Selecting the right mobile app monetization partner
As the pandemic continues to drive consumers onto their mobile devices1 and mobile ad spend continues to soar in India2, app developers are poised to reap the benefits – but selecting the right partner to help is critical. Choosing an ally for their in-app monetization strategy is vital for long-term success, growth, and potentially even adoption.
Unlike desktop monetization, where partners are typically chosen after a website is created and has generated a meaningful amount of traffic, in-app monetization partners are chosen when developers write their first lines of code. These must be implemented prior to submitting an app to the app store, so there are great incentives to starting a search early.
To help app developers, we’ve put together a list of five key things to consider when selecting a monetization partner.
Quality
Sometimes overlooked in the rush to monetize, but quality of partners is a very important element to consider – a negative user experience can lead to bad reviews and by extension lower adoption and downloads.
Fewer things are more (negatively) impactful to user experience than seeing a bad ad (i.e. irrelevant, malicious, offensive) while using an app. Therefore, looking for high ad quality should be a primary consideration for an in-app monetization partner. The better the ad quality, the more likely users will remain in an app for longer user sessions and return in the future—increasing daily active user (DAU) numbers.
Ask potential partners how they ensure ad quality and if they work with any third-party fraud protection vendors. What about adoption of IAB initiatives such as the recently announced buyers.json and demand chain object. This new set of standards aims to improve the transparency about buyers currently hidden from view and identification upstream from a DSP, and ultimately aims to decrease the amount of malvertising that works its way through the supply chain to publishers and their audiences.
The transparency of their answers, and ability to provide evidence they are taking concrete steps to ensure ad quality, can tell a developer a lot about whether they should work with them.
Global support
App users are rarely confined to just one geo – apps tend to be global, with users – and by extension, demand – all over the world. So, it’s critical to work with a partner that can provide a seamless ad experience regardless of where users are located. For this reason, it is advisable to work with a partner who has data centre end points close to key user bases. Regional end point locations will speed up ad delivery, especially for data heavy ad formats such as playable and rewarded video.
The ad formats supported by a monetization partner is also an important consideration – for developers with global ambitions, a partner who supports standard IAB ad formats is a must. Buyers around the world recognise these formats and design creative to fit them, meaning increased demand.
Support for multiple ad formats – interstitial video AND rewarded video, native AND banner (and whatever comes next example) is another must. This increases bidding opportunities and ensures long-term viability in this ever-changing landscape.
Integration options
How a monetization partner integrates into an app is also a very important thing to consider because every integration impacts app performance. Users are paying for data packages when not on WiFi, so every byte of data matters when they have to wait for an ad to load.
Developers who choose to integrate via SDK should look for a monetization partner whose SDK is lightweight and modular. The heavier the SDK, the more app performance is slowed down, the more device storage is required, and by extension user experience is negatively impacted. Selecting a modular SDK gives developers the option to customize – deciding which functionality they want and don’t want according to their monetization needs.
Alternatively, if a partner has multiple options available (SDK, server-to-server, JAVA script tag) app developers can experiment with the best option without having to experiment with new partners. Having multiple integrations available also gives a monetization partner the opportunity to fill more inventory. Which brings me onto..
Fill Rates and eCPM
Perhaps the most important thing to consider when choosing an in-app monetization partner is their ability to yield the most revenue. Developers need to choose a partner who can fill most of their inventory, and provides the highest eCPMs.
The more fill an individual partner can provide, the less partners are needed, leading to a lighter weight app. This not only frees up more real estate on a user’s devices but also improves the speed and overall experience. Keep in mind, however, there is a balance between fill rate and eCPMs, as 100% fill at $.01 CPM is not as valuable as a partner who fills 50% of inventory at $.50 CPM.
Header bidding
Partners who offer header bidding can offer app developers a huge advantage. Header bidding sees all demand compete in one unified auction, as opposed to the traditional waterfall set up, where the opportunity to bid is passed sequentially to demand sources.
Two chief drawbacks of the waterfall set up are lower monetization and latency – header bidding solves both of these. In the waterfall set up, with an ad request being passed in sequence to demand sources, app developers may miss out higher bids further down the chain; a demand source in position 5 may have bid $5, but if a demand source in position two bids $3, they will win the impression. By having all demand compete in one auction, header bidding increases competition for each impression, driving up eCPM.
In the waterfall setup, when an ad request is not filled by a demand partner, it gets passed back to allow the next demand partner in line to bid on it. This ‘passback’ process takes up part of the limited time there is for a request to be filled. If a request is not filled in time, it times out – so passbacks contribute to lower fill-rates for publishers. Header bidding eliminates the passback requirement and improves fill rates.
With header bidding, it’s also easy to plug in incremental demand sources, and with the impression going to the highest bidder – app developers can be sure they’re maximizing yield for every impression.
Want to know more?
For more information on how PubMatic can help app developers maximize ad revenue, get in touch with our South Asia team:
1 https://www.appannie.com/cn/go/state-of-mobile-2021/
2https://www.statista.com/statistics/717717/mobile-share-digital-ad-spend-india/
Author – Harguneet Singh, Director, Customer Success, South Asia at PubMatic