Slideme ads - anyone using?

I noticed SlideME has it’s own ad network. Anyone is using it? Is it any good? Do they pay on time?

Basically Mobfox with 75 percent market share. Nice to use if you use their eCPM control and set them as a first tier network.

My experience with SlideMe Ads / Mobdox:

Something like eCPM control was exactly what I was looking for. You can set minimal acceptable amount the ad should pay, in order to show the ad. I am really not interested in showing ads that pay indefinitely small amounts, if clicked. With AdMob, I currently see as low values as 0.006$ per click.

At the same time, Slideme Ads / Mobfox also have CPM paying ads (also controllable with eCPM). Therefore, SlideMe Ads seemed to be excellent choice. I did the integration of Mobfox banners, set up eCPM control, and used AdMob banners as backfill. Soon I have realized, integrating Mobfox was probably bad idea and waste of time/money. 3 major problems with Mobfox, I have:

  1. Extremely non transparent. They don’t report requests / fill rate. Only impressions, clicks, and revenue. As they provide CPC and CPM ads, reports should also be separate, but I haven’t seen that. Do I miss something? Why such non-transparency?
  2. Lack of support. I have tried to contact them, but never got a reply. Their support forum (https://getsatisfaction.com/mobfox) also reveals rather ignorant attitude towards publishers.
  3. And the worst. I count ad clicks, and do my own analytics. Mobfox dashboard stats show less than half clicks, compared to my stats!

I don’t know, how reliable such ad click statistics can be, but more than half clicks disappearing is something non-acceptable for me. Inability to figure out the reasons for such discrepancies is also frustrating.

I would really like to hear more from others that have used Mobfox. Satisfied/unsatisfied?

I must update my yesterday’s post concerning Mobfox (non)transparency. It seems that they are just rolling out enhanced reporting for publishers. The old statistics was only showing impressions, clicks, CTR and earnings. In addition to this, new reports are showing requests and number of ads served, so one can calculate their fill rate now.

So this is improving Mobfox transparency.

I would still like to hear from someone using Mobfox.

So Mobfox allows you to filter by revenue per click - so you set it to only get high paying banner ads ?

If one sets that high - did that help your overall revenue (compared to Admob alone) ?

Yes, their eCPM control lets you do exactly that, filter out low paying banners. The condition to use this feature is, that you must confirm, you are using mobfox as “primary” ad network in your app. You have to send ad request to mobfox first, and if you don’t get their ad, you may use another ad networks. So I use mobfox first, and admob as backfill.

Their eCPM control is great feature by itself; you can adjust thresholds at any time, and see how it works.

But unfortunately, as I was trying to explain, the impact on overall revenue was surprisingly negative.

At the same time, mobfox dashboard was showing me higher eCPM, than that from admob! This seemed to be totally paradoxical. As mobfox was only showing impressions, clicks, and revenue (they are just fixing their reporting with requests as well), I would be totally lost, if I didn’t have data from analytics.

I have figured out two things. First, the more traffic I gave to mobfox (by setting low eCPM thresholds), the lower was the number of overall impressions per user session. I am still unable to figure out why, but I will do explore this further, as mobfox now displays number of requests as well.

The second thing I’ve figured out is, that I had clicks that were missing from mobfox reports. Mobfox API provides adClicked(), and I use it to track ad clicks in my anayitics, so I can compare numbers. Discrepancy is huge, mobfox reports are showing less than half clicks compared to my stats!

One might argue such ad tracking is useless. I am doing exactly the same for admob (using onLeaveApplication() callback, and there are no notable discrepancies at all (from this point of view, admob is good).

The bottom-line:

Introducing mobfox, my overall revenue dropped, no matter how eECPM control was adjusted.
Although reporting is getting better, I was still not able to find separate revenue for CPC/CPM ads.
I’ve contacted support, but never got a response.

My impression was that Admob is reasonable - and some of the other banner ad networks like madvertise (better revenue for Germany etc.) were not delivering.

At least that is the impression early 2013. That may change again.

I have seen Admob give similar eCPM as Millennial Media - though some report better eCPM with Millennial Media with lower refresh rate, but I could not reproduce that result with the default settings (using Millennial Media via Admob mediation).

I should add that adding AppBrain banner ads to the mix generally seems to increase revenue - you just need to give a smaller portion say 25% of banner time to AppBrain banner ads (since overpresentation may not give any better results - plus the AppBrain simple “More Apps” text banner ads may have better value when they are a novelty in a sea of Admob banner ads).

Yes, I have recently added AppBrain interstitials, and have already decided to add banners soon.

I should ask AppBrain, but as AppBrain is being mentioned: do you happen to know, if AppBrain and GetJar are compatible in same app?
From appBrain TOS (http://www.appbrain.com/info/sdk-tos): “We reserve the right to exclude any app from our system at any time for any reason, …. or the app or the use of the SDK competing with the interests of AppBrain.”

If you are showing Admob banner ads and AppBrain banner ads, it may not help you much to present AppBrain beyond 25% (i.e. 75% for Admob) - since you may not gain much from overpresenting AppBrain, but will lose revenue from lower Admob exposure.

I should ask AppBrain, but as AppBrain is being mentioned: do you happen to know, if AppBrain and GetJar are compatible in same app?
From appBrain TOS (AppBrain Publisher terms of service | AppBrain Documentation): “We reserve the right to exclude any app from our system at any time for any reason, …. or the app or the use of the SDK competing with the interests of AppBrain.”

You don’t need to ask AppBrain - they are completely different things. In fact GetJar is even more “respectable” than Tapjoy.

Ok, thanks. I was thinking to give appbrain banners something around 10% only.