What Are Rewarded Ads? A Complete Guide for Mobile Game Developers

first Ro female 2029 mhm best practice is not to stop this campaign it's to adjust the bids correct hey everyone this is Roman from tangon welcome to another episode of Roi one1 today we'll talk about rewarded ads and most importantly about the best practices when running rewarded ads we have a special guest milky from edel milky how is it going hi Roman and hi everyone very happy to be here yeah Ed team has prepared some slides for us so we'll jump right into them and start discussing boom here is our slides cool really cool um yeah hi everyone I'm mil a senior Partnerships manager at ago um

I've been in attech industry for quite some time now almost 10 years and uh have had experience working with the some of the global gaming companies in Mobile and I'm continuing that Journey with ago um ago is an adtech company offering uh mobile advertising and app mization Solutions and some of which actually is a is a shared or a common partner with tenen so we're recently recognized to be in the top 10 Global ad networks so we are most known for our rewarded ad format playtime and we are now also entering the programmatic advertising scene so um today we'll explore as you said uh rewarded advertising starting with what it is um why it matters and uh the key strategies for success in this space and we'll also be sharing real life examples um and

offering basically practical tips for making this ad solution work for our marketers so I hope everyone uh stays with us until the end of the session for sure for sure this is what our audience love like practical stuff practical tips yeah yeah but here is a good start uh the theory what is rewarded at yep um so yeah for uh the people who are unfamiliar and actually also the famili people in in essence uh rewarded ad it's it's an ad format that provide the users with an incentive such as in-game currency or items in exchange for uh engaging with the ad so this form of advertising enhances uh the user experience by offering them uh tangible rewards so um you can see here an example of of the user Journey on the uh

playtime rewarded ads where uh playtime is uh directly integrated with uh our Publishers and once the user decides to interact with uh playtime they will be presented with a short list of uh personalized gaming offers so once they download and uh start playing uh they will earn rewards from time spent or even levels achieved and they earn rewards for which app the original app that where they saw the ad or the new one correct uh so they earn rewards from the uh the publisher app yes okay got it but wait milky the offer walls were like since forever available and now there are no offer walls at least no one is talking about themselves as offeres but there are a lot of companies that are rewarded that what's the difference uh that's a very good question so I believe that off

offer walls are one of AD formats offering the rewarded advertising so offer walls typically use uh CPA um like onetime reward or CPE which is a multi- rewards uh models so uh they they offer both gaming and non-gaming options uh with hundreds of um offers available however uh targeting is limited to Geo and Source data with within uh with very minimal uh personalization so some offer walls uh enable time rewarding but it's done based on advertisers uh postbacks so it works as um it works the same as events basically so um playtime as I mentioned is another uh uh is is another available rewarded ad format so it's allowing time tracking based on first

party data so the users uh device so this makes the rewarding more stable and um playtime operates on CPI a cost per insall model um it is also centered around gaming and offers more uh personalized ads with um Advanced targeting through opin uh so this is fully compliant with gdpr as well and uh that is what um ad is offering so the difference so there is no difference between an offer wall and rewarded ads I believe that rewarded ads are um uh can be seen inside an offer wall oh okay gotta but again let's uh I got the the idea but I I'm asking this question all of the time of the camera but just wanted to do it like for this recording so I'm getting uh some sort of incentive to play another app

right as a user but now as an Advertiser why would I pay for such users they have uh not a lot of motivation to play my game or do they on the advertiser side you mean yeah I mean they do because uh so this is uh what we're going to go through today uh like what is the motivation for them to to to uh basically engage in the game right so they will uh the motivation there is basically to earn more rewards on uh the original or the the the publisher app where they get incentives basically of either so the the most popular or the most common uh publisher in this rewarded space are playter apps if you're familiar with them um so we do have some gaming but uh majority would be Play Turn apps because these are uh consumer based uh kind of

audience so they come the motivation there is for them to earn rewards that they can exchange um uh outside of the outside of the app gotcha um then we can go through the slides and I'll see if anything looks interesting yeah let's go forward yeah so um yeah so uh why it's uh uh important um or or why rewarded right why why is it becoming more popular uh these days so based on our uh partner testimonials those who have uh have had uh success in uh playtime rewarded they consistently highlight the value of uh deeper engagement and higher user interaction so additionally um we have

case that have seen faster returns with uh profitability to achieve in as little as 7 to 14 days so this is substantially quicker than a traditional ad channel so um when uh discussing the value of rewarded adver advertising it's also especially important to consider its impact on iOS as one uh partner noted it's easier to track users and gain a clear understanding of uh Real Performance there was actually a case study from Unity that highlights uh the additional value of rewarded traffic so um uh few of the Highlight would be higher engagement so they have found that players are four to nine times actually that's a quite High number uh more likely to make an app purchase um after they engage with a rewarded ads and on top of that of course uh we're

considering better you user experience so the user are actively uh choose to engage because uh rewarded ad is a type of a non-intrusive ad so leading to a higher satisfaction and uh better retention yeah that's what I also heard from people in the space that like they actually not all of the users are there only for the rewards the gamer so they kind of get into the game and they kind of enjoy it and then they don't really have a reason to leave because they like it they they yeah they're fooked yeah that's that's yeah yeah and I heard this both from vendors and advertisers so now advertisers really love those rewarded ads true a lot of companies that are offering that um any other reason why I rewarded as popular

nowadays um I think in my experience uh you mentioned it earlier right rewarded ads have been in the space for for quite some time now but recently uh the evolving iOS Market has pushed um marketers to test and adapt new Solutions so this is revealing the true value of uh rewarded ads additionally uh rewarded solution have evolved from one off rewards um I think you mentioned this earlier as well so they've evolved from oneoff rewards to deeper engagement funnels which uh playtime was unique with from from the very beginning got it yeah let's see what do we have next yep so yeah uh playtime um uh as I mentioned uh is a rewarded solution and it comes with two main campaign types for uh for us so uh we have time based campaign so this rewards

uh users for the amount of time they spend playing and um event-based campaign here uh the users are rewarded for completing a a specific task for an achievements in the game um I think you mentioned earlier about like the motivation right so let's take a closer look at why uh different rewarding models um are essential so the reason is very simple um every player is different and uh players have uh this varied motivations when engaging with a game and by recognizing these differences you can tailor the rewards for a Maximum Impact so at AO we categorize them into two different um uh groups so we one would be the explorer who prefers time based rewards for longer engagement um uh I think this was

uh what you mentioned earlier where they kind of are hooked to the game already and the Achievers who respond better to event Pace rewards tied to um in-game events so so would I run let's pause here would I run both of these companions simultaneously let's talk about the best practices what would you recommend so the answer is yes um because uh having uh testing them both at the same time uh will will give us like a wider Target I think uh as as straightforward as it is it also gives us um it also gives the user more options to um to basically engage would they want to go you know would they want to earn the rewards based on time span or would they want to earn the rewards based on achieving a certain level got it got it um let's dive deep I saw Prim most so yeah um so I wanted to

sorry I wanted to uh dive uh deeper into each of the campaign types so on on Time based campaign um adil's algorithm manages timebase the the timebase rewarding logic so we're giving users just enough rewards for uh the time they spent in the game to keeping them engaged you know without making rewards their their sole Focus so for this campaign type we um allow our models to calculate the rewards based on the users's behavior and on the other hand um advertisers can customize reward moments with uh key points in their app gameplay so this could be levels achieve uh completed task or any other uh specific achievements so compared to timebase reward system there's more flexibility to tailor the reward based on how far the users get to the game

encouraging them to reach um higher levels in exchange for higher rewards so let's say I'm a small Indie developer let's say I'm a founder of such company I don't have a UA team I'm running all my compaigns by myself I would assume that I would rather run a Time based campaign because it will do everything for me is it accurate um it really depends so uh right now we have a lot of these cases um at the moment but the answer really is it depends on your goal so it depends on how small is small right in in my experience for partners with conservative resources we we still try to recommend testing it both both initially and decide down the line which

format to keep or is is timebase working than better than event base there are also cases where you know there are again it it it it it it's different how we Define small because some smaller advertisers don't have the capability to track um inapp um events so of course in that case where events are not available we then go directly for time base okay got you but okay let's use budget as a differentiator what is the meaning of budget here so there actually is um no uh exact numbers um in in our case um I'm going to go through it real quick later for for some tips but basically there are few factors that we consider uh in terms of before we can Define the budget so there actually isn't we usually

recommend of course the in in rewarded and specific the testing period is um a little bit longer than a normal channel so um of course the the total budget should be enough to to be able to gain enough data to optimize from so yeah again there is a there are different factors that we need to consider before we can decide for for a testing budget would the advertiser kind of understand when it's algorithm learned so we pass this learning phase or how would the advertiser know that the learning phase is over um so I think in in in any case uh we try to run the campaigns for a minimum of two weeks I think it also it also depends so there are apps so for games that are for example casual or um

in a base campaigns they have uh longer cohorts you know uh they try they they see profitability in like D60 D90 um uh cohorts uh so for this ones of course the learning period is um doesn't stop at like 14 days right so for hyper casual games for example I think you can already see a stable result after 14 days so in in our experience we try to run the campaigns um minimum of 14 days and try to uh generate as much data as we can within that time period and start uh optimizing the campaigns uh within that after that sorry super super yeah this is what what basically advertisers need yeah uh just just to know some like of course it always depends but just to set some some like numb some goals and give some understanding okay let's see

let's see what else do they have um so so that's the event based campaign for you and um for advertisers who are wondering which events to use uh particularly for event based campaign we typically recommend uh starting with five to 10 events so balancing both uh early and uh deeper events or deeper Milestone so the first event should aim for at Le at Le 80% of uh user completion rate while the final event should Target around 2 to five% of completion rate so this is to ensure a natural progression of uh engagement um yeah so I think uh this is also a very interesting topic for um any UA or marketers out there so for advertisers aiming to scale their UA effort efforts um on rewarded space it's

essential to partner with providers offering uh Global traffic so at AO we typically categorize our markets into uh the top markets the core and uh the active tier So based in my experience uh you can see you know sort of similar strategies among advertisers to categorize um their markets into three different tiers so uh tier one for example is a is a good starting point because um markets just as us of course Germany France UK Japan and Korea uh these are ideal for starting tests as they often um uh deliver strong roas in uh tier two on the other hand uh is a market that offers a solid uh return and AD spend and good volumes but also less competition and of course last but not the least uh

including APAC and the rest of the world um this is a this is a geo where it's great for um High volumes with lower CPI uh comined with higher retention rates and of course minimal competition so what was a split let's just repeat the budget split I think you had it on the first slide here oh yeah yep so it's 70% Tier 1 70% tier 2 20 tier three 10 yes right so um basically this is uh this is the available traffic uh for ago so of course majority of our traffic is still coming from tier one but we also have the cor markets in tier two which makes up 20% of our traffic and uh for active markets like APAC and rest of the world um we have at least 10% overall okay and do you recommend to

mix those up or it's like compain per tier campaign per country or uh yes um so basically uh us we always just have us as as a separate campaign right but for the rest of it uh we have a feature where you can um have this uh the uh within uh one campaign so I think that's the um I think that's the that's one feature that I wanted to highlight because then if you see the performance of each sort of GEOS in one campaign and you want to you see like one campaign or one go is performing better than the other you can always take that um go out create a new campaign and you know have a higher bidding or you can actually do it in inside the same campaign so um this is where uh the granular bidding comes into play where we optimize the Performance Based on you know what performance we

see in in each tier or in each go got it got it so um so yeah I think uh we're going into one of the most exciting part which is uh best practices so um I think uh when setting up campaigns um I wanted to to share uh some tips uh to keep in mind and um in this guide uh here are some key factors to consider when setting up a test campaign uh for for your app so start by of course as we just mentioned start by focusing on your top performing markets and uh we suggest targeting uh broader demographics to um basically gather the data and uh and fine-tune as the campaign progress so you can also considering excluding you know the non-compatible devices at the beginning

and uh the same goes for uh OS I wanted to highlight as well the lookalike audiences so I think lastly that you should consider looking or adding a lookalike audience as part of an additional campaign so this will help you reach you know potential users who share similar characteristics with uh with your existing audience so um another um uh going back to your question earlier about test budget as I mentioned there are uh several factors that we consider uh one of which of course is type of game uh that you want to promote again you will not have the same budget for uh for a casual game uh versus an RPG game um so it's important to keep that in mind uh we also um look into the monetization mix so what's the percentage between um you know uh the

revenue from ads and you know the revenue from from purchase and uh it also the the test budget will also depends on how many countries you want to Target right at the beginning and um as well as the uh the granular targeting that you wanted to test out at the very beginning as well and of course most importantly um the kpis uh where you know of course an aggressive kpis would require um you know a certain amount of budget um some of the tips that we wanted to uh share today as well is always um for a rewarded networks you always want to aim bid uh or or to bid as high as possible because you want to be competitive and make sure that your ad reaches you know the best placement so this is um again so when uh you know when having the when

we're when we're talking about the budgets um when we're talking about the budgets we of course need to uh consider that if we have higher bids and higher cpis then we'll need a uh higher budgets and if cpis are lower then we can start at a lower uh tier of uh budget um so we aim to of course uh gather between 150 and 200 installs per campaign daily and in terms of optimization we continuously um optimize by adjusting the bids uh splitting the age group and adjusting sources based on performance nice so yeah so I actually wanted to quickly as I promised at the beginning of this we wanted to give you a real life examples of uh of the success that we've had so I wanted to quickly share a case study from one of our uh leading

match re puzzle games um and we run the test in the US uh targeting females uh aged 20 to 99 and Os set at a 10 and higher so the bid was set initially at $8 with approximately 800 installs uh per day so going into the first week um uh going into the first week of the campaign we started adjusting bids based on uh AG group as well as uh as we move forward we try to optimize sources as we progress so here uh we see that the age group between 20 to 29 uh was behind the D7 uh Target or um so we started to optimize it so we lower down the bids and based on this performance um uh as opposed to just you know excluding it completely we we went into just

optimizing the bids the result of this was an improvement to the RAS um overall so as you can see also the other age group um while they already have positive results by um by trying a much more competitive bids uh it basically increas or you know it it delivered a higher returns of at least 32% for the best per performing age group so you can see the row has to be consistently um improving after this adjustment so this goes to shows how um uh how important to have proper bids so we can maximize the performance for all types of users and uh this kind of granular optimization you can uh expect from a playtime rewarded ads let's go to the previous slide just so I understand

it um so the first one uh first female 2029 MH best practice is not to stop this campaign it's to adjust the bids correct got it yeah so that that has always been a best practice and this is just an example this also applies to publisher uh bidding optimization as well as other targeting that we can do so the best practice is to not stop it completely but rather optimize the bids especially when we are on the testing phase of the campaign and you said here you lowered the bit right so it can be is lowering or going higher correct correct okay okay yeah how do you know how would you know would you lower or increase ah of course so so yeah so see see for for example if you have of

course if we see that um within this age group The this D7 is already uh almost 20% behind the goal and and and there when we see a negative we'll just always try to decrease it by first we try to do it incrementally but like it's say for example if the if the negative is I don't know like 50 70% of course we'll decrease it even further so at the beginning depending on the performance we try to decrease it between 10 20 30% um and same for increasing it we Tred to increase it incrementally as well as opposed to you know jumping um or increasing it like at at a very high uh um stage okay this is yeah this is very good and the next slide please uh at one of the previous slides you had something with a s forces and now you don't have

it what what happened here what was the reason for a second um I think uh what we wanted to do here is uh just to focus more on the age group um but we can also talk about the um sources sources is where the ad is uh displayed the Publishers correct correct so so basically in terms of optimizing the sources it it's the same right so when we see the performance uh to be working well in Publisher a b or c we then try to increase the bids there to make sure that we're maximizing you know the results from that particular publisher and of course vice versa if the performance is not working well for a certain publisher then we try to decrease the bids as um the performance suggest got it and how do you do this

like do you go to your account manager or yes uh that's a good question so uh this is a uh done through our uh internal dashboard so usually our account managers will or our demand growth Partners uh go to our um advertisers uh sometimes very proactively and say hey we see that um one of our Publishers is working really well they want to increase the bid so we do it on our side so at the moment we are our our platform is co-manage so it means our um advertisers have an access to it but also we have uh dedicated account managers who will make suggestion based on uh Based on data to basically change or optimize or fine tune anything that we need to um uh update within within the campaigns to

ensure that we're reaching the goals got it okay cool cool cool cool uh yeah let's see what else do we have yeah so so yeah so we talk about like the the importance of um uh we talk about the importance of being able to you know manage the bids and align it based on the per performs of each user and uh there was actually we wanted to share H success story is also an example of taking advantage of our uh granular bidding strategy so H um I think everyone's familiar is a hyper and hybrid casual studio with a lot of AD Revenue heavy apps within their portfolio so the challenge is which I think is very common for this type of of games is acquiring high quality users at

a lower cost so the solution was um our bidding strategy coupled with uh granular targeting we aligned the bids based on each users uh user segment's performance so in um in summary uh their kpi were overachieved by 130% and uh the initial performance was actually very promising that within the first 30 days they launch most of their titles which is I think around 30 games so I think um yeah this is a a very um yeah yeah yeah so this is a a very successful story that we have um being able to use uh our our first party data to make this kind of adjustment was uh substantial for hom um so yeah uh I think in any UA topic which I think you already have had a lot but uh creatives uh will always

come to play so and I wanted to uh share a little bit of um what we do in terms of creatives um on the on the rewarded side so the question is that does creative matter on uh on on a format such as uh playtime so what what we can see is that on play time we consider the users's mindset uh is similar to when they enter you know an app store you know a Google Store uh where they see um offers but like fewer apps to choose from or download so this mindset um this mindset uh with this mindset the amount of rewards as well as the placement of the app impacts their decision to engage um to engage with an app while the the creatives become secondary so this is uh this is actually

what I mentioned earlier that having a competitive bids will always make sure that your placement is always you know at at a good uh ranking so and uh besides that I on on our end we still of course wanted to share some few tips on creatives on how they work on particularly for rewarded ads so number one of course uh we should avoid uh fake ads that will you know will misrepresent the game and on our side uh video uh using video ads converts much better and um localization is also one of the key part so to ensure that your ads are localized to the language of your uh target audience because we use a lot of descriptions in especially for event based campaign for example where we get give them instruction on you know what to what to

do like I don't know complete level five to earn this much reward and uh as for the frequency we wanted to um aim to update the creatives at least once every one to two months and and yeah so I think that that's it for us for uh the creatives for let's go to the previous one for the time based um can I not upload the creative at all if I'm doing time based campaign and or should I just not care much I no you can I mean we still have we need to uh that's the that's the thing so we still need to have the creatives I think the the goal um for this slide is basically you know what is the impact of the creatives overall in terms of performance okay and you emphasized on time based so for the event base is it

different it's the same it's the same yeah the same concept got it okay clear cool um so so yeah I think uh for for AO what's next for for AO in particular uh we wanted to get our partners excited for our self-served dashboard um which is coming out in October with the for for our our live partners and soon after for new ones as well and we are also uh in a final stage of developing our automated uh roas driven optimization solution so I think we can expect that in Q4 awesome so yeah um I think in conclusion uh playtime rewarded ads with all its features that I just mentioned um it is a powerful tool to drive higher engagement um improve roas as well as retention but

only you know a systemic approach of testing will ensure uh that you can fully leverage this platform to to drive you know your your game success and yeah if you have any questions uh feel free to reach out so thank you so much milk this has a lot of good stuff like I really like the slides um uh give us a like if you like it too uh subscribe of course if you have questions you can also leave them in the comment we'll ask milky and the team uh to answer them um then have a good one and until the next one see you thank you so much Roman and see you again on the next one yeah cheers [Music]