Hi,
I know that banners are not the best performing ads out there (compared to interstitials) but I would like to maximize the revenue generated by my apps. I don’t have a lot of impressions yet and the traffic is mainly from USA, India and Saudi Arabia.
Thanks in advance for your advices.
For Indian traffic, see my research which was done about 1 month ago:
appbrain - very poor sdk
mmedia - poor earnings in india
applovin - optimizes on installs and not just impressions/clicks. Good for high user base apps only
adgoi - only sites, no apps.
vserv.mobi - no immediate approval
adiquity - no immediate approval. sdk throws NPE.
vibrant - no account approved immediately
admob - good for filling impressions but bad earnings from India
airpush - good fillrate and earnings from all over the world
Banner cpm are so low that I wouldn’t recommend them in most cases. Only consider going with them if you’re willing to put them as a permanent part of your screen real estate in a game where users are clicking all over, or, if it’s even possible, as entries in a list that your users are already going through (the way some forums have ads in between the posts).
Otherwise, even if you have banner ads constantly displaying, you’d probably make more with just a single exit interstitial, and chances are you can get away with more than that.
As what I know, not many advertisers want to bid Indian CPI traffic, the lowest bid price on appflood is $0.6 CPI. So you sell CPC and CPM is a right decision indeed, but the banner CTR is so bad. Buzzcity has lots traffic in India, may it suitable for you?
For me Admob is the best.
Yes, AppFlood (I think) suggests to avoid banner ads completely since their payback is so low - and go with interstitial and IAP etc.
That might work for some apps - and probably games etc.
Banner ads also persistently take up a big chunk of screen real-estate.
But for some apps - perhaps shorter session length ones (?) - the admob performance can be not bad compared to some ad networks.
For example, I have used Admob banner ads with Leadbolt HTML AppWall. When Leadbolt was paying well, it would earn double what the Admob banner ads would generate.
However, when Leadbolt experienced a slump (they are now starting to rise again but great variability day to day) - there were days where admob was earning slightly more than the Leadbolt HTML AppWall !!
If you can leverage IAP (in-app purchases) and can show interstitials - probably the revenue there will be so rich that the banner ad revenue is probably a nuisance more than a major contributor.
However for small, novelty apps perhaps admob may still have a role.
A possible game changer is the emergence of Admob interstitial ads - as I have examined in another thread - it is possible that Google is doing automatic translation of pre-existing banner ads to full screen format (for example “Download this app” banner ad becomes full screen by including screenshots from the Google Play page). Such automatic translation MAY allow Admob Interstitials to achieve the same type of fill rates as we have come to expect for Admob banner ads i.e. 100% fill rate. Thus the fear that there is no ad inventory for full screen ads may become a thing of the past (I don’t know if Google has an automatic translation program for the other types of banner ads it shows as well ? - i.e. has Google started to ask advertisers to supply BOTH banner sizes and full screen sizes for their ads ?).