Dina Bader: Leverage the Ad Network to Your Advantage

Mobile advertising isn’t always easy to understand. Between setting up an advertising campaign on the dashboard to getting installs, a chain of actions takes place. In this post, I’ll share the key insights from my session at White Nights Online Conference on how you can leverage the ad network to your advantage through tools like Flexbid on Chartboost’s self-serve dashboard.

Understanding the ad network to influence it

Leveraging ad network

When it comes to user acquisition on mobile ad networks it’s more than just getting installs for the lowest CPI. It’s a very intricate process that combines your targeting options with your bids and ability to convert.

When it comes to the targeting options they serve as a segment filter. You filter down to the number of users that you want to target. The amount of users generates a particular number of impressions. Those impressions have a particular eCPM. eCPM stands for effective cost per mille: the price you pay per thousand impressions.

Your bid is responsible for the number of users you can acquire because it will correspond to the number of impressions you can afford. By adjusting your bid you can defy the eCPM of your advertising campaign.

Since digital media buying is based on eCPM, the network has to translate it into CPI and this is where creatives come into play. It’s responsible for the amount of users that will convert out of all the impressions and it determines your IPM, installs per mille.

eCPM is a useful stat to understand because it measures how effective your bid price is. Here’s how eCPM is calculated, along with a secondary measure called IPM:

eCPM = Bid price * installs per mille (IPM)

IPM = (Installs / Impressions) * 1000

A high IPM means that your creative is getting more installs — and helps determine whether the advertising network shows your ad. A high IPM allows your creative to be included in more auctions, which ultimately means more installs.

Getting a high IPM means your eCPM will also be high. This can be confusing for people coming from traditional advertising, where a low eCPM is generally preferred. But for app install ads, a high eCPM doesn’t mean high costs: your eCPM can increase even while your CPI remains the same, as seen in the chart below. So next, we’ll talk about how to reach a healthy eCPM and IPM.

LEVERAGE AD NETWORK

Getting leverage

Advertising networks base decisions on eCPM, which is a combination of IPM and your CPI. Obviously, you want to increase IPM.

When you launch a new campaign, the ad network wants to use eCPM to determine in what publisher app inventory it should show your ad. However, it doesn’t know your IPM yet. So the network runs a little test with free impressions that determine predicted eCPM. Higher bids lead to higher predicted eCPM.

If your goal bid is $10, try bidding 20-30% more to ensure that your predicted eCPM will be higher. The result will be that your ad will become more competitive and will receive more impressions. If your actual eCPM ends up being lower than the prediction, your ad will still appear at even more publisher apps — and you can then lower your bid. In the meantime, you’ll be as competitive as if you had a higher bid.

For an older ad campaign, it’s important to rotate your creatives. New creatives fight off ad fatigue, increase conversions, keep IPM high, and result in the ad network choosing to display your ads more often.

Use effective tools

Finally, use tools that allow you to maximize the value of every impression. Through Chartboost’s self-serve dashboard, we offer the Flexbid tool that helps auto-optimize bid prices across multiple bid dimensions.

For example, if you have a publisher that you want to buy more traffic from then you can use Flexbid to set a multiplier for the specific publisher traffic. The multiplier will reflect a percentage increase of your bid which influences your predicted eCPM. During the auction, your new predicted eCPM will make your ad more competitive for that publisher and will increase the average eCPM for the campaign as a whole which in return will give you access to more inventory from the network. Multipliers are an effective technique for maximizing installs by paying the right price for every user while boosting ROAS.

In a case study with Tactile Games, they moved 70% of its ad budget to Flexbid, and planned to double it in light of the transparency and ease of use offered by the tool. Flexbid tool is available on the Chartboost self-serve dashboard or through API where advertisers can set automated daily optimizations.

If you haven’t tried Chartboost yet, get started with in-app advertising today by signing up!