Need help monetizing a successful game

So, my first game has good reviews/blah/blah/etc and a loyal and growing player base. But I cannot figure out how to monetize it effectively using advertising. Since it is a realtime competitive spelling game, virtual goods don’t seem to make sense. A paid version also does not make sense as there are ongoing server costs.

The game uses 320x50 banner adverts only, because it does NOT have a pause between levels/rounds/etc, so I cannot do interstitial’s without breaking the user out of the game and annoying them.

Currently I am doing around 70-90k impressions (on a 90 second refresh) per day (depends on day of the week) using MoPub. Mopub redirects to jumptap, admob, millennial, tapit, mobfix and their internal ‘market’ with geo-targeting.

CTR is around 0.3% and eCPM is $0.10 total. Fill rate is over 90%. This means my income is around $250/month before back-end server costs (this is a realtime multiplayer game with leaderboards, so I need servers).

Advertising companies boast eCPM’s of $1-$2 for banners and more for interstitial’s etc. Now if my eCPM was $1, income would be $2500/month!!

I have read multiple forums/posts/etc and besides the ‘place advert in the correct position’ and ‘use interstitials in a natural break in the app’ type advice, nobody seems to be able to tell me:

a) why is my CTR so low ?
b) how do I increase it ?

Does anyone have any suggestions ? Are there any companies that specialize in providing advertizing optimization on mobile apps and guarantee their results ?

Thanks in advance!

If anyone cares: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.rhs.wordhero

in market your game shows very low download numbers compared to your daily impressions.

so maybe you are simply displaying too much ads. so your impression rate is too high. When a player gets 50 impressions he will not click them 50 times - he will merely click 1 of them.

so your CTR is very low and so will be your eCPM.

Try to get the most clicks with less impressions possible. that will raise your CTR and so the eCPM.

Sure, you will not get more money, because 100 clicks are still 100 clicks (if you can follow me) but the numbers will look nicer and you will be maybe getting better ads, which are more likely being clicked.

your ads seem to be positioned very well, so i would not change something in your game. Be aware, that everytime you switch the activity or show/hide the ad activity/layer this will be a new request + a new impression.

What you can try is, make your whole game inside a frame and let the ad layer always be visible (hope, you understand what I mean) this way you can eliminate “false requests”.

Otherwise you can also disable auto-refresh and refresh yourself when it is time to do so (if necessary)

PS: Your game is nice :slight_smile:

90k impressions per day with 1000-5000 downloads? How is it possible?

lol… 16k downloads on Amazon… then there is Slideme, Appia and BlackBerry Playbook port. The game is VERY, VERY addictive :slight_smile:

Slightly offtopic:
About SlideMe - do you have separate statistics on ads impressions for it?
I’m asking because I think they “inflate” download counts.
I uploaded my apps to SlideMe and was excited to see about 200 downloads the next day. But then I checked the number of ads requests/impressions from these apps, and didn’t see any! (except for a few requests that I generated while testing). So it seems like all or most of these 200 downloads are fake.

I know, that slideme will count every download - even updates. So their numbers are not very helpful.

But you can clearly see, that their “just-in” section is working - slideme stopped generating downloads after a while. I do not know who is actually USING slideme to download apps, but maybe(!) slideme is for users who do not have internet access on their device.

btw. How did you manage to get 16k downloads in amazon???

I agree with this. My widget showed about 200 downloads in 2 days on slideme, yet with tapjoy it only showed about 5 new users (there were about 12 downloads on google play market). Now granted, users will only show up if they open the settings page, it wont count if they just add the widget to their homescreen. But only 0.02% of users figuring out how to get to the settings sounds a bit suspect…

Is it possible, that slideme gets visited by bots? I mean, look around, there are so many sites which automtically add new apks to their db … and because google play doesn’t show new apps, maybe they go with slideme where they can just grab the newest apps there.

(that may also be a reason, why google dropped just in…)

I rode the Kindle Fire Christmas present wave. There were very few apps listed as 'Kindle Fire compatible" in the Puzzle&Triva section, so people downloaded my app. After that everyone figured out how to get their app Kindle compatible, so this situation is not replicable.

Conversely, Android market is just HORRID for users finding new apps. I have around 1000 installs from Android market.

Mopub stats do not seem accurate to me, and I had about 0.1 ecpm as well when i tried them. I suggest you go mainly with admob plus mobclix backfill.

In my experience, I was doing mobclix with Admob backfill. I averaged $0.10 eCPM.

I made changes to my app, added a tablet mode, moved to Mopub … and I now have $0.70 eCPM…

Mmmm I hear you, but are you relying on their dashboards to compute the ecpm ? What about the amount you earn for an equivalent traffic, is it really bigger with MoPub ?

Well, the real trick is signing up with Millennial Media… they pay a LOT better per click :slight_smile:

where to buy fresh google play account ?