Mobile game ad monetisation: What you need to know

This is the second part in a series from Aurion11 CEO and Co-founder Igor Lautar. Gain into ad monetisation at one of our many worldwide Pocket Gamer Connects conferences, such as PGC Barcelona on June 15th to 16th.

In the previous ad monetisation guide, we covered the product aspects of ads, the mediation platforms and various performance KPIs. If you haven’t read the basics part, I recommend you check that out before continuing with this article. 

This article expands upon the concepts introduced previously and is targeted towards publishers who want to understand more regarding their ad inventory and how to optimally utilise it.

We’ll go deeper into understanding of your inventory as an asset, check out how to optimise that inventory and delve into the benefits of A/B testing and advanced monitoring.

By the end of this document you should understand better how to deal with more advanced optimisation techniques and how to squeeze out a bit more performance out of the ad monetisation stack you built. So let’s get into it!

Part 1: Ad monetisation stack optimisations

With whatever current ad monetisation you are running, there is always the challenge of how you can optimise and squeeze more out of what you’ve built. There are lots of directions you can go in, but these decisions are hard, requiring lots of A/B testing, established telemetry, analysis and tough decisions.

With a good mediation product you can make those decisions easier, take into account any setup that you have and optimise it to be the best it can be. But let’s take a look at some classic modes of operation for ad platforms and their more advanced utilisations. 

Waterfall mediation

This is increasingly a legacy concept now that bidding has taken over on mobile, but it’s still relevant in hybrid setups. It uses multiple calls to the same network at various set CPMs, ordered by historical performance data to maximise revenue from each opportunity. On its own, it's a blunt instrument, but combined with real-time bidding, it becomes more interesting - that’s what we call a hybrid mediation.

Hybrid mediation

This is the current default for most mediation platforms, combining real-time bidding with historical performance-based waterfalls. The tricky part is deciding what to prioritise when you're comparing a live bid price against a historical CPM.

They're not directly comparable, but there are effective ways to handle this. If you're building your own mediation stack rather than using an off-the-shelf platform, this is something you'll need to think through carefully.

Bid floor price optimisation

When using the bidding part of the mediation platform, your floor price dictates the minimum you're willing to accept for an impression.

Most mediation platforms let you set this and many publishers use it as a simple blanket setting i.e.something like $0.20 on banners just to avoid a fire sale of impressions at $0.01.

The relationship between floor price, CPM, and impression volume is important. Setting floors thoughtfully can cut off lower-quality demand, reduce impression count and still land you at the same or better revenue with improved ad quality metrics.

Dynamic bid floor prices

If a static floor price is useful, a dynamic one can be more powerful. The idea is an algorithm that calculates optimal floor prices in real time based on historical data, current user data, app events and whatever else is relevant to your setup. Getting this right requires either a proper data science team or a platform that already has this capability built in. 

Multiple mediation platform utilisation

This technique lets you play to the strengths of several mediation platforms at once. Running different platforms across different user segments allows you to extract more from each.

It’s an advanced approach that requires significant implementation work or a third-party SDK that already supports it. Not for everyone, but worth knowing it exists.

All of the above can be mixed, matched, and built upon. The options can get overwhelming quickly, so the practical advice is to iterate and not try to implement everything at once.

Even if you know there's money being left on the table, taking on too many changes simultaneously means that when something goes wrong (and something always will!), you won't know what caused it. 

Part 2: Telemetry and remote configuration

With ad monetisation stack optimisations as we showed, there are a lot of options on how ad stacks can work. When trying out new things it’s important to know what is actually happening, hence telemetry is a crucial feature to have implemented.

Telemetry 

Telemetry in this context means in-app events that track exactly what’s actually happening across your ad monetisation flows. There are two sides to telemetry that are worth understanding separately. 

The first is the client ad lifecycle. Events like when you initiated a specific SDK, when a request was fired, an ad loaded and when the exact impression happened give you a map of your mediation stack in action.

Once you know what a healthy flow looks like for your setup, you can monitor anything that falls outside it, from broken requests, to failed loads and gaps where impressions should be.

It’s also your best friend when you make a change and want to verify you haven’t accidentally broken something. Combined with your broader in-app event data this gives you a genuinely useful picture of the full user journey. 

The second is ad performance data. Impression Level Revenue (ILR) is the main one, with most mediation platforms providing it as part of the integration, cross referencing it against your network’s data is a solid way to catch discrepancies. It’s worth knowing that ILR is usually only available for networks participating in bidding.

For non-bidding networks, you’re working from historical CPMs instead. While this is less precise, it’s still a useful reference.

A good mediation optimiser brings all of this data out of the box - you can hook up to any event and send it to your data storage or decide to monitor everything from our dashboards.

This way you don’t have to worry about correctly implementing each and every event, debugging it if needed and making sure you can trust this data. 

Remote configuration  

The problem with hardcoding your ad parameters is that every change from a cooldown timer to a frequency cap or a placement you want to test needs a full development cycle, an app store submission and then a gradual rollout as users update. This means you could be sitting on something that isn’t working for weeks before a fix reaches everyone. 

Remote configuration moves those parameters to a backend system where changes go live immediately. Firebase is the obvious starting point if you want something up and running quickly with a decent dashboard.

Building your own gives you more control but does need more upfront investment, which is worth it if the engineering capacity is there. 

What’s actually worth putting behind remote configuration? 

• The things with the most direct impact.
• Ad frequency: Interstitial cooldown timers, frequency caps for interstitials and rewarded video, banner refresh rates.
• Placement management: Toggling specific ad positions on or off, enabling or disabling interstitial triggers.
• If you're running custom mediation logic: Waterfall configs and floor prices, enabling or disabling specific networks.
• Telemetry settings: Adjusting how many events you are collecting and where.
• A/B testing parameters: Running experiments across user segments while not needing to make a new app release

If seasonality hits, you can adjust in real time. If there’s a new hypothesis to test you don’t need to wait for a release window. It turns monetisation from something you react to into something you can actively monitor and optimise.

With a good mediation product you can remotely configure any aspect of your ad mediation stack - from changing placement IDs to switching from one mediation platform to another - it offers you greater freedom and the capability to adapt to new situations on the spot.

Stay tuned for the next part in this ad monetisation guide, coming soon.