Everything You Wanted To Know About Rewarded Video Ads But Were Afraid To Ask
This week, we’re excited to share a guest blog penned by Marne Litfin, content manager for Adjust. Tapjoy recently partnered with Adjust to present the webinar, “Rewarded Video Advertising: How to Engage the Mobile Gamer”. Head over to Adjust’s blog to check out the webinar in full!
It’s not just teenagers — everyone plays games. Over 70 percent of mobile users play games on their phone, and three-quarters of them fall into the coveted 25–54 demographic. Gaming is the number one vertical on mobile in which users of every age spend their time (on average over 55 minutes per day, far surpassing both media and social). This is a broad, heterogeneous group, but these users have one thing in common: they prefer rewarded video advertising to non-rewarded ads by a margin of four to one.
Tapjoy’s Senior Director of Ad Products, Pratik Shah, recently sat down with Joli Baretta, Adjust’s Senior Product Specialist, to talk about why nearly 80 percent of US consumers prefer opt-in rewarded video ads and how to align your rewarded campaigns with a mobile measurement partner like Adjust for maximum benefit. You can download the webinar or read below for a summary of their conversation, which includes topics like the benefits of rewarded advertising for advertisers, publishers, and users alike, and why rewarded video ads will continue to be a driver of the mobile ecosystem’s explosive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future.
It’s all about the freemium
Mobile gaming represents such a massive proportion of future mobile growth because mobile game developers are the forefront of app monetization. Where other verticals lagged behind, mobile games developed innovations that turned their apps into viable businesses, mobile gaming app devs were busy perfecting things like the offerwall (an in-app ad unit that shows end users a variety of offers they can engage with) and the freemium model.
As Pratik explained, with a freemium setup users can enjoy content without an upfront paywall. This allows the user to understand and enjoy the game (or for example the newspaper, as this model has been adopted by many other verticals), then upgrade or make in-app purchases once they really get the hang of the app. Rewarded video advertising is a perfect companion for the freemium setting. A user hits their limit of turns or plays and has the opportunity to interact with a video in order to receive another turn or five more gems. It’s a winning situation for everyone, with a far superior experience for the user, as well as a better value exchange model for them.
The benefits of rewarded video advertising
One of the main benefits of rewarded video advertising is that the user typically takes an unrewarded action after they interact with the video. Whatever that action is, you get very high intent from users combined with very high engagement with the video ad itself, due to the opt-in nature of the model. It’s been shown that user sessions increase 34 percent after engaging with a rewarded ad and 30-day retention increased three to five percent as well. Users who engage with rewarded ads are 4.5 percent more likely to make an in-app purchase.
One of the highlights of rewarded video advertising is the quality of user acquisition for the advertiser. As Pratik explained, “this is the best aspect of rewarded video advertising. The fundamental innovation is the fact that the user is rewarded for engaging with the video, but the action they complete after is non-rewarded, but leads to very high quality. The highest quality of users acquired come purely from rewarded video”.
For advertisers, because the model is one where users choose to engage, it’s a rare, brand-safe environment with high viewability and completion rates. Fully 98 percent of users are verified human and are viewable. The average click-through rate hovers around four percent, with an overall video completion rate of a staggering 85 percent. There are also a number of innovations in the pipeline with this model that certify rewarded video advertising’s position as the dominant advertising model as VR and AR technology steps into the marketplace. Playables, which allow users to engage with the content of the ad through, for example, a mini-game, and increasingly personalized advertising are two areas in which Tapjoy is continuing to innovate.
Combining rewarded video advertising campaigns with your mobile measurement partner
You may know everything there is to know about rewarded ads, but none of that matters if you can’t measure each channel, and track and analyze your results. Adjust is a mobile measuring partner designed to help you quickly identify your most influential creatives and weed out the material that isn’t working as well for you. Adjust does this by providing three sublevels of data with full customizable parameters. You can set creative where it makes sense for your analysis, based on the type of campaign you’re running, for example — at video run length, the focus of your content, or portrait vs. landscape orientation.
One of the most valuable tools in a mobile measurement partner like Adjust is the ability to track and analyze cohorts — groups of users who have installed within a specific timeframe. They’re a really effective way to assess marketing initiatives on a very granular level. As Joli explained, since you have users that have installed at a similar time, as initiated by the same creative, even from the same publisher, “you’re able to make these apples to apple comparisons about user behavior, and while it might be that Publisher A has a higher conversion rate from engagement to install, you might notice Publisher B that has a lower conversion rate, but a higher percentage of in-app purchases. From there, you may work with your network to increase volume on Publisher B. Then once you have these types of insights, you can actually extract these users by their advertising IDs or their push notification token within the Audience Builder. From there, you can choose to re-engage users that have yet to make a purchase or users that you’d even like to see purchase again.”
This is a win for everyone in the mobile ecosystem. For advertisers, who want qualified leads — quality users who will actually subscribe. For users, who want a great experience and advertising that brings them real value. And for publishers, who can point to the successes that this unique model offers. None of it is possible without tight measurement and a great feedback loop between Tapjoy and a mobile measurement partner like Adjust.
