Mobile Advertising FAQ
What are the highest paying mobile advertising platforms?
The answer to this depends on the type of app and the type of traffic that you have as well as the method of monetization. For example, an app with traffic mainly in the US will do better with a platform with more US-based advertisers whereas an app with users mainly in India will monetize better with networks with a bigger presence in that market.
Monetization also depends on the format used. Interstitials, offerwalls and other formats can often perform better than standard banners for some traffic and use cases. Video is another format that has became mainstream in mobile advertising industry and currently demonstrates a higher level of performance than above mentioned formats. With the video format, advertisers are the best equipped to convey a message about their products and quite often publishers have the best chances to monetize their inventory by placing video ads inside their mobile apps or websites.
The best option is often to integrate with an ad mediation platform which can include multiple traffic sources and the tools that allow publishers to manage, optimize and get reports from those sources within a single dashboard. A choice of a specific ad mediation platform is defined by its setup cost, type of integration it provides, number of supported networks and more.
Which mobile ad formats are best ?
The toolbox of advertising formats that mobile advertiser has consists of the following items – a banner ad (either static fo animated), an interstitial banner (it occupies all mobile app interface real estate), video and native ad. Among the above mentioned four, video and native formats are the current mobile advertising industry frontrunners.
Mobile users in general are shifting from watching video on a desktop to mobile and hence short engaging video ads on their smartphones and tablets are in a position to get higher level of engagement and bring more money for mobile publishers.
By definition, a native ad format is the one that is least intrusive amongst all mobile ad formats available. It’s designed to follow the natural form and function of the mobile user experience inside a mobile app or website. Because it complements any content of a mobile app or a website where it’s placed, it’s capable to generate higher engagement and lead to a desired action on a mobile user’s part.
What is the best business model for publishers? CPM, CPC or CPA?
It is one of the most often asked questions about online advertising, and mobile advertising in particular. At the end of the day, app and website owners become publishers to monetize their inventory, to make money. The short answer on this question is – it depends. To provide a longer answer we need to analyze each model briefly and stack them to each other.
CPC or cost-per-install model generates revenue for a mobile publisher whenever users click on ad that is placed in his inventory. The most favorable situation for users to click on an ad is when they’re shown this ad as a result of them searching for some mobile app, product or service in general.
CPM or cost-per-mile, where mile is a nickname for 1,000 ad impressions served. With CPM model publisher is paid for ad views inside his inventory. You can read about the average mobile CPM rates here.
So the fundamental difference between these models lies in a fact that with the CPC one a publisher is certain about what revenue he can generate with a fixed price for a mobile ad clickthrough, with CPM he does not. The weak point of the CPC model is a click fraud, when dishonest publishers artificially generate revenue via automated scripts that “click” on ads placed inside their inventory. The weak point of CPM model is that view counts isn’t always accurate and this ongoing issue has lead to the Mobile Web Advertising Measurement Guidelines establishing.
The ultimate decision about what business model to choose should be made by each publisher individually after careful analysis of ad networks he’s considering to work to monetize his mobile or desktop inventory.
What’s the best way to target mobile advertising campaigns?
Targeting is a crucial part of any mobile ad campaign, having well written text or well designed graphic creatives is not enough to launch a successful advertising campaign. If your ad misses people that may find its message compelling to act on and at the right time, you’re wasting your advertising budget.
There are number of parameters that influence what audience a mobile ad will reach.
Such as:
- Demographics
- Geolocation
- time of a day
- mobile operator
- OS
- wifi / mobile connection
- device and interests / habits.
To define the best strategy for mobile ad campaign targeting you need to define what mobile users you want to reach. The more accurate profile of a mobile audience you manage to build, the more precise your ad campaign targeting will be. The ideal audience profile should contain information about such things as where do people live, their gender, age, mobile devices they use and what habits and interests they express on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Google.
One of the most effective ways to target mobile ad campaign is Retargeting. Essentially retargeting implies usage of data collected about mobile users that visited your website or installed your app to reach them on various ad networks, social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others.
There are three major ways to collect information to apply Retargeting technique to your mobile ad campaign – building an email list by collecting addresses people leave on your website, pixel placing to track people who visit your website or mobile advertising IDs collected from your app installs.
What is the difference between an incentive and non-incentive mobile traffic?
With all complexity that mobile traffic generation brings to bear, there is one way to separate it into two kinds – incentive and non-incentive traffic. With the latter one, mobile users are compensated for downloading mobile apps with a some kind of reward, usually a virtual currency.
There are different use cases for each defined by its pros and cons. By launching an incentive traffic ad campaign, mobile advertiser can quickly increase her / his mobile app ranking on the App Store or Google Play marketplace, build an initial app user base to test various ideas for its design and more. The weak point of incentive traffic is that by definition it’s not capable to build a loyal user base for an app. To find mobile users that will be loyal to an app is what a non-incentive traffic campaign suites really well for. Read about different use case for each type here.
What are major Mobile Advertising IDs
With Mobile Advertising ID app developers have a tool to identify who is using their mobile apps. Among several there are three major ones on the market:
- IDFA (Apple’s Advertising Identifier), it’s provided to iOS developers as a part of iOS to implement a system for serving ads
- Android Advertising ID – the one that Google provides to developers as part of the Android to serve ads inside apps
- Facebook App User IDs, which allows developers to collect information about their app users via the Facebook SDK.
How Does Mobile Ad Mediation Work?
This is the framework for a mobile publisher to monetize her or his inventory efficiently and achieve both high fill rates, meaning all inventory is used to display ads, and high revenue. Essentially Ad mediation algorithms allow publishers to match the right inventory to the right ad network.
Here is how an ad mediation technology works. Based on publishers preferences (in most cases it’s to prioritize highest eCPM paying ad networks first), the system ranks some ad networks higher than others and if a specific ad network can’t fill the ad request, the system picks the next one in the rank. The biggest advantage for a publisher here is that such system is using a single SDK to manage hundreds of SDK of various ad networks.
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