Offerwalls: a guide to everything you ever wanted to know

This article attempts to consolidate the scattered and complex knowledge of offerwalls into one place. Learn how they work, what they do, how they’re evolving, and tips on implementing a unique offerwall experience into your projects!

Image created with Midjourney

As a player, I first bumped into an offerwall a few years ago. But still, until recently, I knew very little about this concept. When I actually decided to take a closer look, I realized that everything was much more complicated than I had initially thought.

My name is Ivan Klevakichev, and I’m a product manager of the R&A department at MY.GAMES. In this post, I’m going to tell you all about offerwalls. This was written for those people who were like me — perhaps you’ve heard about offerwalls, but don’t fully understand what exactly they are, or how they work.

Why offerwalls? Games with an offerwall receive a boost of about +10–40% to advertising revenue (which is about +3–5% total revenue). Moreover, in terms of user acquisition, an offerwall might add 10–15% of the marketing budget (and we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars here), with positive ROI and a short pay-off period.

Offerwalls are complex, but everyone can take something new from this article. Game Designers and PMs will learn about how offerwall marketing works and other important things to consider during setup. Marketing and UA Managers will learn how offerwall mechanics look on the product side, and what they should keep in mind when interacting with product people. For everyone else, this article might just be some interesting information that will come in handy later!

Meet the offerwall

In short, an offerwall is a mechanism where players can get currency (or some reward) for fulfilling a certain task. I believe many of you have likely come across this mechanism as players.

The tasks can vary, but at some point, they’ll need to install another app, or experience some marketing mechanism, as part of this process. Then, the ad mediator gives the reward and they get a small commission fee from the advertiser; the advertiser also pays for the reward itself.

Essentially, offerwalls consist of monetization, user acquisition, and gameplay.

In terms of monetization, it’s an opportunity to earn extra money, for user acquisition, the offerwall is an extra source of motivated traffic, and as a gameplay element it gives players choose tasks, and plan and track the results of fulfilled tasks. (And as with all gameplay, an offerwall has influence on retention and engagement numbers.)

Offerwalls under the hood

Here’s the big picture of how offerwalls work: an advertiser wants to attract some traffic and creates an offer with a fixed price of, let’s say, $10. Next, an ad mediation service (like IronSource or Tapjoy) places this offer to the wall (this is actually from where offerwalls take their name). The game integrates the offerwall, and here, users fulfill tasks and receive rewards for doing so. What happens next is, the ad mediation service gives the user the reward for the performed task and obtains a small commission fee. All these costs are covered by the advertiser; they pay the commission fee to the ad mediation service and pay for the reward itself.

Conceptually speaking, offerwalls are located somewhere between video ads and purchases, and the pyramid above illustrates that offerwall users are between rewarded video users and in-app paying users. As a matter of fact, the main difference from rewarded videos is that players can spend their money directly through a “spend-$10-in this-game task” or just make any type of payment.

Offerwalls have some common features with both video ads and in-app purchases.

In terms of similarities with video ads, they both have the chance to generate extra income from non-paying users. With regards to UA, offerwalls can be a traffic source, and just like video ads, that is initiated by the users.

And here are the key differences between offerwalls and in-app ads: regarding monetization, offerwall transactions can amount to $100+, and it’s possible to set prices and discounts; in terms of UA, offerwalls provide an opportunity to acquire some motivated traffic, and task setup turned out to be a more efficient tool compared to work with creatives. Plus, it’s cheaper, and has a more long-lasting effect. Finally, in terms of gameplay, players get to choose tasks for themselves depending on the reward they want, or go through a chain of tasks.

Everything we’ve previously described about how offerwalls work wouldn’t be as efficient without MCPs (Multiple Credit Promos). (By the way, these were formerly called DCPs, or Double Credit Promos, but at some point they realized that if it’s possible to give double credit, then why not x3 and x5 credit? So, it became the “Multiple Credit Promo”.) MCPs are offer a rare win-win-win scenario for the involved parties:

• From the perspective of an ad mediation service, an MCP is an extra chance to attract advertising during some limited-time event.
• In terms of the product, an MCP is an opportunity to give users discounts for hard currency or bonuses and earn extra money.
• And for advertisers, it’s an extra opportunity to try out new task types: for instance, fast tasks with short pay-off periods, and to acquire more traffic.

Here’s what the effect of an MPC launch looks like:

We can observe radical changes in Engagement Rate and ARPDAU of our projects; it becomes clear that the main share of the revenue is gained via MCPs.

Offerwall monetization

In terms of monetization, the primary risk that most people are concerned about is the danger and consequences of overloading players with hard currency. That’s a valid concern, however, if you do everything correctly, monetization will allow you to increase your revenue. And a bit later you’ll learn about how to set up your MPCs correctly and effectively.

Moving on to setting up tasks and rewards: one part of setting up tasks and rewards is carried out on the game or the client side. Here, we can manage the cost of the hard currency using a single multiplier i.e, the currency conversion rate will be the same for a $1 compared to a $100 task. On the client side, we can also manage the bonus that players receive for a fulfilled task, and notify users about the offerwall and bonus offers in it.

Let’s briefly mention the aspects that are beyond the game’s or the client’s control:

1. The number of tasks (this is not really controlled by anyone; maybe by the ad mediation service, to some extent)
2. Task quality
3. Task rewards

Managing multiplier bonuses

It’s important to keep in mind that multipliers are managed by the game — so when IronSource comes to you and says, “Hey, here’s our event schedule. It’s Valentine’s Day soon, so we suggest using a x3 multiplier” — that’s absolutely non-binding for you. You can choose to use a x2, x5 multiplier, or none at all, and this can be done even when there is no activity on the ad mediator’s side. It’s totally up to you.

As I’ve mentioned before, an MCP is an analogue of a hard currency sale in the store, and this leads to some considerations. For instance, if you regularly give serious bonuses to your players, with hard currency being something they accumulate and spend quickly, in this case, you can give significant bonuses on your offerwall too.

However, if hard currency is something players don’t see that often, or they don’t often see it in big quantities, if you give a max 30% discount in your store, there’s no point in x2 sale. You should set an adequate rate, and in your case, you should reduce the rate, in order to sell hard currency with a x2 multiplier, the discount being exactly 20–30%, the same as your usual discount during a sale.

Additionally, in terms of timing, it’s very important to incorporate any MCP into your event calendar, in order to sync everything and avoid conflicts with other events. You should understand that an MCP entails a serious inflow of hard currency into the game, so it should be offset by a hard currency withdrawal event to balance things out. If you do this, there will be no hard currency overload and no drops. Instead, you’ll see a peak followed by a normal plateau, you’ll earn your profit and carry on.

Moving on to bonus multiplier size, over a year ago, Nord Studio carried out an A/B test comparing x2 and x5 multipliers. The result was striking — income during the MCP sale increased threefold, but the total revenue in the control groups saw almost no increase. So, there was no long-term effect of using different multipliers.

My recommendation is to continue experimenting with multipliers. Take into account the specifics of your game’s hard currency. If you need to load players with hard currency prior to some event, you can set a higher multiplier. If you understand your players have enough hard currency, set a lower one.

Everything is quite individual: you should consider hard currency rate, your multipliers, when you’re going to use them, how your MCPs are embedded into your calendar, how efficient your hard currency wash out events are — all of this should be considered when activating an offerwall. Only then you will receive your desired result, you can’t simply activate it and carry on with your life. You have to constantly work and experiment with it! For instance, it’s worth experimenting with various ad mediations, different multipliers by regions and by user cohorts.

There are no set-in-stone rules regarding offerwalls, as the example with MCPs illustrates. The mechanics behind offerwalls evolve over time, new ad mediators appear, and so on.

Offerwalls: user acquisition

As mentioned earlier, offerwalls are one of the few sources of motivated traffic; in fact, we could count these on one hand:

• Partnership programs: these not popular now in mobile games, but have been popular for social network games
• Referral programs are still popular: this is when a player gets some in-game rewards for referring a friend through special links and user progress
• Offerwalls: these are an evolution of the referral program, we use IronSource and TapJoy at our studios, but there are more like Fyber, Personality and AyeT-Studios, which we also plan to start working with.

An offerwall can be used to attract traffic into games only on Google Play, it’s possible to place quests from both, game products and retail there. It’s impossible to attract gaming traffic on iOS, because they perceive it as a controversial mechanic, so they only allow retail tasks. But both platforms allow games to earn money, that is, traffic can be attracted from Google Play only, but games can earn money on both platforms.

Let’s discuss tasks in more detail:

• We can be single tasks (one where a player performs a task and gets a reward) or a chain of tasks (where players need to perform several tasks in a row).
• Tasks can have a duration — a period of time during which you are supposed to perform a single task or a chain of tasks. And if you can’t do it, then the task expires as does the reward.
• In terms of goals, tasks can be free and paid-for — the first are about progress (players must pass a definite number of levels), and the latter require a payment directly, or through in-app purchases.

Integrating offerwalls in games

This is going to be the most visual part, because there are lots of presentations, reports, tests, comparative experiments from the work we’ve done in our company, and I’ve just gathered them all into one place.

In terms of UI, the main entry point to the offerwall is a separate icon in the first store slot in the currency tab. The size of these icons matches the others, because smaller icons show worse results.

Rush Royale: Engagement Rate — 6.5%

On the main screen, entry points can also be indicated in the form of a sign reading “Free” next to a hard currency symbol or the symbol of the store sign, which indicate some available tasks in the offerwall.

I highly recommend displaying the notification that an MCP is starting two times, first, you should have a notification in HUD, to inform about the start of the x2 (xN)-gold period, and you should also set a regular pop-up message at the start of the game, with something like “hurry up, complete tasks to earn more diamonds” (or hard currency).

Further, the Nord Studio team recommend matching the overall offerwall style with the game style; and indeed, IronSource templates allow us to adjust all the colors, fonts, buttons and images to match the game. This isn’t something that will crucially increase your metrics, but it will have a more natural look and be perceived by the players more favorably.

And last, but not least, don’t forget to disable your offerwall on iOS for regions where it’s not available. Again, this is something that won’t make your players churn, because in case you don’t do it, they will see something like this image below. However players might get upset anyway and start writing to your user support team. Simply disable it and be done with it!

Offerwalls: common questions and answers

Let’s discuss some FAQs about offerwalls. These are some tricky topics which I encountered while creating this article (and long before that, actually, exactly the reason I decided to write the article in the first place!)

First up, let me just mention that there is a common complaint that “offerwall income is falling”. This is true — it’s falling now in terms of absolute numbers. However, this drop is not linked to offerwalls themselves, but the fact that advertising revenues are falling throughout the whole market. So, yes, we see that the offerwall absolute revenue is falling, however, the relative revenue doesn’t.

Do offerwalls have any cons?

Yes, theoretically, they can have one, and only one, disadvantage — it can cannibalize IAPs. But that said, this is in fact, a disadvantage of any sale, bonus, discount or offer. However, if you set up everything correctly you can mitigate this risk and enjoy all the pros of this mechanism.

Do offerwalls suit casual projects?

I’ve heard the opinion expressed that offerwalls don’t work well with casual projects — this is equally true and false. Our casual projects have implemented offerwalls and this brings +10% advertising revenue, and there’s room for improvement, and the possibility to increase this number. If we compare the percentage of advertising revenue from mid-core and casual projects in our studio, then in the case of the former, the numbers will be a bit higher, but not so high that we can say that an offerwall is useless for casual projects. It won’t give you 40% more advertising revenue, but can result in 10–15–20%.

Is it worth having the offerwall on iOS?

So, rumor has it that it doesn’t make sense to implement offerwalls on iOS. That’s true, but this is a bit of outdated info. Recent A/B tests carried out by Whalekit studio demonstrated that if you implement Tapjoy instead of IronSource then you can get a 40% revenue increase on iOS. (And by the way, if you haven’t implemented an offerwall yet, I generally would recommend starting with Tapjoy instead of IronSource. Even IronSource themselves, who recently acquired Tapjoy, have stated their plan to move to Tapjoy, so start with it and work on iOS!)

What if users start churning?

There is a fear that users, in order to complete a task from an offerwall, will download another game and go there. Theoretically, this is possible, but according to analytical information from open sources, like IronSource, there are no such examples.

This is also confirmed by our own marketing department — they say that all users who downloaded our game (by going through an offerwall from another game) and then completed the entire chain of quests (as part of the offer from the offerwall) opt not to stay in our game, but instead return to where they came from. Further, the modern mobile market is designed in such a way that players usually play several games simultaneously, and if you worry for your most valuable whales, then you can always disable the offerwall for them or display a very disadvantageous exchange rate for them. All this is in your hands, and you shouldn’t worry too much about it.

Summing things up

There’s a lot of information out there about offerwalls but it’s all scattered in bits. This was my attempt to consolidate some of that! Hopefully, this article will be a guiding light for you. Let’s wrap things up by reiterating three key points regarding offerwalls:

1. Offerwalls give us a highly effective mechanic to help boost ad spending and revenue
2. Offerwalls keeps evolving, and we need to keep working and experimenting with them
3. Each offerwall is individual. You can borrow offerwall models from other products, but you’ll have to adjust the numbers suitable for your product (currency exchange rate, discount size, etc.)