exchange rate is defined as a net, so that's the money that you're going to be paid out from the networks, you're actually making money on this compared to the purchases, uh which if you open the game are gross, which because they include uh Apple and Google um fees. And lastly, one of the, let's say, uh best practices that we like to follow um are the um the offerwall currency sales events. Uh these events are usually run every 4 to 6 weeks, depending on the game and on the season. Usually are organized around some real real-world events, maybe Christmas, Halloween, uh Black Friday, Thanksgiving Day, 4th of July, and so on. So, the these holidays that have big visibility in the real world, and the intention here is to promote the offerwall to your users, to make sure that it's top of mind. And the reason why people would engage with the offerwall at those specific time slots is because you at those times it's

typical to give more currency than usual, so to be more generous with the exchange rate, to make sure that the uh the you give uh users uh some incentive to interact with the offerwall at those times. Um and in that way you can use those opportunities to actually um educate uh the users uh about the offerwall. Uh now, here is, for example, um how Nitro Nation uh was doing uh some of the um the um the promo- the the promotions. So, what they do is they do a pop-up saying, you know, you need more gold or more coins, uh this weekend we're giving two times more. So, it's a clear call to action for users to interact with the offerwall. Now, common mistakes. So, pretty much everything on the opposite side of everything that I just said. So, offerwall is not visible enough. Uh people start showing offerwall way too late. They say, "Okay, if this user reaches level 20 or if they've been um

playing the game for a month, then we're going to show the offerwall." That's not the way to maximize the the offerwall revenue. Uh then, uh limiting offerwall only to non-paying users. We're going to show you one example uh there. And also, exchange rate is too strict. Here we have one example that we took from the one of the case studies from Unity which shows example from Big Fish who in the beginning they allowed offer wall only to non-paying users. Okay, and then they started testing they they started testing offer wall on paying users as well and this is the increase that you can see. So including paying users into showing it to to so showing offer wall to paying users can create a big big increase in eCPM and effectively in your revenue as well while not cannibalizing on inner

purchases if done correctly. And also you can see the effect of the currency sales that I mentioned. So here we have free up-ticks which show how these sales events are increasing increasing monetization. Now there are some advanced options as well which are helping developers really squeeze the lemon and make sure that they're making the most out of the offer wall. One of the things and I think this is broadly speaking true for any ad format but also for inner purchases is segmentation. So go crazy with segmentation. Payers versus non-payers, countries, early users versus late users. You can play around with it. You can define different exchange rates for these user segments. So once you've established a baseline, a good product, you can actually optimize exchange rates depending on some user features and in that way make sure that offer wall is more attractive to them. You can perfect

the user experience. I have some examples here. Multiple offer wall providers. This is something that's that's we love doing in the past few years where typically unlike rewarded video you want Usually people are using just one provider, but we played around with using multiple providers to make sure there's competition between them, that we have enough offers, and so on, and that gave us good results. And finally, if offer wall works well for you, you can also try out rewarded surveys. Here you can see some results of optimizing um exchange rate per different countries. You can see, for example, for Brazil, um Italy, um Spain, uh and many other countries, um how much increase you can generate by optimizing exchange rate depending on where the where the user is coming from. And to make sure that the user experience is smooth, you can customize these messages. For example, after the first time user visited the offer wall, you can say, "Okay, thank

you for visiting." You can explain when when they can expect the rewards, um and so on. And to wrap up, um um I would say that offer wall is a really powerful tool. Uh it's an important tool if you have a stable in-app purchase economy, and there's need for the rewards in your game. Um it can help you grow your um ads revenue. It can even help you with their intention, even uh with the in-app purchase revenue, if done correctly. But you have to be careful with some of the things that I mentioned, with the exchange rate, uh with uh user segmentation, with the placements, with communication with the users, to make sure that you avoid uh any user frustration or in-app purchase concerns. Um that would be all, uh but I I don't know if we have any time for questions. We've got 30 seconds. Do we have burning questions? Anybody? In the back. Sure, after the fact. Um yeah, let's take the gentleman in the

corner real quick. Uh hi. So, you mentioned that you need to have IAPs well established for this to work. In the case of So, I would say that typically for the offer wall you would give it to So, you would be giving out hard currency. So, the currency that's only available for purchase. So, that's one way to distinguish it from the remaining ads like rewarded video ads for example. And the second thing is rewarded video ad is reaching 50, 60, 70% of users of your daily active users, whereas offer wall are going to reach maybe two, three, four, five percent of users. So, it's a different audience. People who are looking for a quick ad,

they're still going to watch rewarded video. People who are dedicated enough to go through the offer wall trouble is a different audience. So, it's not necessarily going to cannibalize on each other. Thanks. No worries. THANK YOU VERY MUCH. THAT WRAPS it up for the budget. Thank you so much indeed. Thank you. ADAM ON LINKEDIN, HE KNOWS HIS STUFF. OKAY.