Ad Monetization Rocket Science

You’ve got an app and you have an ad monetization strategy, you also established your ad mediation tech stack (in 95% of cases this means using some sort of 3rd party mediation platform like MAX, Levelplay or Admob).

You’re now put behind the wheel of your ad monetization and the road to a great setup seems pretty daunting. You can of course perform a one time setup that gets you that 80% of the way and move on to improving your app, adding new features and dealing with the fun stuff, but there is a whole world of ad monetization options which will get you to the end of that road.

Those range from integrating more networks (bidders, SDKs), SSPs, exchanges etc. to painstaking analysis of your different segments and trying to adopt various bidding strategies (e.g. varying the bid floor per segment, user etc.). 

Then there is how you are actually utilizing your app and the opportunities to show ads while balancing the retention and engagement of your users. There are discussions with your partners regarding your inventory and its worth, running of potential direct deal campaigns etc. How will you utilize your cross promotion and the worth of users shifting through your ecosystem? …the options keep popping up!

At Aurion11 we know that ad monetization optimization does not start and end with a simple ad mediation platform integration, but how you utilize your entire app ecosystem as a valuable product that advertisers want to access. From the design of your app to support an ad-based model, to optimizations right down to the user level, you're essentially packaging and selling the engagement, attention, and behaviors of your users.

This means thinking like a media company: your users’ time, interests, and interactions are the actual product being sold to advertisers through ads. Putting all the puzzle pieces together is a complicated process that requires multiple people (or teams!) to actually do, because you're not just managing ad placements - you're curating and optimizing access to your ecosystem's value.

We’re approaching this issue with publishers in mind, trying to cater to each one, getting to know their tech and seeing what years of experience building our own mediation can bring to the table of other publishers. We’re trying to save teams years of research, testing and analysis by utilizing our knowledge.