AdMob Mediation

coming up we're going to talk all about admob mediation and why it's so crucial to add to your monetization stack stay tuned what is up app nation it is steve p young founder of appmasters.com and today we're going to talk all about add mediation we're gonna break it down talk about what it's all about and then how you can really maximize it to make more revenues from your ad and joining me as always my expert when it comes to all things admob is sid gupta he is the ceo and co-founder of app broda go check him out it is broda.com sid welcome back thanks man thanks for having me i said let's break it down let's first talk about for those who aren't familiar with mediation what is ad mediation ad mediation to simply put is about competition building essentially if you think about it you're selling ad spaces right ad spaces are also a function of supply and demand if you have a certain amount of spaces to

sell or certain amount of products to sell you essentially want to increase the brand value that you have now when you're only working with one demand source for example admob you're basically saying this is the ad space available whatever price you have i'm more than happy to take it but mediation is about adding more players into the mix and saying guys i've got more people in the bidding stack help me increase the competition who's gonna bid higher that's what mediation is all about increasing competition for your inventory and making it more brand valuable that's the idea i said now talk to me about where you see mediation headed to where we've been now where are we headed when you're starting mediation the most important aspect is first setting up a baseline it's very important to understand your historical data and set up a baseline now when you're setting up a baseline you've got to keep three parameters in

mind the format the devices the jio each format each device and each zio might have a very different strategy let me take an example let's talk about jio let's say you have users in multiple countries one of them is the united states now we need to cop united states applovin or iron source or nmobi becomes really important partner but the same partner when it comes to india might not have the same amount of demand so geography plays an extremely important part let's talk about format if you've got rewarded video one of the very good formats as does very well has high cpms and devoted video is unity let's talk about devices each device types has different sort of user identification to it so when you segment it you're basically helping the you helping the advertiser identify a certain kind of users a certain price point of users so always set up a baseline always understand your users by format by device by cho here your

analytics kicks in and this is going to be a really important part where you build up a team you set up your firebase you get your data in place understand each aspect and segment your audiences to understand what works once you figure out your format devices and jio's you will basically have clusters of audiences now the next step that you need to do is to is to go out to partners make a list of all the partners that you think are most relevant to you go out to them talk to them tell them about the kind of inventory you have and they will come back to you and tell you where they have the most amount of demand get this in place get your stack ready and this is the first thing you've got to do so once you've got the historical baseline in place uh understand the history of it because that's how you'll understand how mediation has worked historically the oldest method of mediation is waterfall

waterfall means that you have multiple layers of advertise add networks in place which you can call at different times at different cpms and these like i said would be layered to your format device and jio once you've made these clusters of audiences you've divided these audiences you figure out the partners you would set up different flows for each one of them now flow setting is a completely new exercise it's massive every product every demand partner has different capabilities but let's talk about admob admob being the largest demand partner they've got these really interesting ways to get your optimization done when you're setting up your waterfall now waterfall can be set up in two ways depending on what product you're using if you're on admob there's something called google optimized google optimized flows or manual flows google optimize flows means uh google dynamically sets the floor based on user geography the

traffic the historical data that's what we just spoke about right so if you don't want to do that exercise if you want to keep it supremely simple just set google optimized flows and it'll automatically segment it based on the format device jios your audiences all histories great way to do it but i think it's great when you're getting started if you're looking at improving the efficiency of your optimization a little further it's always good to do your own segmentation and figure out what's most important for you now the manual flows is where it comes in handy so in a manual flow setting you can exactly set the flow that you're looking at let's say you set one dollar as the floor that essentially means any advertiser who's saying that i want to buy your inventory for less than a dollar your is not available right and this you can segment by country this is about admob now let's talk about if you

had google ad manager for example google ad manager is a great product uh it's a it's an alternate to admob and there are certain little advantages that are there in google ad manager when you're setting up your mediation in that it allows you two different kinds of flows one is called target ecpm and the other is called flow cpu now flow cpm is very simple to similar to manually cpm you set the flow and you figure out you tell google this is the bare minimum price that i need but when you say target cpm target cpm essentially means you tell google i need one dollar in this inventory so google figures out dynamic flows across geographies across across devices across users across your historical data to figure out how to reach that one dollar in instagram so it's a great strategy depending on how you want to do it this is also a great thing another big advantage of google ad manager is actually bid distribution essentially if

you think about it you're basically doing an auction right you're getting multiple people to bid for your inventory now imagine if you had the availability of all the data on who is bidding how much are they bidding for and then you can accordingly set the price that allows you to get the maximum number of bits that's a very very important data set gam or google ad manager gives you these bits the number of bits and the average price of each bit that allows you to set the right price so that you maximize your inventory so that's a great strategy allows you to do it a beautiful way to do it once you've got this in place you've set your multiple flows now google is going from one partner to the other partner so you've got let's say the first partner at one dollar at admob the second partner at 90 cents uh on fan the third partner let's say applovin the fourth partner uh let's add in source

right now one thing which each partner lets you do is do multi call that's another very interesting aspect that means each partner and you will have to work with each partner to understand what's legally allowed but most partners allow you to bid each partner for the same placement multiple times that allows you to pull multiple requests and multiple times ask them if you if uh the advertiser or the ad network has demand for the same placement if you're able to do that great that's a great way to get get your roi in place and so always look at multi call within the same placement there are two interesting things that also admob has launched a lot of other mediation platform has launched when you're setting up your waterfall right you basically set up a stack of multiple placements now this is something that steve you and i have talked about it multiple times uh when you're looking at an ad network

essentially it's a bunch of people sitting at the other side of the table and they're going out and selling demand right there is a seasonality involved they're going and buying certain kind of inventory they're selling certain kind of ads so the cpm fluctuates a lot right in the olden times you would have to actually look at the data regularly right you would have to look at maybe set up custom groups and understand how can you understand the seasonality of each player but google has come up with this new technique called eno uh at network optimization what that basically allows you to do is it sets you real timey cpm so if there is a fluctuation in ecpm in a partner it automatically switches the priority so your waterfall can automatically switch the priority on whichever partner is giving you a higher cpm and that allows you to further increase the efficiency now this was one very old or actually the first type of

mediation that has existed now let's talk about the next every next step that mediation evolved into header bidding it is also important to understand why that happened now think about what i've just told you essentially what you're going to be doing is you're going to be setting up a waterfall right that means a step-by-step process of about seven to eight partners where your app is hitting each partner and asking for a certain ad at a certain price point and if it's not available it goes to the next partner now once people set this up by geography by format by devices they realize the number of partners that they have to hit to get the right cpm increased and what that increases is the latency of the ad right what that essentially means is you ask for an ad and it's taking time to ask for for each partner to come and return and tell you if there is an ad only if one partner says no then it goes to the other the other ad

network so it's extremely important that you do it in as many as less partners as possible so it became really important and it essentially limited the number of partners you can work with this affected your shore rate and this affected the number of partners you can work with that led to open bidding or header bidding now what is header bidding or what is open bidding essentially that means it's a live auction it's a live auction where you're telling everybody guys i've got this ad demand now come you bet live and tell me how many how much price you're willing to do and whoever's get the best price you come in auction right now you give me that placement so that means if there are five people five ad network sitting here right now i would tell them this is my inventory tell me what's the best price if for example if steve is an ad network and you're telling uh you're bidding for my inventory for one dollar

uh let's say there's another steve too who's doing for two dollars automatically i give it to steve too then to see one that's the way open bidding works open bidding has massive advantages beyond just a latency avoidance a couple of more when you look at uh mediation waterfall the problem is you've got to integrate a lot of ad networks you've got to integrate a lot of their sdks with open bidding you can avoid that a lot of the sdks are not required they are server level uh integrations that prevent you from adding a lot of sdks and in a lot of cases your app becomes more bulky you end up having more crashes you've got to have a bigger integration team to ensure that they support all kinds of integration you've got to keep a track of all updates on all sdks what's not working so it becomes really cumbersome so to reduce all that integration effort uh they've they've done open bidding that's a very very big advantage the

second thing is latency like i said latency is avoided to a great extent you can now hit 10 partners at the same time 15 partners 20 partners at the same time in the stack and ask them for the right price you don't have to worry about improving the changing the stack reducing the number of partners worrying about latency because it is parallel bidding so uh there is no effect on latency the third thing i think which is specifically to google and i don't know about other uh mediation partners is actually payments right uh when you do mediation you're essentially means you're actually building a relationship with each of these individual ad networks for payment collection a lot of developers i work with always have cash flow shoes it's a concern that a lot of developers work with so every every ad network follows a different payment cycle you've got to chase with them the one or two partners

where you never have a problem with this with google and facebook right so imagine google is taking away your headache completely and saying guys we will manage your entire payment cycle we will pay you on the 21st of each month and we will do all the subjugation with all the partners to ensure we manage all your payments and we collect it on your behalf and pay you right the fourth advantage is actually data accuracy when you were doing mediation there was always uh an issue with the data that was shown on the mediation platform as well as the original platform so a lot of times for example if you're running app love and mediation or added source or in moby the numbers that were shown on the inmobi dashboard would not match on the mediation platform that is eliminated through open bidding and header bidding right so that's a great way solves a lot of problems right this is the second evolution now let's talk about what's in

the future now once you've understood both these strategies people always come up with a bias that one is better than the other but the world that is moving today is actually moving towards a hybrid strategy that allows you to actually use both strategies in place and work in conjugation to be able to do it the advantage there is there are certain partners that do really really well on header bidding and open bidding and you can subjugate certain demands certain inventories certain supplies there and the rest of the inventory you can actually do it in the mediation stack that's it that was phenomenal content i think the one thing i want to make sure the audience leaves with is look you can apply any of these strategies to any mediation platform but what sid was breaking down was look there's benefits to just using admob's mediation because of the pay the payouts like everything you can set in within admob too and so

you have access to not only admob's inventory but all the ad networks and you get paid on time that's one of the biggest difficulties because you're running ua you're spending that money and you gotta wait x amount of days to get paid and there's that gap that's where developers really struggle it's the gap between you dishing out the facebook you know the iron source the money to run the ads and drive the users and then to wait to get the money back from the ads itself so that's what we talked about so it can apply to any mediation platform but admob is the one that we're recommending sid thank you so much for doing this is there anything else that you want to mention before we say goodbye more than happy uh again like i said mediation is a really important strategy i think you guys uh focus on the hybrid strategy if you would like to know more you can reach out to abroda and we can help you

design your entire habits id and how to move forward if you're just curious about how to increase your revenues through ads i recommend go checking out broda i trusted we've done a ton of videos together and they're going to really just help you out if they can if you can want to work with them go ahead and do that but they're going to really help you out as well they have the strategies to really increase it isn't just about these things that we talked about it's just within your app how do you incorporate ads more into the app and then make more money so once again it is at broda.com say thank you so much for coming on doing this again man thanks man thanks for having me thank you guys for watching and i'll see you on the next video