App monetization can seem like an insurmountable challenge. What is a game developer to do when players grow to dislike in-app purchases, aren’t willing to pay outright for an app, and expect full functionality without paying a premium? Actually, reward video ads can help you overcome those challenges and boost app monetization. However, you need to customize the player experience. Otherwise, it’s possible that you’ll miss the traction these ads can offer.
Why Customize Reward Video Ads?
Why should you consider customizing your reward video ads? There are plenty of reasons, all of which ultimately affect your app monetization success, user engagement, player retention and overall profitability.
Less Repetition – One reason to customize the ads displayed, position of display, and other metrics involved with reward video ads is to ensure that your players aren’t being inundated with the same ad or series of ads over and over and over again. That repetition becomes annoying, and then it becomes frustrating.
Ultimately, it creates a disconnect between your players and the game, and they opt out, jumping to another game where they’ll have a fresh experience. Customize the types of ads, the video content, the duration of the videos, and where those videos are displayed to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Give Them What They Want – Your players don’t want the same thing. Some may be more interested in a particular type of power up, while others will be more interested in a reward that helps them achieve their overall in-game goals. By customizing your reward video ads, you ensure that you’re able to give your players what they want, and less of what they don’t want.
All Players Aren’t the Same – Sure, all of your players are playing your game. However, that doesn’t mean they are the same, or even similar. It’s entirely possible that your game will appeal to male gamers over the age of 30 and teen gamers, or female gamers in their 20s, and male gamers in their 30s. By customizing your reward video ads, you ensure that you’re not taking a one-size-fits all approach to ad serving or rewards.
Experiment and Tweak
It’s impossible to get everything right on the first go, and that includes rolling out your reward video ads. You’ll need to play around with a range of factors to ensure that you’re offering each player the most engaging experience possible. After all, that’s the entire purpose of the game. If you thought it was about making money, then you’re going at the problem incorrectly. Create engagement first, and profitability will come. Focus on profitability, and engagement may suffer.
Experiment, study, tweak and refine your ad serving and gamer experience. You should regularly adjust things like reward units and amounts (what you’re giving away and how much of it), as well as the location of your reward videos within the flow of the game. Scale up and down to find the right mix.
You’ll find that offering rewards early on, and then scaling back to focus more on in-app purchases later in the game is a good strategy to create player engagement, and then encourage them to spend their own money on purchases rather than relying strictly on rewards. However, don’t remove reward ads entirely, even for players who are far into the game, or starting another play through. This can create resentment and cost you players, ultimately.
In the end, customizing your reward video ads can offer a significant boost to app monetization, but it must be handled strategically, and adjusted on the fly to maintain user engagement.
Source:
https://admob.googleblog.com/2016/03/mediate-rewarded-video-ads-with-admob.htmlhttps://developers.facebook.com/docs/audience-network/android/rewarded-video-old/https://developers.google.com/admob/android/rewarded-videohttps://developers.google.com/admob/android/rewarded-video-adapters
