How TutoTOONS protects our brand and our users with Ad Quality
Ad content is something that’s very important to myself and the team at TutoTOONS. We see ourselves as not only creators of games but guardians of our users’ experience. The majority of our users are minors — we make games meant to be played by everyone. And that means we have to think of everyone when considering what content our players will see or interact with, including in our ads.
Some might think that inappropriate or frustrating ads are not necessarily harmful, or aren’t that big of a deal. This is a feeling that I think is not just incorrect, but shows an ignorance of the impact that harmful content can have — particularly when it comes to younger audiences. An adult may see an ad that is inappropriate and it leaves a bad taste in their mouth, for children it’s a whole other ballgame.
The same is true for frustrating ads, while an adult may see an ad that’s buggy or has a hidden x-button and be able to navigate around the problem, younger users can get stuck. For these reasons, bad or frustrating ads have the ability to ruin a day and leave a real lasting impression when we’re talking about younger users.
On top of these ethical concerns, as a family friendly studio, we need to ensure that we’re compliant with app store policies that govern what games can be advertised as for everyone. As a result, we have strict guidelines for what ad content can be shown in our titles.
We do a huge amount of work at TutoTOONS to ensure we don’t show frustrating or inappropriate ads in our games. Here’s how we protect our brand and ensure the best possible experience for our users.
Get to know what ads are running on your apps
The first step in ridding your app of bad ads is to monitor what ads are running on your supply. To do this, we use Ad Quality from Unity LevelPlay. This tool allows us to see what ads are running and from which demand source, giving us a transparent and detailed view of what our users are seeing.
Dedication to the best possible user experience
We believe that protecting our brand and ensuring good user experience should be a top priority, and so we’ve created a dedicated role just to track and monitor the ads we run. This Ads Quality Manager follows a multi-level process for finding and reporting unwanted ads, starting with an application that notifies us through Slack whenever we receive a negative review that contains keywords like “ads” or “inappropriate.” They then use the Ad Quality tool to review what ads were running at the approximate time of the review and in the user’s region, if we have it.
If any problematic ads are discovered they’ll report the ads to the network. Otherwise, they’ll check the source of the ads to see if the apps being advertised are the cause of concern, as some apps contain mature content even if their ads don’t.
Another way our Ads Quality Manager works to keep our apps free of bad ads is by actually playing our games. This allows them to see what our users are experiencing when they play, seeing what ads they see.
Prevention is the best cure
However, as effective as this process is at detecting ads that have negatively impacted a user’s experience, a better alternative is to stop these ads from being shown at all. But with a huge influx of ads each day, this is a monumental task. So to accomplish this we’ve created an internal dashboard that allows us to document problematic sources and preemptively report them.
The dashboard is made possible by the Ad Quality from Unity LevelPlay’s Raw Data API. Using it, we’re able to quickly monitor the ads being shown with a whitelist for trusted sources and ads and a blacklist for problematic ones This enables us to get a bird’s eye view of the ads running on our apps and bulk report or approve them.
A layered defense against bad ads
All these processes are combined into a layered methodology for reporting and preventing ads that might negatively affect the user experience and tarnish our brand. First, we preempt the ads by using our dashboard and blacklist. Second, if a bad ad evades this measure and a user leaves a negative review mentioning a bad ad experience, we can track down the offending ad and report it. Lastly, we spend a significant amount of time engaging with our own apps to ensure that no bad ads have escaped our notice.
In conclusion
The industry is putting more and more emphasis on the user ad experience, and for good reason. A bad ad experience can seriously damage your brand’s reputation and cause users to churn and not return. But tools like Ad Quality from Unity LevelPlay are a huge help in understanding where there may be an issue with your ad user experience, finding it, and fixing it — a must if we’re to ensure that the ad monetization ecosystem keeps thriving.
