Ad mediation/Code to switch ads - Which do you do?

[Rick-Stranberg]

Hello Everyone,

I want to know everybody’s philosophy about ad mediation. To my understanding, ad mediation is simply directing a certain percentage of traffic to various ad networks. It can be set via adMob or others. At this point and time, I am not doing any ad mediation. However, due to adMob’s poor performance with eCPM over the past month and a half, I have been looking to do something.

I don’t feel that I have enough traffic to switch between ad networks and see a worthwhile income. What I was planning to do, was switch to another network completely, StartApp in this case, but then I learned about what a not so good fill-rate it has (banner). So, what I was thinking about doing was putting in a listener for adLoaded for my first adnetwork, then if not go to the next, and so on. Unfortunately, StartApp doesn’t have a listener for banners.

So, which would you do of these three choices?

1. Simply use ad mediation code and direct traffic to different ad networks, directing a larger portion to those with higher eCPMs and risk no-fill for those networks?

2. Use code to switch between ad networks giving priority to those networks with the current highest ad eCPM?

3. Suck it up and just wait until adMob’s eCPMs go up and enjoy a high fill-rate?

OR, would you have a different suggestion?..

[gen]

I strongly suggest to use mediation for two reasons
1)Not all ad networks good in all countries (so choose and configure best adnetwork for particular region) (There is no need to write code)
2)Backfill (incase one network is out of inventory use another network)

[Rick-Stranberg]

Thanks for the reply, gen.

I haven’t used ad mediation before, so I guess i just need to educate myself in it. I didn’t know how 2) in your suggestion would work.

[mak]

@Rick Stranberg

Thanks for the reply, gen.

I haven’t used ad mediation before, so I guess i just need to educate myself in it. I didn’t know how 2) in your suggestion would work.

Mediation usually takes place in a waterfall arrangement i.e.

1st choice: Blue Ad Network
2nd choice: Green Ad Network
3rd choice: Yellow Ad Network
4th choice: …

As @gen mentioned already, if the ad network marked as your 1st choice has no ads available to show at that moment, you move on sequentially to the next choice until you find an ad network with available ads (hence the term “waterfall”).

Your choices can either be hard coded with event listeners or be downloaded as a list by your mediation provider’s SDK.

For the latter scenario, you can either pre-define which ad networks will be included in the list and in what order from a dashboard or let an optimization algorithm run in the background.

[Rick-Stranberg]

@mak

Mediation usually takes place in a waterfall arrangement i.e.

1st choice: Blue Ad Network
2nd choice: Green Ad Network
3rd choice: Yellow Ad Network
4th choice: …

As @gen mentioned already, if the ad network marked as your 1st choice has no ads available to show at that moment, you move on sequentially to the next choice until you find an ad network with available ads (hence the term “waterfall”).

Your choices can either be hard coded with event listeners or be downloaded as a list by your mediation provider’s SDK.

For the latter scenario, you can either pre-define which ad networks will be included in the list and in what order from a dashboard or let an optimization algorithm run in the background.

Hi mak,
I understand in principal how it works, I just am not sure how the mediation provider’s SDK “knows” when an ad is not available. For instance, I don’t think Startapp has a listener for their banner ads. That’s why I was wondering what people do.

I just need to research myself and do it.

[gen]

Hi,
Even if you can’t find solution,
I still suggest you to use mediation,
Configure mediation highest ecpm for Startapp in the countries you are getting best revenue from startapp and use other network for rest of the world.