What can I do to increase eCPM in my App?

Eswar Priyadarshan, CTO

I was one of the panelists at an app developer conference recently when one of the developers asked, “What advice would you give me on steps I can take to improve eCPM within my App?”. I thought it was an excellent question to try to answer in this edition of the Quattro newsletter.

My answer in this article begins at exactly the same place I began my answer at the panel – follow the money. In other words, think about how and why advertisers buy ad space in any digital medium – be it the wired web or mobile – and maximize your App’s opportunities to grab the biggest possible slice of this ad spend.

Advertisers buy on a set of core criteria: Ad User Experience, Ad Performance, Ad Context and Audience. Ad Servers constantly target and re-target/optimize trying to get the best Return-On-Investment for advertisers and publishers alike based these core criteria. Your App qualifies to a greater or lesser extent across these criteria – your job in improving eCPM is to find and tune all possible knobs to improve across the core criteria.

So let’s get down to some specifics on what the criteria above really mean and what tangible knobs are really available to you for tuning and optimization.

Let’s start with Ad User Experience – very simply, advertisers (typically on the Branded/CPM side) are willing to pay a premium for rich, interactive ad experiences. To that end, on September 30, 2009, I published a product update on new ad formats in the Quattro SDK. Our Ad SDK on the iPhone supports several innovative ad unit formats that leverage the capabilities of the iPhone 3.0 SDK, including support for the accelerometer and maps integration.

I encourage you to visit our Developer Portal and download and/or upgrade to this SDK if you have not already done so – it’s the fastest way for you to jump on board and have your App support ads with a rich, interactive user experience. Advertisers typically pay great CPM rates for richer ad experiences -- we have ad buys on our network right now that fully leverage the capabilities of the SDK and would love to have as many Apps on board to increase our effective reach and increase your eCPM. That’s it, a simple straightforward knob we have made available to you to leverage the power and the premium of great Ad User Experiences supported by our SDK – the additional benefit being that you don’t have to do very much in order to derive all the benefits.

There are several further steps you can take to further improve your “score” on the Ad User Experience front:

• Perhaps you have a Game App that presents a Leaderboard. You might consider changing your App to make an ad call for an Interstitial ad (basically, an ad that occupies a lot more screen real estate than a banner) prior to showing the Leaderboard.
• The Quattro SDK provides many other options for you to further control and/or customize the Ad User Experience within your App – from App formats such as Interstitial to ways you can control the entry and exit of banners.
• Quattro’s Publisher Services provides a “Beyond the Banner” program in the event that you are interested in further tailoring your App to provide additional opportunities for advertisers. As an example, you could be a Sports App provider willing to let a Truck brand “takeover” your entire App User Experience during College Football game days – we are experienced in facilitating these types of ad integrations.

Onto Ad Performance – most advertisers use CTR (Click-Through-Rate) as a way to measure the effectiveness of their ads. Direct Response advertisers who pay on a per-click basis obviously focus a lot of their ad spend strategy by tracking CTR. The Quattro Ad Server’s core Ad Algorithm optimizes where ads are shown by driving ads to spots where they are experiencing the best CTR. So what does this mean for you?

First, you need to understand that your App is being ranked and measured within networks such as Quattro by CTR. Say you are a Instant Messaging (IM) App – you might have started out by showing a new ad every time you displayed a new message – your App’s measured CTR will go down because of this strategy since you are displaying many more ads than are being clicked on. You should consider switching to a model where you show an ad for 15 seconds (no matter the message traffic), and then rotate to a new ad.

Quattro’s SDK provides a callback mechanism for you to track exactly when clicks are happening within your App – you should consider using this callback to manage the CTR for various sections of your App and indeed for different users/sessions of your App. This way, you have a real-time heartbeat for key advertiser criterion at all times within your App’s logic, so you can make intelligent decisions whether you should slow down or speed up the rate of your ad calls across various sections of your App.

There’s one additional suggestion on the Ad Performance front that our Publisher Services folks always recommend – go gentle on Ad Exclusions. A good mix of ads generally yields better click-throughs, since people are not seeing the same ads over and over again. We completely understand your desire for total control over all content (including ad content) that your users see – but you might find relaxing the rules a bit increases ad flow and improves ad mix. We provide a very effective Blacklist capability for you to completely exclude competitors and the like – we therefore recommend dialing down on full category Exclusions and instead utilizing Blacklisting to cut off advertisers you are sure you don’t want on your App.

Then there’s Ad Context – at its simplest, this is all about supporting standard use cases such as Sports Advertisers get to advertise within the Sports Apps and the Sports section of News Apps, that Movie Advertisers get to advertise within Entertainment Apps or the Entertainment section of other Apps. The Quattro SDK lets chunk up your App into different sections or even “mini-sites” in making your ad calls (contact our Publisher Services team for more info). It’s well worth your while to break down your App into sub-sections, if possible, and perhaps add a few new sections to increase your App functionality. You may find yourself with increased access to advertiser spend by doing so – we have had several publishers add Automotive sections to their Apps (where they originally thought they were just Social Networking and/or Ethnic content providers) and therefore get new Auto advertiser ad spend dollars as a reward for their efforts.

Finally, Audience – advertisers always need to know who they are reaching and are usually willing to pay a premium for different audience targeting options. The Quattro SDK provides an extensive geographic and demographic targeting API that is all about leveraging, in a very privacy-sensitive manner, your non-PII knowledge of your Apps’ audience. For example, you may not know (or want to know) a user’s precise latitude/longtitude, but you may have asked them for a Zip code to further personalize their content feed – you could pass us the Zip in an SDK function call to get ads and we’ll be happy to provide ads targeted at that specific Zip. As another example, you may know that a particular section of your App is primarily used by men in the 18-25 age range, you can tell us that via SDK call and we’ll be happy to use it to further refine ad targeting. This sort of additional precision in targeting is critical for advertisers since they need to know they are getting to the right audience – our SDK provides extensive support for you to share non-PII information so we can get you the best CPM results you are entitled to.

An additional and obvious audience metric is audience size, i.e. how many users have downloaded and are using your App? You should strongly consider becoming an advertiser on the Quattro Network, leverage our App download/conversion tracking, and drive more App downloads. Please visit our Promote Your Application page for more information.

Back to the question posed at the very beginning of this article – what can I do to improve my eCPM? I hope this piece has given you some additional insight on how the “money” (i.e. the advertiser) thinks and perhaps equally importantly, how you can leverage the Quattro SDK and Quattro Publisher Services to gain maximal access to the money in order to increase your eCPM.