Mobile Game Ad Monetization

What is up AppNation? Welcome to this amazing webinar all about mobile games growth. Now, I've brought on two experts to talk about the full scope of the mobile gaming space. We got Fyber who's going to talk all about monetization and UA. We got SocialPeta who's going to be talking about what's really working from the advertising standpoint. What popular game genres there are, what are the popular UA creatives, and all that stuff. So, I feel like this is going to be the action pack webinar. And if you got any questions, obviously leave it in the the webinar comments as well. So, joining us from the Fyber side, we've got Eyal Hofstetter. He's the director of publishers account management at Fyber, a Digital Turbine company. Eyal has been a business leader for over 5 years and is an expert in the ad monetization space, app monetization space, especially for gaming companies.

Now, in case you were under a rock, Fyber was by Digital Turbine in 2021 alongside AdColony and is part of Digital Turbine's independent mobile growth platform for advertisers, publishers, carriers, and OEMs. If you haven't been following along, all that really means is they got a full suite of monetization and UA solutions. Eyal, welcome. Uh yeah, Digital just a a little thing, Digital Turbine. Oh, what did I say? What did I say?

Turbine, but it's it's all good. hell am I doing? Okay, I apologize. There's no second take on this, so I Digital Turbine, I apologize. Eyal from Digital Turbine. Eyal, what's got you most interested in the the ad the monetization space? Monetization is it moves so quickly, right? Everything moves so fast. Every day someone gets acquired. One of the most interesting things have been going on recently is the brand. Brand is coming into the gaming space, in-app gaming space. We see more and more brand buyers. We see the big names, the food companies, jewelry, cars. A lot of these are going into in-app. It's not anymore only other apps UA, other performance buyers. Now we see a lot a lot of brand. And obviously a lot of these brand buyers, they have a lot more money than another big studio who spends on UA. Is there anything So, when you're talking about brands, you're saying brands are advertising in the mobile game space. Is

there anything that we can do as a developer to make sure that we start highlighting some of these brands or what's the best way? Knowing this knowledge, what's the best way that we can do something actionable that we can do with this knowledge? So, basically, sometimes the brand buyers, they they tend to buy for slightly lower prices than the UA buyers. However, they when you look at churn and your retention rate, so when you see when a user sees an ads by for instance Coca-Cola, there's a smaller chance that it will churn, right? Because it's not going to go and play one of their competitor games. And therefore, working with networks that can offer brand is a key for the success.

It's part of the diversification of uh of your um ad suite. And obviously, there's once they see success, once the brand buyers, the agencies, they see more and more success and in uh monetization, they will spend more money. Are there any ad units that we can be utilizing to make sure we show up some of these brands too? Um definitely. So, brand is all over the place. The you can see them in you can see more and more brand coming to rewarded video. So, if you're familiar with rewarded video, so basically, you get a certain reward for doing something inside the app. Um normally, rewarded video tends to be um the format one of the priciest formats out there.

Yeah. Right? So, and you get a certain virtual currency for your action, for watching a video. We see more and more brands going into this space of the rewarded video. We see we see brand into interstitials as well, as well as video interstitials. A user can see a nice video of Coca-Cola or other big companies. And then it causes them to engage. We've always been seeing um a lot of brand under um banners. So, on banner ads, um normally, the bottom of the of the screen, there's a lot of brand there as well. They've been Basically, they've been buying for quite high prices. So, under brand under banners, they always are able to compete really well with uh the performance buyers.

I like it. Hey Eyal, you know, measuring the success of and the efficiency of your monetization, what are some of the best practices in optimizing your monetization stack? Right. So, basically, we always say you must test everything, right? So, we have a certain feature uh on FairBid Fyber FairBid called the multi-testing and there you're able to test bidding. So, today, you know, one of the biggest things have been happening in in our industry is uh we've seen more and more networks go into bidding.

But yet, you want to know if you're actually making more money. Are you actually increasing your ARPDAU when you go into bidding? So, we're able currently to run up to five variants where we're able to see waterfall versus bidders and get a better understanding whether or not we're able to increase uh the actual ARPDAU of the of the publisher. Um we can also split it by percentage and do some other kind of test. But the idea is test as much as possible.

Automation, right? So, you know, the waterfall, we've all know the waterfall for so many years. We see a lot of the networks going into bidding, but there's a lot a lot of manual work. And therefore, we have a lot of uh tools that will help to automate, for to create all the instances and to and to monitor a lot a lot is going into automation. Basically, bidding is automation as well of the waterfall. So, we see this uh is a very big thing that has been happening recently.

And most important or one of the most important is transparency. Do I know do I know what is going on inside my mediation layer? Is my mediation competing with me? If I'm a game developer, do I know if the mediation is competing with me? Are they fishing out some of the my users to go into their own gaming platforms? Some of the competitors of Fyber, they have their own gaming um uh studios. Does it make sense to own a gaming studio and yet to be a mediation layer?

We at Fyber, we create a lot of tools that will show transparency. It will show the developer exactly what happens in the waterfall. It's not just a black box. There's a lot of reporting layers. Helps the the developer to make decisions. What I want to hit on a couple of things, Eyal. What kind of decisions? Like, all right, we understand this data. Sometimes here's what I feel about data is like, what the hell do I do with this? This is a lot of data. How do I go through it and make the proper decisions? So, what kind of decisions are you helping developers make?

For instance, refresh rates, right? You want to show the user you want to show the user an ad for 10 seconds or you want to show him for 11 seconds or 12 seconds. You should be able to AB test all these things in real time. Maybe it makes sense to show in a certain country a 10 seconds um ad in in a different one only 11 seconds. There's so many tests to do. How many instances should you offer for each and every one of the networks? Should you offer them five? Should you offer them six? Do you reach latency?

There are a lot a lot of questions that, you know, that can help the the the developer to increase his ARPDAU. And then in the multi-test frame, so I'm going to ask like a newbie type of question, but is it testing different ad units or is it testing what you're talking about like, hey, how you're getting paid? Like the I'm assuming it's ECPM regarded when you're talking about bidding and the what's the other word that you use? But is that what we're testing here? Waterfall, bidding? So, it's like the mechanism that you're getting the highest ECPM versus like the ad units. What are we testing here?

Well, there there you know, it's a very good question. You can test lots of things. That's the the cool part about it. You can you can take a certain network and you can check it on uh bidding versus non-bidding because most of the networks they were able to buy under waterfall um method before the bidding part. But yeah, there there's so many tests that you you can do. You know, like you think of latency. Cuz right at the end, the user, he wants to see an ad. So, how long does it take until the user sees an ad? And therefore, if you you know, you want to have a lot of calls, a lot of instances inside the waterfall. What happens if you have five instances versus seven instances?

How do you increase the ARPDAU of um of the the developer? Got it. And then what if you had to just pick one, Eyal, I don't want to put you on the spot. If you had to just pick one, one of the first tests you should start to really increase your monetization, what would that What would that first test be for you? Well, I think, you know, I think I would go to diversification. I would keep on testing everything. You know, you think of like what kind of a developer you are, what kind of games are you creating? Are you Are you hyper-casual where you show quite a few ads and quite a few formats?

Do you have like a strategy game, a mid-core game where you might show only rewarded video and the offer wall? So, the offer wall is is another really cool tool that we have offer wall edge where you can show there are certain offers and you complete an offer and then you get in exchange for certain virtual currency in the game. So, I mean, you know, it's like we do know that a lot of users they spend money or some of the users they spend money, but not all the users are spending money in IAP inside the game.

And yes, we want to give the developer wants to give all the users the certain abilities to succeed in the game. He wants the users not to get only to level one to three. He wants to have the users continue and engage and have very long retention with the game. And therefore, for certain users certain users are never going to spend any money and these kind of users they might be using more the offer wall or the rewarded video in order to continue with the game.

Hey Ido, one thing I wanted to talk to you about is I'm going to a newer game developer out there who's you know, saying, "Hey look, I just launched and you know, there's all these ad creatives that have to do." Is there one that you're like, "Hey, you know, if you're just starting out and you want to get you want to start advertising, you got some budget you can do all these, but is there like a couple that you're like, "Hey, you know, start with these and this should get you most of the way there?"

Well, it really depends on what kind of developer you are. So, you know, if we start the easiest would be to start with the hyper-casuals because the hyper-casual tend to work with they they work with the rewarded video and they work with full-screen video and banner. Mostly the hyper-casuals they don't really offer any kind of proper virtual currency, but just for the continuity of the game like, you know, you you play a certain game, you fall, you die and then you can you get another life, right? So, that's where the rewarded video will come into place.

So, if you're like this kind of publisher with a lot of your or maybe all of your revenue it comes in from ads, then I would suggest you know, trying all the three, the rewarded video, the full-screen interstitial video, and the banner. Now, if you are more of a casual game like match three, it's very common or um card game, word game, then these are what we call as casual games. A lot of these casual games they it depends how much they rely on in-app purchase versus in-app ads and then it depends.

They either might use the the the same three like the hyper-casuals or they will just use the banner or the interstitial. It depends how much uh they want to interfere with the game play. The interesting part if you go to a bit the um the deeper games like the games that you know, when you download them it takes all the battery from your phone. The kind of games that yeah, makes your your phone really slow. So, these they mostly rely on in-app purchase.

Sometimes it can be um 80% uh for in-app purchase and the rest will be um ads. Sometimes it can be even more like 95 95% in-app purchase. Um and like I said before, the problem with these kind of publishers is they they they have a certain percentage of users who will actual spend money in the game, which can be like you know, 5% will be not bad and then like a 1% will be whales and maybe uh 10% will ever you know, ever uh spend any money in the game. Like what do you do with all the rest of these all these the rest of these users? How do you let them enjoy the game? They want to continue they want to play the game. They will advertise the game and for these kind of users you want to show the rewarded video and the offer wall. The offer wall is very cool because um when you a rewarded video it's you know, it's a matter of like 30 seconds, maybe 35 seconds depends if you you go into an end card.

The offer wall you in order to complete an offer it's slightly more uh difficult. It takes a bit longer, but then you get a lot more virtual currency for it. Basically, it's kind of a bit like working, right? But it but fun working because you can for instance download an app and then play another game and reach a certain level. So, we classify we classify the different offers. There's an easy offer and there is a hard offer and you as a user you can decide which kind of offer you would like to complete.

But it works very well with the game especially on more of the heavier games, but yet you can see them on casual games as well. Some of the match three or puzzle games they will still have an offer wall which can be integrated well as and we see these. Banners, huh? You just banners was like a popular thing. I was like, "Wow, banners still working." I remember talking to Christian Calderon who was at the time he was the CRO of Ketchapp and he was saying like our number two most money maker ad unit was banner ads. I was like, "Holy cow, that's insane." And so, it's pretty interesting. We thought banners were dead.

No, banners are like super big. We see more and more publishers developers asking about banners. Basically, you know, it's not really intrusive, right? It's it's in the bottom of the screen. They're cheaper, but you know, if you have a long game, a long puzzle game, they can they flash and flash and flash and flash and then you basically you get paid for each and every one of these refreshes. Yeah. So, and they're mostly brand. They're very very brand orientated.

It's really worthwhile checking the banner. Con- like I said before, you constantly need to test. You need to test all the time. You need to diversify. You need to look for the new thing and the banner is is you know, it's coming back. It's com- We hear a lot many many studios asking for this now. When you talk about the refresh rate, you know, I said I asked you, "Hey, what should you be testing?" You said 10 10 seconds, 11 seconds. You're primarily talking about the banner, right?

Yes. Yes. Good. All right. I am following along. Look at me. Ido, anything I miss on your end that you want to make sure we we talk about before we say goodbye. Um no, just like you know, uh constantly test. Make sure that you know, when you work with a mediation layer that you know exactly what is happening. It's not a black box um that you get a lot of that that you diversify with brand, with different formats, keep testing new things, keep testing um new formats and new networks and uh and you know, if you don't test, if you don't move on quickly, then in this industry it's you know, things move very fast and you know, you you must move quickly.

To the audience and to those who might be listening it on the podcast, it is fiber.com f y b e r. If you want a full suite of UA and monetization solutions. If you want to access to those amazing brands that Ido was talking about, go check out fiber.com. Ido, if the audience wants to connect with you in any other way, do you want to send them anywhere else besides fiber.com? Um I think I think they'll find find their way, but I can also share my email and they can reach me out definitely.

Yes, cuz I messed up last earlier. It is fiber digital turbine company. Digital turbine. I mean, I should just I should just be a cool kid and call it DT like everybody else was doing, but digital turbine. Thank you guys for joining. We will see you guys next time. Bye. Thank you.