💰 You Hit $1,000/Day in Ad Revenue. Now Here Are the 5 Tricks Ad Networks hope you NEVER Learn

I've actually seen that makes sense is for some large-scale apps that have a big user cohort of ECPMs for impressions that are above $300 because then essentially this percentage increase that you can get by spacing ads out an hour or two are actually worth it because you're getting maybe 10 or 20% higher revenue from these impressions after that. So, if you're showing high imp though, basically know that they decrease in value. Just keep an eye on this and know about it.
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Okay, real talk before we start. This episode is brought to you by Potensic and if you're a mobile game publisher tired of leaving money on the table, then listen up. Potensic is a premium ad network built by people who have actually been on both sides of this industry, game publishers, agencies, successful exits. So, they get it. Here's the thing. Potensic has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. It's not programmatic. It's direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs, no middleman tax. And they handle everything with their in-house team in terms of the creatives.

Plus, they've partnered with playable maker, Vungle. So, they will take brands' YouTube videos or static images and actually turn them into playable ads or rewarded video. Proper interactive format built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming native creative, publishers are getting a higher CPMs. Everyone wins. Head to potentials.com to get started or check their creative in the link in the show notes. Thank you very much Potentials for sponsoring this episode.
Hello everyone and welcome to a special ad monetization episode of the two and a half gamers podcast. So, today it's me recording a episode all alone from the capital of mobile gaming right now, which is Istanbul. I'm here for our event with Latin America and Google and also for Mobile Dictum, but also before going to all those events, I thought I would want to record a short solo episode on ad monetization. And this

episode I'm particularly keen for because essentially I've made a lot of content on you for you publishers that are just getting started because there's so little stuff about basics. But here I want to talk about yeah, a bit more advanced tactics for what you should kind of think about and how you should set up your ad monetization on mobile after you're earning a thousand dollars a day. So, it's still a big milestone to get to, but once you get there, there's actually quite a lot you can do and more tricks that you need to be aware of to actually grow your revenue significantly more. So, I'm going to rant for about 15-20 minutes about how to think about this. But the most important thing to remember when you're actually earning around a thousand or more dollars a day is that ad monetization really stacks on top of itself, right? So, now basically you've gotten to the point of earning a thousand a day that you can actually do stuff that didn't make sense before because if you think

about it, if you do something that increases your ad revenue by two or three percent, if it's a thousand dollars a day, it's a couple of bucks a day, like ten, twenty dollars a day, right? But, if you're doing that when you're a hundred dollars a day, it's not really worth it. So, kind of your what actually becomes worth doing with your time is actually quite uh different from when you're smaller. So, the first things first. So, which networks should I be working with? So, if you're earning a thousand dollars a day, I would genuinely recommend that you work with at least six or seven of the main ten ad networks. Right now, in order, uh no particular order, I can tell you on Android, uh the largest networks is AppLovin, Meta, [clears throat] Google, Unity, Mintegral, InMobi, Digital Turbine, and Pangle, and Moloco. Liftoff is also quite good for that. iOS, AppLovin, Unity, Moloco, Mintegral, Pangle, Liftoff, Meta, Google, BidMachine, InMobi. Those are the main

networks that are quite good to work with. You should genuinely work with kind of seven of those if you're a thousand dollars a day, and if you're above three thousand a day, I'd say you need to probably work with all of them because then you cover your basis, and then you just need to add the adapters, and then you're also bidding and getting inventory from these networks. Genuinely adding a good network usually boosts your ad revenue by about five to ten percent. So, if you're earning a thousand dollars a day, that's another hundred dollars a day or fifty dollars a day, depending on the network. How I usually think about ads.txt files when you get to this. So, if you haven't been covering or looking at our any of our other content, essentially ads.txt files are these web pages that you have to list on your on your on your website. So, how it works is that in order for networks, what people mistake to do is like they assume that it's like a beer tap that you just plug it in and everyone gets the equal amount of

demand. That's not true because networks bid and do essentially what's the most profitable for them, right? So, what they can also do is essentially sell out because they own the relationship with you as a publisher. They can actually sell out their plumbing or basically the SDK connection they have with publishers to resellers. And essentially, what they can do is they pay 30 40 on margin to basically be able to target your users. And essentially, for some networks, direct traffic, for example, I would probably assume that any network that has an exchange, so let's say Mintgral for example, I'm assuming probably here when you plug it in, it's only about 30 or 40% of direct Mintgral UA traffic you're actually getting access to. The rest is actually coming from resellers. How it works is that here is a random ads.txt file. You actually have to have these lists here on your app store and your Google Play page from your website. You have to have the extension

/app-ads.txt. That's how crawlers go in and check essentially if you have the reseller lines. If you have the reseller lines, what can happen is that these resellers then have the permission to target your app and actually make the bids inside of your application or game. If you don't have them here, essentially you're missing the right or the network doesn't give you the right to actually have the reseller demand. So, if you're earning a thousand dollars a day, probably you need to update this file I'd say every three or four months because you have to go to the networks and actually update it. If you're earning more than 10,000 a day, I'd probably say you should update this at least once a month just to get access to this. If you haven't updated it for while, uh you're probably missing out on anywhere from 10 to 10-ish% of your revenue. So, that's the easiest thing to remember. So, also one thing to remember here is that now the laws of big numbers kind of start working against you in a bigger

way, and you kind of have to start thinking about it. So, it's a bit like going fast in a car, right? The air tries to slow you down. And I guess also here in mobile applications, the bigger you are or the more ads that you show, the less they actually are worth. So, what does that actually mean? So, networks all build on something called a recency model. That's fancy network speak for essentially they assume that your users essentially have more attention when they're seeing their first ad compared to the subsequent ads. So, that means that the highest revenue you get paid is usually on the first impression for that user. And after you show multiple ads, which you might do if you're earning $1,000 a day, so if you say you're showing five interstitial ads uh throughout your average session or day, what you'll see happening is that if you look on a user level and an impression level, they will actually start to drop. By how

much? So, looking at interstitials here in this application where I pulled between the first to the 12th impression over one day, essentially between the first impression and the 12th impression, they basically drop by anywhere between 39 to 52%. And so, a really big drop-off between 12 impressions. So, uh what that actually means is that the more ads you showed, the more decrease you have. So, yeah, for basically low-value impressions, they lose anywhere like so three to six dollar ECPM cohorts, they lose about 4% of decline per impression. And the more valuable impressions, the hundred to two hundred dollar ECPM cohort, they lose about 5.1 of value per impression that you show. All right? So, the way to think about this is that yeah, the more ads you show, the actually less worth they become. So,

there is actually an inflection point where the retention trade-off or the economic value that you give up is not worth it anymore because essentially, you might be churning your users and actually might not be making you that much money. So, I've been in conversations, for example, where we went from showing seven rewarded ads in an app and then we increase it to eight, but actually the ECPM gains weren't the ECPM losses were quite big on going to that and actually we ended up not gaining any money from that. So, we ended up pulling it up because it gave less economic value up inside of the game. So, the tail end of this as well is that the longer you wait between showing impressions, actually they also recover. So, this is a chart showing how quickly ads recover on iOS and Android. It recovers a bit quicker on Android than iOS because essentially, there's more tracking on Android. So, the big caveat to know here is that I actually haven't had a case yet where

I am working with an app where it makes sense to wait and space out ads. The only time I've actually seen that makes sense is for some large-scale apps that have a big user cohort of ECPMs for impressions that are above three hundred dollars because then essentially, this percentage increase that you can get by spacing ads out an hour or two are actually worth it because you're getting maybe 10 or 20% higher revenue from these impressions after that. So, if you're showing high imp though, basically know that they decrease in value. Just keep an eye on this and know about it. So, if you're also earning a thousand dollars a day, what's super important to know is that networks over time, what's been happening is that networks have been making ads longer and longer and harder to click out of, right? So, if you think about what this actually is, networks their money machine, how they get paid

is on conversion. So, when a user clicks on an ad that they see in your game or app and then converts and downloads and basically starts using the other application. A clever thing to do because networks are extremely facetious and annoying about actually changing these templates. So, when you're actually earning a thousand or more a day, you can actually speak to networks to actually get them to change their templates. If you go live, for example, on AppLovin without changing any templates, rewarded videos can be as long as 120 or 190 seconds, and interstitials can be as long as 20 seconds with like four or five steps to click out of the ads. This is the same for all application for all networks, but essentially, the best thing you can do because having annoying ads actually churns a lot of users and pisses people off. So, how I usually recommend to start do tracking this and actually policing it is that you need to track the time stamp

in your from your mediation. So, what I I recommend to do in AppLovin MAX is to track the on ad display event and start a time stamp there and and and end that same time stamp on the ad hidden event. What that essentially does is you start to know exactly how long users are spending in your ads. That essentially means that you can start building bar charts like this Where essentially you can see exactly how long it takes users to complete rewarded ads or interstitial ads in your game by network. What you'll also have to do is you probably have to remove the top two or three percent and the bottom two or three percent of seconds because basically sometimes people rage quit ads or just leave them open and you don't want to count that. But what essentially having this data point means is that you can go to networks that have uh extra long end cards or creative formats and essentially just tell them like, "Hey, it's not okay that

you have a longer format than everyone else because it's an unfair advantage to your network." So, staying on top of this and flagging it helps a lot. Also, what you need to know is that networks change their templates without telling you, right? And they run experiments constantly. So, basically having this data close at hand is super helpful to essentially police the networks and stay on top of what's actually happening in your game or app. So, also, a very pro tip that you can do, uh I guess I should have mentioned this a bit earlier uh when I was talking about the ads decreasing in value. So, what I've also started working So, let's say you're a game, you're earning a thousand a day, but you're showing 12 uh rewarded ads to your users. What happens is that at some point there will come an inflection point where actually a rewarded ad is worth less than an interstitial ad. So, let's say your seventh interstitial ad uh seventh rewarded ad is actually worth less than

an interstitial. What you can actually do then is that you can load an interstitial instead of the rewarded ad. You have to look in the ad callbacks and basically look at the cached ad eCPM. And then you can actually determine what is actually more profitable to show. So, what you need to keep in mind is that showing an interstitial in a rewarded ad slot is not illegal or is not against terms and conditions. Kind of is against terms and conditions of Meta and uh Google because they have their own rewarded interstitial ad format. But essentially, what you can do is you show an interstitial in the rewarded ad slot. There are rules against showing interstitials in a rewarded slot, but rewarded ads in an interstitial slot, but essentially, what you can do is show interstitials because they're worth more for users. And you can just switch it out because these eCPM degradation curves are separate by ad format. So, you can actually earn a bit more extra money. How much more?

Usually, this is a thing that depends on how many ads you're showing, but if you're showing a lot of ads, this probably will add anywhere from 5 to 7% on your total ad revenue. But, you know, if you're earning 10,000 a day, that might be worth it. If you're earning 1,000 a day, it might not be worth it yet. But, there definitely comes an inflection point where doing this becomes very worth it. This brings me on to the final thing that you should start doing if you're earning more than $1,000 a day, and that is bid floors. So, essentially, how networks work as well is that they all bid on something called a bandit model. And what the bandit model is that DSPs and networks use is there's two ways they can really make money, right? So, if you think about the conversion, what they can do to increase margin is they can get the advertisers to pay more, or they can buy supply cheaper. If you're buying supply cheaper, the easiest thing that you can actually do is basically decrease what your bids

are. So, let's say if you're sending 100,000 bids a day inside of an app, what the bandit models will do is automatically try to bid at lower prices, expecting to lose, and basically see if they ever get a conversion. If they ever get a conversion at a lower price percentile, that essentially moves the entire average down. So, we essentially about 2 years ago moved from an environment where we had both waterfall and header bidders to a environment where only have bidders. This is more accurate. This is easier to use, but essentially it's bad for you as a publisher because you essentially move from being a price setter to a price taker, right? Because basically programmatically everything decides what your impressions are worth on an ECPM. The only thing that you can do now is actually set up bid floors to actually counteract that.

The biggest issue about bid floors that I'm working with clients and seeing the biggest mistakes that they're doing is that bid floors depend on two things. Essentially, it depends on what the bid floor levels are, but also the cadence on how you should be updating your bid floors. And also usually the percentage increase from working with bid floors is highly dependent on how much exposure you actually have to these the network algorithms are using the bandit model. Every network uses the bandit model, so basically it's just about how much they can actually increase their margins. How much? Usually using bid floors can give you a boost of anywhere from 5 to 20% if you do it on your own. And essentially, I've actually also announced a product uh just this last week that essentially helps publishers about above $1,000 a day who are mediating on MAX essentially set up bid

floors in an SDK-less solution. So, how it actually works is that I plug into your MAX, and essentially what I do is I turn on the bid floors and update them at the cadence that I know works. And essentially that means that you're usually earning anywhere between 5 to 20% more ad revenue from your impressions if you're doing the bid floors correctly. Uh you can see here is a chart that I'm showing from a client where we turned it on for a strict specific period and then we turned them off right after and you can essentially see that this client earned nearly 30% more ad revenue from working with me on bid floors. I'll leave the link below as well if you want to actually reach out to me and talk about bid floors. This is a shameless plug I know but I'm quite excited about this. We have 11 games live. I'm looking for the 12th. And if you want help please just email me and I can explain exactly how it works. But

I'm going to end here on this note and say that congratulations for making to a thousand dollars a day and above. The next target I guess you have for yourself I probably would say is 25 to 30,000 dollars a day because that's the next inflection point where you have to start thinking about things very differently again. I can make a video on that as well but usually after that people will usually hire help so they actually know what they're doing. But anyway, I'm going to end it here. This has been a fantastic episode from the Two and a Half Gamers podcast coming from Istanbul. I hope to see you at our event. If not, thank you for stopping by. Have a good day. Bye-bye.