How to Foster Your App Monetization With the Rewarded Video Ads

The rewarded video has quickly transitioned from the ‘most promising’ to the ‘most favorable’ ad format among reputable advertisers, mobile game developers, and app publishers. Rewarded video format has gained a momentum in 2016-2018 and now is positioned as a necessary creative component of mobile and in-app branding campaigns.

Advertisers and app marketers are making high stakes on rewarded format: because the whole generations are raised on certain types of games, their audiences form the core of the most attractive paying demographics. Meanwhile, the gamers in 53% of cases prefer watching rewarded videos instead of pre-rolls or interstitials and watch approximately four videos per day to get the in-game rewards, according to SmartyAds data.

Rewarded formula: win-win-win

The success of rewarded video format is hidden in the concept of value the user gets in return for watching. While with banners, interstitials and other known ad formats the users have no choice but to see the ad, the rewarded format provides them with valuable in-game currency in exchange for attention. The incentives users get after watching 5-15 sec. rewarded video may range from hints to in-game items for purchasing, bonus options of app customization or free hours of music listening.

Rewarded video is considered to be the “win-win-win” format for all three parties involved – an advertiser, user and developer/publisher. The data gathered by SmartyAds illustrates the point:

• Advertisers continuously extend budgets on rewarded ad campaigns for mobile platforms.
• The rewarded video features lower cost-per-thousand impressions compared to other ad formats.
• The format makes it possible to capture the attention of the most “paying’ demographics aged 25-50.
• The format is interactive, meaning that ad is perceived as a part of the game so the users are not annoyed and retention rate is not affected.
• Rewarded video format is a leader in terms of eCPM on both IOS and Android platforms.

Challenge & solution: Rewarded videos in action

As we already found out, rewarded ads perform equally good on IOS and Android platforms when compared to other known formats. According to SmartyAds data gathered from SSP platform, the format helps to achieve 50% higher IAP, increase LTV up to 70% and significantly boost the revenues.

The average CTR for Rewarded Video is 4% – one of the highest among existing formats. Delivering 10,000 impressions per day with only rewarded ads, the publishers, in general, can reach $1500 revenue bar.

Thus, for instance Vesta Soft LLC, the developer of Duck Destroyer game (available on iTunes) used the format as a part of their programmatic revenue growth strategy. The developer double-digited the performance so that their revenue on Android grew 30% higher and took 43% of the total mobile ad income as a result of increased eCPM. On the IOS platform, they experienced 29x revenue increasement and 33% revenue growth.

How to make the most of rewarded ads?

With rewarded video advertising success of app monetization will largely depend on the advertiser’s intuition and the competence of the developer integrating SDK into the app or game.

Planning rewarded video placement is a delicate matter, merely pasting it at the beginning of the game or somewhere in the middle, like simple video won’t do the trick. It is worth pre-arranging the rewarded video to make it look like a part of the game and balance between the user experience and the maximum monetization opportunity.

Here is a handful of practices that help developers, publishers, and advertisers optimize rewarded creatives so that they bring essentially better profits:

Help them to find it. Make it easy for the users to find and use the reward, make sure the reward you offer is worthy, too small incentives may not work at all. Also, the users should be able to use the reward immediately after watching the video.

Define your audience. Learn the audience of your app: gender, age, profession, geolocation. Configure the targeting options on the programmatic platform, this data will be used by SSP as an important indicator of where and to whom the ad should be shown.

Set the limits. Repetitive creative may annoy the users, that’s why it is important to set the limit when displaying the same ad to the users through frequency capping. This will make the creative easier to digest. As well, set the right floor price in the dashboard in order to accept the bids from advertisers that meet the minimum price level for the impression.

Review the effectiveness. Use the ARPDAU method to calculate the daily conversion per active app/game user. Divide the advertising revenue by the total number of active users, is preferable to create the groups, according to the countries and ad formats. Same way the effectiveness per format, country or audience group can be tracked in SSP platform real-time.

To wrap it up

Rewarded video ad format is a great all-in-one approach to gain more revenue while keeping the app or game users entertained and engaged. Almost any mobile game and non-game application developer can apply it using the principle of “find out what user might need and monetize it.” Create the engaging video, provide the users with valuable incentives, monitor the campaign performance and the growth in revenue and user loyalty will not be slow to show up.

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