Despite concerns among developers about the negative impact of placing ads in their games, there are several benefits of in-app advertising that can alleviate these worries. To counter these concerns, we present some compelling advantages supported by data from the Facebook Audience Network’s report.
Utilizing the Non-Paying Audience
Monetizing a price-sensitive audience is a challenge. Prioritizing in-game ads is the most straightforward solution, especially for games with casual audiences.
What we’ve seen a lot of successful games do is combine the IAA and IAP monetization model. The majority of the audience might be non-paying, but if they catch some payers, it might result in two effective revenue streams.
Boosting User Engagement and Retention
If everything is done right: the chosen ad formats, the right placements, and frequency, ad monetization can positively affect user retention, engagement, and player LTV.
Opt-In Nature and Motivation
Most of the main ad formats are of opt-in nature such as rewarded video ads and offerwalls. And despite the available x button, the users often voluntarily choose to watch the ads.
As much as 71% of players would like to be able to choose whether or not to view an ad.
Their motivation to watch ads lies in three key things:
- The fact they don’t have to pay for anything
- Getting rewards and other bonuses
- Learning about new games
Increasing In-App Purchases
Even though most users won’t make in-app purchases, in-app ads can seriously encourage those that will. If you have a hybrid monetization model, ads can drive the IAPs as well. According to IronSource, users that interact with rewarded ads are 6x more likely to complete an in-app purchase.
Longer Play Sessions
According to Facebook Audience Network’s data, including ads into gameplay directly prolonged play sessions among 51% of mobile gamers.
Players Get Rewards
Rewarded video ads are the ad format that completely stands out from the competition. The players simply love them – 53% of them stated that receiving rewards made them play longer.
Help Unlock Levels
If the players know that watching through an ad will help them progress in-game, they don’t mind them. In fact, 38% of them listed this as the reason why they like in-game ads.
Uninterrupted Gameplay
As long as ads don’t interfere with their gameplay, gamers don’t have a problem with them. For this reason, it’s extremely important to strategically place the ads between game stages.
Fitting User Interests
Displaying ads is a discovery experience. The ads should have the same effect as when you’re scrolling through social media and see “suggested for you” posts. This is what good targeting and ad choice can do.
Location-Relevancy
Ad networks offer the option to serve location-relevant ads. As with all other factors of personalization and relevancy, this can contribute to the overall user ad experience.
Downsides of Monetizing With In-App Ads
Most of the disadvantages of this monetization model are practical mistakes you can avoid.
Ads That Are Too Frequent
Even if you manage to do everything else right, but get greedy with the frequency of your ads – the players will feel an ad overload. How much is too much? According to Facebook Audience Network, anything over 26 per session.
Irrelevant Ads
With all the targeting options the ad networks provide, some game developers still don’t realize they can’t put just any kind of ads into their game and hope for the best.
Slow and Low-Quality Ads
Other than ad relevance, this is also something to pay attention to. If you display poor-quality ads that don’t match your game’s integrity, it might turn users off.
Accidental Ad Clicks
Sometimes, users click on ads they weren’t intending to and it leads them away from the game. If this happens a lot, it can result in a frustrating experience that might make them churn.
Source: Blog.udonis
We hope this article helped you in understanding the benefits of a successful ad monetization. If you feel like you need some more guidance, feel free to contact us!
