Can We Make Mobile Game Ads More Meaningful?
Online advertising has come a long way. Although ads were once seen as an interruption for consumers and their impact was hard to measure for advertisers, that’s often no longer the case.
Today, platforms like Facebook, Google and display ad networks allow advertisers to get extremely targeted in terms of what ads they show to which people. This targeting ensures relevance for consumers and boosts results for advertisers. Additionally, these platforms now collect mountains of data around impressions, clicks, conversions and so on to help advertisers measure the success of their ads so they can continue to improve performance.
However, advertising within mobile games is a completely different story.
Current State of Advertising within Mobile Games
Currently, ads are quite popular within mobile games because they help game developers monetize their platforms.
While the core monetization is there, the overall ad experience within games is far behind where it is elsewhere. In-game advertising offers very minimal, if any, personalization, which creates a poor user experience. Couple that with the fact that those same, generic ads also tend to take users away from the game they’re playing at the time (or, worse yet, advertise a different game and pull users away entirely), and the situation is not ideal for gamers or game developers.
As a result of these challenges, CPM rates (the cost per a thousand impressions that game developers receive for hosting ads within their games) have decreased significantly. Despite that fact, the market for ads within mobile games is ripe. Just look at the numbers:
- Mobile games have a strong audience, with smartphone users spending 43% of their in-app time in games.
- Even better, a strong revenue stream already exists. In 2017, 78% of the 50 highest grossing mobile games in the US included ads and the global ad revenue from mobile games is on pace to reach nearly $40 million.
Nevertheless, one can argue that mobile game ads are succeeding in spite of themselves, especially when you consider how those numbers pale in comparison to those achieved on platforms like Facebook. The social media giant reported $8 billion in mobile advertising revenue in Q2 of 2017 alone. The reason Facebook advertising performs so well? Because Facebook allows advertisers to get specific ads in front of very targeted groups of people, and that personalization makes the difference between being relevant vs. being considered an interruption.
The Future of Ads in Mobile Games: How to Deliver a More Meaningful, More Profitable Experience
So what exactly can the mobile gaming industry do to up its game when it comes to advertising? It’s all about personalization and rewards.
In terms of personalization, game developers need to start integrating technology that can collect data on gamers in order to serve them more targeted ads. These ads should be targeted based on the content in the game itself at any given point in time as well as each player’s interests. Looking at rewards, game developers should consider introducing systems that reward users with physical rewards for engaging with certain ad content.
When done correctly, this combination of personalization and rewards can create a more meaningful ad experience for gamers and generate more revenue for game developers and advertisers alike.
Taking it one layer deeper, key benefits of this personalized, rewards-based approach to mobile game advertising include:
- For gamers: relevance. Since ads are personalized based on individual gamers’ interests and their in-game experience as well as the opportunity to earn rewards for their time spent engaging with those ads, the likelihood of the ads being highly relevant is almost guaranteed.
- For game developers: monetization. The opportunity to monetize games (especially free ones) in a smart way keeps players interested and engaged, rewards them for their time spent, and doesn’t pull them elsewhere, all of which work to create a better player experience (and makes them want to keep coming back). Together, these benefits help extend the player lifecycle and improve ad performance, therefore leading to higher CPM rates.
- For advertisers: reach. The ability to target a very specific demographic in a personalized way and do so across multiple games, should they all use the same advertising platform, helps to increase stickiness and engagement to a much broader, more relevant audience.
Of course the key to bringing this type of meaningful, profitable ad experience to life lies in the advertising network used throughout mobile games and the data that powers it all.
Recognizing this need, and the opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the solution, we’re creating the Monetizr game reward engine. It’s a platform to reward gamers within mobile gaming apps. Among the many purposes it serves, it can help improve the in-game advertising experience as described above.
Specifically, our platform can collect data about gamer behavior and interests, which is stored as part of the players’ profiles. This information is correlated across multiple mobile games in order to identify the same gamer across those different environments. These capabilities allow Monetizr to help game developers create better fan experiences, down to where and when they place advertisements within their games, all while helping advertisers serve up targeted ads that are more likely to pique each player’s interest. Finally, the physical rewards make it easy for game developers to implement a rewards-based system to further engage gamers.
The result of all that? An advertising experience that’s more meaningful for gamers and more profitable for gamers, game developers and advertisers. And who could pass up on that?
If you want to learn more about how Monetizr is making in-game advertising more meaningful, email us sales@themonetizr.com.
