How to improve the earnings of your AppBrain ad units
To improve your earnings you need to either generate more impressions or generate more revenue for the same number of impressions (this means you’ll get a higher eCPM, see Monetization tips: Understanding your eCPM for details). The eCPM of your ad unit is influenced by 3 factors. These factors are:
Click-through rate (CTR): the more users click your ad unit, the more likely you will make money. CTR is expressed as the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.
Conversion rate (CR): When a user has clicked your ad unit, he will get to a Google Play page to install an app. Whether he actually installs the app or not is measured by the conversion rate. The conversion rate is expressed as the number of app installs divided by the number of clicks.
CPI bid: the maximum price an advertiser is willing to pay when a user installs his app.
Let’s look at each factor to understand how they influence your eCPM and what you can do to optimize them.
The Click-through rate (CTR)
When users see an ad in your app, this is called an impression. When your ad units are badly positioned, you lower your chances for clicks and ultimately installs and you may also harm your user experience. Therefore it’s important to carefully look at where and when it’s best to show an ad, and optimize the click-through rate of those ads.
You can use AppBrain Ad IDs to monitor clickthrough rates of different ad units in your app. With the AppBrain Ad ID you get a separate ad report for every ad unit in your app so that you can compare your ad units’ click-through rates and optimize them. For more information visit our post Get the most out of your ad units with the AppBrain Ad ID
The conversion rate (CR)
After having clicked an ad in your app, a user should install a promoted app that was advertised. To find the best ads for your users, our targeting engine matches the user data that you send on the ad call from your app with the user data from the ads’ install history. (Read our AppBrain SDK integration policy for more information about the user data AppBrain collects from your app.) Our system tries to pick ads for apps that your users are most likely to install.
You can help our system by sharing more data with our system about your users. This can be done in two different ways:
If you know the age and gender of your indidividual users, you can send them along with ad requests. The javadoc of AppBrainUserData explains how this can be done.
You can also set the gender and age that you think is typical for your user base. For example, if your users are mainly male between the age of 25-40 years you can specify this in the “Ad Settings” tab of your publisher app. This is shown in the following screenshot.
If you use both methods, we will look first at the data that you send with the ad request, and if that is empty, we will use the data from the “Ad Settings” tab.
The CPI bid
The CPI bid determines how much you will get paid for a promoted app that’s installed by one of your users. The height of the CPI bids are fluctuate with demand and supply from AppBrain advertisers and other publishers like you.
How does this work? If many new advertisers join the AppBrain ad network in one month but the number of publisher apps and available ad impressions stays the same, there’s relatively much demand for app promotion. Advertisers may start increasing their CPI bids to get enough app installs to reach their targets. On the other hand, if there’s suddenly a lot of new publisher apps on the network with the same number of advertisers, there’s relatively much supply of ad inventory. Advertisers will notice that they can lower their CPI bids and still reach the number of installs that they want.
We are continuously working to attract more advertisers so that your apps will show the best ads at the best prices, which will increase your revenue.
The CPI bids are also highly dependent on the country your user is in. Advertisers are willing to spend a lot more for a user in the United States than for users in many other countries. If you are able to increase the number of users that use your app in countries with high CPI bids, this will increase your revenue. You can see an up-to-date map of CPI prices on the average CPI bid per country overview page.
