Ad Quality & Accountability: How to Keep Users Happy and Revenue Growing with Multiple Monetization Partners

Mobile has always been about connections. It started with making calls simple, easy, and universal. But we didn’t stop with phone calls. Our devices now connect us to a whole lot more - information, media, stories, games. The apps and content on our phone are our lifeblood.

But how we connect to our lifeblood has changed. When Apple introduced the App Store it held 500 Apps. Since then, the App and Play Stores have grown from boutique shops to massive warehouses with 2 million apps. It’s a store in name only. People aren’t shopping for apps there. They learn about them elsewhere and use the store to install.

<There’s a second game users play on your app. It’s called “Find the X” that commences every time an ad is served. User experience with the X button and also ad rendering and the game itself, may affect their enjoyment of your game.

Ad quality is one of the main reasons users uninstall games. Thankfully, game developers have their choice in monetization partners. Measuring ad quality and holding monetization partners accountable to serve quality ads can prevent losing users because of the unwanted “Find the X” game.

Ad Quality Ripple Effect

Step 1. You Lose Existing Users

Negative experience from an ad due to content or rendering issues can cause users to close a game and even leave it altogether. In your users’ eyes, the ads are a united experience with your game, and publishers are the one paying for that.

]Step 2. You Lose Potential Users

If that user experience is particularly negative, they’ll leave a bad review on your app store page about it.

According to the latest research by Storemaven, 80% of users check ratings and reviews to determine whether they download an app. Poor ad experience costs you not only existing users, but your potential ones also.

Step 3. You Exponentially Lose Revenue

Every user that leaves your game is costing you - but the greater cost is the revenue they keep from you. This is how ad quality can severely hinder your bottom line. A user lost means IAA revenue lost especially if the user could have had a longer in-game life time. While the user MAY attribute it to the game experience, looking deeper you might find it’s one of your monetization partners that is accountable.

Ad quality is still a relatively new idea for app developers when it comes to monetization, but advertisers already use many metrics analyzing success of their campaigns. It’s time publishers had one to measure the quality of ads multiple monetization partners serve within their apps.

Okay, so how do I measure the impact?

To see the impact of the ad experience on your app audience, you can take a similar approach to churn rate standard formula, and adapt it to the ad experience:

The result will always trend to 1 which represents the perfect ad quality, meaning zero users closed the game after seeing an ad. The closer to 1 the result is, the better the ad quality and user experience with ads you serve.

Calculating this rate for each of your networks will help you understand your users’ ad experience with each of your partners. While achieving an index of 1 is virtually impossible as you are bound to lose users in some way, your partners are here to grow your revenue and your apps, not harm it.

By understanding your users better and prioritizing the right ad networks according to the quality of ads they serve and demand diversity, developers can create an enjoyable experience with ads. Hold your partners accountable for the ads they serve and never lose your users, and revenue again.