You guys bring up some good points. You’re right, the reason we have the benchmark at 5000 is because it can be difficult to assess the performance of an app with little data. We simply need more data in most cases. It’s common for us to get support requests from users with a couple dozen completed views wondering why they’re not seeing revenue.
For games that show a lot of daily impressions and quickly hit the 5000 impression benchmark, we might simply need more time. Attributions don’t always happen in the same day as the impression.
In your case, @JamesLeeNZ , an $0.87 eCPM is a pretty rough deal. Usually with that many impressions over that amount of time, you should be seeing more revenue. I’m curious. I’d like to know which countries are driving most of your traffic for your game, and what your completion rate for ad impressions is. Would also like to know on average how many ads each user ends up viewing on a daily basis.
We are working to improve our dashboard so that we can better communicate how an app is performing, even early on. Rather than just posting eCPM values, it would be more helpful to break down the eCPM by top 10 performing countries so that you can see how well impressions in your game are performing in top tier countries while still having fill in lower tier countries (which do tend have a lower CPMs, but fill means potential revenue).
Another figure that’s really important to consider, one that might be helpful to add to the dashboard, is the average revenue per daily active user. This will tell you (regardless of how many impressions) how well you are monetizing your user base. Fewer impressions can have a tendency to improve eCPM. At the same time though, if you limit your impressions you may be leaving money on the table. Knowing how much revenue you’re generating per user can help determine if showing more ads is positively or negatively affecting your revenue stream.
Lets take your figures for example ($140 after 160,000 impressions), if each of your users were shown all available ads each day, each user would have generated roughly $0.02 on average per day. Granted this is an absolute extreme (assuming each user watches all 25 available ads per day), but it starts to give you an idea of how well you’re monetizing your user base. It would be interesting to see what your actual average revenue per daily active user is.
As for showing campaigns more than once, most countries (at least those in the top tiers) have enough active campaigns that users won’t see the same ad twice in one day. The same ad is never shown twice in the same hour.
The success of an app does sometimes seem like it’s hit or miss, but there are a lot of things you can do to help your app to be successful. It really comes down to implementation. The higher the quality of the app and the more engaging the ad implementation, the more likely it is to perform well. If a game looks good, feels good, and is fun to play, it’s likely to be successful. Ads that play a strong, purposeful roll in the design of the game also tend to be successful.
It’s also important to keep in mind that an implementation for one game might not be the most effective for another game. If you have a large enough user base, you can implement user segmentation in order to A/B test different monetization implementations to see what works best for your game.
Oscar Clark talks more about design in his article, A Designer’s Guide to Using Video Ads. These basic principals are a good starting point, but they can always be expanded upon.
If you want to send me a link to your games, I’d be willing to check them out and offer any suggestions I can.
