Best Practices for Mobile Publishers & App Developers

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1 Best Practices for Mobile Publishers & App Developers A 5-Step Process for Monetization Success

2 A 5-Step Process for Monetization Success Mobile publishers and app developers are instantly faced with a litany of choices when it comes to monetizing their content within their apps and mobile websites. Even deciding up front how best to configure your ad units for the app or website can be tricky; but don t worry - at every stage of your post-development journey, from initial ad unit decisions to full optimization and management of your mobile advertising inventory, Smaato is here to help. We ve been helping mobile publishers make money with our mobile-first platform since 2005, and we ve seen a few things. Here are some of the best practices we recommend based on this experience. Step 1: How Will I Make Money on My Inventory? You re now live in an app store, or on the mobile web, and it s time to start making money on the inventory within your app or site. Having made a decision to use advertising as your means of monetization, you re in good company. Mobile advertising is the primary mechanism for mobile app and website monetization, in every country in the world, and advertisers are pouring into mobile at an unprecedented rate. You have something that s valuable to them - users and data. It s important to set up your inventory within Smaato s Publisher Platform (SPX) accordingly. Here are some questions you ll want to answer to make this process smooth: How many impressions am I getting in my app or mobile website? What geographies am I receiving impressions from? What devices are sending me impressions? (for example, iphones, high-end Android devices or low-end smartphones?) What operating systems are sending me impressions? (Android, ios, Windows Phone etc.) What sort of data do I have on my users that I can provide to enhance targeting? If you know the answers to these questions, you ll have the core information that you need to start displaying ads that are relevant to your users within your app and website. 1.

3 It s important to also have a sense of what types of ads you can or want to display. Here are the key types and sizes: Classic Banner Ad Limit to one per screen Don t place next to interactive elements like a game play screen, or near navigation Medium Rectangle Place above the fold, in the instantly viewable area of the screen Full Screen These load in background, and appear when ad rendered Ad overlays the app content Interstitial Use at a pause or at the end stage of a game, or between videos in a video app VAST Video and Rich Media Highly engaging for users, and in-demand for advertisers Translates into significant revenues for publishers Native Advertising Less disruptive, highly user-friendly design; advertisers pay higher CPMs Use Smaato s Native Ad Builder within SPX to build your own spaces What s best for you? We highly recommend that you pick the largest ad format that works for your UX. Larger units will garner higher ecpms in virtually all instances. For instance, rich media ads generate 83% higher ecpms that image-based ads. Simply put, publishers with more rich media inventory make more revenue. Or consider VAST video. If your app supports this, you ll likely see over 12 times higher ecpms with video than you will with standard banner ads. Even an interstitial ad will typically see a 341% higher ecpm, on average, than a Medium Rectangle ad. 2.

4 In some geographies, demand may be lower for larger formats, and you ll want to therefore consider the standard 320x50 banner ad to increase your fill rate. Step 2: What Price Should I Charge for My Inventory? Now that you ve got a sense of what ad spaces you ll have within your app or website, you ll want to make some decisions about pricing. Smaato can help here. For instance, apps and websites will command different ecpms. These vary geographically as well - for instance, US traffic brings in a higher ecpm than that of Indonesia. One common mistake is to set floor prices on your inventory too early on. At Smaato, we recommend instead that you introduce your inventory into the market, and let the market tell you how it values your inventory. You can then decide at what price point you want to pass your ad requests to a 3rd party network once you have given DSPs a few days to discover your inventory, and thereby effectively measure performance. If you do set floor prices, there are other things to keep in mind. Some publishers will mistakenly set the same floor price (let s say, USD $1.00) for their inventory across all geographies, and then experience low fill rates in places like Indonesia or Saudi Arabia, while getting high fill rates in the US and UK. It s also important to remember that floor prices shouldn t be the same across all geographies because of the differing levels of sophistication with regard to programmatic buying around the world. Developing markets are often in the midst of transitioning from performance-based advertising to the new world of programmatic, and this should be taken into account when deciding how to price your inventory in various markets. As always, the Smaato team can help with best practices and advice for your particular app or mobile website. Please check out Smaato s website and Wiki page online as well for tips and further best practices. Step 3: What Signals Should I Be Sending to Advertisers? Data about the users of your app and website are crucial to garnering you the highest ecpms and fill rates for your inventory. Age and gender data, for instance - how old and what gender you users are - drives 385% higher ecpms than not sending this data to advertisers at all. Geolocation data (also known as lat/long) also boosts ecpms by an impressive 238% on average. Device IDs (for app traffic) help as well, but not as dramatically, because a Device ID can t differentiate between a device that belongs to a 22 year-old woman in California or her 49 year-old father in New York - yet it still contributes 29% more ecpm than not passing it at all. 3.

5 Think about it this way: a soap or detergent advertiser wants to target women aged located in the UK and Germany, and who use higher-end smartphones like iphones and Samsung Galaxy devices. If you re passing all of the aforementioned data on your users, and your app and website is determined to be a strong fit for these advertisers, you re very likely to not only receive this ad, but also a terrifically high ecpm for having allowed the advertiser to target these users so effectively. Step 4: How Do I Integrate? If you re running an app, we strongly recommend integrating the Smaato SDK, which creates the technical link between your mobile app and the Smaato platform. It removes latency - which means faster ads in your apps. It is easy and quick to integrate, it comes with a free ad server, and it also comes loaded with robust ad quality controls, such as the automatic blocking of auto-redirects. Your app s ad requests are connected to an optimization algorithm that ensures they are routed to the most appropriate demand partner. The Smaato SDK comes with comprehensive ad format support (including VAST video, native and MRAID 2.0 and 1.0 support for interactive ads), plus powerful tools to enhance the user experience, including an integrated SDK browser, which keeps users within your app when they click on a banner ad. API is a server-to-server interface designed to fill the needs of mobile publishers and developers with their own sophisticated infrastructures who don t require the tools that come with our error-proof SDK. It s Smaato s preferred integration method for mobile web publishers. Ad Tags may not be the preferred method for integrating with the Smaato Publisher Platform, but there are instances where it makes sense. Ad tags are a piece of javascript code that can be placed directly into your mobile websites, or run via a third party ad server. It can be enriched using your ad server s replacement macros in order to pass additional targeting data such as device ID, demographics or location data. Choosing Your Integration Method SDK Best option for apps API Best option for mobile web AD TAG Step 5: I m now up and running. How do I Optimize? Now that you re integrated and and running advertisements - and making money - you ll want to spend some time making sure you re getting all you can out of SPX: the highest CPMs and the best fill rates possible. Here are the questions you ll need to ask yourself in this step. 4.

6 Did I enter my download URL? DSPs will check your app based on the download URL, so make sure you ve entered that within SPX, as well as your app or website s category. Check the plumbing - am I actually passing all of my data? Once you ve integrated with SPX, you need to pass certain information such as Device IDs and Lat/Long details. If this isn t being passed, you re missing out on advertisers who require it in order to send you traffic. Are you accepting rich media? All of these are parameters that you ll set up in your connection with SPX. The more you re passing, the higher your ecpms and/or the better fill you ll get, with more targeted ads for your customers. Is my inventory transparent? This means that you re passing what you say you re passing. You need to be passing the bundle ID or referring URLs that truly belong to your app or website. Is my app or website categorized properly? The IAB publishes a list of primary and secondary content categories to, among other things, make it easier to for advertisers to reach you. Are you set up correctly here? For instance, you might be a sports news app that s been miscategorized as a News app, and therefore receives a certain amount of traffic that s entirely irrelevant to your demographic. A simple adjustment, to categorize the app as a Sports app, will change the quality of advertising that will flow to this app or website. Is my floor price set too high? As discussed earlier, this is not an uncommon mistake. We don t recommend setting it at all initially, and instead let the market tell you how it values your inventory. By setting a floor price high, you ll get the higher ecpm that you re looking for, but most inventory won t be filled. Having too much unsold inventory does you little good, no matter how high the ecpm is on the few impressions you are getting. It is indeed often a ecpm vs. fill game, and one you and your Smaato account manager can keep an eye on together. You can potentially make a lot more money by setting a lower floor price, if you re setting one at all, and thereby fill your app or website with lots and lots of paying impressions. ecpm FILL RATE 5.

7 Am I setting different floor prices for different regions? Not all regions are equal in pricing. What you re able to get in China will be different than in the United States, for instance. Another good one to keep a close watch on as you optimize your SPX set-up. Do I understand currency differences? Since you probably don t want to put the same floor price in each region across across the globe, you ll also want to keep an eye on the fact that currencies also fluctuate, and that advertisers in local markets are paying in their local currencies. Make sure you re thinking and paying in dollars in places that accept dollars, and thinking and paying in kroner, renminbi, euro and rupee in the countries that accept those. Final thoughts You re now live and you re optimizing - congratulations. It s really about a 4-week process to get to the point where you re truly set up and bringing in the revenues you should be. You need to set up, go live, optimize, see results, make new decisions and optimize again. Remember that DSPs are learning about your traffic to understand patterns, and to make decisions on what to send you accordingly. Sometimes fill rates and ecpms can spike early, then level off before building again. In other cases, your fill rates and ecpms will start slowly and build from there. Keep in mind that much of this is very date, time and season-dependent, and that just as in the retail world, mobile advertising has its busy hours, days and seasons (many of which are very similar to in-store, brick and mortar traffic). We re happy to answer any additional questions that you have about Best Practices for Monetization, so don t forget to visit us online and contact us directly should you need any assistance. 6.

8 About Smaato Smaato is the global real-time advertising platform for mobile publishers and app developers. Smaato runs the world s largest independent mobile ad exchange and has been pioneering innovative, mobile-first solutions for publishers since Smaato s SPX is a global, intelligent, and free to use self-service platform built to solve the mobile monetization challenge for its over 90,000 mobile app developers and publishers. The company s worldwide reach and extensive network of demand partners provides a massive inventory of advertisers with one single integration. Smaato manages up to 6 billion ads every day around the world, across over 800 million mobile users each month. Smaato Inc. Headquarters 240 Stockton St, 10th Floor San Francisco, CA T: +1 (650) americas@smaato.com Empire State Building 350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 4210 New York, NY T: +1 (646) americas@smaato.com EMEA Valentinskamp 70, Emporio 19th Floor Hamburg, Germany T: +49 (40) emea@smaato.com APAC 333 North Bridge Rd. #05-00 Singapore T: apac@smaato.com