Publishers have to face many challenges to ensure the success of their apps. App discoverability continues to be a big challenge for them not to mention the rising cost of user acquisition. The total number of apps in the app stores is staggering, yet only an elite few are making all the dollars.
It is tough navigating through the fragmented mobile advertising landscape. Publishers looking to monetize their apps with ads have to make the decision between choosing between an ad network and ad mediation company.
What exactly are ad networks and ad mediation companies?
Ad networks and ad mediation companies are essentially the middlemen between publishers and advertisers. The end goal of each of these players is to help publishers make money through serving ads in their app. However, they differ in functionality. Here is a simplistic explanation of each of these players:
Ad networks: are companies that connect publishers who host ads to advertisers who want to buy impressions. Different ad networks have different strengths and the decision to choose the best one lies with the publishers.
Ad mediation companies: are essentially ad tracking platforms that connect to multiple ad networks maximizing fill rates and boosting publisher revenue. Ad mediation companies make it easier for publishers to monetize their apps as they take the hard decisions of choosing the best ad network and optimizing their ad inventory away from the publisher. This way publishers who have little or no knowledge about ad networks and ad optimization, can safely rely on the mediation platform and get the maximum revenue out of the ads they are hosting on their apps.
Why is mobile ad mediation better than using ad networks?
It is very difficult to choose one ad network for serving the best ads as each ad network has varied strengths. Moreover, most publishers have more inventory than they can sell through just one ad network. Mobile ad mediation is a much more optimized way to make the most of publisher inventory as the ad mediation platform automatically and seamlessly connects to hundreds of ad networks, thereby making monetization easy for publishers.
Here are 5 reasons why mobile ad mediation trumps ad networks:
- Ad network management:
Ad mediation platforms connect to hundreds of ad networks and save publishers the trouble of integrating hundreds of separate SDKs. An added benefit is that the mediation platforms manage all the ad networks they are connected to and handle everything from ranking the ad networks based on the eCPMs and fill rates they provide, to optimizing each ad call from the publisher and routing it to the correct ad network efficiently. The ultimate goal of ad mediation platforms is to help the publishers earn more revenue. - Ad Optimization: The good ad mediation platforms ensure that the ads shown on a publishers’ app match the content of that app and cater the apps audience perfectly. Nothing is worse than seeing a jarring ad about something completely irrelevant to you. While adding context to ads in mobile is still in its nascent stages there are innovative companies like Personagraph that are able to enrich every ad call with data segments, making every ad served highly relevant and targeted to the publishers audience.
- Increased coverage: Every ad network is optimized for a certain location. Sticking to one ad network restricts the reach publishers can get for their app. With the help of ad mediation platforms publishers’ apps can get a more global reach as they now have access to hundreds of ad networks together. Integration with the numerous ad networks also caters for localization thereby ensuring the ads shown on the publishers’ apps are relevant to their audience regardless of their location.
- Higher fill rates: The way ad mediation platforms work is, they are connected to hundreds of ad networks at the API level. Ad mediation platforms rank all the ad networks based on some preference. When the mediation platform gets an ad call, it first sends it to the top ranked ad network. If this network cannot fill the ad request, it then goes to the second ranked ad network and so on. The ad request “waterfalls” down the ad network chain until it gets filled. All this happens in a matter of milliseconds. This kind of waterfall model ensures that publishers get high fill rates for their ad requests.
- Higher revenue: App monetization in the end is a money game. Most publishers want to make good money from their app and are always on the lookout for companies that will help them do so. One of the hardest decision that app developers have to make is choosing the right ad network/exchange that will help them maximize the amount of revenue they will make. Choosing ad mediation platforms makes that decision easier as they are known to generate higher revenues for publishers due to their sheer reach alone.
As you can see, choosing an ad mediation company over a single ad network will almost guarantee you higher fill rates and higher eCPMs. Personagraph recently launched its own ad mediation service called PG Monetize. By making sure advertisers reach their target audiences based on our rich insights we enable higher eCPM’s for publishers. It is truly a win-win situation.
This post was originally published on the Personagraph Blog.