The real story of mobile game ad monetisation

[Music] good morning everyone thanks for being here today we will be talking about ad monetization with our four great panelists here so today we're gonna actually going to get into we're gonna go behind the curtains to see the real story of ad monetization our panelists have many many years of experience in you know small working with small companies and big companies with various types of titles so hopefully we'll get into some stories of the good the bad and the ugly just to start off my name is Chris lamb I work for a company called hyper Amex we are an ad network that's based in New York and we work with Fortune 500 companies to bring brand advertising into mobile games and mobile apps we will move on to intros so Sarah yeah I guess that's me I'm Sami

and I'm leading operations in hatch and I'm all about streaming platform for games Mariana I'm gonna I'm a head of gross for a creative mobile she's a game development company based in Thailand in Estonia and when you work with free-to-play games muslim my name is Erin Arlo and I'm a product manager at play stack we're a mobile PC and console games publisher hi I'm Sebastian Moser I'm CEO and co-founder at pixel we are focusing on builder games with IP and brands as well as our own franchise sandbox which was being acquired last month by animo caverns great well thanks everybody we structured the panel in a

little different way I actually sent out the questions to all the panelists beforehand and we collected all the answers and it's all be putting up the questions and the answers for each of the each of the each of the questions so that we can move along a little quicker since we only have 20 minutes so to start off in ad monetization can you guys give me an example of an experiment maybe that you guys have done that you know did not work out so well and you know maybe tell us about what you learned from from those types of experiences so who wants to start off sure I can start so as a mobile game developer I think a lot of people in this room will feel the same we receive I don't know how many emails per day from various networks who approaches to try to integrate them they are promising

we are going to help you monetize so much better than what you're already doing and it becomes quite unmanageable like you get dozen of those every week to the point now we start ignoring them but our company is eight years old and at the beginning we didn't know yet that it was going to be that way so we were I would say rookies and we were willing to trust those emails and try things and so we started working with one with two testing with a third one to do that was keeping to promote hey we are going to do even better eCPM etc and what we saw was a huge waste of our time unfortunately to implement those our networks set up all the operations until the app is updated on stores and we can collect some data to see result and we

were approaching it the wrong way like just trusting the single fact we can bring you higher eCPM and more revenue so my recommendation to that ugly situation that we would all want to avoid is to be at the beginning of those conversation like don't say no everywhere just look at it and ask them more tea tell about I all right eCPM but in which region in which country in which platform and compared with actual data if you do have some actual data on your life games give them under nga your numbers and see can you really do battery CPM in this country of this country where I do have a volume of impression that makes sense for me to get more revenue so there's a piece of advice I'd like to give great I definitely share investments paying about all this too many offers coming in

and for our company well it was six years ago six seven years ago and then well the the ad mediation Network they didn't exist exist back then so we decided that okay more is better so we're trying to integrate all the network and networks that we could find and finally it ended up where as a crash rate of 23% because the app couldn't handle so many is the case so it is a funny story each actual was an experiment so we didn't put it life anymore so it was an experiment to see how many at education actually handled and we'll figure that out yeah funny but familiar well hatch is in open bet at the moment so this is the perfect time for us to do testing even fail implement new things that would probably work do some more

testing look at the analytics but one thing that I believe that everybody can relate that well hatch is positioning itself as a premium environment for brands and publishers and we have specific ad categories and black listings in place but sometimes I get reports that we are showing the ads well that we do not want to show so it's very hard to balance what is to deliver quality ads but then you have to just see is it because of the partners you are working with but yeah it's part of the testing process yeah so we introduced off the wall into one of our games and we didn't really think about in what regions and in what in what one instances so we just we just had it at the front at the main menu once she's done this tutorial the offer wall was on screen had the revenue coming in we thought oh this is great we're getting we're getting a lot more additional revenue but then when we actually analyzed it we were actually getting a lower up there in quite a few

of our high-performing territories mainly because it was great because they provide you with a lot more revenue when when users perform the actions but of course the majority of waffles they they give out hard currency which means which means if someone does a particular action or does something called Amazon to complete an aweful they're gonna get a lot of hard currency for that so what we then when it done is we in the in the countries where we we noticed the the drop we restricted the offer water only appear after X amount of days so we've experimented with how many days that is so we can so we make sure that people that want to purchase I EPS they don't get put off by just using the offer wall which seems to have been a good balance for us because we're we we haven't damaged our up there anymore in fact we've increased it because we introduced the offer war at the right time great

thanks guys so moving on to the next question Mariana this kind of leads leads to the point that you were mentioning earlier so I asked everyone do you use third-party mediation or do you run an in-house solution you mentioned earlier that you guys had an in-house solution so currently are you guys still using that in-house solution or are you using a third-party mediator Oh currently we're using a third-party solution because these guys they really know what what they do and where game developers not add mediation developers right probably we should leave that to specialists who know their stuff so the idea is to leave it to the experts you guys don't want to spend resources on kind of building your own exactly well after that experiment that when I was 25 Esther case we actually decided to work on our own solution that is going to be I'm

just going to hold all these air at the case on a single server and then just to to push the ads just stream the ads to choose an app from the server we spent two years building that we pretty much said it in that we used that solution for a couple of more years and was successful assaulted and now we just leave the job for the specific specialist to do great anyone else have anything sure so again back in our early days we started to integrated one two three advertising SDKs and we put manual waterfall as simple like is there an add variable yes/no and if not what a fault with the next one and just doing that simple and basic and stupid as it sounds was already a lot of work in terms of maintenance of those SDKs for each new

mo specifically as iOS h9 came Agfa a new GID change Roth well a lot of hustle and when you were team which is like 10 people making a game or 2030 people like us now you don't really want to devote a lot of your Monday development power to doing such stupid tasks as updating those SDK data so about three years ago we took the decisions or let's stop that just move into our mediation live use solution made by engineers dedicated to the job that understand also all the algorithms are going to put to maximize the revenue you can make out of it and so far it's been a very wise decision for us so getting into some of the details you

know being on the on the on the ad service and platform side of things what I've heard from a lot of partners is that they're using CPM floors and putting partners in multiple times into their waterfall you guys want to comment on whether you guys are using CPM floors have you has anyone experimented with it what's the you know the good in the bad I know we don't basically since we implemented mediation and because of the size of our studio we kind of became lazy on looking at how to tweak these things and I think until a certain company size where you don't have a person in charge of managing that full-time or until you have such an audience of dozen of minion oh if ma you that every single tweak could turn into six figure like four to six figures increase of revenue it doesn't make sense to spend your time on that there's

so many other things as a game developer you need to handle from production to marketing currency management you way whatever name it right for us it's not being focused yet I I think on this on this topic on similar topic is it's important to go out there and talk to these ad companies because they're we meet we meet we meet a lot of devs we meet a lot of des we've successful games and they they think I'll tapped I won't talk to us because you know we're we're not super sale or not Rovio or we're not King but these companies are they're that they're screaming out for like exclusivity deals and guaranteed CPM deals and if you if you if you talk to them about giving them like top of the waterfall and a mediation platform or some makes utility deals their guarantee you some CPM especially in some territories where there's some territories for instance in one of our games in South America where in-app purchases isn't particularly great but

it's very much a driven and they're the territories where we want to get some some decent CPMs so it was okay we'll give you a certificate wired for free mum's but give us a good EC CPM in some of these South American territories that really do move the needle in in terms of our revenue yes and I especially if you have many items many ad placements you can find yourself using a lot of time in just putting manually their floors in place and we have decided to work with the partners who will take care of this for us because that's their job so why not to be smart and let the mediation do its job so a quick question just to you know give everyone a baseline for your top titles how many how many ad monetization SDKs do you guys do you guys actually integrate currently it's only one

because it is a mediation network does that count so so you you have one mediation Network and you're running like they're like at their exchange yeah for exam an okay it's still more than six for us we have the mediation and I will not count all the other networks inside but then along side we have over walls we have survey ads and we are testing a few format as well with some partners so still yeah we have a few SDKs integrated but we haven't decide any fixed amount of SDKs of course we want to avoid having too many of them but we are always open-minded because the reality is that you have to test what works so maybe first tip is to start with server to server integration or attack or and then move forward with SDK integration we in the media as we

use we we put in as many of the wrappers for the for the air networks as we can really because you never know we're more than they're going to call up and say hey can we can we do a deal war or or can we can we put you second fur placement research on the water hall so as long as we have it set up that the disadvantage of that is that you constantly get an updates for rappers and that you need to you need to always update but having them at least in there means that you're ready to pounce on anything that does actually come out and you can you can go and grab them offers when they appear one of the things that we've seen recently is that you know a couple years ago I thought interstitials were dead we've seen you know interstitials make a big comeback recently especially in the in the in the hyper casual space are are you guys using interstitials in your in your

titles what kind of sea PM's and stuff are you guys seeing today we do use the interstitial whenever the flow inside the game experience makes sense so if it's a linear if it's a nonlinear game where you never have a screen that interrupts the gameplay don't put interstitial it's horrible in terms of user experience but let's say if it's a game based on level and transition from one world to another or just the game over screen here it could make more sense yeah I've been recently converted again for instace issues I was very much against them as a strong word but had too many bad experiences with games where where they just appear and accidentally tap on an ad and he takes me to the App Store on a lot right I'm just a league in this app now but the important there we release a new release a hyper casual game and it's been interesting actually been very successful but just the important thing just similar sorts been said here is it

they just need to be predictable the player needs to know when they're going to actually appear so they can get ready for it from an experience point of view because if an ad ever surprises the player and an ad appears that the player wasn't expecting it to appear then it's just gonna you're just going to damage your attention and she's going to make players delete delete the app and and you can get some decent CPM story they can't give you a nice boost but it's just it's just critical how you implement them because we've rewarded ads obviously it's a player interaction a player is deciding to watch an ad where it's less so obviously with an institutional all right so I think we're running out of time here so maybe you will will the next speaker isn't actually going to be able to make it okay so we have more time if you want to take it otherwise well we have a couple more questions

sure so will will run through the last last few questions here maybe if you guys could share like just a one piece of advice that you would give to a dev that they can do today to increase revenue yeah I could kind of continue what you said so it's all about how you implement the ad placements I have seen if those ad placements are properly thought those are part of your monetization strategy and they fit the user flow also the revenue for a CPM levels are going to be higher so think about your monetization strategy think about your game how the ads feed your game and it's not just a bad thing to have it there just to make some money it should be an entity and pick two partners correctly so a lot of testing and analytics yes I'm here so if you manage to make the the advertisement as it is as a friend of your players when they not only get the reward but it also helps them prove it helps to also back

to the previous question about changes to shows so when you have a natural pause in the user flow it is absolutely okay to use interstitial at that point because you're not interrupting the session and also you give you give you a player like 30 seconds to to rest a little bit to overseeing what they have done in the game for the during this session and etc so if if that if as our integrated the way that they're they look natural in the in the gaming process in the gaming session then yeah you get a higher retention and higher CPM that's pretty office for us the one tip is I don't think just one ad network fits everything no matter the format I've being rewarded just usual

banners so what you need to do is look at your analytics and most specifically where's your audience in which countries or regions of the world and do you have fill rates on your ad network for this audience because often wise in games we have many downloads in those breaks country like Brazil India China and it could be actually a lot of impression and you would serve almost zero impressions to them and it's a lot of money out of the table so it's very easy to increase that by talking them to our network who have specialized and have more inventory in those territory and it's one of the thing I would ask and most typically when they write you we have inventory in China and not all of them do some well they should be honest about that yeah I think the before when

you start working out the economy game and where your revenue is gonna come from trying to establish where it's very finger in the air but trying to establish where your IP revenue and where your ad revenue where you think the splits gonna be and then try and incorporate that until into the into the game play so a great example of is is Idol clickers now many Idol clickers they have every free hour every four hours watching ads and it doubles your revenue for the next four hours and then what you have there is you have not only do you have like a retention return mechanic that players feel like they're losing out if they don't come in and watch the ad because they think that for the next four hours there's a wedding game there currency I'm going to lose so so make it a reason for players to have to come in on watch an ad so that will not only increase your app revenues but that will hopefully drive your your sessions and your retention as well and maybe for for developers that are brand new to ad monetization you know do you guys have a

piece of advice of like how do you kind of dip your toe into this world of making money with ads you know think back to when you guys were first starting out so we're a mobile game company and often we only talk to people in a mobile game space in terms of provider partners etc and it's almost a closed ecosystem like the people the advertising people in mobile game space they are going to advertise about other mobile games and sometimes you think about it and if they do I really want to have my players see an ad for potentially very tempting game and then leave mine so on our side we've been exploring a little bit out and trying to find our networks that serve like a branded ad about like coca-cola our cars whatever CPMs could be lower but it's still interesting revenue and it's a trade between revenue and retention so

the stage of advertisers market now is there are so many networks so many solutions and all of them are are saying that you should integrate our network and you will live happily ever after but it is like the same thing when you give a some sophisticated tool or even a hammer to a monkey and monkey has no idea how to use the thing so this is the same so all there all the solutions that market offers these are tools that we have to know how to use and there is no one-size-fits-all model because all games are different you use the flow is different your game design economics balance is different experiment it is the only way to figure out what what works for your particular

game is to run a series of experiments with different models and see you you know what works so easy yeah I totally agree and if your plan is to monetize with ads and you're about to launch a game make sure the ads are introduced already in the beginning so that us do not come as a surprise for the players so already get used to the ads and make sure that those are kind of I'm a fan of rewarded any kind of rewarded placements so those rewarded placements in the best case Tenorio will also increase retention rates use use your soft launch wound if you're a hyper casual game if you're if you're if you're a game that you think is gonna be more than 50% of your revenue is gonna going to come from ads particular events in there just stick loads of ads that you're going to get refused to say and there's too many ads in the game just because it's gonna be easier for you to start taking those out and trying to find a sweet spot in soft launch rather than

have it the other way round where you find that you haven't got enough ads in there and then you start introducing ads and everyone's like oh this game used to be really fun but now it's just full of ads so use your sophomore as well and and just kind of just go go backwards a little bit so start with the maximum amount of ads and then start to scale back when you required yeah you never know when the users start coming in and when things are starting to ramp up so you're not gonna waste any business opportunity if you have ads already in place great thanks guys I'm gonna skip that last one and just kind of move to questions since we have these four great panelists does anyone have any questions for them it feels we got a recording it's much easier if we got the question on the recording as well thank you I just have a quick question about offer walls imagined it quickly how it can influence the game well for negative and positive way I'm currently writing our theses about monetization of games and we are

on right currently writing about just offer walls but do you know any behind the technical part of the game how much does it actually benefit than just having regular ads in it in there instead or game well that usually Rafah walls is two things one on one it's usually for hard currency so it's the it's the currency that can be purchased with in-app purchases but also it can be a high quantity as well so as I said that you may get an item this is by enamels by an Amazon voucher or buy from this store but they give you a thousand gold whereas a regular video ad will only give you one gold and it's that kind of even if you've got the exchange rate for that set up correctly it's that kind of of item that can't damage the economy because it it damages the repeat purchase rate or it damages the average revenue per player rate and it's just they're the kind of things that you've got to be careful of is because there's a there's high high quantities of items

can be can be gained from some of them do you feel like the conversion rate should be hidden or with invisible Germany it is it's usually just developer face and I made a plaque and try and work it out of course but it's it's it's just you just need to always keep an eye on it just to make sure you're not cannibalizing your your revenue monkeys how much of this is specific to the game or are there enough general lessons that we can apply I mean that that sounds like a fairly general lesson does that apply to all games and I'd love to know what you guys think about how generic these lessons are versus how specifically are the games well I could just bring out an example of a solution that would well for zoo craft game so when we integrated visual video has rewarded video ads in the game we were

trying to put it as a natural thing that people would like to have there so we developed a new character a new visitor who comes to a zoo and he is a filmmaker and he asked you to check out his latest movie and this process is so naturally integrated in the game because there are other visitors who have other quests and they give such a rubles for for this and actually our players they just love this filmmaker and we set the cap of only 5 ads for 4 hours I guess so or 5 hours six hours I don't actually remember what the number was in the beginning but players that they would process struggling like on Facebook and all the social networks so why the filmmaker is not coming I want a filmmaker yeah

absolutely I think all that I find fascinating particularly as well I think what you're touching on there is another type of kind of ad format which hasn't worked typically the kind of something we used native for different things but in my case when I first came across the word native ads it was all about things like the pizza box or the can of coke and things like that and that sounds to me like you're kind of knew of your binding benefit from that kind of experience but that sounds very very much about the one game it would work in rather than general we also have city builders more strictly speaking he thinking about Snoopy town in our case so a little bit like you do we did it before but not with a character we just had a movie sign like theater movie sign in the game that showed like when you tap on it is going to play a video ads but the way we

did it it was very passive it was just another shortcut instead of going to the edge the UI you go you tap on the building inside the game and sometimes you tap and you don't know if that's a video so about six months ago we added some little tweak just like a green checkmark that appears every time there's an ADD and that just different may be huge difference like people didn't end it up like ten times and sometimes they say they've right was hey I didn't get the green check for the past ten minutes what's going on so maybe in your case you just maybe need to notify when it's the character is coming and that will solve your I think I think compass point West is something very similar I think a truck comes in and they're basically you can then click on that together so maybe I maybe I'm going wrong the generic thing is the fact that you can make something feel embedded in the game and

maybe that's the kind of wider point I was trying to sort of make is that there are you know to your monkey question that there are lots of things that we have to experiment even when we told these wonderful techniques that other games are using it's how they apply to our game that still has to be worked out is that a fair yeah I think I think one of the the common themes was just giving a lot of thought beforehand on how you're gonna be integrating these ads or the ad experience into each individual game because each each game is different and you know you do need to experiment and really have a thoughtful process when you're designing the game on how to put the ads on I think in the past when a lot of developers think last-minute hey I want to do some ad monetization they kind of just tack it on and it feels tacked on and it obviously does not succeed that's yeah I tried to stop one of my clients from doing that and I failed in the game so

thank you all for your insights I have a question about relevance of ads and whether you have any advice or strategies on making sure the relevant ads are being shown to your audience I guess especially important for branded ads when it comes to negotiating with the different networks the best ways of knowing who your audience actually is or confirming that with the data that you collect or what you can collect I think it's something that's more in the expertise of network and the up mediation partners and in to our ends as a developer unless you're rather big company like Zynga Ubisoft order manage themselves inventory what I know what I understand as a game the about how our networks

work is that they are going to try to show you with the ads that have the highest eCPM or CPI for you and the way it's being determined is because people tend to click more on or add or convert more so Szell's is going to be related like no advertiser unless they're really stupid or want to push something hard he's going to pay more for placement in your heart if it's not relevant or going to convert better so right so maybe I can jump in here since I I work for a ad network that focuses purely on brands the way we target is basically looking at you know the brand campaigns that we're running whether it's McDonald's or Pepsi or Toyota and looking at you know the games that that we work with and trying to align the audience of the game to the audience that our brand

advertiser is trying to trying to reach there's a the campaigns kind of like go through a whole spectrum there's certain campaigns where brand advertisers are purely looking for reach so they're just looking for millions and millions of completed views in those cases you know those campaigns can run virtually anywhere in any game and then there's other at the other end of the spectrum certain brand advertisers will say I'm running this for a brand new product that I'm launching and it's specific I want it specifically targeted to women that are of this age group and like Sebastian was saying a lot of that data is stuff that we have and we are targeting based on based on you know first party data that were collecting and one point also that at the moment we are heavily focusing on retention so we need to decide what is important for you at that point so is it showing relevant ads for other relevant

audience and they keep coming back because they feel that they get accused experience or is it about just getting the best money out of the networks and brands so really need to consider the trade alright great so let's wrap everything up thank you for the panelists for your great insights thanks everyone have a great day dye your orange thank you [Applause] [Music]