Optimizing your mobile app ad experience

To ads or not to ads?

Throughout our years at Outfit7 we've learned that the most successful monetization strategies aren't about choosing between ads or in-app purchases—they're about finding the right balance for your specific audience. Through countless A/B tests, we've discovered that ad placement can make or break not just your revenue, but your entire user retention strategy. That is why it is important to define your ad monetization strategy carefully.

Consider ads if you have engaged users who spend meaningful time in your app - whether through frequent short sessions or fewer but extended sessions. If your user base is generally inclined to not spend (or your app is simply not strong on the IAP side) or is mostly casual, this is also a good indicator to monetize with ads. Apps with large user bases and low IAP conversion rates can often significantly improve overall revenue through ad implementation.

Sometimes a hybrid approach works best when you can offer a highly engaging app but want to remove ads for high-engagement and paying users. It’s important to think about which aspects of your app you want to support with ads and when to lower that annoyance factor for some users.

Where do you place them?

This is the first step in line on how to optimize the ad experience of your users. If you are missing obvious opportunities where to place ads or are too invasive with ads and users are leaving, well then no amount of optimization will help you. It’s important to start slow, decide on the most non intrusive transitions or places where to place ads (make sure to check the google play and appstore guidelines!) and test, test, test. Make sure to test your user engagement and retention levels with each iteration of new ad positions, a classic A/B test will already do a lot in making sure that upping the frequency of ads or putting them on a new transition is not harming your userbase. If you upped your revenue by 15% with new ad positions but are now hemorrhaging users in the long run, you are losing money. Beware also that the content of ads themselves have an effect on users, so tracking and testing by yourself what networks are showing what kinds of ads can be important. While going with your gut feeling sometimes works out, we’ve seen that sticking to data supported facts seems to work out better in the long run. Every ad position change should be measured against user retention metrics and your other ad KPI’s.

At Aurion11, we bring these hard-learned lessons from Outfit7 to help developers optimize their ad monetization without destroying user experience. 

Feel free to contact us at aurion11.com regarding your ad monetization strategies.