Stop Ignoring these 6 ad placements in 2025 by Felix Braberg

that these are the step offers or rewarded offer chains that can be used for APS. So how it actually works is that you have a step offer chain where usually the first two items that you can click on are small ticket soft currency items that you can actually click on to get stuff for free and then the next item would actually be a rewarded ad. You can see it's appearing here for free for a rewarded ad. So, usually how I've tested this with my clients is that instead of serving the normal offers, which would be a popup where there's a discounted price, actually how you present that offer is that you It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice drops of golden coins. Jacks with the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew talking UAS and game design too. M feeling shaking the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early day life a master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the

cyerspace skies. Feeling stacks colors like a wizard in disguise. Challenge craft reals lift us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey sick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They like the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Aha. Uh-huh. Hello everyone and welcome to a special episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast where you can stay two and a half steps of the mobile gaming industry. So, as you can see, it's a very special episode today because it's only me here and I'm here to talk to you about six ad placements that I've seen converting extremely well that I've been using with my clients in the last couple of months. So, as I'm alone, it's only going to be ads, and that's what we're going to talk about. Uh, but before we get started, uh, just wanted to kind of share how I think about ad placements

and how to stay on top of what actually works extremely well with ad placements. And that is you try to look at the largest admonetized games in the industry. you play these games and then you have a very good chance of knowing that if there's something implemented in these games that these type of ad placements convert extremely well. So, what games is it that I'm looking at right now? So, if you're an avid follower of my content or this is a shameless plug for my Substack, I actually made a post about this last week about the top ad monetized games on Android. But if you're not, let me just share the screen here. And these are the games that I tend to keep a very close eye eye on because these games are very large and they earn a lot of ad revenue. So the games I tend to keep a track of. Oh, hello. Here I am. I have something very important to say. This episode is brought to you by vibe.com. Have you ever thought about TV ads and how they

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test these ad placements because historically these type of ad placements that I've gotten from these games tends to work extremely well. All right, so now I want to dive into the six ad placements. So I'm going to show a couple of video and explain what's actually happening. So the first video that I want to share is from Coffee Mania. It's not particularly an ad placement that's only here, but what it helps to do is showcase how offers and how you display offers has actually changed quite radically in the last couple of years and how offers can be used to also be a avenue for first-time purchases but also to increase your overall ad revenue. So uh if I share the screen here uh we can see here that these are the step offers or rewarded offer chains that can be used for APS. So how it actually works is that you have a step offer chain where usually the first two items that you can click on are small ticket soft currency items

that you can actually click on to get stuff for free and then the next item would actually be a rewarded ad. You can see it's appearing here for free for a rewarded ad. So, usually how I've tested this with my clients is that instead of serving the normal offers, which would be a popup where there's a discounted price, actually how you present that offer is that you have free free rewarded ad paid then free. So that basically changes the way how the offer is presented and also creates sort of a ladder in the player's mind where they're actually clicking on the things and they can see that they can get even more offers if they make the per uh purchase to actually get free stuff afterwards as well. It's one of the placements that I've utilized the most in the last 6 months with uh my uh clients and it's worked extremely well. So test this. Basically split up your offer in some free items. Add a rewarded

ad. And then what you can also do is add a notification button that essentially illuminates every time there's a rewarded ad available in the setup or in kind of the step offer chain. So the next game uh I wanted to talk about uh is Screw Master 3D. And this was a great episode uh where we had Samantha on for Supersonic to talk about what kind of interesting things are doing on the back end of this game. So we have ad placements that basically get users to watch ads and converts, but also what you have on the other side is on the back end, you also have a lot of stuff that you can do to improve your revenue. And one of the most interesting things that she revealed from this episode was on how to actually change the mediation setup to maximize your ad revenue based on the recency effect. So what is the recency effect? Every network that you plug into bids on your inventory under

the assumption that the first impression is where the user has the most amount of attention. And then subsequently after you have multiple impressions, the per value uh the per value price that you're paid per impression decreases because networks assume that you have less attention. So what did supersonic do uh to essentially get the better of this kind of recency effect? So what they did was on first app open what they do is that they call and cache both an interstitial ad and both a rewarded ad and then what they do is they create an if then statement. So let's say you're watching three or four rewarded ads in a row. Then what they do every time you click on the call rewarded ad button is that they double check that the eCPM you're actually getting for the interstitial is not higher than the rewarded ad. So what they do is for example after six impressions on the rewarded side is what they do is instead

of calling the rewarded ad they call an interstitial ad because it's still worth more. So the recency effect is separated by the different ad unit. So let's say that you have served already five rewarded impressions to the user. Maybe the interstitial impression that you have already cashed is actually worth more than the sixth rewarded impression. Very clever way uh of actually maximizing the revenue. So, one word of caution on this is that you can only serve interstitials in a rewarded slot and you can't do it vice versa because inter uh rewarded ads are actually intent and what they have is essentially uh you need to have the 30 seconds. So, you can't do it the other way around. So, you can't call a rewarded ad in the interstitial slot because then eventually what will happen is that networks will catch on and they'll demonetize your inventory. So, another blast from the past that I've used quite a lot. I'll showcase it here in this video from Whole IO by Voodoo. And I kind of call it the yeah

convert or die method for rewarded ads or interstitials where you have natural game play such as this where you know you're playing around with the different users. Let me just fast forward. So you're actually beating the level and then you're coming to a natural break in the game where you have a rewarded out. Let me pause it here. Right. So this is what I call converter dive. So usually what you do here in any hybrid casual game is that you would have a natural break and serve an interstitial ad. So one thing I've been experimenting a lot with my clients is actually when you come to these natural breaks, you give the option to watch a rewarded ad. Uh here in this case it's to get bigger and then actually if you actually press the rewarded ads button you load the rewarded ad button. Uh but if you don't press it to skip it you actually serve an interstitial. So in that case you're kind of maximizing the potential value of an impression uh from a user because

the eCPM for rewarded ads tends to be so much higher than interstitial ads. So no matter what happens, the user will see an ad, but if they have, they have the option to watch a rewarded ad and actually get something from it. Also, what I found with this placement, what happens is that over a long period of time, what happens is that users actually get used to this. So when they actually get faced with the option to watch a rewarded ad, when they know an interstitial is coming, they choose to watch the rewarded ad because they know they're going to be served with an ad no matter what. So, that's enough of videos. So, the actual next three placements that I wanted to showcase, uh, I'm going to fire up the emulator. And it's kind of nice not having Yakob or Matia here because they usually stress me out with this. But here is the fourth placement, which I think just deserves so much credit. So this is word search explorer by Indian studio play

simple games. And one kind of little trick that I usually do to show or to basically gauge how good a placement is seeing if a studio has multiple similar types of titles in their portfolio. If the ad placement gets rolled out across the whole portfolio that wasn't there before, that's usually a really good canary in the coal mine sign that this ad placement works extremely well. And this placement that I'm going to talk about right now has now been rolled ac rolled out across their whole portfolio. So I have a strong sense that this placement is converting really well. So what the placement is is essentially a rewarded ad placement when you leave the store instead of actually inside of the store. So what Play Simple did was if you go to the store and if you don't purchase anything when you then leave the store what happens is that you're served the rewarded ad button. Let me

show you here. Right. So we're gone into the store and we've had a look and we've decided not to buy anything. And there you go. You can see that then you're served with a full screen kind of popup that says you can earn 25 more coins by watching a video. So extremely clever because kind of what you're doing is you're segmenting the users as well uh by hey if I'm not making a purchase yeah we should see the ad placement but also what you're doing then after is that you're highlighting the rewarded ad placement as a standalone thing. So it eliminates the noise and it's kind of also like yeah I want to watch some coins when I leave. But then kind of the interesting sign on this this game has been scaling like crazy but then they took this ad placement and also moved it across their whole portfolio. So what I've been telling my clients to do is hey instead of having your rewarded ad button inside of your store actually show it when someone leaves the store without purchasing anything as a standalone popup. And yeah, so far from

my aspect, it's converting extremely well. So, also one thing I wanted to show from another game that I've been playing uh so I haven't played it a lot on Android, but this is uh uh I've been playing it a lot on iOS, and that's Color Maze Adventure by Triple Dot. And the thing that they're kind of really good at in this game is that it's a bit of a hyper casual game where you're solving these puzzles. Uh, however, one of the things that they do extremely well and one thing that I think is extremely undermonetized currently is that they allow you to watch ads for different paint schemes or skins. So, for example, the yellow scheme, you have to watch three rewarded ads in a row or pay coins for it. So what they do is actually yeah five ads for unlocking a different maze or uh watch two rewarded ads for watching uh watching rewarded ads to unlock a different colored ball

in this case the earth ball. So what they do is they actually move skins uh and different types of paint jobs or mazes and they put them behind rewarded ads. Right? And one of the things I've actually done uh I did for a client a couple weeks ago, uh we don't work together anymore, but anyway, what we did was we actually looked at the first eCPM value of the user from the first cached ad. And what we did was we actually use that eCPM value to actually decide if we show the rewarded ad placements or not, if they're a likely purchaser or not essentially, and it's working extremely well. Then the last thing or the last ad placement out of the six that I wanted to showcase. Uh it's more of a meta feature. Uh so let me actually just go here to one of the OGs in the industry which is Subway Surfers. So Subway Surfers monetizes only with rewarded ads. It has probably

I would say the most amount of organic downloads in mobile history. But what they do extremely well is what I call meta rewards for rewarded ads. And it's also another thing that I've started implementing on a lot of clients that tends to convert extremely well. So what is it? It's essentially awarding users for watching a lot of rewarded ads. So there's a bunch of other games that do this, but it really has a lot of powerful features. So basically, if you watch 10 rewarded ads, then what happens is that you unlock some kind of in-game reward. So idle like I've done this a lot on idle arcade games. For example, if you watch 10 rewarded ads in a day, your movement speed increases. And what we see is that whenever you implement these meta rewards uh from watching a lot of ads, there's actually a lot of ad whales that actually love to watch a lot of ads. So they will actually watch 10 or 15 rewarded ads to get these meta

rewards. that then increases your overall adow which is helpful because then you can run ad monetized or ad driven revenue campaigns uh which actually helps. So try this out as meta rewards and I've seen some really good results from this. So that wraps it up for my little short episode on the top kind of ad placements that I've been experimenting with. If you have any questions, uh, my email address is here in the show notes. Uh, if you want to reach out to us, please join our Slack group. Uh, unless there's anything else, uh, please reach out. Uh, have a great day and best of luck with your ad monetization, ad placements. Thank you. Bye-bye. [Music]