How I increased app revenue by 299% from in-app ads with @AdTapsy in two weeks
We at AdTapsy believe that app monetization with all those formats and more than 100 ad networks is a little bit confusing for developers. It is difficult to keep up with all of the new trends in mobile advertising. We want to help app developers to focus on application development and not to waste time researching and testing the latest innovative formats.
That is why we have built a solution aiming to help app developers and app publishers easily maximize their mobile ad revenue. With our SDK, app developers and publishers can integrate more than one ad format and more than one ad network very easily, and optimize them for the best results.
In addition to working on AdTapsy I own an indie app studio Borixo Mobile, where I monetize apps mainly with in-app advertising. Borixo has reached more than 6M+ app downloads, but I have never been satisfied with the ad revenue. I always felt I could do better than that. The whole idea of AdTapsy actually came about as an idea after many unsuccessful attempts to achieve the desired results. I figured out that the only way is to make sure to:
- Sell 100% of your ad inventory
- Sell ad inventory for the highest eCPM possible
- Be able to control ad networks in real-time
For months now AdTapsy has been live and working, and covers all these requirements above. I will show you how it increased my ad revenue by almost 300% in just two weeks.
Before AdTapsy
For this purpose we will take a look at one of my apps: Horoscope Plus. This app was monetized with banner ads only. I never liked them. Banners occupy valuable space on a screen that is already very small. Even worse, their eCPM is very low — even when they are generating a lot of ad impressions. I checked the statistics: average weekly revenue was $63, and for the final week it was $60.42.
Week 1: AdTapsy integration
AdTapsy supports 7 major ad networks: AdMob, InMobi, RevMob, AppLovin, Vungle, Chartboost and AdColony. In my horoscope app I have enabled six of them (with the exception of Chartboost since it is only for games). With Control Panel I have divided traffic equally between all ad networks for one week. We always recommend doing the same equal division for newly submitted apps in AdTapsy. That way you give a chance to every single ad network. After one week, you just need to check the stats, see which one has the highest eCPM, and prioritize your ad networks by the eCPM numbers.
This prioritization is truly a money maker! And the best thing about it is that if your highest priority ad network fails to show an ad, our technology detects it and auto-switches to your next highest priority ad network. This way you never lose any of your traffic because of low ad networks’ fill rates.
Week 2: Prioritized ad networks by eCPM
After one week on equal rotation of ad networks, I prioritized the ad networks by eCPM. Best performing ad networks for this app were AdMob, AdColony and AppLovin. AdColony had the best eCPM, but because of its low fill rate you can see that it didn’t bring me the highest revenue as a single ad network. Vungle was not performing well, it is probably not suitable for this app, in other apps and games I have had good results.
My prioritization looked like this: 1. AdColony, 2. AdMob, 3. AppLovin, 4. RevMob, 5. InMobi, 6. Vungle.
299% increase after two weeks!
The result for one week after prioritization was a 299.26% increase and $241.23 total revenue. Check the numbers below:
Some proof with screenshots showing the network performance:
My downloads stayed the same:
Note: It is not guaranteed to receive the same increase, it depends on many factors and what ad networks and formats have been used before.
Starting from July 2014 I will update this article with up-to-date news and stats about the horoscope app revenue, eCPM for ad networks and perhaps a few more metrics (feel free to comment with suggestions). So follow me here or on twitter @bgizdov for new insights into ad networks. Of course if you want to increase ad revenue for your apps as well, register here: http://www.adtapsy.com
